"Why don't you just say it, Robert," my mother said. "Say what you mean. Say Daughter, I hate you." Her voice started shaking. "Everybody sees it. Everybody knows it. Why don't you say it out loud?"

"Ms. O'Rourke?" Officer Jenkins was back at the window.

"Let's hear it," my mother went on. "Officer, I hate my daughter."

The cop's eyes flicked for a moment into the back seat.

"According to the information I received, Ms. O'Rourke," Officer Jenkins said, "you are required to wear corrective lenses."

"That's right," I said.

"And you are wearing contacts now?" There was something like hope in his voice.

"No, sir."

"She can't even lie?" my father asked. "About one little thing?"

"Okay now, on three," my mother said. "Daughter, I wish you had never been born."

"Ms. O'Rourke," Officer Jenkins said, "I'm just going to give you a warning today." My father bit off the end of a laugh.

"Thank you very much," I said.

"I hate to say this, Ms. O'Rourke," the cop said, "but there's nothing I could do to you that's going to feel like punishment." He held out his hand for me to shake. "You drive safely now," he said, and he was gone.

786.

PAM HOUSTON.

When the Fiesta Bowl was over, my parents and I drove back up to Carefree to attend a New Year's Eve party given by a gay man my mother knew who belonged to the wine club called the Royal Order of the Grape. My father wasn't happy about it, but he was silent. I just wanted to watch the ball come down on TV like I had every year of my childhood with the babysitter, but the men at the party were showing home movie after home movie of the club's indoctrination ceremony, while every so often two or three partygoers would get taken to the cellar to look at the bottles and taste.

When my father tried to light a cigarette, he got whisked outside faster than I had ever seen him move. I was too young to be taken to the cellar, too old to be doted on, so after another half-hour of being ignored I went outside to join my father.

The lights of Phoenix sparkled every color below us in the dark.

"Lucille," he said, "when you get to be my age, don't ever spend New Year's Eve in a house where they won't let you smoke."

"Okay," I said.

"Your mother," he said, as he always did.

"I know," I said, even though I didn't.

"We just don't get love right, this family, b u t . . . " He paused, and the sky above Phoenix exploded into color, umbrellas of red and green and yellow. I'd never seen fireworks before, from the top.

"Come in, come in, for the New Year's toast!" Our host was calling us from the door. I wanted more than anything for my father to finish his sentence, but he stabbed out his cigarette, got up, and walked inside. I've finished it for him a hundred times, but never to my satisfaction.

We pay the bill and Leo informs me that he has the temporary use of a twenty-seven-foot sailboat in Sausalito that belongs to a man he hardly knows. The fog has lifted enough for us to see the place where the sun should be, and it's brighter yet out by the Golden Gate, and we take the little boat out and aim for the brightness, the way a real couple might on a Saturday afternoon.

It's a squirrelly boat, designed to make fast moves in a light wind, and Leo gives me the tiller two hundred yards before we pass under the dark shadow of the bridge. I am just getting the feel of it when Leo looks over his shoulder and says, "It appears we are in a race," and I look too, and there is a boat bearing down on us, twice our size, ten times, Leo tells me, our boat's value.

77 i The Best Girlfriend You Never Had "Maybe you should take it then," I say.

"You're doing fine," he says. "Just set your mind on what's out there and run for it."

At first all I can think about is Leo sitting up on top of the bridge running numbers in his head, and a story Gordon told me where two guys meet up there on the walkway and find out they are both survivors of a previous jump.

Then I let my mind roll out past the cliffs and the breakers, past the Marin headlands and all the navigation buoys, out to some place where the swells swallow up the coastline and Hawaii is the only thing between me and forever, and what are the odds of hitting it if I just head for the horizon and never change my course?

I can hear the big boat's bow breaking right behind us, and I set my mind even harder on a universe with nothing in it except deep blue water.

"You scared him," Leo says. "He's coming about."

The big boat turns away from us, back toward the harbor, just as the giant shadow of the bridge crosses our bow. Leo jumps up and gives me an America's Cup hug. Above us the great orange span of the thing is trembling, just slightly, in the wind.

