Birds of America

by Lorrie Moore

  Now Abby struggled over a short stone wall and hid, squatting, eyeing the sheep warily. She was spacey with jet lag, and when she got back to the car, she realized she’d left the guidebook back on a stone and had to turn around and retrieve it.

  “There,” she said, getting back in the car.

  Mrs. Mallon shifted into gear. “I always feel that if people would just be like animals and excrete here and there rather than in a single agreed-upon spot, we wouldn’t have any pollution.”

  Abby nodded. “That’s brilliant, Mom.”

  “Is it?”

  They stopped briefly at an English manor house, to see the natural world cut up into moldings and rugs, wool and wood captive and squared, the earth stolen and embalmed and shellacked. Abby wanted to leave. “Let’s leave,” she whispered.

  “What is it with you?” complained her mother. From there, they visited a neolithic passage grave, its floor plan like a birth in reverse, its narrow stone corridor spilling into a high, round room. They took off their sunglasses and studied the Celtic curlicues. “Older than the pyramids,” announced the guide, though he failed to address its most important feature, Abby felt: its deadly maternal metaphor.

  “Are you still too nervous to cross the border to Northern Ireland?” asked Mrs. Mallon.

  “Uh-huh.” Abby bit at her thumbnail, tearing the end of it off like a tiny twig.

  “Oh, come on,” said her mother. “Get a grip.”

  And so they crossed the border into the North, past the flak-jacketed soldiers patrolling the neighborhoods and barbed wire of Newry, young men holding automatic weapons and walking backward, block after block, their partners across the street, walking forward, on the watch. Helicopters flapped above. “This is a little scary,” said Abby.

  “It’s all show,” said Mrs. Mallon breezily.

  “It’s a scary show.”

  “If you get scared easily.”

  Which was quickly becoming the theme of their trip—Abby could see that already. That Abby had no courage and her mother did. And that it had forever been that way.

  “You scare too easily,” said her mother. “You always did. When you were a child, you wouldn’t go into a house unless you were reassured there were no balloons in it.”

  “I didn’t like balloons.”

  “And you were scared on the plane coming over,” said her mother.

  Abby grew defensive. “Only when the flight attendant said there was no coffee because the percolator was broken. Didn’t you find that alarming? And then after all that slamming, they still couldn’t get one of the overhead bins shut.” Abby remembered this like a distant, bitter memory, though it had only been yesterday. The plane had taken off with a terrible shudder, and when it proceeded with the rattle of an old subway car, particularly over Greenland, the flight attendant had gotten on the address system to announce there was nothing to worry about, especially when you think about “how heavy air really is.”

  Now her mother thought she was Tarzan. “I want to go on that rope bridge I saw in the guidebook,” she said.

  On page 98 in the guidebook was a photograph of a rope-and-board bridge slung high between two cliffs. It was supposed to be for fishermen, but tourists were allowed, though they were cautioned about strong winds.

  “Why do you want to go on the rope bridge?” asked Abby.

  “Why?” replied her mother, who then seemed stuck and fell silent.

  For the next two days, they drove east and to the north, skirting Belfast, along the coastline, past old windmills and sheep farms, and up out onto vertiginous cliffs that looked out toward Scotland, a pale sliver on the sea. They stayed at a tiny stucco bed-and-breakfast, one with a thatched roof like Cleopatra bangs. They slept lumpily, and in the morning in the breakfast room with its large front window, they ate their cereal and rashers and black and white pudding in an exhausted way, going through the motions of good guesthood—“Yes, the troubles,” they agreed, for who could say for certain whom you were talking to? It wasn’t like race-riven America, where you always knew. Abby nodded. Out the window, there was a breeze, but she couldn’t hear the faintest rustle of it. She could only see it silently moving the dangling branches of the sun-sequined spruce, just slightly, like objects hanging from a rearview mirror in someone else’s car.

  She charged the bill to her Visa, tried to lift both bags, and then just lifted her own.

  “Good-bye! Thank you!” she and her mother called to their host. Back in the car, briefly, Mrs. Mallon began to sing “Toora-loora-loora.” “ ‘Over in Killarney, many years ago,’ ” she warbled. Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.

  And so they drove on. The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

  They came to the sign for the rope bridge.

  “I want to do this,” said Mrs. Mallon, and swung the car sharply right. They crunched into a gravel parking lot and parked; the bridge was a quarter-mile walk from there. In the distance, dark clouds roiled like a hemorrhage, and the wind was picking up. Rain mizzled the windshield.

  “I’m going to stay here,” said Abby.

  “You are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever,” said her mother in a disgusted way, and she got out, scowling, and trudged down the path to the bridge, disappearing beyond a curve.

