The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore (82 page)

go like this;
my husband pushes my head between my knees.

Ugh, what a night, I say, huh.

Ssshhhh. Be quiet. This increases the oxygen to the cortex. You know you're not supposed to drink like that.

I inhale four times with the drama of the first amphibian. How am I doing so far?

The sun is up, depressing me like the mindless smile of a cheerleader. My face is the big bluish-white of white elephants.

The phone rings.

It is Olga, her quiet Slavic cheekbones pale and calming even through the wires, her voice a learned English breathiness affected in the style of too much late night Joan Fontaine. She is sorry, she says, for not having spoken much to me last night. She felt a little bewildered both by my announcement and by the reaction of the others. It was, she says, as if they had already known before and had nothing but clinically prepared affirmations for me, convinced as always of Liz's sound-mindedness.

Well, the dissent left early, I say, and forgot its umbrella.

I, too, am dissenting, she says slowly, like Jane Eyre. Don't the others know what you still have to offer, in terms of your writing, in terms of your daughter?

Olga, I despise people propping my pillows.

Olga is getting cheeky: Perhaps the time has come for you to learn to need people, Liz. And to be patient. You haven't earned your death yet. You want the orgasm without the foreplay.

Look, Olga, at this point I'd take what I could get. Don't get too sexual on me, okay, sweetie? (I can feel myself starting to get mean, my tone invidious.)

Please, Liz. I'm trying to tell you what your sister might have told you. I mean, I couldn't let last night just sit there like that, Shennan standing there like an Indian priestess celebrating death in this fraudulent guise of a philosophy, and Myrna—well, Myrna will be Myrna.

(And sometimes not, I think. God, I'm not in the mood for this. Olga, dear, go back to the moors.)

I care so much for you, Liz, she continues. (Oh, Rochester, take her the fuck away.) It's just that… it's like you and your death, you're facing each other like loners from a singles bar who have scarcely spoken. You haven't really kissed or touched and yet are about to plunge into bed together.

(Sex again. Jane Eyre, indeed.)

Honestly, Olga. All this erotica on a Sunday. Has Richard returned for free piano lessons or something? (I am cruel; a schoolmaster with a switch and a stool.) I really must see what Blaine is shouting about; she's downstairs and has been calling to me for a while now. It may be one of her turtles or something.

Liz, look. I don't want to go like this. Let's have lunch soon.

(We make plans to make plans.)

I think about what William should do.

elliott and i
have weekly philharmonic seats. I am in bed this Friday, not feeling up to it.

Go ahead, I say. Take Blaine. Take Shennan.

Liz, he drawls, a mild reprimand. He sits at the bed's edge, zooted, smelling of Danish soap, and I think of Ivan Ilych's wife, off to the theater while her husband's kidneys floated in his eyes like cataracts, his legs propped up on the footboard by the manservant—ah, where are the manservants?

Elliott, look at how I'm feeling today. I can't go like this. Please, go ahead without me.

You feel pretty bad, huh, he says, looking at his watch at the same time. He gives me the old honey I'll bring you home a treat, like I'm a fucking retard or something whose nights can be relieved of their hellish sameness with gifts of Colorforms and Sky Bars.

Enjoy, enjoy, you asshole, I do not chirp.

it is already july.
The fireflies will soon be out. My death flashes across my afternoon like a nun in white, hurrying, evanescing, apparitional as the rise of heat off boulevards, the parched white of sails across cement, around the corner, fleeing the sun. I have not yet seen the face, it is hooded, perhaps wrapped, but I know the flow, the cloth of her, moving always in diagonals, in waves toward me, then footlessly away again.

we told blaine
tonight. We had decided to do it together. We were in the living room.

You're going to die, she said, aren't you? before I had a chance to say, Now you're young and probably don't understand. She has developed a habit of tucking her hair nervously behind her ears when she does not want to cry. She is prophetic. Tuck, tuck.

Yes. And we told her why. And I got a chance, after all, to say you're young and probably don't understand, and she got a chance to look at me with that scrambled gaze of contempt and hurt that only fourth-graders know, and then to close her eyes like an angel and fall into my arms, sobbing, and I sobbed too into that hair tucked behind those ears and I cursed God for this day and Blaine of course wanted to know who would take her to clarinet class.

