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Authors: Lorrie Moore

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BOOK: Birds of America
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Holding fast to her little patch of marital ground, she’d watched as his lovers floated through like ballerinas, or dandelion
down, all of them sudden and fleeting, as if they were calendar girls ripped monthly by the same mysterious calendar-ripping wind that hurried time along in old movies. Hello! Good-bye! Ha! Ha! Ha! What did Ruth care now? Those girls were over and gone. The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.

“You
assume
they’re over and gone,” said her friend Carla, who, in Ruth’s living room, was working on both her inner child and her inner thighs, getting rid of the child but in touch with the thighs; Ruth couldn’t keep it straight. Carla sometimes came over and did her exercises in the middle of Ruth’s Afghan rug. Carla liked to blurt out things and then say, “Ooops, did I say that?” Or sometimes: “You know what? Life is short. Dumpy, too, so you’ve got to do your best: no Empire waists.” She lay on her back and did breathing exercises and encouraged Ruth to do the same. “I can’t. I’ll just fall asleep,” said Ruth, though she suspected she wouldn’t really.

Carla shrugged. “If you fall asleep, great. It’s a beauty nap. If you almost do but don’t actually, it’s meditation.”


That’s
meditation?”

“That’s meditation.”

Two years ago, when Ruth was going through chemo—the oncologist in Chicago had set Ruth’s five-year survival chances at fifty-fifty; how mean not to lie and say sixty-forty!—Carla had brought over lasagnas, which lasted in their various shrinking incarnations in Ruth’s refrigerator for weeks. “Try not to think of roadkill when you reheat,” Carla said. She also brought over sage and rosemary soaps, which looked like slabs of butter with twigs in them. She brought Ruth a book to read, a collection of stories entitled
Trust Me
, and she had, on the jacket, crossed out the author’s name and written in her own: Carla McGraw. Carla was a friend. Who had many friends these days?

“I do assume,” Ruth said. “I have to.” Terence’s last affair, two springs ago, had ended badly. He’d told Ruth he had a meeting that would go on rather late, until ten or so, but then
he arrived home, damp and disheveled, at 7:30. “The meeting’s been canceled,” he said, and went directly upstairs, where she could hear him sobbing in the bathroom. He cried for almost an hour, and as she listened to him, her heart filled up with pity and a deep, sisterly love. At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn’t reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling resemblance, a thin and charming twin, which you took back home with you to fatten and cradle, nuzzle and scold.

Oh, the rich torment that was life. She just didn’t investigate Terence’s activities anymore. No steaming open credit-card statements, no “accidentally” picking up the phone extension. As the doctor who diagnosed her now fully remissioned cancer once said to her, “The only way to know absolutely everything in life is via an autopsy.”

Nuptial forensics. Ruth would let her marriage live. No mercy killing, no autopsy. She would let it live! Ha! She would settle, as a person must, for not knowing everything: ignorance as mystery; mystery as faith; faith as food; food as sex; sex as love; love as hate; hate as transcendence. Was this a religion or some weird kind of math?

Or was this, in fact, just spring?

Certain things helped: the occasional Winston (convinced, as Ruth was, despite the one lung, the lip blisters, and the keloidal track across her ribs, that at the end she would regret the cigarettes she hadn’t smoked more than the ones she had; besides, she no longer coughed much at all, let alone so hard that her retinas detached); pots of lobelia (“Excuse me, gotta go,” she had said more than once to a loquacious store clerk, “I’ve got some new lobelia sitting in a steaming hot car”); plus a long, scenic search for a new house.

“A move … yes. A move will be good. We’ve soiled the
nest, in many respects,” her husband had said, in the circuitous syntax and ponderous Louisiana drawl that, like so much else about him, had once made her misty with desire and now drove her nuts with scorn. “Think about it, honey,” he’d said after the reconciliation, the first remission, and the initial reconnaissance through the realtors—after her feelings had gone well beyond rage into sarcasm and carcinoma. “We should probably consider leaving this home entirely behind. Depending on what you want to do—or, of course. If you have another home in mind, I’m practically certain I’d be amenable. We would want to discuss it, however, or anything else you might be thinking of. I myself—though it may be presumptuous of me, I realize—but then, hey: it wouldn’t be the first time, now would it? I myself was thinking that, if you were inclined—”

“Terence!” Ruth clapped her hands twice, sharply. “Speak more quickly! I don’t have long to live!” They’d been married for twenty-three years. Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically. “And, please,” she added, “don’t be fooled by the euphemisms of realtors. This was never a home, darling. This is a
house
.”

In this way—a wedding of emotionally handicapped parking spaces, an arduously tatted lace of property and irritation—they’d managed to stay married. He was not such a bad guy!—just a handsome country boy, disbelieving of his own luck, which came to him imperfectly but continually, like crackers from a cookie jar. She had counted on him to make money—was that so wrong?—and he had made some, in used-car dealerships and computer software stock. With its sweet, urgent beginnings, and grateful, hand-holding end, marriage was always its worst in the middle: it was always a muddle, a ruin, an unnavigable field. But it was not, she felt, a total wasteland. In her own marriage there was one sweet little recurrent season, one tiny nameless room, that suited and
consoled her. She would lie in Terence’s arms and he would be quiet and his quietness would restore her. There was music. There was peace. That was all. There were no words in it. But that tiny spot—like any season, or moon, or theater set; like a cake in a rotary display—invariably spun out of reach and view, and the quarreling would resume and she would have to wait a long time for the cake to come round again.

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.

BOOK: Birds of America
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