Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online

I don’t feel that way.”
    “But … can’t you just say it anyway?”
    At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other’s gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning. But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, “Your father. He was in a dance. And he just couldn’t dance.” Earlier that year she had written me: “That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls—we all have a bit of that—but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.”
    These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts—a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster—but the touches and the words andthe moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try. No matter how you lick them. The envelopes will not stay glued.
    “Dear Mom, The extra courseload makes life hectic, but I think I’m getting used to it. Spring break is the 19th. Yikes. So much to do before I can leave. See you then.”
    When I was thirteen, my mother left rice burning on the stove and half-tried to drown herself in the lake. At seven o’clock, my father not home yet and James late at Chess Club, I stepped out the back door and called for her. It was March and the lake was not even completely melted yet—a steely slate green with a far-off whitish center, like some monstrous wound. I walked down to the dock; sometimes she went down there “for air” just before making dinner. I found her on the shore—we really had no beach, just a stoney straggle along the waterline for jogging and rock-skipping. She was on her back, her blouse soaked and transparent, her black hair plastered in strings across her face, water lapping at her like an indifferent cat. She was clutching fistfuls of gravel and smearing them across her cheeks, down the front of her body, her legs still but her mouth opening and closing noiselessly, twisted and stretched, the first of two such expressions of hers I would witness. I couldn’t move. Even years later I would see that face—in my own, in photos, in mirrors, that severely sculpted anguish moving behind mine, against mine, against my less dramatic bones and thick, squarish mouth, struggling to emerge. I cried. I didn’t know what to do. I ran back to the house, burst into the kitchen, and saw my father, who had just gotten home, scraping black smoking rice angrily from the bottom of the pan. “Mom, it’s Mom,” I panted, and pointed toward the lake. And he shouted, “What?” and hurried out and down the path.
    At eight o’clock an ambulance came and took her away. She came back, however, the next morning, looking a little pale and raccoon-eyed, trudging upstairs on my father’s arm. She glanced at me, it seemed, apologetically.
    My father spent that next day down on the dock, singing out at the lake, something Italian, a Puccini aria or something. He actually did this about twice a year while I was growing up, a way of releasing things inside of him, my mother said, in a way, he hoped, that would not disturb the neighbors (who were a quarter of a mile away on each side). Sometimes I would stare out the back-door window and be able to make out the outline of him, sometimes sitting, but more often pacing the dock cross-planks, his voice floating up toward the house. But not his school voice or his theater voice—this was something else, a throbbing, pained vibrato, like some creature that lived inside of him that