The Best American Short Stories 2017
Lois came into the room and joined me.
“That’s a real beauty,” she said. “A real beauty. 1870s. Maybe 1880s. I’d be glad if she was yours.”
She jumped up and grabbed me by the hand. Hand in hand (her hand, as I imagined, was sweaty and clammy, and I didn’t like my proximity to it), but at last she dropped my hand as she made her way to, and I could see her running to, the computer. She typed something out and ran back, the old dog following her more quickly than I thought he could. She handed me what she’d just printed out.
Description
American Victorian Eastlake upholstered cherry armchair. Aesthetic influence, having a padded, arched back flanked by carved, scrolled stiles, supported on a wide rail cut-out with a large carved sunflower nested beneath a serpentine-shaped, scrolled vine terminating with opposing anthemions, fitted with two rail arms, padded between arched ends respectively; embellished with Greek key above a short beehive, turned support and scrolled acanthus, and a trapezoidal padded seat with a teeded front rail supported on blocked double ogee molded legs, fitted with small wooden castors and flared rear legs which are continuous from the stiles.
Dating is from the 1880s to the 1890s. The back and seat are each covered with a pale green damask fabric pattern with a field of small palmate leaves accompanied by scrolled tendrils. The finish is in good overall condition with a warm, dark reddish-brown finish having a few minor scratches, but which is probably original. The upholstery on the seat needs to have the prints retied. Measures 35” tall and 25” across the arms.
“I don’t know what your background is, but have you heard of John Ruskin?” Lois said.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m a failed English PhD.” For some reason, I told her about my dissertation. She didn’t seem interested.
“Well the people who made these chairs were American disciples of Ruskin and Morris.” They didn’t do a lot, but what they did was fine. “She’s a real beauty,” Lois said. “I’d be happy if she was yours.”
“How much?” I asked, my heart beating stupidly fast.
“Three hundred. But we’ll have to take it to a friend of mine for a little repair.”
“But I’m only here six weeks.”
“He’ll do whatever I tell him. If we take it over, he’ll do it while you wait.”
“Okay, Lois, I really love it.”
It occurred to me that maybe she wanted me to bargain with her. But I had no impulse. I wanted to take her home. I was already calling it “her.” But after all, I knew that She was mine.
“We’ll take this other chair with us, it needs to be resprung, and oh God, so much, it needs so much.”
I guess I was lonelier than I thought because I accepted her invitation with what I hoped wasn’t a too obvious eagerness.
“Help me hump this one into the car,” she said, pointing to a chair she’d placed near the door. This one was small—Lois said it was called a slipper chair—perfect for a rather reserved, perhaps easily intimidated wife of a judge or surgeon sometime between 1925 and 1960. The upholstery was a pale pink brocade, but the seat and the back looked like someone had taken a box cutter to them with a particularly brutal hand.
We drove for ten miles or so, and Lois spoke to me as if we had known each other for years, referring to people by their first names only, so I had no idea who she was talking about. I gathered they were relatives, and so I tried to assuage her worries about their health, their financial well-being, their fragile sprits—even though I had no idea of the real circumstances. But she took no comfort from anything I said, rejecting any hopeful note as simply out of the question. When she wasn’t speaking, she was whistling through her teeth something that I thought dated from the First World War. “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie,” “Daisy Daisy,” “Down by the Old Mill Stream.”
She drove to the back entrance of a warehouse and beeped her horn in what must have been a coded pattern because in a minute a bald man in overalls with a reddish toothbrush mustache came out of the metal door, accompanied by a springer spaniel.
The dog jumped on Lois, and she bent down so he could lick her face. From the pocket of her shirt she took three small dog biscuits, for which the dog seemed grateful, but not surprised: it was clearly a part of their routine.
“Hey, Rusty,” Lois said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to the man or the dog, although the dog was white with tannish spots, so I was betting on the man.
And in fact it was he who responded. “Well aren’t you a sight for sore eyes. What have you brought me from your treasure trove?”
