Six Shorts 2017: The finalists for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Victor Lodato
she even stepped onto the train, she realised that what she had told herself, that she had nowhere in mind, was not true. She knew first by which direction she chose, then by which line, then by the way she settled into her seat to wait out the long ride. She was sure when she when she emerged into the grey world and saw the families, the men dressed like all the other men and the women like all the other women, moving in united huddles down the sidewalks. She knew by the sound of the muttered Yiddish, by the sudden and foreign envy she felt for the wigs the women wore, those automatic signifiers of purity. They were probably not the women who had feigned ignorance when they heard what the boy said was done to his body, Alice told herself, the men who had surrounded Weberman to shield him from the press.
March in New York was confused – a bleached blue sky, a corrosive wind – and it felt to her not like a certain season, but the weather’s selfish refusal to decide on one. She skulked behind the families, made itchy by the thought that they had known the boy, spoken or refused to speak about him over the warmth of their crowded dinner tables. As she cut up to their side, they grouped automatically to the right or left, avoiding her as they would some broken glass. When she was past them she hurried along, feeling very much the foreigner she was there, her hair tangled and too long, her clothing of too many colours. In her town there had been Christmas pageants at her parents’ Lutheran church, pancake feeds to support the fire department each fall, spring carnivals where one-hit wonders performed to a slumped drunk audience, but these had been traditions that asked nothing of her. She had slipped out of that town as easily as a hand from a pocket. Her mother and father had been the only family she’d known, and they too had required little of Alice, had somehow failed to create an ineluctable bond or even a few private jokes that could be leaned on when necessary. In the eight years since she’d left home, her father had become one of those people who lurked around ancestry.com, and sometimes, without any attached commentary, he sent her links to a patch of people he suspected were their relatives, a bread-maker named Flossie or a Civil War veteran and his twin boys who had died of typhus. Clicking around there inspired very little in her, felt about as personal as a trip to the DMV, and because she could not determine the correct reply to these emails she did not respond at all.
The image of her parents, silent before their television, without a word or a look for the other, was the obverse of what she saw now on the street. As soon as she was past one family, she was upon another, all of them unbothered by the vicious weather, caught up in a conversation that had gone on for happy years. They were coming and going from every direction, milling through the iron gates of houses with plastic awnings, filling the crosswalks, their hands linked, their skin moon-pale and immaculate. She wanted to visit the places that had made up the boy’s life but realised she did not know how to get there; she had become that person whose knowledge of her city resided within her telephone. Alice fielded a question about an intersection to a young Hasidic mother of twins, but she produced no more than a vague southern wave before she scurried away.
A half an hour later, Alice was down by the water, resigned to the parts of the boy’s life she had not been able to see. The scent of the East River was never restorative – it smelled more like something fermenting, turning over and over in the sweat of not getting anywhere. Still, it was better sitting on this bench, in view of the rotting, mossy piles, than weaving through the mass of people who belonged to each other. She had found a relatively quiet place to consider where she would go next in order not to go home, and she was alone, save the presence of a man a few years younger. He stood 6ft behind her, blowing on his bare hands, pulling a sheepskin collar closer to his neck, scrutinising his phone and the water in equal measure. Her fingers had just begun to slacken, and her jaw had just let up its working, when the hat came into view.
It was the shape from all the news photos, the wide brim and the severe line of the top, and for a moment it was an inch from her toes. She expected the owner to follow, but he didn’t, and then she saw a gust filling the hat again, lifting one side of it. Alice had dressed badly, in layers that failed to keep the wind out, and she felt a certain fascination watching it, this thing also the victim of bad weather. Did she want the wind to die down, to let it rest, or to animate it more fully, bring it across the rocks and into the river? Alice let the thought go: her attention was divided now between the wobble of the flapping felt and the approaching sound of laboured breathing. The man was running in shallow steps, holding his coat closed, obviously pained by the exposure of his hair and scalp, his payots oscillating, still too far from the hat to save it from its path toward the water. The birthmark on his face was the red of strawberry juice. Alice gave him a mollifying flash of her palm, and she reached down and pinched.
When she rose she was aware of an internal pressure and warmth, something like one might feel when handing over an earnestly considered, long-planned and saved-for gift. She wanted to smile and hand the man this thing he needed, wanted to communicate that it had been no problem to help him in this way. She wanted to say that the silk lining was soothing to touch, that she could appreciate the craftsmanship and the good care he took of it. But she also needed him to nod and thank her, which she soon saw he could and would not. He was fixated on the hat in her hands, his eyes not moving from where her fingers held it. When she extended it towards him his hands flew up and his knees bent, and they did this several times, his dip becoming deeper in each frantic iteration. Her thoughts moved from disappointment to anger in a matter of seconds, and it did not feel like a choice, then, when she spoke.
“Oh, you can’t take it because I’ve touched it? You think I’ve poisoned the hat?” She knew, in fact, what his upbringing had told him not to do, which was to let his fingers meet hers, but she did not release her grip. She brought the hat to her chest, making it impossible for him to touch it without touching her.
He was leaning incrementally backward with his hands spread, sweat pearling on his bare forehead, looking like something hunted.
“What is it you think I am? What is it you think I’ve done to it? You ran after it but you won’t take it?” She kept rocking onto her front foot, bending then straightening her arm to offer then withdraw the hat. “I’m so impure that you can’t accept something I’ve saved for you? It would be better if it had flown into the East River? I’m so evil that I do not count as human? I am Alice. I am Alice Niemand, and I saved this fucking hat because I believed it would matter to you.” She had never heard vitriol in her own voice, never issued anything close to a speech, never admitted to hate, never let it exist outside the hours she mulled it over alone in bed. Alice was a woman who met deadlines, nodded when addressed, favoured solid colours, held doors for the elderly, relinquished her seat to the pregnant, allowed the men she slept with to adjust her however they wanted.
When she finally threw it – onto a strip of yellow grass, still patched with the last snow – behind him, when she watched him whirl around, she felt a schism in her body, a divorce of her anger from the rest of her. The rotten part that had blistered at the man was still there, but now it was observable, open to her own judgment. She did not notice the man who had lingered and watched them, his wingtips vintage and his neck tattooed with arrows, or see his face made joyful by the phone he held to his face. Her shame and shock carried her forward, up some blocks into a more trafficked area, where she poured herself into a cab.
At home, in the queen-sized bed whose softness felt undeserved, she saw herself on loop, taunting the man, ridiculing the only beliefs he knew, pitching the hat. She paused the memory to rehash his reaction, how her cruelty had hit his face, how he had eaten at his bottom lip and not known where to look. She saw the birthmark intensifying in colour. She ran circles around these details until finally an overheated sleep came, and it kept her 11 hours, through the sun’s decline and return.
When Alice woke, she could not remember the routine she was meant to follow, was unsure what the necessary steps for reacquainting herself with the world might be – did she need food, or a shower, or an in-person conversation with someone who claimed to know her? She was allowed no opportunity for assessment, because when she groped for her phone to check the time she saw a text from her last one-night stand. It was rare she reached out to these people and rarer she heard from them, so she was, for the millisecond of her ignorance, intrigued.
Personally, I think you look hot with those horns. You’re famous, Alice Niemand!