HEAVEN by Sallie Bingham
No one cared any longer, and after a while Marion Crawford understood that no one had ever cared, really, and felt instead of a pang of disappointment a relief she couldn’t describe, as if she’d stepped off a cliff into thin air but instead of falling, floated.
All those husbands! She thought, although in fact there’d only been two, but in memory, they blossomed into a division. All those lovers! Not so many of them, either, but her thoughts about them and plans for them had taken up great swatches of time and space. Her life had been built, she thought now, on the sand of her expectations, shifting under the weight of each disappointment. (Those sleepless nights!) A house, or many houses, built on sand.
The truth was no one cared, really, for anyone but the shelled self – she included herself – and she was free, for the rest of her life, from trying to revise that truth. It was not cynicism. It was the fresh air of faithlessness, where any idea could drift and blow.
But in that clear air, something came to her. After a while she admitted to herself that she was still freighted with one old ridiculous belief: she believed in Heaven.
Heaven came to her in a dream one cold night when she had just turned seventy. The green pastures spread out before her as she stepped out of a door, which closed resolutely behind her. Far off, apple orchards were blooming, their bridal finery set against the pasture’s green; there were sheep over there, gently grazing – the scene was out of a hymn. Yet it was real, and it was for her.
Nothing in her substantial education had prepared her for this revelation.
She attended church now and then, a clean, friendly little Episcopal church in her neighborhood, as attractive as the houses around it. Heaven was never discussed there. She couldn’t remember a single gospel lesson or a sermon, all the cold winter, that mentioned the word. It seemed to have been discarded along with so much else – the incense, and the robes. Yet her vision remained, even though nothing in her life – her advance degrees, her long years as a corporate lawyer, her community work leading tours in the art museum – supported it, and none of her friends (who over the years had replaced, fruitfully, the husbands and lovers) would have even considered discussing the notion.
Her children, those two remarkable adults, would have been concerned for her sanity had she raised such a possibility: that there was a place, Heaven, green pastures, streams of living water. And that she intended to go there.
She didn’t need anyone’s affirmation of her belief, if it was a belief; it seemed to sustain itself – a feeling, even a passion, but silent by necessity, like all passions. The couples and single souls who sat next to her in the pews at church did not discuss the afterlife, as they might have called it; it would have been unseemly, like a raw debate about sex (that belonged to the days of liberation, long passed). Her minister, a devout-seeming, sparrowish woman, would, she believed, have been shocked by such a primitive belief, as though Marion Crawford had come to church dressed in sackcloth and ashes.
No one in Marion’s circle had died recently, and so she couldn’t be sure that Heaven was left out of the funeral service, but she felt unable, at first, to look for it in the little worn black prayer book her mother had given her at her confirmation.
A week later, her scrupulousness made her go to the ceiling-high bookcases in her living room and search for the prayer book, crammed in between more substantial volumes.
The yellowed front page hardly held her mother’s dim handwriting; it seemed about to drift off the paper. “For my daughter Marion,” she read, “on the day of her confirmation,” and a date so far in the past she couldn’t compute it.
For the first time in her life, Marion wondered what her mother had meant by giving her the prayer book – it was unusable now, written in the old language. She realized she had no idea whether her mother had believed in anything beyond the importance of a good healthy breakfast. Certainly, even on her deathbed, which had been small in both time and space, she had never mentioned Heaven, preoccupied instead with the jewelry she’d planned to parcel out to each of her many descendants. Her list, she’d felt sure in those last moments before she slid into unconsciousness, was out of date. She’d forgotten to add the latest granddaughter.
From these unprofitable memories, Miriam turned to the prayer book. It was musty, unused. Even in the days before revision, she’d never carried it to church, associating that with lace-edged handkerchiefs and crushed sprigs of artificial violets pinned to jacket lapels.
She did not read much of the service for the dead. The gravity of the words alarmed her. They were too weighty for the life she knew. She skipped quickly to “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes” because it was familiar, and so lighter. She felt as though those six words released her into her own vision, restored her Heaven to her, and wondered if the fires of cremation – now that everyone was cremated – might have the same effect, lifting the mourner along with the carrion flesh and carrying them both away.