  Abby waited, now feeling the true loneliness of this trip. She realized she missed Bob and his warm, quiet confusion; how he sat on the rug in front of the fireplace, where her dog, Randolph, used to sit; sat there beneath the five Christmas cards they’d received and placed on the mantel—five, including the one from the paperboy—sat there picking at his feet, or naming all the fruits in his fruit salad, remarking life’s great variety! or asking what was wrong (in his own silent way), while poking endlessly at a smoldering log. She thought, too, about poor Randolph, at the vet, with his patchy fur and begging, dying eyes. And she thought about the pale bachelor lyricist, how he had once come to see her, and how he hadn’t even placed enough pressure on the doorbell to make it ring, and so had stood there waiting on the porch, holding a purple cone-flower, until she just happened to walk by the front window and see him standing there. 0 poetry! When she invited him in, and he gave her the flower and sat down to decry the coded bloom and doom of all things, decry as well his own unearned deathlessness, how everything hurtles toward oblivion, except words, which assemble themselves in time like molecules in space, for God was an act—an act!—of language, it hadn’t seemed silly to her, not really, at least not that silly.

  The wind was gusting. She looked at her watch, worried now about her mother. She turned on the radio to find a weather report, though the stations all seemed to be playing strange, redone versions of American pop songs from 1970. Every so often, there was a two-minute quiz show—Who is the president of France? Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?—questions that the caller rarely if ever answered correctly, which made it quite embarrassing to listen to. Why did they do it? Puzzles, quizzes, game shows. Abby knew from AST that a surprising percentage of those taking the college entrance exams never actually applied to college. People just loved a test. Wasn’t that true? People loved to put themselves to one.

  Her mother was now knocking on the glass. She was muddy and wet. Abby unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Was it worth it?” Abby asked.

  Her mother got in, big and dank and puffing. She started the car without looking at her daughter. “What a bridge,” she said finally.

  The next day, they made their way along the Antrim coast, through towns bannered with Union Jacks and Scottish hymns, down to Derry with its barbed wire and IRA scrawlings on the city walls—“John Major is a Zionist Jew” (“Hello,” said a British officer when they stopped to stare)—and then escaping across bandit country, and once more down across the border into the south, down the Donegal coast, its fishing villages like some ol
d, never-was Cape Cod. Staring out through the windshield, off into the horizon, Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce—winds, seas—a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world—no flower or stone—as a single hello from a human being.

  Once in a while, Abby and her mother broke their silences with talk of Mrs. Mallon’s job as office manager at a small flashlight company—“I had to totally rearrange our insurance policies. The dental and Major Medical were eating our lunch!”—or with questions about the route signs, or the black dots signifying the auto deaths. But mostly, her mother wanted to talk about Abby’s shaky marriage and what she was going to do. “Look, another ruined abbey,” she took to saying every time they passed a heap of medieval stones.

  “When you going back to Bob?”

  “I went back,” said Abby. “But then I left again. Oops.”

  Her mother sighed. “Women of your generation are always hoping for some other kind of romance than the one they have,” said Mrs. Mallon. “Aren’t they?”

  “Who knows?” said Abby. She was starting to feel a little tight-lipped with her mother, crammed into this space together like astronauts. She was starting to have a highly inflamed sense of event: a single word rang and vibrated. The slightest movement could annoy, the breath, the odor. Unlike her sister, Theda, who had always remained sunny and cheerfully intimate with everyone, Abby had always been darker and left to her own devices; she and her mother had never been very close. When Abby was a child, her mother had always repelled her a bit—the oily smell of her hair, her belly button like a worm curled in a pit, the sanitary napkins in the bathroom wastebasket, horrid as a war, then later strewn along the curb by raccoons who would tear them from the trash cans at night. Once at a restaurant, when she was little, Abby had burst into an unlatched ladies’ room stall, only to find her mother sitting there in a dazed and unseemly way, peering out at her from the toilet seat like a cuckoo in a clock.

  There were things one should never know about another person.

  Later, Abby decided that perhaps it hadn’t been her mother at all.

  Yet now here she and her mother were, sharing the tiniest of cars, reunited in a wheeled and metal womb, sharing small double beds in bed-and-breakfasts, waking up with mouths stale and close upon each other, or backs turned and rocking in angry-seeming humps. The land of ire! Talk of Abby’s marriage and its possible demise trotted before them on the road like a herd of sheep, insomnia’s sheep, and it made Abby want to have a gun.

  “I never bothered with conventional romantic fluff,” said Mrs. Mallon. “I wasn’t the type. I always worked, and I was practical, put myself forward, and got things done and over with. If I liked a man, I asked him out myself. That’s how I met your father. I asked him out. I even proposed the marriage.”

  “I know.”

  “And then I stayed with him until the day he died. Actually, three days after. He was a good man.” She paused. “Which is more than I can say about some people.”

  Abby didn’t say anything.

  “Bob’s a good man,” added Mrs. Mallon.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

  There was silence again between them now as the countryside once more unfolded its quilt of greens, the old roads triggering memories as if it were a land she had traveled long ago, its mix of luck and unluck like her own past; it seemed stuck in time, like a daydream or a book. Up close the mountains were craggy, scabby with rock and green, like a buck’s antlers trying to lose their fuzz. But distance filled the gaps with moss. Wasn’t that the truth? Abby sat quietly, glugging Ballygowan water from a plastic bottle and popping Extra Strong Mints. Perhaps she should turn on the radio, listen to one of the call-in quizzes or to the news. But then her mother would take over, fiddle and retune. Her mother was always searching for country music, songs with the words devil woman. She loved those.

