Birds of America

by Lorrie Moore

  For Memorial Day weekend, Agnes flew with Joe to New York, to show him the city for the first time. “A place,” she said, “where if you’re not white and not born there, you’re not automatically a story.” She had grown annoyed with Iowa, the pathetic thirdhand manner in which the large issues and conversations of the world were encountered, the oblique and tired way history situated itself there—if ever. She longed to be a citizen of the globe!

  They roller-skated in Central Park. They looked in the Lord & Taylor windows. They went to the Joffrey. They went to a hair salon on Fifty-seventh Street and there she had her hair dyed red. They sat in the window booths of coffee shops and got coffee refills and ate pie.

  “So much seems the same,” she said to Joe. “When I lived here, everyone was hustling for money. The rich were. The poor were. But everyone tried hard to be funny. Everywhere you went—a store, a manicure place—someone was telling a joke. A good one.” She remembered it had made any given day seem bearable, that impulse toward a joke. It had been a determined sort of humor, an intensity mirroring the intensity of the city, and it seemed to embrace and alleviate the hard sadness of people having used one another and marred the earth the way they had. “It was like brains having sex. It was like every brain was a sex maniac.” She looked down at her pie. “People really worked at it, the laughing,” she said. “People need to laugh.”

  “They do,” said Joe. He took a swig of coffee, his lips out over the cup in a fleshy flower. He was afraid she might cry—she was getting that look again—and if she did, he would feel guilty and lost and sorry for her that her life was not here anymore, but in a far and boring place now with him. He set the cup down and tried to smile. “They sure do,” he said. And he looked out the window at the rickety taxis, the oystery garbage and tubercular air, seven pounds of chicken giblets dumped on the curb in front of the restaurant where they were. He turned back to her and made the face of a clown.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “It’s a clown face.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a clown face’?” Someone behind her was singing “I Love New York,” and for the first time she noticed the strange irresolution of the tune.

  “A regular clown face is what I mean.”

  “It didn’t look like that.”

  “No? What did it look like?”

  “You want me to do the face?”

  “Yeah, do the face.”

  She looked at Joe. Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself: she attempted the face—a look of such monstrous emptiness and stupidity that Joe burst out in a howling sort of laughter, like a dog, and then so did she, air exploding through her nose in a snort, her head thrown forward, then back, then forward again, setting loose a fit of coughing.

  “Are you okay?” asked Joe, and she nodded. Out of politeness, he looked away, outside, where it had suddenly started to rain. Across the street, two people had planted themselves under the window ledge of a Gap store, trying to stay dry, waiting out the downpour, their figures dark and scarecrowish against the lit window display. When he turned back to his wife—his sad young wife—to point this out to her, to show her what was funny to a man firmly in the grip of middle age, she was still bent sideways in her seat, so that her face fell below the line of the table, and he could only see the curve of her heaving back, the fuzzy penumbra of her thin spring sweater, and the garish top of her bright, new, and terrible hair.

  CHARADES

  It’s fitting that Christmas should degenerate to this, its barest bones. The family has begun to seem to Therese like a pack of thespians anyway; everyone arrives, performs for one another, catches early flights out, to Logan or O’Hare. Probably it’s appropriate that a party game should literally appear and insert itself in the guise of a holiday tradition (which it isn’t). Usually, no one in Therese’s family expresses much genuine feeling anyway; everyone aims instead—though gamely!—for enactments.

  Each year now, the stage is a new one—their aging parents, in their restless old age, buying and selling town houses, moving steadily southward from Maine. The real estate is Therese’s mother’s idea. Since he’s retired, Therese’s father has focused more on bird feeders; he is learning how to build them. “Who knows what he’ll do next?” Her mother sighs. “He’ll probably start carving designs into the side of the house.”

  This year, they are in Bethesda, Maryland, near where Andrew, Therese’s brother, lives. Andrew works as an electrical engineer and is married to a sweet, pretty, part-time private detective named Pam. Pam is pixie-haired and smiley. Who would ever suspect her of discreetly gathering confidences and facts for one’s adversaries? She freezes hams. She makes Jell-O salad days in advance. She and Andrew are the parents of a one-and-a-half-year-old named Winnie, who already reads.

