Birds of America

by Lorrie Moore

  “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.”

  “You crawled back on your hands and knees?”

  “Well, yes,” she admitted. “There was a nice Belgian man who helped me.” She felt unmasked, no doubt, before her daughter and now gulped at her Guinness.

  Abby tried to take a cheerful tone, switching the subject a little, and it reminded her of Theda, Theda somehow living in her voice, her larynx suddenly a summer camp for the cheerful and slow. “Well, look at you!” said Abby. “Do you feel eloquent and confident, now that you’ve kissed the stone?”

  “Not really.” Mrs. Mallon shrugged.

  Now that they had kissed it, or sort of, would they become self-conscious? What would they end up talking about?

  Movies, probably. Just as they always had at home. Movies with scenery, movies with songs.

  “How about you?” asked Mrs. Mallon.

  “Well,” said Abby, “mostly I feel like we’ve probably caught strep throat. And yet, and yet …” Here she sat up and leaned forward. No tests, or radio quizzes, or ungodly speeches, or songs brain-dead with biography, or kooky prayers, or shouts, or prolix conversations that with drink and too much time always revealed how stupid and mean even the best people were, just simply this: “A toast. I feel a toast coming on.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do.” No one had toasted Abby and Bob at their little wedding, and that’s what ha
d been wrong, she believed now. No toast. There had been only thirty guests and they had simply eaten the ham canapes and gone home. How could a marriage go right? It wasn’t that such ceremonies were important in and of themselves. They were nothing. They were zeros. But they were zeros as placeholders; they held numbers and equations intact. And once you underwent them, you could move on, know the empty power of their blessing, and not spend time missing them.

  From here on in, she would believe in toasts. One was collecting itself now, in her head, in a kind of hesitant philately. She gazed over at her mother and took a deep breath. Perhaps her mother had never shown Abby affection, not really, but she had given her a knack for solitude, with its terrible lurches outward, and its smooth glide back to peace. Abby would toast her for that. It was really the world that was one’s brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world. Abby lifted her glass. “May the worst always be behind you. May the sun daily warm your arms.…” She looked down at her cocktail napkin for assistance, but there was only a cartoon of a big-chested colleen, two shamrocks over her breasts. Abby looked back up. God’s word is quick! “May your car always start—” But perhaps God might also begin with tall, slow words; the belly bloat of a fib; the distended tale. “And may you always have a clean shirt,” she continued, her voice growing gallant, public and loud, “and a holding roof, healthy children and good cabbages—and may you be with me in my heart, Mother, as you are now, in this place; always and forever—like a flaming light.”

  There was noise in the pub.

  Blank is to childhood as journey is to lips.

  “Right,” said Mrs. Mallon, looking into her stout in a concentrated, bright-eyed way. She had never been courted before, not once in her entire life, and now she blushed, ears on fire, lifted her pint, and drank.

  DANCE IN AMERICA

  I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it’s the body’s reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it’s the heart’s triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It’s life flipping death the bird.

  I make this stuff up. But then I feel the stray voltage of my rented charisma, hear the jerry-rigged authority in my voice, and I, too, believe. I’m convinced. The troupe dismantled, the choreography commissions dwindling, my body harder to make limber, to make go, I have come here for two weeks—to Pennsylvania Dutch country, as a “Dancer in the Schools.” I visit classes, at colleges and elementary schools, spreading Dance’s holy word. My head fills with my own yack. What interior life has accrued in me is depleted fast, emptied out my mouth, as I stand before audiences, answering their fearful, forbidding German questions about art and my “whorish dances” (the thrusted hip, the sudden bump and grind before an attitude). They ask why everything I make seems so “feministic.”

  “I think the word is feministical,” I say. I’ve grown tired. I burned down my life for a few good pieces, and now this.

  With only one night left, I’ve fled the Quality Inn. (CREAMED CHICKEN ON WAFFLE $3.95 reads the sign out front. How could I leave?) The karaoke in the cocktail lounge has kept me up, all those tipsy and bellowing voices just back from the men’s room and urged to the front of the lounge to sing “Sexual Healing” or “Alfie.” I’ve accepted an invitation to stay with my old friend Cal, who teaches anthropology at Burkwell, one of the myriad local colleges. He and his wife own a former frat house they’ve never bothered to renovate. “It was the only way we could live in a house this big,” he says. “Besides, we’re perversely fascinated by the wreckage.” It is Fastnacht, the lip of Lent, the night when the locals make hot fried dough and eat it in honor of Christ. We are outside, before dinner, walking Cal’s dog, Chappers, in the cold.

  “The house is amazing to look at,” I say. “It’s beat-up in such an intricate way. Like a Rauschenberg. Like one of those beautiful wind-tattered billboards one sees in the California desert.” I’m determined to be agreeable; the house, truth be told, is a shock. Maple seedlings have sprouted up through the dining room floorboards, from where a tree outside has pushed into the foundation. Squirrels the size of collies scrabble in the walls. Paint is chipping everywhere, in scales and blisters and flaps; in the cracked plaster beneath are written the names of women who, in 1972, 1973, and 1974, spent the night during Spring Rush weekend. The kitchen ceiling reads “Sigma power!” and “Wank me with a spoon.”

