The Best American Short Stories 2020 Read online

  I twisted my hair and put on a bathrobe. I started to call Nicole but we didn’t speak the same language anymore, and I didn’t want to field her questions about the stolen wine. I fell back onto the groaning iron bed my mama and them had dragged over from Mississippi. I told myself that begging my people of the impossible and staying up too late with my bad attitudes had earned me conversations like the ones I kept having with the godmother.

  “So you mean to tell me that you don’t have anything to do with it?” Her voice was almost familiar.

  I turned to the mirror and something inside started to crumble, grain by grain. This robe was supposed to make me look like a rich wizard, but you can never trust the colors you see on the computer. I just looked like my dead aunties. “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m tired of everything.”

  “Refusing to learn can do that to a person,” she said. She was manning the stove, striking a match, lighting a pilot. “How it violates the soul! Your only soul.”

  But I couldn’t stop being myself! My people kept giving me the special look that lets you know you’ve reached the end of something. It made me feel at ease to see it, but then I’d panic because I didn’t know what in the world was going to happen to me. So I’d end up begging things of people I’d already worn out.

  The godmother looked on with her mouth set in a judgy bunch. A timer went off and she pulled a roasting pan of macaroni and cheese casserole from the oven, throwing lights everywhere. That was one of her powers: she only cooked the type of food you had to wait in suffering for. She set the pan on the counter and dug her hand into the steaming macaroni and cheese, eating like a monster.

  “You’re not even listening to me,” I said. “Are you?”

  “What you expect?” The godmother laughed so hard I could see the craters in her wisdom teeth. “You ain’t saying nothing.”

  * * *

  Saturday afternoon I drove my granny’s car to André’s house. The plan was to perpetrate like I was just passing through the hood or something, but he was already outside mowing the lawn as I came creeping by.

  This shouldn’t matter, but it must be said: André Simpson is an extraordinarily handsome individual. He’s lanky, with a long neck and wavy Caesar, and he sometimes looks like a sweet, mute butler who with more opportunities could have been the principal dancer. André always got me thinking of possibilities. Sometimes I had to remind myself that he was just a mechanical engineer, shy until he’d learned he was beautiful and wanted, a stubborn child who after all this time refused to speak properly. You couldn’t creep up on a dude like that, but I was moved to try.

  I tricked his ass into feeding me. We rode in his car to a dirty chicken restaurant, the kind of place where they don’t even put out tables and chairs because nobody wants you to stay. We ate in the car, talking elliptically about old rappers and how irrational it was to try to live off the grid and the fact that I had declined him first and now there was Porsche to whom he felt a physical obligation, so there was no point in talking about possibilities anyway. Then we were silent.

  I told André that his silence was a way of strong-arming us back into our respective gender roles, and he shrugged, saying he didn’t make the laws of nature. “Sound like you mad at God,” he said. He looked into my eyes so directly, almost musically, and I just knew that he was never going to say anything of romantic import to me ever again. And I realized that I had nothing new to say to him either.

  So, naturally, I started begging. “Please say something. But know that whatever you say, I’m going to hold on to it forever.”

  “Don’t you do that,” said André. “Not for no nigger.” He glanced in the rearview, almost hopeful for carjackers.

  But what I had wanted to say was that he was nullifying my entire life. I wanted to tell André that if some fool rolled through and shot up the parking lot, murdering me only, I hoped he would be haunted for the rest of his stupid-ass life. But I was embarrassed that the rants of a hula-hooping crazy summarized the true feelings of my heart. The goal was to attract him again.

  André drove me back to his hovel. Bypassing my granny’s car, I led him to his own front door. I think we both knew that without some disembodied sex, the whole encounter would be a waste.

  Porsche sat cross-legged on the sectional playing a basketball game on the console. Her hair was pinned to her scalp in a dozen black rosettes, and she was wearing one of André’s dress shirts the way you were supposed to if you had the audacity to wear a man’s shirt. André glanced at us both. He went to the kitchen and came back with a water bottle. I tried to shoot him a telepathic gaze but my face was only begging, telling what he already knew.

  Porsche interjected, telling someone on the headset, or me, “You can keep your mouth when I cut your head off.” She said, “You want to slap me? Let me reach my face out so you can do it.” As she looked up at me, her face was like a once-in-a-lifetime full moon. But after one glance, she was too dazzled by my pain to look back again. I kept staring at her in André’s shirt, trying to remember that I was a woman too.

  Usually I’m pretty sheepish around beautiful low-income women, but my recent situation had empowered me. I gave the shirt the nod and said, “Is that André’s?”

  He was already out the door, saying that he was going to walk me to my car, although it had belonged to my granny. Porsche looked down at the controller and laughed like she knew secrets about me. She adjusted her headset and, addressing somebody else, said, “Y’all need a glass-cleaner?”

  * * *

  I noticed that André was doing his best to make it quick. I tried taking off my shoes, but he wouldn’t let me. I tried pulling up the front of his shirt, but this wasn’t the place for that either. He moved smoothly, barely touching me, and something about the whole thing fit in with my idea of a cat burglar, if you know what I mean. He had tangled his face into a look-what-you-made-me-do expression directed at me only. I kissed him before he could move his face out the way.

