Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Before leaving, the Chows went to look at Rikki and Bok’s apartment. They climbed up the stairs. No one was home. Rikki and Bok had barely started to pack. Bok’s naked man, surrounded by an assortment of spears and arrows, was still hanging on the living room wall. Bok had paid good money for the photograph: an aboriginal gent stares into the camera, he’s smiling, his teeth are good and large, and in his palms he’s holding his sex out like a prize eel.

Mrs. Chow looked at the photograph for as long as it was discreetly possible before she averted her eyes and made her usual remark about Bok’s tastes. Beyond the building’s edge she saw the manager’s cottage, bleached white in the sun. Outside the front door Remora Cass sat in a folding chair, her eyes shut, her pie-tin face turned up to catch the rays, while Velvet, her feet anchored to the asphalt, rolled her mother’s hair in pink curlers. Between the big woman’s legs the baby lay in a wicker basket. He was quietly rocking from side to side. Remora Cass’s chest rose and fell in the rhythm of sleep.

Driving home, they passed the boardwalk, and Mrs. Chow asked if they might stop.

Chow refused to ride the roller coaster in the daytime, no matter how much Mrs. Chow teased. It was hard enough at night, when the heights from which the cars fell were lit by a few rows of bulbs. As he handed her an orange ticket, Chow said, “A drunk doesn’t look in mirrors.”

The Milky Way clattered into the terminus. After she boarded the ride, she watched Chow, who had wandered from the loading platform and was standing beside a popcorn wagon, looking up at a billboard. His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his legs crossed at the shins. That had been his pose, the brim of his hat low on his brow, as he waited for her finally to pass through the gates of Immigration.

“Go on,” an old woman said. “You’ll be glad you did.” The old woman nudged her young charge toward the empty seat in Mrs. Chow’s car. “Go on, she won’t bite.” The girl looked back at the old woman. “Grand-muth-ther!” she said, and then reluctantly climbed in beside Mrs. Chow.

Once the attendant strapped the girl in, she turned from her grandmother and stared at her new companion. The machine jerked away from the platform. They were climbing the first ascent when Mrs. Chow snuck a look at the girl. She was met by the clearest eyes she had ever known, eyes that didn’t shy from the encounter. The girl’s pupils, despite the bright sun, were fully dilated, stretched with fear. Now that she had Mrs. Chow’s attention, she turned her gaze slowly toward the vertical track ahead. Mrs. Chow looked beyond the summit to the empty blue sky.

Within seconds they tumbled through that plane and plunged downward, the cars flung suddenly left and right, centrifugal force throwing Mrs. Chow against the girl’s rigid body. She was surprised by Chow’s absence.

It’s gravity that makes the stomach fly, that causes the liver to flutter; it’s the body catching up with the speed of falling. Until today, she had never known such sensations. Today there was a weightiness at her core, like a hard, concentrated pull inward, as if an incision had been made and a fist-sized magnet embedded.

Her arms flew up, two weak wings cutting the rush of wind. But it wasn’t the old sensation this time, not the familiar embrace of the whole fleeting continent, but a grasp at something once there, now lost.

Chow had moved into position to see the riders’ faces as they careened down the steepest stretch of track. Whenever he was up there with her, his eyes were clenched and his scream so wild and his grip on his life so tenuous that he never noticed her expression. At the top of the rise the cars seemed to stop momentarily, but then up and over, tumbling down, at what appeared, from his safe vantage point, a surprisingly slow speed. Arms shot up, the machine whooshed past him, preceded a split second earlier by the riders’ collective scream. And for the first time Chow thought he heard her, she who loved this torture so, scream too.

As she was whipped skyward once more, her arms were wrapped around the little girl. Not in flight, not soaring, but anchored by another’s being, as her parents stood against the liberators to protect their land.

Some curves, a gentle dip, one last sharp bend, and the ride rumbled to rest. The girl’s breath was warm against Mrs. Chow’s neck. For a moment longer she held on to the girl, whose small ribs were as thin as paintbrushes.

The Chows walked to the edge of the platform. He looked up at the billboard he had noticed earlier. It was a picture of an American woman with bright red hair, large red lips, and a slightly upturned nose; a fur was draped around her neck, pearls cut across her throat.

“What do you suppose they’re selling?” he asked.

His wife pointed at the billboard. She read aloud what was printed there: “No other home permanent wave looks, feels, behaves so much like naturally curly hair.”

She then gave a quick translation and asked what he thought of her curling her hair.

He made no reply. For some time now he couldn’t lift his eyes from her.

“I won’t do it,” she said, “but what do you say?”

She turned away from him and stared a long time at the face on the billboard and then at the beach on the other side of the boardwalk and at the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and at the horizon where all lines of sight converge, before she realized the land on the other side wouldn’t come into view.

AT THE END OF 1989, SHANNON RAVENEL RESIGNED as the series editor, moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and continued her work with Algonquin Books. Again Houghton Mifflin had to find a replacement. They chose Katrina Kenison, a young in-house editor. She said, “Reading wasn’t something I did as a child, it was who I was.” After graduating from Smith College, Kenison got a job at Macy’s selling lingerie… One day an article in the Sunday New York Times caught my eye: a feature about a small literary imprint of Houghton Mifflin Company being launched in New Haven, where we were living. I looked up the editor in chief in the phone book, typed a letter saying I would do anything, and mailed it to his home address. Within a week I was installed on a stool in the kitchen (the offices were in a newly renovated Victorian house), with scissors, a stack of news clippings, and a jar of rubber cement… It wasn’t long before I was writing jacket copy, copy editing manuscripts, and reading the slush pile. And when I found a first novel that was good enough to publish, I was allowed to edit it.

She spent nine years working as an editor for Houghton Mifflin, first in New Haven, then in New York, and finally in the Boston office.

Kenison’s first son was only a month old when she became the fourth series editor of The Best American Short Stories . She said, “I hired a baby sitter, bought my first computer, and learned to use FileMaker Pro so I could keep track of the more than 200 magazine subscriptions I’d suddenly inherited.”

Ravenel told Kenison, “Read everything. Stay open-minded. Never write someone off just because you’ve read twenty-five of his stories and none of them has worked; the twenty-sixth might be wonderful.” When she sent her first volume of stories to Houghton Mifflin, Kenison included a letter suggesting that someone look into two new writers she had come across in her reading: Robert Olen Butler and Charles D’Ambrosio.

Kenison reinstated the series editor’s foreword. In her first foreword, she defined her taste almost as broadly as Foley had: “A good story has a way of announcing itself, rendering irrelevant any preconceived maxims of standards of excellence.” She assured readers that any fears of the homogenization of literary short fiction because of the proliferation of writing programs were unfounded, that “our best fiction writers are in no danger.”