Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

"well, i'm glad we did that," I said on the way back home. I was sitting alone in the back, sneaking some of the gin — why bother ever again with rickey mix? — and I'd been staring out the window. Now I looked forward and noticed that Pat was driving. Pat hadn't driven in years. A pickup truck with the bumper sticker "No Hillary No Way" roared past us, and we stared at its message as if we were staring at a swastika. Where were we living?

"Redneck," Isabel muttered at the driver.

"It's a trap, isn't it," I said.

"What is?" asked Pat.

"This place!" exclaimed Isabel. "Our work! Our houses! The college!"

"It's all a trap!" I repeated.

But we did not entirely believe it. Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew, for ourselves or for anyone else. "It was good to see Robin," I continued from the back. "It was really good to see her."

"That's true," said Isabel. Pat said nothing. She was coming off her manic high and driving took all she had.

"All in all, it was a good night," I said.

"A really good night," agreed Isabel.

"good night," Robin had said the last time I'd seen her well, standing in her own doorway. She had invited me over and we were hanging out, eating her summery stir-fry, things both lonely and warm between us, when she asked about the man I was seeing, the one she had dated briefly.

"Well, I don't know," I said, a little sad. At that point I was still sitting at her table and I found myself rubbing the grain of it with one finger. "He seems now also to be seeing this other person — Daphne Kern? Do you know her? She's one of those beautician-slash-art dealers?" All the restaurants, coffee shops, and hair salons in town seemed to have suddenly gotten into hanging, showing, and selling art. This dignified, or artified, the business of serving. Did I feel I was better, more interesting, with my piano and my violin and my singing?

"I know Daphne. I took a yoga class once from her, when she was doing that."

"You did?" I could not control myself. "So what's so compelling about her?" My voice was not successfully shy of a whine. "Is she nice?"

"She's pretty, she's nice, she's intuitive," Robin said, casually ticking off the qualities. "She's actually a talented yoga instructor. She's very physical. Even when she speaks she uses her body a lot. You know, frankly? She's probably just really good in bed."

At this my heart sickened and plummeted down my left side and into my shoe. My appetite, too, shrank to a small pebble and sat in stony reserve in the place my heart had been and to which my heart would at some point return, but just not in time for dessert.

"I've made a lemon meringue pie," said Robin, getting up and clearing the dishes. She was always making pies. She would have written more plays if she had made fewer pies. "More meringue than lemon, I'm afraid."

"Oh, thank you. I'm just full," I said, looking down at my unfinished food.

"I'm sorry," Robin said, a hint of worry in her voice. "Should I not have said that thing about Daphne?"

"Oh, no," I said. "That's fine. It's nothing." But soon I felt it was time for me to go, and after a single cup of tea I stood, clearing only a few of the dishes with her. I found my purse and headed for the door.

She stood in the doorway, holding the uneaten meringue pie. "That skirt, by the way, is great," she said in the June night. "Orange is a good color on you. Orange and gold."

"Thanks," I said.

Then, without warning, she suddenly lifted up the pie and pushed it into her own face. When she pulled off the tin, meringue clung to her skin like blown snow. The foam of it covered her lashes and brows and, with her red hair, for a minute she looked like a demented Queen Elizabeth.

"What the fuck ?" I said, shaking my head. I needed new friends. I would go to more conferences and meet more people.

"I've always wanted to do that," said Robin. The mask of meringue on her face looked eerie, not clownish at all, and her mouth speaking through the white foam seemed to be a separate creature entirely, a puppet or a fish. "I've always wanted to do that, and now I have."

"Hey," I said. "There's no business like show business." I was digging in my purse for my car keys.

Long hair flying over her head, bits of meringue dropping on the porch, she took a dramatic bow. "Everything," she added, from behind her mask, "everything, everything, well, almost everything about it" — she gulped a little pie that had fallen in from one corner of her mouth—"is appealing."

"Brava," I said, smiling. I had found my keys. "Now I'm out of here."

"Of course," she said, gesturing with her one pie-free hand. "Onward."

for Nietzchka Keene

(1952–2004)

ira had been divorced for six months and still couldn't get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily — a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition was how he explained it. "I'm going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed," he told his friends. The ring (supposedly gold, though now that everything he had ever received from Marilyn had been thrown into doubt, who knew?) cinched the blowsy fat of his finger, which had grown twistedly around it like a fucking happy challah. "Maybe I should cut the whole hand off and send it to her," he said on the phone to his friend Mike, with whom he worked at the State Historical Society. "She'd understand the reference." Ira had already ceremoniously set fire to his dove-gray wedding tux — hanging it on a tall stick in his backyard, scarecrow style, and igniting it with a Bic lighter. "That sucker went up really fast," he gasped apologetically to the fire marshal, after the hedge caught, too — and before he was taken overnight to the local lockdown facility. " So fast. Maybe it was, I don't know, like the residual dry-cleaning fluid."

"You'll remove that ring when you're ready," Mike said now. Mike's job approving historical-preservation projects on old houses left him time to take a lot of lenient-parenting courses and to read all the lenient-parenting books, though he had no children himself. He did this for project-applicant-management purposes. "Here's what you do for your depression. I'm not going to say lose yourself in charity work. I'm not going to say get some perspective by watching our country's news every night and contemplating those worse off than yourself, those, say, who are about to be blown apart by bombs. I'm going to say this: Stop drinking, stop smoking. Eliminate coffee, sugar, dairy products. Do this for three days, then start everything back up again. Bam . I guarantee you, you will be so happy."

"I'm afraid," Ira said softly, "that the only thing that would make me happy right now is snipping the brake cables on Marilyn's car."

"Spring," Mike said helplessly, though it was still only the end of winter. "It can really hang you up the most."

"Hey. You should write songs. Just not too often." Ira looked at his hands. Actually, he had once got the ring off in a hot bath, but the sight of his finger, naked as a child's, had terrified him and he had shoved the ring back on.

He could hear Mike sighing and casting about. Cupboard doors closed loudly. The refrigerator puckered open then whooshed shut. Ira knew that Mike and Kate had had their troubles — as the phrase went — but their marriage had always held. "I'd divorce Kate," Mike had once confided timidly, "but she'd kill me."

"Look," Mike suggested, "why don't you come to our house Sunday for a little Lent dinner. We're having some people by, and who knows?"