Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

I remember seeing one letter that started out Friend of my Youth . I don’t know whom it was to. They were all friends of her youth. I don’t recall one that began with My dear and most admired Flora . I would always look at them, try to read the salutation and the few sentences she had written, and because I could not bear to feel sadness I would feel an impatience with the flowery language, the direct appeal for love and pity. She would get more of that, I thought (more from myself, I meant), if she could manage to withdraw, with dignity, instead of reaching out all the time to cast her stricken shadow.

I had lost interest in Flora by then. I was always thinking of stories, and by this time I probably had a new one on my mind.

But I have thought of her since. I have wondered what kind of store. A hardware store or a five-and-ten, where she has to wear a coverall, or a drugstore, where she is uniformed like a nurse, or a Ladies’ Wear, where she is expected to be genteelly fashionable? She must have had to learn about food blenders or chain saws, negligees, cosmetics, even condoms. She would have to work all day under electric lights, and operate a cash register. Would she get a permanent, paint her nails, put on lipstick? And she must have found a place to live — a little apartment with a kitchenette, overlooking the main street, or a room in a boarding house. How could she go on being a Cameronian? How could she get to that out-of-the-way church, unless she managed to buy a car and learned to drive it? And if she did that she might drive not only to church but to other places. She might go on holidays. She might rent a cottage on a lake for a week, learn to swim, visit a city. She might eat meals in a restaurant, possibly in a restaurant where drinks were served. She might make friends with women who were divorced.

She might meet a man. A friend’s widowed brother, perhaps. A man who did not know that she was a Cameronian or what Cameronians were. Who knew nothing of her story. A man who had never heard about the partial painting of the house or the two betrayals, or that it took all her dignity and innocence to keep her from being a joke. He might want to take her dancing, and she would have to explain that she could not go. He would be surprised but not put off — all that Cameronian business might seem quaint to him, almost charming. So it would to everybody. She was brought up in some weird religion, people would say. She lived a long time out on some godforsaken farm. She is a little bit strange but really quite nice. Nice-looking, too. Especially since she went and got her hair done.

I might go into a store and find her.

No, no. She would be dead a long time now.

But suppose I had gone into a store — perhaps a department store. I see a place with the brisk atmosphere, the straightforward displays, the old-fashioned modern look of the fifties. Suppose a tall, handsome woman, nicely turned out, had come to wait on me, and I had known, somehow, in spite of the sprayed and puffed hair and the pink or coral lips and fingernails — I had known that this was Flora. I would have wanted to tell her that I knew, I knew her story, though we had never met. I imagine myself trying to tell her. (This is a dream now, I understand it as a dream.) I imagine her listening, with a pleasant composure. But she shakes her head. She smiles at me, and in her smile there is a degree of mockery, a faint, self-assured malice. Weariness, as well. She is not surprised that I am telling her this, but she is weary of it, of me and my idea of her, my information, my notion that I can know anything about her.

Of course it’s my mother I’m thinking of, my mother as she was in those dreams, saying, It’s nothing, just this little tremor, saying with such astonishing lighthearted forgiveness, Oh, I knew you’d come someday. My mother surprising me, and doing it almost indifferently. Her mask, her fate, and most of her affliction, taken away. How relieved I was, and happy. But I now recall that I was disconcerted as well. I would have to say that I felt slightly cheated. Yes. Offended, tricked, cheated, by this welcome turnaround, this reprieve. My mother, moving rather carelessly out of her old prison, showing options and powers I never dreamed she had, changes more than herself. She changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom — something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.

The Cameronians, I have discovered, are or were an uncompromising remnant of the Covenanters — those Scots who in the seventeenth century bound themselves, with God, to resist prayer books, bishops, any taint of popery or interference by the king. Their name comes from Richard Cameron, an outlawed or “field” preacher, soon cut down. The Cameronians went into battle singing the Seventy-fourth and the Seventy-eighth Psalms. They hacked the haughty archbishop of St. Andrews to death on the highway and rode their horses over his body. One of their ministers, in a mood of firm rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world.

MARY GAITSKILL was born in 1954 in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in the Detroit area. She left home at the age of sixteen and went to live in Canada, traveling from Montreal to Vancouver and back before settling in Toronto. At nineteen she decided she wanted to become a writer and returned to the United States to take a high school equivalency test and then attend community college. From there she went to the University of Michigan, where she took a BA. She moved to New York City in 1981.

Gaitskill published her first book, a story collection titled Bad Behavior , in 1988; the book was hailed by the New York Times as a work “of unusual importance at this time.” She has since published two more collections of stories ( Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry ) and two novels ( Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica ). She has taught writing at the graduate and undergraduate level since 1993.

Gaitskill became known for portraying sexuality in conflict with social norms; her work has more recently come to examine the social personality mystified by and in conflict with its own nature, or what critic Wyatt Mason called “that immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world.”

Mary Gaitskill lives in Brooklyn, New York.

★

JOHN MORTON CAME down the aisle of the plane, banging his luggage into people’s knees and sweating angrily under his suit. He had just run through the corridors of the airport, cursing and struggling with his luggage, slipping and flailing in front of the vapid brat at the seat assignment desk. Too winded to speak, he thrust his ticket at the boy and readjusted his luggage in his sticky hands. “You’re a little late for a seat assignment,” said the kid snottily. “I hope you can get on board before it pulls away.”

He took his boarding pass and said, “Thanks, you little prick.” The boy’s discomfiture was heightened by his pretense of hauteur; it both soothed and fed John’s anger.

At least he was able to stuff his bags into the compartment above the first seat he found. He sat down, grunting territorially, and his body slowly eased into a normal dull pulse and ebb. He looked at his watch; desk attendant to the contrary, the plane was sitting stupidly still, twenty minutes after takeoff time. He had the pleasing fantasy of punching the little bastard’s face.

He was always just barely making his flight. His wife had read in one of her magazines that habitual lateness meant lack of interest in life, or depression or something. Well, who could blame him for lack of interest in the crap he was dealing with?