The Best American Short Stories 2015 (14 page)

“Sister Wilda,” says Aoife, “won't you take some food?”

Wilda says nothing.

“Sister Wilda,” says Aoife, “are you well?”

“I am,” says Wilda, her voice an ugly croak, her throat full of yellow bile.

Her heart sinks as Aoife slips away.

When Wilda wakes up, some kind of flying creature is flapping around her room. A candle flickers on her writing table, her book still open there.

She spots a flash of wing in a corner. A dove-sized angel hovers beside her door like a trapped bird wanting out. An emissary, Wilda thinks, come to tell her that Christ is near. Wilda unlatches the door, peeks out into the dark hallway, and lets the creature out. The angel floats, wings lashing, and motions for her to follow. The angel darts down the hall, a streak of frantic light. Wilda lopes after it, feeling dizzy, chilled. They pass the lavatory, the empty infirmary. The angel flies out into the courtyard and flits toward the warming house, where smoke puffs from both chimneys. Crunching through snow, Wilda follows the angel into the blazing room.

The angel disappears with a diamond flash of light.

Fires rage in both hearths. And there, basking on a mattress heaped with fine pillows, is Aoife. Dressed in the green gown, drinking something from a silver communion goblet, Aoife smiles. Hazel lolls beside her in sapphire velvet, munching on marzipan, an insolent look on her face.

“Sister.” Aoife sits up, eyes glowing like sunlit honey. “Come warm your bones.”

Overcome with a fit of coughing, Wilda can't speak. It takes all of her strength to turn away from the delicious warmth, the smells of almond and vanilla, from beautiful Aoife with her wine-stained lips and copper hair. Hacking, Wilda flees, runs through the frozen courtyard, through empty stone passageways where icicles dangle from the eaves, back to her cell, where she collapses, shivering, onto her cot.

When Wilda wakes up, her room is packed with angels, swarms of them, glowing and glowering and thumping against walls. An infestation of angels, they brush against her skin, sometimes burning, sometimes freezing. She hurries to her desk, kneels, and takes up her plume.

A hoste of angells flashing like waspes on a summer afternoone. My fleshe burned, but I felte colde
.

One of the creatures whizzes near her and makes a furious face—eyes bugged, scarlet cheeks puffed. Another perches on her naked shoulder, digging claws into her skin. Wilda shudders, shakes the creature off. A high-pitched humming, interspersed with sharp squeaks, fills the room as the throng moves toward the door. She opens the door, follows the cloud of celestial beings down the hallway, past the infirmary, out into the kitchen courtyard.

Wind howls. Granules of ice strike her bare skin as Wilda follows the angels toward the orchard. Her heart pounds, for surely the moment has come: The fruit grove glows with angelic light. Wilda can see skeletal trees sparkling with ice, a million flakes of wind-whipped snow, the darkness of the forest beyond. And there, just at the edge of the woods, the shape of a man on horseback. The angels sweep down the hill toward the woods and wait, buzzing with frustration as Wilda trudges barefooted through knee-deep snow. But her feet are not cold. Her entire body burns with miraculous warmth. And now she can see the man more clearly, dressed in a green velvet riding suit, a few strands of copper hair spilling from his tall hat. His mouth puckers with a pretty smile. His eyes are enormous, radiant, yellow as apricots.

LOUISE ERDRICH

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HE WOMEN
in my wife's family all snored, and when we visited for the holidays every winter I got no sleep. Elida's three sisters and their bombproof husbands loved to gather at her parents' house in Golden Valley, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. The house was less than twenty years old, but the sly tricks of the contractor were evident in every sagging sill, skewed jamb, cracked plaster wall, tilted handrail, and, most significantly, in the general lack of insulation that caused the outer walls to ice up and the inside to resound.

Every night the sounds were different. Helplessly cognizant, I formed mental scenarios while drifting in and out of sleep. One memorable night, I tossed and turned in a metalworking shop. From the far end of the second-floor hallway came the powerful rip of my mother-in-law's rough-cut saw. From below, on the living room's foldout couches, the intermittent thrum of welders' torches—a wild hissing as the sisters' noses sparked and soldered invisible objects. Beside me, Elida's finishing touch: the high-pitched burr of a polisher perfecting a metal surface. Elida was slight, and she dressed in precise, quiet colors. She sat with her hands folded, wore clear nail polish and almost undetectable makeup. You would never have imagined that such a stark little person could produce such sounds.

