100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  The woman next to him was hurriedly flipping the pages of People, presumably looking for something as engrossing as “AIDS Wedding.” When she didn’t find it, she closed the magazine and turned to him in a way that invited conversation.

  She said she’d lived in L.A. for eight years and that she liked it, even though it was “gross.”

  “I’ve never been to L.A.,” he said. “I picture it being like L.A. Law. Is it like that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen L.A. Law. I don’t watch TV. I don’t own one.”

  He had never known a person who didn’t own a TV, not even an old high school friend who lived in a slum and got food stamps. “You must read the newspapers a lot.”

  “No. I don’t read them much at all.”

  He was incredulous. “How do you connect with the rest of the world? How do you know anything?”

  “I’m part of the world. I know a lot of things.”

  He expelled a snort of laughter. “That’s an awfully small perspective you’ve got there.”

  She shrugged and turned her head, and he was sorry he’d been rude. He glanced at her profile to read her expression and—of course; she reminded him of Patty LaForge, poor Patty.

  He had met Patty at Meadow Community College in Coate, Minnesota. He was in his last semester; she had just entered. They worked in the student union cafeteria, preparing, serving and snacking on denatured food. She was a slim, curvy person with dark blond hair, hazel eyes and remarkable legs and hips. Her beauty was spoiled by the aggressive resignation that held her features in a fixed position and made all her expressions stiff. Her full mouth had a bitter downturn and her voice was quick, low, self-deprecating and sarcastic. She presented her beautiful body statically, as if it were a shield, and the effort of this presentation seemed to be the source of her animation.

  Most of the people he knew at Meadow were kids he’d gone to high school and even junior high with. They still lived at home and still drove their cars around together at night, drank in the small bars of Coate, adventured in Minneapolis and made love to each other. This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional quality that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and become different from one another and this made them exult in their closeness and alikeness.

  The woman on the plane was flying to Kentucky to visit her parents and stopping over in Cincinnati.

  “Did you grow up in Kentucky?” he asked. He imagined her as a big-eyed child in a cotton shift playing in some dusty, sunny alley, some rural Kentucky-like place. Funny she had grown up to be this wan little bun with too much makeup in black creases under her eyes.

  “No, I was born there, but I grew up mostly in Minnesota near Minneapolis.”

  He turned away, registered the little shock of coincidence and turned back. The situation compounded: she had gone to Redford Community College in Thorold, a suburb much like Coate. She had grown up in Thorold, like Patty. The only reason Patty had gone to Meadow was that Redford didn’t exist yet.

  He felt a surge of commonality. He imagined that she had experienced his adolescence and this made him experience it for a moment. He had loved walking the small neat walkways of the campus through the stiffly banked hedges of snow and harsh morning austerity, entering the close food-smelling student union with the hard winter air popping off his skin. He would see his friends standing in a conspiratorial huddle, warming their hands on cheap cups of coffee; he always remembered the face of a particular girl, Layla, turning to greet him, looking over her frail sloped shoulder, her hair a bunched dark tangle, her round eyes ringed with green pencil, her perfectly ordinary face compelling in its configurations of girlish curiosity, maternal license, sexual knowledge, forgiveness and femininity. A familiar mystery he had meant to explore sometime and never did except when he grabbed her ass at a Halloween party and she smiled like a mother of four who worked as a porn model on the side. He loved driving with his friends to the Red Owl to buy alcohol and bagged salty snacks which they consumed as they drove around Coate playing the tape deck and yelling at each other, the beautiful ordinary landscape unpeeling before them, revealing the essential strangeness of its shadows and night movements. He loved driving with girls to the deserted housing development they called “the Spot,” loved the blurred memories of the girls in the back seat with their naked legs curled up to their chests, their shirts bunched about their necks, their eyes wide with ardor and alcohol, beer and potato chips spilled on the floor of the car, the tape deck singing of love and triumph. He getting out of the car for a triumphant piss while the girl daintily replaced her pants. In the morning his mother would make him “cowboy eggs,” eggs fried on top of bacon, and he would go through the cold to Meadow to sit in a fluorescent classroom and dream.

  “Did you like growing up in that area?” she asked.

  “Like it? It was the greatest time of my life.” Some extremity in his voice made her look away, and as she did, he looked more fully at her profile. She didn’t look that much like Patty, she wasn’t even blond. But the small physical resemblance was augmented by a less tangible affinity, a telling similarity of speech and movement.

  Patty belonged to a different crowd at Meadow. They were rougher than the Coate people, but the two groups were friendly. Patty was a strange, still presence within her group, with her hip thrust out and a cigarette always bleeding smoke from her hand. She was loose even by seventies standards, she had a dirty sense of humor and she wore pants so tight you could see the swollen outline of her genitals. She was also shy. When she talked she pawed the ground with her foot and pulled her hair over her mouth, she looked away from you and then snuck a look back to see what you thought of her. She was accepted by the Thorold people the way you accept what you’ve always known. The stiffness of her face and body contradicting her loose reputation, her coarse language expressed in her timid voice and shy manners, her beauty and her ordinariness all gave her a disconnected sexiness that was aggravating.

