The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore (32 page)

Of course, their daughter, Mitzy, adored Terence—the hot, lucky fire of him. In Ruth, on the other hand, Mitzy seemed to sense only the chill spirit of a woman getting by. But what was a person in Ruth's position
supposed
to do, except rebuild herself, from the ground up, as an iceberg? Ruth wanted to know! And so, in the strange, warm dissolutions that came over her these May nights silently before sleep, a pointillist's breaking up of the body and self and of the very room, a gentle fracturing to bubbles and black dotted swiss, Ruth began, again, to foresee her own death.

at first,
looking at other houses on Sunday afternoons—wandering across other people's floors and carpets, opening the closets to look at other people's shoes—gave Ruth a thrill. The tacky photos on the potter's piano. The dean with no doorknobs. The orthodontist with thirty built-in cubbyholes for his thirty tennis shoes. Wallpaper peeling like birch skin. Assorted stained, scuffed floors and misaligned moldings. The Dacron carpets. The trashy magazines on the coffee table. And those economy snacks! People had pretzel boxes the size of bookcases. And no bookcases. What would they do with a book? Just put it in the pretzel box! Ruth took an unseemly interest in the faulty angles of a staircase landing, or the contents of a room: the ceramic pinecone lamps, the wedding photo of the dogs. Was the town that boring that this was now what amused her? What was so intriguing to her about all this home-owning thrown open to the marketplace? The airing of the family vault? The peek into the grave? Ruth hired a realtor. Stepping into a house, hunting out its little spaces, surveying its ceiling stains and roof rot exhilarated her. It amazed her that there was always something wrong with a house, and after awhile, her amazement became a kind of pleasure; it was pleasing that there should always be something wrong. It made the house seem more natural that way.

But soon she backed off. "I could never buy a house that had that magazine on the coffee table," she said once. A kind of fear overtook her. "I don't like that neo-Georgian thing," she said now, before the realtor, Kit, had even turned off the car, forcing Kit to back out again from the driveway. "I'm sorry, but when I look at it," Ruth added, "my eye feels disorganized, and my heart just empties right out."

"I care about you, Ruth," said Kit, who was terrified of losing clients and so worked hard to hide the fact that she had the patience of a gnat. "Our motto is 'We Care,' and that is just so true: We really, really care, Ruth. We care about you. We care about your feelings and desires. We want you to be happy. So, here we are driving along. Driving toward a thing, then driving past. You want a house, Ruth, or shall we just go to the goddamn movies?"

"You think I'm being unrealistic."

"Aw, I get enough realism as it is. Realism's overrated. I mean it about the movies."

"You do?"

"Sure!" And so that once, Ruth went to the movies with her realtor. It was a preseason matinee of
Forrest Gump
, which made her teary with weariness, hurt, and bone-thinning boredom. "Such a career-ender for poor Tom Hanks. Mark my words," Ruth whispered to her realtor, candy wrappers floating down in the dark toward her shoes. "Thank God we bought toffees. What would we do without these toffees?"

eventually,
not even a month later, in Kit's white Cabriolet, the top down, the wind whipping everyone's hair in an unsightly way, Ruth and Terence took a final tour of the suburbanized cornfields on the periphery of town and found a house. It was the original ancient four-square farmhouse in the center of a 1979 subdivision. A man-made pond had been dug into the former field that edged the side yard. A wishing well full of wildflowers stood in the front yard.

"This is it," Terence said, gesturing toward the house.

"It is?" said Ruth. She tried to study it with an open mind—its porch and dormers angled as if by a Cubist, its chimney crumbling on one side, its cedar shingles ornately leprous with old green paint. "If one of us kisses it, will it turn into a house?" The dispiriting white ranches and split-levels lined up on either side at least possessed a geometry she understood.

"It needs a lot of work," admitted Kit.

"Yes," said Ruth. Even the
for sale
sign had sprouted a shock of dandelions at its base. "Unlike chocolates, houses are predictable: you always know you're getting rot and decay and a long, tough mortgage. Eat them or put them back in the box—you can't do either without a lawsuit or an ordinance hearing."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Terence. He took Ruth aside.

