by Lorrie Moore
Then I tried to knock wood, but we were sitting in plush and leaning on plastic. Wood! I shouted. Please, some wood! Anybody here have a matchstick?
Oh, shut up, she said. Anyway, death doesn’t count.
I tried to think of a couple of sorrows as irreversible as death. But truthfully nothing in my life can compare to hers: a son, a boy of fifteen, who disappears before your very eyes into a darkness or a light behind his own, from which neither hugging nor hitting can bring him. If you shout, Come back, come back, he won’t come. Mickey, Mickey, Mickey, we once screamed, as though he were twenty miles away instead of right in front of us in a kitchen chair; but he refused to return. And when he did, twelve hours later, he left immediately for California.
Well, some bad things have happened in my life, I said.
What? You were born a woman? Is that it?
She was, of course, mocking me this time, referring to an old discussion about feminism and Judaism. Actually, on the prism of isms, both of those do have to be looked at together once in a while.
Well, I said, my mother died a couple of years ago and I still feel it. I think Ma sometimes and I lose my breath. I miss her. You understand that. Your mother’s seventy-six. You have to admit it’s nice still having her.
She’s very sick, Ann said. Half the time she’s out of it.
I decided not to describe my mother’s death. I could have done so and made Ann even more miserable. But I thought I’d save that for her next attack on me. These constrictions of her spirit were coming closer and closer together. Probably a great enmity was about to be born.
Susan’s eyes opened. The death or dying of someone near or dear often makes people irritable, she stated. (She’s been taking a course in relationships and interrelationships.) The real name of my seminar is Skills: Personal Friendship and Community. It’s a very good course despite your snide remarks.
While we talked, a number of cities passed us, going in the opposite direction. I had tried to look at New London through the dusk of the windows. Now I was missing New Haven. The conductor explained, smiling: Lady, if the windows were clean, half of you’d be dead. The tracks are lined with sharpshooters.
Do you believe that? I hate people to talk that way.
He may be exaggerating, Susan said, but don’t wash the window.
A man leaned across the aisle. Ladies, he said, I do believe it. According to what I hear of this part of the country, it don’t seem unplausible.
Susan turned to see if he was worth engaging in political dialogue.
You’ve forgotten Selena already, Ann said. All of us have. Then you’ll make this nice memorial service for her and everyone will stand up and say a few words and then we’ll forget her again—for good. What’ll you say at the memorial, Faith?
It’s not right to talk like that. She’s not dead yet, Annie.
Yes, she is, said Ann.
We discovered the next day that give or take an hour or two, Ann had been correct. It was a combination—David Clark, surgeon, said—of being sick unto real death and having a tabletop full of little bottles.
Now, why are you taking all those hormones? Susan had asked Selena a couple of years earlier. They were visiting New Orleans. It was Mardi Gras.
Oh, they’re mostly vitamins, Selena said. Besides, I want to be young and beautiful. She made a joking pirouette.
Susan said, That’s absolutely ridiculous.
But Susan’s seven or eight years younger than Selena. What did she know? Because: People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they’re getting older they look at each other’s faces a little ashamed. It’s clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn’t mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn’t want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life. To which, most of the time, the friend’s eyes will courteously reply, My dear, it’s nothing at all. I hardly noticed.
Luckily, I learned recently how to get out of that deep well of melancholy. Anyone can do it. You grab at roots of the littlest future, sometimes just stubs of conversation. Though some believe you miss a great deal of depth by not sinking down down down.
Susan, I asked, you still seeing Ed Flores?
Went back to his wife.
Lucky she didn’t kill you, said Ann. I’d never fool around with a Spanish guy. They all have tough ladies back in the barrio.
No, said Susan, she’s unusual. I met her at a meeting. We had an amazing talk. Luisa is a very fine woman. She’s one of the office-worker organizers I told you about. She only needs him two more years, she says. Because the kids—they’re girls—need to be watched a little in their neighborhood. The neighborhood is definitely not good. He’s a good father but not such a great husband.
I’d call that a word to the wise.
Well, you know me—I don’t want a husband. I like a male person around. I hate to do without. Anyway, listen to this. She, Luisa, whispers in my ear the other day, she whispers, Suzie, in two years you still want him, I promise you, you got him. Really, I may still want him then. He’s only about forty-five now. Still got a lot of spunk. I’ll have my degree in two years. Chrissy will be out of the house.
Two years! In two years we’ll all be dead, said Ann.
I know she didn’t mean all of us. She meant Mickey. That boy of hers would surely be killed in one of the drugstores or whorehouses of Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco. I’m in a big beautiful city, he said when he called last month. Makes New York look like a garbage tank.
Mickey! Where?
Ha-ha, he said and hung up.
Soon he’d be picked up for vagrancy, dealing, small thievery, or simply screaming dirty words at night under a citizen’s window. Then Ann would fly to the town or not fly to the town to disentangle him, depending on a confluence of financial reality and psychiatric advice.
