The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

  "I don't think I'm ticklish," he said.

  "Oh." She stopped.

  "I mean, I probably am a little" he added, "just not a lot."

  "I'd like you to meet my son," she said.

  "Is he here?"

  "Sure. He's under the bed. Bruny?" Oh, these funny ones were funny. "No. He's with his dad this week."

  The extended families of divorce. Ira tried not to feel jealous. It was quite possible that he was not mature enough to date a divorced woman. "Tell me about his dad."

  "His dad? His dad is another pediatrician, but he was really into English country dancing. Where eventually he met a lass. Alas."

  Ira would put that in his book of verse. Alas, a lass. "I don't think anyone should dance in a way that's not just regular dancing," Ira said. "It's not normal. That's just my opinion."

  "Well, he left a long time ago. He said he'd made a terrible mistake getting married. He said that he just wasn't capable of intimacy. I know that's true for some people, but I'd never actually heard anyone say it out loud about themselves."

  "I know," Ira said. "Even Hitler never said that! I mean, I don't mean to compare your ex to Hitler as a leader. Only as a man."

  Zora stroked his arm. "Do you feel ready to meet Bruno? I mean, he didn't care for my last boyfriend at all. That's why we broke up."

  "Really?" This silenced him for a moment. "If I left those matters up to my daughter, I'd be dating a beagle."

  "I believe children come first." Her voice now had a steely edge.

  "Oh, yes, yes, so do I," Ira said quickly. He felt suddenly paralyzed and cold.

  She reached into the nightstand drawer, took out a vial, and bit into a pill. "Here, take half," she said. "Otherwise we won't get any sleep at all. Sometimes I snore. Probably you do, too."

  "This is so cute," Ira said warmly. "Our taking these pills together."

  he staggered through his days, tired and unsure. At the office, he misplaced files. Sometimes he knocked things over by accident—a glass of water or the benefits manual. The buildup to war, too, was taking its toll. He lay in bed at night, the moments before sleep a kind of stark acquaintance with death. What had happened to the world? It was mid-March now, but it still did not look like spring, especially with the plastic sheeting duct-taped to his windows. When he tried to look out, the trees seemed to be pasted onto the waxy dinge of a still wintry sky. He wished that this month shared its name with a less military verb. Why "March"? How about a month named Skip? That could work.

  He got a couple of cats from the pound so that Bekka could have some live pet action at his house, too. He and Bekka went to the store and stocked up on litter and cat food.

  "Provisions!" Ira exclaimed.

  "In case the war comes here, we can eat the cat food," Bekka suggested.

  "Cat food, heck. We can eat the cats," Ira said.

  "That's disgusting, Dad."

  Ira shrugged.

  "You see, that's one of the things Mom didn't like about you!" she added.

  "Really? She said that?"

  "Sort of."

  "Mom likes me. She's just very busy."

  "Yeah. Whatever."

  He got back to the cats. "What should we name them?"

  "I don't know." She studied the cats.

  Ira hated the precious literary names that people gave pets—characters from opera and Proust. When he first met Marilyn, she had a cat named Portia, but he had insisted on calling it Fang.

  "I think we should name them Snowball and Snowflake," Bekka said, looking glassy-eyed at the two golden tabbies. In the pound, someone with nametag duty had named them "Jake" and "Fake Jake," but the quotation marks around their names seemed an invitation to change them.

  "They don't look like a snowball or a snowflake," Ira said, trying not to let his disappointment show. Sometimes Bekka seemed completely banal to him. She had spells of inexplicable and vapid conventionality. He had always wanted to name a cat Bowser. "How about Bowser and Bowsee?"

  "Fireball and Fireflake," Bekka tried again.

  Ira looked at her, he hoped, beseechingly and persuasively. "Are you sure? Fireball and Fireflake don't really sound like cats that would belong to you."

  Bekka's face clenched tearily. "You don't know me! I only live with you part time! The rest of the time I live with Mom, and she doesn't know me, either! The only person who knows me is me!"

  "O.K., O.K.," Ira said. The cats were eyeing him warily. In time of war, never argue with a fireball or a fireflake. Never argue with the food. "Fireball and Fireflake."

