There Is No Long Distance Now

  There is no

  LONG Distance NOW

  Very Short Stories

  NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

  Dedication

  In Loving Memory

  Susan Harrison Kaufman

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Stay True Hotel

  Thud

  Beet Cake

  Curb

  Somebody Needs To Be Punished

  Downhill

  Easter Bonnet

  Enough

  Weatherman

  Feeding Nightmares

  Fixer-Upper

  Break

  Are We Friends?

  Great Wall

  Allied with Green

  His Own Voice

  Horizon

  Thoreau Is My Partner

  I Don’t Want To Talk About It

  Interest

  We Like You for Your Flaws

  Killer Chili

  Lightning

  Mailbox

  My Gospel

  New Man

  Play Me a Tune

  Second Thoughts Are the Only Thoughts I Have

  Mary Alvarez Is Ninety Today

  See How This Thing Goes

  See You in Ireland

  Something He Left Me

  Teeth

  There Is No Long Distance Now

  My Boyfriend, John Mayer

  Where We Come From

  Tomorrow, Summer

  Johnnie

  Freshen Up

  Will You Hold My Bullet, Please?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  A message arrived. Do you have any short stories 1,000 words or less? I wrote back, No, I do not. Thank you.

  A second message arrived. Please send us some of your short stories immediately, 1,000 words or less.

  I walked around. I swept the front porch. I sat down and wrote one. It seemed possible.

  I wrote some more. Swept the back porch. Leaves and twigs, shells of sunflower seeds. Thank you, birds.

  Thank you, minutes and hours and bounties. People walking down the street. Thank you, everything we remember. Distance between thought and action. Distance between suggestion, intention, reality. There used to be a very big difference between local calls and long-distance calls, but now, usually, there is not.

  Thank you, lives we did not lead, might like to lead, might still lead.

  About a year later, after I turned in some of the revised stories to my real editor Virginia, the man who walks the pitiful fluff-ball dog spoke to me for the first time ever. He said, Did you hear the weather report? It is going to get very cold!!!! He said this with great excitement.

  The dog was leading him, he was not leading it.

  I stuttered, responding. What would he think if he knew he was in a story?

  He and his dog are two of the only real characters in this book. So is the taxi driver in Chicago. And the people he mentions.

  The other people are all made up.

  Really.

  Stay True Hotel

  Jane’s father announced their moves as if they were dinner menus. Pasta with mushrooms. Now, Berlin.

  He had a better offer (always) from a fine company. Transferring from her London school into a school in Germany would be no problem. (He would probably feel contented for a year before he got restless again.)

  You will like Berlin, I promise, he said.

  He had also said this about Dublin, London.

  Berlin was spacious, expansive—air cleanly cold in winter, clear in summer. Students rode free on subways, buses. Studied English. Summer light lasted so long a day felt double-wide. Lots of art and music, he said. Everything you love. I promise.

  Jane said, You always promise.

  Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old. A double-wide child, mother and baby mixed together.

  Your mother loved Berlin, he said. Her favorite city.

  What?

  Sometimes Jane resented her father’s guarded style. Why didn’t you tell me before?

  He stared out the window at the trees they were saying good-bye to.

  We weren’t there. What good would it have done?

  In the airplane Jane watched her father drinking a German beer and eating chips. He didn’t look that old, really. A bit handsome, with his messy dark mop, sad eyes. She thought, It is not his fault she died. Maybe he thinks he can leave his sadness behind him and that is why we keep moving.

  Germany felt bright, awake. Green fields, silver windmills. The apartment in Berlin would be ready in a month. Till then Jane and her father were moving into a hotel called Bleibtreu. We will navigate the city, her father said. Discreet, gray façade, Bleibtreustrasse Number 31.

  While her father did paperwork at the desk, she looked around.

  There didn’t seem to be a door. Three passageways, a bar, a deli, shop selling antique roses, courtyard with long blue tiled table surrounded by a moat of glittering blue chips. Two metal dog sculptures, one sitting in a cement chair.

  Where was she?

  On the wall, hearts with words, Stay True. White chair sculpture with lights under feet. Glass art, painted plates.

  Daddy? she said, which she rarely said. How did you find this place?

  Grinning. He had navigated.

  They rode excitedly up the glass elevator to Three. Two low white beds, soft cotton sheeting, puffy comforters. Mysterious wooden ladders on the walls next to the beds. Jane unpacked immediately. Placed her favorite picture of her mother on a rung—face turned up, as if to breeze or gentle rain. She turned the handles of the wooden windows, pulled them open.

  Across the street, a man watered geraniums on a balcony.

  Her father said, Do you want to go with me to check in at the office?

  She shook her head.

  Okay, feel free, go out, look around.

  Jane always felt free. Didn’t she?

