Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“It’s all show,” said Mrs. Mallon breezily.

“It’s a scary show.”

“If you get scared easily.”

Which was quickly becoming the theme of their trip — Abby could see that already. That Abby had no courage and her mother did. And that it had forever been that way.

“You scare too easily,” said her mother. “You always did. When you were a child, you wouldn’t go into a house unless you were reassured there were no balloons in it.”

“I didn’t like balloons.”

“And you were scared on the plane coming over,” said her mother.

Abby grew defensive. “Only when the flight attendant said there was no coffee because the percolator was broken. Didn’t you find that alarming? And then after all that slamming, they still couldn’t get one of the overhead bins shut.” Abby remembered this like a distant, bitter memory, though it had only been yesterday. The plane had taken off with a terrible shudder, and when it proceeded with the rattle of an old subway car, particularly over Greenland, the flight attendant had gotten on the address system to announce there was nothing to worry about, especially when you think about “how heavy air really is.”

Now her mother thought she was Tarzan. “I want to go on that rope bridge I saw in the guidebook,” she said.

On page 98 in the guidebook was a photograph of a rope-and-board bridge slung high between two cliffs. It was supposed to be for fishermen, but tourists were allowed, though they were cautioned about strong winds.

“Why do you want to go on the rope bridge?” asked Abby.

“Why?” replied her mother, who then seemed stuck and fell silent.

For the next two days, they drove east and to the north, skirting Belfast, along the coastline, past old windmills and sheep farms, and up out onto vertiginous cliffs that looked out toward Scotland, a pale sliver on the sea. They stayed at a tiny stucco bed-and-breakfast, one with a thatched roof like Cleopatra bangs. They slept lumpily, and in the morning in the breakfast room with its large front window, they ate their cereal and rashers and black and white pudding in an exhausted way, going through the motions of good guesthood—“Yes, the troubles,” they agreed, for who could say for certain whom you were talking to? It wasn’t like race-riven America, where you always knew. Abby nodded. Out the window, there was a breeze, but she couldn’t hear the faintest rustle of it. She could only see it silently moving the dangling branches of the sun-sequined spruce, just slightly, like objects hanging from a rearview mirror in someone else’s car.

She charged the bill to her Visa, tried to lift both bags, and then just lifted her own.

“Good-bye! Thank you!” she and her mother called to their host. Back in the car, briefly, Mrs. Mallon began to sing “Toora-loora-loora.” “ ‘Over in Killarney, many years ago,’ ” she warbled. Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.

And so they drove on. The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

They came to the sign for the rope bridge.

“I want to do this,” said Mrs. Mallon, and swung the car sharply right. They crunched into a gravel parking lot and parked; the bridge was a quarter-mile walk from there. In the distance, dark clouds roiled like a hemorrhage, and the wind was picking up. Rain mizzled the windshield.

“I’m going to stay here,” said Abby.

“You are?”

“Yeah.”

“Whatever,” said her mother in a disgusted way, and she got out, scowling, and trudged down the path to the bridge, disappearing beyond a curve.

Abby waited, now feeling the true loneliness of this trip. She realized she missed Bob and his warm, quiet confusion; how he sat on the rug in front of the fireplace, where her dog, Randolph, used to sit; sat there beneath the five Christmas cards they’d received and placed on the mantel — five, including the one from the paperboy — sat there picking at his feet, or naming all the fruits in his fruit salad, remarking life’s great variety! or asking what was wrong (in his own silent way), while poking endlessly at a smoldering log. She thought, too, about poor Randolph, at the vet, with his patchy fur and begging, dying eyes. And she thought about the pale bachelor lyricist, how he had once come to see her, and how he hadn’t even placed enough pressure on the doorbell to make it ring, and so had stood there waiting on the porch, holding a purple cone-flower, until she just happened to walk by the front window and see him standing there. 0 poetry! When she invited him in, and he gave her the flower and sat down to decry the coded bloom and doom of all things, decry as well his own unearned deathlessness, how everything hurtles toward oblivion, except words, which assemble themselves in time like molecules in space, for God was an act — an act! — of language, it hadn’t seemed silly to her, not really, at least not that silly.

The wind was gusting. She looked at her watch, worried now about her mother. She turned on the radio to find a weather report, though the stations all seemed to be playing strange, redone versions of American pop songs from 1970. Every so often, there was a two-minute quiz show — Who is the president of France? Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit? — questions that the caller rarely if ever answered correctly, which made it quite embarrassing to listen to. Why did they do it? Puzzles, quizzes, game shows. Abby knew from AST that a surprising percentage of those taking the college entrance exams never actually applied to college. People just loved a test. Wasn’t that true? People loved to put themselves to one.

Her mother was now knocking on the glass. She was muddy and wet. Abby unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Was it worth it?” Abby asked.

Her mother got in, big and dank and puffing. She started the car without looking at her daughter. “What a bridge,” she said finally.

The next day, they made their way along the Antrim coast, through towns bannered with Union Jacks and Scottish hymns, down to Derry with its barbed wire and IRA scrawlings on the city walls—“John Major is a Zionist Jew” (“Hello,” said a British officer when they stopped to stare) — and then escaping across bandit country, and once more down across the border into the south, down the Donegal coast, its fishing villages like some old, never-was Cape Cod. Staring out through the windshield, off into the horizon, Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce — winds, seas — a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world — no flower or stone — as a single hello from a human being.

Once in a while, Abby and her mother broke their silences with talk of Mrs. Mallon’s job as office manager at a small flashlight company—“I had to totally rearrange our insurance policies. The dental and Major Medical were eating our lunch!”—or with questions about the route signs, or the black dots signifying the auto deaths. But mostly, her mother wanted to talk about Abby’s shaky marriage and what she was going to do. “Look, another ruined abbey,” she took to saying every time they passed a heap of medieval stones.

“When you going back to Bob?”

“I went back,” said Abby. “But then I left again. Oops.”

Her mother sighed. “Women of your generation are always hoping for some other kind of romance than the one they have,” said Mrs. Mallon. “Aren’t they?”