  What were those? Two divorced middle-aged people on a date?

  "why don't you come to dinner?" Zora phoned one afternoon. "I'm making spring spaghetti, Bruny's favorite, and you can come over and meet him. Unless you have Bekka tonight."

  "What is spring spaghetti?" Ira asked.

  "Oh, it's the same as regular spaghetti—you just serve it kind of lukewarm. Room temperature. With a little fresh basil."

  "What should I bring?"

  "Perhaps you could just bring a small appetizer and some dessert," she said. "And maybe a salad, some bread if you're close to a bakery, and a bottle of wine. Also an extra chair, if you have one. We'll need an extra chair."

  "O.K.," he said.

  He was a little loaded down at the door. She stepped outside, he thought to help him, but she simply put her arms around him. "I have to kiss you outside. Bruny doesn't like to see that sort of thing." She kissed Ira in a sweet, rubbery way on the mouth. Then she stepped back in, smiling, holding the door open for him. Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually better-looking than other people. Dating proved it! The aluminum foil over his salad was sliding off, and the brownies he had made for dessert were still warm underneath the salad bowl, heating and wilting the lettuce. He attempted a familiar and proprietary stride through Zora's living room, though he felt neither, then dumped everything on her kitchen table.

  "Thank you," she said, and placed her hand on the small of his back. He was deeply attracted to her. There was nothing he could do about that.

  "It smells good," he said. "You smell good." Some mix of garlic and citrus and baby powder overlaid with nutmeg. Her hand wandered down and stroked his behind. "I've got to run back out to the car and get the appetizer and the chair," he said, and made a quick dash. When he came back in, he handed her the appetizer—a dish of herbed olives (he knew nothing about food; someone at work had told him you could never go wrong with herbed olives: "Spell it out. H-e-r b-e-d. Get it?"). He then set the chair up at Zora's little dining table for two (he'd never seen one not set up for at least four). Zora looked brightly at him and whispered, "Are you ready to meet Bruny?"

  Ready. He did not know precisely what she meant by that. It seemed that she had reversed everything, that she should be asking Bruno, or Bruny, if he was ready to meet him. "Ready," he said.

  There was wavery flute-playing behind a closed door down the hallway. "Bruny?" Zora called. The music stopped. Suddenly a barking, howling voice called, "What?"

  "Come out and meet Ira, please."

  There was silence. Nobody moved at all for a very long time. Ira smiled politely. "Oh, let him play," he said.

  "I'll be right back," Zora said, and she headed down the hall to Bruno's room, knocked on the door, then went in, closing it behind her. Ira stood there for a while, then he picked up the Screwpull, opened the bottle of wine, and began to drink. After several minutes, Zora returned to the kitchen, sighing, "Bruny's in a little bit of a mood." Suddenly a door slammed and soft, trudging footsteps brought Bruno, the boy himself, into the kitchen. He was barefoot and in a T-shirt and gym shorts, his legs already dark with hair. His eyebrows sprouted in a manly black V over the bridge of his nose. He was not tall but he was muscular, broad-shouldered, and thick-limbed. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall with weary belligerence.

  "Bruny, this is
Ira," Zora said. Ira put his wineglass down and extended his hand. Bruno unfolded his arms, but did not shake hands. Instead, he thrust out his chin and scowled. Ira picked up his wineglass again.

  "Good to meet you. Your mother has said a lot of wonderful things about you."

  Bruno looked at the appetizer bowl. "What's all this grassy gunk all over the olives." It was not really a question, so no one answered it.

  Bruno turned back to his mother. "May I go back to my room now?"

  "Yes, dear," Zora said. She looked at Ira. "He's practicing for the woodwind competition next Saturday. He's very serious."

  When Bruno had tramped back down to his room, Ira leaned in to kiss Zora, but she pulled away. "Bruny might hear us," she whispered.

  "Let's go to a restaurant. Just you and me. My salad's no good."

  "Oh, we couldn't leave Bruno here alone. He's only sixteen."

  "I was working in a steel factory when I was sixteen!" Ira decided not to say. Instead, he said, "Doesn't he have friends?"

  "He's between social groups right now," Zora said defensively. "It's difficult for him to find other kids who are as intellectually serious as he is."