She opened the back of the station wagon and lifted the chair into the driveway.
“You just don’t understand how people can abuse a lovely thing like this,” he said.
“They didn’t deserve to have it. Ever. Not for one minute.”
I’d heard people speak that way about children or animals that had been badly treated, but I’d never heard the words applied to furniture. I understood, but for Lois and Rusty the chair was, if not a living thing, then something with a life.
She didn’t bother to introduce me, and I saw no way to introduce myself, so I just followed behind her, and looked over her shoulder as she and Rusty looked through swatches, bringing a few to the chair then stepping back from it until they finally both agreed on one that was very like the original.
“That’s it, that’s it,” Lois said.
“No question about it. We’re on the money this time, girlie,” he said.
They high-fived each other. It had been a long time since I’d seen two people so happy.
The place smelled wonderfully of new wood and hot glue and steamy fabric. My eye traveled to the part of the warehouse where people were cutting and sewing and nailing and gluing with the peaceful, rapt expression that comes over someone when he’s doing something he knows he’s good at, that he believes is of real use.
That night, after Lois had dropped me off and I ate my lentil salad in front of the TV, it occurred to me that neither of them had said a word about money. Not a single word.
No one at the Monroe headquarters of Verdance seemed to have the slightest interest in seeing me outside of work. It wasn’t that they weren’t friendly; they were excessively friendly. But they probably sensed that my presence there wouldn’t be good for any of them, and besides, they all seemed to have small children. Which was the problem, of course, the reason I was there. I understood that they were busy and tired, I understood why none of them had so much as invited me for a coffee. I didn’t mind being alone so much, not really; I was enjoying being able to read at night and watch BBC mysteries on my laptop. But I was delighted when Lois called and asked if I’d be interested in a wonderful set of Spode dishes that she needed to get rid of and would give me at “a ridiculous price, just because I like you. And the pattern is called ‘old rose’ and I remember what you said about that dissertation of yours that you never wrote.”
I certainly knew that she was odd, and that the offer for the dishes was odd. I knew it was odd, that everything about it was odd. Why would she think I wanted a set of china? And didn’t she know that people didn’t just tell people that they liked them, and that they were giving them a good deal because of that? Or if they did say that, that the other person wouldn’t believe them, not either part of the sentence, either that the salesperson liked them or that the deal was really good? But there was something uncanny about Lois—she might have been a figure in a children’s tale, the trickster, the woman coming from nowhere who knows everything and knows just what everyone should do.
Then I wondered if she knew something about me that I didn’t know about myself, that I had always wanted a set of matching china, good china, real china, but had never had access to that particular truth.
She indicated a set of dishes displayed in a glass-fronted cabinet, and once again my heart leapt when I saw them. Roses, the pattern was of roses, vivid, but delicate, strong blossoms, a deep pink, and leaves and stem
s a clear and lucid green. Roses, what I had wanted to write about, what I had given up. Roses that had been put into poetry so that they would last forever, and now roses would be on my table; I would be eating off roses that, like the roses in the poems, would not die. And I could have them, they would be mine. Immediately, the possibility of a whole new life opened for me. Openhearted Thanksgivings, the grieving newly widowed, bipolars whom nobody was sure when to invite, people from exotic foreign countries who’d never had cranberry sauce. My whole family: all the little fissures healed. They weren’t major fissures, not anything moral or political or religious—none of us was particularly political or religious, but we simply had different interests. Or maybe it’s better to say we just weren’t that interested in one another. My brother and his wife and three children all seemed devoted to, if not based on, computers; my sister had moved to Montana and was raising designer dogs—some mix of poodle and something else not so smart, I can never remember exactly what. I don’t even know exactly what my parents are interested in. They watch a lot of television. They go on cruises: my mother keeps saying how she’ll never get over the Alaskan landscape, but my father said once was enough for him. “You’ve seen one moose, you’ve seen them all,” he’d said. I think that hurt her.
