Lorrie Moore: Bark: Stories

Or “I had a strange dream last night that I was a bad little fairy.”

She was in contact with her turmoil and with her ability to survive. How could that be anything less than emotional brilliance?

One morning she said, “I had a really scary dream. There was this tornado with a face inside? And I married it.” Ira smiled. “It may sound funny to you, Dad, but it was really scary.”

He stole a look at her school writing journal once and found this poem:

Time moving .

Time standing still .

What is the difference?

Time standing still is the difference .

He had no idea what it meant, but he knew it was awesome. He had given her the middle name Clio, after the muse of History, so of course she would know very well that time standing still was the difference — whatever that meant. He himself felt he was watching history from the dimmest of backwaters, a land of beer and golf, the horizon peacefully fish-gray, the sky a suicide silver, the windows duct-taped with plastic sheeting so that he felt he was observing life from a plastic container, like a leftover, peering into the tallow fog of the world. Time moving. Time standing still .

The major bombing started on the first day of spring. “It’s happening,” Ira said into Mike’s answering machine. “The whole thing is starting now.”

Zora called and asked him to the movies. “Sure,” Ira said. “I’d love to.”

“Well, we were thinking of this Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but Bruno would also be willing to see the Mel Gibson one.” We . He was dating a tenth grader now. Even in tenth grade he’d never done that. Well, now he’d see what he’d been missing.

They picked him up at six-forty, and, as Bruno made no move to cede the front seat, Ira sat in the back of Zora’s Honda, his long legs wedged together at a diagonal like a lady riding sidesaddle. Zora drove carefully, not like a mad hellcat at all, which for some reason he’d thought she would. As a result they were late for the Mel Gibson movie and had to make do with the Arnold Schwarzenegger one. Ira thrust money at the ticket taker saying, “Three please,” and they all wordlessly went in, their computerized stubs in hand. “So you like Arnold Schwarzenegger?” Ira said to Bruno as they headed down one of the red-carpeted corridors.

“Not really,” muttered Bruno. Bruno sat between Zora and Ira, and together they all passed a small container of popcorn back and forth. Ira jumped up twice to refill it back out in the lobby, a kind of relief for him from Arnold, whose line readings were less brutish than they used to be, but not less brutish enough. Afterward, heading out into the parking lot, Bruno and Zora reenacted body-bouncing scenes from the film, throwing themselves against each other’s backs and shoulders with great, giggling force. When they reached the car, Ira was again relegated to the backseat.

“Shall we go to dinner?” he called up to the front.

Both Zora and Bruno were silent.

“Shall we?” he tried again cheerfully.

“Would you like to, Bruno?” asked Zora. “Are you hungry?”

“I don’t know,” Bruno said, peering gloomily out the window.

“Did you like the movie?” asked Ira.

Bruno shrugged. “I dunno.”

They went to a barbecue place and got ribs and chicken. “Let me pay for this,” said Ira, though Zora had never offered. He would spare them the awkwardness.

“Oh, OK,” she said.

Afterward, Zora dropped Ira at the curb, where Ira stood for a minute, waving, in front of his house. Bruno flung the back of his hand toward him, not actually looking. Zora waved vigorously through the open window over the top of the car. He watched them roll down the end of the block and disappear around the corner. He went inside and made himself a drink with cranberry juice and rum. He turned on the TV news and watched the bombing. Night bombing, so you could not really see.

A few mornings later was the first of a new month, his birthday month. The illusion of time flying, he knew, was to make people think life could have more in it than it actually could. Actually, time flying could make human lives seem victorious over time itself. Time flew so fast that in ways it failed to make an impact. People’s lives fell between its stabbing powers like insects between raindrops. “We cheat the power of time with our very brevity!” he said aloud to Bekka, feeling confident she would understand, but she only just kept petting the cats. The house had already begun to fill with the acrid-honey smell of cat pee, though neither he nor Bekka seemed to mind. Spring! One more month and it would be May, his least favorite. Why not a month named Can? Or Must! Well, maybe not Must. Zora phoned him early, with a dour tone. “I don’t know. I think we should break up,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yes, I don’t see that this is going anywhere. Things aren’t really moving forward in any way I can understand. And I don’t think we should waste each other’s time.”

“Really?” Desperation washed through him.

“It may be fine for some, but dinner, movie, then sex is not my idea of a relationship.”

“Maybe we could eliminate the movie?”

“We’re adults—”

“True. I mean, we are?”

“—and what is the point, if there are clear obstacles or any unclear idea of where this is headed, of continuing? It becomes difficult to maintain faith. We’ve hardly begun seeing each other, I realize, but already I just don’t envision us as a couple.”

“I’m sorry to hear you say that.” He was now sitting down in his kitchen. He could feel himself trying not to cry.

“Let’s just move on,” she said with gentle firmness.

“Really? Is that honestly what you think? I feel terrible.”

“April Fools’!” she cried out into the phone.

His heart rose to his throat, then sank to his colon, then bobbed back up close to the surface of his rib cage, where his right hand was clutching at it. Were there paddles somewhere close by that could be applied to his chest?

“I beg your pardon?” he asked faintly.

“April Fools’,” she said again, laughing. “It’s April Fools’ Day.”

“I guess,” he said, gasping a little, “I guess that’s the kind of joke that gets better the longer you think about it.”

He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.

“How are you liking Zora?” asked Mike over a beer, after work, after they’d mulled over the war and Dick Cheney’s tax return, which had just been reprinted in the paper. Why wasn’t there a revolution? Was everyone too distracted with tennis and sex and iris bulbs? Marxism in the spring lacked oomph. Ira had just hired someone to paint his house, so that now in his front lawn he had two signs: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER in blue and on the other side, in black and yellow, JENKINS PAINTING IS THE ANSWER.

“Oh, Zora’s great.” Ira paused. “Great. Just great. In fact, do you perhaps know any other single women?”

“Really?”

“Well, it’s just that she might not be all that mentally well .” Ira thought about the moment, just last night, at dinner, when she’d said, “I love your mouth most when it does that odd grimace in the middle of sex,” and then she contorted her face so hideously, Ira felt he had been struck. Later in the evening she had said, “Watch this,” and she took her collapsible umbrella, placed its handle on the crotch of her trousers, then pressed the button that sent it rocketing out, unfurled, like a cartoon erection. Ira did not know who or what she was, though he wanted to cut her slack, give her a break, bestow upon her the benefit of the doubt — all those paradoxical clichés of supposed generosity, most of which he had denied his wife. He tried not to think that the only happiness he might have been fated for had already occurred, had been with Bekka and Marilyn, when the three of them were together. A hike, a bike ride — he tried not to think that his crazy dream of family had shown its sweet face only long enough to torment him for the rest of his life though scarcely long enough to sustain him through a meal. To torture oneself with this idea of family happiness while not actually having a family, he decided, might be a fairly new circumstance in social history. People were probably not like this a hundred years ago. He imagined an exhibit at the society. He imagined the puppets.