100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  That was what I believed my mother would make of things. In her own plight her notions had turned mystical, and there was sometimes a hush, a solemn thrill in her voice that grated on me, alerted me to what seemed a personal danger. I felt a great fog of platitudes and pieties lurking, and incontestable crippled-mother power, which could capture and choke me. There would be no end to it. I had to keep myself sharp-tongued and cynical, arguing and deflating. Eventually I gave up even that recognition and opposed her in silence.

  This is a fancy way of saying that I was no comfort and poor company to her, when she had almost nowhere else to turn.

  I had my own ideas about Flora’s story. I didn’t think that I could have written a novel but that I would write one. I would take a different tack. I saw through my mother’s story and put in what she left out. My Flora would be as wrong as hers was right. Rejoicing in the bad turns done to her and in her own forgiveness, spying on the shambles of her sister’s life. A Presbyterian witch, reading out of her poisonous book. It takes a rival ruthlessness, the comparatively innocent brutality of the thick-skinned nurse, to drive her back, to flourish in her shade. But she is driven back, the power of sex and ordinary greed drive her back and shut her up in her own part of the house, with the coal-oil lamps. She shrinks, she caves in, her bones harden and her joints thicken and—Oh, this is it, this is it, I see the bare beauty of the ending I will contrive!—she becomes crippled herself, with arthritis, hardly able to move. Now Audrey Atkinson comes into her full power—she demands the whole house. She wants those partitions knocked out which Robert put up with Flora’s help when he married Ellie. She will provide Flora with a room, she will take care of her. (Audrey Atkinson does not wish to be seen as a monster, and perhaps she really isn’t one.) So one day Robert carries Flora—for the first and last time he carries her in his arms—to the room that his wife, Audrey, has prepared for her. And once Flora is settled in her well-lit, well-heated corner, Audrey Atkinson undertakes to clean out the newly vacated rooms—Flora’s rooms. She carries a heap of old books out into the yard. It’s spring again, housecleaning time, the season when Flora herself performed such feats, and now the pale face of Flora appears behind the new net curtains. She has dragged herself from her corner. She sees the light blue sky with its high skidding clouds over the watery fields, the contending crows, the flooded creeks, the reddening tree branches. She sees the smoke rise out of the incinerator in the yard, where her books are burning. Those smelly old books, as Audrey has called them. Words and pages, the ominous dark spines. The elect, the damned, the slim hopes, the mighty torments—up in smoke. There was the ending.

  To me the really mysterious person in the story, as my mother told it, was Robert. He never has a word to say. He got engaged to Flora. He is walking beside her along the river when Ellie leaps out at them. He finds Ellie’s thistles in his bed. He does the carpentry made necessary by his and Ellie’s marriage. He listens or does not listen while Flora reads. Finally he sits scrunched up in the school desk while his flashy bride dances by with all the men.

  So much for his public acts and appearances. But he was the one who started everything, in secret. He did it to Ellie. He did it to that skinny wild girl at a time when he was engaged to her sister, and he did it to her again and again when she was nothing but a poor botched body, a failed childbearer, lying in bed.

  He must have done it to Audrey Atkinson, too, but with less disastrous results.

  Those words, did it to—the words my mother, no more than Flora, would never bring herself to speak—were simply exciting to me. I didn’t feel any decent revulsion or reasonable indignation. I refused the warning. Not even the fate of Ellie could put me off. Not when I thought of that first encounter—the desperation of it, the ripping and striving. I used to sneak longing looks at men, in those days. I admired their wrists and their necks and any bit of their chests a loose button let show, and even their ears and their feet in shoes. I expected nothing reasonable of them, only to be engulfed by their passion. I had similar thoughts about Robert.

  What made Flora evil, in my story, was just what made her admirable, in my mother’s—her turning away from sex. I fought against everything my mother wanted to tell me on this subject; I despised even the drop in her voice, the gloomy caution, with which she approached it. My mother had grown up in a time and in a place where sex was a dark undertaking for women. She knew that you could die of it. So she honored the decency, the prudery, the frigidity that might protect you. And I grew up in horror of that very protection, the dainty tyranny that seemed to me to extend to all areas of life, to enforce tea parties and white gloves and all other sorts of tinkling inanities. I favored bad words and a breakthrough, I teased myself with the thought of a man’s recklessness and domination. The odd thing is that my mother’s ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in my times. This in spite of the fact that we both believed ourselves independent, and lived in backwaters that did not register such changes. It’s as if tendencies that seemed most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, had come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.

  Not long before she died, but when I was still at home, my mother got a letter from the real Flora. It came from that town near the farm, the town that Flora used to ride to, with Robert, in the cart, holding on to the sacks of wool or potatoes.

  Flora wrote that she was no longer living on the farm.

