The Middle Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE PRINCESS AND THE PLUMBER

  MERMAID IN A JAR

  THE MISS AND SYLVIA AND SAM

  THE WOMAN WHO LIVED IN A SHOE

  THE MIDDLEMAN TO ELDA

  THE FUNDAMENTAL RACE

  THE LITTLEST DUMPLING

  THE FAVORITE MONKEY

  THE GIANT

  THE GIRL WHO WAS BLIND ALL THE TIME

  THE MOON MONOLOGUE

  THE PARTY AT HER PLACE, WITH HER PIANO

  THE GIRL WHO PLANTED FLOWERS

  ELEANOR

  THE ACCIDENT

  MR. JONES’S FIRST OUTING

  A FEW ADVENTURES OF THE YOUNG FORNICATOR

  WHAT CHANGED

  JANIS AND MARCUS

  THE RASPBERRY BUSH

  FRAMES FROM CHRISTIANITY

  A BENCH FOR MARIANNE AND TODD

  THE POET AND THE NOVELIST AS ROOMMATES

  THE SORT OF WOMAN FREEMAN LOVED

  THE NIGHT OF RORY

  THE MAN FROM OUT OF TOWN

  THE LITTLE OLD LADY AND THE LITTLE OLD MAN

  THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE LANE

  COWS AND BREAD

  THE MAN WITH THE HAT

  NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Sheila Heti’s

  THE MIDDLE STORIES

  “By cross-pollinating fairy tales with the awkwardnesses of contemporary life, Heti makes the familiar uncanny and the uncanny familiar, all in delightful, perfectly crafted, shimmering prose.”

  —BRIAN EVENSON, author of The Open Curtain and Immobility

  “It’s hard not to look for a key or a moral in the stories collected in Sheila Heti’s widely-praised first book, The Middle Stories. A little dumpling falls from the pot to the kitchen floor below. A plumber woos a princess, taking advice from a frog. A small girl is very unkind to a mermaid in a jar that she found at a flea market—there’s just got to be a lesson in that.”

  —HARRY VANDERVLIST, FFWD

  “This keen sense of the arbitrary extends to Heti’s approach to the implied social structure typically contained by the world of fable. For example, Heti employs a repeating female character—obsessed with beauty and her superficial power over men—who’d be the princess in a fairy tale. In Heti’s fictional world, she’s a typical, self-obsessed urbanite who has been granted an arbitrary position of authority by society.”

  —KEVIN CONNOLLY, Eye Weekly

  “Heti’s overall sensibility is reminiscent of a remark Brassai once made about his photographs: ‘I never sought to express anything but reality itself, than which there is nothing more surreal.’”

  —EVA TIHANYI, Toronto Star

  “The Middle Stories heralds in a New Nihilism, a smack in the face of conservative fiction. Sheila Heti’s stories are fantastic, strange and bleak.”

  —STEVEN NAYLOR, Literary Review of Canada

  For my family

  THE PRINCESS AND THE PLUMBER

  A REGIONAL MAN who was just a plumber asked the princess to marry him. He was from the region so it was okay, partly, but he was a plumber, and he knew that even if she loved him her father would say no.

  She did not love him. She didn’t even know him. When he went to present himself to her, leaning over the garden gate, she looked up from her book, over her sunglasses, and said, her legs long and bare in the sun, “Can’t you see I’m a princess? I have no time for any common boys. I have no time for you. If you are a prince one day, then you can come back and see me. Until then, I have no more words.”

  The plumber, being a modest fellow, was quite distressed. He was a good man, he thought, even a handsome man, and he deserved better than this.

  “I’m strong,” he said, “and I have a good sense of humor. You will see that if you will only spend one night with me. I can give you whatever you desire. I will make you very happy.”

  “I have said all I have to say and I’m not going to say any more,” the princess replied. “I am not happy to talk to you.” And she turned her head and picked up from the grass a sheet of metal tanning foil and blocked his view of her with it.

  “All right for now,” he said. “But I’m coming back.”

  That evening he went home and, using a hammer and some wood, built the most marvelous marriage contraption the world had ever seen. It takes a special kind of man to invent something new, something never before thought of, and that night, inspired by her rejection, he did just that.

  The next day, after only seven hours of sleep, he returned to the princess’s castle and rang the front bell. A maid answered.

  “I am here to see the princess,” he said. “I have a present for her. I must see her at once.”

  “What is your name?” asked the maid.

  The plumber waited and waited, and waited and waited, but the maid did not return. He rang the doorbell again and still the maid did not answer. He started to go, but before he could reach the bus stop a voice came calling after him.

  “Come here! Come back! You give up too easily, man!”

  The plumber turned but could see nobody. “Who is it?” he asked. “Who’s following me?”

  “It is I!” came the voice, and the plumber traced it and came face to face with a frog in a tree. “I have been watching the whole thing,” said the frog, “and it’s a shame the way she’s been treating you. Why don’t you find yourself a nice girl? There are many beautiful girls in this town.”

