The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories

By Valerie Sayers

In the spirit of Muriel Spark and Walker Percy, The Age of Infidelity's eleven stories embrace the comic, the absurd, and the dead serious. Faithless parents betray their children, the young betray the old, and lovers betray each other--but somehow these characters cling to hope.

Aging white cheerleaders shout through an online megaphone, remembering a time when racial equality seemed almost possible; a teenager endures her father's abandonment as her mother's psychotic episodes pick up pace; an old couple on the lam from the Constitutional Guard of the future hides out in a garage reminiscent of our consumerist past. In an age many call post-religious, these characters want to believe in something, but they're not always sure what that something is.

Set in landscapes from the small-town South to New York City, from a parched Midwest to a deserted Dublin, these stories time-travel from our Jim Crow past to an imagined future of warehouses for the aged where robots do the nursing. With what the Washington Post describes as her "distinctive brutal elegance," Valerie Sayers writes playfully, powerfully, and musically. These stories form an album riffing on our age, the Age of Infidelity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Slant Books
• Release date: Jun 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781639820504

Valerie Sayers

Valerie Sayers, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of six critically acclaimed novels including Brain Fever and The Powers. Among other honors, her fiction has received a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes for short stories. Her stories, essays, and reviews appear widely.

Book preview

Suicide Dogs

ONCE UPON A TIME we haven’t yet lived through—but I know we will, and you know it too—I moved to the outskirts of Greenglass with my young son and daughter. Their father had left us and I decided, under the circumstances, that we’d be better off a little distance from neighbors who were trying to scope out anything they could report to the Constitutional Guards. Besides, I thought we could plant a little garden to supplement the scant supplies I was allowed.

As you can guess, the garden didn’t work out. That first summer I had only a handful of baby lettuces to gather before the rains streamed down and the river rose up: the landscape is flat and I was flooded sure as everybody else. The world was so wet that July I thought I was seeping out of my own body, my eyes and ears leaking day and night. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was some new punishment they’d dreamed up.

One day when the rain and the hail pelted down together, the children and I heard a peculiar rustling outside. I cracked the front door open and watched a scruffy creature shake herself under what was left of our awning: she was a midsize mutt, her hair neither short nor long but thick and yellow, red-tinged, matted with rain. When I opened the door a little wider, against my better judgment, the dog made a dignified promenade into our little front room and proceeded to lay herself down on the straw mat as if she’d lived with us forever. She cocked her head to one side, awaiting further instructions.

Well, you know about children and yellow dogs. Pete and Annie gazed on her with reverence. I made the usual objections—that her people must be looking, that we barely had enough food for ourselves—but I knew from the first that she had joined our exile. You have to respect a dame who just strolls in and makes herself at home. We called her Ruby.

* * *

That same summer Pete witnessed his first dog suicide. One afternoon when the rain let up, he went on a ramble through the remaining woods and on his way home saw another yellow dog biding his time by the side of the road. Rabies was rampant again, so he hung back.

He was waiting for a truck to come fast.

Pete, sweetie, we can’t know that.

I know. I watched him. He was looking up and down the road.

I bet lots of trucks passed.

They were too slow. You know, you know what I mean.

Pete was only seven that year, still young enough to let me touch him, still beautiful. He was the opposite of me: serious, responsible. His dark hair climbed up his forehead before it fell back down, and the freckles on his cheeks matched the walnut shade of his curls. He said this dog stood patient as a guard on duty while the slow convoys ambled through, but soon as he heard the rumble of the solo truck racing to catch up, he crouched and sprang. The driver didn’t stop, so it was up to my little boy to drag the mangled oozing body from the asphalt to the ditch. The buzzards were circling by the time he headed home.

I scrubbed him up, down, and sidewise, but he said he’d watched the dog long enough to be sure: no foaming, nothing strange.

Nothing strange but throwing himself in front of a truck.

So I suppose I was beginning to believe it even then. Ruby sat quiet, listening to his story while I cleaned the blood and the goo at the kitchen sink.

* * *

You know exactly what happened next: years of drought followed the rains, and after three of those years I saw what foolishness it was to think I’d ever have a garden of greens again, much less a blooming fruit tree. I taught the children how to juice the cacti they planted by the side of the road: Guard Juice, we called it, and gurgled to signify our contempt. Pete and Annie roamed while they still could, in the early morning and the late afternoon, their sun gear weighing them down. The guards didn’t bother children, only to ask whether they’d seen anyone hiding, and my children knew to shake their heads no without a single word. No wiseguy business—thank God, they weren’t born with my wise-guy gene.

