Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Lorrie Moore

Yup, he says, and shapes his fingers into a gun and pulls the trigger, blowing off her face. Bang, he says.

  She is startled. Now Jeffrey dear, you don’t mean that, she coos nervously, taking his little hand and gently, quietly, returning it to his lap. It flies back up with a fierce quickness. Jeffrey looks at her face, her sour-breath face, and doesn’t smile. Bang, he says again from behind the mask, the finger curling slowly, firmly. Bang.

  You love once, I told you. Even when you love over and over again it is the same once, the same one. And you sent me your recipes—Ezra Pound Cake, Beef Mallarmé—and you wrote: Do you think if you eat one meal, every meal after that is the same meal, just because it too is a meal? And I said some are the same meal.

  In the hospital cafeteria Jeffrey asks me if he can have a BB gun. He is eating around the crusts of his bologna sandwich, pulling out the lettuce and dropping it unsurreptitiously onto the floor.

  Of course not, I say. Take your mask off while you’re eating. He obeys.

  Why on earth do you want a BB gun?

  He shrugs his shoulders. I dunno, he says and I can hear his legs swinging beneath the table, his sneakers hitting the aluminum, vibrating his Jello-O. Dad’ll let me.

  No, he won’t, Jeffrey, now that’s the end of it.

  He thinks about this for a while. Can I have some ice cream, then?

  No. Finish your sandwich.

  Can I … (now he’s just thinking up any old thing) … take this home with me? He holds up a plastic fork.

  Good god. All right.

  Goody, he says.

  Tuesday at work I have to yell at Amahara. She has mis-priced all the Italian clutches.

  Big deal, bubbleass, she mutters into her own right shoulder.

  One more crack like that, Amahara, and you’re through.

  I didn’t say nothing, she protests, wickedly wide-eyed.

  Just watch it. My voice is scraping, ugly, it unnerves me. I go back out on the floor and re-mark the bags myself. It is a thankless, mechanical chore, tag after tag, one after another. The Italian clutches have brassy leering clasps and I can see myself in them, muzzy and sickeningly golden. I am suddenly embarrassed to be marking up such flimsy merchandise.

  I leave early not even checking the afternoon’s returns, pick up Batman from nursery school, drive home, and lying in bed later ask Tom if he thinks I have a big ass like a bubble and he says no.

  When I’m working at the store, Jeffrey stays at Mr. Fernandez’s nursery school on Spruce Street. He is a former aging hippie who became a panhandler outside the art museum where I met him, years ago, when I was trying to get pregnant. He thought I was Tricia Nixon and vociferously demanded a quarter. When I failed to drop one into his coffee can because I was looking at a brochure on Cézanne’s The Great Bathers, he started hissing things at me.

  Excuse me? I said, stopping on the stairs to look at him. I was disoriented after so much post-impressionism. And then he knew, glancing up at me, that he had it all wrong. Too big, he said. Too big. I’m sorry. I thought you were Tricia Nixon. And that’s when he got up and walked over to me, a dusky, swaying man, and said in a slight accent: Geeze lady, I’m really sorry. He extended his right hand and I shook it, putting away the brochure, and then we talked a bit, he about the eighteenth-century Chippendale commode in the English wing, and I about him, asking what he was doing with his life, why he was here. He merely smiled sadly, I suppose the truest sort of explanation he could muster, and said what he would really like to do is raise a family and how envious he was of me, still young and newly pregnant and—

  And I said: Pregnant? What makes you say that? (Sometimes I am sensitive about my size.)

  And then he became even more apologetic and said, well, that it was just a way he had, a witchiness, but not a bad witchiness, and he just knew these things.

  And sure enough eight months later Batman flew out, and Mr. Fernandez, newly scrubbed and reformed, the beneficiary of ten thousand dollars from a dead Ohio cousin and of manicure advice from me, threw a giant shower and gave me a yellow horse pinata never to be whacked open but simply to hang in Jeffrey’s room, a lesson in hope and greed and peaceful coexistence, and it has been there ever since. And Mr. Fernandez has successfully opened a nursery school on Spruce Street called Pinata Pre-School, and only I, not even Tom, know of his museum-step past and I have promised not to divulge it, and he has hugged me gratefully on several occasions and we have become quite close friends and he is really so good, so good with children.

