Lorrie Moore

Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage - a power grab, as in who would be the dog, and who would be the owner of the dog.

Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore.

I would be a genius now,_ Quilty has said three times already, __f only I__ memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu._ __f only,_ says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He__ read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!

Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

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.

Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel and money again, and we lay there, both of our breaths bad, both of our underwear dangling elastic, and then you turned toward me with a gaze like two matches, putting the horoscope aside, you traced my buried ribs with your index finger, lingered at my collarbone, admiring it as one might a flying buttress, murmuring: Nice clavicle. And me, too new at it and scared, not knowing what to say, whispering: You should see my ten-speed.

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn__ bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess _ an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? __veryone admires us for our courage,_ says one man. __hey have no idea what they__e talking about.___ourage requires options,_ the man adds.__here are options,_ says a woman with a thick suede headband. __ou could give up. You could fall apart.___o you can__. Nobody does. I__e never seen it,_ says the man. __ell, not really fall apart.

She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures.

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.'Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler__ mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye__ instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That__ where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth__ eager devastation.

I mean__ Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Mave, but Mave was watching the waitress approach. Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice___e grabbed Mave__ wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. __ mean, it__ not as if you__e been dozing off,_ Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. __ mean, correct me if I__ wrong,_ he said, __ut I don__ think I__e been having this conversation alone._ He tightened his grip. __ mean, have I?

Life is sad. Here is someone.

I had one elegantly folded cookie__ short paper nerve baked in an ear.

And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.