"Birds of America"

[fiefoe]

Lorrie Moore's short story collection has been sitting on our bookshelf for a really long time and I finally decided to (re)visit the 90s. The stories are hit-or-miss, with characters I can't always connect with. But at least they are not grim, just very why-do-adults-get-up-in-the-morning-why.

WILLING

• “You have the body,” studio heads told her over lunch at Chasen’s.
  She looked away. “Habeas corpus,” she said, not smiling.
  “Pardon me?” A hip that knew Latin. Christ.
• A false, unavailable, anonymous hip. She herself was true as a goddamn dairy product; available as lunch whenever.
• One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadnesses occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzily back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.
• She was starting to have two speeds: Coma and Hysteria. Two meals: breakfast and popcorn. Two friends: Charlotte Peveril and Tommy. She could hear the clink of his bourbon glass.
• “Talent. I don’t have talent. I have willingness. What talent?” As a kid, she had always told the raunchiest jokes. As an adult, she could rip open a bone and speak out of it. Simple, clear. There was never anything to stop her. Why was there never anything to stop her? “I can stretch out the neck of a sweater to point at a freckle on my shoulder. Anyone who didn’t get enough attention in nursery school can do that. Talent is something else.”
• “Okay. So I sold the mineral rights to my body years ago, but, hey, at least I got good money for mine.”
• She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, “Oh, never mind.” She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked. <> And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked. <> But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl.
• Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. It suggested sexual things.
• She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. “Envy,” said Sidra. “That’s a lot like hate, isn’t it.”
• “Ugh! Quit him like a music lesson!”
  “Like a music lesson? What is this, Similes from the Middle Class? One Man’s Opinion?” She was irritated.
• the kind of performance she had become, briefly, known for: a patched-together intimacy with the audience, half cartoon, half revelation; a cross between shyness and derision. She had not given a damn back then, sort of like now, only then it had been a style, a way of being, not a diagnosis or demise.
• It was exactly like Sidra’s childhood: just when she thought life had become simple again, her mother gave her a new portion of the world to organize.
• She phoned Walter instead. “I need to see you,” she said. <> “Oh, really?” he said skeptically, and then added, with a sweetness he seemed to have plucked expertly from the air like a fly, “Is this a great country or what?”
• She felt cheated of all the simple things—the radical calm of obscurity, of routine, of blah domestic bliss. “I don’t want to go back to L.A.,” she said.
• He began, suddenly, to cry—loudly at first, with lots of ohs, then tiredly, as if from a deep sleep, his face buried in the poncho he’d thrown over the couch arm, his body sinking into the plush of the cushions—a man held hostage by the anxious cast of his dream.
  “What can I do?” he asked.
  But his dream had now changed, and she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.