Tuck, tuck. She laid her head in my lap like a leaky egg. We stayed like that for an hour. I whispered little things to her, smoothing back her hair, about how much I loved her, how patient she would have to be, how strong. At nine-thirty she went silently to her room and lay in bed, swollen-eyed, facing the wall like a spurned and dying lover.

  i
realize now
what it is that William should do. When the badass wildebeest comes out of the closet and messes up his room, William should blow a trumpet and make the wildebeest cease and desist. He should put his foot down and say, Enough of this darned nonsense, silly wildebeest: Let's get this room picked up! I am practically certain that wildebeests listen to trumpets.

I would tell this to Elliott, but the wildebeest was in the third book. And I finished that long ago.

No, I must think of something else.

oh god,
it's not supposed to go like this. There I was like Jesus, sure as a blazing rooster, on Palm Sunday riding tall, dauntless as Barbra Streisand, now suddenly on Thursday shoved up against the softer edges of my skin and even Jesus, look, he's crying and whimpering and heaving so, Christ, he pees in his pants, please god, I mean God, don't let me go like this but let me stay right in this garden next to the plastic flamingoes and let me croon the blues till I am crazy with them.

elliott has a way
of walking in just before dinner and kissing me as if for a publicity shot.

Who do we have out there waiting in the wings, Elliott, fucking Happy Rockefeller? Channel 6 News? Hey, baby, I'm not dead yet; I'm writing, I'm hungry: let's make love, baby, let's do it on the terrace, high and cool, sugar, hey how about the terrace Elliott babydoll, waddaya say?

And if he does not stride angrily from the room, he stays, fumbles insincerely, makes me weep. He has no taste for necrophilia, and I sigh and crave the white of his shoulders under my chin, his breath on my neck, the plum smoothness of him in my hands. And I want it still for me here now as I lie in the blue-black of this aloneness thirsting for love more than I ever thought I could.

even at midnight
the city groans in the heat. We have had no rain for quite a while. The traffic sounds below ride the night air in waves of trigonometry, the cosine of a siren, the tangent of a sigh, a system, an axis, a logic to this chaos, yes.

tomorrow's bastille day,
Elliott, and I want what I've written for the fourth William book changed. So far William thinks he forgot his umbrella and wanders all over the city looking for it, misfortune following him like an odious dog, until after he is splashed by a truck and nearly hit by a cab, he goes home only to realize he never forgot his umbrella at all. I want that changed. I want him to have all kinds of wonderful, picaresque adventures so that it doesn't even matter if he has lost his umbrella or not. Can you change that for me? Can you think of some wonderful adventures for me? Maybe he meets up with cowboys and a few Indians and has a cookout with music and barbecue beans.

Or meets a pretty little Indian girl and gets married, suggests Elliott, an asshole sometimes, I swear. He doesn't even realize, I guess.

My turn: Yeah, and scalps her and wins hero-of-the-day badge. I guess I'll just have to entrust it all to you, Elliott.

Don't worry, he says, gingerly stroking my hair, which I picture now like the last pieces of thread around a spool.

I really would like to finish it myself, but tomorrow is Bastille Day.

Yes, says Elliott.

JOanie, hon,
Joanie with the webbed toes, I know it's late, no, no, don't feel you have to come over, no please don't, Elliott's here, it's fine. I just wanted to say I love you and don't feel sad for me please… you know I feel pretty good and these pills, well, they're here in a little saucer staring at me, listen, I'm going to let you go back to bed now and well you know how I've always felt about you Joan and if there is an afterlife… yeah well maybe
I'm
not going to heaven, okay… what… do you think I'm silly? I mean if it wouldn't scare you, maybe I'll try to get in touch, if you wouldn't mind, yes, and please keep an eye out for Blaine for me, Joan, would you, god she's so young and I only just told her about menstruation this past spring and she seemed so interested but then only said, So does that mean all twins look alike? so I know there will be other things she will want to know, you know, and she loves you, Joan, she really does. And be good to Olga for me, I have been so unkind, and remind your husband I've immortalized him, ha! yeah… can you believe it, dear rigid soul, and Joanie, take care of yourself and say prayers for me and for Blaine and for Elliott who did cry this morning for the first helpless time, how I do love him, Joan, despite everything everything I can see from the round eye of this empty saucer, faintly making out a patch of droughted trees and a string of wildebeests, one by one, like the sheep of a child's insomnia, throwing in the towel, circling, lying down in the sun silently to decompose, in spite of themselves, god, there's no music, no trumpet here, it is fast, and there's no sound at all, just this white heat of July going on and on, going on like this.