  “I don’t want a nice girl,” he replied. “I want the princess. Only she won’t give me a chance because I’m a plumber. She doesn’t see what I can do. Here, I made this,” he said, and held out the wooden contraption, inspired especially by her. “If she saw it she would know what kind of man I really am.”

  “I know what kind of a man you really are,” said the frog. “You’re a crazy man! What is this contraption? That won’t make her love you. Women don’t care for bits and gadgets. They want you to prove you’re better than them. Building this ridiculous machine makes you no better than her, I say that.”

  The plumber looked at the frog a moment longer, then turned and walked toward the bus stop. He was upset with what the frog had said and disinclined to believe him, but the frog had spoken so persuasively, and with such assurance. Still, what did a frog know about love? He was about to return and ask for his credentials, but the bus arrived and it only came once every twenty minutes.

  On the bus there was a beautiful girl of about seven or eight. She was carrying a rubber doll and sitting next to the only empty seat. The plumber sat beside her and her blond pigtail rested against his bare arm. She couldn’t help it; they were flyaway curls.

  “Your celluloid doll,” he said. “What’s her name?”

  The girl smiled a little smile, then turned her sad watery eyes out the window and with a faraway look said, “I’m in the middle of a very bad nightmare. Don’t speak to me, sir, please.” She saw the world going by at a very high speed, and outside everything was dark and gray. Cities and towns just whooshed on by, and beside her was a giant skyscraper of a man with big burly hands. She whispered into her doll a secret that the man could not hear, but as he was afraid of saying anything more, he did not ask.

  He got off at his stop, but her hair somehow followed him. Three little bits of it had stuck to his arm, and in bed that night they pressed against him and softly lulled him to sleep.

  That night he had a sad sad dream, and when he woke in the morning he remembered the princess. The three hairs of the girl from the bus had wound themselves into the shape of a heart above his own heart, and he lifted it with his finger and recalled what the frog had told him:
“Woman wants a man who is better than herself.”

  He got up and went to the shower. He did not shower, though. He didn’t want to start the day with such an unexceptional activity. So the plumber turned and dressed and stepped out straight into the fresh sunny air. It was springtime and still each sunny day was a present. “Hello!” he called to the birds that swooped down around him, and went straight to the castle to call on the princess.

  When he arrived he could tell something was the matter. Whereas before in the air there had been riches and gaiety and pomp, on that day there was something thick and skeletal and musty. The plumber rang the bell. The maid answered, but the maid was all of a sudden quite a skinny woman.

  “What happened to your body?” he couldn’t help asking, aghast.

  “Oh me.” She looked down at the ground and her eyes welled up with tears. “I have become this way in only a day. There seems to be a plague upon the castle. All of us are shriveling away. The butlers, the cooks, even our little princess.”

  “The princess!” cried the plumber. “I must see her.”

  “No!” said the maid. “You must stay away from this house. It is quarantined. You will get sick if you come in, plagued with whatever plague has befallen it. Plus, she is too weak to take visitors.”

  “She’s dying,” he said softly, and immediately knew whose fault it was. He gave his condolences and pulled a few blades of grass from the lawn and threw them on the bricks that made up the castle walls.

  When he had wandered far enough away he called out, “Frog!” and patrolled the tree where he had met the frog the day before. “Come out! I know you’re there! You’re probably camouflaging yourself! Come out, come out!”

  The frog reluctantly climbed onto a low branch from the bramble of leaves where he had been happily shading himself.

  “Why are you killing the princess?” the man demanded.

  “What? Who? I? I am not killing the princess. It is you who are killing the princess.”

  “What are you talking about,” said the man who was a plumber and had forgotten all about his job over the last three days. If he didn’t go to work soon he would surely have no job at all, and that would not be right.

  “Pay attention to me now,” the frog said. “The world is changing. It’s a different place from when you were a boy. All of a sudden there are going to be large corporations with robots to do all the work. People will have no jobs and no use. The money the corporations make will be taxed heavily by the government, and the government will give all that money to the people. It will be a complete welfare state. At the same time, people will be living up to two hundred years, what with the advances scientists are making in aging. The whole way we look at living will be radically altered. Nothing we know about how to live a life will apply anymore. People will have two hundred years of leisure and never have to work or do anything.”

  The plumber was baffled. “What are you saying?” he asked. “How do you know all this? How do you know about this and how do you know about women? I don’t believe you. You have no credentials.”

  “You want credentials! What kind of boor are you?” said the frog.

  “You can’t just spout your opinions at me. I have to save the princess.”

  “You’ll do no saving. What can you do? You have such puerile taste. There are many beautiful and willing women in the city, and lots of them would be happy with a man like you. What are you pursuing this sickly creature for?”

  “Why are you killing the princess?”

  “I’m not, you are.”

  “I don’t believe this,” said the plumber, then he took his leave and got on a bus and ended up sitting next to the same little girl. Her eyes looked even more frightened than before, her hair was messed up, and there were dark blue circles where there should have been soft rosy cheeks.

  “I’m still in the same nightmare,” she said mechanically.

  “The princess doesn’t love me and is dying.”