How is Mickey? Selena had said. In fact, that was her first sentence when we came, solemn and embarrassed, into her sunny front room that was full of the light and shadow of windy courtyard trees. We said, each in her own way, How are you feeling, Selena? She said, O.K., first things first. Let’s talk about important things. How’s Richard? How’s Tonto? How’s John? How’s Chrissy? How’s Judy? How’s Mickey?
I don’t want to talk about Mickey, said Ann.
Oh, let’s talk about him, talk about him, Selena said, taking Ann’s hand. Let’s all think before it’s too late. How did it start? Oh, for God’s sake talk about him.
Susan and I were smart enough to keep our mouths shut.
Nobody knows, nobody knows anything. Why? Where? Everybody has an idea, theories, and writes articles. Nobody knows.
Ann said this sternly. She didn’t whine. She wouldn’t lean too far into Selena’s softness, but listening to Selena speak Mickey’s name, she could sit in her chair more easily. I watched. It was interesting. Ann breathed deeply in and out the way we’ve learned in our Thursday-night yoga class. She was able to rest her body a little bit.
We were riding the rails of the trough called Park Avenue-in-the-Bronx. Susan had turned from us to talk to the man across the aisle. She was explaining that the war in Vietnam was not yet over and would not be, as far as she was concerned, until we repaired the dikes we’d bombed and paid for some of the hopeless ecological damage. He didn’t see it that way. Fifty thousand American lives, our own boys—we’d paid, he said. He asked us if we agreed with Susan. Every word, we said.
You don’t look like hippies. He laughed. Then his face changed. As the resident face-reader, I decided he was thinking: Adventure. He may have hit a mother lode of late counterculture in three opinionated left-wing ladies. That was the nice part of his face. The other part was the sly out-of-town-husband-in-New-York look.
I’d like to see you again, he said to Susan.
Oh? Well, come to dinner day after tomorrow. Only two of my kids will be home. You ought to have at least one decent meal in New York
.
Kids? His face thought it over. Thanks. Sure, he said. I’ll come.
Ann muttered, She’s impossible. She did it again.
Oh, Susan’s O.K., I said. She’s just right in there. Isn’t that good?
This is a long ride, said Ann.
Then we were in the darkness that precedes Grand Central.
We’re irritable, Susan explained to her new pal. We’re angry with our friend Selena for dying. The reason is, we want her to be present when we’re dying. We all require a mother or mother-surrogate to fix our pillows on that final occasion, and we were counting on her to be that person.
I know just what you mean, he said. You’d like to have someone around. A little fuss, maybe.
Something like that. Right, Faith?
It always takes me a minute to slide under the style of her public-address system. I agreed. Yes.
The train stopped hard, in a grinding agony of opposing technologies.
Right. Wrong. Who cares? Ann said. She didn’t have to die. She really wrecked everything.
Oh, Annie, I said.
Shut up, will you? Both of you, said Ann, nearly breaking our knees as she jammed past us and out of the train.
Then Susan, like a New York hostess, began to tell that man all our private troubles—the mistake of the World Trade Center, Westway, the decay of the South Bronx, the rage in Williamsburg. She rose with him on the escalator, gabbing into evening friendship and a happy night.
At home Anthony, my youngest son, said, Hello, you just missed Richard. He’s in Paris now. He had to call collect.
Collect? From Paris?
He saw my sad face and made one of the herb teas used by his peer group to calm their overwrought natures. He does want to improve my pretty good health and spirits. His friends have a book that says a person should, if properly nutritioned, live forever. He wants me to give it a try. He also believes that the human race, its brains and good looks, will end in his time.
At about eleven-thirty he went out to live the pleasures of his eighteen-year-old nighttime life.
At 3 A.M. he found me washing the floors and making little apartment repairs.
More tea, Mom? he asked. He sat down to keep me company. O.K., Faith. I know you feel terrible. But how come Selena never realized about Abby?
Anthony, what the hell do I realize about you?
Come on, you had to be blind. I was just a little kid, and I saw. Honest to God, Ma.
Listen, Tonto. Basically Abby was O.K. She was. You don’t know yet what their times can do to a person.
Here she goes with her goody-goodies—everything is so groovy wonderful far-out terrific. Next thing, you’ll say people are darling and the world is so nice and round that Union Carbide will never blow it up.
I have never said anything as hopeful as that. And why to all our knowledge of that sad day did Tonto at 3 A.M. have to add the fact of the world?
The next night Max called from North Carolina. How’s Selena? I’m flying up, he said. I have one early-morning appointment. Then I’m canceling everything.
At 7 A.M. Annie called. I had barely brushed my morning teeth. It was hard, she said. The whole damn thing. I don’t mean Selena. All of us. In the train. None of you seemed real to me.
Real? Reality, huh? Listen, how about coming over for breakfast—I don’t have to get going until after nine? I have this neat sourdough rye?
No, she said. Oh Christ, no. No!
I remember Ann’s eyes and the hat she wore the day we first looked at each other. Our babies had just stepped howling out of the sandbox on their new walking legs. We picked them up. Over their sandy heads we smiled. I think a bond was sealed then, at least as useful as the vow we’d all sworn with husbands to whom we’re no longer married. Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.
