Like Life by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

bags. “No, really, you can sit here,” said Harry. “I just need to get by you to get in.”
    “Thanks a lot!” shouted the woman. Her teeth were gray in the grain, like old wood. “Thanks!”
    “Come back!” he called. “It’s perfectly OK!” But the woman staggered halfway down the block, turned, and started screamingat him. “Thanks for all you’ve done for me! I really appreciate it! I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me my whole life!”
    To relax, he enrolled in a yoga class. It was held three blocks away, and the teacher, short, overweight, and knowledgeable, kept coming over to Harry to tell him he was doing things wrong.
    “Stomach in! Shoulders down! Head back!” she bellowed in the darkness of the yoga room. People looked. She was not fond of tall, thin men who thought they knew what they were doing. “Head back!” she said again, and this time tugged on his hair, to get his head at the right angle.
    “I can’t believe you pulled my hair,” said Harry.
    “Pardon me?” said the instructor. She pressed her knee into the middle disks of his spine.
    “I would just do better,” said Harry loudly, “if you wouldn’t keep touching me!”
    “All right, all right,” said the teacher. “I won’t touch you,” and she walked to the other side of the darkened room, to attend to someone else. Harry lay back for the deep breathing, spine pressed against the tough thread of the carpet. He put his hand over his eyes and stayed like that, while the rest of the class continued with headstands and cat stretches.
    The next week Harry decided to try a calisthenics class instead. It was across the street from the yoga class and was full of white people in pastel Spandex. Serious acid disco blared from the corner speakers. The instructor was a thin black man, who smiled happily at the class and led them in exercises that resembled the motion of field hands picking cotton. “Pick that cotton!” he shouted gleefully, overseeing the group, walking archly among them. “Pick it fast!” He giggled, clasping his hands. “Oh, what sweet revenge!” The class lasted an hour and a half, and Harry stayed on for the next class as well, another hour and a half. It strangely encouraged and calmed him, andwhen he went to the grocery store afterward, he felt almost serene. He lingered at the yogurt and the freshly made pasta. He filled his cart with mineral water, feeling healthy and whole again, when a man one aisle away was caught shoplifting a can of bean-with-bacon soup.
    “Hey!” shouted the store manager, and two large shelf clerks grabbed the man with the soup. “I didn’t do nothing!” yelled the man with the soup, but they dragged him by the ears across the store floor to the meat counter and the back room, where the butchers worked in the day. There they began to beat him, until he could no longer call out. Trails of red smeared the floor of the canned goods aisle, where his ears had split open like fruit and bled.
    “Stop it!” cried Harry, following the men to the swinging meat doors. “There’s no reason for this sort of violence!” and after two minutes, the employees finally let the shoplifter go. They shoved him, swollen and in shock, out the swinging doors toward the exit.
    Harry turned to several other customers, who, also distressed, had come up behind him. “My God,” said Harry. “I had two exercise classes today, and it still wasn’t enough.” He left his shopping cart and fled the store for the phone booth outside, where he dialed the police. “I would like to report a crime. My name is Harry DeLeo, and I am standing on the corner of Eighth and—”
    “Yeah. Harry DeLeo. Trucks. Look, Harry DeLeo, we got real things,” and the policeman hung up.
    AT NIGHT Harry slept in the other room, the “living” room, the room decorated in what Breckie called Early American Mental Institution, the room away from the windows and the trucks, on the sharp-armed sofa, damp