Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Read online

  BINOCULAR VISION

  ALSO BY EDITH PEARLMAN

  How to Fall

  Love Among the Greats

  Vaquita

  BINOCULAR VISION

  NEW & SELECTED STORIES

  EDITH PEARLMAN

  LOOKOUT BOOKS

  University of North Carolina Wilmington

  ©2011 by Edith Pearlman

  All rights reserved. No material in this book may be copied or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without the express written consent of the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. Page 375 constitutes a continuation of this notice.

  First printing, January 2011

  Cover design by Claire Bateman and Emily Louise Smith

  Cover photograph © Keith Brofsky / Getty

  Book design by Claire Bateman and Rachel Jenkins

  for The Publishing Laboratory

  ISBN: 978-0-9823382-9-2

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Pearlman, Edith, 1936–

  Binocular Vision : New & Selected Stories / Edith Pearlman

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-9823382-9-2 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3566.E2187B56 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2010033376

  Lookout Books gratefully acknowledges support

  from the University of North Carolina Wilmington

  and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Printed in Canada by Printcrafters Inc., an FSC Certified company.

  LOOKOUT BOOKS

  Department of Creative Writing

  University of North Carolina Wilmington

  601 S. College Road

  Wilmington, NC 28403

  www.lookout.org

  for JOSEPH

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Ann Patchett

  SELECTED STORIES

  Inbound

  Day of Awe

  Settlers

  The Noncombatant

  Vaquita

  Allog

  Chance

  ToyFolk

  Tess

  Fidelity

  If Love Were All

  Purim Night

  The Coat

  Mates

  How to Fall

  The Story

  Rules

  Home Schooling

  Hanging Fire

  Unravished Bride

  Binocular Vision

  NEW STORIES

  Granski

  The Little Wife

  Capers

  The Ministry of Restraint

  On Junius Bridge

  Relic and Type

  Lineage

  Girl in Blue with Brown Bag

  Jan Term

  Elder Jinks

  Vallies

  Aunt Telephone

  Self-Reliance

  INTRODUCTION

  TO THAT GREAT LIST of human mysteries which includes the construction of the pyramids and the persistent use of Styrofoam as a packing material let me add this one: why isn’t Edith Pearlman famous? Of course by not having the level of recognition her work so clearly deserves, she gives those of us who love her the smug satisfaction of being in the know. Say the words Edith Pearlman to certain enlightened readers and you are instantly acknowledged as an insider, a person who understands and appreciates that which is beautiful. Still, I think that Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories should be the book with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret-handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure. Put her stories beside those of John Updike and Alice Munro. That’s where they belong.

  I first read Edith Pearlman when I was the guest editor for Best American Short Stories, in 2006. Somehow two of my favorite stories in the more than one hundred I was given to choose from—“On Junius Bridge” and “Self-Reliance”—were by the same writer, a writer I’d never heard of. How was this possible? Katrina Kenison, who was then the series editor, told me that finding new Edith Pearlman stories year after year was one of the greatest pleasures of her job. After a ridiculous amount of consideration, I decided to include “Self-Reliance” in the collection, only because taking two stories by the same author simply isn’t done. From there I went straight to her backlist: How to Fall, Love Among the Greats, and Vaquita. My transcendent love for Edith Pearlman was sealed.

  But even when love is sealed, it can still grow. When Best American Short Stories 2006 was published, there was a party for the book in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for that party three actors were hired to do readings of three of the stories from the collection. It was going to be my job to do the introductions, except that two days before the event, one of the actors fell through. I was told it would be up to me to read “Self-Reliance.”

  While I am no stranger to giving public readings, there’s a big difference between reading your own work and performing someone else’s work alongside two professional actors. And so I locked myself in my hotel room and, sitting in the middle of the bed, I practiced. It is not a long story and I easily read it aloud twenty times before I was sure I had it. I am here to tell you: There are very few things that hold up to being read twenty times aloud, and very, very few things that improve with every pass, but the more I subjected “Self-Reliance” to repetition, the more it bloomed. I felt like a junior watchmaker taking apart a Vacheron Constantin. I knew the story was good when I first read it, but when I had read it twenty times I could see that it was flawless. Every word in every sentence was indispensable, every observation subtle and complex. The rhythm of the language carried the reader forward as much as the plot. Every time I thought I had mastered all of the nuances, the story offered up another part of itself to me, something quiet and undemanding that had been standing back and waiting for me to find it. This is not to say that the stories in this book need to be read repeatedly in order to be fully comprehended. It’s to say that there is such richness in them, such depth of spirit, that they are capable of taking you as far as you are willing to go.

  It is without a trace of vanity that I tell you I brought the house down that night. Edith Pearlman herself was in the audience, which made me feel like I had the lead in Uncle Vanya on a night that Chekhov was in attendance. My only challenge was to keep from interrupting myself as I read. So often I wanted to stop and say to the audience, “Did you hear that? Do you understand how good this is?”