Ambien, earplugs, two pillows over my head—nothing could shut the noise out. I lay awake stewing, even though I knew I should feel sorry for them. The sisters and their mother had visited sleep clinics, endured surgery, blown their CPAPs off their faces, tried every nose strip and homeopathic remedy that existed. It wasn't that they liked to snore but that they were incurable. I think they took comfort in solidarity, though. Elida admitted that she loved sleeping in that noisy house, and sometimes they snored in unison—which was terrifying.

One subzero vacation morning, my daughter, Valery, ran her finger across the ice-furred downstairs living-room wall and asked, “What is this, Daddy?”

“Snores,” I said, blue with tiredness. “All the snores from last night have stuck to the walls.”

Later, after her mother and I had divorced, Valery wistfully recalled that moment as the first time she'd realized how alive with sound the night was—and that all the noise emanated from the women in the family. Later still, she asked her mother at what age she'd begun to snore, and asked me if that was the reason we'd split up. Valery was worried for her own future. I assured her that snoring had had nothing to do with the divorce, which was amicable but also unavoidably painful. I laughed and hugged Valery. I even told her that I had adored her mother's snores. I had never adored them, but I had adored Elida, almost to the point of madness, from the first time we met.

We found each other in Hollywood, as Minnesotan expatriates always do, common sense driving them together—though to leave the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes for a thirsty city built on a desert may speak of some interior flaw. For Elida, it was the compulsive lure of film editing. In my case, the shame of acting. Although I auditioned endlessly and always had work, my parts generally lasted between six and twelve seconds. I rarely had a line. But I had Elida, her intense green stare, her Nordic pallor, even after years of sunlight, her slender, gliding walk, and the dark swerve of her severe haircut. She was mine.

When Valery turned twelve, I was cast in a supporting role in a movie that got a lot of attention. It could have been my fabled break. But Elida suddenly panicked over how unhappy Valery was in high school and decided that the schools in Minneapolis were more nurturing. We moved back. I had to accept the fact that my film career was over. I'd worked steadily and spoken a line or two, given many a meaningful glance, tripped villains, sucker-punched heroes, spilled coffee on or danced around movie stars in revolving doors. I had appeared in dozens of films, TV episodes, commercials. But Elida hadn't been doing well, and both of us got better, more reliable jobs back home.

Elida loved the minuscule: the hundreds of tiny decisions that together produce a great flow of scenes. She applied this love of detail to her new vocation, planning corporate events. I also loved the small, when it consisted of learning to say lines a dozen different ways, with different tonal qualities, inflections, and gestures. In my new job, as a fund-raiser for a vibrant local theater company, I perfected the gestures and tones that I hoped would coax donations to my organization.

For my birthday that year, perhaps to console me for the life I'd given up, Elida somehow managed to clip and splice together a half-hour movie of my bit parts, which she set to eerily repetitive music. Shortly after she gave me that gift, which she titled “Man of a Thousand Glimpses,” we parted. I moved out of our downtown condominium, near nurturing DeLaSalle High School.

For the first couple of months after leaving Elida, I bolted out of work at exactly 4 p.m. I drove to my tiny apartment impatiently, hungrily, addicted not to a new relationship but to sleep itself. Deep rest was a drug. Waking from relaxed oblivion, I vibrated with an almost tear-inducing pleasure. Why shoot up, I wondered, when just by depriving the body of uninterrupted sleep for twenty years you can have ecstasy with no side effects? Except, it might be said, for Laurene.

It took no time at all before I was sleeping the entire night beside a woman whom I feared I had married too quickly because she slept like a drunk kitten.

From the beginning, I had to consciously keep myself from referring to Laurene in casual conversation as “my current wife.” Though it was taken as a joke, I knew better: it was a slip. Laurene Schotts was the daughter of the owner of an immensely successful Midwestern sporting-goods chain with outlets in the ex-est of the exurbs throughout the tristate area. She was also a lover of the theater arts. At the annual gala dinner for my theater company, which Elida organized pro bono the year we parted, Laurene spoke between the salad and the entrée. Her flattering words of thanks to our supporters, which screened a plea for still greater largesse, impressed me with their genuine, awkward grace.

