Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“All right, you’re out of here,” she said. To subsequent prospective buyers, she abandoned any sales pitch and went for candor. “I admit, this bathroom’s got mildew. And look at this stupid little hallway. This is why we’re moving! We hate this house.” She soon hired back her Forrest Gump realtor, who, at the open house, played Vivaldi on the stereo and baked banana bread, selling the place in two hours.

The night after they closed on both houses, having sat silently through the two proceedings, like deaf-mutes being had, the mysterious Canadian once more absent and represented only by a purple-suited realtor named Flo, Ruth and Terence stood in their empty new house and ate take-out Chinese straight from the cartons. Their furniture was sitting in a truck, which was parked in a supermarket parking lot on the east side of town, and it all would be delivered the next day. For now, they stood at the bare front window of their large, echoey new dining room. A small lit candle on the floor cast their shadows up on the ceiling, gloomy and fat. Wind rattled the panes and the boiler in the cellar burst on in small, frightening explosions. The radiators hissed and smelled like cats, burning off dust as they heated up, vibrating the cobwebs in the ceiling corners above them. The entire frame of the house groaned and rumbled. There was scampering in the walls. The sound of footsteps — or something like footsteps — thudded softly in the attic, two floors above them.

“We’ve bought a haunted house,” said Ruth. Terence’s mouth was full of hot cabbagey egg roll. “A ghost!” she continued. “Just a little extra protein. Just a little amino-acid bonus.” It was what her own father had always said when he found a small green worm in his bowl of blueberries.

“The house is settling,” said Terence.

“It’s had a hundred and ten years to settle; you would think it had gotten it done with by now.”

“Settling goes on and on,” said Terence.

“We would know,” said Ruth.

He looked at her, then dug into the container of lo mein.

A scrabbling sound came from the front porch. Terence chewed, swallowed, then walked over to turn the light on, but the light didn’t come on. “Was this disclosed?” he shouted.

“It’s probably just the lightbulb.”

“All new lightbulbs were just put in, Flo said.” He opened the front door. “The light’s broken, and it should have been disclosed.” He was holding a flashlight with one hand and unscrewing the front light with the other. Behind the light fixture gleamed three pairs of masked eyes. Dark raccoon feces were mounded up in the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof.

“What the hell ?” shouted Terence, backing away.

“This house is infested !” said Ruth. She put down her food.

“How did those creatures get up there?”

She felt a twinge in her one lung. “How does anything get anywhere — that’s what I want to know.” She had only ever been the lightest of smokers, never in a high-risk category, but now every pinch, prick, tick, or tock in her ribs, every glitch in the material world anywhere made her want to light up and puff.

“Oh, God, the stench.”

“Shouldn’t the inspector have found this?”

“Inspectors! Obviously, they’re useless. What this place needed was an MRI.”

“Ah, geeze. This is the worst.”

Every house is a grave, thought Ruth. All that life-stealing fuss and preparation. Which made moving from a house a resurrection — or an exodus of ghouls, depending on your point of view — and made moving to a house (yet another house!) the darkest of follies and desires. At best, it was a restlessness come falsely to rest. But the inevitable rot and demolition, from which the soul eventually had to flee (to live in the sky or disperse itself among the trees?), would necessarily make a person stupid with unhappiness.

Oh, well!

After their furniture arrived and was positioned almost exactly the way it had been in their old house, Ruth began to call a lot of people to come measure, inspect, capture, cart away, clean, spray, bring samples, provide estimates and bids, and sometimes they did come, though once people had gotten a deposit, they often disappeared entirely. Machines began to answer instead of humans and sometimes phone numbers announced themselves disconnected altogether. “We’re sorry. The number you have reached …”

The windows of the new house were huge — dusty, but bright because of their size — and because the shade shop had not yet delivered the shades, the entire neighborhood of spiffy middle management could peer into Ruth and Terence’s bedroom. For one long, bewildering day, Ruth took to waving, and only sometimes did people wave back. More often, they just squinted and stared. The next day, Ruth taped bedsheets up to the windows with masking tape, but invariably the sheets fell off after ten minutes. When she bathed, she had to crawl naked out of the bathroom down the hall and into the bedroom and then into the closet to put her clothes on. Or sometimes she just lay there on the bathroom floor and wriggled into things. It was all so very hard.

In their new backyard, crows the size of suitcases cawed and bounced in the branches of the pear tree. Carpenter ants — like shiny pieces of a child’s game — swarmed the porch steps. Ruth made even more phone calls, and finally a man with a mottled, bulbous nose and a clean white van with a cockroach painted on it came and doused the ants with poison.

“It just looks like a fire extinguisher, what you’re using,” said Ruth, watching.

“Ho no, ma’am. Way stronger than that.” He wheezed. His nose was knobby as a pickle. He looked underneath the porch and then back up at Ruth. “There’s a whole lot of dying going on in there,” he said.

“There’s nothing you can do about the crows?” Ruth asked.

“Not me, but you could get a gun and shoot ’em yourself,” he said. “It’s not legal, but if your house were one hundred yards down that way, it would be. If it were one hundred yards down that way, you could bag twenty crows a day. Since you’re where you are, within the town limits, you’re going to have to do it at night, with a silencer. Catch ’em live in the morning with nets and corn, then at sunset, take ’em out behind the garage and put ’em out of your misery.”

“Nets?” said Ruth.

She called many people. She collected more guesstimates and advice. A guy named Noel from a lawn company advised her to forget about the crows, worry about the squirrels. She should plant her tulips deeper, and with a lot of red pepper, so that squirrels would not dig them up. “Look at all these squirrels!” he said, pointing to the garage roof and to all the weedy flower beds. “And how about some ground cover in here, by the porch, some lilies by the well, and some sunflowers in the side yard?”

“Let me think about it,” said Ruth. “I would like to keep some of these violets,” she said, indicating the pleasant-looking leaves throughout the irises.

“Those aren’t violets. That’s a weed. That’s a very common, tough little weed.”

“I always thought those were violets.”

“Nope.”

“Things can really overtake a place, can’t they? This planet’s just one big divisive cutthroat competition of growing. I mean, they look like violets, don’t they? The leaves, I mean.”

Noel shrugged. “Not to me. Not really.”

How could she keep any of it straight? There was spirea and there was false spirea — she forgot which was which. “Which is the spirea again?” she asked. Noel pointed to the bridal-wreath hedge, which was joyously blooming from left to right, from sun to shade, and in two weeks would sag and brown in the same direction. “Ah, marriage,” she said aloud.