  A year later, I was asked to give a reading at my public library in Nashville for adult story hour (grown-ups who come together at lunch to hear grown-up fiction) and I had the chance to read “Self-Reliance” again. A repeat performance! The considerable crowd went wild. They wanted to know how they had they never heard of Edith Pearlman before. I told them I understood their confusion. I had used less than half of my allotted hour and so I suggested a discussion of the story.

  “No,” someone called out. “We want another Pearlman story.”

  “Read another story,” the audience cried.

  So I picked up one of her books (it was a library, after all) and started to read aloud. And even though I wasn’t prepared, the brilliance of the work carried me through. It turned out to be the second-best reading I have ever given.

  When I was asked to write this introduction, an invitation I leapt at, I sat down to read the manuscript with a pen in my hand. I thought it would be a good idea to underline some of the best sentences so I could quote them along the way, but I could quickly see the ridiculousness of that idea. I was underlining the entire book. Okay, I thought, just put a check by your favorite stories so you can b
e sure to mention them, but by the time I’d finished reading the book, every one of them was checked. Every story.

  What you have in your hands now is a treasure, a book you could take to a desert island knowing that every time you got to the end you could simply turn to the front cover and start it all again. It is not a collection of bus crashes, junkies, and despair. Despair is much easier to write about than self-reliance. These stories are an exercise in imagination and compassion, a trip around the world, an example of what happens when talent meets discipline and a stunning intelligence. This collection offers a look at an artist at the height of her powers. Once you have read it, I hope you will go forth and spread the news. Edith Pearlman has been a secret much too long.

  ANN PATCHETT

  Author of Run and Bel Canto

  Nashville, July 2010

  SELECTED STORIES

  INBOUND

  ON THE SUBWAY Sophie recited the list of stations like a poem. Then she read the names from the bottom up. Saying something backward made it easy to remember, sealed it in.

  When the family got off at the Harvard Square station she frowned at a platform sign. “Outbound?” she asked her mother.

  Joanna was bending over Lily’s stroller, adjusting the child’s harness. So Ken answered. “Outbound in this case means away from the center of the city,” he said. “There are two sets of tracks, coextensive.” He paused. Coextensive? Sophie had learned to read at three; her vocabulary at seven was prodigious; still … “They coextend,” he tried. “One set of tracks carries trains outbound and the other carries them … ?”

  “Inbound,” Sophie said. “Then when we go back to the hotel we’ll go inbound. But why aren’t the inbound tracks next to these ones? Yesterday, under the aquarium …”

  Ken inhaled deeply; for a moment Sophie regretted getting him started. “This Harvard Square station used to be the terminus,” he told her, “the last stop. When the engineers enlarged the system they ran up against the sewers, so they had to separate inbound and outbound vertically.” He had invented this explanation, or maybe he’d heard it somewhere. “Inbound is one level below us.” That much he was sure of.

  The family walked down a shallow ramp to the concourse. Sophie led the way. Her straight blond hair half covered the multi-colored hump of her new backpack, a birthday gift from her parents. During their early-married travels Ken and Joanna had worn explorers’ rucksacks to out-of-the-way places. After Sophie was born they traveled only to France, always with their little girl. This venture from the northern plains, across half the country, was the first family excursion since Lily’s birth two years ago. “An excursion is a loop,” Joanna had lightly explained to Sophie. “We start from home, we end up at home.”

  Ken, pushing the heavy stroller and its calm passenger, kept pace with Sophie. Joanna was at his heels, swinging the diaper bag and her scuffed brown pocketbook.

  On the concourse Sophie paused. “The stairs are at the left,” Ken said. Sophie started toward them, her parents like friendly bears behind her. Other people on the way out pushed through unresisting turnstiles, but because of the large stroller Ken and Joanna and Sophie and Lily had to use the gate near the token vendor’s booth. The stairway to the street was broad enough to climb together. Ken and Joanna lifted the stroller between them. All four, blinking, reached the white light of Harvard Square at the same time. Lily, startled and amused by the hawkers, made her familiar gurgle.

  “Mama,” she said to Ken.

  “Dada, darling,” he returned.

  “Dada.”

  “Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,” said Sophie, dancing in front of the stroller.

  “Mama,” Lily said.

  She was not yet able to say her sister’s name, though sometimes, on the living room floor, when Sophie was helping her pick up a toy, Lily would raise her odd eyes and gaze at the older girl with brief interest.

  She had Down’s syndrome. At two she was small, fair, and un-fretful, though Ken and Joanna knew—there was little about Down’s that they did not now know—that the condition was no guarantee of placidity. Lily was just beginning to crawl, and her muscle tone was improving; the doctor was pleased. In the padded stroller she could sit more or less erect.