We sail on out to the edge of the headlands, where the swells get big enough to make us both a little sick and it's finally Leo who takes the tiller from my hand and turns the boat around. It's sunny as Ber-muda out here, and I'm still so high from the boat race that I can tell myself there's really nothing to be afraid of. Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you're walking out of the theater you can't remember anything at all about your own life.

You might forget, for example, that you live in a city where people have so many choices they throw words away, or so few they will bleed in your car for a hundred dollars. You might forget eleven or maybe twelve of the sixteen-in-a-row totaled cars. You might forget that you never expected to be alone at thirty-two or that a crazy man might be waiting for you with a gun when you get home tonight or that all the people you know - without exception - have their hearts all wrapped around someone who won't ever love them back.

"I'm scared," I say to Leo, and this time his eyes come to meet mine.

The fog is sitting in the center of the bay as if it's over a big pot of soup and we're about to enter it.

788.

PAM HOUSTON.

"I can't help you," Leo says, and squints his eyes against the mist in the air.

When I was two years old my father took me down to the beach in New Jersey, carried me into the surf until the waves were crashing onto his chest, and then threw me in like a dog, to see, I suppose, whether I would sink or float.

My mother, who was from high in the Rocky Mountains, where all the water was too cold for swimming, and who had been told since birth never to get her face wet (she took only baths, never showers), got so hysterical by the water's edge that lifeguards from two different stands leapt to my rescue.

There was no need, however. By the time they arrived at my father's side I had passed the flotation test, had swum as hard and fast as my untried limbs would carry me, and my father had me up on his shoulders, smiling and smug and a little surprised.

I make Leo drive back by the Palace of the Fine Arts on the way home, though the Richmond Bridge is faster. The fog has moved in there too, and the last of the brides are worrying their hairdos while the grooms help them into big dark cars that will whisk them away to the honeymoon suite at the Four Seasons, or to the airport to board planes bound for Tokyo or Rio.

Leo stays in the car while I walk back to the pond. The sidewalk is littered with rose petals and that artificial rice that dissolves in the rain.

Even the swans have paired off and are swimming that way, the feathers of their inside wings barely touching, their long necks bent slightly toward each other, the tips of their beaks almost closing the M.

I take the swans' picture, and a picture of the rose petals bleeding onto the sidewalk. I step up under the tallest of the arches and bow to my imaginary husband. He takes my hand and we turn to the minister, who bows to us, and we bow again.

"I'm scared," I say again, but this time it comes out stronger, almost like singing, as though it might be the first step - in fifty-five or a thousand - toward something like a real life, the very first step toward something that will last.

Biographical Notes.

The author of more than one hundred short stories and ten novels, Alice Adams (1926- ) lives and writes in San Francisco. Her most recent novels are Medicine Men, A Southern Exposure, and Caroline's Daughters. She has received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement.

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) began his writing career in 1913 after serving in the Spanish-American War, working as a copywriter, and managing a paint plant. He initially received critical notice for Winesburg, Ohio, the first of several collections of stories. His other works include poetry, criticism, essays, and novels, including Dark Laughter; Tar, A Midwest Childhood; and A Story-Teller's Story.

Known for his irreverent, innovative fiction, Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) wrote a dozen books, including the novels Sadness, Snow White, and The Dead Father. His story collections include Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; City Life; Amateurs; and Great Days. He won the National Book Award in 1972 for The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, a book for children, and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1974 for Guilty Pleasures.

One of the most distinctive voices of her generation, A n n Beattie (1947-) is the author of several novels, including Chilly Scenes of Winter, Falling in Place, Love Always, Picturing Will, and Another You. Her story collections include The Burning House, Distortions, Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories, What Was Mine, Secrets and Surprises, and, most recently, Convergences: New and Selected Stories.

