Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

Pete had lost his job in the new economic downturn. At one point he had been poised to live with her, but her child’s deepening troubles had caused him to pull back — he believed he loved her but could not find the large space he needed for himself in her life or in her house (and did not blame her son, or did he?). He eyed with somewhat visible covetousness and sour remarks the front room that her son, when home, lived in with large blankets and empty ice-cream pints, an Xbox, and DVDs.

She no longer knew where Pete went, sometimes for weeks at a time. She thought it an act of vigilance and attachment that she would not ask, would try not to care. She once grew so hungry for touch she went to the Stressed Tress salon around the corner just to have her hair washed. The few times she had flown to Buffalo to see her brother and his family, at airport security she had chosen the pat-downs and the wandings rather than the scanning machine.

“Where is Pete?” her son cried out at visits she made alone, his face scarlet with acne, swollen and wide with the effects of medications that had been changed then changed again, and she said Pete was busy today, but soon, soon, maybe next week. A maternal vertigo beset her, the room circled, and the cutting scars on her son’s arms sometimes seemed to spell out Pete’s name in the thin lines there, the loss of fathers etched primitively in an algebra of skin. In the carousel spin of the room, the white webbed lines resembled coarse campfire writing, as when young people used to stiffly carve the words PEACE and FUCK in park picnic tables and trees, the C three-quarters of a square. Mutilation was a language. And vice versa. The cutting endeared her boy to the girls, who were all cutters themselves and seldom saw a boy who was one as well, and so in the group sessions he became popular, which he seemed neither to mind nor perhaps really to notice. When no one was looking he cut the bottoms of his feet with crisp paper from crafts hour. He also pretended to read the girls’ soles like palms, announcing the arrival of strangers and the progress toward romance—“toemances!” he called them — and detours, sometimes glimpsing his own fate in the words they had cut there.

Now she and Pete went to see her son without the jams but with a soft deckle-edged book about Daniel Boone, which was allowed, even if her son would believe it contained messages for him, believe that although it was a story about a long-ago person it was also the story of his own sorrow and heroism in the face of every manner of wilderness and defeat and abduction and that his own life could be draped over the book, which was noble armature for the revelation of tales of him . There would be clues in the words on pages with numbers that added up to his age: 97, 88, 466. There were other veiled references to his existence. There always were.

They sat at the visitors’ table together and her son set the book aside and did try to smile at both of them. There was still sweetness in his eyes, the sweetness he was born with, even if fury could dart in a scattershot fashion across them. Someone had cut his tawny hair — or at least had tried. Perhaps the staff person did not want the scissors near him for a prolonged period and had snipped quickly, then leaped away, then approached again, grabbed and snipped, then jumped back. At least that’s what it looked like. It was wavy hair and had to be cut carefully. Now it no longer cascaded down but was close to his head, springing out at angles that seemed to matter to no one but a mother.

“So where have you been?” her son asked Pete, giving him a hard stare.

“Good question,” said Pete, as if praising the thing would make it go away. How could people be mentally well in such a world?

“Do you miss us?” the boy asked.

Pete did not answer.

“Do you think of me when you look at the black capillaries of the trees at night?”

“I suppose I do.” Pete stared back at him, so as not to shift in his seat. “I am always hoping you are OK and that they treat you well here.”

“Do you think of my mom when staring up at the clouds and all they hold?”

Pete fell quiet again.

Her son continued, studying Pete. “Have you ever watched how sparrows can kill the offspring of others? Baby wrens, for instance? I’ve been watching out the windows. Did you know that sparrows can swoop into the wrens’ house and pluck out the fledglings from their nests and hurl them to the ground with a force you would not think possible for a sparrow? Even a homicidal sparrow?”

“Nature can be cruel,” said Pete.

“Nature can be one big horror movie! But murder is not something one would expect — from a sparrow. All things can be found in the world — but usually you have to look for them. You have to look! For instance, you have to look for us! We are sort of hidden but sort of not. We can be found. If you look in the obvious places, we can be found. We haven’t disappeared, even if you want us to, we are there to—”

“That’s enough,” she said to her son, who turned to her with a change of expression.

“There’s supposed to be cake this afternoon for someone’s birthday,” he said.

“That will be nice!” she said, smiling back.

“No candles, of course. Or forks. We will just have to grab the frosting and mash it into our eyes for blinding. Do you ever think about how at that moment of the candles time stands still, even as the moments carry away the smoke? It’s like the fire of burning love. Do you ever wonder why so many people have things they don’t deserve but how absurd all those things are to begin with? Do you really think a wish can come true if you never ever ever ever ever ever tell it to anyone?”

On the ride home she and Pete did not exchange a word, and every time she looked at his aging hands, clasped arthritically around the steering wheel, the familiar thumbs slung low in their slightly simian way, she would understand anew the desperate place they both were in, though the desperations were separate, not joined, and her eyes would then feel the stabbing pressure of tears. The last time her son had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, morbidly ingenious. He might have succeeded but a fellow patient, a girl from group, had stopped him at the last minute. There had been blood to be mopped. Once her son had only wanted a distracting pain, but then soon he had wanted to tear a hole in himself and flee through it. Life was full of spies and preoccupying espionage. Yet the spies sometimes would flee as well and someone might have to go after them in order, paradoxically, to escape them altogether, over the rolling fields of living dream, into the early morning mountains of dawning signification.

There was a storm in front and lightning did its quick, purposeful zigzag between and in the clouds. She did not need such stark illustration that horizons could be shattered, filled with messages, broken codes, yet there it was. A spring snow began to fall with the lightning still cracking, and Pete put the windshield wipers on so that they both could peer through the cleared semicircles at the darkening road before them. She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did. The fruit trees had bloomed early, for instance, and the orchards they passed were pink, but the early warmth precluded bees, and so there would be little fruit. Most of the dangling blossoms would fall in this very storm.

When they arrived at her house and went in, Pete glanced at himself in the hallway mirror. Perhaps he needed assurance that he was alive and not the ghost he seemed.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked, hoping he would stay. “I have some good vodka. I could make you a nice White Russian!”