  “Robert and Audrey are still there,” she wrote. “Robert has some trouble with his back but otherwise he is very well. Audrey has poor circulation and is often short of breath. The doctor says she must lose weight but none of the diets seem to work. The farm has been doing very well. They are out of sheep entirely and into dairy cattle. As you may have heard, the chief thing nowadays is to get your milk quota from the government and then you are set. The old stable is all fixed up with milking machines and the latest modern equipment, it is quite a marvel. When I go out there to visit I hardly know where I am.”

  She went on to say that she had been living in town for some years now, and that she had a job clerking in a store. She must have said what kind of store this was, but I cannot now remember. She said nothing, of course, about what had led her to this decision—whether she had in fact been put off her own farm, or had sold out her share, apparently not to much advantage. She stressed the fact of her friendliness with Robert and Audrey. She said her health was good.

  “I hear that you have not been so lucky in that way,” she wrote. “I ran into Cleta Barnes, who used to be Cleta Stapleton at the post office out at home, and she told me that there is some problem with your muscles and she said your speech is affected, too. This is sad to hear but they can do such wonderful things nowadays so I am hoping that the doctors may be able to help you.”

  An unsettling letter, leaving so many things out. Nothing in it about God’s will or His role in our afflictions. No mention of whether Flora still went to that church. I don’t think my mother ever answered. Her fine legible handwriting, her schoolteacher’s writing, had deteriorated, and she had difficulty holding a pen. She was always beginning letters and not finishing them. I would find them lying around the house. My dearest Mary, they began. My darling Ruth, My dear little Joanna (though I realize you are not little anymore), My dear old friend Cleta, My lovely Margaret. These women were friends from her teaching days, her Normal School days, and from high school. A few were former pupils. I have friends all over the country, she would say, defiantly. I have dear, dear friends.

  I remember seeing one letter that started out Friend of my Youth. I don’t know whom it was to. They were all friends of her youth. I don’t recall one that began with My dear and most admired Flora. I would always look at them, try to read the salutation and the few sentences she had written, and because I could not bear to feel sadness I would feel an impatience with the flowery language, the direct appeal fo
r love and pity. She would get more of that, I thought (more from myself, I meant), if she could manage to withdraw, with dignity, instead of reaching out all the time to cast her stricken shadow.

  I had lost interest in Flora by then. I was always thinking of stories, and by this time I probably had a new one on my mind.

  But I have thought of her since. I have wondered what kind of store. A hardware store or a five-and-ten, where she has to wear a coverall, or a drugstore, where she is uniformed like a nurse, or a Ladies’ Wear, where she is expected to be genteelly fashionable? She must have had to learn about food blenders or chain saws, negligees, cosmetics, even condoms. She would have to work all day under electric lights, and operate a cash register. Would she get a permanent, paint her nails, put on lipstick? And she must have found a place to live—a little apartment with a kitchenette, overlooking the main street, or a room in a boarding house. How could she go on being a Cameronian? How could she get to that out-of-the-way church, unless she managed to buy a car and learned to drive it? And if she did that she might drive not only to church but to other places. She might go on holidays. She might rent a cottage on a lake for a week, learn to swim, visit a city. She might eat meals in a restaurant, possibly in a restaurant where drinks were served. She might make friends with women who were divorced.

  She might meet a man. A friend’s widowed brother, perhaps. A man who did not know that she was a Cameronian or what Cameronians were. Who knew nothing of her story. A man who had never heard about the partial painting of the house or the two betrayals, or that it took all her dignity and innocence to keep her from being a joke. He might want to take her dancing, and she would have to explain that she could not go. He would be surprised but not put off—all that Cameronian business might seem quaint to him, almost charming. So it would to everybody. She was brought up in some weird religion, people would say. She lived a long time out on some godforsaken farm. She is a little bit strange but really quite nice. Nice-looking, too. Especially since she went and got her hair done.

  I might go into a store and find her.

  No, no. She would be dead a long time now.

  But suppose I had gone into a store—perhaps a department store. I see a place with the brisk atmosphere, the straightforward displays, the old-fashioned modern look of the fifties. Suppose a tall, handsome woman, nicely turned out, had come to wait on me, and I had known, somehow, in spite of the sprayed and puffed hair and the pink or coral lips and fingernails—I had known that this was Flora. I would have wanted to tell her that I knew, I knew her story, though we had never met. I imagine myself trying to tell her. (This is a dream now, I understand it as a dream.) I imagine her listening, with a pleasant composure. But she shakes her head. She smiles at me, and in her smile there is a degree of mockery, a faint, self-assured malice. Weariness, as well. She is not surprised that I am telling her this, but she is weary of it, of me and my idea of her, my information, my notion that I can know anything about her.

  Of course it’s my mother I’m thinking of, my mother as she was in those dreams, saying, It’s nothing, just this little tremor, saying with such astonishing lighthearted forgiveness, Oh, I knew you’d come someday. My mother surprising me, and doing it almost indifferently. Her mask, her fate, and most of her affliction, taken away. How relieved I was, and happy. But I now recall that I was disconcerted as well. I would have to say that I felt slightly cheated. Yes. Offended, tricked, cheated, by this welcome turnaround, this reprieve. My mother, moving rather carelessly out of her old prison, showing options and powers I never dreamed she had, changes more than herself. She changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom—something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy.