  Reads the reading videos on TV, but reads.

  Everyone has divided into teams, four and four, and written the names of famous people, songs, films, plays, books on scraps of wrapping paper torn off the gifts hours earlier. It is another few hours until Therese and her husband Ray’s flight, at 4:30, from National Airport. “Yes,” says Therese, “I guess we’ll have to forgo the ‘Averell Harriman: Statesman for All Seasons’ exhibit.”

  “I don’t know why you couldn’t catch a later flight,” says Therese’s sister, Ann. She is scowling. Ann is the youngest, and ten years younger than Therese, who is the oldest, but lately Ann’s voice has taken up a prissy and matronly scolding that startles Therese. “Four-thirty,” says Ann, pursing her lips and propping her feet up on the chair next to her. “That’s a little ridiculous. You’re missing dinner.” Her shoes are pointy and Victorian-looking. They are green suede—a cross between a courtesan’s and Peter Pan’s.

  The teams are divided in such a way that Therese and Ray and her parents are on one team, Andrew and Pam, Ann and Tad, Ann’s fiancé, on the other. Tad is slender and red-haired, a marketing rep for Neutrogena. He and Ann have just become engaged. After nearly a decade of casting about in love and work, Ann is now going to law school and planning her summer wedding. Since Therese worked for years as a public defender and is currently, through a fluky political appointment, a county circuit court judge, she has assumed that Ann’s decision to be a lawyer is a kind of sororal affirmation, that it will somehow mean the two of them will have new things in common, that Ann will have questions for her, observations, forensic things to say. But this seems not to be so. Ann appears instead to be preoccupied with trying to hire bands and caterers, and to rent a large room in a restaurant. “Ugh,” said Therese sympathetically. “Doesn’t it make you want to elope?” Therese and Ray were married at the courthouse, with the file clerks as witnesses.

  Ann shrugged. “I’m trying to figure out how to get everybody from the church to the restaurant in a way that won’t wrinkle their outfits and spoil the pictures.”

  “Really?” asked Therese. “You are?”

  The titles are put in two big salad bowls, each team receiving the other’s bowl of titles. Therese’s father goes first. “All right! Everyone ready!” He has always been witty, competitive, tense; games have usually brought out the best and worst in him. These days, however, he seems anxious and elderly. There is a pain in his eyes, something sad and unfocused that sometimes stabs at them—the fear of a misspent life, or an uncertainty as to where he’s left the keys. He signals that his assigned name is a famous person. No one could remember how to signal that and so the family has invented one: a quick pompous posture, hands on hips, chin in air. Mustering up a sense of drama, Therese’s father does this well.

  “Famous person!” Everyone shouts it, though of course there is someone who shouts “Idiot” to be witty. This time, it is Therese’s mother.

  “Idiot!” she shouts. “Village idiot!”

  But Therese’s father has continued signaling the syllables, ignoring his wife, slapping the fingers of his right hand hard on
his left sleeve. The famous person has three names. He is doing the first name, first syllable. He takes out a dollar bill and points to it.

  “George Washington,” shouts Ray.

  “George Washington Carver!” shouts Therese. Therese’s father shakes his head angrily, turning the dollar around and pointing at it violently. It bothers him not to be able to control the discourse.

  “Dollar bill,” says Therese’s mother.

  “Bill!” says Therese. At this, her father begins nodding and pointing at her psychotically. Yes, yes, yes. Now he makes stretching motions with his hands. “Bill, Billy, William,” says Therese, and her father points wildly at her again. “William,” she says. “William Kennedy Smith.”

  “Yes!” shouts her father, clapping his hands and throwing his head back as if to praise the ceiling.

  “William Kennedy Smith?” Ann is scowling again. “How did you get that from just William?”

