by Lorrie Moore
“No, I’ll go,” I said. “If you want me to.”
“It’s not that I want you to or don’t want you to. It’s up to you.”
“Well, it would be nice if you wanted me to. I mean, I don’t want to go if you don’t want me to.”
“It’s up to you,” he said. His eyes were knobby, like knuckles.
“I get the feeling you don’t want me to go.”
“It’s up to you! Look, if you think you’ll have things to say at a party full of music-types, fine. I mean, I’m a musician, and sometimes even I have trouble.”
“You don’t want me to go. Okay, I won’t go.”
“Benna, it’s not that. Come along if you—”
“Never mind,” I said. “Never mind, Gerard.” I drove him to the cast party and then drove home, where I got into my pajamas and in my own apartment listened to the sound track from The Turning Point, an album, I realized, I had always loved.
There was one main reason I didn’t tell Eleanor I was pregnant, although once, when we both had gone into the ladies’ room together, a not unusual occurrence of synchronized plumbing which allowed chit-chat between the stalls, I almost told her anyway. I attempted it. I stared at the crotch of my underwear and said, “You know, I think I’m pregnant.” There was no response, so when I was finished, I stepped out, washed my hands slowly, and then just said to the feet in Eleanor’s stall, “Welp, see you out in the real world.” I looked in the mirror; the glare and precision of it startled me. I had that old look: that look where you look—old. When I got back to our table, Eleanor was already sitting there lighting one of my Winstons. “You took a long time,” she said.
“Oh, my god,” I laughed. “I just confessed my entire life story to someone in black boots.”
“I would never wear black boots,” said Eleanor.
Which was some residual thing, she said, having to do with Catholic school. Which was why I never finally told her about the pregnancy: She still had weird, unresolved strings to Catholicism. She was sentimental about it. She once told me about a frugal, lapsed Catholic aunt of hers who, when she died, left two large, mysterious boxes in her attic, one full of various marital and contraceptive devices, and one labeled “Strings Too Short to Use,” which was a huge collection of small pieces of string, multicolored and inexplicable, matted together in large coils and nests. That, I realized, was both Eleanor’s and her aunt’s relationship to Catholicism: ties too short to bind and therefore stowed away in a huge and secret box. But Eleanor clearly liked to lug her box around, display her ties like a traveling waresperson.
“You can’t really be a fallen Protestant,” she said. “How can there be any guilt?”
“There can be guilt,” I said. “It’s my piety, I can cry if I want to.”
“But being a fallen Catholic—that’s skydiving! Being a fallen Protestant—that’s like mugging an old lady, so easy why bother.”
“Yeah, but think how awful you’d feel after you’d mugged an old lady.”
Eleanor shrugged. She liked lapsed Catholics; I think the only reason she managed to like Gerard at all was that they both had been Catholics. Sometimes when Gerard got on the phone to ask her things about Virgil, they would end up talking about Dante and then about nuns they’d known in Catholic school. They’d both attended parochial schools called The Assumption School, where, they said, they had learned to assume many things. More than once I sat at Gerard’s kitchen table and listened while he talked on the phone with Eleanor, uproarious and slap-happy, exchanging priest stories. I had never known a priest. But it was curious and lovely to see Gerard so taken up by his own childhood, so communed via anecdotes with Eleanor, so pleased with his own escape into an adulthood that allowed him these survivor’s jokes, that I would sit there, floating and transfixed as a moon, laughing along with him, with them, even though I didn’t really know what the two of them were talking about.
“I’ve made an appointment,” I said to Gerard.
We were in my apartment. He thought he might have left his keys there.
“Christ, Benna,” he said. “You stare at me with those cow eyes of yours—what am I supposed to say? I’ve got to go off to a gig in a half hour and you say, ‘I’ve made an appointment.’ It’s like what you did the night of the cast party: cow eyes and then ‘I think I’m pregnant.’ ”
“I just thought you’d want to know.” I kept thinking of that horrible saying mothers tell you about getting the milk and buying the cow.
“You make me feel like I’m in a tiny store and all I want to do is relax, look, and enjoy, but because I’m the only potential customer there, you keep coming over and pressuring me.”
“I don’t pressure you,” I said. I have a lump in my breast, I wanted to say but didn’t. Maybe I will die.
“Yes, you do. You’re like one of those ladies that just keeps coming over to say, ‘Can I help you?’ ”
I stared at his square chin, his impossibly handsome unshaven chin and then I looked off at the Mary Cassatt print on the wall, mother bathing child, why did I own such a thing, and it was at that moment I really truly understood that he was in love with Susan Fitzbaum.
Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.
Gerard kept repeating himself. “You’re like one of those ladies that just keeps coming up to you—‘Can I help you, this is nice, let me know’—over and over and over. You won’t leave me the hell alone.”
I thought about this. Finally I said very quietly, “But you’re in the store, Gerard. If you don’t like it, get out of the goddamn store.”
