Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

“There are a bazillion Brazilians here,” said Nickie, arriving with two lemonades.

“What did you expect?” I took one of the lemonades for Ian and put my arm around her.

“I don’t know. I only ever met her sister. Just once. The upside is at least I’m not the only one wearing a color.”

We gazed across the long yard of the farmhouse. Maria’s sister and her mother were by the rosebushes, having their pictures taken without the bride.

“Maria and her sister both look like their mother.” Her mother and I had met once before, and I now nodded in her direction across the yard. I couldn’t tell if she could see me.

Nickie nodded with a slight smirk. “Their father died in a car crash. So yeah, they don’t look like him.”

I swatted her arm. “Nickie. Sheesh.”

She was silent for a while. “Do you ever think of Dad?”

“Dad who?”

“Come on.”

“You mean, Dad-eeeeee?”

The weekend her father left — left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back — he had said, “You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.”

And I had said, “Are you on crack?” And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, “Yes, a little.”

“Dadder. As in badder ,” Nickie said now. She sometimes claimed to friends that her father had died, and when she was asked how, she would gaze bereavedly off into the distance and say, “A really, really serious game of Hangman.” Mothers and their only children of divorce were a skewed family dynamic, if they were families at all. Perhaps they were more like cruddy buddy movies, and the dialogue between them was unrecognizable as filial or parental. It was extraterrestrial. With a streak of dog-walkers-meeting-at-the-park. It contained more sibling banter than it should have. Still, I preferred the whole thing to being a lonely old spinster, the fate I once thought I was most genetically destined for, though I’d worked hard, too hard, to defy and avoid it, when perhaps there it lay ahead of me regardless. If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why “learn to be alone” in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

Maria came out of the house in her beautiful shoulderless wedding dress, which was white as could be.

“What a fantastic costume,” said Nickie archly.

Nickie was both keen observer and enthusiastic participant in the sartorial disguise department, and when she was little there had been much playing of Wedding, fake bridal bouquets made of ragged plastic-handled sponges tossed up into the air and often into the garage basketball hoop, catching there. She was also into Halloween. She would trick-or-treat for UNICEF dressed in a sniper outfit or a suicide bomber outfit replete with vest. Once when she was eight, she went as a dryad, a tree nymph, and when asked at doors what she was, she kept saying, “A tree-nip.” She had been a haughty trick-or-treater, alert to the failed adult guessing game of it— you’re a what? a vampire? — so when the neighbors looked confused, she scowled and said reproachfully, “Have you never studied Greek mythology?” Nickie knew how to terrify. She had sometimes been more interested in answering our own door than in knocking on others, peering around the edge of it with a witch hat and a loud cackle. “I think it’s time to get back to the customers,” she announced to me one Halloween when she was five, grabbing my hand and racing back to our house. She was fearless: she had always chosen the peanut allergy table at school since a boy she liked sat there — the cafeteria version of The Magic Mountain . Nickie’s childhood, like all dreams, sharpened artificially into stray vignettes when I tried to conjure it, then faded away entirely. Now tall and long-limbed and inscrutable, she seemed more than ever like a sniper. I felt paralyzed beside her, and the love I had for her was less for this new spiky Nickie than for the old spiky one, which was still inside her somewhere, though it was a matter of faith to think so. Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether. When, in the last few months, Nickie had “stood her ground” in various rooms of the house, screaming at me abusively, I would begin mutely to disrobe, slowly lifting my shirt over my head so as not to see her, and only that would send her flying out of the room in disgust. Only nakedness was silencing, but at least something was.

“I can’t believe Maria’s wearing white,” said Nickie.

I shrugged. “What color should she wear?”

“Gray!” Nickie said immediately. “To acknowledge having a brain! A little gray matter!”

“Actually, I saw something on PBS recently that said only the outer bark of the brain — and it does look like bark — is gray. Apparently the other half of the brain has a lot of white matter. For connectivity.”

Nickie snorted, as she often did when I uttered the letters PBS . “Then she should wear gray in acknowledgment of having half a brain.”

I nodded. “I get your point,” I said.

Guests were eating canapés on paper plates and having their pictures taken with the bride. Not so much with Maria’s new groom, a boy named Hank, which was short not for Henry but for Johannes, and who was not wearing sunglasses like everyone else but was sort of squinting at Maria in pride and disbelief. Hank was also a musician, though he mostly repaired banjos and guitars, restrung and varnished them, and that was how he, Maria, and Ian had all met.

Now the air was filled with the old-silver-jewelry smell of oncoming rain. I edged toward Ian, who was looking for the next song, idly strumming, trying not to watch his father eye Maria.

“Whatcha got? ‘I’ll Be There’?” I asked cheerfully. I had always liked Ian. He had chosen Maria like a character, met her on a semester abroad and then come home already married to her — much to the marveling of his dad. Ian loved Maria, and was always loyal to her, no matter what story she was in, but Maria was a narrative girl and the story had to be spellbinding or she lost interest in the main character, who was sometimes herself and sometimes not. She was destined to marry and marry and marry. Ian smiled and began to sing “I Will Always Love You,” sounding oddly like Bob Dylan but without the sneer.

I swayed. I stayed. I did not get in the way.

“You are a saint,” I said when he finished. He was a sweet boy, and when Nickie was little he had often come over and played soccer in the yard with her and Maria.

“Oh no, I’m just a deposed king of corn. She bought the farm. I mean, I sold it to her, and then she flipped it and bought this one instead.” He motioned toward the endless field beyond the tent, where the corn was midget and standing in mud, June not having been hot enough to evaporate the puddles. The tomatoes and marijuana would not do well this year. “Last night I had a dream that I was in West Side Story and had forgotten all the words to ‘I like to be in America.’ Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“Jesus, what is my dad doing ?” Ian said, looking down and away.

Ian’s father was still prowling the perimeter, a little drunkenly, not taking his eyes off the bride.