  Amahara and I had drinks at lunch today. I guess we are on speaking terms again. We sent to La Kommissary and she told me about a guy she went out with this weekend.

  He’s not interested in what’s inside, complains Amahara. I want a guy who wants my heart, you know? I want him to look for my heart.

  You know when he’s fumbling with your breasts? I flutter my eyes at Amahara. He’s looking for your heart. They all do that.

  What a bitter hag I have become.

  Amahara grins. He’s really into orange.

  But what does that mean, into orange?

  Like really into it. She smiles enigmatically.

  The color?

  Yeah. Really into it.

  But what do you mean? His car? His hair? Your hair?

  His life, she says dramatically. He’s really into it.

  Into it, I repeat dumbly, believing I am trying to understand; what is wrong with me, I thought we were on speaking terms, what are speaking terms am I on them with anyone am I from outer space, is she?

  I can’t believe, I say firmly, hoping it will pass, that a person could be so into it.

  For damn sure, says Amahara.

  I pick up the check. Amahara goes for her wallet, but I say nope, it’s on me, I’m into it.

  Intuit, you said, blowing out the candle. Intuition is the secret life of fat cells. And then you burrowed into me, whispering your questions.

  I am becoming hugely depressed. Like last year. Just a month ago I was better, sporting a simpler, terse sort of disenchantment, a neat black vest of sadness. Elegant ironies leaped from my mouth fine as cuisses de grenouilles. Now the darkness sleeps and wakes in me daily like an Asian carnivore at the Philly zoo.

  In my little white house I am in a slump. I look around. All these possessions, all these new things, are little teeth, death markers, my home one compact little memorial park remember when they used to be called cemeteries. Now even gravestones are called family monuments, like these things, monuments to the family. I stare at my gold faucets, my new chairs, my popcorn popper, and my outsized spice rack—thyme leaves, time leaves—and wonder how they got here, how I have arrived at this point of clutter. These things, things, things, my mind is shouting and I hurl appliances, earrings, wine glasses, into the kitchen trash and, gripped immediately by a zinging, many-knuckled panic, pick them out again, hurry, hurry, one by one, rinse them off, put them back away, behind their doors, watch TV, breathe, watch TV.

  My face worsens, and my eye, yet Tom doesn’t seem to notice. It seems my question about my ass, however, has made him a bit braver, and he suggests, gently, as we lie side by side in the dark, ever so delicately, that perhaps I should lose some—Christ in the foothills, Riva, why don’t you lose some—weight.

  He has another business trip to Scranton on Thursday, he says. Won’t be back until late Saturday.

  Scranton. History dangles in front of me, a terrible mobile. My arms cannot move. My forehead opens up like a garage door. You’ve got to be kidding, I gasp, panicked.

  No, why? he murmurs. Shouldn’t be too bad.

  Oh come off it, Tom. These suburban, marital clichés. They’ve crawled into us like tapeworms. Put a sugar cube on the tongue, flash a light up the ass, and they poke out their tiny white heads to investigate, they’re eating us Tom there’s something eating us.

  He snorts, smooths his baggy pajamas, closes his handsome eyes. He says he doesn’t understand why it is always late at night that I grow
so incomprehensible.

  I grow so incomprehensible.

  I am stealing more and more money. I keep it in my top drawer beneath my underwear, along with my diaphragm and my lipstick and my switchblade these are things a woman needs.

  You are the man removing my bobby pins, my hair unfurling, the one who saunters in still, grinning then absconding with all of my pulses, over and over again, that long graceful stride toward a city, toward a bathroom, toward a door. I sleep alone this week, my husband gone, rolling into my own empty arms might they be yours, sleep on top of them as if to kill them, and in the morning they are dead as salamis until I massage the blood down into them again with my palm. Sweet, sweet Riva, you said to the blind white place behind my ear. Come live with me and be my lunch.

  After I’ve picked up Jeffrey and the two of us have come home, we are alone in the kitchen and he teaches me what he has learned in his dance class.