Then she remembered that her sister had watched the plume from the highway-side crematorium on the day after their last brother’s funeral – her sister had been driving to the supermarket – and thought it might be their brother turning to ashes and felt no sort of lightening at all. In fact, Susan had horrified Marion by telling her, over the telephone – Marion had fled the day after the funeral – that she believed the smoke was all that was left of that cranky, imperious, unhappy man, vanishing into the polluted sky of a dim autumn day.
Yet it was not long after that call, and after the funeral, which had left her unmoved, that Marion had her insight, if she could call it that – her vision (the word was not usual, for her) of Heaven.
She remembered stories from her childhood of the dead calling to the living, appearing after they were supposed to have disappeared, in some shadowy corner of their old living place. The stories had made her shudder – she had a horror of things that refused to die, snakes run over in the road who still tried to creep away, old crippled dogs dragging themselves across the floor. It was indecent, at some point, to insist on continuing to live. Perhaps that obscenity was why no one else seemed to believe in Heaven; the living deserved to be freed, eternally, from the dead.
But she did not think she was the only one who believed. Yet who were the others?
Her friends from childhood – the beautiful, cloud-like actress who still appeared, imposingly, in shawls and scarves; the crone sufferer of many diseases who held her fixed with her sharp fox eyes – she did not think either of them, or any of the many others (she was barricaded with friends) would understand. They were all too well-educated, too well-off, too sly. The appearance of some uncouth belief out of an ancient, unprivileged time would have seemed as unattrac-tive as a dangling hem or a suspicion of body odor.
(Later, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of the attractive, civilized old men with their clean ears and high foreheads she’d known most of her life, but she had never felt any bond with them other than the long-ago bond of attraction, had never attempted to find a way to another sort of intimacy, and now it might really be too late.)
However, there was one woman of her acquaintance who might legitimately be expected to believe in Heaven, and that was Mother Martha, her own rector, the young woman who presided at the altar as, Marion thought, she herself presided at her dinner table, dispensing hospitality. She remembered Mother Martha’s small pale hands on the silver cup, on the plate of wafers – serving, as she herself had served, for so many years. Surely there was a link, there, in ordinariness, to belief.
She called to make an appointment. Mother Martha was on the road, as she often was, going to a convention, and so it was a week or so before she could see Marion. During that week, the point of her question sharpened. It began to wake her up at night, like a stone hidden in the mattress of her soft bed.
Finally, Marion went back again to the funeral service in her old prayer book. It came after “Communion of the Sick” and was called, shockingly, “Burial of the Dead,” as though to be read at the raw edge of an open grave rather than in the sanctuary of a church. How brutal the past must have been, with its endless early deaths and farmyard burials. Then it occurred to her that her vision was somehow connected to muddy shoes and the smell of upturned clods. This time she read the whole service.
On the day of her appointment, she dressed with care – her belief was eccentric and so she wouldn’t strike that note – and dug the prayer book into the bottom of her purse, hiding it like a grenade.
The wind was blowing when she drove up to the pretty little church, so like its neighbors, with their neatly-painted exteriors and trim yards. All sunbelt communities, Marion thought, probably shared this neatness, these pastels. She’d thought, years ago, when she moved from the East, that her new home might provide her with a link to indigenous life; she’d read extensively about the local tribes and their spiritual practices – dances, sweat lodges, all that – but her attempts to attend their ceremonies and learn something from their closed faces had faltered. There was no nourishment, for her, there. Instead, the church of her childhood, long discarded, even scorned, had returned to her like a forgotten habit, harmless, even benign.
She parked her hybrid and walked in a gale of desert wind to the front door of the church, wide and white, like the entrance of a small hotel. The wind held the door closed and she wrenched at it fiercely, feeling, again, the sharp point that had been waking her in the night. Opened, the door flew out of her hand and crashed against the outside wall, and she was swept in on a torrent of chilly air.
When she was finally able to close the door, the stillness of the hall that connected the church and the parish house confounded her. She realized she’d never been in the building on a weekday and might have imagined that it ceased to exist after the service on Sunday. The busy life of the community had never interested her, although she heard the announcements about prayer shawl ministries and housing for the needy; the news, if it was news, slid off while she waited for the next hymn – she loved to sing, loved if she had dared to admit it the sound of her high soprano, embroidering the more earthbound tones of the people around her.