Gerard picked up a magazine and hurled it across the room; then, without looking further for his keys, he left early for his gig at The Smokey Fern.
I was not large enough for Gerard. I was small, lumpy, anchored with worry, imploded. He didn’t want me, he wanted Macy’s; like Aeneas or Ulysses, he wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.
Eleanor had said she was staying home to watch The Sound of Music, so I stayed in and read the abortion chapter in my women’s health book. On TV I watched a nature documentary. It was on animal species who, due to a change in the landscape, begin to produce unviable eggs, or are chased into the hills.
I wandered into Gerard’s apartment and fetched back some of my stuff that had ended up there: shoes, dishes, magazines, silverware. It was like some principle of physics: Things flowed naturally back and forth between the two apartments until the maximum level of chaos was reached. I had his can opener, but he had my ice-cube trays. It was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind.
On Monday I met Eleanor for breakfast at Hank’s. I wanted to discuss hopeful things: the job in New York, how she might feel about coming with me. Perhaps she could start up a reading group there. I would promise not to die of Globner’s Disease.
“We should stop smoking cigarettes. Do you wanna stop smoking cigarettes?” said Eleanor as soon as I sat down.
Despite my degenerating health, I enjoyed them too much. They were sororal. “But they’re so cysterly,” I said, and stuck out a breast. No idiocy was too undignified for me. I might as well have sat in a corner and applied Winstons directly to my lymph nodes, laughing and telling terrible jokes.
Eleanor’s mouth formed a small, tough segment of a smile. “I have something to tell you, Benna.”
Something to do with cysterly; I said, “What?”
“Benna, I asked Gerard to go to bed with me.”
I was still smiling, inappropriately, and my breast was still stuck out a bit. “So, when was this?” I said. I pulled back my breast
, realigned my torso. Something between us had suddenly gone pale and gray, like a small piece of meat one dislodges hours late from between the teeth. I lit up a cigarette.
“Saturday night.” Eleanor’s face looked arranged in anxiety, the same face she used when reading Romeo’s speech to the County Paris he’s just killed: O, give me thy hand / One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book. She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does.
“I thought you said you were staying in to watch The Sound of Music,” I said in the same voice I always used when blowing cigarette smoke out my nostrils.
“I, uh, ended up not doing that. I went to see Gerard play instead. He said you’d had a fight, Benna.”
And suddenly I knew this was only a half-truth. Suddenly I knew there’d been more than this. That there always had been.
“Benna, I thought at first we were kidding,” she continued. She kept saying my name. “I sat down next to him and said, ‘Hey, let’s ruin a beautiful friendship—’ ”
“You hated each other,” I insisted.
“—and he said, ‘Sure why not?’ and Benna, I’m convinced he thought at first he was kidding …”
Kidding? That was what my Mary Cassatt print was a picture of. A woman with kids.
“Benna, I’m sure it’s not …”
Eleanor’s skin was smooth and poreless. Her hair was frosted golden like some expensive, marbley wood. I wanted her to stop saying my name.
“But you didn’t actually sleep together, did you?” I asked, though it sounded pathetic, like a tiny Hans Christian Andersen character.
Eleanor stared at me. Her eyes started to fill with water. She felt sorry for me. She felt sorry for herself. I could feel my heart wither like a hand. I could feel the lump in my breast rise into my throat, from where perhaps it had fallen to begin with.
“Oh, Benna, he’s such a shit.” They did hate each other. That was why she was telling me this: We all hated each other. “I’m so sorry, Benna. He’s such a shit. I knew he would never tell you.”
She was fat. She didn’t know anything about music. She was a child. She still received money from her parents in Doc Country. No animal is as problematic in captivity as the elephant, I thought meanly, like an aerobics teacher who watches too much PBS. Every year around the world at least one zookeeper is killed.
Something in Eleanor now began crumbling and biting. “How long do you think I could have been a sounding board for the two of you, Benna?”
This was horrible. This was the sort of thing you read about in magazine advice columns. O, give my thy hand / One writ with me in sour Ms. Fortune’s book.
“… I deserved a love affair, and instead I was spending all of my time being envious of you. And you never noticed me. You never even noticed I’d lost weight.” She knew nothing about music. She knew none of the pieces from The Turning Point.
“Don’t you see, sisterhood has to be redefined,” she was saying. “There are too few men in the world. It’s a heterosexual depression out there!”
What I finally managed to say, looking at the Heimlich Maneuver poster, was, “So, is this what’s called sociobiology?” She smiled weakly, hopefully, and I started to laugh, and then we were both laughing, teary-eyed, our faces falling into our arms on the table, and that’s when I took the ketchup bottle and cracked it over her head. And then I got up and wobbled out, my soul numb as a crossed leg, and Hank yelled something at me in Greek and rushed out from behind the counter over to Eleanor who was sobbing loudly and would probably need stitches.
