The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore Read Online Free PDF

say, laughing. "Well, I'm not," I said. "I'm not good at it in the least."
    "It's late," I said again to the man, and I made two gin rickeys and lit candles.
    Every woman I knew here drank—nightly. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for the stray voltages of mother-love in the very places they would never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another. I was the only one of my friends—all of us academic transplants, all soldiers of art stationed on a far-off base (or so we imagined it)—who hadn't had something terrible happen to her yet.
     
    the next morning I dressed in cheery colors. Orange and gold. There was nothing useful to bring Robin, but I made a bouquet of cut mums nonetheless and stuck them in a plastic cup with some wet paper towels holding them in. I was headed toward the front door when the phone rang. It was ZJ. "I'm leaving now to see Robin," I said.
    "Don't bother."
    "Oh, no," I said. My vision left me for a second.
    "She died late last night. About two in the morning."
    I sank down into a chair, and my plastic cup of mums fell, breaking two stems. "Oh, my God," I said.
    "I know," he said.
    "I was going to go see her last night but it got late and I thought it would be better to go this morning when she was more rested." I tried not to wail.
    "Don't worry about it," he said.
    "I feel terrible," I cried, as if this were what mattered.
    "She was not doing well. It's a blessing." From diagnosis to decline had been precipitous, I knew. She had started the semester teaching, then suddenly the new chemo was not going well and she was lying outside the emergency room, on the concrete, afraid to lie down inside because of other people's germs. She was placed in the actual hospital, which was full of other people's germs. Then she'd been there almost a week and I hadn't made it in to see her.
    "It's all so unbelievable."
    "I know."
    "How are
you
?" I asked.
    "I can't even go there," he said.
    "Please phone me if there's something I can do," I said emptily. "Let me know when the service will be."
    "Sure," he said.
    I went upstairs and with all my cheery clothes on got back into bed. It still smelled a little of the man. I pulled the sheet over my head and lay there, every muscle of my body strung taut. I could not move.
    But I must have fallen asleep, and for some time, because when I heard the doorbell downstairs and pulled the sheet off my face it was already dark, though the sun set these days at four, so it was hard ever to know just by looking out the window what time it might possibly be. I flicked on the lights as I went—bedroom, hall, stairs—making my way down toward the ringing bell. I turned on the porch light and opened the door.
    There stood Isabel, her left coat sleeve dangling empty at her side, and Pat, whose deep eyes looked crazy and bright as a dog's. "We've got the gin, we've got the rickey mix," they said, holding up the bags. "Come on. We're going to go see Robin."
    "I thought Robin died," I said.
    Pat made a face. "Yes, well," she said.
    "That hospital was such a bad scene," said Isabel. She was not wearing her prosthetic arm. Except in pieces choreographed by others, she almost never did anymore. "But she's back home now and expecting us."
    "How can that be?"
    "You know women and their houses," said Pat. "It's hard for them to part company." Pat had had a massive stroke two years ago, which had wiped out her ebullient personality and her short-term memory, but periodically her wounded, recovering brain cast about desperately and landed on a switch and threw it, and she woke up in a beautiful manic frenzy, seeming like the old Pat, saying, "I feel like I've been asleep for years," and she would stay like that for days on end, insomniac and babbling and reminiscing, painting her paintings, then she'd crash again, passive and mute. She was on disability leave and had a student living with her full time who took care of her.
    "Maybe we all