  Shooba plié, shooba plié, he chants, hanging on to the Formica edge of the counter, jiggling and squatting repeatedly in his corduroys. He always looks so awkward I’m sure he’s doing something wrong.

  What’s a shooba? I inquire, silly me.

  It’s this, he says, doing lord knows what with his pelvis. Then you make a Driveway, he explains, indicating the newly created space between his turned-out feet, but you don’t drive in it, he adds.

  You mean, it’s just for show? I ask, incredulous. My smile frustrates him.

  Welp … Mommy, listen! You just do Jellyfish fingers, hang, hang, then leapareeno! and he grand jetés, or sort of, across the linoleum, whoops loudly, slides into the potato cabinet. Then he’s up again, his fallen socks now bunched at his instep, and he scoots across the floor with little brush steps, singing hoo-la, hoo-la, brock-co-lee!

  How did he get this far from me? So short a time and already he is off and away, inventing his own life. I want to come up behind him, cover his head with my dirty, oniony apron, suck him back up into my body I want to know his bones again, to keep him from the world.

  Mommy?

  My brain feels crammed and gassy as if with cole slaw. You live, I read once, you live if you dance to the voice that ails you.

  You go like this, Mom.

  I stop my staring. Like this? I am no dummy. I am swiftly up on my toes, flitting past the refrigerator, my arms flapping like sick ducks. Hoo-la, hoo-la, I sing. Hoo-la-la.

  Sometimes I find myself walking down the street or through Scarves and Handbags thinking about absolutely nothing, my mind worrying its own emptiness. I think: Everyone is thinking bigger thoughts than I, everyone is thinking thoughts. Sometimes it scares me, this bone box of a head of mine, this clean, shiny ashtray.

  And when after one hundred years, I am reading to Jeffrey, a prince came across Sleeping Beauty in the forest and kissed her, she awoke with a start and said, Prince! What took you so long? for she had been asleep for quite some time and all of her dreams were in reruns.

  Jeffrey gulps solemnly: Like Starsky and Hutch.

  And then the prince took Sleeping Beauty in his arms and said: Let us be married, fair lady, and we shall live happily ever after or until the AFC championship games, whichever comes first.

  Ma-om! Jeffrey lets out a two-toned groan. That’s not how it goes.

  Oh, excuse me, I apologize. You’re right. He says: Let us be married, fair dozing one. And I shall make you my princess. And Sleeping Beauty says: Oh, handsome prince. I love you so. But I have been asleep for a hundred years and am old enough to be your grandmother.

  Jeffrey giggles.

  The prince thought about this and was just about to say, Well, that being the case maybe I’ll be running along now, when a magic bluebird swooped down out of the sky and made him one hundred years older as well, and then boy did Sleeping Beauty have a good laugh.

  Did they live happily ever after?

  Gee, honey, you know it just doesn’t say. What do you think?

  Yup, says Jeffrey, not smiling.

  Knock, knock, says Mr. Fernandez.

  Who’s there? I smile, on my way home with Jeffrey. I am double-parked on Spruce Street.

  Amnesia.

  Amnesia who?

  The moon is full is serene, wanders indolent and pale as a cow, a moon cow through my window, taking me to its breast, swaddling me in its folds of light. I leave on this moon, float out into the night on it, wash out like a wave and encircle the earth, I move with a husbandless gait, an ease about the flanks, the luminous hugeness of milk at my eyes I shift, disappear by slow degrees, travel, looking. Where did you go?

  I owe. I owe the store so much money I cannot believe it. I let Amahara go home early today and then go into the back office, get the books out again, and calculate how much it has been: so much I cannot say.

  At least I have done it neatly. There is something soothing in arithmetic, in little piles, little stacks of numbers that obey you.

  Tuesday I stop at Wanamaker’s and pick up ruby-colored satin slippers for my mother and walk out of the store without paying for them. I then head for Mr. Fernandez’s to pick up Jeffrey. Together, big blonde, little blonde, we walk the sixteen blocks to St. Veronica’s, no need to get home early; Tom’s still in Scranton.

  Sister Mary Marian is ecstatic at seeing Jeffrey again. He gives her a big juicy kiss on the cheek and she giggles and reddens. It makes me uncomfortable.

