Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Perhaps because of the “Hollywoodization” of short fiction and a growing disdain for writers who were thought to have sold out, certain writers became fiercely private and, as they grew more successful, denied Foley permission to reprint their stories in the series. After granting permission for Foley to reprint “A Girl I Knew,” J. D. Salinger refused all future requests for permission, even though Foley had first published his fiction in Story . These refusals had the unexpected effect of benefiting other writers. Vladimir Nabokov refused Foley permission to reprint a story, and at the last minute she replaced his with “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” by Raymond Carver. It was Carver’s first appearance in the series. He wrote, “People used to call it that — simply, ‘The Foley Collection’… the day the anthology came in the mail I took it to bed to read and just to look at, you know, and hold it, but I did more looking and holding than actual reading. I fell asleep and woke up the next morning with the book there in bed beside me, with my wife.”

Foley had a contentious relationship with Houghton Mifflin. Her editors grew frustrated by how frequently she missed deadlines and wondered about the breadth of her taste. They suggested that she share the editorship with two other people, but she refused and threatened to take the series to another house. She frequently demanded early payments; she struggled financially throughout her life and felt that she was never paid enough for her work. In order to support herself and her son, she taught fiction writing at Columbia University. She became known for her pragmatism — she insisted that everything the students wrote be submitted to magazines. She passed along her insights about the writing life; her student Barbara Probst Solomon explained, “She advised the women writers not to fall in love with writers and spend [their] lives typing their manuscripts for them.” Despite her editorship, her teaching job, and miscellaneous freelance assignments, Foley continued to struggle financially, and in 1959 the IRS issued a tax lien and levy on her royalties. From then on, 20 percent of her earnings went directly to the U.S. government. Years later Foley wrote, “[My editor] once figured out that I receive far less than a cleaning woman for my time and work.”

TILLIE OLSEN (1912–2007) was born in Nebraska, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. She dropped out of high school at fifteen and worked as a waitress, factory worker, and maid. She became politically active and eventually joined the American Communist Party. She later moved to San Francisco, which became her home for most of her life.

Tell Me a Riddle , Olsen’s first book, was a collection of short stories mostly narrated by mothers. Olsen wrote relatively little during her career, but her stories did bring awareness of the plight of exploited people.

Olsen taught at colleges such as Amherst College and Stanford University and was the recipient of nine honorary degrees, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the Rea Award for the Short Story, in 1994, for a lifetime of achievement. She died at the age of ninety-four.

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I STAND HERE IRONING, and what you asked of me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.

“I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”

“Who needs help?” Even if I came what good would it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been — and would be, I would tell her — and was now, to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine.

I nursed her. They feel that’s important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.

Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything.

She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur. She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father, who “could no longer endure” (he wrote in his goodbye note) “sharing want with us.”

I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression. I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet.

After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and it was better. But it came to where I had to bring her to his family and leave her.

It took a long time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got chicken pox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone.

She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I know now — the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.

Except that it would have made no difference if I had known. It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job.

And even without knowing, I knew. I knew the teacher that was evil because all these years it has curdled into my memory, the little boy hunched in the corner, her rasp, “Why aren’t you outside, because Alvin hits you? That’s no reason, go out, coward.” I knew Emily hated it even if she did not clutch and implore “Don’t go, Mommy” like the other children, mornings.

She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick, Momma. I feel sick. Momma, the teachers aren’t there today, they’re sick. Momma there was a fire there last night. Momma it’s a holiday today, no school, they told me.

But never a direct protest, never rebellion. I think of our others in their three-, four-year-oldness — the explosions, the tempers, the denunciations, the demands — and I feel suddenly ill. I stop the ironing. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?

The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way, “You should smile at Emily more when you look at her.” What was in my face when I looked at her? I loved her. There were all the acts of love.