But I knew we would all be livelier than ever around the table with my wonderful new dishes. Of course I didn’t have a table yet, and I knew this wasn’t the kind of pattern Hugh would like, but I could let him buy some kind of postmodern, off-center table and convince him that putting a pattern of rose china on it would be “incredibly ironic.”
“Are you sure?” I asked Lois when she offered me the whole set—service for twelve—for $300.
“I wouldn’t have made the offer if I weren’t sure.”
“But how will I get it back to New York?” I asked. Then I remembered somewhat guiltily that Hugh had agreed to drive out and drive me back to New York in a month. I realized how far that thought was from my mind. I tried to make a joke of it, to myself, really more than Lois. “A month seems like a lifetime away,” I said.
“So you’ll only be with us another month,” she said.
I felt ridiculous that those words made me so sad.
“It will take me quite a bit of time to pack these properly,” she said. “Can I bring them by your place tomorrow?”
“Lois, you don’t have to do that. I’ll be glad to come by and get it.”
“No biggie,” she said. “I want the excuse to visit the chair.”
The apartment was so entirely blank, so impervious to improvement, that it was impossible to have the slightest even reflex anxiety about having a guest.
She set the large box down on my counter. She was wearing her usual outfit of running shorts, T-shirt, knee socks, and sneakers. She told me she ran marathons, but it was so incongruous with everything else about her that I couldn’t keep the idea in my head. Everything about her suggested the opposite of healthiness, of health.
“Where do you want me to put these?” she asked, her eyes flicking every surface like the eyes on a Felix the Cat clock I’d had as a child.
I pointed to the closet.
“Sit in the chair,” I said. “It will be glad to see you.”
She rested her hands on her thighs, leaned back, and sighed deeply. She closed her eyes.
“I feel so bad for you,” she said.
I couldn’t think of any reason for her to feel bad for me. I hadn’t told her anything about my life, and besides, I had been unusually unmarked by tragedy.
“Life’s been good to me, Lois,” I said.
“That’s as may be,” she said. “It’s as may be. But I know about you: you care for the look of a thing. And this place is, well, it must be terrible. So unlovely. No one who had anything to do with this place cared for the look of a thing. It must be terrible.”
“Well Lois, I’m only here for another month.”
“But a month of living among unlovely things is like a month of bad food. You’re being poisoned. Seriously poisoned. Thank God you have the chair. When you look at it, well, it’s like drinking spring water after you’ve had nothing but junk food.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt exposed, and simultaneously understood; at once violated and protected.
“Would you like to move into the basement apartment I own? I sometimes rent it out. It’s downstairs from where I live. Just one big room. A studio. On the lake.”
“Oh, Lois, really it’s too much trouble. Only a few more weeks.”
“Four weeks of poison. Is that something you want to do to yourself?”
“The company’s already paid for this,” I said.
“I wouldn’t charge you,” she said. “I’m going to use it for storage from now on anyway, I’m sick of dealing with tenants. I’d be happy for you and your chair to move in.”
“But I don’t have any furniture,” I said.
“Jeez Louise, what business do you think I’m in?”
“May I think about it Lois?” I said. “Just for a day or two.”
She stood up and slapped her hands on her thighs. She looked at me with a curious patience, and I felt the possibility of a large leisure in which to make my choices.
But in the morning after I woke up and sat on the scratchy tweed couch looking at the parking lot and counting the dents in the wall-to-wall carpeting, I knew that I’d made up my mind.
We agreed to meet at the house after I was through with work and she’d closed the shop. I could see the lake after I’d turned off the main commercial street, which was clearly trying to revivify itself by attracting a new, younger clientele: there was a bicycle shop, a yoga studio, a Thai restaurant. Next to the Thai restaurant I was happy to see a plumbing supply store, huge, the size of a firehouse, plain, responsible, like a slightly unimaginative bachelor uncle who had never moved away.
