Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

We hooked our fingers in the metal fence. You know, one of those aluminum fences around a playground. There were pigeons standing on the painted game circles. Then a bell rang and all these kids came out, yelling, spilling into groups. This was a poor school, mostly black kids, Mexican kids, all in bright colors. There’s a Nabisco factory nearby and the whole air smelled like blueberry muffins.

The girls were jump-roping and the boys were shoving and running and hanging on to the monkey bars. Lauren pinched her fingers on the back of my neck and pushed my head against the fence.

“Eight years old. Look at them. They’re eight years old. One of their fathers is sleeping with one of those girls. Look at her. Do you blame her? Can you blame her? Because if you can forgive her you can forgive yourself.”

“I’ll kill him,” I said.

“And I’ll kill Glenn,” Lauren says.

So we went and got pancakes. And drank coffee until it was time for class.

I saw Glenn yesterday. It was so weird after all this time. I just had lunch with Lauren. We picked up tickets for Talking Heads and I wanted to get back to the lab before class and I’m walking along and Glenn was working, you know, on the lawn in front of the Mobi Building. He was still gorgeous. I was just going to walk, but he yelled over at me.

“Hey, Jenny.”

“Hi, Glenn.”

He congratulated me, he heard about the NSF thing. We stood there. He has another girlfriend now. I don’t know, when I looked at him and stood there by the lawn mower, it’s chugging away, I felt the same as I always used to, that I loved him and all that, but he might just be one of those things you can’t have. Like I should have been for my father and look at him now. Oh, I think he’s better, they’re all better, but I’m gone, he’ll never have me again.

I’m glad they’re there and I’m here, but it’s strange, I feel more alone now. Glenn looked down at the little pile of grass by the lawn mower and said, “Well, kid, take care of yourself,” and I said, “You too, ’bye,” and started walking.

So, you know what’s bad, though, I started taking stuff again. Little stuff from the mailroom. No packages and not people I know anymore.

But I take one letter a Saturday, I make it just one and someone I don’t know. And I keep ’em and burn ’em with a match in the bathroom sink and wash the ashes down the drain. I wait until the end of the shift. I always expect it to be something exciting. The two so far were just everyday letters, just mundane, so that’s all that’s new, I-had-a-pork-chop-for-dinner letters.

But something happened today, I was in the middle, three-quarters way down the bag, still looking, I hadn’t picked my letter for the day, I’m being really stern, I really mean just one, no more, and there’s this little white envelope addressed to me. I sit there, trembling with it in my hand. It’s the first one I’ve gotten all year. It was my name and address, typed out, and I just stared at it. There’s no address. I got so nervous, I thought maybe it was from Glenn, of course, I wanted it to be from Glenn so bad, but then I knew it couldn’t be, he’s got that new girlfriend now, so I threw it in the garbage can right there, one of those with the swinging metal door, and then I finished my shift. My hands were sweating, I smudged the writing on one of the envelopes.

So all the letters are in boxes, I clean off the table, fold the bags up neat and close the door, ready to go. And then I thought, I don’t have to keep looking at the garbage can, I’m allowed to take it back, that’s my letter. And I fished it out, the thing practically lopped my arm off. And I had it and I held it a few minutes, wondering who it was from. Then I put it in my mailbox so I can go like everybody else and get mail.

RICHARD FORD was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. At nineteen he worked as a switchman on the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and he later earned a BA from Michigan State University. Ford has experienced dyslexia all his life and has said, “Being a slow reader made me pore over sentences and possibly, helpfully, become more receptive to the ‘poetical’ aspects of written language.”

Ford is known for the Bascombe books, which include The Sportswriter, Independence Day —winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award— The Lay of the Land , and the recently published Let Me Be Frank with You . His short story collections include Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins . He is Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University in New York.

In an interview, Ford said, “Fiction always uses language to refer the reader to lived life and to express life’s consequence. This is true irrespective of how ‘realistic’ or how hermetic, self-referring, or abstract an individual story happens to be. It always takes us back to life.”

Richard Ford lives in East Boothbay, Maine.

★

MY MOTHER ONCE had a boyfriend named Glen Baxter. This was in 1961. We — my mother and I — were living in the little house my father had left her up the Sun River, near Victory, Montana, west of Great Falls. My mother was thirty-one at the time. I was sixteen. Glen Baxter was somewhere in the middle, between us, though I cannot be exact about it.

We were living then off the proceeds of my father’s life insurance policies, with my mother doing some part-time waitressing work up in Great Falls and going to the bars in the evenings, which I know is where she met Glen Baxter. Sometimes he would come back with her and stay in her room at night, or she would call up from town and explain that she was staying with him in his little place on Lewis Street by the GN yards. She gave me his number every time, but I never called it. I think she probably thought that what she was doing was terrible, but simply couldn’t help herself. I thought it was all right, though. Regular life it seemed and still does. She was young, and I knew that even then.

Glen Baxter was a Communist and liked hunting, which he talked about a lot. Pheasants. Ducks. Deer. He killed all of them, he said. He had been to Vietnam as far back as then, and when he was in our house he often talked about shooting the animals over there — monkeys and beautiful parrots — using military guns just for sport. We did not know what Vietnam was then, and Glen, when he talked about that, referred to it only as “the Far East.” I think now he must’ve been in the CIA and been disillusioned by something he saw or found out about and had been thrown out, but that kind of thing did not matter to us. He was a tall, dark-eyed man with thick black hair, and was usually in a good humor. He had gone halfway through college in Peoria, Illinois, he said, where he grew up. But when he was around our life he worked wheat farms as a ditcher, and stayed out of work winters and in the bars drinking with women like my mother, who had work and some money. It is not an uncommon life to lead in Montana.

What I want to explain happened in November. We had not been seeing Glen Baxter for some time. Two months had gone by. My mother knew other men, but she came home most days from work and stayed inside watching television in her bedroom and drinking beers. I asked about Glen once, and she said only that she didn’t know where he was, and I assumed they had had a fight and that he was gone off on a flyer back to Illinois or Massachusetts, where he said he had relatives. I’ll admit that I liked him. He had something on his mind always. He was a labor man as well as a Communist, and liked to say that the country was poisoned by the rich, and strong men would need to bring it to life again, and I liked that because my father had been a labor man, which was why we had a house to live in and money coming through. It was also true that I’d had a few boxing bouts by then — just with town boys and one with an Indian from Choteau — and there were some girlfriends I knew from that. I did not like my mother being around the house so much at night, and I wished Glen Baxter would come back, or that another man would come along and entertain her somewhere else.