by Lorrie Moore
From there on in, only her parents, in their throaty Romanian accents, ever called her Nell, her secret, jaunty American self existing only for them.
"Nell, how are ze ozer children at ze school?"
"Nell, please to tell us what you do."
Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone. It was a body walled in the cellar of her, a whiff and forecast of doom like an early, rotten spring—and she longed for the Nell-that-never-lived's return. She wished to start over again, to be someone living coltishly in the world, not someone hidden away, behind books, with a carefully learned voice and a sad past.
She missed her mother the most.
the library Olena worked in was one of the most prestigious university libraries in the Midwest. It housed a large collection of rare and foreign books, and she had driven across several states to get there, squinting through the splattered tempera of insects on the windshield, watching for the dark tail of a possible tornado, and getting sick, painfully, in Indiana, in the rest rooms of the dead-Hoosier service plazas along I-80. The ladies' rooms there had had electric eyes for the toilets, the sinks, the hand dryers, and she'd set them all off by staggering in and out of the stalls or leaning into the sinks. "You the only one in here?" asked a cleaning woman. "You the only one in here making this racket?" Olena had smiled, a dog's smile; in the yellowish light, everything seemed tragic and ridiculous and unable to stop. The flatness of the terrain gave her vertigo, she decided, that was it. The land was windswept; there were no smells. In Vermont, she had felt cradled by mountains. Now, here, she would have to be brave. But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when she gave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up.
she first met nick at the library in May. She was temporarily positioned at the reference desk, hauled out from her ordinary task as supervisor of foreign cataloging, to replace someone who was ill. Nick was researching statistics on municipal campaign spending in the state. "Haven't stepped into a library since I was eighteen," he said. He looked at least forty.
She showed him where he might look. "Try looking here," she said, writing down the names of indexes to state records, but he kept looking at her. "Or here."
"I'm managing a county board seat campaign," he said. "The election's not until the fall, but I'm trying to get a jump on things." His hair was a coppery brown, threaded through with silver. There was something animated in his eyes, like pond life. "I just wanted to get some comparison figures. Will you have a cup of coffee with me?"
"I don't think so," she said.
But he came back the next day and asked her again.
the coffee shop near campus was hot and noisy, crowded with students, and Nick loudly ordered espresso for them both. She usually didn't like espresso, its gritty, cigarish taste. But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility. She drank the espresso fast, with determination and a sense of adventure. "I guess I'll have a second," she said, and wiped her mouth with a napkin.
"I'll get it," said Nick, and when he came back, he told her some more about the campaign he was running. "It's important to get the endorsements of the neighborhood associations," he said. He ran a bratwurst and frozen yogurt stand called Please Squeeze and Bratwursts. He had gotten to know a lot of people that way. "I feel alive and relevant, living my life like this," he said. "I don't feel like I've sold out."
"Sold out to what?" she asked.
He smiled. "I can tell you're not from around here," he said. He raked his hand through the various metals of his hair. "Selling out. Like doing something you really never wanted to do, and getting paid too much for it."
"Oh," she said.
"When I was a kid, my father said to me, 'Sometimes in life, son, you're going to find you have to do things you don't want to do,' and I looked him right in the eye and said, 'No fucking way.'" Olena laughed. "I mean, you probably always wanted to be a librarian, right?"
She looked at all the crooked diagonals of his face and couldn't tell whether he was serious. "Me?" she said. "I first went to graduate school to be an English professor." She sighed, switched elbows, sinking her chin into her other hand. "I did try," she said. "I read Derrida. I read Lacan. I read Reading Lacan. I read 'Reading Reading Lacan—and that's when I applied to library school."
"I don't know who Lacan is," he said.
"He's, well—you see? That's why I like libraries: No whos or whys. Just 'where is it?'"
"And where are you from?" he asked, his face briefly animated by his own clever change of subject. "Originally." There was, it seemed, a way of spotting those not native to the town. It was a college town, attractive and dull, and it hurried the transients along—the students, gypsies, visiting scholars and comics—with a motion not unlike peristalsis.
"Vermont," she said.
"Vermont!" Nick exclaimed, as if this were exotic, which made her glad she hadn't said something like Transylvania. He leaned toward her, confidentially. "I have to tell you: I own one chair from Ethan Allen Furniture."
"You do?" She smiled. "I won't tell anyone."
"Before that, however, I was in prison, and didn't own a stick."
"Really?" she asked. She sat back. Was he telling the truth? As a girl, she'd been very gullible, but she had always learned more that way.
"I went to school here," he said. "In the sixties. I bombed a warehouse where the military was storing research supplies. I got twelve years." He paused, searching her eyes to see how she was doing with this, how he was doing with it. Then he fetched back his gaze, like a piece of jewelry he'd merely wanted to show her, quick. "There wasn't supposed to be anyone there; we'd checked it all out in advance. But this poor asshole named Lawrence Sperry—Larry Sperry! Christ, can you imagine having a name like that?"
