Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

As for me, I have not strayed much farther. Mala and I live in a town about twenty miles from Boston, on a tree-lined street much like Mrs. Croft’s, in a house we own, with a garden that saves us from buying tomatoes in summer. We are American citizens now, so that we can collect Social Security when it is time. Though we visit Calcutta every few years, we have decided to grow old here. I work in a small college library. We have a son who attends Harvard University. Mala no longer drapes the end of her sari over her head, or weeps at night for her parents, but occasionally she weeps for our son. So we drive to Cambridge to visit him, or bring him home for a weekend, so that he can eat rice with us with his hands, and speak in Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after we die.

Whenever we make that drive, I always take Massachusetts Avenue, in spite of the traffic. I barely recognize the buildings now, but each time I am there I return instantly to those six weeks as if they were only the other day, and I slow down and point to Mrs. Croft’s street, saying to my son, Here was my first home in America, where I lived with a woman who was 103. “Remember?” Mala says, and smiles, amazed, as I am, that there was ever a time that we were strangers. My son always expresses his astonishment, not at Mrs. Croft’s age but at how little I paid in rent, a fact nearly as inconceivable to him as a flag on the moon was to a woman born in 1866. In my son’s eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

ZZ PACKER was born in Chicago in 1973 and grew up in Atlanta and Louisville. She first published in Seventeen when she was nineteen years old. Packer attended Yale University and went on to study at Johns Hopkins University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She was then named a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.

Her short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere , was published in 2003. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, and selected by John Updike for the Today show Book Club.

Packer said, “I think a lot of my characters wish race didn’t matter as much as it does, but it does. When you are either in the minority as is the case for blacks in the U.S. or the oppressed majority as was formerly the case in South Africa, you don’t have the luxury of being able to decide whether or not to pay attention to race, because if you don’t, someone else will, and the surprise repercussions are far worse than preparing for the worst and being pleasantly surprised if the worst never occurs.”

Packer won a Guggenheim Fellowship and was named one of America’s Best Young Novelists by Granta , one of The New Yorker ’s 20 Under 40, as well as one of Smithsonian magazine’s Young Innovators in October 2007. She lives in San Francisco.

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BY THE END of our first day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions like a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters — Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse — or the generic ones cheap parents bought — washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.

Our troop wended its way past their bus, past the ranger station, past the colorful trail guide drawn like a treasure map, locked behind glass.

“Man, did you smell them?” Arnetta said, giving the girls a slow once-over. “They smell like Chihuahuas. Wet Chihuahuas.” Although we had passed their troop by yards, Arnetta raised her nose in the air and grimaced.

Arnetta said this from the very rear of the line, far away from Mrs. Margolin, who strung our troop behind her like a brood of obedient ducklings. Mrs. Margolin even looked like a mother duck — she had hair cropped close to a small ball of a head, almost no neck, and huge, miraculous breasts. She wore enormous belts that looked like the kind weight lifters wear, except hers were cheap metallic gold or rabbit fur or covered with gigantic fake sunflowers. Often these belts would become nature lessons in and of themselves. “See,” Mrs. Margolin once said to us, pointing to her belt. “This one’s made entirely from the feathers of baby pigeons.”

The belt layered with feathers was uncanny enough, but I was more disturbed by the realization that I had never actually seen a baby pigeon. I searched for weeks for one, in vain — scampering after pigeons whenever I was downtown with my father.

But nature lessons were not Mrs. Margolin’s top priority. She saw the position of troop leader as an evangelical post. Back at the A.M.E. church where our Brownie meetings were held, she was especially fond of imparting religious aphorisms by means of acrostics — Satan was the “Serpent Always Tempting And Noisome”; she’d refer to the Bible as “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” Whenever she occasionally quizzed us on these at the beginning of the Brownie meeting, expecting to hear the acrostics parroted back to her, only Arnetta’s correct replies soared over our vague mumblings. “Jesus?” Mrs. Margolin might ask expectantly, and Arnetta alone would dutifully answer, “Jehovah’s Example, Saving Us Sinners.”

Arnetta made a point of listening to Mrs. Margolin’s religious talk and giving her what she wanted to hear. Because of this, Arnetta could have blared through a megaphone that the white girls of Troop 909 were “wet Chihuahuas” without arousing so much as a blink from Mrs. Margolin. Once Arnetta killed the troop goldfish by feeding it a French fry covered in ketchup, and when Mrs. Margolin demanded an explanation, Arnetta claimed that the goldfish had been eyeing her meal for hours , until — giving in to temptation — it had leapt up and snatched the whole golden fry from her fingertips.

“ Serious Chihuahua,” Octavia added — though neither Arnetta nor Octavia could spell “Chihuahua” or had ever seen a Chihuahua. Trisyllabic words had gained a sort of exoticism within our fourth-grade set at Woodrow Wilson Elementary. Arnetta and Octavia, compelled to outdo each other, would flip through the dictionary, determined to work the vulgar-sounding ones like “Djibouti” and “asinine” into conversation.

“ Caucasian Chihuahuas,” Arnetta said.

That did it. Drema and Elise doubled up on each other like inextricably entwined kites; Octavia slapped the skin of her belly; Janice jumped straight up in the air, then did it again, just as hard, as if to slam-dunk her own head. No one had laughed so hard since a boy named Martez had stuck his pencil in the electric socket and spent the whole day with a strange grin on his face.