Saul Bellow (1915-) was born in Canada and grew up in Chicago. His works include The Dangling Man, Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day, and Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. The recipient of many literary awards, he won the National Book Award in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, in 1965 for 790 Biographical Notes Herzog, and in 1971 for Mr. Sammler's Planet. In 1976 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt's Gift and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A celebrated poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was also a teacher, transla-tor, and avid traveler. The recipient of many awards for her poetry, she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for North and South - A Cold Spring. Her other work includes the travel books Questions of Travel and Brazil; the collections of poems Geography III and The Complete Poems; and The Collected Prose.

Harold Brodkey was born in 1930 in Alton, Illinois. His story collections include First Love and Other Sorrows, Stones in an Almost Classical Mode, Profane Friendship, and Women and Angels. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, a memoir chronicling his death from AIDS, was published in 1996.

The poet, short story writer, and novelist Rosellen Brown (1939- ) is the author most recently of Cora Fry's Pillow Book, a book-length poem. Her fiction includes The Autobiography of My Mother, Tender Mercies,'Civil Wars, Before and After, Banquet, and Street Games.

R a y m o n d Carver (1938-1988) was an influential writer of short fiction as well as poetry. His collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please was nominated for the National Book Award. Two other collections, Cathedral and Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Willa Cather (1876-1947) was born in Virginia and moved to Nebraska with her parents at the age of nine. Among her many novels, the best-known may be O Pioneers!, MyAntonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, though she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours. Cather also published several collections of stories, poems, and criticism.

One of the century's great short story writers, John Cheever (1912-1982) won the O. Henry Memorial Prize twice, in 1956 for "A Country Husband" and in 1964 for "The Embarkment of the Cythers." He also received the National Book Award in 1958 for The Wapshot Chronicles and the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the American Book Award for The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1979. In 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.

Grace Stone Coates (1881-1976) was born in Ruby, Kansas, and attended the University of Chicago. She spent most of her life in Montana, where she was the assistant editor of The Frontier, an important western literary journal. Her publications include two works of fiction, Black Cherries and Riding the High Country, and two books of verse.

Alice Elliott D a r k (1953-) is the author of two short story collections, In the Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. A novel, Think of England, will be published in the spring of 2001.

Pam D u r b a n (1947- ) is the author of a collection of short stories, All Set About with Fever Trees, and a novel, The Laughing Place. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for 791 Biographical Notes the Arts. A professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, she serves as fiction editor of Five Points magazine.

Stanley Elkin (1930-1995) was the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including Why I Live Where I Live, Mrs. Ted Bliss, Van Gogh's Room at Aries, The MacGuffin, The Magic Kingdom, and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers. His novel George Mills won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, and he was nominated three times for the National Book Award.

A native of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner (1897-1962) was a prolific writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. Among the best-known of his books are Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Intruder in the Dust, Go Down, Moses, and The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for A Fable and in 1962 for The Reivers, and he received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Carolyn Ferrell (1962- ) is the author of the collection Don't Erase Me, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She has held residencies at the William T. Flannagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, Yaddo, the Blue Mountain Center, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Imagination Writers Conference at Cleveland State University. She lives in Bronx, New York, with her husband and son and is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College.

The first writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) to appear in print was a detective story in his school newspaper when he was thirteen. He was the author of four collections of short stories, including Tales of the Jazz Age and All the Sad Young Men, and five novels, including The Beautiful and Damned, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night.

M a r y Ladd Gavell (1919-1967) was born in Cuero, Texas, and became the managing editor of Psychiatry magazine in 1955. "The Rotifer" is her only published story; it appeared in Psychiatry after her death, as a memorial to her.

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) began her groundbreaking career as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine, covering the Spanish civil war. Her fiction includes The Trouble I've Seen, A Stricken Field, The Heart of Another, Liana, and The Wine of Astonishment, and she also wrote an autobiography, Travels with Myself and Another.

Susan Glaspell (1882-1948) is best known for her many plays, including Alison's House, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Among her other books are a collection of short stories, a biography, and seven novels. Glaspell was a founder of the Provincetown Players and the Playwright's Theatre.

Alexander Godin (1909-?) was born in the Ukraine and came to New York in 1922. He worked as a bottler in a chemical plant while writing the novel On the Threshold. Nothing more is known about him.

