Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

“No.”

“Well, maybe I’m wrong about those. I’m probably wrong. That’s where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in.” In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amidst the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died. Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit’s gums. On the counter a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark’s grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn’t. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.

The summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She’d been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even buried in an excellent suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date. Why not complete the symmetry? he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and in keeping generally with the principles of space alien culture. The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if it were the more formal versions of themselves who were divorcing — their birth certificates were divorcing! — and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not told her yet he’d bought a new one. “Honey,” she said trembling, “something very interesting came in the mail today.”

Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat. At two different funerals of elderly people she hardly knew she went in and wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe — or rather, Raphael — again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation, so what could they do. This at last was what all those high school drama classes had been for: acting. She once had played the queen in The Winter’s Tale and once a changeling child in a play called Love Me Right Now , written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these she learned that time was essentially a comic thing — only constraints upon it forced it to tragedy, or at least to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde — if only they’d had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.

Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in order to persuade her not to join them on this vacation. “I don’t think you should go,” he announced.

“I’m going,” she said.

“We’ll be giving the children false hope.”

“Hope is never false. Or it’s always false. Whatever. It’s just hope,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“I just don’t think you should go.” Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab, as in who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

What bimbo did he want to give her ticket to? (Only later would she find out. “As a feminist you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor told her. “As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit replied.)

And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage “irretrievably broken.” What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction. Was not everything fixable? This age of disposables, was it not also an age of fantastic adhesives? Why “irretrievably broken” like a songbird’s wing? Why not “Do you find this person you were married to, and who is now sitting next to you in the courtroom, a total asshole?” That would suffice, and be more accurate. The term “irretrievably broken” sent one off into an eternity of wondering. Whereas the other did not.

She and Rafe had not yet, however, signed the papers. And there was the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn’t look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring — which did look like a typical wedding ring — a year earlier because he said it “bothered” him. She had thought at the time he’d meant it was rubbing. He had often just shed his clothes spontaneously — when they had first met he was something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

“What if I can’t get my ring off,” she said to him now on the plane to La Caribe, the gringo enclave Rafe had chosen. She had gained a little weight in 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.

More than the girls, who were just little, she was worried about Sam, their sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the 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 and float a little 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 the arrival of riffraff. 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 children from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it there and downplay the creases — to appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once looked at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had gotten lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop — the words LA CARIBE emblazoned across every single thing.