Now, in the quiet corridor, with the notices of all those meet-ings – opportunities – fluttering on the bulletin board, she felt the life of the church swarming around her, crowding uncomfortably close, and wondered for the first time if she had failed in her duty, somehow, in applying to the Sunday service for succor but offering nothing in return. Well, she did contribute financially, and her checks were generous, but perhaps in the end that was not enough.
But then there was, she reminded herself, her sharply-pointed belief in Heaven, which was a sort of tribute, at least, and perhaps as valuable as the shopping bags of canned food people brought to the altar on the first Sunday of the month, for the homeless – perhaps even more valuable, since no one asked the homeless what they wanted to eat, and she suspected that the bags were full of canned beans members of the congregation no longer wanted, now that the latest national emergency had passed.
And did the homeless have can openers, or stoves, or pots? She wondered, to amuse herself, or was the definition of “homeless” the absolute absence of domestic necessities?
Marion did not mind – had never minded – making a fool of herself with this sort of speculation. She was amused by her own mind, its strange quirks and avoidances. It seemed to dance, at times, to music she couldn’t hear – perhaps the old tunes from the movies of the 1940s, the tunes she hummed while she ground her coffee in the mornings.
The minister’s office was a small, undistinguished room, off the silent corridor. The door stood half open. Marion peered in, feeling shy. Mother Martha, wearing a pair of blue jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and cardigan, was talking on the telephone; she turned in her squeaking chair and beckoned Marion in. At least Mother Martha was wearing her turned-around corner.
Marion could not help feeling a little disappointed by her casualness. Succor should come, or might come, at least, from someone dressed in wisdom clothes – whatever they might be – rather than looking as though she was about to go outside and pull weeds.
I’m getting old, Marion thought suddenly. My expectations have hardened.
Mother Martha cradled the phone and smiled. “Please make yourself comfortable. Would you like some water?”
One of the few distinctive features of the Southwest, Marion had found, was that she was always being offered water. Not coffee, or tea, or a soft drink or (God forbid) a martini, but water, plain, in a paper cup. This was what Mother Martha was handing her, although Marion didn’t remember asking for it.
She sipped. The lukewarm water tasted waxy although Marion knew waxed-paper cups were a thing of the past. She wondered if her belief had also disappeared from modern life, as silently, as un-remarked, as waxed-paper cups.
“So glad you could make time to come in and see me,” Mother Martha said into the looming silence, and Marion knew she had to begin.
“I have a question.” She heard herself gasp and felt gripped by panic.
“Yes?” Mother Martha asked encouragingly.
Marion looked at her small, pale hands, the nails close-clipped, uncolored, and remembered them on the stem of the silver communion cup, tipping it so Marion could drink.
“I’m afraid I believe in Heaven,” Marion said, deeply embarrassed. She began to dig in her purse for a tissue. Next it would be loud, tearing sobs.
“Is this a problem for you?” Mother Martha asked gently, pushing a box of tissues toward her.
Marion waved it away. “I’m afraid it is,” she said, and now her voice was within her grasp again. It fluttered a little, in her throat, but she was able to calm it. “You see, it doesn’t fit with anything else I believe, or the way I’ve lived my life. I mean, it’s not rational,” she said.
Mother Martha did not smile, as Marion had feared she would. Once, years earlier, she’d tried to talk to a young priest about Original Sin – the concept had dogged her, during her years of marrying, divorcing and taking lovers – and he had smiled at her, shaking his head. That had been the end of the conversation.
“Have you always believed in heaven?” the minister asked. Marion felt sure she was not giving the word its capital letter.
“Never. I would have scorned the mere idea,” she said, remembering living rooms in big cities, cocktail parties, silent people who’d been her seat companions on airplanes crossing oceans. None of those people – friends, acquaintance or strangers – would have accepted that the woman next to them believed in Heaven.
“What brought you to it?” Mother Martha asked, across the current of Marion’s memories. “I mean, was it something in particular? A moment,” she added cautiously, “of grace?”
“Nothing like that,” Marion said quickly. Moments of grace were a far more distant concept. “It just came to me, a few weeks ago. I don’t remember exactly when – maybe it woke me up in the middle of the night,” she added, remembering the sharp point in her bed.
“Is it a problem for you?” the minister asked again. “This belief?”
