The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore (6 page)

Kate's divorced friend was named Zora and was a pediatrician. Although no one else did, she howled with laughter, and when her face wasn't blasted apart with it or her jaw snapping mutely open and shut like a pair of scissors (in what Ira recognized as post-divorce hysteria: "How long have you been divorced?" he later asked her. "Eleven years," she replied), Ira could see that she was very beautiful: short black hair; eyes a clear, reddish hazel, like orange pekoe tea; a strong aquiline nose; thick lashes that spiked out, wrought and black as the tines of a fireplace fork. Her body was a mixture of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way.
Age and youth
, he chanted silently,
youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage
. Ira was working on a modest little volume of doggerel, its tentative title "Women from Venus, Men from—well—Penis."

Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.

When it was directed at him, the person just seemed so totally
nice
. And so Zora's laughter, in conjunction with her beauty, doomed him a little, made him grateful beyond reason.

immediately,
he sent her a postcard, a photograph of newlyweds dragging empty Spam cans from the bumper of their car. He wrote:
Dear Zora, Had such fun meeting you at Mike's
. And then he wrote his phone number. He kept it simple. In courtship he had a history of mistakes, beginning at sixteen with his first girlfriend, for whom he had bought at the local head shop the coolest thing he had then ever seen in his life: a beautifully carved wooden hand with its middle finger sticking up. He himself had coveted it tremulously for a year. How could she not love it? Her contempt for it, and then for him, had left him feeling baffled and betrayed. With Marilyn, he had taken the other approach and played hard to get, which had turned their relationship into a never-ending Sadie Hawkins Day, with subsequent marriage to Sadie an inevitable ruin—a humiliating and interminable Dutch date.

But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct combination of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix—the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle—was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? The whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings: graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation with a colleague, punished with his wife's full-blown affair and false business trips (credit-union conventions that never took place) and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife produce and star in a fabulous one of her own he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of van Gogh's room in Aries. Beneath the clock face of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the "g"s and "f"s. It read,
Had such fun meeting you at Mike's
. Wasn't that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no "too," no emphasized
you
, just exactly the same words thrown back at him like some lunatic postal Ping-Pong. Either she was stupid or crazy or he was already being too hard on her. Not being hard on people—"You
bark
at them," Marilyn used to say—was something he was trying to work on. When he pictured Zora's lovely face, it helped his tenuous affections. She had written her phone number and signed off with a swashbuckling "Z"—as in Zorro. That was cute, he supposed. He guessed. Who knew? He had to lie down.

he had bekka
for the weekend. She sat in the living room, tuned to the Cartoon Network. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, as the cartoons flashed on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but he tried his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every visit, though tonight he had again caved in. Last week, Bekka had said to him, "When you and Mommy were married, we always had mashed potatoes for supper. Now you're divorced and we always have spaghetti."

"Which do you like better?" he'd asked.

"Neither!" she'd shouted, summing up her distaste for everything, marriage
and
divorce. "I hate them both."

Tonight, he had ordered the pizza half plain cheese and half with banana peppers and jalapeños. The two of them sat together in front of
Justice League
, eating slices from their respective sides. Chesty, narrow-waisted heroes in bright colors battled their enemies with righteous confidence and, of course, laser guns. Bekka finally turned to him. "Mommy says that if her boyfriend Daniel moves in I can have a dog. A dog and a bunny."

"
And
a bunny?" Ira said. When the family was still together, the four-year-old Bekka, new to numbers and the passage of time, used to exclaim triumphantly to her friends, "Mommy and Daddy say I can have a dog! When I turn eighteen!" There'd been no talk of bunnies. But perhaps the imminence of Easter had brought this on. He knew that Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bath-time reverie, named her five favorite people, four of whom were dogs. The fifth was her own blue bike.

"A dog
and
a bunny," Bekka repeated, and Ira had to repress images of the dog with the rabbit's bloody head in its mouth.

"So, what do you think about that?" he asked cautiously, wanting to get her opinion on the whole Daniel thing.

Bekka shrugged and chewed. "Whatever," she said, her new word for "You're welcome,"

"Hello,"

"Goodbye," and "I'm only eight."

"I really just don't want all his stuff there. His car already blocks our car in the driveway."

"Bummer," Ira said, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore."

