100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “I have a study in the barn,” he told Candace. “I work there. When I have time.” The lie was absurd, but he felt the need of it.

  “And you’re working with Vietnam veterans,” Candace declared.

  “Supposedly,” Elliot said. He was growing impatient with her nodding solicitude.

  “Actually,” he said, “I came in for the new Oxford Classical World. I thought you’d get it for the library and I could have a look before I spent my hard-earned cash.”

  Candace beamed. “You’ve come to the right place, Chas, I’m happy to say.” He thought she looked disproportionately happy. “I have it.”

  “Good,” Elliot said, standing. “I’ll just take it, then. I can’t really stay.”

  Candace took his cup and saucer and stood as he did. When the library telephone rang, she ignored it, reluctant to let him go. “How’s Grace?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Elliot said. “Grace is well.”

  At the third ring she went to the desk. When her back was turned, he hesitated for a moment and then went outside.

  The gray afternoon had softened into night, and it was snowing. The falling snow whirled like a furious mist in the headlight beams on Route 7 and settled implacably on Elliot’s cheeks and eyelids. His heart, for no good reason, leaped up in childlike expectation. He had run away from a dream and encountered possibility. He felt in possession of a promise. He began to walk toward the roadside lights.

  Only gradually did he begin to understand what had brought him there and what the happy anticipation was that fluttered in his breast. Drinking, he had started his evening from the Conway Library. He would arrive hung over in the early afternoon to browse and read. When the old pain rolled in with dusk, he would walk down to the Midway Tavern for a remedy. Standing in the snow outside the library, he realized that he had contrived to promise himself a drink.

  Ahead, through the storm, he could see the beer signs in the Midway’s window warm and welcoming. Snowflakes spun around his head like an excitement.

  Outside the Midway’s package store, he paused with his hand on the doorknob. There was an old man behind the counter whom Elliot remembered from his drinking days. When he was inside, he realized that the old man neither knew nor cared who he was. The package store was thick with dust; it was on the counter, the shelves, the bottles themselves. The old counterman looked dusty. Elliot bought a bottle of King William Scotch and put it in the inside pocket of his overcoat.

  Passing the windows of the Midway Tavern, Elliot could see the ranks of bottles aglow behind the bar. The place was crowded with men leaving the afternoon shifts at the shoe and felt factories. No one turned to note him when he passed inside. There was a single stool vacant at the bar and he took it. His heart beat faster. Bruce Springsteen was on the jukebox.

  The bartender was a club fighter from Pittsfield called Jackie G., with whom Elliot had often gossiped. Jackie G. greeted him as though he had been in the previous evening. “Say, babe?”

  “How do,” Elliot said.

  A couple of men at the bar eyed his shirt and tie. Confronted with the bartender, he felt impelled to explain his presence. “Just thought I’d stop by,” he told Jackie G. “Just thought I’d have one. Saw the light. The snow . . .” He chuckled expansively.

  “Good move,” the bartender said. “Scotch?”

  “Double,” Elliot said.

  When he shoved two dollars forward along the bar, Jackie G. pushed one of the bills back to him. “Happy hour, babe.”

  “Ah,” Elliot said. He watched Jackie pour the double. “Not a moment too soon.”

  For five minutes or so, Elliot sat in his car in the barn with the engine running and his Handel tape on full volume. He had driven over from East Ilford in a baroque ecstasy, swinging and swaying and singing along. When the tape ended, he turned off the engine and poured some Scotch into an apple juice container to store providentially beneath the car seat. Then he took the tape and the Scotch into the house with him. He was lying on the sofa in the dark living room, listening to the Largo, when he heard his wife’s car in the driveway. By the time Grace had made her way up the icy back-porch steps, he was able to hide the Scotch and rinse his glass clean in the kitchen sink. The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment.

  Soon she was in the tiny cloakroom struggling off with her overcoat. In the process she knocked over a cross-country ski, which stood propped against the cloakroom wall. It had been more than a year since Elliot had used the skis.

