Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

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 guards and barbed wire, throwing rocks. When a cruise ship temporarily docked in the bay, and then departed, she joined some other tourists on the beach to shout at the boat, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass!” as if they were different and not all of them tourists, seeking to console themselves with hierarchies of tourism, to keep the stone-throwing boys from one’s thoughts.

There were ways of making things temporarily vanish. One could disappear oneself in movement and repetition. Sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but Sam sensed their cruelty. “They speak a language,” he said. “We shouldn’t ride them.”

“They look happy,” said Kit.

Sam looked at her with 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 only understand something if you did not desire it. How did he know these things already? Usually girls realized this first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond Kit’s 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, silently, Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bail, as they buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. Anyone near, on a towel, reading of holocausts, turned and smiled. In this fine, far compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable. She went to the central office and signed up for a hot stone massage: “Would you like a man or a woman?” asked the receptionist.

“Excuse me?” asked Kit, 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 ,” her friend Jan used to say, until recently. “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 now, buying time. She thought of the slow mating of snails, an entire day, being hermaphrodites and having it all be so confusing: by the time they had it 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 she knew she’d get a man. Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas — tobacco, incense, cannabis — exhaling and swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed, he had the Dickensian name of Daniel Handler, and he did not speak. He placed hot stones along her back and left them there in a line up her spine — did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him? Are you crazy ? The mad joy pulsing in her face was held over the floor by the table headpiece and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out her nose, which she realized then was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. He left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat she could no longer feel it even there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and feel it 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 — perhaps in embittered rage about his own life — but that more likely had no intention at all. “That was nice,” she said at the end, when she saw him putting all his stones away. He had heated them in a plastic electric Crock-Pot filled with water, she saw, 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 could see.

“They’re river stones,” he said. “I’ve been collecting them for years up in Colorado.” He replaced them in a metal fishing tackle box.

“You live in Colorado?” she asked.

“Used to,” he said, and that was that. Later that day they would see each other at the Farmacia de Jesus and look the other way.

Kit got dressed. “Someday you, like me, will have done sufficient lab work,” Jan had said. “Soon you, like me, in your next life, like me, will want them old and rich, on their deathbed, really, and with no sudden rallyings in the hospice.”

“You’re a woman of steel and ice,” Kit had said.

“Not at all,” Jan had said. “I’m just a voice on the phone, drinking a little tea.”

On their last night of vacation Kit’s suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn’t even open it. They put out the paper doorknob flag that said WAKE US UP FOR THE SEA TURTLES. The doorknob flag had a preprinted request to be woken at 3:00 a.m. 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. But though Sam had hung the flag carefully and before the midnight deadline, no staffperson awoke 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 in the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who’d been too lazy or deaf to have gotten up in time. “Look, come see!” said a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented out the scuba gear. Sam, Beth, Dale, Kit all ran over. (Rafe stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the warming sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in dessicating brown. “I’m going to have to let them go now,” said the man. “You are the last ones to see these little bebés .” He took them over to the water’s edge and let them go, hours too late, to make their own way into the sea. And one by one a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.

Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else’s lust. “I think I need a drink,” she said. The kids were swimming.

“Don’t expect me to buy you a drink,” he said.

Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passersby? Who told you that ?

When they left La Caribe, its crab claws of land extending into the blue bay, she was glad. Staying there she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it all in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But for now she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who as he aged stoically and carried on regardless would come scarcely to recall — was it past even imagining? — that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.