  “He’s been in the news.” Therese shrugs. She does not know how to explain Ann’s sourness. Perhaps it has something to do with Ann’s struggles in law school, or with Therese’s being a circuit court judge, or with the diamond on Ann’s finger, which is so huge that it seems, to Therese, unkind to wear it around their mother’s, which is, when one gets right down to it, a chip. Earlier this morning, Ann told Therese that she is going to take Tad’s name, as well. “You’re going to call yourself Tad?” Therese asked, but Ann was not amused. Ann’s sense of humor was never that flexible, though she used to like a good sight gag.

  Ann officiously explained the name change: “Because I believe a family is like a team, and everyone on the team should have the same name, like a color. I believe a spouse should be a team player.”

  Therese no longer has any idea who Ann is. She liked her better when Ann was eight, with her blue pencil case, and a strange, loping run that came from having one leg a quarter of an inch longer than the other. Ann was more attractive as a child. She was awkward and inquiring. She was cute. Or so she seemed to Therese, who was mostly in high school and college, slightly depressed and studying too much, destroying her already-bad eyes, so that now she wore glasses so thick her eyes swam in a cloudy way behind them. This morning, when she’d stood listening to Ann talk about team players, Therese had smiled and nodded, but she felt preached at, as if she were a messy, wayward hippie. She wanted to grab her sister, throw herself upon her, embrace her, shut her up. She tried to understand Ann’s dark and worried nuptial words, but instead she found herself recalling the pratfalls she used to perform for Ann—Therese could take a fall straight on the face—in order to make Ann laugh.

  Ann’s voice was going on now. “When you sit too long, the bodices bunch up. …”

  Therese mentally measured the length of her body in front of her and wondered if she could do it. Of course she could. Of course. But would she? And then suddenly, she knew she would. She let her hip twist and fell straight forward, her arm at an angle, her mouth in a whoop. She had learned to do this in drama club when she was fifteen. She hadn’t been pretty, and it was a means of getting the boys’ attention. She landed with a thud.

  “You still do that?” asked Ann with incredulity and disgust. “You’re a judge and you still do that?”

  “Sort of,” said Therese from the floor. She felt around for her glasses.

  Now it is the team player herself standing up to give clues to her team. She looks at the name on her scrap of paper and makes a slight face. “I need a consultation,” she says in a vaguely repelled way that perhaps she imagines is sophisticated. She takes the scrap of wrapping paper over to Therese’s team. “What is this?” Ann asks. There in Ray’s handwriting is a misspelled Arachnophobia.

  “It’s a movie,” says Ray apologetically. “Did I spell it wrong?”

  “I think you did, honey,” says Therese, leaning in to look at it. “You got some of the o’s and a’s mixed up.” Ray is dyslexic. When the roofing business slows in the winter months, instead of staying in with a book, or going to psychotherapy, he drives to cheap matinees of bad movies—“flicks,” he calls them, or “cliffs” when he’s making fun of himself. Ray misspells everything. Is it input or imput? Is it averse, adverse, or adversed? Stock or stalk? Carrot or karate? His roofing business has a reputation for being reasonable, but a bit slipshod and second-rate. Nonetheless, Therese thinks he is great. He is never condescending. He cooks infinite dishes with chicken. He is ardent and capable and claims almost every night in his husbandly way to find Therese the sexiest woman he’s ever known. Therese likes that. She is also having an affair with a young assistant DA in the prosecutor’s office, but it is a limited thing—like taking her gloves off, clapping her hands, and putting the gloves back on again. It is quiet and undiscoverable. It is nothing, except that it is sex with a man who is not dyslexic, and once in a while, Jesus Christ, she needs that.

  Ann is acting out Arachnophobia, the whole concept, rather than working syllable by syllable. She stares into her fiancé’s eyes, wiggling her fingers about and then jumping away in a fright, but Tad doesn’t get it, though he does look a little alarmed. Ann waves her Christmas-manicured nails at him more furiously. One of the nails has a little Santa Claus painted on it. Ann’s black hair is cut severely in sharp, expensive lines, and her long, drapey clothes hang from her shoulders, as if still on a hanger. She looks starved and rich and enraged. Everything seems struggled toward and forced, a little cartoonish, like the green shoes, which may be why her fiancé suddenly shouts out, “Little Miss Muffett!” Ann turns now instead to Andrew, motioning at him encouragingly, as if to punish Tad. The awkward lope of her childhood has taken on a chiropracticed slink. Therese turns back toward her own team, toward her father, who is still muttering something about William Kennedy Smith. “A woman shouldn’t be in a bar at three o’clock in the morning, that’s all there is to it.”