  She ran down the stairs, circled the block. Then three, collecting details for return. Windows lined with checkered shirts, burgundy peonies in buckets. And what was this large pink pipe supported by purple poles?

  Ponytailed women in dressy clothes and high heels riding bicycles, miniature dogs in their baskets. Couples gripping hands. Tattoos, canes, studded purses, prams, clicking and humming of the planet. Something snazzy in the pace here.

  Jane stared at a street sign, Kurfürstendamm, wondering, Will a name that long ever feel familiar in my head? Sometimes it felt thrilling to be surrounded by someone else’s language. Wrapping “bitte” and “danke” around her tongue felt hopeful. “Handgebügelt” scrawled in a window; pastry shop, frilled cakes; Deutsche Post. Stationery stores made her happy. Her father had slipped her twenty Euros—she bought a notebook, blue paper, envelopes, a fistful of thick German pencils with nice dots on them, a wooden sharpener. . . .

  By the time she’d rounded many blocks, not even counting anymore, a hunger for absorption overtook her, warm waves on a beach, desire for colors and sounds. How long since she had felt this? A couple approached, pointing at a map, speaking slow English, as if they thought she were German. Though she had arrived only hours before, she could answer. Kurfürstendamm! Pointed, and they smiled—Americans. She never let on that she spoke English.

  She stepped back into the hotel, sharpened, stirred. Eyes more vivid. Rocklike handles on cupboards. Deep white-tiled soaking tub. Could she be happy here?

  Stay true. True to her Scottish accent? Her mother’s smile that never left her? The gre
en rims of land where they used to walk?

  She thought, This beautiful city Berlin never wanted to be rubble. Before the war, proud of its boulevards, leafy parks, bustling trains—this city never wished to be struck by bombs, ruined, none of it.

  And look at it now. Restored.

  Her father had not wanted to be a widower.

  Most importantly, her mother had not wanted to die.

  But when something happened that you did not want . . . later there might be a long avenue with a German name stuck to it. Ways you could turn.

  Jane stared out the window. The watering man was gone now.

  Sometimes after long sadness, you needed a new thought. Hold it awhile. Stay true to it. She thought, If I am true to my mother, what do I do? Lift my face up, as she did in this picture? Would she prefer I remain true to gloom?

  Jane closed her eyes. A life could change in ten minutes. Then she stepped back toward the hallway, the quiet elevator, rode it down to blue stones in the moat and the colorful chairs placed at angles around the table, and thought, I’ll sit here a while. Watch people. There’s a man drinking a ginger ale with an orange slice in it.

  Already I could write a letter, and I haven’t been here a day yet.

  When my dad comes back, I’ll see a different dad.

  Thud

  There are many things Rainey does not understand: war, and running with the bulls, for two examples. Why get anywhere near herds of bulls and irritate them in the first place? Why is this popular? She would prefer to be liked by bulls—to meet them in a placid zone and stare at one another.

  She has no desire to binge drink or congregate with believers. The pious confidence of people who think they know “the truth” repels her. If only one could slap them with mysteries. . . .

  She pictures herself on the edge of any scene. Scenes need fringe observers—people to take notes and tell what you did later.

  If you can find them.

  Rainey decided to be invisible in her last year of high school.

  The episodes seemed so tiresome—who liked whom, who had broken up, or overdosed—flickering hordes of rumors—she abandoned them all. A wide swath of her brain felt relieved. She had no interest in Adderall. She made up a boyfriend named Leo who lived in Wisconsin, where no one she knew had been. His parents were professors who stayed home by the fireplace reading all winter long.

  At school if someone asked her to do something sociable, she’d say, “I’m okay.” If pressed, she’d say something about Leo. They were working on a long-distance project. Something, anything.

  On weekends Rainey pitched a book and water bottle into her basket and rode her bicycle around the abandoned brewery and the ancient mill. One day the waterwheel was spinning again. She watched parents prepare birthday parties for their kids at Roosevelt Park, hanging piñatas, weighting paper tablecloths down with horrible giant soda bottles. She conversed with abandoned dogs and dreamed of delivering them all to the Utopia Animal Sanctuary, where they would be cared for with kindness and attention.

  Rainey felt she needed to examine the mysteries of her childhood more deeply before going off to college. Those strange reverberations around the sixth grade year, what was that about? That sense of precipice—as if you’d gone hiking and reached a cliff at the end of the trail and where was your parachute? Because the days were definitely, definitely going to push you off. And if you hadn’t learned rock climbing by then, or discovered some way to bungee jump, you were in big trouble. Rainey had never yet fully reckoned with the sixth grade. Was she still standing there, immobilized? Had everyone jumped but her?

  This was not something you could talk about with the homecoming queen.