Laurene reveled in that sort of gala, where people bid on donated items—the use of time-shares in warm countries, fur coats, ski packages, signed books, hand-painted scarves. Scarves draped our chairs, and we took superb vacations. Laurene was blond, social, generous, and loved to barbecue. Elida was dark, wayward, introverted, frugal, and usually a vegetarian. Laurene could drink a whole bottle of cold Pinot Gris between 5 and 6 p.m. Elida might sip one murderous, snore-inducing glass of Côtes du Rhône between eleven and midnight.

After the divorce, Elida and I met once a month to discuss Valery. We had agreed to do this early on, even when it hurt to see each other. Every time, after we had wincingly established where Valery's college tuition would come from, or whether she needed a new therapist, after Elida had confided the latest news of Valery's boyfriend, who we both hoped would turn out to be simply “experience,” we would conclude the hour with a cheerful goodbye, perhaps saying “That wasn't so bad!” or even “Good to see you!” We laughed in relief. We hugged, patted each other on the back, sometimes drank a cup of tea before the drive home. We never kissed, not even on the cheek. Our divorce had been agreeable and final. Our postdivorce meetings were lingering, tedious, and self-congratulatory.

Once Laurene and I were married, however, the meetings with Elida became more difficult. The boyfriend had turned into a problem—we suspected an addiction. We also began, without any warning, to fight. It would start with some obscure thing and progress to even more obscure things. By the end of our meetings, Elida and I were worn out. Then, after one particularly difficult session, still upset as we were saying goodbye, Elida, instead of hugging me, stuck out her hand. I took her hand and held on to it until she met my eyes. Her glare pulled me to her, and I shocked us both by kissing her studious, pale lips. We jumped apart, as though scorched, and turned away. We didn't speak of it.

Our next meeting was set up by e-mail, and I found myself walking eagerly toward Nick's, a restaurant off Loring Park, which was quiet and decorous by day, with leather booths and gauzy curtains that let in glowing white rafts of winter light.

Elida was sitting at the third booth in, and raised a hand as I entered, then put a tissue to her eyes. She had been crying, a rare event. It usually meant, frighteningly, that she'd had some breakthrough realization about me that she'd repressed for years. Warily, I asked her what was wrong. She told me that Valery had started snoring. Her boyfriend had left her, thank goodness, but now Valery was refusing to believe that her mother's snoring hadn't precipitated our divorce.

“Of course it didn't!”

“Maybe not. We had other issues.”

“Who doesn't? Twenty good years. One bad year. A thousand little issues came home to roost.”

“I thought, you know, because of those good years we might still get back together,” Elida said. “Until Laurene. She doesn't snore, right?”

I admitted as much.

“Ah.” Elida turned to look out the window, and her dark glinting hair swung sorrowfully alongside her cheek. “The first time we spent the night together.”

“St. George Street.”

“I warned you I snored. I'd already been to the specialists and had surgery, which only made it worse. It's almost a relief to sleep alone now. At least I'm not blasting a man out of bed.”

“I never minded.”

I thought of the couch in Los Feliz that had wrecked my back. The walk-in closet with a floor pallet in our Minneapolis condominium. I'd adjourned to these lonely sleeping venues on most nights. I did mind, but her fixed gaze shook my heart.

“Last month you kissed me.”

“I did.”

We grew perplexed, ate in silence, each secretly examining the other's face from time to time. I was very conscious of the drama of the situation. Any former actor would have been. Elida sussed that out.

“You're trying on expressions,” she said, laughing.

It was true. Various expressions crossed my face, but none felt right. The elements wouldn't meld. My eyes would express affection while my mouth was tense. Surprise would lift an eyebrow while my upper lip worked cynically. Embarrassment smote me. At least that was real. I put my face in my hands and tried to breathe, but my hands covering my mouth made me hyperventilate. When I looked up, Elida was signing the credit-card slip. She folded her napkin.