  But I haven’t seen Cal in twelve years, not since he left for Belgium on a Fulbright, so I must be nice. He seems different to me: shorter, older, cleaner, despite the house. In a burst of candor, he has already confessed that those long years ago, out of friendship for me, he’d been exaggerating his interest in dance. “I didn’t get it,” he admitted. “I kept trying to figure out the story. I’d look at the purple guy who hadn’t moved in awhile, and I’d think, So what’s the issue with him?”

  Now Chappers tugs at his leash. “Yeah, the house.” Cal sighs. “We did once have a painter give us an estimate, but we were put off by the names of the paints: Myth, Vesper, Snickerdoodle. I didn’t want anything called Snickerdoodle in my house.”

  “What is a Snickerdoodle?”

  “I think they’re hunted in Madagascar.”

  I leap to join him, to play. “Or eaten in Vienna,” I say.

  “Or worshiped in L.A.” I laugh again for him, and then we watch as Chappers sniffs at the roots of an oak.

  “But a myth or a vesper—they’re always good,” I add.

  “Crucial,” he says. “But we didn’t need paint for that.”

  Cal’s son, Eugene, is seven and has cystic fibrosis. Eugene’s whole life is a race with medical research. “It’s not that I’m not for the arts,” says Cal. “You’re here; money for the arts brought you here. That’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to see you after all these years. It’s wonderful to fund the arts. It’s wonderful; you’re wonderful. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.”

  Something chokes up in him. There can be optimism in the increments, the bits, the chapters; but I haven’t seen him in twelve years and he has had to tell me the whole story, straight from the beginning, and it’s the whole story that’s just so sad.

  “We both carried the gene but never knew,” he says. “That’s the way it works. The odds are one in twenty, times one in twenty, and then after that, still only one in four. One in sixteen hundred, total. Bingo! We should move to Vegas.”

  When I first knew Cal, we were in New York, just out of graduate school; he was single, and anxious, and struck me as someone who would never actually marry and have a family, or if he did, would marry someone decorative, someone slight. But now, twelve years later, his silver-haired wife, Simone, is nothing like that: she is big and fierce and original, joined with him in grief and courage. She storms out of PTA meetings. She glues little sequins to her shoes. English is her third language; she was once a French diplomat to Belgium and to Japan. “I miss the caviar” is all she’ll say of it. “I miss the caviar so much.” Now, in Pennsylvania Dutchland, she paints satirical oils of long-armed handless people. “The locals,” she explains in her French accent, giggling. “But I can’t paint hands.” She and Eugene have made a studio from one of the wrecked rooms upstairs.

  “How is Simone through all this?” I ask.

  “She’s better than I am,” he says. “She had a sister who died young. She expects unhappiness.”

  “But isn’t there hope?” I ask, stuck for words.

  Already, Cal says, Eugene has degenerated, grown worse, too much liquid in his lungs. “Stickiness,” he calls it. “If he were three, instead of seven, there’d be more hope. The researchers are making some strides; they really are.”

  “He’s a great kid,” I say. Across the street, there are old Colonial houses with candles lit in each wind
ow; it is a Pennsylvania Dutch custom, or left over from Desert Storm, depending on whom you ask.

  Cal stops and turns toward me, and the dog comes up and nuzzles him. “It’s not just that Eugene’s great,” he says. “It’s not just the precocity or that he’s the only child I’ll ever have. It’s also that he’s such a good person. He accepts things. He’s very good at understanding everything.”

  I cannot imagine anything in my life that contains such sorrow as this, such anticipation of missing someone. Cal falls silent, the dog trots before us, and I place my hand lightly in the middle of Cal’s back as we walk like that through the cold, empty streets. Up in the sky, Venus and the thinnest paring of sickle moon, like a cup and saucer, like a nose and mouth, have made the Turkish flag in the sky. “Look at that,” I say to Cal as we traipse after the dog, the leash taut as a stick.

  “Wow,” Cal says. “The Turkish flag.”

  “You’re back, you’re back!” Eugene shouts from inside, dashing toward the front door as we step up onto the front porch with Chappers. Eugene is in his pajamas already, his body skinny and hunched. His glasses are thick, magnifying, and his eyes, puffed and swimming, seem not to miss a thing. He slides into the front entryway, in his stocking feet, and lands on the floor. He smiles up at me, all charm, like a kid with a crush. He has painted his face with Merthiolate and hopes we’ll find that funny.

  “Eugene, you look beautiful!” I say.

  “No I don’t!” he says. “I look witty.”

  “Where’s your mother?” asks Cal, unleashing the dog.

  “In the kitchen. Dad, Mom says you have to go up to the attic and bring down one of the pans for dinner.” He gets up and chases after Chappers, to tackle him and bring him back.

  “We have a couple pots up there to catch leaks,” Cal explains, taking off his coat. “But then we end up needing the pots for cooking, so we fetch them back.”

  “Do you need some help?” I don’t know whether I should be with Simone in the kitchen, Cal in the attic, or Eugene on the floor.