Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“Idiot!” she shouts. “Village idiot!”

But Therese’s father has continued signaling the syllables, ignoring his wife, slapping the fingers of his right hand hard on his left sleeve. The famous person has three names. He is doing the first name, first syllable. He takes out a dollar bill and points to it.

“George Washington,” shouts Ray.

“George Washington Carver!” shouts Therese. Therese’s father shakes his head angrily, turning the dollar around and pointing at it violently. It bothers him not to be able to control the discourse.

“Dollar bill,” says Therese’s mother.

“Bill!” says Therese. At this, her father begins nodding and pointing at her psychotically. Yes, yes, yes . Now he makes stretching motions with his hands. “Bill, Billy, William,” says Therese, and her father points wildly at her again. “William,” she says. “William Kennedy Smith.”

“Yes!” shouts her father, clapping his hands and throwing his head back as if to praise the ceiling.

“William Kennedy Smith?” Ann is scowling again. “How did you get that from just William?”

“He’s been in the news.” Therese shrugs. She does not know how to explain Ann’s sourness. Perhaps it has something to do with Ann’s struggles in law school, or with Therese’s being a circuit court judge, or with the diamond on Ann’s finger, which is so huge that it seems, to Therese, unkind to wear it around their mother’s, which is, when one gets right down to it, a chip. Earlier this morning, Ann told Therese that she is going to take Tad’s name, as well. “You’re going to call yourself Tad?” Therese asked, but Ann was not amused. Ann’s sense of humor was never that flexible, though she used to like a good sight gag.

Ann officiously explained the name change: “Because I believe a family is like a team, and everyone on the team should have the same name, like a color. I believe a spouse should be a team player.”

Therese no longer has any idea who Ann is. She liked her better when Ann was eight, with her blue pencil case, and a strange, loping run that came from having one leg a quarter of an inch longer than the other. Ann was more attractive as a child. She was awkward and inquiring. She was cute. Or so she seemed to Therese, who was mostly in high school and college, slightly depressed and studying too much, destroying her already-bad eyes, so that now she wore glasses so thick her eyes swam in a cloudy way behind them. This morning, when she’d stood listening to Ann talk about team players, Therese had smiled and nodded, but she felt preached at, as if she were a messy, wayward hippie. She wanted to grab her sister, throw herself upon her, embrace her, shut her up. She tried to understand Ann’s dark and worried nuptial words, but instead she found herself recalling the pratfalls she used to perform for Ann — Therese could take a fall straight on the face — in order to make Ann laugh.

Ann’s voice was going on now. “When you sit too long, the bodices bunch up. …”

Therese mentally measured the length of her body in front of her and wondered if she could do it. Of course she could. Of course. But would she? And then suddenly, she knew she would. She let her hip twist and fell straight forward, her arm at an angle, her mouth in a whoop. She had learned to do this in drama club when she was fifteen. She hadn’t been pretty, and it was a means of getting the boys’ attention. She landed with a thud.

“You still do that?” asked Ann with incredulity and disgust. “You’re a judge and you still do that?”

“Sort of,” said Therese from the floor. She felt around for her glasses.

Now it is the team player herself standing up to give clues to her team. She looks at the name on her scrap of paper and makes a slight face. “I need a consultation,” she says in a vaguely repelled way that perhaps she imagines is sophisticated. She takes the scrap of wrapping paper over to Therese’s team. “What is this?” Ann asks. There in Ray’s handwriting is a misspelled Arachnophobia .

“It’s a movie,” says Ray apologetically. “Did I spell it wrong?”

“I think you did, honey,” says Therese, leaning in to look at it. “You got some of the o’s and a’s mixed up.” Ray is dyslexic. When the roofing business slows in the winter months, instead of staying in with a book, or going to psychotherapy, he drives to cheap matinees of bad movies—“flicks,” he calls them, or “cliffs” when he’s making fun of himself. Ray misspells everything. Is it input or imput ? Is it averse, adverse , or adversed? Stock or stalk? Carrot or karate ? His roofing business has a reputation for being reasonable, but a bit slipshod and second-rate. Nonetheless, Therese thinks he is great. He is never condescending. He cooks infinite dishes with chicken. He is ardent and capable and claims almost every night in his husbandly way to find Therese the sexiest woman he’s ever known. Therese likes that. She is also having an affair with a young assistant DA in the prosecutor’s office, but it is a limited thing — like taking her gloves off, clapping her hands, and putting the gloves back on again. It is quiet and undiscoverable. It is nothing, except that it is sex with a man who is not dyslexic, and once in a while, Jesus Christ, she needs that.

Ann is acting out Arachnophobia , the whole concept, rather than working syllable by syllable. She stares into her fiancé’s eyes, wiggling her fingers about and then jumping away in a fright, but Tad doesn’t get it, though he does look a little alarmed. Ann waves her Christmas-manicured nails at him more furiously. One of the nails has a little Santa Claus painted on it. Ann’s black hair is cut severely in sharp, expensive lines, and her long, drapey clothes hang from her shoulders, as if still on a hanger. She looks starved and rich and enraged. Everything seems struggled toward and forced, a little cartoonish, like the green shoes, which may be why her fiancé suddenly shouts out, “Little Miss Muffett!” Ann turns now instead to Andrew, motioning at him encouragingly, as if to punish Tad. The awkward lope of her childhood has taken on a chiropracticed slink. Therese turns back toward her own team, toward her father, who is still muttering something about William Kennedy Smith. “A woman shouldn’t be in a bar at three o’clock in the morning, that’s all there is to it.”

“Dad, that’s ludicrous,” whispers Therese, not wanting to interrupt the game. “Bars are open to everyone. Public Accommodations Law.”

“I’m not talking about the cold legalities,” he says chastisingly. He has never liked lawyers, and is baffled by his daughters. “I’m talking about a long-understood moral code .” Her father is of that Victorian sensibility that deep down respects prostitutes more than it does women in general.

“ ‘Long-understood moral code’?” Therese looks at him gently. “Dad, you’re seventy-five years old. Things change.”

“Arachnophobia!” Andrew shouts, and he and Ann rush together and do high fives.

Therese’s father makes a quick little spitting sound, then crosses his legs and looks the other way. Therese looks over at her mother and her mother is smiling at her conspiratorially, behind Therese’s father’s back, making little donkey ears with her fingers, her sign for when she thinks he’s being a jackass.

“All right, forget the William Kennedy Smith. Doll, your turn,” says Therese’s father to her mother. Therese’s mother gets up slowly but bends gleefully to pick up the scrap of paper. She looks at it, walks to the center of the room, and shoves the paper scrap in her pocket. She faces the other team and makes the sign for a famous person.