  Afterward he had some extra look in his eyes, but not so much that he saw past what he’d already concluded about me. Nothing told him that, enhanced by all this burgundy leather and all that I was going through, I was someone he could get stuck on again, possibly. I can admit that I was waiting for him to say the things dudes say to give you hope. But all of a sudden André couldn’t look at me.

  The feelings almost got me, but then I realized that were she in a similar position, the godmother would find a way to come out on top. I needed to get like her. I needed solutions. Then one came to me. I told André, “I need that shirt.” I needed him to pluck his own shirt off Porsche’s sweetly dipped back.

  He started to smile, but once I’d conjured up my best godmother face, he crawled out the door, rushing back inside. I had set him up to free-style a lie for someone who’d maybe had a hard childhood. Porsche could be saved in other ways. The wait that followed made the car’s interior more luxurious than ever before. Then two boys walked up the street passing a forty back and forth, and I watched them the way white people have watched me. Guilt rippled through me on low heat.

  André returned, presenting the shirt like a token of his expired affections, and I smiled hard, becoming myself again. I wouldn’t wish that smile on anybody. Nobody living, nobody with hopes of coming to life should ever have to smile like I did.

  * * *

  Back in my apartment, something told me to downplay my happiness. I sat at the table recounting the worst parts for the godmother’s entertainment. In my kitchen she was lording over pots of steaming beauty, shaking her head without end. But as she was sprinkling sparkling hoops of season-all salt or pouring sizzling bacon grease into a jar, I suddenly felt defeated and ended up just telling the truth. “Our relationship wasn’t even that great,” I told her. “But back then, I felt like I was inevitable. At the same time, I remembered how he used to look at me, like what I had wasn’t much but he was willing to work with it.”

  “That’s probably exactly wha
t he was thinking,” said the godmother. “If he was thinking anything coherent at all.”

  “You know what,” I said. “I’m getting tired of you and your marinades.” It was my own fault. You can’t be self-deprecating with everyone. “Anyway. It was nice,” I said, but that wasn’t accurate either. Already it was hard to remember that moment where André and I had looked at each other and realized anything could happen, now that everything had.

  “You trying to sound dumb?” said the godmother. “This is what happens when you call a false love, love. The man just doesn’t see things your way. Never did, never will.”

  “I wish you’d jump in the air and stay put,” I said. “You’re like a diss track I can’t turn off.”

  “What you need me to say?” The godmother screwed up her face, and the skin of her forehead stood up in cursive. “You misread the whole thing? He was doing his very best to make love to you, girl. He missed you so much it was scary, and now he regrets everything. You changed his life. You put a move on his heart, an impress on his soul. Matter fact, you’re the one. He wants you back.”

  I considered reminding the godmother, like André did me, that I had declined him first, but it wouldn’t sound right coming out of my mouth.

  “I know it’s hard. He done broke down all your walls of vulnerability,” she said, “but you can’t rebuild with someone you had nothing with in the first place. And you ought to know marriage is out of the question.”

  I knew that. Everybody knows not to do marriage if you want to keep the feeling going. “I want him to apologize,” I said. “For not choosing me.”

  “Nobody does that,” said the godmother. “Not even when they’re saying the words.”

  She whipped up a Jell-O salad with grapes and peaches swimming inside and a frosting sprinkled with pecans. She warmed up Vienna sausages in the microwave and served them still popping on a salad plate. The taste of everything brought me to tears.

  “But I want him to say the words,” I said.

  “Then you’re a fool,” said the godmother. She was watching the tears in my eyes, seeing if I would let them fall.

  * * *

  I made the obvious sartorial decision and wore André’s shirt the next day, fantasizing that on the other side of town there was a gorgeous, half-naked woman realizing just what she’d lost. To complete the look, I experimented with some fuchsia lipstick my mother would’ve despised and I drew my eyebrows up and away from my nose, which I’d been noticing was the new style. This was the image of myself that I wanted to keep in perpetuity.

  I held my expired license close to my heart as I drove my granny’s car to the DMV. En route, the city seemed to have changed its opinions about me. I could speed up traffic with the nod of my head. I could weave through lanes. There wasn’t a person alive whose angry gaze could get their hooks in. I was a different Joy altogether and it was an incredible feeling, to be who I hoped to be. My soul was filled with laughter that made me shake. I thought I was free.

  But when I arrived, the building was locked. The DMV was closed on Sunday, coinciding with the holiday that I hadn’t realized was happening. On the door I saw my reflection and how I really looked in André’s shirt on Easter Sunday, an excited, ruby-eyed bunny cartwheeling across on my chest. This pleased bunny seemed to be dancing all over me, over everything I’d accomplished.

  I called my mother but I remembered that she never knew what to say or how to say it, and on the first ring I hung up the phone. When I saw that she was calling me back, I was too ashamed for us both to answer. So I called Nicole, but she declined me. Then, for an instant, I thought I’d made a little progress in my journey simply because all that internalized sexism kept me from immediately calling André. But in seconds I decided to be a free woman and I called him too.

