Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

At about eleven-thirty he went out to live the pleasures of his eighteen-year-old nighttime life.

At 3 A.M. he found me washing the floors and making little apartment repairs.

More tea, Mom? he asked. He sat down to keep me company. O.K., Faith. I know you feel terrible. But how come Selena never realized about Abby?

Anthony, what the hell do I realize about you?

Come on, you had to be blind. I was just a little kid, and I saw. Honest to God, Ma.

Listen, Tonto. Basically Abby was O.K. She was. You don’t know yet what their times can do to a person.

Here she goes with her goody-goodies — everything is so groovy wonderful far-out terrific. Next thing, you’ll say people are darling and the world is so nice and round that Union Carbide will never blow it up.

I have never said anything as hopeful as that. And why to all our knowledge of that sad day did Tonto at 3 A.M. have to add the fact of the world?

The next night Max called from North Carolina. How’s Selena? I’m flying up, he said. I have one early-morning appointment. Then I’m canceling everything.

At 7 A.M. Annie called. I had barely brushed my morning teeth. It was hard, she said. The whole damn thing. I don’t mean Selena. All of us. In the train. None of you seemed real to me.

Real? Reality, huh? Listen, how about coming over for breakfast — I don’t have to get going until after nine? I have this neat sourdough rye?

No, she said. Oh Christ, no. No!

I remember Ann’s eyes and the hat she wore the day we first looked at each other. Our babies had just stepped howling out of the sandbox on their new walking legs. We picked them up. Over their sandy heads we smiled. I think a bond was sealed then, at least as useful as the vow we’d all sworn with husbands to whom we’re no longer married. Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

Meanwhile, Anthony’s world — poor, dense, defenseless thing — rolls round and round. Living and dying are fastened to its surface and stuffed into its softer parts.

He was right to call my attention to its suffering and danger. He was right to harass my responsible nature. But I was right to invent for my friends and our children a report on these private deaths and the condition of our lifelong attachments.

CHARLES BAXTER was born in 1947 in Minneapolis, and grew up “on forty acres of halfhearted farmland outside of Excelsior, Minnesota.” He said, “I was very happy in elementary school, less happy in middle school, and very unhappy in high school.” He earned his BA from Macalester College and his PhD in English from the University of Buffalo.

In 1983 Baxter submitted his first story collection, Harmony of the World , to an Association of Writers and Writing Programs competition. He explained, “They had already rejected the book at the Iowa contest and at a number of other fine high-rent locales. Don Barthelme was the judge of the AWP [Award] that year, and he liked my book enough to give it the prize.”

Baxter is the author of the novels First Light; Shadow Play; The Feast of Love , which was nominated for the National Book Award; Saul and Patsy ; and The Soul Thief . His story collections include Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, Believers, Gryphon , and, most recently, There’s Something I Want You to Do . His books on writing are Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction and The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot . He has also published three collections of poetry.

The Atlantic defined Baxter’s signature themes as “revelations of the unexpected in the course of mundane day-to-day reality, the fleeting moments that indelibly shape a life, the moral and emotional quandaries that besiege us all.”

Baxter has taught at Wayne State University, in the University of Michigan’s MFA program in Ann Arbor, and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.

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I

In the small Ohio town where I grew up, many homes had parlors that contained pianos, sideboards, and sofas, heavy objects signifying gentility. These pianos were rarely tuned. They went flat in summer around the Fourth of July, and sharp in winter at Christmas. Ours was a Story and Clark. On its music stand were copies of Stephen Foster and Ethelbert Nevin favorites, along with one Chopin prelude that my mother would practice for twenty minutes every three years. She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio — all of it, every scrap — made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything. Happiness is not infectious, but somehow her happiness infected my father, a pharmacist, and then spread through the rest of the household. My whole family was obstinately cheerful. I think of my two sisters, my brother, and my parents as having artificial pasted-on smiles, like circus clowns. They apparently thought cheer and good Christian words were universals, respected everywhere. The pianos were part of this cheer. They played for celebrations and moments of pleasant pain. Or rather someone played them, but not too well, since excellent playing would have been faintly antisocial. “Chopin,” my mother said, shaking her head as she stumbled through the prelude. “Why is he famous?”

When I was six, I received my first standing ovation. On the stage of the community auditorium, where the temperature was about ninety-four degrees, sweat fell from my forehead onto the piano keys, making their ivory surfaces slippery. At the conclusion of the piece, when everyone stood up to applaud, I thought they were just being nice. My playing had been mediocre; only my sweating had been extraordinary. Two years later, they stood up again. When I was eleven, they cheered. By that time I was astonishing these small-town audiences with Chopin and Rachmaninoff recital chestnuts. I thought I was a genius, and read biographies of Einstein. Already the townspeople were saying that I was the best thing Parkersville had ever seen, that I would put the place on the map . Mothers would send their children by to watch me practice. The kids sat with their mouths open while I polished off another classic.

Like many musicians, I cannot remember ever playing badly, in the sense of not knowing what I was doing. In high school, my identity was being sealed shut: My classmates called me El Señor Longhair, even though I wore a crewcut, this being the 1950s. Whenever the town needed a demonstration of local genius, it called upon me. There were newspaper articles detailing my accomplishments, and I must have heard the phrase “future concert career” at least two hundred times. My parents smiled and smiled as I collected applause. My senior year, I gave a solo recital and was hired for umpteen weddings and funerals. I was good luck. On the Fourth of July the townspeople brought out a piano to the city square so that I could improvise music between explosions at the fireworks display. Just before I left for college, I noticed that our neighbors wanted to come up to me, ostensibly for small talk but actually to touch me.

In college I made a shocking discovery: Other people existed in the world who were as talented as I was. If I sat down to play a Debussy etude, they would sit down and play Beethoven, only louder and faster than I had. I felt their breath on my neck. Apparently there were other small towns. In each of these small towns there was a genius. Perhaps some geniuses were not actually geniuses. I practiced constantly and began to specialize in the non-Germanic piano repertoire. I kept my eye out for students younger than I was, who might have flashier technique. At my senior recital I played Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, and Debussy, with encore pieces by Scriabin and Thomson. I managed to get the audience to stand up for the last time.