“See you tomorrow,” Jocelyn managed to say. She made it far enough away that she didn’t think Ms. Nementhal saw her gag, though nothing came up.
What was it that made Jocelyn revise her essay that night? It could be fiction, so that was what she wrote, though she thought journalism was cool and fiction was sort of retarded. She wrote about someone who went to an auction with her husband, and they came home with (she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t say it was the doll) two Elvis lamps and had an argument about whose was better. The flash-forward part (which was required) was that five years later, when they were still arguing about the Elvis lamps, which they drove around in the backseat, they died in a car crash (please; enough of the Rapture!) and went to Heaven. God, who was sort of a joker, at first said he wouldn’t let Elvis in, but then the lamps started singing and God relented, and decided which Elvis was better, then twerked with the winning Elvis like an actor at the end of a Bollywood movie. Jocelyn wrote the transition from the car crash to Heaven this way: “What they didn’t know and wouldn’t for some time was that they were dead, and that meant they could have what they wanted. Not what they feared… not what they said silent prayers hoping to ward off… but anything they wanted.” Jocelyn wasn’t sure about the three dots for punctuation, whatever they were called, but she’d tried a colon first and that didn’t look right. She continued: “So they decided on Heaven and before they blinked they’d arrived though it took them years to realize it because time goes very slowly there, and God did not at first appear.” She knew the last comma was correct because it was a compound sentence joined by the word and. It got her a B.
Here’s what the Hand of Fate wrote: Jocelyn had to go forward, she couldn’t look back. Not even at the indentation in the sand where they’d had sex. The sand wouldn’t look different, and if you bothered to turn around and look, who wouldn’t want what met their eye to be worthy of their hesitation, their double take, special? Sand was ordinary. So was the face of her friend Zelda, who’d shown up that night, running down the beach, trailing her scarf, sensing something was up. She and T. G. never talked about having sex that one time. He wasn’t her first. Not long afterward, he tried to kill himself, though the two things were unrelated. She went to an auction with her aunt and uncle when she was seven weeks pregnant. The auction was a sad affair, and all the time she sat there, she had a feeling that she knew what was wrong. Not just what was wrong with her but what was wrong all around her, with people bantering and wasting time, sitting passively in a converted barn that denatured everyone who entered, because it wasn’t a working barn. It was repurposed — there’s the word of the age — and the goings-on inside were hectic, because hectic equaled fun. That was underscored by the auctioneer’s kidding about things that weren’t really funny. Summer was almost over. The auction ended. Money was spent — maybe money that shouldn’t have been — and prayers and worries lifted up to the rafters and got stuck there like a dust mote, or a bird feather. The night started one way and ended another. Jocelyn became Everywoman. That’s where the story ends.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© SIGRID ESTRADA
ANN BEATTIE has been included in four O. Henry Award collections, in John Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and in Jennifer Egan’s The Best American Short Stories 2014. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine and Key West, Florida.