The Books: “Birds of America” – ‘Dance In America’ (Lorrie Moore)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries), by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story ‘Dance in America’. One of the quotes from a review on Amazon of Lorrie Moore’s stuff says: that she has the “ability to catch the moment that flips someone from eccentric to unmoored”, and I think that’s exactly right. And usually it doesn’t take much. Just a moment. Perhaps the pressure has been building. Lorrie Moore’s main characters are usually single, but there the similarity ends. They are single girls, looking around at a world that either has passed them by or has openly rejected them. In contrast to the cliche, Lorrie Moore’s “single girls” are not blue, or self-pitying, or bitter. They are busy, they have jobs, sometimes weird jobs … they like to make puns, they crack stupid jokes, they drive around town obsessing about things, they want to get involved, they want to connect … they don’t sit around be-moaning their single state. They have other things on their mind. And so their loneliness ambushes them. In terrible form. In Dance In America, the main character is a dance instructor, and she travels to colleges, giving workshops. As she gives lectures and talks about dance, she thinks to herself what an asshole she sounds like. She’s just making shit up. But hey, it’s a living. She has had one major relationship, with a man named Patrick, who finally left her because he couldn’t stand her selfishness. This seems to confuse her. She doesn’t experience herself as selfish. She’s just trying to get through the day. For most of the time, she seems too busy to dwell on the past. She goes to one college, in Pennsylvania Dutch country … and contacts an old friend of hers from grad school, Cal – who is teaching at a nearby college. He offers to put her up. He lives with his wife Simone and their young son Eugene. They haven’t seen each other in years. Cal takes the dog for a walk, and she goes with him and they catch up a bit.

I just love how Lorrie Moore describes characters and situations. It’s so specific, so … unlike anything else. In that way, it feels like life. Yes, there are “types” we encounter in life – and in Lorrie Moore’s world it’s no different … but it’s the words she chooses to boil down a situation or a person that is so breathtakingly specific.

Here’s the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries), by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story ‘Dance in America’.

But I haven’t seen Cal in twelve years, not since he left for Belgium on a Fulbright, so I must be nice. He seems different to me: shorter, older, cleaner, despite the house. In a burst of candor, he has already confessed that those long years ago, out of friendship for me, he’d been exaggerating his interest in dance. “I didn’t get it,” he admitted. “I kept trying to figure out the story. I’d look at the purple guy who hadn’t moved in awhile, and I’d think, So what’s the issue with him?”

Now Chappers tugs at his leash. “Yeah, the house.” Cal sighs. “We did once have a painter give us an estimate, but we were put off by the names of the paints: Myth, Vesper, Snickerdoodle. I didn’t want anything called Snickerdoodle in my house.”

“What is a Snickerdoodle?”

“I think they’re hunted in Madagascar.”

I leap to join him, to play. “Or eaten in Vienna,” I say.

“Or worshiped in L.A.” I laugh again for him, and then we watch as Chappers sniffs at the roots of an oak.

“But a myth or a vesper – they’re always good,” I add.

“Crucial,” he says. “But we didn’t need paint for that.”

Cal’s son, Eugene, is seven and has cystic fibrosis. Eugene’s whole life is a race with medical research. “It’s not that I’m not for the arts,” says Cal. “You’re here; money for the arts brought you here. That’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to see you after all these years. It’s wonderful to fund the arts. It’s wonderful, you’re wonderful. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.”

Something chokes up in him. There can be optimism in the increments, the bits, the chapters; but I haven’t seen him in twelve years and he has had to tell me the whole story, straight from the beginning, and it’s the whole story that’s just so sad.

“We both carried the gene but never knew,” he said. “That’s the way it works. The odds are one in twenty, times one in twenty, and then after that, still only one in four. One in sixteen hundred, total. Bingo! We should move to Vegas.”

When I first knew Cal, we were in New York, just out of graduate school; he was single, and anxious, and struck me as someone who would never actually marry and have a family, or if he did, would marry someone decorative, someone slight. But now, twelve years later, his silver-haired wife, Simone, is nothing like that: she is big and fierce and original, joined with him in grief and courage. She storms out of PTA meetings. She glues little sequins to her shoes. English is her third language; she was once a French diplomat to Belgium and to Japan. “I miss the caviar” is all she’ll say of it. “I miss the caviar so much.” Now, in Pennsylvania Dutchland, she paints satirical oils of long-armed handless people. “The locals,” she explains in her French accent, giggling. “But I can’t paint hands.” She and Eugene have made a studio from one of the wrecked rooms upstairs.

“How is Simone through all this?” I ask.

“She’s better than I am,” he says. “She had a sister who died young. She expects unhappiness.”

“But isn’t there hope?” I ask, stuck for words.

Already, Cal says, Eugene has degenerated, grown worse, too much liquid in his lungs. “Stickiness,” he calls it. “If he were three, instead of seven, there’d be more hope. The researchers are making some strides; they really are.”

“He’s a great kid,” I say. Across the street, there are old Colonial houses with candles lit in each window; it is a Pennsylvania Dutch custom, or left over from Desert Storm, depending on whom you ask.

Cal stops and turns toward me, and the dog comes up and nuzzles him. “It’s not just that Eugene’s great,” he says. “It’s not just the precocity or that he’s the only child I’ll ever have. It’s also that he’s such a good person. He accepts things. He’s very good at understanding everything.”

I cannot imagine anything in my life that contains such sorrow as this, such anticipation of missing someone. Cal falls silent, the dog trots before us, and I place my hand lightly in the middle of Cal’s back as we walk like that through the cold, empty streets. Up in the sky, Venus and the thinnest paring of sickle moon, like a cup and saucer, like a nose and mouth, have made the Turkish flag in the sky. “Look at that,” I say to Cal as we traipse after the dog, the leash taut as a stick.

“Wow,” Cal says. “The Turkish flag.”