“It doesn’t fit,” Marion said, and her voice began to flutter again. “It cuts me out.” She didn’t want to explain. It seemed unworthy of the size of her belief. But it would, if anyone knew, cut her out of all human exchange, except with priests and fanatics – people she had never in her life wanted to know.
“Cuts you out?” Mother Martha asked.
“I can’t explain.” That would have entailed admitting that she was in the presence of one of the few people from whom she would not be separated, and that she definitely did not want to be joined to this woman in any way.
“Would you like to pray with me?” the minister asked, more softly. From long experience, she must have recognized the note of desperation in Marion’s fluttering voice.
Marion did not want to pray with her, or with anyone else, or even alone. It was a habit she’d never developed. But in that setting – a church office – it would have been rude to refuse.
“Can we pray something from the funeral service?” she asked, inspired, digging the old black prayer book out of the bottom of her purse.
“I don’t think we can pray it, exactly,” the minister said.
“Then would you read something to me?” Marion asked, handing her the prayer book. “I’m afraid it’s the old version.”
Water in the desert, Marion thought as Mother Martha checked the index and opened to the page.
“We don’t use all this anymore,” the minister said, paging through the text.
“Just one passage,” Marion said.
“Do you have any favorites?”
Marion smiled, for the first time. It was as though Mother Martha was asking her to choose between flavors of ice cream.
“I don’t have any favorites,” she admitted circumspectly, “but there is a passage I’d like you to read,” and she reached for her prayer book. The tissue-thin pages were hard to separate but she found the place at last and handed the book back. “Middle of the Burial Service, Rite 11: ‘O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered . . . ’”
Mother Martha took up the reading, not in what Marion thought of as a church voice but in the same voice she had used all along: “‘Grant Him an entrance into the land of light and joy – ’”
Marion interrupted, “That’s the closest it comes to describing Heaven – it sounds like some kind of camp!”
“How do you see it?” the minister asked, closing the prayer book.
“I don’t see it,” Marion admitted, “except once, in a sort of flash.”
“And was it so different?”
“No,” she admitted. The minister lifted her hand, as though to close the interview, but Marion did not intend to be sent away with a mundane matching of her vision to the hackneyed words in the prayer book. “There’s another problem,” she said. “If I go on believing in Heaven, I’ll have to believe I’ll see everybody I know there too.” She snatched her prayer book back and paged rapidly. “There it is – ‘the corruptible bodies of those that sleep in him . . . ’”
The minister took it up: “‘Shall be changed and made like unto his own glorious body – ’.”
“That’s what caused it,” Marion exclaimed with a sort of triumph. “That’s what started the problem. If I have to believe in Heaven I want to know that more than their bodies will be changed. Their bodies were not the trouble,” she added, “or at least they weren’t the cause of the trouble.”
Mother Martha looked puzzled. “Would you explain?”
Marion launched in, with appetite now, and energy. “You see, if we’re all going to be changed after we die, that resolves my problem with Heaven – if I can believe that,” she added more quietly. When she saw that the minister still didn’t understand, she went on, “I’m disturbed by the thought of going to Heaven and finding people there I got rid of on earth.”
Mother Martha looked startled. “I don’t mean I murdered them,” Marion said, “but I did get rid of them – tossed them out of my life. And for good reason.”
“Who were they?”
Marion hesitated. It was an old story, self-serving. Finally she admitted, “My last brother, and my last husband,” then was grateful the minister didn’t ask her how many brothers and husbands there’d been.
In the silence, she knew she’d have to go on. “My brother was violent,” she said, and the vision of his face rose up, the broad, glowering forehead, eyes pale blue like a goat’s, the beautiful, red, sneering mouth. It was a vision she’d fought hard to subdue. “And my last husband was an alcoholic.” A relief to seize on the correct term.
“They harmed you,” Mother Martha said.
“Yes. I don’t mean anything dramatic. Pinching, pushing, in my brother’s case, and my husband couldn’t control his temper.” Then she realized she’d dampened the whole thing down. “It went further than that,” she admitted.
“Do you want to tell me?”
“No.” She laughed, admiring her honesty. “But I have to, if I’m going to see them in Heaven. Unless,” she added, but it was a small hope, “they’ll be entirely changed.”
“From what to what?” Mother Martha asked reasonably, and so Marion had to tell her.