One suppertime they brought a friend they found in their roaming into the shade of our little house. The three of them had seen another dog lunge into a fast convoy and language streamed out of them: not appalled exactly, just excited, the way we all get when we watch disaster happen. Pete had seen plenty more dogs fling themselves at trucks in those three years, but he was getting old enough to doubt his own eyes. This time he had witnesses.

Their new friend Jude said: Your dog saw too. I calculated Jude to be between Pete and Annie’s ages, maybe eight or nine, with the look of a cartoon bird: he worried his lower lip in and out as if he were about to open his beak for food. She was talking, it was like talking, and then she growled. When that other dog got hit. Ruby sat tall and held herself perfectly still, listening.

Nothing to do, I thought, but offer this birdchild supper while they all calmed down. We still had some of the plantains and yucca the children were allotted. We’d make it a little party, and Ruby could lick our plates. We messaged Jude’s mother on his wristie and she beamed back: MAY I TALK TO YOU PRIVATELY.

So I asked Jude if I could borrow his wristie. He unstrapped it right away but as I went off to the kitchen, flinging a scarf around my neck, I heard him whisper: Where’s your wristies, guys? Where’s hers?

And even before I saw his mother’s small face, birdlike too, pinched on the little childsize screen, I knew it was dangerous to talk to her in my condition, crazy lonely, disguising myself with scarves. Be good, I told myself, which was how I always knew I was about to be bad. I craved the company of women enough to do something foolish, whereas I avoided men and stayed out of trouble. Who wouldn’t, after the children’s father who couldn’t contain his jealousy, after the guards who stripped me naked, after the judge who took my device away and said I was unfit for the company of decent citizens. His kind of decency I could do without—but I did long for another woman, one who would chatter, tell me a new joke, repeat Guard-gossip. We could dance! I was getting carried away.

You’re kind to have Jude over. She stared at me so intently I began to blink. We can’t afford, he’s not in school.

I let myself hope, just a little. Most folks couldn’t afford to send their children to school anymore, but that phrase––we can’t afford, the it lopped off—was the code schoolies used. I said: Me too. I can’t afford.

She tapped the air where she saw Jude’s ID code in the corner. You can’t afford a device, either.

She was either rude as she could be or she’d guessed the truth. I felt myself throwing off all good sense, the way you do when you fall in love. I didn’t even know her name. It was taken.

Only those three words: it sounded like I was talking about my virginity. The notion scared a laugh out of me, after what I’d been through, but when I heard the sound of my own giggle, creaky and out of practice, I knew what level of mistake I’d made. She was still staring.

You’re on home exile.

I didn’t say a word. I stared back, into the little wristie I held at arm’s length, but I couldn’t help feeling to see if my scarf was still in place. Maybe I could make home exile look fashionable?

I’ll come right away. If I’m stopped, I’ll say you’re my sister.

I tried to sound breezy: The court says I’m allowed visitors. I didn’t let on how few visitors I’d had, how long ago.

They changed the rules. Only family allowed now.

Without a wristie I had no way to receive the message about my new punishment. Boy, the Constitutional Authority really didn’t know how to take a joke. I pictured the long list of things I didn’t know, cut off like this. What if the bond I’d posted to pay for my supplies wasn’t enough anymore? What if they tried to take my children? Those words, my children, must have escaped.

She was as no-nonsense as a third-grade teacher. They’re OK. Now stop, please, and delete all that.

Both wristie screens went blank as I followed her command. I knew a lot of women like her, Midwestern women who specialized in nice but knew the way the world worked, who told you that dress made you look fat, that if you could just pick up the dustballs the clutter wouldn’t matter so much, that you shouldn’t stick your neck out.

Ruby wandered in and stood next to me, ears pricked, listening to the erasure of my conversation. She was a strange mix of breeds, the long collie snout rounding out over fierce jaws, her ribs showing but her muscles rippling. Since the day she arrived, she’d taken in every word, every pitch of our voices. My head swam off into some dead gray horizon. They couldn’t listen to every conversation, God knows, but what if they’d caught ours? They might take Jude’s mother away too, and I didn’t even know yet if she’d tell me my man-size shirt from the charity pile at Supply Distribution didn’t flatter me.

Ruby nudged the back of my knee, as if to say: Buck up.

* * *

I waited for Jude’s mother by the window, where I hadn’t let myself stand for the longest time––the landscape had been erased so systematically I preferred to imagine the old one. Even before it declined into a sad rustbelt city, nobody would have called this city beautiful, but here and there, especially on the outskirts, a simple green charm as unsophisticated as the rest of the Midwest once defined us. Now those trees had all withered or died: sycamores and pin oaks, black walnuts and mulberries, even the spindly honeysuckle that used to drape itself so carelessly over the roadway from here to town, turning a springtime walk dappled and dreamy. Now animals choked on the gristle of poisonous plants they couldn’t smell anymore. The children said Ruby chewed off dangling saplings and used them for bones. Her jaws are pit bull, I told them: those dogs chew through metal.

