The Books: “Birds of America” – ‘Agnes of Iowa’ (Lorrie Moore)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries), by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story ‘Agnes of Iowa’. One of the most powerful stories of the collection. I’m not sure why it is so effective – there are the themes of loss, and letting go of youth, and accepting that life has not turned out the way you wanted it to … there’s that … but then there are other elements that add to its power: the imagery, the characters (Agnes talking to her one black student – trying to convince her not to write about vampires anymore but to write about her own childhood – the black student is like, “Oh HELL to the No! I LIVED my childhood, I don’t want to write about it! I want to write about vampires!) – Agnes’ sad and vaguely grumpy husband Joe … the visiting Afrikaner poet who comes to speak at the college – and Agnes is at first all pissed off that the college would be supporting someone who, in essence, was benefiting from apartheid – but her encounters with the poet show a different story. Agnes is another of those Lorrie Moore creations: the woman who is always trying to crack jokes, keep things light – but who also always manages to say the wrong thing. People get embarrassed for Agnes. Agnes had lived in New York for 10 years before she got married – she was a writer. It had been a crazy time, she had had no money, had gone to crazy parties – you know, lived the life of a young artist struggling in New York. And then, as so often happens, she had a crisis in her late 20s, early 30s – where she felt like time was suddenly running out on her, and she got nervous … so she moved home to her native Iowa. She got a job teaching writing. She married Joe. And at first she doesn’t experience her choice as some giant compromise that she will later regret. It was the right thing to do. She and Joe fell passionately in love/lust … and they got married. After 6 years of trying to have a baby (where their relationship is basically ruined – all romance sucked out of it in the trying to make a baby thing) … and now, realizing they will not have a baby … and they are basically stuck with each other … fills them with something like horror. Things have become awkward, strained. They don’t know what to say, do, and the future yawns before them, empty and awful. But Agnes still is doing the best she can. Trying to teach, trying to ingratiate herself with the head of her department … trying not to get lost. But she finds herself, suddenly, yearning for New York again … looking back on her chaotic days there as something wonderful that is now lost forever. There is something terrible about realizing: wow, that was the best time of my life, and I didn’t even know it then!

Agnes of Iowa is a masterpiece.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries), by Lorrie Moore – excerpt from the story ‘Agnes of Iowa’

When Agnes first met Joe, they’d fallen madly upon each other. They’d kissed in restaurants; they’d groped, under coats, at the movies. At his little house, they’d made love on the porch, or the landing of the staircase, against the wall in the hall by the door to the attic, filled with too much desire to make their way to a real room.

Now they struggled self-consciously for atmosphere, something they’d never needed before. She prepared the bedroom carefully. She played quiet music and concentrated. She lit candles – as if she were in church, praying for the deceased. She donned a filmy gown. She took hot baths and entered the bedroom in nothing but a towel, a wild fishlike creature of moist, perfumed heat. In the nightstand drawer she still kept the charts a doctor once told her to keep, still placed an X on any date she and Joe actually had sex. But she could never show these to her doctor; not now. It pained Agnes to see them. She and Joe looked like worse than bad shots. She and Joe looked like idiots. She and Joe looked dead.

Frantic candlelight flickered on the ceiling like a puppet show. While she waited for Joe to come out of the bathroom, Agnes lay back on the bed and thought about her week, the bloody politics of it, how she was not very good at politics. Once, before he was elected, she had gone to a rally for Bill Clinton, but when he was late and had kept the crowd waiting for over an hour, and when the sun got hot and bees began landing on people’s heads, when everyone’s feet hurt and tiny children began to cry and a state assemblyman stepped forward to announce that Clinton had stopped at a Dairy Queen in Des Moines and that was why he was late – Dairy Queen! – she had grown angry and resentful and apolitical in her own sweet-starved thirst and she’d joined in with some other people who had started to chant, “Do us a favor, tell us the flavor.”

Through college she had been a feminist – basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say. She signed day-care petitions, and petitions for Planned Parenthood. And although she had never been very aggressive with men, she felt strongly that she knew the difference between feminism and Sadie Hawkins Day – which some people, she believed, did not.

“Agnes, are we out of toothpaste or is this it – oh, okay, I see.”

And once, in New York, she had quixotically organized the ladies’ room line at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Because the play was going to start any minute and the line was still twenty women long, she had gotten six women to walk across the lobby with her to the men’s room. “Everybody out of there?” she’d called in timidly, allowing the men to finish up first, which took awhile, especially with other men coming up impatiently and cutting ahead in line. Later, at intermission, she saw how it should have been done. Two elderly black women, with greater expertise in civil rights, stepped very confidently into the men’s room and called out, “Don’t mind us, boys. We’re coming on in. Don’t mind us.”

“Are you okay?” asked Joe, smiling. He was already beside her. He smelled sweet, of soap and minty teeth, like a child.

“I think so,” she said, and turned toward him in the bordello light of their room. He had never acquired the look of maturity anchored in sorrow that burnished so many men’s faces. His own sadness in life – a childhood of beatings, a dying mother – was like quicksand, and he had to stay away from it entirely. He permitted no unhappy memories spoken aloud. He stuck with the same mild cheerfulness he’d honed successfully as a boy, and it made him seem fatuous – even, she knew, to himself. Probably it hurt his business a little.

“Your mind’s wandering,” he said, letting his own eyes close.

“I know.” She yawned, moved her legs onto his for warmth, and in this way, with the candles burning into their tins, she and Joe fell asleep.