From the outside, the house was undistinguished: two stories, white stucco, small, serious-looking windows trimmed in serious black. I walked down a small flagstone path to the front door; on that side of the house, the house facing the lake, the windows were larger and untrimmed.
Lois came to the door. Her hair was wet from the shower, but it still looked greasy, and her skin was more mottled than usual, probably because of the water’s heat. She was wearing her usual shorts, T-shirt, and knee socks. This time they were lime green. “This is it,” she said, and showed me into a room that was almost breathtaking in its plainness. The walls were white, the floors slate-gray, the cabinets were a plain light pine, the countertop and the three stools beside it matched its wood.
I was simultaneously alarmed and thrilled by the emptiness. I wanted some time to understand what I was feeling so I turned my back on Lois, and focused on the view of the lake.
I had never thought much about lakes. I’m a born and bred New Yorker, you remember, and when people like me thought about a body of water it was only the ocean. You could even take a subway to it. But lakes—they were irrelevant. Maybe they had something to do with motorboats or water skiing, the kind of thing done by people you would never know.
The lake was so close to the door of the apartment that it could have been its front lawn. There were ten paces’ worth of grass and there it was. Even closer than a lawn, it spread itself like a lap, and as I thought of the word lap, meaning something to sit on, to be comforted by, and a gentle sound of water, I felt immediately comforted and accommodated, and I knew that I would stay.
“I’ll just bring a few things from the shop for you,” Lois said. “It will be all ready for you to move in tomorrow at this time.”
She was, as she said, in the furniture business, but the way she “furnished” my apartment was simply perfect. She provided only what I absolutely needed: a simple platform bed whose wood matched the cabinets and counter, a plain pine table with apple-green legs, and a chair of matching apple green. At the center of the empty space, which because of its very emptiness served as an almost theatrical backdrop, we
placed my chair, just the right distance from the window so that I could sit, surrounded by nothing, and look at the lake.
Sitting in my chair and looking at the lake became the most important thing in my life. The house faced east, so I didn’t get to see sunsets, only sunrises, which might have been disappointing, but it wasn’t. Like the dishes Lois had sold me, getting up to see the sunrise suggested to me the real, the very real, possibility of an entirely new way of living. I never let myself say a new way of life.
I would wake early, sometimes as early as five, and sit by the window. I watched for the last star . . . the morning star; I watched the moon disappear, and the sky gradually lighten. What I liked best were the moments before the sun was actually visible: the dimness, gradually taking on color, as if it were some porous paper drinking color in: first silver, then gray-blue, then the dramatic pink and yellow. When the full sun struck the lake, it was almost disappointing: a diva showing off, silencing the gentle chorus.
Twice, Lois invited me to the movies to the “film society,” where classic films were shown to an audience of which I was the youngest by at least thirty years. We saw Jules and Jim, The Bicycle Thief, and Strangers on a Train. We ate at a pub near the film society; Lois always ordered a hamburger, but left three-quarters of it behind, and nibbled only three or four of her fries. The hamburger always came with lettuce, tomato, and onion, and she always removed it and put it on her plate. I wondered why she didn’t tell the waiter to hold the lettuce and tomato, but I didn’t like to ask.
And five or six times, I realize now, I stopped by Rusty’s shop. It was open till nine. He had said to come any time, and I took him at his word. I’d just drop in, bringing sweets or cheese and crackers, and everyone seemed glad to see me, no one suggested it was odd. It was soothing to be there, with the good smells, and the serene industriousness, and NPR playing in the background, and the dog—whose name I never learned—moving from one warm spot to another, circling to find the perfect spot for his latest naps. I thought that what they were doing was a wonderful way to make a living, and the words make a living seemed more literal than metaphoric. The words that came to me were innocent, beneficent, and I was pleased at the slant rhyme—an atavistic pleasure, but I welcomed the old taste. After a while, I realized that I’d begun fantasizing about apprenticing myself to Rusty, calculating how long I could live on my savings before I needed to earn money again. I knew that was ridiculous, and I banished the thought whenever it rose up.