Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“Looks pretty straight to me,” said Nick. With his fist, he tapped Olena’s arm lightly, teasingly.

“Will you stop?”

“Though it was doing this whole astrology thing — I don’t know. Maybe it’s a zodiac bat.”

“Maybe it’s a brown bat. It’s not a vampire bat, is it?”

“I think you have to go to South America for those,” he said. “Take your platform shoes!”

She sank down on the steps, pulled her robe tighter. She felt for the light switch and flicked it on. The bat, she could now see, was small and light-colored, its wings folded in like a packed tent, a mouse with backpacking equipment. It had a sweet face, like a deer, though blood drizzled from its head. It reminded her of a cat she’d seen once as a child, shot with a BB in the eye.

“I can’t look anymore,” she said, and went back upstairs.

Nick appeared a half hour later, standing in the doorway. She was in bed, a book propped in her lap — a biography of a French feminist, which she was reading for the hairdo information.

“I had lunch with Erin today,” he said.

She stared at the page. Snoods. Turbans and snoods. You could go for days in a snood. “Why?”

“A lot of different reasons. For Ken, mostly. She’s still head of the neighborhood association, and he needs her endorsement. I just wanted to let you know. Listen, you’ve gotta cut me some slack.”

She grew hot in the face again. “I’ve cut you some slack,” she said. “I’ve cut you a whole forest of slack. The whole global slack forest has been cut for you.” She closed the book. “I don’t know why you cavort with these people. They’re nothing but a bunch of clerks.”

He’d been trying to look pleasant, but now he winced a little. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Miss High-Minded. You whose father made his living off furs. Furs!” He took two steps toward her, then turned and paced back again. “I can’t believe I’m living with someone who grew up on the proceeds of tortured animals!”

She was quiet. This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they recycled their newspapers!

“Don’t drag my father into this.”

“Look, I’ve spent years of my life working for peace and free expression. I’ve been in prison already. I’ve lived in a cage! I don’t need to live in another one.”

“You and your free expression! You who can’t listen to me for two minutes!”

“Listen to you what?”

“Listen to me when I”—and here she bit her lip a little—“when I tell you that these people you care about, this hateful Erin what’s-her-name, they’re just small, awful, nothing people.”

“So they don’t read enough books ,” he said slowly. “Who the fuck cares.”

The next day he was off to a meeting with Ken at the Senior Citizens Association. The host from Jeopardy! was going to be there, and Ken wanted to shake a few hands, sign up volunteers. The host from Jeopardy! was going to give a talk.

“I don’t get it,” Olena said.

“I know.” He sighed, the pond life treading water in his eyes. “But, well — it’s the American way.” He grabbed up his keys, and the look that quickly passed over his face told her this: she wasn’t pretty enough.

“I hate America,” she said.

Nonetheless, he called her at the library during a break. She’d been sitting in the back with Sarah, thinking up Tom Swifties, her brain ready to bleed from the ears, when the phone rang. “You should see this,” he said. “Some old geezer raises his hand, I call on him, and he stands up, and the first thing he says is, ‘I had my hand raised for ten whole minutes and you kept passing over me. I don’t like to be passed over. You can’t just pass over a guy like me, not at my age.’ ”

She laughed, as he wanted her to.

This hot dog’s awful, she said frankly .

“To appeal to the doctors, Ken’s got all these signs up that say ‘Teetlebaum for tort reform.’ ”

“Sounds like a Wallace Stevens poem,” she said.

“I don’t know what I expected. But the swirl of this whole event has not felt right.”

She’s a real dog, he said cattily .

She was quiet, deciding to let him do the work of this call.

“Do you realize that Ken’s entire softball team just wrote a letter to The Star , calling him a loudmouth and a cheat?”

“Well,” she said, “what can you expect from a bunch of grown men who pitch underhand?”

There was some silence. “I care about us,” he said finally. “I just want you to know that.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I know I’m just a pain in the ass to you,” he said. “But you’re an inspiration to me, you are.”

I like a good sled dog, she said huskily .

“Thank you for just — for saying that,” she said.

“I just sometimes wish you’d get involved in the community, help out with the campaign. Give of yourself. Connect a little with something.”

· · ·

At the hospital, she got up on the table and pulled the paper gown tightly around her, her feet in the stirrups. The doctor took a plastic speculum out of a drawer. “Anything particular seem to be the problem today?” asked the doctor.

“I just want you to look and tell me if there’s anything wrong,” said Olena.

The doctor studied her carefully. “There’s a class of medical students outside. Do you mind if they come in?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know this is a teaching hospital,” she said. “We hope that our patients won’t mind contributing to the education of our medical students by allowing them in during an examination. It’s a way of contributing to the larger medical community, if you will. But it’s totally up to you. You can say no.”

Olena clutched at her paper gown. There’s never been an accident, she said recklessly . “How many of them are there?”

The doctor smiled quickly. “Seven,” she said. “Like dwarfs.”

“They’ll come in and do what?”

The doctor was growing impatient and looked at her watch. “They’ll participate in the examination. It’s a learning visit.”

Olena sank back down on the table. She didn’t feel that she could offer herself up this way. You’re only average, he said meanly .

“All right,” she said. “Okay.”

Take a bow, he said sternly .

The doctor opened up the doorway and called a short way down the corridor. “Class?”

They were young, more than half of them men, and they gathered around the examination table in a horseshoe shape, looking slightly ashamed, sorry for her, no doubt, the way art students sometimes felt sorry for the shivering model they were about to draw. The doctor pulled up a stool between Olena’s feet and inserted the plastic speculum, the stiff, widening arms of it uncomfortable, embarrassing. “Today we will be doing a routine pelvic examination,” she announced loudly, and then she got up again, went to a drawer, and passed out rubber gloves to everyone.

Olena went a little blind. A white light, starting at the center, spread to the black edges of her sight. One by one, the hands of the students entered her, or pressed on her abdomen, felt hungrily, innocently, for something to learn from her, in her.

She missed her mother the most.

“Next,” the doctor was saying. And then again. “All right. Next?”

Olena missed her mother the most.

But it was her father’s face that suddenly loomed before her now, his face at night in the doorway of her bedroom, coming to check on her before he went to bed, his bewildered face, horrified to find her lying there beneath the covers, touching herself and gasping, his whispered “Nell? Are you okay?” and then his vanishing, closing the door loudly, to leave her there, finally forever; to die and leave her there feeling only her own sorrow and disgrace, which she would live in like a coat.