Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

She and Dench had not developed their talents sufficiently nor cared for them properly — or so a booking agent told them.

Dench took offense. “You forget about the prize perplexity, the award angle — they are often looking for people like us: we could win something!” he exclaimed, with Pringles in his teeth.

The gardenia in KC’s throat, the flower that was her singing voice — its brown wilt would have to be painstakingly slowed through the years — had already begun its rapid degeneration into simple crocus, then scraggly weed. She’d been given something perfect — youth! — and done imperfect things with it. The moon shone whole then partial in the sky, having its life without her. Sometimes she just chased roughly after a melody — like someone kicking a can down a road. She had not hemmed in her speaking voice, kept it tame and tended so that her singing one could fly. Her speaking voice was the same as her singing one, a roller coaster of various registers, the Myrna Loy — Billie Burke timbre of the Edwardian grandmother who had raised her, a woman who had trained at conservatory but had never had a singing career and practically sang every sentence she uttered: Katherine? It’s time for dinner went up and down the scale. Only her dying words— Marry well —had been flat, the drone of chagrin, a practical warning: life-preserving but with a glimpse of a dark little bunker in a war not yet declared. Marry well had been uttered after she begged KC to get a teaching certificate. Teaching makes interesting people boring, sure , she had said. But it also makes boring people interesting. So there’s an upside. There always is an upside if you look up .

Dench’s own poor mother wasn’t able to leave him — or his sisters — a dime, though he had always done what she said, even that one year they lived in motels and he obligingly wore the identical nightgown as his sisters so that they might better be mistaken for a single child, to avoid an extra room charge, in case the maid walked in. His young mother had died with breathing tubes hooked right to her wallet, he said, just sucking it all up. Dench made a big comedic whooshing sound when he told this part. His father’s disappearance, which had come long before, had devastated and haunted her: when they were out for dinner one night his father announced that he had to see a man about a horse, and he excused himself, went to the men’s room, and climbed out the window never to return. Dench made a whooshing sound for this part of the story as well.

“I can’t decide whether that is cowardice or a weird kind of courage,” Dench said.

“It’s neither,” KC replied. “It has nothing to do with either of those things.”

Motherless children would always find each other. She had once heard that. They had the misery that wasn’t misery but presumed to be so to others. They had the misery that liked company and was company. Only sometimes they felt the facts of their motherless lives. They were a long, long way from home. They had theme songs hatched in a spiritual tradition. There was no fondling of the gold coins of memory. The world was their orphanage.

But when they moved in together he hesitated.

“What about my belongings?” he asked.

“It’s not like you have a dog who won’t get along with mine,” she said.

“I have plants.”

“But plants are not a dog.”

“Oh, I see: you’re one of those people who thinks animals are better, more important than plants!”

She studied him, his eyes large with protest or with drugs or with madness. There were too many things to choose from. “Are you serious?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said and turned to unpack his things.

Now she rose to take the dog for his daily walk. She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.

The sublet she and Dench were in now was a nice one, a fluke, a modern, flat-roofed, stone-and-redwood ranch house with a carport in a neighborhood that was not far from the hospital and was therefore full of surgeons and radiologists and their families. The hospital itself was under construction and the cranes bisected the sky. Big-jawed excavators and backhoes worked beneath lights at night. Walking the dog, she once watched as an excavator’s mandibled head was released and fell to the ground; the headless neck then leaned down and began to nudge it, as if trying to find out if it might still be alive. Of course there was an operator, but after that it was hard to think of a creature like this as a machine. When a wall was knocked down, and its quiet secrets sent scattering, the lines between things seemed up for grabs.

The person who owned their house was not connected to the hospital. He was an entrepreneur named Ian who had made a bundle in the nineties on some sort of business software and who for long stretches of time lived out of state — in Ibiza, Zihuatanejo, and Portland — in order to avoid the cold. The house came furnished except, strangely, for a bed, which they bought. On their first day they found food in the refrigerator with not even mold but dust on it. “I don’t know,” said Dench. “Look at the closets. This must be what Ian was using. With hooks this strong maybe we don’t need a bed. We can just hang ourselves there at night, like bats.”

With Dench she knew, in an unspoken way, that she was the one who was supposed to get them to wherever it was they were going. She was supposed to be the GPS lady who, when you stopped for gas, said, “Get back on the highway.” She tried to be that voice with Dench: stubborn, unflappable, keeping to the map and not saying what she knew the GPS lady really wanted to say, which was not “Recalculating” but “What in fucking hell are you thinking?”

“It all may look wrong from outer space, which is where a GPS is seeing it from,” Dench would say, when proposing alternatives of any sort, large or small, “but on the ground there’s a certain logic. Stick with me on this one. You can have all the others.”

There were no sidewalks in this wooded part of town. The sap of the stick-bare trees was just stirring after what looked like a fierce fire of a winter. The roadside gullies that would soon warm and sprout joe-pye weed and pea were still just pebble-flecked mud, and KC’s dog, Cat, sniffed his way along, feeling the winter’s melt, the ground loosening its fertile odor of wakened worms. Overhead the dirt pearl sky of March hung low as a hat brim. The houses were sidled next to marshes and sycamores, and as she walked along the roads occasionally a car would pass, and she would yank on Cat’s leash to heel him close. The roads, all named after colleges out east — Dartmouth Drive, Wellesley Way, Sweet Briar Road; where was her alma mater, SUNY New Paltz Street? — were glistening with the flat glossy colors of flattened box turtles who’d made the spring crossing too slowly and were now stuck to the macadam, thin and shiny as magazine ads.

HOSPICE CARE: IT’S NEVER TOO SOON TO CALL read a billboard near the coffee shop in what constituted the neighborhood’s commercial roar. Next to it a traffic sign read PASS WITH CARE. Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real. The largest part of the strip was occupied by an out-of-business bookstore whose plate-glass windows were already cloudy with dust. The D was missing from the sign so that it now read BOR ERS. In insolvency, truth: soon the chain would be shipping its entire stock to the latrines of Swaziland.

Cat was a good dog, part corgi, part Lab, and if KC wore her sunglasses into the coffee shop he could pass for a Seeing Eye dog, and she a blind person, so she didn’t have to tie him to a parking sign out front.