It came in pieces, chokingly.
“I was fourteen. He – my big brother – chased me around my bedroom. I just had time to run in the bathroom – there was a lock on that door. He wedged his foot in but some strength came to me and I slammed the door and squeezed his toes out.” She could still see the toes, pulling back. He’d cursed, crashing his fist into the door so the mirror on her side shattered, but it hadn’t mattered. She’d stood among the gleaming shards, laughing. It was the end of years of torment. “I never saw him again till I saw him in his coffin,” she finished. “And then I was glad.” With horror she remembered how she’d glared triumphantly at his white face. “He was dead, and I was alive, and I was glad.” Marion glanced at Mother Martha apprehensively. “I’ve never told anyone that.”
“He harmed you,” the minister repeated, quietly. It was her quietness that, suddenly, penetrated Marion’s restraint. There would be no drama, no theatrics, and she realized that her little tale was nothing compared to the horrors the minister heard about, even witnessed, every day.
“What about your last husband?” Mother Martha asked, as though she didn’t need to hear anything more about the brother, or Marion’s outrageous triumph at his funeral.
“Don’t I need some sort of forgiveness for that?” Marion asked, taking a sip from her paper cup.
“For what? Closing the door on his foot?”
“No – nearly laughing at his funeral.”
“You’re living with guilt. Isn’t that enough?”
“I’m not really sure I feel guilt. It’s something . . . sharper.”
The minister looked at her speculatively, and Marion noticed her coffee-colored, small eyes, set in pale lashes. “Do you want me to absolve you?”
It seemed possible, shockingly, that absolution was what she had come for, even though she’d never uttered that word in her life and did not know what context would make it appropriate. “Let me tell you about my husband first,” she said.
But the minister was beckoning her, actually beckoning, with one small, shapely hand, and now Marion imagined that hand soothing a sweating forehead.
“How did you come to this . . . career?” Marion asked.
Mother Martha smiled. “I was drawn to service.”
“Wasn’t Martha the sister who served in the kitchen while the other one, I’ve forgotten her name, sat at Christ’s feet?”
“Mary,” the minister said. “Yes.”
“Is that part of what you do?” Marion remembered the kitchen she’d seen once when she was reluctantly participating in the after-service coffee hour; going to look for milk, she’d seen a mess of pots and pans, unwashed, maybe, for days, piled in the sink and on the counters. Perhaps Martha washed all that – could it be one of her duties?
“We’ll talk about what I do later, if you want,” Martha said. “Right now I want to hear about your last husband.”
“There were only two,” Marion murmured, abashed.
“And – ?”
The term she’d been using for years to sum him up and dismiss him would not come to her; it no longer fit in her mouth. “He had his problems,” she said neutrally, unable to think of anything more definite. “He used to get mad.” That sounded childish, and she glanced at Martha apprehensively. “Really mad, sometimes,” she added, but still it had no weight and she wished she could use the term that had summed him up for so long.
“Did he strike you?”
“You mean abuse?” There was a term that did it all.
“Anything like that?” Martha asked neutrally, and again Marion understood that this was nothing in the lexicon of grief.
“He threw a skillet at me once, an iron skillet, but it missed me.” She saw rather than heard the skillet hitting the wall above her head, the long crack in the plaster she’d refused to have repaired. “I told him I’d leave him if he ever tried anything like that again,” she said proudly, then realized she’d reverted to the old script. “I was always afraid, when I was living with him,” she added in a lower voice, looking at her lap.
“So you had to get out.” In the minister’s mouth, it seemed the only possible outcome for the story.
“But he went downhill after that. Friends told me his heart was broken. He died,” she added, wondering how that volcanic fury could have come, so quickly, to the earth.
“And you blame yourself.”
“No!” She was startled by her own vehemence. She’d spent years fighting off that simple, bald observation; she would not wedge herself, now or ever, into it. “I just don’t want to meet him in Heaven.” It was so outrageous she had to laugh.
The minister didn’t laugh, or smile – Marion observed her carefully.
“I’d be afraid again,” Marion went on when Martha said nothing. “Afraid in Heaven, for the rest of time, of those two men. Afraid of them even though I got rid of them. I never think about them,” she added, “it’s only now when this ridiculous idea . . . ”
Martha stood up, and Marion thought she was leaving, perhaps shocked, or bored beyond patience. She saw the minister’s long, thin legs inside her worn blue jeans, saw the backs of her hands, mottled with age spots. They were about the same age, she realized, although she’d assumed Martha was younger. They belonged to the same time and space.
