Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

“This is ridiculous,” said Abby. But by the time they’d reached the top, her annoyance had turned to anxiety. To kiss the stone, she saw, people had to lie on their backs out over a parapet, stretching their necks out to place their lips on the underside of a supporting wall where the stone was laid. A strange-looking leprechaunish man was squatting at the side of the stone, supposedly to help people arch back, but he seemed to be holding them too loosely, a careless and sadistic glint in his eyes, and some people were changing their minds and going back downstairs, fearful and inarticulate as ever.

“I don’t think I can do this,” said Abby hesitantly, tying her dark raincoat more tightly around her.

“Of course you can,” said her mother. “You’ve come all this way. This is why you came.” Now that they were at the top of the castle, the line seemed to be moving quickly. Abby looked back, and around, and the view was green and rich, and breathtaking, like a photo soaked in dyes.

“Next!” she heard the leprechaun shouting.

Ahead of them, a German woman was struggling to get back up from where the leprechaun had left her. She wiped her mouth and made a face. “That vuz awfhul,” she grumbled.

Panic seized Abby. “You know what? I don’t want to do this,” she said again to her mother. There were only two people ahead of them in line. One of them was now getting down on his back, clutching the iron supports and inching his hands down, arching at the neck and waist to reach the stone, exposing his white throat. His wife stood above him, taking his picture.

“But you came all this way! Don’t be a ninny!” Her mother was bullying her again. It never gave her courage; in fact, it deprived her of courage. But it gave her bitterness and impulsiveness, which could look like the same thing.

“Next,” said the leprechaun nastily. He hated these people; one could see that. One could see he half-hoped they would go crashing down off the ledge into a heap of raincoats, limbs, and traveler’s checks.

“Go on,” said Mrs. Mallon.

“I can’t,” Abby whined. Her mother was nudging and the leprechaun was frowning. “I can’t. You go.”

“No. Come on. Think of it as a test.” Her mother gave her a scowl, unhinged by something lunatic in it. “You work with tests. And in school, you always did well on them.”

“For tests, you have to study.”

“You studied!”

“I didn’t study the right thing.”

“Oh, Abby.”

“I can’t,” Abby whispered. “I just don’t think I can.” She breathed deeply and moved quickly. “Oh — okay.” She threw her hat down and fell to the stone floor fast, to get it over with.

“Move back, move back,” droned the leprechaun, like a train conductor.

She could feel now no more space behind her back; from her waist up, she was out over air and hanging on only by her clenched hands and the iron rails. She bent her head as far back as she could, but it wasn’t far enough.

“Lower,” said the leprechaun.

She slid her hands down farther, as if she were doing a trick on a jungle gym. Still, she couldn’t see the stone itself, only the castle wall.

“Lower,” said the leprechaun.

She slid her hands even lower, bent her head back, her chin skyward, could feel the vertebrae of her throat pressing out against the skin, and this time she could see the stone. It was about the size of a microwave oven and was covered with moisture and dirt and lipstick marks in the shape of lips — lavender, apricot, red. It seemed very unhygienic for a public event, filthy and wet, and so now instead of giving it a big smack, she blew a peck at it, then shouted, “Okay, help me up, please,” and the leprechaun helped her back up.

Abby stood and brushed herself off. Her raincoat was covered with whitish mud. “Eeyuhh,” she said. But she had done it! At least sort of. She put her hat back on. She tipped the leprechaun a pound. She didn’t know how she felt. She felt nothing. Finally, these dares one made oneself commit didn’t change a thing. They were all a construction of wish and string and distance.

“Now my turn,” said her mother with a kind of reluctant determination, handing Abby her sunglasses, and as her mother got down stiffly, inching her way toward the stone, Abby suddenly saw something she’d never seen before: her mother was terrified. For all her bullying and bravado, her mother was proceeding, and proceeding badly, through a great storm of terror in her brain. As her mother tried to inch herself back toward the stone, Abby, now privy to her bare face, saw that this fierce bonfire of a woman had gone twitchy and melancholic — it was a ruse, all her formidable display. She was only trying to prove something, trying pointlessly to defy and overcome her fears — instead of just learning to live with them, since, hell, you were living with them anyway. “Mom, you okay?” Mrs. Mallon’s face was in a grimace, her mouth open and bared. The former auburn of her hair had descended, Abby saw, to her teeth, which she’d let rust with years of coffee and tea.

Now the leprechaun was having to hold her more than he had the other people. “Lower, now lower.”

“Oh, God, not any lower,” cried Mrs. Mallon.

“You’re almost there.”

“I don’t see it.”

“There you got it?” He loosened his grip and let her slip farther.

“Yes,” she said. She let out a puckering, spitting sound. But then when she struggled to come back up, she seemed to be stuck. Her legs thrashed out before her; her shoes loosened from her feet; her skirt rode up, revealing the brown tops of her panty hose. She was bent too strangely, from the hips, it seemed, and she was plump and didn’t have the stomach muscles to lift herself back up. The leprechaun seemed to be having difficulty.

“Can someone here help me?”

“Oh my God,” said Abby, and she and another man in line immediately squatted next to Mrs. Mallon to help her. She was heavy, stiff with fright, and when they had finally lifted her and gotten her sitting, then standing again, she seemed stricken and pale.

A guard near the staircase volunteered to escort her down.

“Would you like that, Mom?” and Mrs. Mallon simply nodded.

“You get in front of us,” the guard said to Abby in the singsong accent of County Cork, “just in case she falls.” And Abby got in front, her coat taking the updraft and spreading to either side as she circled slowly down into the dungeon-dark of the stairwell, into the black like a bat new to its wings.

In a square in the center of town, an evangelist was waving a Bible and shouting about “the brevity of life,” how it was a thing grabbed by one hand and then gone, escaped through the fingers. “God’s word is quick!” he called out.

“Let’s go over there,” said Abby, and she took her mother to a place called Brady’s Public House for a restorative Guinness. “Are you okay?” Abby kept asking. They still had no place to stay that night, and though it remained light quite late, and the inns stayed open until ten, she imagined the two of them temporarily homeless, sleeping under the stars, snacking on slugs. Stars the size of Chicago! Dew like a pixie bath beneath them! They would lick it from their arms.

“I’m fine,” she said, waving Abby’s questions away. “What a stone!”

“Mom,” said Abby, frowning, for she was now wondering about a few things. “When you went across that rope bridge, did you do that okay?”

Mrs. Mallon sighed. “Well, I got the idea of it,” she said huffily. “But there were some gusts of wind that caused it to buck a little, and though some people thought that was fun, I had to get down and crawl back. You’ll recall there was a little rain.”