Lorrie Moore: Bark: Stories

“Bruny, this is Ira,” said Zora. Ira put his wineglass down and thrust out his hand to introduce himself. Bruno unfolded his arms but did not shake hands. Instead, he thrust out his chin and scowled. Ira picked up his wineglass again.

“So, good to meet you. Your mother has said a lot of wonderful things about you.” He tried to remember one.

Bruno looked at the appetizer bowl. “What’s this grassy gunk all over the olives.” It was not really a question, so no one answered it. Bruno turned back to his mother. “May I go back to my room now?”

“Yes, dear,” said Zora. She looked at Ira. “He’s practicing for the woodwind competition next Saturday. He’s very serious.”

When Bruno had tramped back down to his room, Ira leaned in to kiss Zora, but she pulled away. “Bruny might hear us,” she whispered.

“Let’s go to a restaurant. Just you and me. My salad’s no good.”

“Oh, we couldn’t leave Bruno here alone. He’s only sixteen.”

“I was working in a steel factory when I was sixteen!” Ira decided not to say. Instead he said, “Doesn’t he have friends?”

“He’s between social groups right now,” Zora said defensively. “It’s difficult for him to find other kids who are as intellectually serious as he is.”

“We’ll rent him a movie,” said Ira. “Excuse me, a film . A foreign film, since he’s serious. A documentary. We’ll rent him a foreign documentary!”

“We don’t have a VCR.”

“You don’t have a VCR?” At this point Ira found the silverware and helped set the table. When they sat down to eat and poured more wine in their glasses, Bruno suddenly came out and joined them, with no beckoning. The spring spaghetti was tossed in a large glass bowl with grated cheese. “Just how you like it, Brune,” said Zora.

“So, Bruno. What grade are you in?”

Bruno rolled his eyes. “Tenth,” he said.

“So college is a ways off,” said Ira, accidentally thinking out loud.

“I guess,” said Bruno, who then tucked into the spring spaghetti.

“So — what classes are you taking in school, besides music?” asked Ira, after a long awkward spell.

“I don’t take music,” he said with his mouth full. “I’m in All-State Woodwinds.”

“All-State Woodwinds! Interesting! Do you take any courses in like, say, American history?”

“They’re studying the Amazon rain forest yet again,” said Zora. “They’ve been studying it since preschool.”

Ira slurped with morose heartiness at his wine — he had spent too much of his life wandering about in the desert of his own drool, oh, the mealtime assaults he had made on his own fragile consciousness — and some dribbled on his shirt. “For Pete’s sake, look at this.” He dabbed at the wine spot with his napkin and looked up at Bruno, with an ingratiating grin. “Someday this could happen to you,” Ira said, twinkling in Bruno’s direction.

“That would never happen to me,” muttered Bruno.

Ira continued dabbing at his shirt. He began thinking of his book. Though I be your mother’s beau, no rival I, no foe, faux foe . He loved rhymes. Fum! Thumb! Dumb! They were harmonious and joyous in the face of total crap.

Bruno began gently kicking his mother under the table. Zora began playfully to nudge him back, and soon they were both kicking away, their energetic footsie causing them to slip in their chairs a little, while Ira pretended not to notice, cutting his salad with the edge of his fork, too frightened to look up very much. After a few minutes — when the footsie had stopped and Ira had exclaimed, “Great dinner, Zora!”—they all stood and cleared their places, taking the dishes into the kitchen, putting them in a messy pile in the sink. Ira started halfheartedly to run warm water over them, and Zora and Bruno, some distance behind him, began to jostle up against each other, ramming lightly into each other’s sides. Ira glanced over his shoulder and saw Zora now step back and assume a wrestler’s starting stance, as Bruno leaped toward her, heaving her over his shoulder, then running her into the living room, where, Ira could see, Bruno dumped her, laughing, on the couch.

Should Ira join in? Should he leave?

“I can still pin you, Brune, when we’re on the bed,” Zora said.

“Yeah, right,” said Bruno.

Perhaps it was time to go. Next time Ira would bring over a VCR for Bruno and just take Zora out to eat. “Well, look at the time! Good to meet you, Bruno,” he said, shaking the kid’s large, limp hand. Zora stood breathlessly. She walked Ira out to his car, helping to carry his chair and salad bowl. “It was a lovely dinner,” said Ira. “And you are a lovely woman. And your son seems so bright and the two of you are adorable together.”

Zora beamed, seemingly mute with happiness. If only Ira had known how to speak such fanciful baubles during his marriage, surely Marilyn would never have left him.

He gave Zora a quick kiss on the cheek — the heat of her wrestling had heightened her beautiful nutmeg smell — then kissed her again on the neck, near her ear. Alone in the car on the way home he thought of all the deeply wrong erotic attachments made in wartime, all the crazy romances cooked up quickly by the species to offset death. He turned the radio on: the news of the Mideast was so surreal and bleak that when he heard the tonnage of the bombs planned for Baghdad, he could feel his jaw fall slack in astonishment. He pulled the car over, turned on the interior light, and gazed in the rearview mirror just to see what his face looked like in this particular state. He had felt his face drop in this manner once before — when he got the divorce papers from Marilyn, now there was shock and awe for you; there was decapitation —but he had never actually seen what he looked like this way. So. Now he knew. Not good: stunned, pale, and not all that bright. It wasn’t the same as self-knowledge, but life was long and not that edifying, and one sometimes had to make do with randomly seized tidbits.

He started up again, slowly; outside it had begun to rain, and at a brightly lit intersection of two gas stations, one QuikTrip, and a KFC, half a dozen young people in hooded yellow slickers were holding up signs that read HONK FOR PEACE. Ira fell upon his horn, first bouncing his hand there, then just leaning his whole arm into it. Other cars began to do the same, and soon no one was going anywhere, a congregation of mourning doves! but honking like geese in a wild chorus of futility, windshield wipers clearing their fan-shaped spaces on the drizzled night glass. No car went anywhere for the change of two lights. For all its stupidity and solipsism and scenic civic grief, it was something like a gorgeous moment.

Despite her reading difficulties, despite the witless naming of the cats, Ira knew Bekka was highly intelligent. He knew from the time she spent lying around the house, bored and sighing, saying, “Dad? When will childhood be over?” This was a sign of genius! As were other things. Her complete imperviousness to the adult male voice, for instance. Her scrutiny of all food. With interest and hesitancy, she studied the antiwar lawn signs that bestrewed the neighborhood. WAR IS NOT THE PATH TO PEACE, she read slowly aloud. Then added, “Well duh.”

WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER, she read on another. “Well that doesn’t make sense,” she said to Ira. “War is the answer,” she said. “It’s the answer to the question What’s George Bush going to do real soon?”

The times Bekka stayed at Ira’s house, she woke up in the morning and told him her dreams. “I had a dream last night that I was walking with two of my friends and we met a wolf. But I made a deal with the wolf. I said, ‘Don’t eat me. These other two have more meat on them.’ And the wolf said, ‘OK,’ and we shook on it and I got away.”