Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

“I know,” whispered Pat, though I didn’t know.

“Why can’t we turn on the lights?” I asked, also in a whisper. The door closed behind us and we stood there in the quiet, pitch-black house.

“The police,” said Pat.

“No, not the police,” said Isabel.

“Then what?”

“Never mind. Just give it a minute and our eyes will adjust.” We stood there listening to our own breathing. We didn’t move, so as not to trip over anything.

And then on the opposite side of the room a small light flicked on from somewhere at the end of the far hallway; we could not see down it, but out stepped Robin, looking pretty much the same, though she had a white cotton scarf wrapped and knotted around her neck. Against the white, her teeth had a fluorescent ocher sheen, but otherwise she looked regal and appraising, and she smiled at all of us, including me — though more tentatively, I thought, at me. Then she put her finger to her lips and shook her head, so we didn’t speak. She walked toward us.

“You came” were her first hushed words, directed at me. “I missed you a little at the hospital.” Her smile had become clearly tight and judging.

“I am so sorry,” I said.

“That’s OK, they’ll tell you,” she said, indicating Is and Pat. “It was a little nuts.”

“It was totally nuts,” said Pat.

“As a result?” whispered Robin. “No hugs. Everything’s a little precarious, between the postmortem and the tubes in and out all week. This scarf’s the only thing holding my head on.” Though she was pale, her posture was perfect, her dark red hair restored, her long thin arms folded across her chest. She was dressed as she always dressed: in black jeans and a blue sweater. She simply, newly, had the imperial standoffishness I realized only then that I had always associated with the dead. We pulled up chairs and then each of us sat.

“Should we make some gin rickeys?” Isabel asked, motioning toward the bags of booze and lime juice blend.

“We wanted to come here and each present you with something,” said Pat.

“We did?” I said. I’d brought nothing. I had asked them what to bring and they had laughed it off.

Robin looked at me. “Always a little out of the loop, eh?” She smiled stiffly.

Pat was digging around in a hemp tote bag I hadn’t noticed before. “Here’s a little painting I made for you,” she said, handing a small unframed canvas gingerly to Robin. I couldn’t see what the painting was of. Robin stared at it for a very long time and then looked back up at Pat and said, “Thank you so much.” She momentarily laid the painting in her lap and I could see it was nothing but a plain white blank.

I looked longingly at the paper sack of gin.

“And I have a new dance for you!” whispered Isabel excitedly at Robin.

“You do?” I said.

Robin turned to me again. “Always the last to know, huh,” she said and then winced, as if speaking hurt. She clutched Pat’s painting to her stomach.

Isabel stood and moved her chair out of the way. “This piece is dedicated to Robin Ross,” she announced. And then, after a moment’s stillness, she began to move, saying lines of poetry as she did. “ ‘Heap not on this mound / Roses that she loved so well; / Why bewilder her with roses / That she cannot see or smell?’ ” There was more, and as, reciting, she flew and turned and balanced on one leg, her single arm aloft, I thought, What the hell kind of poem is this? It seemed rude to speak of death to the dead, and I kept checking in with Robin’s face, to see how she was taking it, but Robin remained impassive. At the end, she placed the painting back in her lap and clapped. I was about to clap as well, when car headlights from the driveway suddenly arced across the room.

“It’s the cops! Get down!” said Isabel, and we all hit the floor.

“They’re patrolling the house,” whispered Robin, lying on her back on the rug. She was hugging Pat’s painting to her chest. “I guess there have been calls from a neighbor or something. Just lie here for a minute and they’ll leave.” The police car idled in the driveway for a minute, perhaps taking down the license number of Isabel’s car, and then pulled away.

“It’s OK. We can get up now,” said Robin.

“Whew. That was close,” said Pat.

We all got back into our chairs and there was then a long silence, like a Quaker wedding, which I came to understand was being directed at me.

“Well, I guess it’s my turn,” I said. “It’s been a terrible month. First the election, and now this. You.” I indicated Robin, and she nodded just slightly, then grabbed at her scarf and retied the knot. “And I don’t have my violin or my piano here,” I said. Isabel and Pat were staring at me hopelessly. “So — I guess I’ll just sing.” I stood up and cleared my throat. I knew that if you took “The Star-Spangled Banner” very slowly and mournfully, it altered not just the attitude of the song but the actual punctuation, turning it into a protest and a question. I sang it slowly, not without a little twang. “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” Then I sat down. The three of them applauded, Isabel slapping her thigh with one hand.

“Very nice,” Robin said to me. “You never sing enough,” she added, ambiguously. Her smile to me was effortful and pinched. “Now I have to go,” she said, and she stood, leaving Pat’s painting behind on the chair, and walked into the lit hallway, after which we heard the light switch flick off. The whole house was plunged into darkness again.

“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 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 had hung 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.”