  "We'll rent him a movie," Ira said. "Excuse me, a film. A foreign film, since he's serious. A documentary. We'll rent him a foreign documentary!"

  "We don't have a VCR."

  "You don't have a VCR?" At this point, Ira found the silverware and helped set the table. When they sat down to eat, Bruno suddenly came out and joined them. The spring spaghetti was tossed in a large glass bowl with grated cheese. "Just how you like it, Brune," Zora said.

  "So, Bruno. What grade are you in?"

  Bruno rolled his eyes. "Tenth," he said.

  "So college is a ways off," Ira said, accidentally thinking out loud.

  "I guess," Bruno said.

  "What classes are you taking in school, besides music?" Ira asked, after a long awkward spell.

  "I don't take music," Bruno said with his mouth full. "I'm in All-State Woodwinds."

  "All-State Woodwinds! Interesting! Do you take any courses like, say, American history?"

  "They're studying the Amazon rain forest yet again," Zora said. "They've been studying it since pre-school."

  Ira slurped with morose heartiness at his wine—he had spent too much of his life wandering about in the desert of his own drool; oh, the mealtime games he had played on his own fragile mind—and now some wine dribbled on his shirt. "For Pete's sake, look at this." He dabbed at it with his napkin and looked up at Bruno with an ingratiating grin. "Someday this could happen to you," Ira said, twinkling in Bruno's direction.

  "That would never happen to me," Bruno muttered.

  Ira continued dabbing at his shirt. He began thinking of his book. Though I be your mother's beau, no rival I, no foe, faux foe. He loved rhymes. They were harmonious and joyous in the face of total crap.

  Soon Bruno was gently tapping his foot against his mother's under the table. Zora began playfully to nudge him back, and then they were both kicking away, their energetic footsie causing them to slip in their chairs a little, while Ira pretended not to notice, cutting his salad with the edge of his fork, too frightened to look up. After a few minutes—when the footsie had stopped and Ira had exclaimed, "Great dinner, Zora!"—they all stood and cleared their places, taking the dishes into the kitchen, putting them in a messy pile in the sink. Ira began halfheartedly to run warm water over them while Zora and Bruno, some distance behind him, jostled up against each other, ramming lightly into each other's sides. Ira glanced over his shoulder and saw Zora step back and assume a wrestler's starting stance as Bruno leaped toward her, heaving her over his shoulder, then ran into the living room, where, Ira could see, he dumped her, laughing, on the couch.

  Should Ira join in? Should he leave?

  "I can still pin you, Brune, when we're on the bed," Zora said.

  "Yeah, right," Bruno said.

  Perhaps it was time to go. Next time, Ira would bring over a VCR for Bruno and just take Zora out to eat. "Well, look at the clock! Good to meet you, Bruno," he said, shaking the kid's large limp hand. Zora stood, out of breath. She walked Ira out to his car, helping to carry his chair and salad bowl. "It was a lovely evening," Ira said. "And you are a lovely woman. And your son seems so bright and the two of you are adorable together."

  Zora beamed, seemingly mute with happiness. If only Ira had known how to speak such fanciful baubles during his marriage, surely Marilyn would never have left him.

  He gave Zora a quick kiss on the cheek—the heat of wrestling had heightened her beautiful nutmeg smell—then kissed her again on the neck, near her ear. Alone in his car on the way home, he thought of all the deeply wrong erotic attachments that were made in wartime, all the crazy romances cooked up quickly by the species to offset death. He turned the radio on: the news of the Middle East was so surreal and bleak that when he heard the tonnage of the bombs planned for Baghdad he could feel his jaw fall slack in astonishment. He pulled the car over, turned on the interior light, and gazed in the rearview mirror just to see what his face looked like in this particular state. He had felt his face drop in this manner once before, when he first got the divorce papers from Marilyn—now, there was shock and awe for you; there was decapitation—but he had never actually seen what he looked like this way. So. Now he knew. Not good: stunned, pale, and not all that bright. It wasn't the same as self-knowledge, but life was long and not that edifying, and one sometimes had to make do with these randomly seized tidbits.