WHICH IS MORE THAN I CAN SAY ABOUT SOME PEOPLE

• Which is why she had liked her job at American Scholastic Tests: she got to work with words in a private way. The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf:
• Of all Abby’s fanciful ideas for self-improvement (the inspirational video, the breathing exercises, the hypnosis class), the Blarney Stone, with its whoring barter of eloquence for love—O GIFT OF GAB, read the T-shirts—was perhaps the most extreme.
• Of course, she had always admired the idea of marriage, the citizenship and public speech of it, the innocence rebestowed, and Bob was big and comforting. But he didn’t have a lot to say. He was not a verbal man. Rage gave him syntax—but it just wasn’t enough! Soon Abby had begun to keep him as a kind of pet, while she quietly looked for distractions of depth and consequence.
• He would stand behind the coffee table and recite his own songs, then step back and wait fearfully to be seduced. To be lunged at and devoured by the female form was, he believed, something akin to applause.
• They had wandered through the woods for twenty minutes, looking for the bathroom, before they came back out to tell him that they hadn’t been able to find it. Her father had looked perplexed, then amused, and then angry—his usual pattern.
• They stopped briefly at an English manor house, to see the natural world cut up into moldings and rugs, wool and wood captive and squared, the earth stolen and embalmed and shellacked.
• a neolithic passage grave, its floor plan like a birth in reverse, its narrow stone corridor spilling into a high, round room. They took off their sunglasses and studied the Celtic curlicues. “Older than the pyramids,” announced the guide, though he failed to address its most important feature, Abby felt: its deadly maternal metaphor.
• In the distance, dark clouds roiled like a hemorrhage, and the wind was picking up.
• he gave her the flower and sat down to decry the coded bloom and doom of all things, decry as well his own unearned deathlessness, how everything hurtles toward oblivion, except words, which assemble themselves in time like molecules in space, for God was an act—an act!—of language, it hadn’t seemed silly to her, not really, at least not that silly.
• Staring out through the windshield, off into the horizon, Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce—winds, seas—a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world—no flower or stone—as a single hello from a human being.
• when she was little, Abby had burst into an unlatched ladies’ room stall, only to find her mother sitting there in a dazed and unseemly way, peering out at her from the toilet seat like a cuckoo in a clock. <> There were things one should never know about another person.
• There was silence again between them now as the countryside once more unfolded its quilt of greens, the old roads triggering memories as if it were a land she had traveled long ago, its mix of luck and unluck like her own past; it seemed stuck in time, like a daydream or a book.
• Mrs. Mallon continued, thoughtfully, with the sort of pseudowisdom she donned now that she was sixty. “Once you’re with a man, you have to sit still with him. As scary as it seems. You have to be brave and learn to reap the benefits of inertia,”
• They drove down to Clifden, around Connemara, to Galway and Limerick—“There once were two gals from America, one named Abby and her mother named Erica. …” They sang, minstrel speed demons around the Ring of Kerry, its palm trees and blue and pink hydrangea like a set from an operetta. “Playgirls of the Western World!” exclaimed her mother.
• “But you came all this way! Don’t be a ninny!” Her mother was bullying her again. It never gave her courage; in fact, it deprived her of courage. But it gave her bitterness and impulsiveness, which could look like the same thing.
• Finally, these dares one made oneself commit didn’t change a thing. They were all a construction of wish and string and distance.
• Abby, now privy to her bare face, saw that this fierce bonfire of a woman had gone twitchy and melancholic—it was a ruse, all her formidable display. She was only trying to prove something, trying pointlessly to defy and overcome her fears—instead of just learning to live with them
• And Abby got in front, her coat taking the updraft and spreading to either side as she circled slowly down into the dungeon-dark of the stairwell, into the black like a bat new to its wings.
• How could a marriage go right? It wasn’t that such ceremonies were important in and of themselves. They were nothing. They were zeros. But they were zeros as placeholders; they held numbers and equations intact. And once you underwent them, you could move on, know the empty power of their blessing, and not spend time missing them.
• Perhaps her mother had never shown Abby affection, not really, but she had given her a knack for solitude, with its terrible lurches outward, and its smooth glide back to peace. Abby would toast her for that. It was really the world that was one’s brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world.

DANCE IN AMERICA
__ I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it’s the body’s reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it’s the heart’s triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It’s life flipping death the bird. <> I make this stuff up. But then I feel the stray voltage of my rented charisma, hear the jerry-rigged authority in my voice, and I, too, believe.
__ “The house is amazing to look at,” I say. “It’s beat-up in such an intricate way. Like a Rauschenberg. Like one of those beautiful wind-tattered billboards one sees in the California desert.”
__ I am thinking not only of my own body here, that unbeguilable, broken basket, that stiff meringue. I am not, Patrick, thinking only of myself, my lost troupe, my empty bed. I am thinking of the dancing body’s magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed—this body, these bodies, that body

COMMUNITY LIFE

• But when she got to school, the teacher, sensing something dreamy and outcast in her, clasped her hand and exclaimed, “Olena! What a beautiful name!” Olena’s heart filled with gratitude and surprise, and she fell in close to the teacher’s hip, adoring and mute. <> From there on in, only her parents, in their throaty Romanian accents, ever called her Nell, her secret, jaunty American self existing only for them.
• She usually didn’t like espresso, its gritty, cigarish taste. But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility.
• It was a college town, attractive and dull, and it hurried the transients along—the students, gypsies, visiting scholars and comics—with a motion not unlike peristalsis.
• There was a blaze in his eye, a concentrated seeing. He seemed for a moment able to look right into her, know her in a way that was uncluttered by actually knowing her. He seemed to have no information or misinformation, only a kind of photography, factless but true.
• It dismayed her that her Romanian was so weak, that it had seemed almost to vanish, a mere handkerchief in a stairwell, and that now, daily, another book arrived to reprimand her.
• Olena had said once, in the caustic blurt that sometimes afflicts the shy.
• She preferred the quiet poet-clerks of the library. They were delicate and territorial, intellectual, and physically unwell. They sat around at work, thinking up Tom Swifties: I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly... “A cross between Lourdes and The New Price Is Right,” said someone else named George. These were the people she liked: the kind you couldn’t really live with.
• And in this new empathy, in this pants role, like an opera, she thought she understood what it was to make love to a woman, to open the hidden underside of her, like secret food, to thrust yourself up in her, her arch and thrash, like a puppet, to watch her later when she got up and walked around without you, oblivious to the injury you’d surely done her. How could you not love her, gratefully, marveling? She was so mysterious, so recovered, an unshared thought enlivening her eyes; you wanted to follow her forever.
  A man in love. That was a man in love. So different from a woman.
  A woman cleaned up the kitchen. A woman gave and hid, gave and hid, like someone with a May basket.
• She was quiet. This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they recycled their newspapers!
• She didn’t feel that she could offer herself up this way. You’re only average, he said meanly.