  “Joy?” he was saying like I was someone else. “Is that you? Are you there?”

  Stepping off the curb, I was almost struck down by a black car. The car was swerving away just as I started to feel what was happening. I saw myself reflected in the fender, looking as though someone had run a heavy hand across my face and smeared it around. The car raced up the street, zipping the city back in order.

  Somehow I’d kept the phone to my ear the whole time. André was scolding me in his grown man’s voice.

  “You’re childish,” he said. “Playing on the phone like that. It’s Sunday.”

  I handled my brush with eternity by putting on Robert Earl Davis Jr.’s greatest hits and drawing myself a bubble bath. Maybe you already know this, but after too many loops, your favorite song starts to turn on you. The potency of the bass line begins to fade and like that, you’re fresh out of new sounds. When the water went cold, I started to cry.

  “Quit that crying,” said the godmother. “This is not a crying situation.” She walked into the bathroom and sat on the toilet to watch me. She was helping herself to a bowl of leftover eggplant with meat sauce and contemplating me in the bathtub, what it all meant. “Don’t you ever feel sad for your bathtub?” she said. “For having to hold your little body when nobody else will?” She gave me one of her ugly laughs. People who’ve been through too much always laugh like that.

  I tried turning away. “I’m sure it doesn’t mind.”

  Taking another bite, the godmother looked me up and down. “You so sad,” she said, “seem like your home girl could at least give you a hug. Or your man. You did make him your man again?”

  More or less, I thought. “No.”

  The godmother shook her head mercilessly. “In my opinion—​and this is just my opinion—​you gave up way too easily with both. Didn’t you know you gave up? Can’t you tell when you’re doing that? You give up in subtle ways. For example, the way you did your makeup today and the way you try to cook fancy dinners for yourself. None of that’s for the real you. You can’t even be real when nobody else is around. Even the way you beg is a form of surrender. And the funky part is that you gave up way before you started doing all that begging.”

  The beat was doing something tragic, and I sank deeper, looking at my toes. “I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,” I said.

  Something fell softly on the bridge of my nose. When I recognized it as a bit of saucy eggplant, another one hit my eyelid and slid slowly down my face and into the tub. The godmother was throwing my leftovers and saying depressing things about the nature of love, things that I believed, which is what angered me the most. The spirit moved me to jump out the tub and attack the godmother as she defended herself with a ceramic bowl, getting licks in too. I watched myself struggle with her until I realized I was still in the bathtub, still envisioning another something I would never do.

  I told the godmother, “I don’t deserve this type of confrontation.”

  “Deserve,” the godmother said in a voice that carried. “You still stuck on what you deserve.” She shook her head at me and left.

  I drained the tub, threw on my robe, and followed her into the kitchen. In the background Robert Earl Davis Jr.’s chopped-up, joyous pain pressed into my shoulders. The feeling showed in the mirror, and as I passed by, fragments of my ancestors looked out with mild concern.

  They gathered as the godmother prepared my tea. She tilted the kettle to my favorite cup, and it was like the weight of my most telling, desperate fantasies was pouring from her knotted fingers. She brought the steaming cup to me, saying, “Drink.”

  Behind us my ancestors waited for me to make a bad decision. “I am sort of thirsty.”

  The godmother’s eyes did something rude. “Baby,” she drawled, “you are the thirstiest.”

  I staggered back. “This is not commiserating,” I said too loudly. “This is an abyss of despair.”

  The godmother propped her free hand on her hip and curved her neck so that her ear was almost touching her shoulder. “Has anyone ever told you that you talk like a white girl?” she said.

  That may be, but in her case, she talked like someone who had lived too l
ong and had figured everything out, and all the gunk she carried around had probably made its way into her flickted tea, so it couldn’t taste that good anyway. At the same time, I knew I was telling myself lies. Most likely her tea was delicious. The godmother pushed the cup on me again, smiling like she could read my bankrupt thoughts. This above everything else gave me a start. For as long I can remember, I’d wanted to be just like that, just as terrible, but not anymore. I had never changed my mind about a person before, so you can understand why this realization was confusing.

  I was so confused that I started to pray. I prayed that my past loves would feel distant to the point of disappearing. I prayed that I could accept living a life without happiness, that I would make friends who shared this view, that I would not drink too much or become too bitter. I wanted so badly to be in harmony with the city I called home and with my time on this earth and for this to show in my face and the way I talked. And if none of this was meant to be, I prayed that I wouldn’t want it in the first place, that I would be turned into a different girl completely.

  That’s when things turned around for me. I couldn’t say exactly when it happened, but the godmother was gone. She had returned to wherever she belonged, and with her falling back into place, I could become myself again. But I worried that instead of going back, I’d just become yet another version of myself. Nobody was there to explain to me my options. I kept thinking someone was going to tell me what I was supposed to do next.

  I picked out a dress that I used to love because it was orange and had only cost me seven dollars. I pulled the dress over my head, brushed my hair, and stepped into a pair of sandals. I looked into the mirror and waited for that specific presence to tell me that the hemline was too short and that she could see right through the material. But nobody was coming.