  “Promise me one thing,” said Mrs. Mallon.

  “What?” said Abby.

  “That you’ll try with Bob.”

  At what price? Abby wanted to yell, but she and her mother were too old for that now.

  Mrs. Mallon continued, thoughtfully, with the sort of pseudowisdom she donned now that she was sixty. “Once you’re with a man, you have to sit still with him. As scary as it seems. You have to be brave and learn to reap the benefits of inertia,” and here she gunned the motor to pass a tractor on a curve. LOOSE CHIPPINGS said the sign. HIDDEN DIP. But Abby’s mother drove as if these were mere cocktail party chatter. A sign ahead showed six black dots.

  “Yeah,” said Abby, clutching the dashboard. “Dad was inert. Dad was inert, except that once every three years he jumped up and socked somebody in the mouth.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It’s basically true.”

  In Killybegs, they followed the signs for Donegal City. “You women today,” Mrs. Mallon said. “You expect too much.”

  “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Sligo,” said Abby. She had taken to making up stupid jokes. “What do you call a bus with a soccer team on it?”

  “What?” They passed a family of gypsies, camped next to a mountain of car batteries they hoped to sell.

  “A football coach.” Sometimes Abby laughed raucously, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes she just shrugged. She was waiting for the Blarney Stone. That was all she’d come here for, so everything else she could endure.

  They stopped at a bookshop to get a better map and inquire, perhaps, as to a bathroom. Inside, there were four customers: two priests reading golf books, and a mother with her tiny son, who traipsed after her along the shelves, begging, “Please, Mummy, just a wee book, Mummy. Please just a wee book.” There was no better map. There was no bathroom. “Sorry,” the clerk said, and one of the priests glanced up quickly. Abby and her mother went next door to look at the Kinsale smocks and wool sweaters—tiny cardigans that young Irish children, on sweltering summer days of seventy-one degrees, wore on the beach, over their bathing suits. “So cute,” said Abby, and the two of them wandered through the store, touching things. In the back by the wool caps, Abby’s mother found a marionette hanging from a ceiling hook and began to play with it a little, waving its arms to the store music, which was a Beethoven concerto. Abby went to pay for a smock, ask about a bathroom or a good pub, and when she came back, her mother was still there, transfixed, conducting the concerto with the puppet. Her face was arranged in girlish joy, luminous, as Abby rarely saw it. When the concerto was over, Abby handed her a bag. “Here,” she said, “I bought you a smock.”

  Mrs. Mallon let go of the marionette, and her face darkened. “I never had a real childhood,” she said, taking the bag and looking off into the middle distance. “Being the oldest, I was always my mother’s confidante. I always had to act grown-up and responsible. Which wasn’t my natural nature.” Abby steered her toward the door. “And then when I really was grown up, there was Theda, who needed all my time, and your father of course, with his demands. But then there was you. You I liked. You I could leave alone.”

  “I bought you a smock,” Abby said again.

  They used the bathroom at O’Hara’s pub, bought a single mineral water and split it, then went on to the Drumcliff cemetery to see the dead Yeatses. Then they sped on toward Sligo City to find a room, and the next day were up and out to Knock to watch lame women, sick women, women who wanted to get pregnant (“Knocked up,” said Abby) rub their rosaries on the original stones of the shrine. They drove down to Clifden, around Connemara, to Galway and Limerick—“There once were two gals from America, one named Abby and her mother named Erica. …” They sang, minstrel speed demons around the Ring of Kerry, its palm trees and blue and pink hydrangea like a set from an operett
a. “Playgirls of the Western World!” exclaimed her mother. They came to rest, at dark, near Ballylickey, in a bed-and-breakfast, a former hunting lodge, in a glen just off the ring. They ate a late supper of toddies and a soda bread their hostess called “Curranty Dick.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Mrs. Mallon. Which depressed Abby, like a tacky fixture in a room, and so she excused herself and went upstairs, to bed.

  It was the next day, through Ballylickey, Bantry, Skibbereen, and Cork, that they entered Blarney. At the castle, the line to kiss the stone was long, hot, and frightening. It jammed the tiny winding stairs of the castle’s suffocating left tower, and people pressed themselves against the dark wall to make room for others who had lost their nerve and were coming back down.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Abby. But by the time they’d reached the top, her annoyance had turned to anxiety. To kiss the stone, she saw, people had to lie on their backs out over a parapet, stretching their necks out to place their lips on the underside of a supporting wall where the stone was laid. A strange-looking leprechaunish man was squatting at the side of the stone, supposedly to help people arch back, but he seemed to be holding them too loosely, a careless and sadistic glint in his eyes, and some people were changing their minds and going back downstairs, fearful and inarticulate as ever.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” said Abby hesitantly, tying her dark raincoat more tightly around her.

  “Of course you can,” said her mother. “You’ve come all this way. This is why you came.” Now that they were at the top of the castle, the line seemed to be moving quickly. Abby looked back, and around, and the view was green and rich, and breathtaking, like a photo soaked in dyes.