Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

When the professor sees that a student loves a certain sentence, her heart lifts as if she’s been told great news! You will never die! Why does it feel like this? That book in that student’s hand has nothing to do with her. It’s just luck she’s in the same room.

In the center of a roundabout, a paved orbit around a central island whose pale gravel is set with concentric circles of a kind of agave she happens to know are called foxtail after the slender oblong upheld sleekness of their array of pointed leaves, the professor watches while bicycles skim and veer past within arm’s reach, hundreds of bicycles. If she stands here long enough she could easily witness the whirling transit of a thousand bicycles with her as their still center. Either extinction or a drastic diminution of population worldwide is inevitable within their lifetimes, according to research well known by the students. Here we can make some really big, really simple connections—we can cease to care, for a moment, how it looks to make big simple connections instead of subtle small ones. So. The same world that warns them of extinction bestows toys for them to carry, to key, to rub with their thumbs in swift ovals, to insert into those aperatures called in Hamlet “the porch of the ear,” natural distance between brain and music annihilated, the cacophony nudged deep, close, too close to the species’ most exquisite bones, incalculably tiny, the miracle housed within each ridiculous naked human ear. That is the point of the ten thousand toys. They are not about strangeness and newness at all. They seek innateness, sensual invisibility, the body’s quality of being not-there to itself. In their insinuated proximity they elude the soul’s attempt to differentiate between soul and soulless. Which is basically all that literature has ever cared about, and why it will never cease to be loved . Sure, tell that to yourself, the professor tells herself. The strap of the professor’s heavy leather messenger bag rests on her left shoulder, crosses her chest, and fits below her right armpit, an arrangement completed with inevitable creasing of her jacket, which is black or any of the dozen soft shades of gray in her closet; not much variation there, not much risk; the bag itself is revolved until it rests snugly against her back, a trick learned from students in the nick of time, just before her neck acquired a permanent ache from one-shouldered weight-carrying. Calculate it sometime: the weight of the books you have carried in your life, would it equal that of a horse, a boat, a house? Bicycles rush at her from nineteen directions. No one hits anyone. Just how this is accomplished—by what unerring divination of one another’s intentions and how many hundreds of swift corrections—she wants to know, to see, or if she can’t see it, if she’s not quick enough to perceive the glance that averts disaster, and she’s not, then she wants at least to be close to it, she needs to know it happens, it goes on and on happening.

Her heart has always been the same size as it was that long-ago Sunday when she first saw those eyes pointed at both ends, and she has always felt the same to herself. Secretly, because people are supposed to go through enormous changes and to mature, she wonders if there is something wrong with her, to feel such consistency between who she is now and who she was when she looked down into those alive-dead eyes. Is something wrong with still being who she was as a child, or is she fine? What book can answer that? A great number of them seem to the professor to intuit the existence of this question from her , however far away she is in time from the writer of the book, however remote, and in this context the right adverb to modify remote is impossibly . A great many of the books she loves most hold this question. It’s in there somewhere, the question, if not the answers, and why is it enough, in reading, why is it beautiful simply to find your own questions?

Long ago, when she was a new professor with a new professor’s keen motivation, she took the trouble to think of really good answers to certain questions students asked, and the trouble she took then has paid off ever since, because the answers can be revised according to the times, some needing more revision than others, but her original responses continue to strike her as sufficient, and form a sort of core around which revision can take place, and the questions haven’t changed. Really there are only twelve or so, at least in her life. Twelve or so main ones. Around those, a haze or shimmer of worries and intimations that can’t quite materialize into questions. Anxieties like droplets lacking the particles of dust or grit they need to coalesce into clouds. Things they fear. Questions she could not answer anyway.

In her mind she answers the professor who asked the question, who is no longer alive to hear what she wants on her gravestone, not that she plans to have a gravestone because she wants to be cremated and despite her fear of death is consoled by the notion of ending up as ashes—why, she’s not sure: their lightness and vulnerability to dispersion suit her, as does their incorruptibility, the fact that nothing further can be done to ashes, that in their lack of ambition regarding immortality ashes are the opposite of those eyes she gazed into in the museum. In her mind he touches her wrist and asks his question, which for all she knows he’s in the habit of asking as a disconcerting, cut-to-the-chase, what are you really like? refinement of flirtation, whose bad-boy contempt for the usual niceties at least some women would respond to. She had responded to the professor, not in the way he wanted, not with equal and opposite impudence, but with the awkwardness of needing to think before talking, an awkwardness despised at her university, which she mostly hid, but not that evening and not with him, and he hadn’t liked that, and hadn’t liked her answer, so they parted and not long after that lost touch and she was left answering him in her mind, saying yes, there was something she’d like, just one word, on her gravestone. Reader . And in her mind he loves this answer.

For instance, a student will ask whether reading critically and interpreting—by beginning to study literature —will cause the student to stop loving reading, because the student thinks there’s a risk of this, and that is what the student never ever wants to happen, and what is the answer, is it right to reassure the student when after all the professor doesn’t know how it will go for that student, she only knows how it went for her? Well, she says, in my experience, she says, the more someone learns about an intricate thing, like, say, the human heart—the more a surgeon knows about that heart, right?, the deeper in , the more beautiful the thing seems, and by thing I mean a heart or a book, either one. Then the student says thank you and goes away. But the professor does not know any heart surgeons and has never asked a heart surgeon if what is felt is wonder. She made that up.

Only when she is well away from that roundabout, safely settled into her favorite corner of the couch in her office—when a new student plunks down in that corner, it’s a problem—only in this quiet, narrowing her pointed eyes in pleasure in an interval of aloneness she has no right to, because they should be here, the students, they’ve said they’re going to come by and one of them will knock on the door at any second, meaning the value of this interval, the preface to losing oneself in a book, is heightened by her awareness of its likely end—only in the particular space created by unexpected liberty (in which thinking her own thoughts has a stolen or illegitimate savor, really fun) does she intuit the real reason for her love of standing absolutely still in the bicycle onslaught, in the student whirlwind. As usual the real reason has been expertly swaddled in and obscured by false, lesser reasons, very attractive in and of themselves. Oh yes there is pleasure in being unmoved in the midst of an every-which-way assault. But also, this is like her life. They come at her from every direction! They never touch her! No. That’s not it, not the bottommost layer, not the meaning revealed only when other meanings are peeled away, whose existence you only ever discover if peeling is a habit, if you love this deft quiet work of lifting away length of gauze after length of gauze to find the true face. Down down down down down and down. They mean something, these almost-winged cyclists, in their seriousness and lightness, their concentration, in their searchingness that must discern every tiny signal or else , in their absorption. This is reading. No wonder she loves standing there: in the middle of a steady cascade of virtuoso reading on which everything depends.