AGNES OF IOWA

• That had been in Agnes’s mishmash decade, after college. She had lived improvisationally then, getting this job or that, in restaurants or offices, taking a class or two, not thinking too far ahead, negotiating the precariousness and subway flus and scrimping for an occasional manicure or a play. Such a life required much exaggerated self-esteem. It engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.
• Nonetheless, after six years, they still tried, vandalizing what romance was left in their marriage.
• Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say. She signed day-care petitions, and petitions for Planned Parenthood. And although she had never been very aggressive with men, she felt strongly that she knew the difference between feminism and Sadie Hawkins Day—which some people, she believed, did not.
• Later, at intermission, she saw how it should have been done. Two elderly black women, with greater expertise in civil rights, stepped very confidently into the men’s room and called out, “Don’t mind us, boys. We’re coming on in. Don’t mind us.”
• She could see he was a withheld man; although some might say shy, she decided it was withheld: a lack of generosity. Passive-aggressive.
• how can you live in that country?” the man had asked. Agnes had shrugged. “A lot of my stuff is there,” she’d said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.
• marriage, they knew, held that hazard. The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks—as if everything she said had already been said before.
• NYC life: She remembered it had made any given day seem bearable, that impulse toward a joke. It had been a determined sort of humor, an intensity mirroring the intensity of the city, and it seemed to embrace and alleviate the hard sadness of people having used one another and marred the earth the way they had. “It was like brains having sex.
• Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself:

CHARADES
__ It’s fitting that Christmas should degenerate to this, its barest bones. The family has begun to seem to Therese like a pack of thespians anyway; everyone arrives, performs for one another, catches early flights out, to Logan or O’Hare... Usually, no one in Therese’s family expresses much genuine feeling anyway; everyone aims instead—though gamely!—for enactments.
__ “I’m talking about a long-understood moral code.” Her father is of that Victorian sensibility that deep down respects prostitutes more than it does women in general.
__ Her mother smiles exuberantly, her face in a kind of burst; she loves affection, is hungry and grateful for it. When she was younger, she was a frustrated, mean mother, and so she is pleased when her children act as if they don’t remember.

FOUR CALLING BIRDS, THREE FRENCH HENS

• She now spoke that way sometimes, insisted on things, ventured out on a limb, lived dangerously. She had already—carefully, obediently—stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage. Anger to rage—who said she wasn’t making progress?
• And then, there had been Aileen’s one-woman performance of “the housework version of Lysistrata.” “No Sweepie, No Kissie,” Jack had called it. But it had worked. Sort of. For about two weeks. There was, finally, only so much one woman on the vast and wicked stage could do.
• Lila Conch—was angry at the movie. “I just hated the way anytime a woman character said anything of substance, she also happened to be half-naked.”
• Only once did she actually have to slap Sidney awake—lightly. Mostly, she could just clap her hands once and call his name—Sid!—and he would jerk upright in his psychiatrist’s chair, staring wide.
• A good cat had died—you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants. Stop here! Begin here! Begin with Bert!

BEAUTIFUL GRADE

• “You are with Debbie because somewhere in your pahst ease some pretty leetle girl who went away from you,” Lina said to him once on the phone.
  “Or, how about because everyone else I know is married.”
  “Ha!” she said. “You only believe they are married.”
  Which sounded, to Bill, like the late-night, adult version of Peter Pan—no Mary Martin, no songs, just a lot of wishing and thinking lovely thoughts; then afterward all the participants throw themselves out the window.
  And never, never land?
  Marriage, Bill thinks: it’s the film school of the nineties.
• This taboo regarding age is to make us believe that life is long and actually improves us, that we are wiser, better, more knowledgeable later on than early. It is a myth concocted to keep the young from learning what we really are and despising and murdering us. We keep them sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to them that there is something more than regret and decrepitude up ahead... Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones?
• He sits back and listens to the song, translating the sad Spanish. Every songwriter in their smallest song seems to possess some monumental grief clarified and dignified by melody, Bill thinks. His own sadnesses, on the other hand, slosh about in his life in a low-key way, formless and self-consuming.
• Finally, Debbie says, “Don’t you know that Lina’s having an affair with Albert? Can’t you see they’re in love?” <> Something in Bill drops, squares off, makes a neat little knot. “No, I didn’t see.” He feels the sickened sensation he has sometimes felt after killing a housefly and finding blood in it.
• a girl he knew once in law school who, years before, had been raped, shot, and left for dead but then had crawled ten hours out of the woods to the highway with a .22 bullet in her head and flagged a car. That’s when you knew that life was making something up to you, that the narrative was apologizing. That’s when you knew God had glanced up from his knitting, perhaps even risen from his freaking wicker rocker, and staggered at last to the window to look.
• “We are this far from a divorce,” his wife had said bitterly at the end. And if she had spread her arms wide, they might have been able to find a way back, the blinking, intermittent wit of her like a lighthouse to him, but no: she had held her index finger and her thumb up close to her face in a mean pinch of salt.