  He got off at his stop and the girl continued on in her nightmare. This time none of her hairs stuck to him. That night he slept a fitful sleep and when he woke in the morning the sky was a funny shade of purple.

  “What’s happening to this world?” he asked, then got a dull sort of inspiration and built a box out of cardboard, but with folds such as the world had never seen.

  Something was going wrong, he just did not know what or why.

  He went again to see the princess, but this time the maid answered the door and said, “You have come too late. The princess is dead. Long live the queen.”

  The man was devastated. “I’ll never find love now,” he said, and dragged behind him a bouquet of flowers. “I’ll never love again.” He sat down on a bench.

  The frog, but not the same one from before, plopped down from a tree and rested its tired body on his shoulder. The frog said, “The world is changing faster and faster and I am becoming an old man. Just yesterday I had the spring of youth in my step, but today I do not even recognize my belly. I look at myself and see another frog, and I look at the frogs around me and all of them seem to be passing their lives by, doing nothing in particular, all of the time.”

  “It is good to think of some things, some of the time,” said the man who was a plumber but had since lost that skill. He picked up from the ground a blade of grass, perhaps one he had thrown on the castle for luck the day before.

  The grass said nothing, just lay in his hand. He examined it but received no wisdom.

  “The world is changing,” he said, “but love stays the same.”

  That made some things better, for some of the time. The man put his head on his chest and wept and wept like a child, and the sky let the snow fall. Then the man stopped crying like the snow stopped snowing, and the whole world was covered in white.

  MERMAID IN A JAR

  I HAVE A mermaid in a jar that Quilty bought me at a garage sale for twenty-five cents. The mermaid’s all, “I hate you I hate you I hate you,” but she’s in a jar, and unless I loosen the top, she’s not coming out to kill me.

  I keep the little jar on my windowsill, right behind my bed, right near my head so if I look up in the middle of the night, up and back, I can see her swimming in the murky little pool of her own shit and vomit, and I can smile.

  “Hello, mermaid! How are you this fine evening?” I can say, and sometimes do. “How very sad it is that you’re so beautiful, and you’re so young, and you’re so fucking trapped you’ll never get out of that bottle, ha ha!”

  Once I went on a class trip and brought my mermaid along, just for the hell of it. We were going to Niagara Falls and I was thinking, “Right, well, maybe I’ll hold her over the rail, give her a little scare, put her in her place,” or about letting her loose down the falls and out of my life. But once we got there I forgot her in my little brown lunchbag with my hot cheese sandwich, under my seat in the yellow school bus. But she got jolted on the ride there and jolted on the ride back and that was enough for me.

  Once I had a party and invited all my friends, seven little girls to play and sleep over, and having called every number flashing in our heads, and having already called for pizzas twice and seanced out of our minds, I just thought, “Oh, why don’t I bring my mermaid out to show? They could make their faces at it, they could have their fun, and we’d be able to toss it back and forth like a real little football.” But then Emma fell asleep, and then so did Wendy and Carla and the rest, and the mermaid just stayed locked in the closet where I’d put her that afternoon.

  Once when I thought she needed a bit of discipline I rolled her measly bottle down Killer Hill in the ravine. Another time I threw her deep into my best friend’s pool.

  Now she’s getting old it seems. I even saw a gray hair on Friday and wrinkles are spreading all across her skin, and as much as I liked her before, I like her even less now. I was thinking sort of what to do with her, but I think I’ll just keep her there a little while longer. At least until I’m happy again.
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  THE MISS AND SYLVIA AND SAM

  A FRIVOLOUS YOUNG Miss, who was a little bit proper and a little bit delicate, stopped at a flea market stand and picked up a bottle and said to the woman, “And how much is this?”

  “Seventy-five cents.”

  “And how much is this?”

  “Four dollars.”

  “And how much is this thing?”

  “A dollar ninety-five.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  She went on in that manner for the whole entire day, just wandering though stalls, lifting up buttons and handbags and monocles, and thinking nothing greater than, “And how much is this thing? And how much is this thing? And how much is this?”

  When she got home that night she arranged everything she had bought on her little kitchen table, and tallied in her head the amount she had spent—seventy-four dollars and twenty-five cents—and took up the items separately in her hands and began to clean them one by one. First there was the feather baton, then the little top hat, then the picture frame with the picture in it.

  After a few hours she yawned adorably and lifted up her arms. When she woke in the morning she returned to the market. One of the women at one of the stalls, an oval thing with a bob of gray hair, said to the Miss, “Hello. I think I know you. You look very familiar to me.”

  “Yes,” replied the Miss. “I probably am. I was here yesterday.”

  “No,” said the woman from behind the stall, and she put her hands on the glass and leaned a bit forward. “I feel I know you from another life.”

  “Oh, that’s impossible!” laughed the Miss. “This is the only life I’ve had.” She had heard about women like this before, women who believed in reincarnation, though she’d never actually spoken to one. She felt unsure of how to act. “Good-bye,” she said, by way of explanation, and moved precisely down the aisle.