The Books: “Like Life” – ‘Joy’ (Lorrie Moore)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Like Life, by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story ‘Joy’.

Somehow Lorrie Moore manages to convey deep loneliness without going on and on about it in a relentless way. Her characters are not openly depressed – they strive, they crack jokes, they say inappropriate things that don’t go over well, they obsess about OTHER thing – not their loneliness … but the cumulative effect is that you ache for them. In ‘Joy’ we meet Jane, a woman who works in a cheese shop. Her cat has fleas, so much of the story involves her taking her cat back and forth to the vet. She also loves music and was in the choir in high school. During the course of the story, Bridey – a girl she went to high school with – comes into the shop – and they recognize one another and re-connect. Kind of. Bridey is married with kids. Jane is not married, and you can tell that she doesn’t have much experience in the love arena. There was one guy … but that didn’t work out. Bridey was in choir with Jane and she actually has joined a local choir. There’s undercurrents here, you can start to feel them. My experience as a reader is I hear about Jane going back and forth to the vet, and all I want her to do is drop everything and go try out for that choir, too – because she loves music and she should have a happier life! But that’s not the way things go, sometimes. She ends up coming to a rehearsal of the choir with Bridey but just the way Moore writes about that – it’s embarrassing. You’re embarrassed for Jane. She’s not supposed to be there. The choir director asks her to leave. Jane is not a mopey type of person, she’s optimistic, in a weird way (the excerpt below shows that) … but something’s missing in her life. Something went wrong somewhere. Jane can’t re-trace her steps to find out where she took the wrong path. So she goes back to the cheese shop. She does her job. She does the best she can. Tiny moments. Lorrie Moore writes about tiny moments that contain revelations. And sometimes even the characters themselves don’t “get” the revelations. But we do.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Like Life, by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story ‘Joy’.

This particular morning she had to bring her cat in before eight. The dogs came in at eight-o-five, and the vet liked the cats to get there earlier, so there would be no commotion. Jane’s cat actually liked dogs, was curious about them, didn’t mind at all observing them from the safety of someone’s arms. So Jane didn’t worry too much about the eight o’clock rule, and if she got there late, because of traffic or a delayed start on the coffee she needed two cups to simply get dressed in the morning, no one seemed to mind. They only commented on how well-behaved her cat was.

It usually took fifteen minutes to get to the west side, such was the sprawl of the town, and Jane played the radio loudly and sang along: “I’ve forgotten more than she’ll ever know about you.” At red lights she turned to reassure the cat, who lay chagrined and shedding in the passenger’s seat. Ahead of them a station wagon moved slowly, and Jane noticed in the back of it a little girl waving and making faces out the rear window. Jane waved and made faces back, sticking out her tongue when the little girl did, pulling strands of hair into her face, and winking dramatically first on one side and then the other. After several blocks, Jane noticed, however, that the little girl was not really looking at her but just generally at the traffic. Jane re-collected her face, pulled in her tongue, straightened her hair. But the girl’s father, at the wheel, had already spied Jane in his rearview mirror, and was staring, appalled. He slowed down to get a closer look, then picked up speed to get away.

Jane got in the other lane and switched stations on the radio, found a song she liked, something wistful but with a beat. She loved to sing. At home she had the speakers hooked up in the kitchen and would stand at the sink with a hollow-handled sponge filled with dish detergent and sing and wash, sing and rinse. She sang “If the Phone Don’t Ring, I Know It’s You” and “What Love Is to a Dove”. She blasted her way through “Jump Start My Heart”, humming on the verses she didn’t know. She liked all kinds of music. When she was a teenager she had believed that what the Muzac station played on the radio was “classical music”, and to this day here tastes were generous and unjudging – she just liked to get into the song. Most of the time she tried not to worry about whether people might hear her, though an embarrassing thing had happened recently when her landlord had walked into the house, thinking she wasn’t home, and caught her sing-speaking in an English accent. “Excuse me,” said the landlord. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” she said in reply. “I was just practicing for the – Are you here to check the fuse box?”

“Yes,” said the landlord, wondering who it was these days he was renting his houses out to.

Jane had once, briefly, lived in western Oregon but had returned to the Midwest when she and her boyfriend out there had broken up. He was a German man who made rocking horses and jungle gyms and who had been, like her, new to the community. His English was at times halting and full of misheard vernacular, things like “get town” and “to each a zone”. One time, when she’d gotten all dressed up to go to dinner, he told her she looked “hunky-dorky”. He liked to live dangerously, always driving around town with his gas tank on E. “Pick a lane and do stay in it,” he yelled at other drivers. He made the worst coffee Jane had ever tasted, muddy and burned, but she drank it, and stayed long hours in his bed on Sundays. But after a while he took to going out without her, not coming home until two a.m. She started calling him late at night, letting the phone ring, then driving around town looking for his car, which she usually found in front of a tavern somewhere. It had not been like her to do things like this, but knowing that the town was small enough for her to do it, she found it hard to resist. Once she had gotten into the car and started it up, it was as if she had crashed through a wall, gone from one room with rules to another room with no rules. When she found his car, she would go into the tavern, and if she discovered him at the bar with his arm flung loosely around some other woman, she would tap him on the shoulder and say, “Who’s the go-go girl?” Then she’d pour beer onto his legs. She was no longer herself. She had become someone else, a wild West woman, bursting into saloons, the swinging doors flipping behind her. Soon, she thought, bartenders might fear her. Soon they might shout out warnings, like sailors facing a storm: Here she comes! And so, after a while, she left Oregon and came back here alone. She rented a house, got a job first at Karen’s Stout Shoppe, which sold dresses to overweight women, then later at the cheese store in the Marshall Field’s mall.

For a short time she mourned him, believing he had anchored her, had kept her from floating off into No Man’s Land, that land of midnight cries and pets with too many little toys, but now she rarely thought of him. She knew there were only small joys in life – the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through – and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off. You could put the pressure aside, like a child’s game, its box ripped to flaps at the corners. You could stick it in some old closet and forget about it.