"This is it," he hissed. "This is our dream house."

"
Dream
house?" All the dreams she'd been having were about death—its blurry pixilation, its movement through a dark, soft sleep to a hard, bright end.

"I'm surprised you can't see it," said Terence, visibly frustrated.

She squinted again toward the soffits, the Picasso porch, the roof mottled with moss and soot. She studied the geese and the goose poop, moist, mashed cigars of which littered the stony shore of the pond. "Ah, maybe," she said. "Maybe yes. I think I'm beginning to see it. Who owns it again?"

"A Canadian. He's been renting it out. It's a nice neighborhood. Near a nature conservatory and the zoo."

"The zoo?"

Ruth thought about this. They would have to hire a lot of people, of course. It would be like running a company to get this thing back in shape, bossing everybody around, monitoring the loans and payments. She sighed. Such entrepreneurial spirit did not run in her family. It was not native to her. She came from a long line of teachers and ministers—employees. Hopeless people. People with faith but no hope. There was not one successful small business anywhere in her genes. "I'm starting to see the whole thing," she said.

on the other
side of town, where other people lived, a man named Noel and a woman named Nitchka were in an apartment, in the kitchen, having a discussion about music. The woman said, "So you know nothing at all? Not a single song?"

"I don't think so," said Noel. Why was this a problem for her? It wasn't a problem for him. So he didn't know any songs. He had always been willing to let her know more than he did; it didn't bother him, until it bothered her.

"Noel, what kind of upbringing did you have, anyway?" He knew she felt he had been deprived and that he should feel angry about it. But he did! He did feel angry about it! "Didn't your parents ever sing songs to you?" she asked. "Can't you even sing one single song by heart? Sing a song. Just any song."

"Like what?"

"If there was a gun to your head, what song would you sing?"

"I don't know!" he shouted, and threw a chair across the room. They hadn't had sex in two months.

"Is it that you don't even know the
name
of a song?"

At night, every night, they just lay there with their magazines and Tylenol PM and then, often with the lights still on, were whisked quickly down into their own separate worlds of sleep—his filled with lots of whirling trees and antique flying machines and bouquets of ferns. He had no idea why.

"I know the name of a song," he said.

"What song?"

"'Open the Door, Richard.'"

"What kind of song is that?"

It was a song his friend Richard's mother would sing when he was twelve and he and Richard were locked in the bedroom, flipping madly through magazines:
Breasts and the Rest, Tight Tushies
, and
Lollapalooza Ladies
. But it was a real song, which still existed—though you couldn't find those magazines anymore. Noel had looked.

"See? I know a song that you don't!" he exclaimed.

"Is this a song of spiritual significance to you?"

"Yup, it really is." He picked up a rubber band from the counter, stretched it between his fingers, and released it. It hit her in the chin. "Sorry. That was an accident," he said.

"Something is deeply missing in you!" Nitchka shouted, and stormed out of the apartment for a walk.

Noel sank back against the refrigerator. He could see his own reflection in the window over the sink. It was dim and translucent, and a long twisted cobweb outside, caught on the eaves, swung back and forth across his face like a noose. He looked crazy and ill—but with just a smidgen of charisma! "If there was a gun to your head," he said to the reflection, "what song would you sing?"

ruth wondered
whether she really needed a project this badly. A diversion. A resurrection. An undertaking. Their daughter, Mitzy, grown and gone—was the whole empty nest thing such a crisis that they would devote the rest of their days to this mortician's delight? Was it that horribly, echoey quiet and nothing-nothing not to have Mitzy and her struggles furnishing their lives? Was it so bad no longer to have a daughter's frustrated artistic temperament bleeding daily on the carpet of their brains? Mitzy, dear Mitzy, was a dancer. All those ballet and tap lessons as a child—she wasn't supposed to have taken them seriously! They had been intended as middle-class irony and window dressing—you weren't actually supposed to
become
a dancer. But Mitzy had. Despite that she was the fattest in the troupe every time, never belonging, rejected from every important company, until one day a young director saw how beautifully, soulfully she danced—"How beautifully the fat girl dances!"—and ushered her past the corps, set her center stage, and made her a star. Now she traveled the world over and was the darling of the critics. "Size fourteen, yet!" crowed one reviewer. "It is a miracle to see!" She had become a triumph of feet over heft, spirit over matter, matter over doesn't-matter, a figure of immortality, a big fat angel really, and she had "many, many homosexual fans," as Terence put it. As a result, she now rarely came home. Ruth sometimes got postcards, but Ruth hated postcards—so careless and cheap, especially from this new angel of dance writing to her own sick mother. But that was the way with children.