"Sure," said Olena.
Nick looked at her suspiciously. "He was in there, working late. He lost a leg and an eye in the explosion. I got the federal pen in Winford. Attempted murder."
The thick coffee coated his lips. He had been looking steadily at her, but now he looked away.
"Would you like a bun?" asked Olena. "I'm going to go get a bun." She stood, but he turned and gazed up at her with such disbelief that she sat back down again, sloppily, sidesaddle. She twisted forward, leaned into the table. "I'm sorry. Is that all true, what you just said? Did that really happen to you?"
"What?" His mouth fell open. "You think I'd make that up?"
"It's just that, well, I work around a lot of literature," she said.
"'Literature,'" he repeated.
She touched his hand. She didn't know what else to do. "Can I cook dinner for you some night? Tonight?"
There was a blaze in his eye, a concentrated seeing. He seemed for a moment able to look right into her, know her in a way that was uncluttered by actually knowing her. He seemed to have no information or misinformation, only a kind of photography, factless but true.
"Yes," he said, "you can."
Which was how he came to spend the evening beneath the cheap stained-glass lamp of her dining room, its barroom red, its Schlitz-Tiffany light, and then to spend the night, and not leave.
olena had never lived with a man before. "Except my father," she said, and Nick studied her eyes, the streak of blankness in them, when she said it. Though she had dated two different boys in college, they were the kind who liked to leave early, to eat breakfast without her at smoky greasy spoons, to sit at the counter with the large men in the blue windbreakers, read the paper, get their cups refilled.
She had never been with anyone who stayed. Anyone who'd moved in h
is box of tapes, his Ethan Allen chair.
Anyone who'd had lease problems at his old place.
"I'm trying to bring this thing together," he said, holding her in the middle of the afternoon. "My life, the campaign, my thing with you: I'm trying to get all my birds to land in the same yard." Out the window, there was an afternoon moon, like a golf ball, pocked and stuck. She looked at the calcified egg of it, its coin face, its blue neighborhood of nothing. Then she looked at him. There was the pond life again in his eyes, and in the rest of his face a hesitant, warm stillness.
"Do you like making love to me?" she asked, at night, during a thunderstorm.
"Of course. Why do you ask?"
"Are you satisfied with me?"
He turned toward her, kissed her. "Yes," he said. "I don't need a show."
She was quiet for a long time. "People are giving shows?"
The rain and wind rushed down the gutters, snapped the branches of the weak trees in the side yard.
He had her inexperience and self-esteem in mind. At the movies, at the beginning, he whispered, "Twentieth-Century-Fox. Baby, that's you." During a slapstick part, in a library where card catalogs were upended and scattered wildly through the air, she broke into a pale, cold sweat, and he moved toward her, hid her head in his chest, saying, "Don't look, don't look." At the end, they would sit through the long credits—gaffer, best boy, key grip. "That's what we need to get," he said. "A grip."
"Yes," she said. "Also a negative cutter!"
Other times, he encouraged her to walk around the house naked. "If you got it, do it." He smiled, paused, feigned confusion. "If you do it, have it. If you flaunt it, do it."
"If you have it, got it," she added.
"If you say it, mean it." And he pulled her toward him like a dancing partner with soft shoes and the smiling mouth of love.
But too often she lay awake, wondering. There was something missing. Something wasn't happening to her, or was it to him? All through the summer, the thunderstorms set the sky on fire while she lay there, listening for the train sound of a tornado, which never came—though the lightning ripped open the night and lit the trees like things too suddenly remembered, then left them indecipherable again in the dark.
"You're not feeling anything, are you?" he finally said. "What is wrong?"
"I'm not sure," she said cryptically. "The rainstorms are so loud in this part of the world." The wind from a storm blew through the screens and sometimes caused the door to the bedroom to slam shut. "I don't like a door to slam," she whispered. "It makes me think someone is mad."
at the library, there were Romanian books coming in—Olena was to skim them, read them just enough to proffer a brief description for the catalog listing. It dismayed her that her Romanian was so weak, that it had seemed almost to vanish, a mere handkerchief in a stairwell, and that now, daily, another book arrived to reprimand her.
She missed her mother the most.
On her lunch break, she went to Nick's stand for a frozen yogurt. He looked tired, bedraggled, his hair like sprockets. "You want the Sperry Cherry or the Lemon Bomber?" he asked. These were his joke names, the ones he threatened really to use someday.
"How about apple?" she said.
He cut up an apple and arranged it in a paper dish. He squeezed yogurt from a chrome machine. "There's a fund-raiser tonight for the Teetlebaum campaign."