  But he liked her. They were often a team at work and he enjoyed having her next to him, her golden-haired arms plunged in greasy black dishwater, or flecked with garbage as she plucked silverware from vile plates on their way to the dishwasher. She spooned out quivering red Jell-O or drew long bland snakes of soft ice cream from the stainless steel machine, she smoked, wiped her nose and muttered about a fight with her mother or a bad date. Her movements were resigned and bitter, yet her eyes and her nasty humor peeked impishly from under this weight. There was something pleasing in this combination, something congruent with her spoiled beauty.

  It was a long time before he realized she had a crush on him. All her conversation was braided together with a fly strip of different boys she’d been with or was involved with, and she talked of all of them with the same tone of fondness and resentment. He thought nothing of it when she followed him outside to the field behind the union where they would walk along the narrow wet ditch, smoking pot and talking. It was early spring: dark, naked trees pressed intensely against the horizon, wet weeds clung to their jeans and her small voice bobbed assertively on the vibrant air. The cold wind gave her lips a swollen raw look and made her young skin grainy and bleached. “So why do you let him treat you like that?” “Ah, I get back at him. It’s not really him, you know, I’m just fixated on him. I’m working out something through him. Besides, he’s a great lay.” He never noticed how often she came up behind him to walk him to class or sat on the edge of his chair as he lounged in the union. Then one day she missed work and a buddy of his said, “Hey, where’s your little puppy dog today?” and he knew.

  “Did you like Thorold?” he asked the girl next to him.

  “No, I didn’t.” She turned toward him, her face a staccato burst of candor. “I didn’t know what I was doing and I was a practicing alcoholic. I kept trying to fit in and I couldn’t.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.” He smiled. How like Patty
to answer a polite question from a stranger with this emotional nakedness, this urgent excess of information. She was always doing that, especially after the job at the cafeteria ended. He’d see her in a hallway, or the union lounge, where normal life was happening all around them, and she’d swoop into a compressed communication, intently twining her hair around her finger as she quickly muttered that she’d had the strangest dream about this guy David, in which a nuclear war was going on, and he, John, was in it too and—

  “What did you do after Redford?” he asked the girl next to him.

  “Screwed around, basically. I went to New York pretty soon after that and did the same things I was doing in Thorold. Except I was trying to be a singer.”

  “Yeah?” He felt buoyed by her ambition. He pictured her in a tight black dress, lips parted, eyes closed, bathed in cheap, sexy stagelight. “Didja ever do anything with it?”

  “Not much.” She abruptly changed expression, as though she’d just remembered not to put herself down. “Well, some stuff. I had a good band once, we played the club circuit in L.A. for a while six years ago.” She paused. “But I’m mostly a paralegal now.”

  “Well, that’s not bad either. Do you ever sing now?”

  “I haven’t for a long time. But I was thinking of trying again.” Just like Patty she looked away and quickly looked back as if to check his reaction. “I’ve been auditioning. Even though—I don’t know.”

  “It sounds great to me,” he said. “At least you’re trying. It sounds better than what I do.” His self-deprecation annoyed him and he bulled his way through an explanation of what he did, making it sound more interesting than selling software.

  A stewardess with a small pink face asked if they’d like anything to drink, and he ordered two little bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Patty’s shadow had a compressed can of orange juice and an unsavory packet of nuts; their silent companion by the window had vodka straight. He thought of asking her if she were married, but he bet the answer was no and he didn’t want to make her admit her loneliness. Of course, not every single person was lonely, but he guessed that she was. She seemed in need of comfort and care, like a stray animal that gets fed by various kindly people but never held.

  He thought of telling her that she reminded him of someone he’d known in Coate, but he didn’t. He sat silently knocking back his whiskey and watching her roll a greasy peanut between her two fingers.

  Out in the field they were sitting on a fallen branch, sharing a wet stub of pot. “I don’t usually say stuff like this,” said Patty. “I know you think I do because of the way I talk but I don’t. But I’m really attracted to you, John.” The wind blew a piece of hair across her cheek and its texture contrasted acutely with her cold-bleached skin.

  “Yeah, I was beginning to notice.”

  “I guess it was kind of obvious, huh?” She looked down and drew her curtain of hair. “And I’ve been getting these mixed signals from you. I can’t tell if you’re attracted to me or not.” She paused. “But I guess you’re not, huh?”

  Her humility embarrassed and touched him. “Well, I am attracted to you. Sort of. I mean, you’re beautiful and everything. I’m just not attracted enough to do anything. Besides, there’s Susan.”

  “Oh, I thought you didn’t like her that much.” She sniffed and dropped the roach on the raw grass; her lipstick had congealed into little chapped bumps on her lower lip. “Well, I’m really disappointed. I thought you liked me.”

  “I do like you, Patty.”

  “You know what I meant.” Pause. “I’m more attracted to you than I’ve been to anybody for two years. Since Paul.”

  A flattered giggle escaped him.

  “Well, I hope we can be friends,” she said. “We can still talk and stuff, can’t we?”

  “Patty LaForge? I wouldn’t touch her, man, the smell alone.”