  She came into the kitchen and sat down at the table to take off her boots. Her lean, freckled face was flushed with the cold, but her eyes looked weary. “I wish you’d put those skis down in the barn,” she told him. “You never use them.”

  “I always like to think,” Elliot said, “that I’ll start the morning off skiing.”

  “Well, you never do,” she said. “How long have you been home?”

  “Practically just walked in,” he said. Her pointing out that he no longer skied in the morning enraged him. “I stopped at the Conway Library to get the new Oxford Classical World. Candace ordered it.”

  Her look grew troubled. She had caught something in his voice. With dread and bitter satisfaction, Elliot watched his wife detect the smell of whiskey.

  “Oh God,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Let’s get it over with, he thought. Let’s have the song and dance.

  She sat up straight in her chair and looked at him in fear.

  “Oh, Chas,” she said, “how could you?”

  For a moment he was tempted to try to explain it all.

  “The fact is,” Elliot told his wife, “I hate people who start the day cross-country skiing.”

  She shook her head in denial and leaned her forehead on her palm and cried.

  He looked into the kitchen window and saw his own distorted image. “The fact is I think I’ll start tomorrow morning by stringing head-high razor wire across Anderson’s trail.”

  The Andersons were the Elliots’ nearest neighbors. Loyall Anderson was a full professor of government at the state university, thirty miles away. Anderson and his wife were blond and both of them were over six feet tall. They had two blond children, who qualified for the gifted class in the local school but attended regular classes in token of the Andersons’ opposition to elitism.

  “Sure,” Elliot said. “Stringing wire’s good exercise. It’s life-affirming in its own way.”

  The Andersons started each and every day with a brisk morning glide along a trail that they partly maintained. They skied well and presented a pleasing, wholesome sight. If, in the course of their adventure, they encountered a snowmobile, Darlene Anderson would affect to choke and cough, indicating her displeasure. If the snowmobile approached them from behind and the trail was narrow, the Andersons would decline to let it pass, asserting their statutory right-of-way.

  “I don’t want to hear your violent fantasies,” Grace said.

  Elliot was picturing razor wire, the Army kind. He was picturing the decapitated Andersons, their blood and jaunty ski caps bright on the white trail. He was picturing their severed heads, their earnest blue eyes and large white teeth reflecting the virginal morning snow. Although Elliot hated snowmobiles, he hated the Andersons far more.

  He looked at his wife and saw that she had stopped crying. Her long, elegant face was rigid and lipless.

  “Know what I mean? One string at Mommy and Daddy level for Loyall and Darlene. And a bitty wee string at kiddie level for Skippy and Samantha, those cunning little whizzes.”

  “Stop it,” she said to him.

  “Sorry,” Elliot told her.

  Stiff with shame, he went and took his bottle out of the cabinet into which he had thrust it and poured a drink. He was aware of her eyes on him. As he drank, a fragment from old Music’s translation of Medea came into his mind. “Old friend, I have to weep. The gods and I went mad together and made things as they are.” It was such a waste; eighteen months
of struggle thrown away. But there was no way to get the stuff back in the bottle.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said. “You know I’m very sorry, don’t you, Grace?”

  The delectable Handel arias spun on in the next room.

  “You must stop,” she said. “You must make yourself stop before it takes over.”

  “It’s out of my hands,” Elliot said. He showed her his empty hands. “It’s beyond me.”

  “You’ll lose your job, Chas.” She stood up at the table and leaned on it, staring wide-eyed at him. Drunk as he was, the panic in her voice frightened him. “You’ll end up in jail again.”

  “One engages,” Elliot said, “and then one sees.”

  “How can you have done it?” she demanded. “You promised me.”

  “First the promises,” Elliot said, “and then the rest.”

  “Last time was supposed to be the last time,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “I remember.”

