Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“You crawled back on your hands and knees?”

“Well, yes,” she admitted. “There was a nice Belgian man who helped me.” She felt unmasked, no doubt, before her daughter and now gulped at her Guinness.

Abby tried to take a cheerful tone, switching the subject a little, and it reminded her of Theda, Theda somehow living in her voice, her larynx suddenly a summer camp for the cheerful and slow. “Well, look at you!” said Abby. “Do you feel eloquent and confident, now that you’ve kissed the stone?”

“Not really.” Mrs. Mallon shrugged.

Now that they had kissed it, or sort of, would they become self-conscious? What would they end up talking about?

Movies, probably. Just as they always had at home. Movies with scenery, movies with songs.

“How about you?” asked Mrs. Mallon.

“Well,” said Abby, “mostly I feel like we’ve probably caught strep throat. And yet, and yet …” Here she sat up and leaned forward. No tests, or radio quizzes, or ungodly speeches, or songs brain-dead with biography, or kooky prayers, or shouts, or prolix conversations that with drink and too much time always revealed how stupid and mean even the best people were, just simply this: “A toast. I feel a toast coming on.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I do.” No one had toasted Abby and Bob at their little wedding, and that’s what had been wrong, she believed now. No toast. There had been only thirty guests and they had simply eaten the ham canapes and gone home. How could a marriage go right? It wasn’t that such ceremonies were important in and of themselves. They were nothing. They were zeros. But they were zeros as placeholders; they held numbers and equations intact. And once you underwent them, you could move on, know the empty power of their blessing, and not spend time missing them.

From here on in, she would believe in toasts. One was collecting itself now, in her head, in a kind of hesitant philately. She gazed over at her mother and took a deep breath. Perhaps her mother had never shown Abby affection, not really, but she had given her a knack for solitude, with its terrible lurches outward, and its smooth glide back to peace. Abby would toast her for that. It was really the world that was one’s brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world. Abby lifted her glass. “May the worst always be behind you. May the sun daily warm your arms.…” She looked down at her cocktail napkin for assistance, but there was only a cartoon of a big-chested colleen, two shamrocks over her breasts. Abby looked back up. God’s word is quick! “May your car always start—” But perhaps God might also begin with tall, slow words; the belly bloat of a fib; the distended tale. “And may you always have a clean shirt,” she continued, her voice growing gallant, public and loud, “and a holding roof, healthy children and good cabbages — and may you be with me in my heart, Mother, as you are now, in this place; always and forever — like a flaming light.”

There was noise in the pub.

Blank is to childhood as journey is to lips.

“Right,” said Mrs. Mallon, looking into her stout in a concentrated, bright-eyed way. She had never been courted before, not once in her entire life, and now she blushed, ears on fire, lifted her pint, and drank.

I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it’s the body’s reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it’s the heart’s triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It’s life flipping death the bird.

I make this stuff up. But then I feel the stray voltage of my rented charisma, hear the jerry-rigged authority in my voice, and I, too, believe. I’m convinced. The troupe dismantled, the choreography commissions dwindling, my body harder to make limber, to make go, I have come here for two weeks — to Pennsylvania Dutch country, as a “Dancer in the Schools.” I visit classes, at colleges and elementary schools, spreading Dance’s holy word. My head fills with my own yack. What interior life has accrued in me is depleted fast, emptied out my mouth, as I stand before audiences, answering their fearful, forbidding German questions about art and my “whorish dances” (the thrusted hip, the sudden bump and grind before an attitude ). They ask why everything I make seems so “feministic.”

“I think the word is feministical ,” I say. I’ve grown tired. I burned down my life for a few good pieces, and now this.

With only one night left, I’ve fled the Quality Inn. (CREAMED CHICKEN ON WAFFLE $3.95 reads the sign out front. How could I leave?) The karaoke in the cocktail lounge has kept me up, all those tipsy and bellowing voices just back from the men’s room and urged to the front of the lounge to sing “Sexual Healing” or “Alfie.” I’ve accepted an invitation to stay with my old friend Cal, who teaches anthropology at Burkwell, one of the myriad local colleges. He and his wife own a former frat house they’ve never bothered to renovate. “It was the only way we could live in a house this big,” he says. “Besides, we’re perversely fascinated by the wreckage.” It is Fastnacht, the lip of Lent, the night when the locals make hot fried dough and eat it in honor of Christ. We are outside, before dinner, walking Cal’s dog, Chappers, in the cold.

“The house is amazing to look at,” I say. “It’s beat-up in such an intricate way. Like a Rauschenberg. Like one of those beautiful wind-tattered billboards one sees in the California desert.” I’m determined to be agreeable; the house, truth be told, is a shock. Maple seedlings have sprouted up through the dining room floorboards, from where a tree outside has pushed into the foundation. Squirrels the size of collies scrabble in the walls. Paint is chipping everywhere, in scales and blisters and flaps; in the cracked plaster beneath are written the names of women who, in 1972, 1973, and 1974, spent the night during Spring Rush weekend. The kitchen ceiling reads “Sigma power!” and “Wank me with a spoon.”

But I haven’t seen Cal in twelve years, not since he left for Belgium on a Fulbright, so I must be nice. He seems different to me: shorter, older, cleaner, despite the house. In a burst of candor, he has already confessed that those long years ago, out of friendship for me, he’d been exaggerating his interest in dance. “I didn’t get it,” he admitted. “I kept trying to figure out the story . I’d look at the purple guy who hadn’t moved in awhile, and I’d think, So what’s the issue with him ?”

Now Chappers tugs at his leash. “Yeah, the house.” Cal sighs. “We did once have a painter give us an estimate, but we were put off by the names of the paints: Myth, Vesper, Snickerdoodle. I didn’t want anything called Snickerdoodle in my house.”

“What is a Snickerdoodle?”

“I think they’re hunted in Madagascar.”

I leap to join him, to play. “Or eaten in Vienna,” I say.

“Or worshiped in L.A.” I laugh again for him, and then we watch as Chappers sniffs at the roots of an oak.

“But a myth or a vesper — they’re always good,” I add.

“Crucial,” he says. “But we didn’t need paint for that.”

Cal’s son, Eugene, is seven and has cystic fibrosis. Eugene’s whole life is a race with medical research. “It’s not that I’m not for the arts,” says Cal. “ You’re here; money for the arts brought you here. That’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to see you after all these years. It’s wonderful to fund the arts. It’s wonderful; you’re wonderful. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.”