  In the elevator I touch my face, touch my eyes to see if they are behaving, if they are being, if they are having, or misbehaving, miss being had. The words conflate and dizzy me, smack of the errors of my life I misbe. I mishave. Jeffrey pulls on my arm as if he wants to tell me something. We are stalled on the third floor while two orderlies wheel in a giant cart of medical supplies, glasses, and linens. I bend down so Jeffrey can whisper whatever it is he wants to say, and with both his hands he begins assiduously smoothing my hair back and out of the way. When he has the space around my ear sufficiently cleared, however, he doesn’t say anything, but just presses his face close against my head.

  Jeffrey, hon, what is it? The doors now shut and we resume our ascent.

  Nothing, he whispers loudly.

  Nothing? I ask, thinking he might be scared of something. I am still bent over.

  I just wanted to look at your ear, he explains.

  We walk in dully, not knowing what to expect. We leave our raincoats on.

  Mother seems to be having a good day, her spirits up gliding around the white metal room greeting the world like pleasant hosts. And we are the parasites that have just trudged sixteen blocks, the pair of sights, the parricides.

  Riva, dear, and Jeffrey. I was hoping you would come today. How’s Tom?

  But I think she’s said who’s Tom and I freeze, very tired, not wanting to get into that again.

  Do you feel all better, Gramma? Jeffrey asks with a yawn, climbing on the metal footboard, looking as if purposefully at the meaningless clipboard there.

  Gramma just has to speak to the doctor before she can leave here, she says.

  I am shocked that my mother is talking about leaving. Does she no longer think of herself as mad? As Catholic? I look at her face and it is smiling, softened like ice cream.

  Mother, do you mean that? Will you come home with us? I feel equivocal and liver-lipped.

  We’ll see, she says, has forever said, as I sometimes do now to Jeffrey. And yet it seems more hopeful, more certain. I feel, however, the slow creep of ambivalence in me: How will she behave, will she insist on refrying the pork chops, will she snore unforgivably from the den?

  Ladies always say that, announces my clever son. He has now wandered over to the window and stands tiptoe, just barely able to peer out at the emergency entrance in the wing directly opposite this one. Wow, he shouts. Ampulnses. Neato.

  Mother, I think it would be great for you to leave here, and as I’ve said before, we would love to have you. I sit at the bed squeezing her hand, having no idea what I really want her to do, astounded at my disingenuousness—
would she just watch TV nice and quiet all day on the couch?

  Jeffrey is still watching things out the window, saying: They take sick people for rides, right Gramma?

  I haven’t been able to stop eating. Amahara remarks today when I put three Lifesavers in my mouth at once: Boy, don’t you know it’s Lent? You haven’t stopped eating for weeks. Silence. Have you?

  I am reminded of a man’s coat I bought once at a used clothing store, a store of dead people’s clothes, and how I found an old Lifesaver in the pocket and popped it in my mouth, a dead man’s candy. You’ll eat anything, won’t you, said Tom.

  I am suddenly angry at Amahara. I march out wordlessly, straightening my spine. I stand next to Mrs. Rosenbaum our best charge customer and recommend the Korean paisleys while every cell in my body grumbles and gossips. Later I do a small operation with the Ann Klein receipts in the back. I will buy a new dishwasher.

  I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich. I lie back against you, fit the crook of your arm around my neck and into the curve at the base of my skull, bring your hand around to meet my mouth, chewing on your fingers, one by one, as a child might, listening to you tell stories.

  Once upon a time I was in a strange position regarding women, you begin. I saw myself, as someone once said of Mohammed Ali, as a sort of pelvic missionary.

  Ah, I murmur. The pelvic missionary position.

  And your calluses press against my lips and teeth and your fingers strum my smile like a harp I am yours, yours, despite your stories I am yours.

  I want to diet. I want to slink. I want to slink in a mink at the sink.

  Batman is giving me dance lessons again before dinner. Glide, glide, goom-bah, he says, his lithe little body cutting S-weaves across the floor. Mom, he sighs, feigning exasperation at my swivel-hipped attempt to do what he is doing. He is imperious, in imitation of his teacher, a frustrated bursitic Frenchman named Oleg. Move just your feet. Everything else will follow. Goom-bah!