Read Online Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore - Free Book Online

and after a single cup of tea, I stood, clearing only a few of the dishes with her. I found my purse and headed for the door.
    She stood in the doorway, holding the uneaten meringue pie. “That skirt, by the way, is great,” she said in the June night. “Orange is a good color on you. Orange and gold.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    Then, without warning, she suddenly lifted up the pie and pushed it into her own face. When she pulled off the tin, meringue clung to her skin like blown snow. The foam of it covered her lashes and brows, and with her red hair for a minute she looked like a demented Queen Elizabeth.
    “What the
fuck
?” I said, shaking my head. I needed new friends. I would go to more conferences and meet more people.
    “I’ve always wanted to do that,” said Robin. The mask of meringue on her face looked eerie, not clownish at all, and her mouth speaking through the white foam seemed to be a separate creature entirely, a puppet or a fish. “I’ve always wanted to do that, and now I have.”
    “Hey,” I said. “There’s no business like show business.” I was digging in my purse for my car keys.
    Long hair flying over her head, bits of meringue dropping on the porch, she took a deep dramatic bow. “Everything,” she added, from behind her mask, “everything, everything, well, almost everything about it”—she gulped a little pie that had fallen in from one corner of her mouth—“is appealing.”
    “Brava,” I said, smiling. I had found my keys. “Now I’m out of here.”
    “Of course,” she said, gesturing with her one pie-free hand. “Onward.”
    for Nietzchka Keene (1952–2004)

PAPER LOSSES

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage. It was both the shame and the demise of them that hate like love could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shown a spotlight down for it to seize.
Do your stuff, baby! Who’s the best? Who’s the man?
    “Pro-nuke? You are? Really?” Kit was asked by friends, to whom she continued indiscreetly to complain.
    “Well, no.” Kit sighed. “But in a way.”
    “You seem like you need someone to talk to.”
    Which hurt Kit’s feelings, since she’d felt she was talking to
them
. “I’m just concerned about the kids,” Kit said.
    Rafe had changed. His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She did not know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro they put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched.No one ever said a man was now completely screwed up. They said,
The guy has changed
. Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement. He’d become
a little different
. He was something of
a character
. The brazen might suggest,
He’s gotten into some weird shit
. The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she had married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but nonfunctional—like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. “Hey, cutie,” he