For nine days Gerard and I didn’t speak to each other. Through the walls I could hear him entering and exiting his apartment, and presumably he could hear me, but we didn’t speak. On the very first day I had refused to answer his knock.
I went out at night to all the really bad movies in Fitchville and just sat there. Sometimes I brought a book and a flashlight.
I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.
From across the hall I could hear Gerard’s phone ring, and I would listen and wait for him to pick it up and speak into it. The words were always muffled. Sometimes I could hear him laugh, as if he were quite ready to be happy again. A few times when he stayed out all night, his phone rang until three in the morning.
I stopped taking sedatives. The days were all false, warm-gray. Monoxide days. Dirty bathmat. Shoe sole. When I went downtown the stores all bled together like wet magazines. There was a noise in the air that changed with the wind and that could have been music, or roaring, or the voices of children. People were looking up into the trees for something, and I looked up as well and saw what it was: Not far from Marini Street thousands of dark birds had landed, descended from their neat, purposeful geometry into the mess of the neighborhood, scattered their troubled squawking throughout trees and on rooftops, looking the rainbowy, shadowy black of an oil spill. There were scientists, I knew, who did studies of such events, who claimed to discern patterns in such chaos. But this required distance and a study that took no account of any single particle in the mess. Particles were of no value. Up close was of no particular use.
From four blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls.
I walked slowly, away from Marini Street, and understood this small shred: Between large and small, between near and far, there was no wisdom or truce to be had. To be near was to be blind; to be one among so many was to own no shape or say.
“There must be things that can save us!” I wanted to shout. “But they are just not here.”
I got an abortion. Later I suffered from a brief heterosexual depression and had trouble teaching my class: I would inadvertently skip the number three when counting and would instead call out, “Front-two-four-five, Side-two-four-five.” Actually that happened only once, but later, when I was living in New York, it seemed to make a funny story. (“Benna,” said Gerard, the day I left. “Baby, I’m really sorry.”)
Because of the pregnancy, the lump in my breast disappeared, retracted and absorbed, never to sprout again. “A night-blooming-not-so-serious,” I said to the nurse-practitioner. She smiled. When she felt my breast, I wanted her to ask me out to dinner. There was a week in my life when she was the only person I really liked.
But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles.
If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.
And so before I left, I phoned Barney and took him out for a drink. “You’re a sweet girl,” he said, loud as a sportscaster. “I’ve always thought that.”
3
YARD SALE
THERE ARE, I’VE NOTICED, THOSE IN the world who are born salespeople. They know how to transact, how to dispose. They know how to charm their way all the way to the close, to the dump. Then they get in their cars and drive fast.
“Every time I move to a new place,” Eleanor is saying, “I buy a new shower caddy. It gives me a nice sense of starting over.” She smiles, big and pointed.
“I know what you mean,” says Gerard, bending over in his lawn chair to tie a sneaker. We are in the side yard of the house, liquidating our affections, trading our lives in for cash: We are having a yard sale. Gerard straightens back up from his sneaker. His hair falls into his face, makes him look too young, then too handsome when he shakes it back. My heart hurts, spreads, folds over like an omelette.
It’s two against one out here.
; Eleanor is trying to sell her old shower caddy for a quarter, even though the mush of some horrible soap has dried to a green wax all over it. Eleanor is a good friend and has come to our yard sale this weekend with all of the mangy items she failed to sell in her own sale last weekend. I invited her to set up her own concession, but now I wonder if she’s not desecrating our yard. Gerard and I are selling attractive things: a ten-speed bike, a cut-glass wine decanter, some rare jazz albums, healthy plants that need a healthy home, good wool sweaters, two antique ladderback chairs. Eleanor has brought over junk: foam rubber curlers with hairs stuck in them; a lavender lace teddy with a large, unsightly stain; two bags of fiberglass insulation; three seamed and greasy juice glasses, which came free with shrimp cocktail, and which Eleanor now wants to sell for seventy-five cents. She’s also brought an entire crate of halter tops and an old sound track of Thoroughly Modern Millie. She spreads most of this out on one of the low tables Gerard and I have constructed from cement blocks and two old doors hauled from the shed out back. Magdalena, our dog, has a purple homemade price tag somehow stuck (“like a dingleberry,” says the ever-young Gerard) to her rear end. She sniffs at the shrimp glasses and knocks one of them over. Gerard smooths her black coat, strokes her haunches, tells her to cool it. Eleanor once described Magdalena as a dog that looked exactly like a first-grader’s drawing of a dog. Now, however, with her ornamented rear end, Magdalena looks a bit wrong—dressed up and gypsied, like a baby with pierced ears. Her backside says “45 cents.” Magdalena has the carriage of a duchess. I’ve always thought that.
Eleanor places various articles of clothing—some skirts, a frayed jacket, the wounded teddy—in the branches of the birch trees next to us. Now we are truly a slum.
“That is just lovely, Eleanor,” says Gerard, pointing to the birch trees. Magdalena has run over and started woofing up at Eleanor’s clothes.