1982. Without her, for years now, murmur at the defrosting refrigerator, "What?"

"Huh?"

"Shush now," as it creaks, aches, groans, until the final ice block drops from the ceiling of the freezer like something vanquished.

Dream, and in your dreams babies with the personalities of dachshunds, fat as Macy balloons, float by the treetops.

The first permanent polyurethane heart is surgically implanted.

Someone upstairs is playing "You'll Never Walk Alone" on the recorder. Now it's "Oklahoma!" They must have a Rodgers and Hammerstein book.

1981. On public transportation, mothers with soft, soapy, corduroyed seraphs glance at you, their faces dominoes of compassion. Their seraphs are small and quiet or else restlessly counting bus-seat colors: "Blue-blue-blue, red-red-red, lullow-lullow-lullow." The mothers see you eyeing their children. They smile sympathetically. They believe you envy them. They believe you are childless. They believe they know why. Look quickly away, out the smudge of the window.

1980. The hum, rush, clack of things in the kitchen. These are some of the sounds that organize your life. The clink of the silverware inside the drawer, piled like bones in a mass grave. Your similes grow grim, grow tired.

Reagan is elected President, though you distributed donuts and brochures for Carter.

Date an Italian. He rubs your stomach and says, "These are marks of stretch, no? Marks of stretch?" and in your dizzy mind you think: Marks of Harpo, Ideas of Marx, Ides of March, Beware. He plants kisses on the sloping ramp of your neck, and you fall asleep against him, your underpants peeled and rolled around one thigh like a bride's garter.

1979. Once in a while take evening trips past the old unsold house you grew up in, that haunted rural crossroads two hours from where you now live. It is like Halloween: the raked, moonlit lawn, the mammoth, tumid trees, arms and fingers raised into the starless wipe of sky like burns, cracks, map rivers. Their black shadows rock against the side of the east porch. There are dream shadows, other lives here. Turn the corner slowly but continue to stare from the car window. This house is embedded in you deep, something still here you know, you think you know, a voice at the top of those stairs, perhaps, a figure on the porch, an odd apron caught high in the twigs, in the too-warm-for-a-fall-night breeze, something not right, that turret window you can still see from here, from outside, but which can't be reached from within. (The ghostly brag of your childhood: "We have a mystery room. The window shows from the front, but you can't go in, there's no door. A doctor lived there years ago and gave secret operations, and now it's blocked off.") The window sits like a dead eye in the turret. You see a ghost, something like a spinning statue by a shrub.

1978. Bury her in the cold south sideyard of that Halloweenish house. Your brother and his kids are there. Hug. The minister in a tweed sportscoat, the neighborless fields, the crossroads, are all like some stark Kansas. There is praying, then someone shoveling. People walk toward the cars and hug again. Get inside your car with your niece. Wait. Look up through the windshield. In the November sky a wedge of wrens moves south, the lines of their formation, the very sides and vertices mysteriously choreographed, shifting, flowing, crossing like a skater's legs. "They'll descend instinctively upon a tree somewhere," you say, "but not for miles yet." You marvel, watch, until, amoeba-slow, they are dark, faraway stitches in the horizon. You do not start the car. The quiet niece next to you finally speaks: "Aunt Ginnie, are we going to the restaurant with the others?" Look at her. Recognize her: nine in a pile parka. Smile and start the car.

1977. She ages, rocks in your rocker, noiseless as wind. The front strands of her white hair dangle yellow at her eyes from too many cigarettes. She smokes even now, her voice husky with phlegm. Sometimes at dinner in your tiny kitchen she will simply stare, rheumy-eyed, at you, then burst into a fit of coughing that racks her small old man's body like a storm.