Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“I’ve been alone.”

“Yeah, and for how long?”

“Hours,” said Tommy. He sighed. “At least it felt like hours.”

“Right,” she said, “so don’t go lecturing me about inner resources.”

“Okay. So I sold the mineral rights to my body years ago, but, hey, at least I got good money for mine.”

“I got some money,” said Sidra. “I got some.”

Walter leaned her against his parked car. His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There was something numb and on hold in her. There were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling. She went home with him, slept with him. She told him who she was. A minor movie star once nominated for a major award. She told him she lived at the Days Inn. He had been there once, to the top, for a drink. But he did not seem to know her name.

“Never thought I’d sleep with a movie star,” he did say. “I suppose that’s every man’s dream.” He laughed — lightly, nervously.

“Just don’t wake up,” she said. Then she pulled the covers to her chin.

“Or change the dream,” he added seriously. “I mean, in the movie I saw, everything is fine until the sleeping guy begins to dream about something else. I don’t think he wills it or anything; it just happens.”

“You didn’t tell me about that part.”

“That’s right,” he said. “You see, the guy starts dreaming about flamingos and then all the little people turn into flamingos and fly away.”

“Really?” said Sidra.

“I think it was flamingos. I’m not too expert with birds.”

“You’re not ?” She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on.

“To tell you the truth, I really don’t think I ever saw a single movie you were in.”

“Good.” She was drifting, indifferent, no longer paying attention.

He hitched his arm behind his head, wrist to nape. His chest heaved up and down. “I think I may of heard of you, though.”

Django Reinhardt was on the radio. She listened, carefully. “Astonishing sounds came from that man’s hands,” Sidra murmured.

Walter tried to kiss her, tried to get her attention back. He wasn’t that interested in music, though at times he tried to be. “ ‘Astonishing sounds’?” he said. “Like this?” He cupped his palms together, making little pops and suction noises.

“Yeah,” she murmured. But she was elsewhere, letting a dry wind sweep across the plain of her to sleep. “Like that.”

He began to realize, soon, that she did not respect him. A bug could sense it. A doorknob could figure it out. She never quite took him seriously. She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, “Oh, never mind.” She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked.

And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.

But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl. Once in a while, though she tried not to, she asked him about children, about having children, about turning kith to kin. How did he feel about all that? It seemed to her that if she were ever going to have a life of children and lawn mowers and grass clippings, it would be best to have it with someone who was not demeaned or trivialized by discussions of them. Did he like those big fertilized lawns? How about a nice rock garden? How did he feel deep down about those combination storm windows with the built-in screens?

“Yeah, I like them all right,” he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life . She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic — drink, don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

“I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother.” Sidra sighed, peered wistfully into her sherry.

“What was your grandmother’s name?”

Sidra looked at his paisley mouth. “Grandma. Her name was Grandma.” Walter laughed in a honking sort of way. “Oh, thank you,” murmured Sidra. “Thank you for laughing.”

Walter had a subscription to AutoWeek . He flipped through it in bed. He also liked to read repair manuals for new cars, particularly the Toyotas. He knew a lot about control panels, light-up panels, side panels.

“You’re so obviously wrong for each other,” said Charlotte over tapas at a tapas bar.

“Hey, please,” said Sidra. “I think my taste’s a little subtler than that.” The thing with tapas bars was that you just kept stuffing things into your mouth. “Obviously wrong is just the beginning. That’s where I always begin. At obviously wrong.” In theory, she liked the idea of mismatched couples, the wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare.

“I can’t imagine you with someone like him. He’s just not special.” Charlotte had met him only once. But she had heard of him from a girlfriend of hers. He had slept around, she’d said. “Into the pudding” is how she phrased it, and there were some boring stories. “Just don’t let him humiliate you. Don’t mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness,” she added.

“I’m supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?”

“I don’t know, Sidra.”

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. It suggested sexual things. “I’m a very average person,” she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemly— inferior , when you got right down to it. Charlotte studied Sidra’s face, headlights caught in the stare of a deer. Guns don’t kill people, thought Sidra fizzily. Deer kill people.

“Maybe it’s that we all used to envy you so much,” Charlotte said a little bitterly. “You were so talented. You got all the lead parts in the plays. You were everyone’s dream of what they wanted.”

Sidra poked around at the appetizer in front of her, gardening it like a patch of land. She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. “Envy,” said Sidra. “That’s a lot like hate, isn’t it.” But Charlotte didn’t say anything. Probably she wanted Sidra to change the subject. Sidra stuffed her mouth full of feta cheese and onions, and looked up. “Well, all I can say is, I’m glad to be back.” A piece of feta dropped from her lips.

Charlotte looked down at it and smiled. “I know what you mean,” she said. She opened her mouth wide and let all the food inside fall out onto the table.

Charlotte could be funny like that. Sidra had forgotten that about her.

Walter had found some of her old movies in the video-rental place. She had a key. She went over one night and discovered him asleep in front of Recluse with Roommate . It was about a woman named Rose who rarely went out, because when she did, she was afraid of people. They seemed like alien life-forms — soulless, joyless, speaking asyntactically. Rose quickly became loosened from reality. Walter had it freeze-framed at the funny part, where Rose phones the psych ward to have them come take her away, but they refuse. She lay down next to him and tried to sleep, too, but began to cry a little. He stirred. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. You fell asleep. Watching me.”

“I was tired,” he said.