  Mostly, she was still pondering the shock of her father’s death, when she was a freshman and he was still a relatively young man who had a heart attack after work one day. Strangers called 911 when they saw him slumped against his car in the bank parking lot. He’d been taken to the hospital, and was “well on the road to recovery,” said the doctor to Rainey’s mother a few days later, the day he died.

  Rainey had taken a bus to the hospital right after school, carrying a small tub of tabbouleh, her father’s favorite salad. She had a frozen blue ice pack in the pocket of her schoolbag and a plastic spoon. Outside her father’s room, she was stunned to be hugged hard by a woman she’d never seen before. A black nurse with an open face wearing a print smock—small yellow bears holding balloons. Who was she?

  “He didn’t make it, honey. Oh honey, he’s just left us,” the nurse had stifled a sob.

  Was she selected for her softness, her resonant voice? The official hugger-nurse who stood outside stricken rooms to greet the first people who showed up, alert them they were at a new cliff— surely that must be a weird position to apply for. Professional hard-times hugger.

  Rainey wondered some days, if she went to the hospital again, could she find the woman? Could she ask more questions—like, did he call out when he died, did someone hear him? Or was it simply the monitor which began moaning its loud alert? What exactly happened? I’m ready to hear it now, please. Could she tell her, He’ll never leave me, just wanted to let you know?

  Both Rainey and her mother felt guilty they had not been at his bedside when he died. Rainey’s mother had been back at work—she thought he was stable, soon to be released. Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn’t have family members to worry about at that exact moment.

  Easier for the one who was dying, maybe.

  Rainey kept wondering what she would have done had she been there, with her dad. Who expected anyone to have a second heart attack on top of a first? She would not eat tabbouleh again till she was twenty-three.

  Did his sudden departure have anything to do with her inability to negotiate the social roller coaster now?

  Then a bird flew into the window of English Literature during a discussion of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Someone tittered. After class Rainey went outside. A gray mourning dove, stunned on the ground. Rainey filled the cap of her water bottle and poured water over the bird’s beak. The beak opened a tiny bit. The bird opened an eye.

  A boy knelt down beside her. “Hey,” he said. “Sad bird. I’m Leo.”

  Beet Cake

  After learning they were both getting B’s in their first semester of Culinary Arts, Brin slammed her locker door and Sandi cried in the bathroom stall. They had never skipped class. They adored stirring, chopping, combining ingredients. Weren’t they the ones, after all, who had wowed the class with zucchini and thyme omelets and used fresh beets in a cake?

  Somehow they had grown giggly during the Garnishing Unit, then fallen behind with Meats.

  Sandi said parsley was boring and everyone laughed. She didn’t care if it was traditional. She preferred mint or snipped rosemary. Arugula was her fave. Also those loopy red and yellow sauces swirled around desserts—you could paint a plate to look like nursery school.

  Brin adored cilantro. She baked an eggplant in the microwave without piercing it enough and it exploded. But she concocted savory lentils with goat cheese. She and Sandi rolled filo surprises, tucked fancy mushrooms inside, and rolled crusts for small latticed cherry pies when their classmates chose the easier road, pecan.

  Ms. Rippo said they talked too much, staring sternly into her grade book, preferring bland dumplings to cheery paprika girls with pierced eyebrows and pocket chains. Try to focus, please. You’ve been drifting. She looked up at them, looked past them, and sighed.

  Drifting? Sure, they chattered. But talk meant happy, and weren’t cooks better off happy?

  The next day they felt better. Sandi whispered, “Did you know Irma Rombauer who wrote The Joy of Cooking had a horrible life?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her baby died, her husband had nervous breakdowns, and finally killed himself with a shotgun. And then she baked.�
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  “I guess there’s hope for us.”

  “Shhhhh! That’s bad.”

  “Man, I’d like to write a best-seller cookbook and beat it out of here.”

  They’d watched Julie and Julia three times, even though they hated the duck segments.

  Sandi said, “We are going to work in vegetarian restaurants.”

  Brin said, “The cow is still crying in every slab of beef.” Ms. Rippo didn’t appreciate their refusal to cook meat.

  To make up for it, they focused on the salad unit twice. They had to do more with appetizers. In fact, they had to feed the whole administration on talent show night, practically singlehandedly, as everyone else pretended to be performing. Billy Martin had stolen their tongs and kept denying it. They worried about the cheese, which smelled funny. “Cheese always smells funny,” Brin insisted.

  Sometimes they got the giggles the minute they tied their white aprons on. A few students had started a rumor they were a lesbian couple. It didn’t bother them—they were feeding that, too. They stood with their arms around each other when the principal walked through.

  As a freshman, Sandi had played percussion and been kicked out of band for crashing cymbals arbitrarily and making her band mates lose their rhythm on the marching field. Brin had volunteered as a school stagehand, which she enjoyed, but the repetition of rehearsals seemed excruciatingly dull.