Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

triumphed over others by dint of some unknowable charm. Now I was coming to realize that a lot of people baffled this guy, and that I would be next to become incomprehensible and unattractive. That was how dating among straight middle-aged women seemed to go in this college town: one available man every year or so just made the rounds of us all. “I can share. I’m good at sharing,” Robin used to say, laughing.
    “Well I’m not,” I said. “I’m not good at it in the least.”
    “It’s late,” I said again to the man, and I made two gin rickeys and lit candles.
    Every woman I knew here drank—daily. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another. I was the only one of my friends—all of us academic transplants, all soldiers of art stationed on a far-off base (or, so we imagined it)—who hadn’t had something terrible happen to her yet.
    The next morning I dressed in cheery colors. Orange and gold. There was nothing useful to bring Robin, but I made a bouquet of cut mums nonetheless and stuck them in a plastic cup with some wet paper towels holding them in. I was headed toward the front door when the phone rang. It was ZJ. “I’m leaving now to see Robin,” I said.
    “Don’t bother.”
    “Oh, no,” I said. My vision left me for a second.
    “She died late last night. About two in the morning.”
    I sank down into a chair and my plastic cup of mums fell, breaking two stems. “Oh, my God,” I said.
    “I know,” he said.
    “I was going to go see her last night, but it got late and I thought it would be better to go this morning when she was more rested.” I tried not to wail.
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
    “I feel terrible,” I cried, as if this were what mattered.
    “She was not doing well. It’s a blessing.” From diagnosis to decline had been precipitous, I knew. She was teaching, then suddenly the new chemo was not going well and she was lying outside of the emergency room, on the concrete, afraid to lie down inside because of other people’s germs. Then she was placed in the actual hospital, which was full of other people’s germs. She’d been there almost a week and I hadn’t gotten in to see her.
    “It’s all so unbelievable.”
    “I know.”
    “How are
you
?” I asked.
    “I can’t even go there,” he said.
    “Please phone me if there’s something I can do,” I said emptily. “Let me know when the service will be.”
    “Sure,” he said.
    I went upstairs and with all my cheery clothes on got back into bed. It still smelled a little of the man. I pulled the sheet over my head and lay there, every muscle of my body strung taut. I could not move.
    But I must have fallen asleep, and for some time, because when I heard the doorbell downstairs and pulled the sheet off my face, it was already dark, though the sun set these days at four, so it was hard ever to know by just looking out the windows what time it might possibly be. I flicked on the lights as I went—bedroom, hall, stairs—making my way down toward the ringing bell. I turned on the porch light and opened the door.
    There stood Isabel and Pat. “We’ve got the gin, we’ve got the rickey mix,” they said, holding up bags. “Come on. We’re going to go see Robin.”
    “I thought Robin died,” I said.
    Pat made a face. “Yes, well,” she said.
    “That hospital was such a bad scene,” said Isabel. She was not wearing her prosthetic arm. Except in pieces choreographed by others, she almost never did anymore. “But she’s back home now and she’s expecting us.”
    “How can that be?”
    “You know women and their houses,” said Pat. “It’s hard for them to part company.” Pat had had a massive stroke two years before, which had wiped out her ebullient personality and her short-term memory, but periodically her wounded, recovering brain cast