Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

a photo where she is six and has bangs bleached pale from the sun. She is in a white sundress, standing next to a large tricycle, squinting and frowning into the camera. Crabface. That's what my mother called it: "Oh yeah, there's me, ole crabface, pouting for soda pop."

my mother liked to sing, but she would wait until my father wasn't around because he would correct her pitch and straighten her posture and insist she use her lungs and diaphragm better. "Don't sing like a disembodied mule. You should use your whole rib cage." And sitting on the piano bench, she would poker-stare straight ahead at the sheet music and play the C above middle C over and over again with one finger, a sort of hypnosis. "Go mow the lawn, Enrico," she would say sometimes. Which was a joke, because my father's real name was Sam and because we really had no lawn, just a craggy, pine-needled slope, which galloped wildly from the road down to the lake. On the other side of the house was a slow, tiny stream, which trickled and glided gingerly over rocks, like something afraid of hurting itself. At night with the lights out, after she had heard our prayers, my mother would sing to James and me, and we thought she was great. She'd sing "Down by the Old Mill Stream" or some Cole Porter hit she knew from college. She loved Frank Sinatra. She would stand by our bed, crooning imitations into one of the bedposts as if it were a microphone, and afterward we would clap in the dark until our hands stung. (At the end of "Pennies from Heaven," she would place a penny on each post for us to find in the morning.) "Thank you, thank you," she would whisper with a low, wonderful laugh, smiling and bending over us to wetly kiss our cheeks, her hair down, long, black, and sweeping against my chest and chin, smelling soapy and dry. And if the moon was out it lit up the lake, and the lake light shone into the room through the slats of the blinds, tentatively striping her hair and face or the arm of her sweater. And as she moved — to kiss James, to tuck in the blankets — the stripes moved up and down her. When she left she always kept the door slightly unlatched, the lamp from the hall framing the door in cracks of light interrupted only by hinges. She always called in a whisper, "Good night my sweet sparrows," that expression only later in my life seeming silly or indulgent or mad. And often James would be on his back next to me humming late into the night, invisible in the dark, singing the words to "Old Devil Moon" when he could remember them, or sometimes just whispering, "Hey, Lynnie, how does it go again?" his legs jiggling under the sheets.

a photo where she is eight and her hair is darker, wavier, and she already has the bones of her adult face beginning to grow inside, cheekbones awakening behind the skin. She is grinning in a striped shirt with her arm around Uncle Don, her blank-faced little brother, in front of a house they lived in just outside of Syracuse, a white house with a closed-in front porch and a brick chimney painted white, two large tamaracks on either side, their branches dangling curved and protective over the roof, like large mustaches. Uncle Don comes up to her chin.

my father played Liza Doolittle's father in My Fair Lady and the knight with the dog in Camelot . On Sunday afternoons my mother would bring us to watch them rehearse in the Crasden High School auditorium, but in 1956, so that it was new and strong and maroon and velvet and hadn't lost its polish. I loved the dark slope of it, and would gallop along the rows of empty flip-bottom seats as if they were my own private corridors. The director would pace out in front of the stage, a few feet beyond the orchestra pit. At early rehearsals they just used a pianist, a puffy woman named Mrs. Beales who took many trips to the ladies' room. "The entire action to the right and further downstage, downstage," the director was always shouting, waving both arms like a semaphore. He had thick, white, horse-mane hair that he combed straight back from his brow but that nevertheless flopped into his eyes from time to time. He wore white shoes and usually dressed in something of pale blue silk. My lather would say things during scene cuts on stage that we couldn't hear but that made everyone laugh — a talky, theatrical, group laugh, filled with ho-ho's and oh-no's and affectionate hissing, and stomping. Sometimes the director would wear sunglasses and prop them on top of his head and say, "Oh shit, let's take a break." And then the lights would go up and the actors would head for the cafeteria two long marble hallways away, and as the school was empty and lit up like a bowling alley, you could hear the echo of their steps and their loud chatter, the woman who played Liza Doolittle still screeching "Aow," adding, "Did you phone the babysitter, Ron?" and Professor Higgins, not with them but seated on the stage's edge, eating a sandwich he had brought, his legs dangling, sneakers thumping against each other, like a Little Leaguer. During these breaks, James and I would dash up onto the stage to see my father, and, if it was a dress rehearsal, we would giggle at his orange face or his wig or his fake eyebrows arched way up into his forehead. But then we would be struck by shyness when he would say, "Hi, kids," but look past us, over our heads, then turn and head busily backstage to take care of something. Standing there on the stage, we would turn and look out onto the hill of auditorium seats, spot my mother in the tenth row where we had left her reading a book, and she would wave and we would wave, then we'd race to her, like racing home, and climb hungrily all over her lap, as if looking for something. Sometimes we played with the bobby pins in her hair, which she used to hold it in a twist in the back, making antennae, making antlers, my mother allowing it all. "Your father is a talented man," my mother said, sounding like my teachers at school who said similar things to me, my mother sensing our disappointment in never getting his attention for very long. "Talented men have very busy heads. They may seem unkind sometimes." And I would think about this for a long time afterward, chewing my nails, writing letters.

a photo in which she is nine and dressed for a ballet class in a long-sleeved black leotard, in the living room in front of the fireplace. She is doing an arabesque, one arm bent slightly over her head, one arm out to the side; because it is a front view, only one leg shows, and she looks something like an amputee, the tip of her ballet shoe just visible above the outline of her shoulder, her whole body leaning into the camera as her eyes gaze off to one side of it, looking half sorrowful, half comical. "She looks like a greasehead," James said once, sitting next to me, taking note of the tight wet way her hair was pulled off her face into a bun. "You're a greasehead," I said, nurturing fantasies of becoming a ballerina myself, and I punched him in the leg. He moved farther back on the couch, a little away from me, and just chewed his gum harder. Sometimes when we had fights, I would say I'm sorry, and sometimes he would. He liked to look at the pictures, too.

"cold men destroy women," my mother wrote me years later. "They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes — you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect's drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone."

" Dear Mom ," I wrote back. " I am coming home on the 23rd, so should he there for the candlelight service on Sunday. Hope all is going well. Exams are merciless. See you soon ."