Meanwhile, Anthony’s world—poor, dense, defenseless thing—rolls round and round. Living and dying are fastened to its surface and stuffed into its softer parts.
He was right to call my attention to its suffering and danger. He was right to harass my responsible nature. But I was right to invent for my friends and our children a report on these private deaths and the condition of our lifelong attachments.
1982
CHARLES BAXTER
Harmony of the World
from Michigan Quarterly Review
CHARLES BAXTER was born in 1947 in Minneapolis, and grew up “on forty acres of halfhearted farmland outside of Excelsior, Minnesota.” He said, “I was very happy in elementary school, less happy in middle school, and very unhappy in high school.” He earned his BA from Macalester College and his PhD in English from the University of Buffalo.
In 1983 Baxter submitted his first story collection, Harmony of the World, to an Association of Writers and Writing Programs competition. He explained, “They had already rejected the book at the Iowa contest and at a number of other fine high-rent locales. Don Barthelme was the judge of the AWP [Award] that year, and he liked my book enough to give it the prize.”
Baxter is the author of the novels First Light; Shadow Play; The Feast of Love, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Saul and Patsy; and The Soul Thief. His story collections include Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, Believers, Gryphon, and, most recently, There’s Something I Want You to Do. His books on writing are Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction and The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. He has also published three collections of poetry.
The Atlantic defined Baxter’s signature themes as “revelations of the unexpected in the course of mundane day-to-day reality, the fleeting moments that indelibly shape a life, the moral and emotional quandaries that besiege us all.”
Baxter has taught at Wayne State University, in the University of Michigan’s MFA program in Ann Arbor, and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.
★
I
In the small Ohio town where I grew up, many homes had parlors that contained pianos, sideboards, and sofas, heavy objects signifying gentility. These pianos were rarely tuned. They went flat in summer around the Fourth of July, and sharp in winter at Christmas. Ours was a Story and Clark. On its music stand were copies of Stephen Foster and Ethelbert Nevin favorites, along with one Chopin prelude that my mother would practice for twenty minutes every three years. She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio—all of it, every scrap—made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything. Happiness is not infectious, but somehow her happiness infected my father, a pharmacist, and then spread through the rest of the household. My whole family was obstinately cheerful. I think of my two sisters, my brother, and my parents as having artificial pasted-on smiles, like circus clowns. They apparently thought cheer and good Christian words were universals, respected everywhere. The pianos were part of this cheer. They played for celebrations and moments of pleasant pain. Or rather someone played them, but not too well, since excellent playing would have been faintly antisocial. “Chopin,” my mother said, shaking her head as she stumbled through the prelude. “Why is he famous?”
When I was six, I received my first standing ovation. On the stage of the community auditorium, where the temperature was about ninety-four degrees, sweat fell from my forehead onto the piano keys, making their ivory surfaces slippery. At the conclusion of the piece, when everyone stood up to applaud, I thought they were just being nice. My playing had been mediocre; only my sweating had been extraordinary. Two years later, they stood up again. When I was eleven, they cheered. By that time I was astonishing these small-town audiences with Chopin and Rachmaninoff recital chestnuts. I thought I was a genius, and read biographies of Einstein. Already the townspeople were saying that I was the best thing Parkersville had ever seen, that I would put the place on the map. Mothers would send their children by to watch me practice. The kids sat with their mouths open while I polished off another classic.
Like
many musicians, I cannot remember ever playing badly, in the sense of not knowing what I was doing. In high school, my identity was being sealed shut: My classmates called me El Señor Longhair, even though I wore a crewcut, this being the 1950s. Whenever the town needed a demonstration of local genius, it called upon me. There were newspaper articles detailing my accomplishments, and I must have heard the phrase “future concert career” at least two hundred times. My parents smiled and smiled as I collected applause. My senior year, I gave a solo recital and was hired for umpteen weddings and funerals. I was good luck. On the Fourth of July the townspeople brought out a piano to the city square so that I could improvise music between explosions at the fireworks display. Just before I left for college, I noticed that our neighbors wanted to come up to me, ostensibly for small talk but actually to touch me.
In college I made a shocking discovery: Other people existed in the world who were as talented as I was. If I sat down to play a Debussy etude, they would sit down and play Beethoven, only louder and faster than I had. I felt their breath on my neck. Apparently there were other small towns. In each of these small towns there was a genius. Perhaps some geniuses were not actually geniuses. I practiced constantly and began to specialize in the non-Germanic piano repertoire. I kept my eye out for students younger than I was, who might have flashier technique. At my senior recital I played Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, and Debussy, with encore pieces by Scriabin and Thomson. I managed to get the audience to stand up for the last time.
I was accepted into a large midwestern music school, famous for its high standards. Once there, I discovered that genius, to say nothing of talent, was a common commodity. Since I was only a middling composer, with no interesting musical ideas as such, I would have to make my career as a performer or teacher. But I didn’t want to teach, and as a performer I lacked pizzazz. For the first time, it occurred to me that my life might be evolving into something unpleasant, something with the taste of stale bread.