"I don't want a stepfather," Bekka said.

"Maybe he could just live on the steps," Ira said, and Bekka smirked, her mouth full of mozzarella.

"Besides," she said, "I like Larry better. He's stronger."

"Who's Larry?" Ira said, instead of "bummer."

"He's this other dude," Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a "dudette."

"Bummer," Ira said. "Big, big bummer."

he phoned zora
four days later, so as not to seem pathetically eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. "Hi, Zora? This is Ira," he said, and then waited—narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say?—for her response.

"Ira?"

"Yes. Ira Milkins."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know who you are."

Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. "We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate's?" His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.

"Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh—Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy."

"Yeah, the Jew. That was me." Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on.
There
was a man of theatre for you.

"That was a nice dinner," she said.

"Yes, it was."

"I usually skip Lent completely."

"Me, too," Ira said. "It's just simpler. Who needs the fuss?"

"But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this."

Ira had to think about the way she'd used "conjoining." It sounded New Age-y and Amish, both.

"But Mike and Kate run that kind of home," she went on. "It's all warmth and good-heartedness."

Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, even if it was only a coat hanger.
Mom
. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house he'd tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz's imprinting experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up the incubation lights and cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort—the emotional limits of the
Homo sapiens
working Jewish mother—but it was soft science, and therefore less impressive.

"What kind of home do
you
run?" he asked.

"Home? Yeah, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I'm talking to you from a pup tent."

Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. "I
love
pup tents," he said. What was a pup tent, exactly? He'd forgotten.

"Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes."

Now there was silence. He couldn't imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or, rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the second-rate servants whom life had hired to take and bring her order.

"Well, would you like to meet for a drink?" Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of weariness and the cheery pseudo-professionalism of someone in the dully familiar position of being single and dating.

"Yes," Ira said. "That's exactly why I called."

"you can't imagine
the daily drudgery of routine pediatrics," Zora said, not touching her wine. "Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Wope. Here's an exciting one: juvenile-onset diabetes. Day after day, you have to look into the parents' eyes and repeat the same exciting thing—'There are a lot of viruses going around.' I thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they'd gone into such a depressing field they all said, 'Because the
kids
don't get depressed.' That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful. But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don't get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children's books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think, I could do better than that. I started one about a hedgehog."

"Now, what's a hedgehog, exactly?" Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. "I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers."

"They're—well, what does it matter, if they're all wearing little polka-dot clothes, vests and hats and things?" she said irritably.

"I suppose," he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts, like "Why are these things called
napkins
rather than
lapkins
?" He tried to focus on the visuals, on her pumpkin-colored silk blouse, which he hesitated to compliment her on lest she think he was gay. Marilyn had threatened to call off their wedding because he had too strenuously admired the fabric of the gown she was having made; then he had shopped too long and discontentedly for his own tuxedo, failing to find just the right shade of "mourning dove," a color he had read about in a wedding magazine. "Are you homosexual?" she had asked. "You must tell me now. I won't make the same mistake my sister did."

Perhaps Zora's irritability was only job fatigue. Ira himself had creative hankerings. Though his position was with the Historical Society's human-resources office, he liked to help with the society's exhibitions, doing posters and dioramas and once even making a puppet for a little show about the state's first governor. Thank God for meaningful work! He understood those small, diaphanous artistic ambitions that overtook people and could look like nervous breakdowns.

"What happens in your hedgehog tale?" Ira asked, then settled in to finish up his dinner, eggplant parmesan that he now wished he hadn't ordered. He was coveting Zora's wodge of steak. Perhaps he had an iron deficiency. Or perhaps it was just a desire for the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Zora, he knew, was committed to meat. While other people's cars were busy protesting the prospect of war or supporting the summoned troops, on her Honda Zora had a large bumper sticker that said, "Red meat is not bad for you. Fuzzy, greenish-blue meat is bad for you."

"The hedgehog tale? Well," Zora began, "the hedgehog goes for a walk because he is feeling sad—it's based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house with a sign on it that says, 'Welcome, Hedgehog: This could be your new home,' and because he's been feeling sad the thought of a new home appeals to him. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators—well, I'll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that."

"I don't know about that family of alligators."

She was quiet for a minute, chewing her beautiful ruby steak. "Every family is a family of alligators," she said.