It was cheaper for the Authority if I raised my children myself, so the first ten years of my sentence was home exile, mother’s exemption. After that, when Annie turned twelve, I was supposed to report for hard labor––but I would never leave my children alone in this cottage to fend for themselves. It would be safest to escape in year seven or eight: I concocted plans on a daily basis. We would make our way to the riverbed by night—the children told me it was dried to a trickle—and follow it north until the trickle gurgled into a stream.

The plans fell apart as the landscape disappeared, as remains of trees and bushes blew or rolled or burned away, as the hiding places thinned and evaporated. We had no vehicle, no scrip card, no communications device. Sometimes my scheme involved a birchbark canoe, but that would require a birch tree, and finding one was as unlikely as dancing with a stranger. Anyway, the biggest obstacle was my tracking collar.

Ruby stretched out on her own belly, her long face focused on me as I gazed in turn at the exposed road twenty yards from my front window. Finally Jude’s mother came into view, a slight figure holding up a sun hat with a twelve-inch brim. Witches’ hats, the children called them. At least no Guards showed themselves. When I held the door open she flew inside, as bossypants as she’d been on the phone.

How do you do. I must collect my son.

I heard my voice come out as high-pitched as the children’s, telling her how Jude had come to be in an exile’s house. Fool that I am, I still held out hope: I told Jude’s mother how the children tried to stop the dog from flinging itself under the truck. She nodded as if she’d heard it a thousand times.

An epidemic. Our neighbor’s Pekinese leapt from their roof.

My God!

God had nothing to do with it. She shook her head without a hint of humor. She had to climb out a little dormer window. Must have slid it open with her nose.

I never heard of such a thing.

Then you haven’t heard about that mother and son—Dobermans, of all the breeds—that had to pry the Oxycodone out of the tin where they were hidden.

The CG still allows Oxy?

Are you kidding? Basic necessity. Especially for a dog who wants to kill herself.

The sound of her voice! She chattered on about dog suicides, gazing all round the cottage, looking for her son. She’d pushed her sunguards up atop her hat and I saw why her stare had appeared so intense: her eyes were bright and dark, a little too small even for so small a face. She held them open extra-wide to compensate. I held out a hand to take her sunrobe, hoping against hope that she would linger, but she shook her head and pulled the robe tighter over her blaster. It shouldn’t have shocked me. Everybody has to carry one.

I really must go.

Why had I deluded myself? Even the distributors at the supply center knew better than to speak to a woman with the collar. If this were a happier story I’d say that one or two of them tried to smile at me surreptitiously, but they most certainly did not, they clicked their tongues and made hissing noises even when they saw the children blushing. And now this skinny small-eyed woman who’d been decent to me for ten seconds stretched her neck out, scanning, terrified to stay one minute longer in my fairytale cottage. I touched her forearm and watched her jump:

What’s happening to the dogs?

The heat’s so hard on them. We’re all so thirsty. She couldn’t stop herself even as she pulled her arm back. Nobody tells jokes anymore. Nobody sings. Nobody dances! She’d read my mind. Her voice raised ever so slightly, enough for her little boy to come running.

Before I even had time to ask whether the children could meet Jude outside the house again sometime, to promise that I wouldn’t go near them, they were vaporizing, vanishing from our lives as quickly as they’d come. I stood by the window and watched them fade down that desolate road, stripped even of the mourning doves that used to wake us.

And felt, yes, desolate myself: yes, broken. I felt defiant too. The Stricters think home exile is the most effective way to break your spirit, but they forgot to calculate how a woman with children and a dog could hang on to something like cussedness even after the charges piled up. I admit forthrightly that spray-painting on the old railroad trestles was juvenile—worse than juvenile, since Pete would never do such a thing. I guess it wasn’t polite, either, to tell that guard his weaponry was compensatory, but who knew we weren’t allowed to psychoanalyze anymore? I knew myself how stupid it was to start that Low T Is What We Need campaign when the CGs were distributing testosterone door to door. Only I didn’t intend to go to prison. I intended to escape with my children and build a birchbark canoe.

I sang the children to sleep every night. We told jokes all the time, how can you not, how can you be alive and not tell a joke. I see now that I have told this story to this point without a single joke, so here. Here is my children’s favorite joke: What will the space creatures say when they come to rescue us and see our sorry state?

Give up?

We won’t know what they’re saying. They don’t speak English.

Pete and Annie could laugh themselves silly, laugh