  He was driving around with a carload of drunk boys who were filled with a tangle of goodwill and aggression.

  “Ah, LaForge is okay.”

  He was indignant for Patty but he laughed anyway.

  “Were you really an alcoholic when you lived in Thorold?” he asked.

  “I still am, I just don’t drink now. But then I did. Yeah.”

  He had stepped into a conversation that had looked nice and solid and his foot had gone through the floor and into the basement. But he couldn’t stop. “I guess I drank too much then, too. But it wasn’t a problem. We just had a lot of fun.”

  She smiled with tight terse mystery.

  “How come you told me that about yourself? It seems kind of personal.” He attached his gaze to hers as he said this; sometimes women said personal things to you as a way of coming on.

  But instead of becoming soft and encouraging, her expression turned proper and institutional, like a kid about to recite. “It’s part of the twelve-step program to admit it. If I’m going to admit it to other alcoholics in the program, I think I should talk about it in regular life too. It humbles you, sort of.”

  What a bunch of shit, he thought.

  He was drinking with some guys at the Winner’s Circle, a rough pick-up bar, when suddenly Patty walked up to him, really drunk.

  “John,” she gasped. “John, John, John.” She lurched at him and attached her nail-bitten little claws to his jacket. “John, this guy over there really wants to fuck me, and I was going to go with him, but I don’t want him, I want you, I want you.” Her voice wrinkled into a squeak, her face looked like you could smear it with your hand.

  “Patty,” he mumbled, “you’re drunk.”

  “That’s not why, I always feel like this.” Her nose and eyelashes and lips touched his cheek in an alcoholic caress. “Just let me kiss you. Just hold me.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “C’mon, stop it.”

  “It doesn’t have to mean anything. You don’t have to love me. I love you enough for both of us.”

  He felt the presence of his smirking friends. “Patty, these guys are laughing at you. I’ll see you later.” He tried to push her away.

  “I don’t care. I love you, John. I mean it.” She pressed her taut body against his, one sweaty hand under his shirt, and arched her neck until he could see the small veins and bones. “Please. Just be with me. Please.” Her hand stroked him, groped between his legs. He took her shoulders and shoved her harder than he meant to. She staggered back, fell against a table, knocked down a chair and almost fell again. She straightened and looked at him like she’d known him and hated him all her life.

  He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, an overweight, prematurely balding salesman getting drunk on an airplane.

  “Look at the clouds,” said the girl next to him. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lorraine.”

  “I’m John.” He extended his hand and she took it, her eyes unreadable, her hand exuding sweet feminine sweat.

  “Why do you want to talk about your alcoholism publicly? I mean, if nobody asks or anything?”

  Her eyes were steadfast, but her body was hesitant. “Well, I didn’t have to just now. It’s just the first thing I thought of when you asked me about Thorold. In general, it’s to remind me. It’s easy to bullshit yourself that you don’t have a problem.”

  He thought of the rows and rows of people in swivel chairs on talk-show stages, admitting their problems. Wife beaters, child abusers, dominatrixes, porn stars. In the past it probably was a humbling experience to stand up and tell people you were an alcoholic. Now it was just something else to talk about. He remembered Patty tottering through a crowded party on smudged red high heels, bragging about what great blow jobs she gave. Some girl rolled her eyes and said, “Oh no, not again.” Patty disappeared into a bedroom with a bottle of vodka and Jack Spannos.

  He remembered a conversation with his wife before he married her, a conversation about his bachelor party. “It was no women allowed,” he’d told her. “Unless they wanted to g
ive blow jobs.”

  “Couldn’t they just jump naked out of a cake?” she asked.

  “Nope. Blow jobs for everybody.”

  They were at a festive restaurant drinking margaritas. Nervously, she touched her tiny straws. “Wouldn’t that be embarrassing? In front of each other? I can’t imagine Henry doing that in front of you all.”

  He smiled at the mention of his shy friend in this context. “Yeah,” he said. “It probably would be embarrassing. Group sex is for teenagers.”

  Her face rose away from her glass in a kind of excited alarm, her lips parted. “You had group sex when you were a teenager?”

  “Oh. Not really. Just a gangbang once.”

  She looked like an antelope testing the wind with its nose in the air, ready to fly. “It wasn’t rape,” she said.

  “Oh, no, no.” Her body relaxed and released a warm, sensual curiosity, like a cat against his leg. “The girl liked it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. She liked having sex with a lot of guys. We all knew her, she knew us.”

  He felt her shiver inwardly, shocked and fascinated by this dangerous pack-animal aspect of his masculinity.

  “What was it like?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It was a good time with the guys. It was a bunch of guys standing around in their socks and underwear.”

  Some kid he didn’t know walked up and put his arm around him while he was talking to a girl named Chrissie. The kid’s eyes were boyish and drunkenly enthusiastic, his face heavy and porous. He whispered something about Patty in John’s ear and said, “C’mon.”

  The girl’s expression subtly withdrew.

  “What?” said John.

  “Come on,” said the kid.

  “Bye bye,” said Chrissie, with a gingerly wag of her fingers.