  He started up again, slowly; it was raining now, and, at a shimmeringly lit intersection of two gas stations, one Quik-Trip, and a KFC, half a dozen young people in hooded yellow slickers were holding up signs that read "Honk for Peace." Ira fell upon his horn, first bouncing his hand there, then just leaning his whole arm into it. Other cars began to do the same, and soon no one was going anywhere—a congregation of mourning doves! but honking like geese in a wild chorus of futility, windshield wipers clearing their fan-shaped spaces on the drizzled night glass. No car went anywhere for the change of two lights. For all its stupidity and solipsism and self-consciously scenic civic grief, it was something like a gorgeous moment.

  despite bekka's reading difficulties, despite her witless naming of the cats, Ira knew that his daughter was highly intelligent. He knew it from the time she spent lying around the house, bored and sighing, saying, "Dad? When will childhood be over?" This was a sign of genius! As were other things. Her complete imperviousness to the adult male voice, for instance. Her scrutiny of all food. With interest and hesitancy, she studied the antiwar signs that bestrewed the neighborhood lawns. "'War Is Not the Path to Peace,'" she read slowly aloud. Then added, "Well—duh."

  "'War Is Not the Answer,'" she read on another. "Well, that doesn't make sense," she said to Ira. "War is the answer. It's the answer to the question 'What's George Bush going to start real soon?'"

  The times Bekka stayed at his house, she woke up in the morning and told him her dreams. "I had a dream last night that I was walking with two of my friends and we met a wolf. But I made a deal with the wolf. I said, 'Don't eat me. These other two have more meat on them.' And the wolf said, 'O.K.,' and we shook on it and I got away." Or, "I had a strange dream last night that I was a bad little fairy."

  She was in contact with her turmoil and with her ability to survive. How could that be anything less than emotional brilliance?

  One morning she said, "I had a really scary dream. There was this tornado with a face inside? And I married it." Ira smiled. "It may sound funny to you, Dad, but it was really scary."

  He stole a look at her school writing journal once and found this poem:

  Time moving

  Time standing still.

  What is the difference?

  Time standing still is the difference.

  He had no idea what it meant, but he knew that it was awesome. He had given her the middle name Clio, after the Muse of history, so of course she would know very w
ell that time standing still was the difference. He personally felt that he was watching history from the dimmest of backwaters—a land of beer and golf, the horizon peacefully fish-gray. With the windows covered in plastic sheeting, he felt as if he were inside a plastic container, like a leftover, peering into the tallow fog of the world. Time moving. Time standing still.

  the major bombing started on the first day of spring. "It's happening," Ira said into Mike's answering machine. "The whole thing is starting now."

  Zora called and asked him to the movies. "Sure," Ira said mechanically. "I'd love to."

  "Well, we were thinking of this Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but Bruno would also be willing to see the Mel Gibson one." We. He was dating a tenth grader now. Even in tenth grade he hadn't done that. Well, he'd see what he'd missed.

  They picked him up at six-forty, and, as Bruno made no move to cede the front seat, Ira sat in the back of Zora's Honda, his long legs wedged together at a diagonal, like a lady riding sidesaddle. Zora drove carefully, not like a mad hellcat at all, as for some reason he had thought she would. As a result, they were late for the Mel Gibson movie and had to make do with the Schwarzenegger. Ira thrust money at the ticket-seller—"Three, please"—and they all wordlessly went in, their computerized stubs in hand. "So you like Arnold Schwarzenegger?" Ira said to Bruno as they headed down the red-carpeted corridor.

  "Not really," Bruno muttered. Bruno sat between Zora and Ira, and together they passed a small container of popcorn back and forth. Ira jumped up twice to refill it out in the lobby, a kind of relief for him from Arnold, whose line readings were less brutish than they used to be but not less brutish enough. Afterward, heading out into the parking lot, Bruno and Zora re-enacted body-bouncing scenes from the film. When they reached the car, Ira was again relegated to the back seat. "Shall we go to dinner?" he called up to the front.

  Both Zora and Bruno were silent.

  "Shall we?" he tried again, cheerfully.

  "Would you like to, Bruno?" Zora asked. "Are you hungry?"

  "I don't know," Bruno said, peering gloomily out the window.