  “Lily clarifies life,” Sophie had heard her father say to one of his friends. Sophie didn’t agree. Clarity you could get by putting on glasses; or you could skim foam off warm butter—her mother had shown her how—leaving a thin yellow liquid that couldn’t even hold crackers together. Lily didn’t clarify; she softened things and made them sticky. Sophie and each parent had been separate individuals before Lily came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill.

  Even today, walking through the gates of the university that looked like the college where her parents taught, but redder, older, heavier; leaving behind shoppers in Harvard Square; feeling a thudding below their feet as another subway hurtled outbound or inbound; selecting one path within a web of walks in a yard surrounded by buildings … even today, in this uncrowded campus, they moved as a cluster.

  “Massachusetts Hall,” Ken pointed out. “The oldest building in the university. That’s the statue of John Harvard over there. And dormitories new since our time—would you like to live here someday, Sophie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Clumped around the stroller they entered another quadrangle. There was a church on one side and, on the opposite side, a stone staircase as wide as three buildings. The stairs rose toward a colonnade. “That’s the fifth-biggest library in the world,” her father told her.

  “What’s the … sixth?”

  He smiled. “The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. You were there.”

  Paris? Sophie recalled stained glass. They’d had to climb narrow, winding stairs to reach a second floor. Her mother, soon to give birth, had breathed hard. Blue light from the windows poured upon them—upon her tall, thin father, her tall, bulging mother, her invisible sister, herself. She recalled the Metro, too, as smelly as day camp.

  “The Bibliothèque?” her father said again. “Remember?”

  “No.”

  “Ken,” said Joanna.

  They drifted toward the fifth-biggest library. Joanna and Ken carried the stroller up the stone stairs. Sophie, in a spasm of impatience, ran to the top, ran down, flew up again. She hid behind a pillar. They didn’t notice. She welcomed them at the entrance.

  Inside, an old man sat at a desk inspecting backpacks. The family crossed a marble hallway and climbed marble stairs that ended in a nave of computer terminals. At last Lily began to whimper. They pushed the stroller into an area of card catalogs. Joanna picked Lily up. “We’ll go into a big reading room,” she crooned into a lobeless ear. “We’ll look out a window.”

  Sophie watched them walk away—her mother so narrow in the familiar black coat. “Where are the books?” she asked her father.

  “My little scholar,” he said, and took her hand.

  The entrance to the cave of books was just a door. An ordinary, freckled boy who looked like her high school cousin casually guarded the way. Her father fished in every pocket for the card that would admit them; finally he found it.

  “Children—,” began the boy.

  “Ten minutes,” Ken promised. Sophie had heard this tone reassuring a woman who had slipped on the ice in front of their house; her father had used it also to soothe their cat when she was dying of cancer. “We’re in town from Minnesota. I want her to see this treasure. Five minutes.” The boy shrugged.

  Sophie followed her father through the door. Her heart, already low, dropped farther, as when some playground kid shoved her. Upright books were jammed shoulder to shoulder within high metal cases, no room to breathe, book after book, shelf above shelf, case following case with only narrow aisles between. Too many books! Too many even if the print were large. This was floor 4 east, said painted letters on the wall.

  They walked up and down the aisles until they reached the end of 4 East. Then t
hey turned; 4 East became 4 South. Behind a grille stood an aisle of little offices, all with their doors closed. Sophie wondered what her mother was doing. Section 4 West came next. It was just like 4 East, books, books, books; a tiny elevator hunched among them. “Where does that go?” she whispered.

  “Up to five and six,” he whispered back. “Down to three and two and one and A and B—”

  “Are the five minutes up?”

  “—and C and D.”

  This time it was Sophie who led the way—easier than she’d anticipated: you just hugged the perimeter. There was even an exit sign. The freckled boy outside nodded at them.

  Her mother waited next to the stroller. Lily was sitting in it again, sucking on a bottle. Sophie kissed Lily seven times.

  “Was she impressed?” she heard her mother ask.

  “Awed,” her father said.

  She gave Lily a ride, moving among card drawers on wooden legs. Ken and Joanna watched their children appear and disappear.

  “Those silent stacks,” he said. “The elevator, where I first kissed you—I’d forgotten it.” He kissed her again, lightly, on the elegant cheekbone that neither girl had inherited.

  She kept her face raised, as if seeking sunlight. Then: “Let’s try the museum,” she said.

  “Sophie will like the Renoirs,” Ken agreed.

  But at the museum Sophie found the Seated Bather spacey. Her father directed her gaze toward a painting of ballerinas haphazardly practicing. What was the point of that? Only one work caught her interest: substantial angels with dense overlapping feathers and bare feet reflected in the sand. “So you like Burne-Jones,” he rumbled.