The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore

LISA MOORE

Copyright © 2012 Lisa Moore
Introduction copyright © 2012 by Jane Urquhart

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Moore, Lisa Lynne, 1964–
The selected short fiction of Lisa Moore : Open and Degrees
of Nakedness / Lisa Moore ; introduction by Jane Urquhart.

Short stories.
eISBN
978-1-77089-256-9

I. Title.

PS8576.O61444A6 2012 C813'.54 C2012-903620-X
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939947

Cover design: Brian Morgan
Cover illustration: Genevieve Simms

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund
.

I first read a short story by Lisa Moore twenty years ago in early September of 1992. And what an experience that was!

I had arrived — just days before — in the city of St. John's as the first “come-from-away” writer-in-residence at Memorial University. Poet and scholar Mary Dalton had rounded up a very special, and very small, group of local writers to participate in the seminar I would be holding, and these writers — whom I had not yet met — had provided samples of their work in advance of the first session. So, after I had walked up to Signal Hill and back down through the Battery, after I had wandered up and down Duckworth and Water streets and past the Harbour, after I had admired the Basilica and the statue of Saint Patrick blessing the city from the roof of the Benevolent Irish Society building — after I had recovered from all that, I sat down to take a look at the material.

I was presumptuous enough at the time to assume I had a fairly solid notion of what Newfoundland literature would look like: there would be references to the First World War tragedy of Beaumont-Hamel, there would be significant storms and magnificent maritime disasters, there might be some hunger and fiddle music, and if the Newfoundlanders in the fiction were situated elsewhere in the world, there would be a lot of homesickness. And, indeed, there was some of that, though presented in a way that was much more rich and textured than I had naively anticipated. What I was fully unprepared for, though, was the combination of high realism and hallucinogenic imagery, fully realized characterization and pitch-perfect dialogue in the two stories in my file by a then-twenty-eight-year-old unpublished writer called Lisa Moore.

Here were the young urbanites of St. John's: their bars and their apartments, the taxis they rode in and the fraught love affairs they endured and celebrated. This was the membership of a whole new tribe, one as foreign and fascinating to me as the inhabitants of a Tibetan mountain village. And yet, as I followed these young people through marathon parties, interpersonal claustrophobia, breakups, childbirth, and world travels, they became a fully known and profound part of my emotional life. Every preconceived notion I had brought with me to St. John's was so drastically blown apart by these two stories, reading them was like watching a conflagration in a fireworks factory. Here is a description of a couple on Signal Hill. “They made love on the grass, watching out for broken beer bottles, an aureole of amber glitter around their bodies.” I had just come back from Signal Hill but I had seen only sky, waves, and rock. There was so much about this place I didn't know, and so much I would learn by continuing to read the stories of Lisa Moore.

Moore's characters are often artists, photographers, actors, writers, but not always. Her setting is often St. John's, but not always. There are the departures and arrivals from and to St. John's, the remembered trips to India with a best girlfriend, a brief affair with a German tourist, a Scottish swim team bursting in from a snowy night, tense holidays in tropical places. And then there is the world that comes into St. John's over various wires: “The music of
Jeopardy
, a screech from the oven hinges as his mother took out the shepherd's pie. The garburator eating a vibrant clot of carrot peelings — all of this was so altered by Rachel's voice that he almost fainted for the second time in his life.”

One of the many astonishing things about Lisa Moore's stories is their immediacy: the reader is right inside the kitchen and on the phone with that teenager, right inside a hydroplaning pickup truck that has an eighteen-wheeler careering toward it, and right inside the middle-of-the-night bedroom of a crying infant whose mother is imagining “the whole universe being sucked into his tiny body, she and Lyle, their eleven-year-old daughter, Alex, the telephone poles, grimy snowbanks, loose pennies, Christmas presents, the Atlantic, asteroids.” Furthermore, the long, brilliantly wrought, and exhausting parties in Moore's fiction are presented in such a visceral fashion that I myself have had the symptoms of a hangover after I put down the book in which they took place, as if I had been a full participant.

This selection, comprising stories from her first collection,
Degrees of Nakedness
, her later book
Open
, and two new pieces, is a welcome compilation, and not only provides readers with the pleasure of encountering Moore's startlingly vivid imagery and satisfying narratives, but also serves to indicate how assured and original her voice was right from the very beginning. Just as I realized that day after I had climbed Signal Hill for the first time. I had nothing to teach a writer as naturally gifted as Lisa Moore, nothing really to give to her. Like the night baby in the story “Natural Parents,” she had already inhaled it all. And, in these stories, “the world, ragged and inconsolable, (comes) back out.”

Ragged and inconsolable, yes, in the most wonderful of ways, and always completely life-enhancing.

T
hey were driving through all the cold dark cities of North America in the back of a transport truck with walls of Plexiglas two weeks before Christmas. The glass box was designed to look like a Caribbean beach. The fourth wall a backdrop of shimmering surf at sunset in front of which they were supposed to frolic and lounge. They were a live advertisement for Hot Vacations in the Festive Season.

Laurie and two male bodybuilders wearing red sequined bathing suits and matching Santa hats posing in the sand and on the recliners or playing a little badminton. There was a beach umbrella. Sunlamps shone down from the ceiling of the glass box and up from the floor to keep them warm and make sure the glass didn't fog.

Basil lounged at Laurie's feet and Max rubbed sunscreen into her shoulders. They danced to carols from an iPod dock. The Plexiglas was festooned with silver garlands; there were three inflatable palm trees smothered in tinsel.

Keep it clean, Edward White had said. He was the manager of Hot Vacations. The audition had taken place during a snow squall that tore down Yonge Street, making the ropes of Christmas lights snap like whips. The wind forced people to hold their hats with both hands.

Laurie had received a letter from the power company before setting out for the day's auditions. It came in a prettily printed envelope that said
Seasons Greetings!
with a sprig of holly near a cellophane window that showed Laurie's ex-boyfriend's name.

The letter said: FINAL NOTICE. They were sending out field staff, the letter said. They were going to discontinue services unless she paid the bill in full by such and such a date. Laurie didn't read the date.

She read the date but she was standing on tiptoe at the time, feeling around with one hand in the wooden salad bowl on top of the fridge for a banana, one with a withered stem and mottled and leathery skin and a slit in the peel where the moisture had risen up from the softly rotting fruit and had hardened near the slit causing the edges to pucker and blacken and parts of the fruit were bruised and the end of the banana had liquefied and squelched out when she peeled the skin down and a little cloud of drunken fruit flies circled and settled elsewhere. Then she found herself holding the limp banana skin and the banana was gone and she must have eaten it but she didn't remember eating it.

Laurie had come home from her last day of classes and half the furniture was gone. Even the oak desk — she'd found it on the side of the road at the beginning of the semester and had enlisted the goodwill of six boys in hoodies with piercings through their lips and noses and eyebrows, and one of whom had tattooed tears on his cheek, to help her carry it through the honking traffic and up the stairwell because it didn't fit in the elevator — had disappeared. Only the four depressions made by the desk legs in the indoor/outdoor carpet remained.

Laurie's boyfriend was in love with someone else. Someone back home. He was going home for Christmas.

Who?

Never mind who, he'd said. The door of the apartment closed behind him with a solemn click.

Who is it? Who? Laurie had screamed at the closed door and her voice bounced around the gutted apartment like the Snowy Owl in
Hinterland Who's Who
, a frequent re-run on Channel 37. The female owl inhabits the desolate and bleak northern tundra and lays her eggs in a hole she scratches from the frozen ground all by herself and is not as spectacularly marked as the male, would never be as spectacular, in fact she was kind of homely by comparison, except for her eyes which were yellow and lazy-lidded, drooping and undrooping, a lot like her ex-boyfriend's eyes after they'd made love or when he was smoking pot.

Laurie had $165 in her bank account. The banana was the last thing she ate before leaving the apartment to search for work and it made her queasy.

In the audition, she sat on an orange chair next to a man named Basil who was built like a bus and the only other person to show up.

Laurie took a moment to come up with her motivation. What did her character want? She wanted some kind of sign from the universe is what she wanted. She wanted her boyfriend back or someone else to love, someone better, she did not want to spend Christmas alone.

Laurie had a plastic bag of stocking stuffers on her lap that she'd purchased in the Dollar Store on the way to the audition. The bag crinkled loudly and she crunched it down and it sighed.