WHAT YOU WANT TO DO FINE

• He was, after all, a practical person. Beneath all his eccentricities, he possessed a streak of pragmatism so sharp and deep that others mistook it for sanity.
• Quilty had been born blind and had never acquired the guise and camouflage of the sighted; his face remained unclenched, untrained, a clean canvas, transparent as a baby’s gas, clear to the bottom of him. In a face so unguarded and unguarding, one saw one’s own innocent self—and one sometimes recoiled.
• And perhaps because what Quilty knew best were touch and words, or perhaps because Mack had gone through a pig’s life of everything tearing at his feelings, or maybe because the earth had tilted into shadow and cold and the whole damned future seemed dipped in that bad ink, one night in the living room, after a kiss that took only Mack by surprise, and even then only slightly, Mack and Quilty became lovers.
  Still, there were times it completely baffled Mack. How had he gotten here? What soft punch in the mouth had sent him reeling to this new place?
  Uncertainty makes for shyness, and shyness, Quilty kept saying, is what keeps the world together.
• “Think of it this way: the blind leading the straight. It can work. It’s not impossible.”
• In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath.
• “Before he wrote about them,” said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, “Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within literary circles, it is not that widely discussed.”
• Still the song was sad. Stolen love, lost love, amphibious doom—all the transactions of Mack’s own life: I am a Silkie on the sea.
• There is always something a little desperate and diligent about Quilty, poised there with his lips big and searching and his wild unshaded eyes like the creatures of the aquarium, captive yet wandering free in their enclosures. With the two of them kissing like this—exculpatory, specificity, rubric—words are foreign money. There is only the soft punch in the mouth, the shrieking and feeding both, which fills Mack’s ears with light. This, he thinks, this is how a blind man sees. This is how a fish walks. This is how rocks sing. There is nothing at all like a man’s strong kiss: apologies to the women of Kentucky.
• “Stick with Nawlins. A city no longer known for its prostitutes quickly becomes known for its excellent food. Think about it. There’s Paris. There’s here. A city currently known for its prostitutes—Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Washington, D.C.—is seldom a good food city.”
• cemetary: It seems hard for them, when presented with all that toothy geometry of stone and bone, not to rush right up and say hi.
• “You really go for the juggler, don’t you?” he says.
  “Juggler?” Quilty howls. “Juggler? No, obviously, I go for the clowns.”
  Mack is puzzled. Quilty’s head is tilted in that hyperalert way that says nothing in the room will get past him. “Juggler,” Mack says. “Isn’t that the word? What is the word?”
  “A juggler,” says Quilty, slowly for the jury, “is someone who juggles.”
  Mack’s chest tightens around a small emptied space. He feels his own crappy luck returning like a curse.
• “Love laughs at a king/Kings don’t mean a thing” the man sings, and it seems to Mack the most beautiful song in the world. Men everywhere are about to die for reasons they don’t know and wouldn’t like if they did—but here is a song to do it by, so that life, in its mad spasms, might not demolish so much this time.
• Mack sighs. Why must he always take the measure of his own stupid suffering? Why must he always look around and compare his own against others’?
  Because God wants people to.
  Even if you’re comparing yourself to ducks?
  Especially if you’re comparing yourself to ducks.
  He feels his own head shrink with the hate that is love with no place to go.
• Quilty pulls himself up via Mack’s trousers. “Have pity,” he says. <> This is Quilty’s audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart’s own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause.

PEOPLE LIKE THAT ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE HERE: CANONICAL BABBLING IN PEED ONK
__ The Radiologist stops, freezes one of the many swirls of oceanic gray, and clicks repeatedly, a single moment within the long, cavernous weather map that is the Baby’s insides.

TERRIFIC MOTHER
__ She had entered a puritanical decade, a demographic moment—whatever it was—when the best compliment you could get was, “You would make a terrific mother.” The wolf whistle of the nineties.
__ The monk man looked at her. “Are you one of the spouses?”
__ “So you usually find them insincere? The andantes?” She looked quickly out over the other heads to give Martin a fake and girlish wave. <> “It’s the use of the minor seventh,” muttered the musicologist. “So fraudulent and replete.”
__ membered how in certain countries, instead of a tooth fairy, there were such things as tooth spiders. How the tooth spider could steal your children, mix them up, bring you a changeling child, a child that was changed.
__ “Isn’t this soup interesting?” she said to no one in particular. “Zup-pa mari-ta-ta!” Marriage soup. She decided it was perhaps a little like marriage itself: a good idea that, like all ideas, lived awkwardly on earth.