The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Abe, white-faced, standing, lurched toward Celia. “Celia, leave the plates.”

But Celia grabbed the other cake-stained plates, tucking them against her dress and retreating to the hall.

“Enough.” Abe's voice was louder now and harsh, and Celia unblinking.

“Not yours,” she repeated, this time to her father.

Moshe licked his lips, a deliberately delicate gesture. Checked his watch, while Bertha glanced out at the swaying coned lilacs.

“You don’t tell me,” Abe said. “You do not tell me.”

And now Celia turned back to Lillian. “You stay away from them.”

“Celia, you will apologize,” Abe said.

Celia backed up to the staircase, the plates crushed against her, chocolate crumbs falling over the parquet floor. “You apologize,” she said.

“Jo, take your sister upstairs,” Abe said.

Jo crossed her arms over her chest and dropped her voice, “If she wants to go.”

Would knowledge have mattered? Lillian did not yet know that Celia only slept in her late mother's sickroom (a second-floor room which faced the street and the tall elms, and from which a familiar Packard could be remarked); that Jo had suffered insomnia since her mother's collapse; that Rebecca Cohen had not been an Isabel. These were things you tried not to know, truths that might starkly appear and pin you down anyway.

Neither Abe nor Jo nor Celia moved. There was the chugging of a car on Lancaster, and Moshe rose, smiling, stretching, as if nothing had transpired in the mood. “What about a nightspot?” he said. Ashed his cigar. “I think we should. Lillian? Bertha, love?” He set a hand on Abe's shoulder. “Abe?”

“What?” Abe said.

“Let’s.” Moshe ushered the Schumacher women to the front door, nodding to Jo and Celia, “Good evening, ladies.” And then Lillian was out on the lawn, stranded it felt, her sister-in-law murmuring That Celia's a nasty one and strolling past her to the Packard. The upper reaches of the house were lightless, remote. Lillian's palms were damp with sweat, and the lilac-scented air seemed a strange trick. How does one forestall what has already passed? Lillian counted the windows. The ember of Moshe's cigar marked his progress down the front steps and the walkway, Abe and Celia and Jo now fragmented silhouettes through the open front door. Lillian? Moshe's hand a warm weight on her shoulder. Lilly, come with me. Cake still sweet in her mouth, thin breeze nosing a sycamore, the Packard sputtering awake. Then the puzzle of silhouettes shifted, lush grass spilling over Lancaster Avenue, her fingers not exactly her own, her body close to dissolving in the fragrant air, and the night sky unspeaking.

Caitlin Macy Christie

from The New Yorker

WHEN YOU met Christie for the first time, it took only minutes to learn that she was from Greenwich, Connecticut, but months could go by before you got another solid fact out of her. After a couple of years in New York, she realized that she had to give people a little more information to stop them wondering, so once she’d mentioned Greenwich she would quickly add that she’d gone to “the high school,” meaning the public one. The first time she said this, you’d find her forthrightness refreshing-disarming, even, in the midst of so many pretenders. You’d be prompted, perhaps, to admit something about yourself-the fact that you were doing Jenny Craig, for instance, and had to sneak the packaged food into your office microwave when no one was paying attention. But then you’d overhear Christie making the same confession to someone else, and it would lose its charm. It was just Fact No. 2, which, added to Fact No. 1-her childhood in Greenwich-represented the sum total of what could be stated about Christie Thorn's background, about her entire life before college and New York.

Plus, you couldn’t help being suspicious of her motives in revealing Fact No. 2. If, at a party, a group of people were standing around, sharing a corner of the room, and someone made an opening bid-mentioning Hotchkiss or St. George’s, say-Christie would always pointedly interject, “Oh, I wouldn’t know. I went to public school. Greenwich High. That's right-I was a good old suburban kid.” Of course, Christie and the person who had mentioned boarding school were doing the same thing-preemptively defending themselves against attack-and yet you were tempted to give the Hotchkiss guy a free pass. With him, you could figure that his parents had divorced badly, or his mother was an alcoholic, or his brother had committed suicide (or perhaps it really had been an accidental overdose), or that in keeping with the family tradition Dad had gone crazy and now spent his days in slippers and a robe shooting intricate, archaic forms of pool. On account of one or more of these family problems, the young man felt insecure about himself as an individual, and so, in situations of social challenge, he mentioned boarding school a little too early, and a little unnaturally, to shore up his resolve. Still, whatever his problem, whatever the big bad family secret, it was just the slightly burned edge on a cake that everyone still wanted to eat. How bad could those family problems really be, you’d asked yourself more than once, if, at the same time, you had a house on the Vineyard? How bad-if you had the gray shingles, the weathered shutters, the slanting attic roof, the iron bedstead, the needlepoint pillows proclaiming, “A woman's place is on the tennis court!,” the batterie de cuisine of lobster pots and potato mashers from the forties, and the octagonal kitchen window, through which you could glimpse the dunes and smell the salt air-could anything really be?

Meanwhile, you’d assume that Christie had more to protect, that her history was more embarrassing, somehow: a chronological downsizing of suburban homes (all of them, albeit, technically still in Greenwich), a cheapness in things like bedding and glassware, or four people sharing one bathroom with a stand-up shower. And you wouldn’t be wrong. The real story was simple, of course, simple and unnecessarily sad. Christie's father had gone into business for himself and had cash-flow problems. That was all. No one had murdered anyone; there wasn’t a whiff of incest or abuse, embezzlement or even tax fraud. Mr. Thorn had owed money his whole life, but he paid his bills more or less on time, and, when he died, his life-insurance policy would pay off the mortgage on the house. He was an honest man with a clean conscience.

Yet Christie's conscience was not clean, and seemed never to have been. In a typical scenario from her adolescence, her father would plan a nice vacation for the family, then wouldn’t have enough cash to cover it, Christie would throw a tantrum, and her mother, who spoiled her, would somehow find the money to appease her. Christie would go on the vacation, but she would go alone, with a similarly spoiled friend. She and the friend would go helling around Key West, say, or Miami Beach, feeling worse and worse and worse and laughing harder and harder. And then, and this was the kicker, Christies mother would pick them up at LaGuardia (the friend's mother could never be bothered) and would want to know- would have been anxious about, primordially concerned about-whether they’d had a good time.

On the way back from one of these vacations when she was sixteen or seventeen, Christie and her friend checked in late and were bumped up to first class. They were separated, and Christie was seated next to a distinguished-looking older man. He drank Scotches and read a golf magazine, and, when the flight was delayed, the two became partners in peevish complaint, the man turning to Christie to include her in his “Can you believe this?” glare. Eventually, he asked her where she was from, and when she said, “Greenwich,” he looked at her with a kind of absolute approval that she couldn’t recall ever having inspired before. After that, whenever a flight of hers was delayed she’d shake her head and say, “Time to spare, go by air,” as the Scotch-drinking man had, and when she met people she liked to make sure that they knew where she was from.

After college, after a prolonged phase of running around New York while drifting through a series of support jobs at big firms, and after she had slept with, I think, either fifty-five or sixty-five men, Christie found someone to marry. We spent a lot of time speculating as to who would be invited to the wedding (only a strange, angry girl named Mary McLean, who had made some Faustian bargain with Christie long before any of us met her, considered herself one of Christie's real friends), but in the end everyone was invited- and to the Pierre, no less. Throughout the evening, Christie wore a look of incurable dissatisfaction. Her face was