  The Cameronians, I have discovered, are or were an uncompromising remnant of the Covenanters—those Scots who in the seventeenth century bound themselves, with God, to resist prayer books, bishops, any taint of popery or interference by the king. Their name comes from Richard Cameron, an outlawed or “field” preacher, soon cut down. The Cameronians went into battle singing the Seventy-fourth and the Seventy-eighth Psalms. They hacked the haughty archbishop of St. Andrews to death on the highway and rode their horses over his body. One of their ministers, in a mood of firm rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world.

  1993

  MARY GAITSKILL

  The Girl on the Plane

  from Mirabella

  MARY GAITSKILL was born in 1954 in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in the Detroit area. She left home at the age of sixteen and went to live in Canada, traveling from Montreal to Vancouver and back before settling in Toronto. At nineteen she decided she wanted to become a writer and returned to the United States to take a high school equivalency test and then attend community college. From there she went to the University of Michigan, where she took a BA. She moved to New York City in 1981.

  Gaitskill published her first book, a story collection titled Bad Behavior, in 1988; the book was hailed by the New York Times as a work “of unusual importance at this time.” She has since published two more collections of stories (Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry) and two novels (Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica). She has taught writing at the graduate and undergraduate level since 1993.

  Gaitskill became known for portraying sexuality in conflict with social norms; her work has more recently come to examine the social personality mystified by and in conflict with its own nature, or what critic Wyatt Mason called “that immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world.”

  Mary Gaitskill lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  ★

  JOHN MORTON CAME down the aisle of the plane, banging his luggage into people’s knees and sweating angrily under his suit. He had just run through the corridors of the airport, cursing and struggling with his luggage, slipping and flailing in front of the vapid brat at the seat assignment desk. Too winded to speak, he thrust his ticket at the boy and readjusted his luggage in his sticky hands. “You’re a little late for a seat assignment,” said the kid snottily. “I hope you can get on board before it pulls away.”

  He took his boarding pass and said, “Thanks, you little prick.” The boy’s discomfiture was heightened by his pretense of hauteur; it both soothed and fed John’s anger.

  At least he was able to stuff his bags into the compartment above the first seat he found. He sat down, grunting territorially, and his body slowly eased into a normal dull pulse and ebb. He looked at his watch; desk attendant to the contrary, the plane was sitting stupidly still, twenty minutes after takeoff time. He had the pleasing fantasy of punching the little bastard’s face.

  He was always just barely making his flight. His wife had read in one of her magazines that habitual lateness meant lack of interest in life, or depression or something. Well, who could blame him for lack of interest in the crap he was dealing with?

  He glanced at the guy a seat away from him on the left, an alcoholic-looking old shark in an expensive suit, who sat staring fixedly at a magazine photograph of a grinning blonde in a white jumpsuit. The plane continued to sit there while stewardesses fiddled with compartments and women rolled up and down the aisles on trips to the bathroom. They were even boarding a passenger; a woman had just entered, flushed and vigorously banging along the aisle with her luggage. She was very pretty and he watched her, his body still feebly sending off alarm signals in response to its forced run.

  “Hi,” she said. “Can I sit here?”

  “Of course.” The force of his anger entered his magnanimity and swelled it hugely; he pinched his ankles together to let her by. She put her bag under the seat in front of her, sat down and rested her booted feet on its pale leather. The old shark next to her, with an appraising glance at her breasts through her open coat, made smile movements. The stewardess did her parody of a suffocating person reaching for an air mask, the pilot mumbled, the plane prepared to assert its unnatural presence in natur
e.

  “They said I’d missed my flight by fifteen minutes,” she said. “But I knew I’d make it. They’re never on time.” Her voice was unexpectedly small, with a rough, gravelly undertone that was seedy and schoolgirlish at once.

  “It’s bullshit,” he said. “Well, what can you do?” She had large hazel eyes.

  She smiled a tight, rueful smile that he associated with women who’d been fucked too many times, and which he found sexy. She cuddled more deeply into her seat, produced a People magazine and intently read it. He liked her profile—which was an interesting combination of soft (forehead, chin) and sharp (nose, cheekbones)—her shoulder-length, pale brown hair and her soft Mediterranean skin. He liked the coarse quality in the subtle downturn of her lips, and the heavy way her lids sat on her eyes. She was older than he’d originally thought, probably in her early thirties.

  Who did she remind him of? A girl from a long time ago, an older version of some date or crush or screw. Or love, he thought gamely.

  The pilot said they would be leaving the ground shortly. She was now reading something titled “AIDS Wedding—One Last Chance.” He thought of his wife at home in Minneapolis, at the stove poking at something, in the living room reading, the fuzzy pink of her favorite sweater. The plane charged and tore a hole in the air.