  “Dad, that’s ludicrous,” whispers Therese, not wanting to interrupt the game. “Bars are open to everyone. Public Accommodations Law.”

  “I’m not talking about the cold legalities,” he says chastisingly. He has never liked lawyers, and is baffled by his daughters. “I’m talking about a long-understood moral code.” Her father is of that Victorian sensibility that deep down respects prostitutes more than it does women in general.

  “ ‘Long-understood moral code’?” Therese looks at him gently. “Dad, you’re seventy-five years old. Things change.”

  “Arachnophobia!” Andrew shouts, and he and Ann rush together and do high fives.

  Therese’s father makes a quick little spitting sound, then crosses his legs and looks the other way. Therese looks over at her mother and her mother is smiling at her conspiratorially, behind Therese’s father’s back, making little donkey ears with her fingers, her sign for when she thinks he’s being a jackass.

  “All right, forget the William Kennedy Smith. Doll, your turn,” says Therese’s father to her mother. Therese’s mother gets up slowly but bends gleefully to pick up the scrap of paper. She looks at it, walks to the center of the room, and shoves the paper scrap in her pocket. She faces the other team and makes the sign for a famous person.

  “Wrong team, Mom,” says Therese, and her mother says “Oops,” and turns around. She repeats the famous person stance.

  “Famous person,” says Ray encouragingly. Therese’s mother nods. She pauses for a bit to think. Then she spins around, throws her arms up into the air, collapses forward onto the floor, then backward, hitting her head on the stereo.

  “Marjorie, what are you doing?” asks Therese’s father. Her mother is lying there on the floor, laughing.

  “Are you okay?” Therese asks. Her mother nods, still laughing quietly.

  “Fall,” says Ray. “Dizziness. Dizzy Gillespie.”

  Therese’s mother shakes her head.

  “Epilepsy,” says Therese.

  “Explode,” says her father, and her mother nods. “Explosion. Bomb. Robert Oppenheimer!”

  “That’s i
t.” Her mother sighs. She has a little trouble getting back up. She is seventy and her knees are jammed with arthritis.

  “You need help, Mom?” Therese asks.

  “Yeah, Mom, you need help?” asks Ann, who has risen and walked toward the center of the room, to take charge.

  “I’m okay.” Therese’s mother sighs, with a quiet, slightly faked giggle, and walks stiffly back to her seat.

  “That was great, Ma,” says Therese.

  Her mother smiles proudly. “Well, thank you!”

  After that, there are many rounds, and every time Therese’s mother gets anything like Dom De Luise or Tom Jones, she does her bomb imitation again, whipping herself into a spastic frenzy and falling, then rising stiffly again to great applause. Pam brings Winnie in from her nap and everyone oohs and aahs at the child’s sweet sleep-streaked face. “There she is,” coos Aunt Therese. “You want to come see Grandma be a bomb?”

  “It’s your turn,” says Andrew impatiently.

  “Mine?” asks Therese.

  “I think that’s right,” says her father.

  She gets up, digs into the bowl, unfolds the scrap of wrapping paper. It says “Jekylls Street.” “I need a consultation here. Andrew, I think this is your writing.”

  “Okay,” he says, rising, and together they step into the foyer.

  “Is this a TV show?” whispers Therese. “I don’t watch much TV.”

  “No,” says Andrew with a vague smile.

  “What is it?”

  He shifts his weight, reluctant to tell her. Perhaps it is because he is married to a detective. Or, more likely, it is because he himself works with Top Secret documents from the Defense Department; he was recently promoted from the just plain Secret ones. As an engineer, he consults, reviews, approves. His eyes are suppressed, annoyed. “It’s the name of a street two blocks from here.” There’s a surly and defensive curve to his mouth.