Lawrence Sargent Hall (1915-1993) graduated from Bowdoin College in 1936 and received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1941. "The Ledge" won the O. Henry Memorial Award in i960, and Stowaway, Hall's first novel, won the William 792

Biographical Notes.

Faulkner Award in 1961. In addition to fiction, Hall published several books of criticism.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) began his writing career with two collections of stories and went on to publish numerous novels, including The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls; several story collections; a memoir; and a play, The Fifth Column. In 1953 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea, and in 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paul Horgan (1903-1995) was the author of forty-seven books, including seventeen novels, four volumes of short stories, five biographies, several histories, and various other works. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for Great River, a book about the Rio Grande, and in 1976 for Lamy of Santa Fe, a biography.

Pam Houston (1962-) is the author of two collections of linked short stories - Cowboys Are My Weakness, which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat, which was published in 1998 - as well as a collection of essays, A Little More About Me. She lives in Colorado.

Gish Jen (1956-) is the author of two novels, Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land. She has received awards from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Massachusetts. Her most recent book is a collection of stories entitled Who's Irish? and Other Stories.

Thom Jones (1945- ) is the author of three story collections: The Pugilist at Rest, a National Book Award finalist; Cold Snap; and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. A former Guggenheim fellow, he won the O. Henry Award in 1993. He lives in Olympia, Washington.

Ring Lardner (1885-1933) began his literary career in 1905 as a sportswriter and columnist. In addition to numerous story collections, including How to Write Short Stories and The Love Nest, he published a book of verse, a humorous novel, and a spoof autobiography, The Story of a Wonder Man. He also collaborated on two Broadway plays.

Mary Lerner published several short stories in national magazines. Nothing more is known about her.

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) began his career writing stories for the Washington Post and went on to publish eight novels and four collections of short stories. He received the National Book Award in 1959 for The Magic Barrel and the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for The Fixer.

James Alan McPherson (1943- ) is the author of two collections of short stories, Hue and Cry and Elbow Room, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. He is also well known as an essayist. His most recent publication is Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men, edited with DeWitt Henry.

Lorrie Moore (1957- ) is the author of two novels, Who Will Run the Frog 793 Biographical Notes Hospital? and Anagrams, and three collections of stories, Like Life, Self-Help, and Birds of America. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

A native of Ontario, Alice Munro (1931- ) has twice received Canada's Governor's General Award and is the author of numerous collections of short stories, including Who Do You Think You Are?, The Moons of Jupiter, Dance of the Happy Shades, Open Secrets, Friend of My Youth, The Progress of Love, The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose, and, most recently, The Selected Stories of Alice Munro.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) wrote more than forty volumes of fiction, criticism, and poetry, including Invitation to a Beheading, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Laughter in the Dark, Pale Fire, Bend Sinister, Ada, and Speak, Memory, and translated the work of Pushkin and other Russian authors.

He also had a worldwide reputation as a lepidopterist.

T i m O'Brien (1946- ) is the author of Going After Cacciato, which won the 1979 National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novel In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians. His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age, and, most recently, Tomcat in Love.

An acknowledged master of short fiction, Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) published the collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge as well as two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away.

"Greenleaf" won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1957, and The Collected Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor won the National Book Award in 1972.

Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ) is a prolific writer of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. Among her many awards and honors are the National Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, three O. Henry awards, the Rea Award, and the O. Henry, PEN/Malamud, Bobst, and Bram Stoker lifetime achievement awards. Her most recent books are the story collection Will You Always Love Me? and the novella First Love.

Cynthia Ozick (1928- ) is the author of short stories, essays, novels, criticism, and a play. Among her works are The Messiah of Stockholm, Trust, Art & Ardor, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, and Levitation: Five Fictions. She has won four O. Henry first prizes and the Rea Award for the short story. Her most recent books are Fame & Folly, a collection of essays, and The Puttermesser Papers, a novel.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) developed a reputation for caustic wit through her critical reviews for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and in such books of verse as Enough Rope and Death and Taxes. Her short story collections include Here Lies and Laments for the Living.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1965 for her Collected Stories. Her works of fiction include 794

Biographical Notes.