Lorrie Moore: The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"What if I can't get my ring off?" she said to him now on the plane. She had gained a little weight during their twenty years of marriage, but really not all that much. She had been practically a child bride!

"Send me the sawyer's bill," he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye was gone!

"What is wrong with you?" she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space-alien values, space-alien thoughts, and the hollow, shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

"What is wrong with you ?" he snarled. This was his habit, his space-alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

She was less worried about the girls, who were just little, than she was about Sam, her sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle, moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the state's extremely progressive divorce laws — a boy needs his dad! — she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle a little and float off and away like paper carried by wind. With time, he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d' suspecting riffraff. He would see her coming the way a panicked party guest sees someone without a nametag. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on.

They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs — a family about to break apart forever — didn't look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers, she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local boys from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white, beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it and downplay the creases — to make her appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once glanced at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had got lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop — the words "La Caribe" emblazoned across every single thing.

On the beach, people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the barbed wire, throwing rocks.

sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but he sensed their cruelty. "They speak a language," he said. "We shouldn't ride them."

"They look happy," Kit said.

Sam studied her with a seriousness from some sweet beyond. "They look happy so you won't kill them."

"You think so?"

"If dolphins tasted good," he said, "we wouldn't even know about their language." That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could understand something only if you did not desire it. How did he know such things already? Usually girls knew them first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond her comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase "cinnamon M&M's" repeated six times, fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried wands. "I'm a big brother now," Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bale, as they, for instance, buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. A woman on a towel, one of those reading of genocide, turned and smiled. In this fine compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable.

Kit went to the central office and signed up for a hot-stone massage. "Would you like a man or a woman?" the receptionist asked.

"Excuse me?" Kit said, stalling. After all these years of marriage, which did she want? What did she know of men — or women? "There's no such thing as 'men,'" Jan used to say. "Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is, well, a capacity for horrifying violence."

"A man or a woman — for the massage?" Kit asked. She thought of the slow mating of snails, hermaphrodites for whom it was all so confusing: by the time they had figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy, someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.

"Oh, either one," she said, and then knew she'd get a man.

Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas — tobacco, incense, cannabis — swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed. His name was Dan Handler, according to the business card he wore safety-pinned to his shirt like a badge. He did not speak. He placed hot stones up and down her back and left them there. Did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him? Are you crazy ? The mad joy in her face was held over the floor by the massage-table headpiece, and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out of her nose, which she realized was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage-hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. A heart could break. But perhaps, like a several-hearted worm, you could move on to the next one, then the next. The masseur left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat, she could no longer feel it there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and then feel something only then, at the end. Though this wasn't the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean but more likely had no intention at all.

"That was nice," she said, as he was putting all his stones away. He bad heated them in a plastic electric Crockpot filled with water, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.

"Where did you get those stones?" she asked. They were smooth and dark gray — black when wet, she saw.

"They're river stones," he said. "I've been collecting them for years up in Colorado." He placed them in a metal fishing-tackle box.

"You live in Colorado?" she asked.

"Used to," he said, and that was that.

on the last night of their vacation, her suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn't even open it. Sam put out the little doorknob flag that said "wake us up for the sea turtles." The flag had a preprinted request for a 3 a.m. wakeup call so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. Hut though Sam had hung the flag carefully, and before the midnight deadline, no staff person woke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched during the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who were too lazy or deaf to have got up in the night.