Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

a picture of mom and Jacob Fish on a beach. Mom's one-piece is black like her hair and the water is gray and the sand is white. There are buckets, a small shovel, and a blanket. Jacob Fish holds a fistful of sand over Mom's head. She laughs with her eyes closed, a momentary shutting out, the only way sometimes one can laugh.

the fall i turned ten, my father played Billy Bigelow in the Crasden Playhouse production of Carousel . Halfway through the show Billy Bigelow sings a song about his plans for his child to be, warbling through a lilting list of parental love promises. My mother brought us to the Sunday afternoon rehearsals (the real performance was too late for us, she said) and sat stiff and pinched through that song, staring narrowly at my father as he walked through it, following the snow-haired director's commands for the placement of his feet ("Damn it, Sam… you sing like a god, but you just can't dance"). Off to one side two stagehands were painting a merry-go-round red and green. "Bad colors," my mother said, shaking her head critically. A blonde woman a few seats away piped up: "Last week somebody stole all the good paint. Our budget is tight."

"What is beautiful is seized," murmured my mother, and the blonde woman looked at her oddly and said, "Yeah, I guess," and after a few minutes got up and left. Years later my mother would say to me: "That song your father sang in Carousel . What wonderful lies. He never spent time with you kids, never sang to you or took you places."

And when she said it, it became true. But only then, when she said it. Until then it seemed Dad was just Dad, was somehow only what he was supposed to be.

a picture of Jacob Fish standing by a river with a suitcase in one hand and a hat in another. That was the City River, opposite the train station, my mother said. The suitcase was hers. So was the hat. He was trying to look dignified and worldly and had requested props.

she cries, slumped over at her dressing table, and dreams that someone comes up behind her and bends down to hold her, to groan and weep into her neck with her, to turn her around and lift up her face, kiss her eyes, mouth on water, on cheek, on hair. But there is no one, just my father, sitting way across the room from her, in a white and rose upholstered chair (something later moved to my room at college, something I would sit in, stare at), an icy anger tucked behind his face, locked up like a store after hours, a face laced tight as a shoe. His arms are crossed behind his head like a man on vacation, but he is not relaxed. His features arrange themselves in straight, sharp lines.

"Your numbness," my mother cries softly, "is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world."

He picks up a porcelain pill box on the lamp table, hurls and shatters it against the wall. "That's what I have to say to you," he says. "I won't do your little dances." And he walks out, slamming the door.

i only heard parts of this. She told me the rest years later when she was dying, and I spent hours brushing and brushing her hair. She liked me to do that, always managing a smile and sinking back into her pillow. "My legs, Lynnie. Can you do my legs today, dear?" she would ask. And I'd take the Norelco razor from the nightstand drawer, pull up the covers from the foot of the bed, and glide the razor up and down her calves. She liked her legs smooth and hairless, and I think she liked the metallic friction and buzz of it. That, too, made her smile.

a picture of my parents on bikes before they were married. They are at a gas station where they have stopped to fill up their tires with air. Mom smiles. Dad makes a goofy face, both hands on the handlebars. Both of them wear long, Jamaica-style shorts. An Esso sign behind them is missing the O. Yiddish for "eat," my mother told me once.

"they want to take things and destroy them," my mother sighed the same month she died, when we were talking of our lake house, which had been sold at first to a funeral home and then bought by the federal government, who tore it down for vaguely military purposes no one ever bothered to explain.

"They want my hair," she said another day, winking weakly at me when a nurse came in with scissors and suggested a haircut. My mother shook her head, but the nurse's air was insistent.

"I don't think she wants one," I said, and the nurse looked at me dumbly and padded out on the soundless rubber soles those who surround the dying always wear.

my mother coming into our room at night. My childhood sometimes simply a series of images of her swirling into the doorway, in white, over and over again, coming to hear our prayers, to sing us songs, to whisper that she loved us, to kiss me wetly on the mouth, hair dangling, making a tent in which just our faces, hers and mine, lived and breathed forever. She'd rub my nose, and James's too, and whisper, "See you tomorrow," and at the doorway, "Good night, my sparrows."

she dreams that he is trying to kill her. That he has a rifle and is calling her out of the bathroom. In the bathroom she has knives and axes. She bolts awake and he is looking at her, chilly, indifferent. "Your face," she says. "My god. It is a murderer's face."

"What the hell are you talking about?" he says.

the year after Carousel was The Music Man , and the woman who played Marian the librarian used to call our house fairly regularly, purring like older women do at babies. She would ask if my Daddy was home.

"My father's not here," I almost always said, even if I knew he was upstairs with lesson plans. I think of all the things I did as a child, this was the boldest.

She would ask me to tell him that Marcia called. Sometimes I would. I'd knock on the door to his study, walk in, and say: "Marcia called. She wanted you to know."

And he would turn and look at me vacantly, as if he wasn't quite sure who I was talking about, and then say, "Oh, right. About rehearsal. Thanks." And he would turn his back to me and continue working at his desk, and I would just stand there in the doorway, staring at the back of his sweater. It seemed when he corrected papers and things that he always wore the same Norwegian sweater: green with a chain of rectangularized gold reindeer around the top, across his back and shoulders.

"Did you want anything else?" He would twist around again in his seat and lower his glasses.

And I would say, "No. I mean yes."

"What?"

"I forgot," I would say, and turn and flee.

in the wedding photos they wear white against the murky dark of trees. They are thin and elegant. They have placid smiles. The mouth of the father of the bride remains in a short, straight line. I don't know who took these pictures. I suppose they are lies of sorts, revealing by omission, by indirection, by clues such as shoes and clouds. But they tell a truth, the only way lies can. The way only lies can.

another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.

"Look," he sighed in a loud whisper. "I really can't say that I'll never leave you and the kids or that I'll never make love to another woman—"

"Why not?" asked my mother. "Why can't you say that?" Even her anger was gentle, ingenuous.

"Because I don't feel that way."

"But… can't you just say it anyway?"

At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other's gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning. But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, "Your father. He was in a dance. And he just couldn't dance." Earlier that year she had written me: "That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls — we all have a bit of that — but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery."