Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“I’m sorry,” said Jack. “Maybe he would have. Fund-raisers. Cards and letters. Who can say? You two were close, I know.”

She ignored him. “Here,” she said, pointing at her drink. “Have a little festive lift!” She sipped at the amber liquor, and it stung her chapped lips.

“Dewar’s,” said Jack, looking with chagrin at the bottle.

“Well,” she said defensively, sitting up straight and buttoning her sweater. “I suppose you’re out of sympathy with Dewar’s. I suppose you’re more of a Do-ee .”

“That’s right,” said Jack disgustedly. “That’s right! And tomorrow I’m going to wake up and find I’ve been edged out by Truman!” He headed angrily up the stairs, while she listened for the final clomp of his steps and the cracking slam of the door.

Poor Jack: perhaps she had put him through too much. Just last spring, there had been her bunion situation — the limping, the crutch, and the big blue shoe. Then in September, there had been Mimi Andersen’s dinner party, where Jack, the only non-smoker, was made to go out on the porch while everyone else stayed inside and lit up. And then , there had been Aileen’s one-woman performance of “the housework version of Lysistrata .” “No Sweepie, No Kissie,” Jack had called it. But it had worked. Sort of. For about two weeks. There was, finally, only so much one woman on the vast and wicked stage could do.

“I’m worried about you,” said Jack in bed. “I’m being earnest here. And not in the Hemingway sense, either.” He screwed up his face. “You see how I’m talking? Things are wacko around here.” Their bookcase headboard was so stacked with novels and sad memoirs, it now resembled a library carrel more than a conjugal bed.

“You’re fine. I’m fine. Everybody’s fine,” said Aileen. She tried to find his hand under the covers, then just gave up.

“You’re someplace else,” he said. “Where are you?”

The birds had become emboldened, slowly reclaiming the yard, filling up the branches, cheeping hungrily in the mornings from the sills and eaves. “What is that shrieking ?” Aileen asked. The leaves had fallen, but now jays, ravens, and house finches darkened the trees — some of them flying south, some of them staying on, pecking the hardening ground for seeds. Squirrels moved in poking through the old apples that had dropped from the flowering crab. A possum made a home for himself under the porch, thumping and chewing. Raccoons had discovered Sofie’s little gym set, and one morning Aileen looked out and saw two of them swinging on the swings. She’d wanted animal life? Here was animal life!

“Not this,” she said. “None of this would be happening if Bert were still here.” Bert had patrolled the place. Bert had kept things in line.

“Are you talking to me?” asked Jack.

“I guess not,” she said.

“What?”

“I think we need to douse this place in repellent.”

“You mean, like, bug spray?”

“Bug spray, Bugs Bunny,” chanted Sofie. “Bug spray, Bugs Bunny.”

“I don’t know what I mean,” said Aileen.

At her feminist film-critique group, they were still discussing Cat Man , a movie done entirely in flashback from the moment a man jumps off the ledge of an apartment building. Instead of being divided into acts or chapters, the movie was divided into floor numbers, in descending order. At the end of the movie, the handsome remembering man lands on his feet.

Oh, Bert!

One of the women in Aileen’s group — Lila Conch — was angry at the movie. “I just hated the way anytime a woman character said anything of substance, she also happened to be half-naked.”

Aileen sighed. “Actually, I found those parts the most true to life,” she said. “They were the parts I liked best.”

The group glared at her. “Aileen,” said Lila, recrossing her legs. “Go to the kitchen for us, dear, and set up the brownies and tea.”

“Seriously?” asked Aileen.

“Uh — yes,” said Lila.

Thanksgiving came and went in a mechanical way. Aileen and Jack, with Sofie, went out to a restaurant and ordered different things, as if the three of them were strangers asserting their ornery tastes. Then they drove home. Only Sofie, who had ordered the child’s Stuffed Squash, was somehow pleased, sitting in the car seat in back and singing a Thanksgiving song she’d learned at day care. “ ‘Oh, a turkey’s not a pig, you doink / He doesn’t says oink / He says gobble, gobble, gobble .’ ” Their last truly good holiday had been Halloween, when Bert was still alive and they had dressed him up as Jack. They’d then dressed Jack as Bert, Aileen as Sofie, and Sofie as Aileen. “Now, I’m you, Mommy,” Sofie had said when Aileen had tied one of her kitchen aprons around her and pressed lipstick onto her mouth. Jack came up and rubbed his Magic Marker whiskers against Aileen, who giggled in her large pink footie pajamas. The only one who wasn’t having that much fun was Bert himself, sporting one of Jack’s ties, and pawing at it to get it off. When he didn’t succeed, he gamely dragged the tie around for a while, trying to ignore it. Then, cross and humiliated, he waddled over to the corner near the piano and lay there, annoyed. Remembering this, a week later — when Bert was dying in an oxygen tent at the vet’s, heart failing, fluid around his lungs (though his ears still pricked up when Aileen came to visit him; she wore her usual perfume so he would know her smell, and hand-fed him cat snacks when no one else could get him to eat) — Aileen had felt overwhelmed with sorrow and regret.

“I think you should see someone,” said Jack.

“Are we talking a psychiatrist or an affair?”

“An affair, of course.” Jack scowled. “An affair ?”

“I don’t know.” Aileen shrugged. The whiskey she’d been drinking lately had caused her joints to swell, so that now when she lifted her shoulders, they just kind of stayed like that, stiffly, up around her ears.

Jack rubbed her upper arm, as if he either loved her or was wiping something off on her sleeve. Which could it be? “Life is a long journey across a wide country,” he said. “Sometimes the weather’s good. Sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes it’s so bad, your car goes off the road.”

“Really.”

“Just go talk to someone,” he said. “Our health plan will cover part.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Just — no more metaphors.”

She got recommendations, made lists and appointments, conducted interviews.

“I have a death-of-a-pet situation,” she said. “How long does it take for you to do those?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How long will it take you to get me over the death of my cat, and how much do you charge for it?”

Each of the psychiatrists, in turn, with their slightly different outfits, and slightly different potted plants, looked shocked.

“Look,” Aileen said. “Forget Prozac. Forget Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory. Forget Jeffrey Masson — or is it Jackie Mason? The only thing that’s going to revolutionize this profession is Bidding the Job!”

“I’m afraid we don’t work that way,” she was told again and again — until finally, at last, she found someone who did.

“I specialize in Christmas,” said the psychotherapist, a man named Sidney Poe, who wore an argyle sweater vest, a crisp bow tie, shiny black oxfords, and no socks. “Christmas specials. You feel better by Christmas, or your last session’s free.”

“I like the sound of that,” said Aileen. It was already December first. “I like the sound of that a lot.”

“Good,” he said, giving her a smile that, she had to admit, looked crooked and unsound. “Now, what are we dealing with here, a cat or a dog?”