Lorrie Moore - The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore

The same eleven-year-old girl, lips waxed a greenish peach, came by to spit on her.

" What ?" said Mary, aghast.

"Nothin'," said the girl. "I'm not going to hurt you," she mocked, and her shoulders moved around as children's do when they play dress-up, a bad imitation of a movie star. She had a cheap shoulder bag with a long strap, and she hoisted it up over her head and arranged it in a diagonal across her chest.

Mary stood and walked away with what might have been indignation in someone else but in her was a horrified scurry. They could see! Everyone could see what she was, what she was doing! Sl)e wasn't fooling a soul. What she needed was plans. At a time like this, plans could save a person. They could organize time and space for a while, like little sculptures. At home Mary made soup and ate it, staring at the radiator. She would plan a trip! She would travel to some place far away, some place unlittered and pure.

She bought guidebooks about Canada: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island. She stayed in her room, away from spitters, alternately flipped and perused the pages of her books, her head filling like a suitcase with the names of hotels and local monuments and exchange rates and historical episodes, a fearful excitement building in her to an exhaustion, travel moving up through her like a blood, until she felt she had already been to Canada, already been traveling there for months, and now had to fall back, alone, on her bed and rest.

mary went to Number One's office to return some of the fliers and to tell him she was going away. It smelled of cigarettes and cigars, a public place, like a train. He closed the door.

"I'm worried about you. You seem distant. And you're always dressed in white. What's going on?"

"I'm saving myself for marriage," she said. "Not yours."

Number One looked at her. He had been about to say "Mine?" but there wasn't enough room for both of them there, like two men on a base. They were arriving at punch lines together these days. They had begun to do imitations of each other, that most violent and satisfying end to love.

"I'm sorry I haven't been in to work," said Mary. "But I've decided I have to go away for a while. I'm going to Canada. You'll be able to return to your other life."

"What other life? The one where I walk the streets at two in the morning dressed as Himmler? That one?" On his desk was a news clipping about a representative from Nebraska who'd been having affairs far away from home. The headline read: running for public orifice: who should cast the first stone? The dark at the edge of Mary's vision grew inward, then back out again. She grabbed the arm of a chair and sat down.

"My life is very strange," said Mary.

One looked at her steadily. She looked tired and lost. "You know," he said, "you're not the only woman who has ever been involved with a married — a man with marital entanglements." He usually called their romance a situation . Or sometimes, to entertain, grownuppery . All the words caused Mary to feel faint.

"Not the only woman?" said Mary. "And here I thought I was blazing new paths." When she was little her mother had said, "Would you jump off a cliff just because everybody else did?"

"Yes," Mary had said.

" Would you?" said her mother.

Mary had tried again. "No," she said. There were only two answers. Which could it be?

"Let me take you out to dinner," said Number One.

Mary was staring past him out the window. There were women who leaped through such glass. Just got a running start and did it.

"I have to go to Canada for a while," she murmured.

"Canada." One smiled. "You've always been such an adventuress. Did you get your shots?" This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

She handed him his fliers. He put them in a pile near a rhinoceros paperweight, and he slid his hand down his face like a boy with a squeegee. She stood and kissed his ear, which was a delicate thing, a sea creature with the wind of her kiss trapped inside.

to boy number two she said, "I must take a trip."

He held her around the waist, afraid and tight. "Marry me," he said, "or else."

"Else," she said. She always wanted the thing not proposed. The other thing.

"Maybe in two years," she mumbled, trying to step back. They might buy a car, a house at the edge of the Heights. They would grow overweight and rear sullen and lazy children. Two boys.

And a girl.

Number One would send her postcards with jokes on the back. You hog .

She touched Number Two's arm. He was sweet to her, in his way, though his hair split into greasy V's and the strange, occasional panic in him poured worrisomely through the veins of his arms.

"I need a break," said Mary. "I'm going to go to Canada." He let go of her and went to the window, his knuckles hard little men on the sill.

she went to Ottawa for two weeks. It was British and empty and there were no sidewalk cafes as it was already October and who knew when the canals might freeze. She went to the National Gallery and stood before the Paul Peels and Tom Thompsons, their Mother Goose names, their naked children and fiery leaves. She took a tour of Parliament, which was richly wooden and crimson velvet and just that month scandalized by the personal lives of several of its members. "So to speak" — the guide winked, and the jaws in the group went slack.

Mary went to a restaurant that had once been a mill, and she smiled at the waiters and stared at the stone walls. At night, alone in her hotel room, she imagined the cool bridal bleach of the sheets healing her, holding her like a shroud, working their white temporarily through her skin and into the thinking blood of her. Every morning at seven someone phoned her from the desk downstairs to wake her up.

"What is there to do today?" Mary inquired.

"You want Montreal, miss. This is Ottawa."

French. She hadn't wanted anything French.

"Breakfast until ten in the Union lack Room, miss."

She sent postcards to Boy Number One and to Boy Number Two. She wrote on them, I will be home next Tuesday on the two o'clock bus . She put Number One's in an envelope and mailed it to his post office box. She took another tour of Parliament, then went to a church and tried to pray for a very long time. "O father who is the father," she began. "Who is the father of us all. "As a child she had liked to pray and had always improvised. She had closed her eyes tight as stitches and in the midst of all the colors, she was sure she saw God swimming toward her with messages and advice, a large fortune cookie in a beard and a robe, flowing, flowing. Now the chant of it made her dizzy. She opened her eyes. The church was hushed and modern, lit like a library, and full of women on their knees, as if they might never get up.

She slept fitfully on the way home, the bus rumbling beneath her, urging her to dreams and occasionally to wonder, half in and half out of them, whether anyone would be there at the station to greet her. Boy Number Two would probably not be. He was poor and earless and feeling unappreciated. Perhaps One, in a dash from the office, in a characteristically rash gesture, would take a break from campaign considerations and be waiting with flowers. It wasn't entirely a long shot.

Mary struggled off the bus with her bag. She was still groggy from sleep, and this aspect of life, getting on and off things, had always seemed difficult. Someone spoke her name. She looked to one side and heard it again. "Mary." She looked up and up, and there he was: Boy Number Two in a holey sweater and his hair in Vs.

"An announcement," called the PA system. "An announcement for all passengers on…"

"Hi!" said Mary. The peculiar mix of gratitude and disappointment she always felt with Two settled in her joints like the beginnings of flu. They kissed on the cheek and then on the mouth, at which point he insisted on taking her bag.