Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

It could be, the professor tells herself, that apart from your work and your teaching you do not have enough going for you, that you need to get out more, that due to your aloneness, which we’re not going to call loneliness because it’s not that—it’s a deliberate, cultured, desirable, nonnegotiable state, absolutely necessary if you want to get work done, intelligent aloneness, good aloneness; it has a point!—because you are alone, conceivably your students matter too much. At least you have to ask yourself once in a while, you have to check in regarding whether or not it is wrong, what you feel for them, the students. Without fail you need to recognize that the easiest transition love ever makes is into coercion, and that your most useful trait as far as students are concerned is dis interestedness. You’ve said often enough that you love teaching, but you have never said the truer thing, which is that you love your students, because it would only worry everyone to hear it, it would worry even you, and it might not even be true, because there is, remember, the risk that aloneness has exaggerated what you feel for them. Which may not be love, but some minor, teacherly emotion that nobody ever bothered to give a name. Who were they, the people who figured out what the emotions were, and how many of them would be recognized and named, and which sad little shadings or gradations could safely be ignored—who were they, these feeling-namers and numberers, and what did they have against shades of gray?

The students rarely embark on a difficult or painful subject without some sort of rhetorical exit strategy. There is almost no sorrow they can’t disown with an immediate laugh. In that case—in the case of a quick student laugh—the professor is not supposed to know that she has been permitted to glimpse serious emotion. After many years as a professor it still strikes her as unnatural that students, that people fear what she might think: who the fuck is she? But they watch her eyes for what she’s thinking. Will she say something actually useful to them, or something they in their desperation (because sometimes it is desperation) can twist into usefulness, which will be more useful for seeming to have come from her, the professor? What can she tell them about what comes next?

In the corner of the couch with a light titanium-sheathed machine balanced partly on the arm of the couch and partly on one raised knee, the professor clicks through the forests and clearings of a few contested acres. Mild and unevocative except for being somewhat forlorn, these acres, sad in the way of woods that don’t thrive, lacking the cannons, the plaques, the bronze generals on horseback that tell you blood was shed here. The Wilderness, this battlefield is called, capital T, capital W. Walmart wants this particular scrap of The Wilderness for a supercenter whose aisles will be lined with toys for the children of tourists drawn to other already-protected acres of battlefield. There is no telling from these unphotogenic scantily wooded fawn-colored hills that her great-great-grandfather almost died here. If he had died he would have been one among thirty thousand, and she, of course, would never have existed. He lived: the War Department records his new status as prisoner of war, sent by train to Camp Delaware, also known as Pea Patch Island. The professor both likes and hates the irony, the sunny potager promised by the name Pea Patch Island and the reality of filth and exposure and fever and starvation, tainted water and maggoty flour, befalling him at nineteen. Was he as alive to himself as she is to herself, did he feel as real —if he stretched out his hand and flexed its fingers and turned it to study the lines intersecting and diverging in the palm, did he marvel? The deepest despair, the blackest pitch of disillusion about humankind: those are what she imagines, imagining his emotions, but these conjectures could be wrong. He is remote in time and culture. He could have done improbably well, inwardly—could have come through with all his F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact. Consolations that seem to her the most childish lies and self-deceptions might have been his salvation. Not books, but Book. He might, if time were transcended and he could know her and what she thinks and what she teaches her students and her preference for ambiguity over conviction and her godlessness, turn his savage Civil War eyes on her, his billy-goat beard, his cavalryman’s uprightness, his gaunt authority renouncing her, his distant child. A cousin sent the professor the only known photograph of him, a slouch-hatted elderly figure astride a sorrel horse, and even in this photo, no bigger than a matchbook, and even in extreme old age, he is clearly someone to reckon with. So, she thinks, love me. Want me to come into existence. From the year 2012 she gazes into the pixels that comprise his gaze. Back to the homepage of the historical trust fighting Walmart, and with several clicks of the mouse, she buys an acre of these woods where he lay wounded, and her inbox dings with instant thanks from a computer in the trust’s distant offices. It’s his thanks she wants to come dinging in. She is amused at herself, though there are tears in her eyes. Through mouseclicks she had hoped to connect to that long-ago, unknowable, very likely hostile old man. Who she’s somehow as lonely for as if she had once been a child cradled in his arms, as if, leaning his head down so his mouth was close to her ear, he had said her name, and then said listen , and then told her the story that was the story within all the other stories of her life, the oldest and most beautiful and farthest back, the one that would elude death forever and ever and ever amen.

Me . Say you lived at least partly for me .

This is the story that must exist somewhere; this is what she can’t find to read.

THE NEWS FROM SPAIN is terrible. A bomb under a park bench in a small town near Madrid. Fifteen people have been killed and dozens injured. Harriet tells the aide, who crosses herself; the nurse, who says, “It makes you want to stay home and never leave the house—but that would just be giving in to terrorism”; and her daughter Rebecca, who says, “Why do you spend all day watching that stuff?”

Rebecca is tired. Harriet has been sick on and off for years, more than a decade. Rebecca has just driven four hours from Boston to get to the Connecticut nursing home where Harriet now lives. She is taking two days off from the small bookstore she owns, paying her part-time assistant extra to cover for her. She’s brought a shopping bag full of things Harriet likes: rice pudding with raisins, shortbread, fresh figs, and a box of lamejuns from a Middle Eastern bakery. She has walked into the room, and Harriet has barely looked away from the TV to say hello.

What Harriet says is “They just interviewed a man whose granddaughter died in his arms.”

Rebecca puts down the shopping bag and kisses the top of her mother’s head. Someone has given Harriet a haircut, a surprisingly flattering one. Her head smells faintly of shampoo.

Harriet puts up a hand and feels for Rebecca’s face, briefly cupping her chin. “They think it was a Basque separatist group.”

Rebecca nods, and goes down the hall to the kitchen, to put the rice pudding and lamejuns in the fridge. The hallway is full of wheelchairs, a straggly becalmed flotilla of gray people just sitting there, some with their head lolling on their chest. On the way back to her mother’s room, she runs into the social worker assigned to Harriet’s case. Today is Halloween; the social worker is wearing a pirate hat and an eye patch. “How do you think your mom is doing?” she asks Rebecca.