  “I can’t stand it,” she said. “You reduce me to hysterics.” She wrung her hands for him to see. “See? Here I am, I’m in hysterics.”

  “What can I say?” Elliot asked. He went to the bottle and refilled his glass. “Maybe you shouldn’t watch.”

  “You want me to be forbearing, Chas? I’m not going to be.”

  “The last thing I want,” Elliot said, “is an argument.”

  “I’ll give you a fucking argument. You didn’t have to drink. All you had to do was come home.”

  “That must have been the problem,” he said.

  Then he ducked, alert at the last possible second to the missile that came for him at hairline level. Covering up, he heard the shattering of glass, and a fine rain of crystals enveloped him. She had sailed the sugar bowl at him; it had smashed against the wall above his head and there was sugar and glass in his hair.

  “You bastard!” she screamed. “You are undermining me!”

  “You ought not to throw things at me,” Elliot said. “I don’t throw things at you.”

  He left her frozen into her follow-through and went into the living room to turn the music off. When he returned she was leaning back against the wall, rubbing her right elbow with her left hand. Her eyes were bright. She had picked up one of her boots from the middle of the kitchen floor and stood holding it.

  “What the hell do you mean, that must have been the problem?”

  He set his glass on the edge of the sink with an unsteady hand and turned to her. “What do I mean? I mean that most of the time I’m putting one foot in front of the other like a good soldier and I’m out of it from the neck up. But there are times when I don’t think I will ever be dead enough—or dead long enough—to get the taste of this life off my teeth. That’s what I mean!”

  She looked at him dry-eyed. “Poor fella,” she said.

  “What you have to understand, Grace, is that this drink I’m having”—he raised the glass toward her in a gesture of salute—“is the only worthwhile thing I’ve done in the last year and a half. It’s the only thing in my life that means jack shit, the closest thing to satisfaction I’ve had. Now how can you begrudge me that? It’s the best I’m capable of.”

  “You’ll go too far,” she said to him. “You’ll see.”

  “What’s that, Grace? A threat to walk?” He was grinding his teeth. “Don’t make me laugh. You, walk? You, the friend of the unfortunate?”

  “Don’t you hit me,” she said when she looked at his face. “Don’t you dare.”

  “You, the Christian Queen of Calvary, walk? Why, I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  She ran a hand through her hair and bit her lip. “No, we stay,” she said. Anger and distraction made her look young. Her cheeks blazed rosy against the general pallor of her skin. “In my family we stay until the fella dies. That’s the tradition. We stay and pour it for them and they die.”

  He put his drink down and shook his head.

  “I thought we’d come through,” Grace said. “I was sure.”

  “No,” Elliot said. “Not altogether.”

  They stood in silence for a minute. Elliot sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Grace walked around it and poured herself a whiskey.

  “You are undermining me, Chas. You are making things impossible for me and I just don’t know.” She drank and winced. “I’m not going to stay through another drunk. I’m telling you right now. I haven’t got it in me. I’ll die.”

  He did not want to look at her. He watched the flakes settle against the glass of the kitchen door. “Do what you feel the need of,” he said.

  “I just can’t take it,” she said. Her voice was not scolding but measured and reasonable. “It’s February. And I went to court this morning and lost Vopotik.”

  Once again, he thought, my troubles are going to be obviated by those of the deserving poor. He said, “Which one was that?”

  “Don’t you remember them? The three-year-old with the broken fingers?”

  He shrugged. Grace sipped her whiskey.

  “I told you. I said I had a three-year-old with broken fingers, and you said, ‘Maybe he owed somebody money.’”

  “Yes,” he said, “I remember now.”

  “You ought to see the Vopotiks, Chas. The woman is young and obese. She’s so young that for a while I thought I could get to her as a juvenile. The guy is a biker. They believe the kid came from another planet to control their lives. They believe this literally, both of them.”

  “You shouldn’t get involved that way,” Elliot said. “You should leave it to the caseworkers.”

