Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“You should be stricter,” said Willard Stauffbacher, the head of the Instruction Department; he was a short, balding musician who liked to tape on his door pictures of famous people he thought he looked like. Every third Monday, he conducted the monthly departmental meeting — aptly named, Agnes liked to joke, since she did indeed depart mental. “Just because it’s a night course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t impart standards,” Stauffbacher said in a scolding way. “If it’s piffle, use the word piffle . If it’s meaningless, write meaningless across the top of every page.” He had once taught at an elementary school and once at a prison. “I feel like I do all the real work around here,” he added. He had posted near his office a sign that read RULES FOR THE MUSIC ROOM:

I will stay in my seat unless [sic] permission to move.

I will sit up straight.

I will listen to directions.

I will not bother my neighbor.

I will not talk when Mr. Stauffbacher is talking.

I will be polite to others.

I will sing as well as I can.

Agnes stayed after one night with Christa, the only black student in her class. She liked Christa a lot — Christa was smart and funny, and Agnes sometimes liked to stay after with her to chat. Tonight, Agnes had decided to talk Christa out of writing about vampires all the time.

“Why don’t you write about that thing you told me about that time?” Agnes suggested.

Christa looked at her skeptically. “What thing?”

“The time in your childhood, during the Chicago riots, walking with your mother through the police barricades.”

“Man, I lived that. Why should I want to write about it?”

Agnes sighed. Maybe Christa had a point. “It’s just that I’m no help to you with this vampire stuff,” Agnes said. “It’s formulaic, genre fiction.”

“You would be of more help to me with my childhood ?”

“Well, with more serious stories, yes.”

Christa stood up, perturbed. She grabbed back her vampire story. “You with all your Alice Walker and Zora Hurston. I’m just not interested in that anymore. I’ve done that already. I read those books years ago.”

“Christa, please don’t be annoyed.” Please do not talk when Mr. Stauffbacher is talking .

“You’ve got this agenda for me.”

“Really, I don’t at all,” said Agnes. “It’s just that — you know what it is? It’s that I’m just sick of these vampires. They’re so roaming and repeating.”

“If you were black, what you’re saying might have a different spin. But the fact is, you’re not,” Christa said, and picked up her coat and strode out — though ten seconds later, she gamely stuck her head back in and said, “See you next week.”

“We need a visiting writer who’s black,” Agnes said in the next depart mental meeting. “We’ve never had one.” They were looking at their budget, and the readings this year were pitted against Dance Instruction, a program headed up by a redhead named Evergreen.

“The Joffrey is just so much central casting,” said Evergreen, apropos of nothing. As a vacuum cleaner can start to pull up the actual thread of a carpet, her brains had been sucked dry by too much yoga. No one paid much attention to her.

“Perhaps we can get Harold Raferson in Chicago,” Agnes suggested.

“We’ve already got somebody for the visiting writer slot,” said Stauffbacher coyly. “An Afrikaner from Johannesburg.”

“What?” said Agnes. Was he serious? Even Evergreen barked out a laugh.

“W. S. Beyerbach. The university’s bringing him in. We pay our five hundred dollars and we get him out here for a day and a half.”

“Who?” asked Evergreen.

“This has already been decided?” asked Agnes.

“Yup.” Stauffbacher looked accusingly at Agnes. “I’ve done a lot of work to arrange for this. I’ve done all the work!”

“Do less,” said Evergreen.

When Agnes first met Joe, they’d fallen madly upon each other. They’d kissed in restaurants; they’d groped, under coats, at the movies. At his little house, they’d made love on the porch, or the landing of the staircase, against the wall in the hall by the door to the attic, filled with too much desire to make their way to a real room.

Now they struggled self-consciously for atmosphere, something they’d never needed before. She prepared the bedroom carefully. She played quiet music and concentrated. She lit candles — as if she were in church, praying for the deceased. She donned a filmy gown. She took hot baths and entered the bedroom in nothing but a towel, a wild fishlike creature of moist, perfumed heat. In the nightstand drawer she still kept the charts a doctor once told her to keep, still placed an X on any date she and Joe actually had sex. But she could never show these to her doctor; not now. It pained Agnes to see them. She and Joe looked like worse than bad shots. She and Joe looked like idiots. She and Joe looked dead.

Frantic candlelight flickered on the ceiling like a puppet show. While she waited for Joe to come out of the bathroom, Agnes lay back on the bed and thought about her week, the bloody politics of it, how she was not very good at politics. Once, before he was elected, she had gone to a rally for Bill Clinton, but when he was late and had kept the crowd waiting for over an hour, and when the sun got hot and bees began landing on people’s heads, when everyone’s feet hurt and tiny children began to cry and a state assemblyman stepped forward to announce that Clinton had stopped at a Dairy Queen in Des Moines and that was why he was late — Dairy Queen! — she had grown angry and resentful and apolitical in her own sweet-starved thirst and she’d joined in with some other people who had started to chant, “Do us a favor, tell us the flavor.”

Through college she had been a feminist — basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough , she liked to say. She signed day-care petitions, and petitions for Planned Parenthood. And although she had never been very aggressive with men, she felt strongly that she knew the difference between feminism and Sadie Hawkins Day — which some people, she believed, did not.

“Agnes, are we out of toothpaste or is this it — oh, okay, I see.”

And once, in New York, she had quixotically organized the ladies’ room line at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Because the play was going to start any minute and the line was still twenty women long, she had gotten six women to walk across the lobby with her to the men’s room. “Everybody out of there?” she’d called in timidly, allowing the men to finish up first, which took awhile, especially with other men coming up impatiently and cutting ahead in line. Later, at intermission, she saw how it should have been done. Two elderly black women, with greater expertise in civil rights, stepped very confidently into the men’s room and called out, “Don’t mind us, boys. We’re coming on in. Don’t mind us.”

“Are you okay?” asked Joe, smiling. He was already beside her. He smelled sweet, of soap and minty teeth, like a child.

“I think so,” she said, and turned toward him in the bordello light of their room. He had never acquired the look of maturity anchored in sorrow that burnished so many men’s faces. His own sadness in life — a childhood of beatings, a dying mother — was like quicksand, and he had to stay away from it entirely. He permitted no unhappy memories spoken aloud. He stuck with the same mild cheerfulness he’d honed successfully as a boy, and it made him seem fatuous — even, she knew, to himself. Probably it hurt his business a little.

“Your mind’s wandering,” he said, letting his own eyes close.

“I know.” She yawned, moved her legs onto his for warmth, and in this way, with the candles burning into their tins, she and Joe fell asleep.