Martha was not leaving. She was searching among the disorderly pile of papers and books on her desk, fishing out, at last, an old black prayer book that looked almost as shabby as the one Marion was still holding with her palm on her knee.
“Do you remember the Exhortations?” Martha asked, paging rapidly.
“The passage they used to read sometimes before Communion?” Quickly, she added, “Yes – I remember that. They took it away a long time ago, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” Martha said, finding her place. “Would you like to hear it again?”
“After all this time?”
“It may have another meaning for you now.” Without waiting, Martha began to read in her quiet, steady, ordinary voice.
The first sentences ran on smoothly; Marion hardly heard them, focusing instead on Martha’s face. What had caused the pucker between her colorless eyebrows? Why were her ears exposed, her long, dark hair tucked carelessly back? What had made this woman who she was – a question Marion thought was hardly a question, but a statement of unknowingness, of ignorance so new it seemed eternal. I’ve never wanted to know anything about her, she thought, as the words of the prayer book streamed on, meaninglessly. I’ve never really wanted to know anything about anyone, unless it wouldn’t upset me.
Suddenly, she held her own prayer book up like a shield.
“‘So is the danger great,’” the minister was beginning.
“Stop there,” Marion gasped. “I don’t need to hear any more.”
The minister glanced at her curiously. “You remember the rest?”
“I remember it too much.”
Martha closed her prayer book. “What does the rest of that sentence mean, to you?”
She was using that voice, the voice of the professional counselor, and Marion stared at her with dismay.
“It means you’re damned if you don’t repent before you drink of the cup. But what about forgiveness? Where is forgiveness, in all that?” she cried, and she began, again, to dig furiously in her purse for a tissue.
This time the minister didn’t push the box toward her. “Is that your problem with Heaven?” she asked, and Marion felt sure she’d given it its capital.
“Either everything is forgiven, and they are there, or they are not there, and then neither am I,” Marion said.
“No one is “there” unchanged,” Martha said.
“But how can they change? How can anyone change? You didn’t know them,” she added recklessly. “They were fixed in themselves.”
“Haven’t you changed?” Martha asked, leaning toward her. “All these years – suffering like this?”
“Suffering?” She spat the word. “What in the world do you mean?”
“This pain, this fear, this guilt.”
“It isn’t that,” Marion exclaimed, and then she remembered the sharp point in her soft bed. “Is that what it is?” she asked. “Is that what’s been bothering me?”
“Can you forgive yourself?” the minister asked, and her face was looming close now, her pale hands were reaching.
“I didn’t come here for this,” Marion said, cringing back in her chair. She felt the hard, coarse wood against her spine. “I came here to ask you about Heaven.”
“Did they die because of you?” the minister asked relentlessly. “Have you been suffering all these years because you believe that?”
“This is insane!” Marion exclaimed, jolting up from her chair.
Martha stood up. They were the same height. Marion turned toward the door, sliding past Mother Martha who did not attempt to stop her.
She rushed out into the bright, chill air and stood blinking. Behind her, the big church doors swung closed and snapped. She wondered if Martha had hurried behind her and locked them, wondered how often she ministered to unclean spirits before the spirits went squealing and charging over the nearest cliff.
Then Marion began to look for her car. As soon as she found it, unlocked it and climbed inside, she would be back in the interior of her own life, her calm, her beautiful life alone, where there were occasional moments of distress (she knew that, of course, it did not alarm her) but not the horror she had just felt run its fingers along her bones, the horror of being explained.
Of course there is no Heaven, she thought, as amazed by the idea that she might once have believed as she would have been by any other childish form of irrationality. Of course those two men are gone, for good. They lived, they died, they burned to ashes, and their ashes are dispersed.
There’s a harmless sort of kinship in that, she thought as she started her car, for all ashes are the same, and even her own, she knew, would have no particular color, or smell, or taste, and would disperse, as quickly, into the endless sky.
Sallie Bingham has published six novels, the memoir Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf), and four short story collections, the most recent of which is Red Car (Sarabande Books). Her stories have also appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories.