Birds of America
Lorrie Moore
Praise for Lorrie Moore’s
BIRDS OF AMERICA
“A nest of tales that captures the eternal, hummingbird flutter of the human heart. … A volume in which everything comes together: the author’s mordant Dorothy Parker wit, the Joycean epiphanies, the Flannery O’Connor–esque moments of clarity and grace.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“These new stories sparkle; they are keenly and poignantly mindful of the idioms, banalities and canards of contemporary American society, and they hum with Moore’s earmark droll and incisive banter, her astonishing ability to render the intricacy of character in a few sharply focused details.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Cements [Moore’s] reputation as one of our finest writers of fiction.”
—Austin American-Statesman
“Lorrie Moore has made laughingstocks of all of us. And we’re devotedly, blissfully grateful. … Moore … packs more rambunctious American humor and worldly-wide melancholy into a story than many lesser writers can into an entire novel.”
—Newsday
“[Moore] uses language to create a kind of carbonated prose: sentences with pop and fizz, with an effervescence of imagination that continually surprises.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Bats, flamingos, crows, performing ducks and bird feeders crop up in every story, but the real subject is human nature and the myriad ways Moore’s characters flock together or fly apart in the face of change, stasis or grief. … Gorgeous. … Rarely has a writer achieved such consistency, humor and compassion.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“[Moore’s] dialogue snaps with fun. … One could be trapped in an elevator with people like Moore’s men, or especially her women, and feel the luckier for it.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Remains one of the … best volumes of stories that any American has published in recent decades.”
—Bookforum
“I hesitate to lay the adjective wise on one of [Moore’s] age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sight of an artist soaring lifts the heart.”
—Julian Barnes, The New York Review of Books
“Written beautifully, flawlessly, carefully, with a trademark gift for the darkly comic and the perfectly observed. … Thrilling.”
—Dave Eggers, Esquire
“Moore peers into America’s loneliest perches, but her delicate touch turns absurdity into a warming vitality.”
—The New Yorker
“I’ve long been an admirer of Lorrie Moore; her Birds of America is an exquisite collection of stories by a writer at the peak of her form.”
—Geoff Dyer, The Independent
“Moore is blessed with such astonishing, unbridled inventiveness she leaves the rest of us hamstrung mortals blinking in the dust. … Moore writes like a force of nature.”
—The Seattle Times
“Memorable and absorbing.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“These stories … are revelations of insight, the perception of the daily traumas of modern existence raised to ironic levels that tell us who we really are.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Moore is the quintessential short-story writer. There is not a word wasted—her every observation is burnished with humor and sadness.”
—Marie Claire
“One of the most highly regarded collections of the 1990s.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Terrific.”
—Time Out New York
“Exquisite. … Come across these lines in the presence of another human being, and just try to resist reading them aloud.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Brilliant.”
—Bookreporter
“A fine collection. … The reader will be forever susceptible to seeing absurdity everywhere.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The sleight of hand that goes on within a Lorrie Moore story is one of supreme subtlety and wit. … By turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignantly sad.”
—Detroit Free Press
“One of the best short story collections of the ’90s.”
—PopMatters
“Fierce, heart-wrenching. … One of the most remarkable short works published in recent decades, it’s unforgettable and great.”
—Philadelphia Tribune
“Birds of America has the distinction of being one of the only flawless story collections from the twentieth century not written by John Updike.”
—The Stranger
Lorrie Moore
BIRDS OF AMERICA
Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Anagrams, and A Gate at the Stairs. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
ALSO BY LORRIE MOORE
Self-Help
Anagrams
Like Life
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
A Gate at the Stairs
FOR CHILDREN
The Forgotten Helper
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 2010
Copyright © 1998 by Lorrie Moore
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Eleven of these stories were originally published in slightly different form in the following:
Elle: “Agnes of Iowa”; Harper’s: “What You Want to Do Fine” (originally titled “Lucky Ducks”); The New York Times: “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens” (originally titled “If Only Bert Were Here”); The New Yorker: “Beautiful Grade,” “Charades,” “Community Life,” “Dance in America,” “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People,” and “Willing”; The Paris Review: “Terrific Mother.”
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Excerpt from “Syrinx” from A Silence Opens by Amy Clampitt, copyright © 1993 by Amy Clampitt. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “The Meaning of Birds” from Indistinguishable from the Darkness by Charlie Smith, copyright © 1990 by Charlie Smith. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Moore, Lorrie.
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.
PS3565.O6225B57 1999
813′.54—dc21
98-6144
eISBN: 978-0-307-81688-7
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
This book is for my sister and for my parents
and for Benjamin
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Willing
Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People
Dance in America
Community Life
Agnes of Iowa
Charades
Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens
Beautiful Grade
What You Want to Do Fine
Real Estate
People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk
Terrific Mother
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their greatly appreciated and timely generosity I wish to thank the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Graduate Research Committee, and the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission. I also wish to thank, as ever, Melanie Jackson and Victoria Wilson for their abiding patience and skill. My gratitude also goes to the various editors who saw some of these stories early (and into light): Pat Towers, George Plimpton, Mike Levitas, Barbara Jones, Bill Buford, and Alice Quinn.
… it is not news that we live in a world
Where beauty is unexplainable
And suddenly ruined
And has its own routines. We are often far
From home in a dark town, and our griefs
Are difficult to translate into a language
Understood by others.
CHARLIE SMITH
“The Meaning of Birds”
Is it o-ka-lee
Or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
Is it cuckoo for that matter?—
Much less whether a bird’s call
Means anything in
Particular, or at all.
AMY CLAMPITT
“Syrinx”
WILLING
How can I live my life without committing an
act with a giant scissors?
—JOYCE CAROL OATES,
“An Interior Monologue”
In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn’t her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.
“You have the body,” studio heads told her over lunch at Chasen’s.
She looked away. “Habeas corpus,” she said, not smiling.
“Pardon me?” A hip that knew Latin. Christ.
“Nothing,” she said. They smiled at her and dropped names. Scorsese, Brando. Work was all playtime to them, playtime with gel in their hair. At times, she felt bad that it wasn’t her hip. It should have been her hip. A mediocre picture, a picture queasy with pornography: these, she knew, eroticized the unavailable. The doctored and false. The stand-in. Unwittingly, she had participated. Let a hip come between. A false, unavailable, anonymous hip. She herself was true as a goddamn dairy product; available as lunch whenever.
But she was pushing forty.
She began to linger in juice bars. Sit for entire afternoons in places called I Love Juicy or Orange-U-Sweet. She drank juice and, outside, smoked a cigarette now and then. She’d been taken seriously—once—she knew that. Projects were discussed: Nina. Portia. Mother Courage with makeup. Now her hands trembled too much, even drinking juice, especially drinking juice, a Vantage wobbling between her fingers like a compass dial. She was sent scripts in which she was supposed to say lines she would never say, not wear clothes she would never not wear. She began to get obscene phone calls, and postcards signed, “Oh yeah, baby.” Her boyfriend, a director with a growing reputation for expensive flops, a man who twice a week glowered at her Fancy Sunburst guppy and told it to get a job, became a Catholic and went back to his wife.
“Just when we were working out the bumps and chops and rocks,” she said. Then she wept.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
And so she left Hollywood. Phoned her agent and apologized. Went home to Chicago, rented a room by the week at the Days Inn, drank sherry, and grew a little plump. She let her life get dull—dull, but with Hostess cakes. There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went “What?” Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, “Wha—?” It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn’t been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She’d been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, “There you go.” She’d stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.
Still, she was a minor movie star, once nominated for a major award. Mail came to her indirectly. A notice. A bill. A Thanksgiving card. But there was never a party, a dinner, an opening, an iced tea. One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadnesses occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzily back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.
She watched cable and ordered in a lot from a pizza place. A life of obscurity and radical calm. She rented a piano and practiced scales. She invested in the stock market. She wrote down her dreams in the morning to locate clues as to what to trade. Disney, her dreams said once. St. Jude’s Medical. She made a little extra money. She got obsessed. The words cash cow nestled in the side of her mouth like a cud. She tried to be original—not a good thing with stocks—and she began to lose. When a stock went down, she bought more of it, to catch it on the way back up. She got confused. She took to staring out the window at Lake Michigan, the rippled slate of it like a blackboard gone bad.
“Sidra, what are you doing there?” shrieked her friend Tommy long distance over the phone. “Where are you? You’re living in some state that borders on North Dakota!” He was a screenwriter in Santa Monica and once, a long time ago and depressed on Ecstasy, they had slept together. He was gay, but they had liked each other very much.
“Maybe I’ll get married,” she said. She didn’t mind Chicago. She thought of it as a cross between London and Queens, with a dash of Cleveland.
“Oh, please,” he shrieked again. “What are you really doing?”
“Listening to seashore and self-esteem tapes,” she said. She blew air into the mouth of the phone.
“Sounds like dust on the needle,” he said. “Maybe you should get the squawking crickets tape. Have you heard the squawking crickets tape?”
“I got a bad perm today,” she said. “When I was only halfway through with the rod part, the building the salon’s in had a blackout. There were men drilling out front who’d struck a cable.”
“How awful for you,” he said. She could hear him tap his fingers. He had made himself the make-believe author of a make-believe book of essays called One Man’s Opinion, and when he was bored or inspired, he quoted from it. “I was once in a rock band called Bad Perm,” he said instead.
“Get out.” She laughed.
His voice went hushed and worried. “What are you doing there?” he asked again.
Her room was a corner room where a piano was allowed. It was L-shaped, like a life veering off suddenly to become something else. It had a couch and two maple dressers and was never as neat as she might have wanted. She always had the DO NOT DISTURB sign on when the maids came by, and so things got a little out of hand. Wispy motes of dust and hair the size of small heads bumped around in the corners. Smudge began to darken the moldings and cloud the mirrors. The bathroom faucet dripped, and, too tired to phone anyone, she tied a string around the end of it, guiding the drip quietly into the drain, so it wouldn’t bother her anymore. Her only plant, facing east in the window, hung over the popcorn popper and dried to a brown crunch. On the ledge, a jack-o’-lantern she had carved for Halloween had rotted, melted, froze, and now looked like a collapsed basketball—one she might have been saving for sentimental reasons, one from the big game! The man who brought her room service each morning—two poached eggs and a pot of coffee—reported her to the assistant manager, and she received a written warning slid under the door.
On Fridays, she visited her parents in Elmhurst. It was still hard for her father to lo
ok her in the eyes. He was seventy now. Ten years ago, he had gone to the first movie she had ever been in, saw her remove her clothes and dive into a pool. The movie was rated PG, but he never went to another one. Her mother went to all of them and searched later for encouraging things to say. Even something small. She refused to lie. “I liked the way you said the line about leaving home, your eyes wide and your hands fussing with your dress buttons,” she wrote. “That red dress was so becoming. You should wear bright colors!”
“My father takes naps a lot when I visit,” she said to Tommy.
“Naps?”
“I embarrass him. He thinks I’m a whore hippie. A hippie whore.”
“That’s ridiculous. As I said in One Man’s Opinion, you’re the most sexually conservative person I know.”
“Yeah, well.”
Her mother always greeted her warmly, puddle-eyed. These days, she was reading thin paperback books by a man named Robert Valleys, a man who said that after observing all the suffering in the world—war, starvation, greed—he had discovered the cure: hugs.
Hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs.
Her mother believed him. She squeezed so long and hard that Sidra, like an infant or a lover, became lost in the feel and smell of her—her sweet, dry skin, the gray peach fuzz on her neck. “I’m so glad you left that den of iniquity,” her mother said softly.
But Sidra still got calls from the den. At night, sometimes, the director phoned from a phone booth, desiring to be forgiven as well as to direct. “I think of all the things you might be thinking, and I say, ‘Oh, Christ.’ I mean, do you think the things I sometimes think you do?”