  “They scared their first caseworker all the way to California. They were following me to work.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Are you kidding?” she asked. “Of course I didn’t.” To Elliot’s surprise, his wife poured herself a second whiskey. “You know how they address the child? As ‘dude.’ She says to it, ‘Hey, dude.’” Grace shuddered with loathing. “You can’t imagine! The woman munching Twinkies. The kid smelling of shit. They’re high morning, noon, and night, but you can’t get anybody for that these days.”

  “People must really hate it,” Elliot said, “when somebody tells them they’re not treating their kids right.”

  “They definitely don’t want to hear it,” Grace said. “You’re right.” She sat stirring her drink, frowning into the glass. “The Vopotik child will die, I think.”

  “Surely not,” Elliot said.

  “This one I think will die,” Grace said. She took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and looked at him forlornly. “The situation’s extreme. Of course, sometimes you wonder whether it makes any difference. That’s the big question, isn’t it?”

  “I would think,” Elliot said, “that would be the one question you didn’t ask.”

  “But you do,” she said. “You wonder: Ought they to live at all? To continue the cycle?” She put a hand to her hair and shook her head as if in confusion. “Some of these folks, my God, the poor things cannot put Wednesday on top of Tuesday to save their lives.”

  “It’s a trick,” Elliot agreed, “a lot of them can’t manage.”

  “And kids are small, they’re handy and underfoot. They make noise. They can’t hurt you back.”

  “I suppose child abuse is something people can do together,” Elliot said.

  “Some kids are obnoxious. No question about it.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Elliot said.

  “Maybe you should stop complaining. Maybe you’re better off. Maybe your kids are better off unborn.”

  “Better off or not,” Elliot said, “it looks like they’ll stay that way.”

  “I mean our kids, of course,” Grace said. “I’m not blaming you, understand? It’s just that here we are with you drunk again and me losing Vopotik, so I thought why not get into the big unaskable questions.” She got up and folded her arms and began to pace up and down the kitchen. “Oh,” she said when her eye fell upon the bottle, “that’s good stuff, Ch
as. You won’t mind if I have another? I’ll leave you enough to get loaded on.”

  Elliot watched her pour. So much pain, he thought; such anger and confusion. He was tired of pain, anger, and confusion; they were what had got him in trouble that very morning.

  The liquor seemed to be giving him a perverse lucidity when all he now required was oblivion. His rage, especially, was intact in its salting of alcohol. Its contours were palpable and bleeding at the borders. Booze was good for rage. Booze could keep it burning through the darkest night.

  “What happened in court?” he asked his wife.

  She was leaning on one arm against the wall, her long, strong body flexed at the hip. Holding her glass, she stared angrily toward the invisible fields outside. “I lost the child,” she said.

  Elliot thought that a peculiar way of putting it. He said nothing.

  “The court convened in an atmosphere of high hilarity. It may be Hate Month around here but it was buddy-buddy over at Ilford Courthouse. The room was full of bikers and bikers’ lawyers. A colorful crowd. There was a lot of bonding.” She drank and shivered. “They didn’t think too well of me. They don’t think too well of broads as lawyers. Neither does the judge. The judge has the common touch. He’s one of the boys.”

  “Which judge?” Elliot asked.

  “Buckley. A man of about sixty. Know him? Lots of veins on his nose?”

  Elliot shrugged.

  “I thought I had done my homework,” Grace told him. “But suddenly I had nothing but paper. No witnesses. It was Margolis at Valley Hospital who spotted the radiator burns. He called us in the first place. Suddenly he’s got to keep his reservation for a campsite in St. John. So Buckley threw his deposition out.” She began to chew on a fingernail. “The caseworkers have vanished—one’s in L.A., the other’s in Nepal. I went in there and got run over. I lost the child.”

  “It happens all the time,” Elliot said. “Doesn’t it?”

  “This one shouldn’t have been lost, Chas. These people aren’t simply confused. They’re weird. They stink.”