Once, over a year and a half ago, Mitzy had come home, but it was only for two weeks—during Ruth's chemotherapy. Mitzy was, as usual, in a state of crisis. "Sure they like my work," she wailed as Ruth adjusted that first itchy acrylic wig, the one that used to scare people. "But do they like me?" Mitzy was an only child, so it was natural that her first bout of sibling rivalry would be with her own work. When Ruth suggested as much, Mitzy gave her a withering look accompanied by a snorting noise, and after that, with a cocked eyebrow and a wince of a gaze, Mitzy began monopolizing the telephone with moving and travel plans. "You seem to be doing
extremely well
, Mom," she said, looking over her shoulder, jotting things down. Then she'd fled.

at first terence,
even more than she, seemed enlivened by the prospect of new real estate. The simplest discussion—of doorjambs or gutters—made his blood move around his face and neck like a lava lamp. Roof-shingle samples—rough, grainy squares of sepia, rose, and gray—lit his eyes up like love. He brought home doorknob catalogs and phoned a plasterer or two. After a while, however, she could see him tire and retreat, recoil even—another fling flung. "My God, Terence. Don't quit on me now. This is just like the Rollerblades!" He had last fall gone through a Rollerblade period.

"I'm way too busy," he said.

And before Ruth knew it, the entire house project—its purchase and renovation—had been turned over to her.

first ruth had
to try to sell their current house. She decided to try something called a "fosbo." FOSBO: a "For Sale by Owner." She put ads in papers, bought a sign for the front yard, and planted violet and coral impatiens in the flower beds for the horticulturally unsuspecting, those with no knowledge of perennials. Gorgeous yard! Mature plantings! She worked up a little flyer describing the moldings and light fixtures, all "original to the house." Someone came by to look and sniff. He fingered one of the ripped window shades. "
Original to the house
?" he said.

"All right, you're out of here," she said. To subsequent prospective buyers, she abandoned any sales pitch and went for candor. "I admit, this bathroom's got mildew. And look at this
stupid
little hallway. This is why we're moving! We hate this house." She soon hired back her Forrest Gump realtor, who, at the open house, played Vivaldi on the stereo and baked banana bread, selling the place in two hours.

the night after
they closed on both houses, having sat silently through the two proceedings, like deaf-mutes being had, the mysterious Canadian once more absent and represented only by a purple-suited realtor named Flo, Ruth and Terence stood in their empty new house and ate take-out Chinese straight from the cartons. Their furniture was sitting in a truck, which was parked in a supermarket parking lot on the east side of town, and it all would be delivered the next day. For now, they stood at the bare front window of their large, echoey new dining room. A small lit candle on the floor cast their shadows up on the ceiling, gloomy and fat. Wind rattled the panes and the boiler in the cellar burst on in small, frightening explosions. The radiators hissed and smelled like cats, burning off dust as they heated up, vibrating the cobwebs in the ceiling corners above them. The entire frame of the house groaned and rumbled.

There was scampering in the walls. The sound of footsteps—or something like footsteps—thudded softly in the attic, two floors above them.

"We've bought a haunted house," said Ruth. Terence's mouth was full of hot cabbagey egg roll. "A ghost!" she continued. "Just a little extra protein. Just a little amino-acid bonus." It was what her own father had always said when he found a small green worm in his bowl of blueberries.

"The house is settling," said Terence.

"It's had a hundred and ten years to settle; you would think it had gotten it done with by now."

"Settling goes on and on," said Terence.

"We would know," said Ruth.

He looked at her, then dug into the container of lo mein.