"Oh," she said. She had been to these fund-raisers before. At first she had liked them, glimpsing corners of the city she would never have seen otherwise, Nick leading her out into them, Nick knowing everyone, so that it seemed her life filled with possibility, with homefulness. But finally, she felt, such events were too full of dreary, glad-handing people speaking incessantly of their camping trips out west. They never really spoke to you. They spoke toward you. They spoke at you. They spoke near you, on you. They believed themselves crucial to the welfare of the community. But they seldom went to libraries. They didn't read books. "At least they're contribute™ to the community" said Nick. "At least they're not sucking the blood of it."
"Lapping," she said.
"What?"
"Gnashing and lapping. Not sucking."
He looked at her in a doubtful, worried way. "I looked it up once," she said.
"Whatever." He scowled. "At least they care. At least they're trying to give something back."
"I'd rather live in Russia," she said.
"I'll be back around ten or so," he said.
"You don't want me to come?" Truth was she disliked Ken Teetlebaum. Perhaps Nick had figured this out. Though he had the support of the local leftover Left, there was something fatuous and vain about Ken. He tended to do little isometric leg exercises while you were talking to him. Often he took out a Woolworth photo of himself and showed it to people. "Look at this," he'd say. "This was back when I had long hair, can you believe it?" And people would look and see a handsome teenaged boy who bore only a slight resemblance to the puffy Ken Teetlebaum of today. "Don't I look like Eric Clapton?"
"Eric Clapton would never have sat in a Woolworth photo booth like some high school girl," Olena had said once, in the caustic blurt that sometimes afflicts the shy. Ken had looked at her in a laughing, hurt sort of way, and after that he stopped showing the photo around when she was present.
"You can come, if you want to." Nick reached up, smoothed his hair, and looked handsome again. "Meet me there."
the fund-raiser was in the upstairs room of a local restaurant called Dutch's. She paid ten dollars, went in, and ate a lot of raw cauliflower and hummus before she saw Nick back in a far corner, talking to a woman in jeans and a brown blazer. She was the sort of woman that Nick might twist around to look at in restaurants: fiery auburn hair cut bluntly in a pageboy. She had a pretty face, but the hair was too severe, too separate and tended to. Olena herself had long, disorganized hair, and she wore it pulled back messily in a clip. When she reached up to wave to Nick, and he looked away without acknowledging her, back toward the auburn pageboy, Olena kept her hand up and moved it back, to fuss with the clip. She would never fit in here, she thought. Not among these jolly, activist-clerk types. She preferred the quiet poet-clerks of the library. They were delicate and territorial, intellectual, and physically unwell. They sat around at work, thinking up Tom Swifties: I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly.
Would you like a soda? he asked spritely.
They spent weekends at the Mayo Clinic. "An amusement park for hypochondriacs," said a cataloger named Sarah. "A cross between Lourdes and The New Price Is Right" said someone else named George. These were the people she liked: the kind you couldn't really live with.
She turned to head toward the ladies' room and bumped into Ken. He gave her a hug hello, and then whispered in her ear, "You live with Nick. Help us think of an issue. I need another issue."
"I'll get you one at the issue store," she said, and pulled away as someone approached him with a heartily extended hand and a false, booming "Here's the man of the hour." In the bathroom, she stared at her own reflection: in an attempt at extroversion, she had worn a tunic with large slices of watermelon depicted on the front. What had she been thinking of ?
She went into the stall and slid the bolt shut. She read the graffiti on the back of the door. Anita loves David S. Or: Christ + Diane W. It was good to see that even in a town like this, people could love one another.
"who were you talking to?" she asked him later at home.
"Who? What do you mean?"
"The one with the plasticine hair."
"Oh, Erin? She does look like she does something to her hair. It looks like she hennas it."
"It looks like she tacks it against the wall and stands underneath it."
"She's head of the Bayre Corners Neighborhood Association. Come September, we're really going to need her endorsement." Olena sighed, looked away. "It's the democratic process," said Nick. "I'd rather have a king and queen," she said.
the following Friday, the nigh
t of the Fish Fry Fund-raiser at the Labor Temple, was the night Nick slept with Erin of the Bayre Corners Neighborhood Association. He arrived back home at seven in the morning and confessed to Olena, who, when Nick hadn't come home, had downed half a packet of Dramamine to get to sleep.
"I'm sorry," he said, his head in his hands. "It's a sixties thing."
"A sixties thing?" She was fuzzy, zonked from the Dramamine.
"You get all involved in a political event, and you find yourself sleeping together. She's from that era, too. It's also that, I don't know, she just seems to really care about her community. She's got this reaching, expressive side to her. I got caught up in that." He was sitting down, leaning forward on his knees, talking to his shoes. The electric fan was blowing on him, moving his hair gently, like weeds in water.
"A sixties thing?" Olena repeated. "A sixties thing, what is that—like 'Easy to Be Hard'?" It was the song she remembered best. But now something switched off in her. The bones in her chest hurt. Even the room seemed changed—brighter and awful. Everything had fled, run away to become something else. She started to perspire under her arms and her face grew hot. "You're a murderer," she said. "That's finally what you are. That's finally what you'll always be." She began to weep so loudly that Nick got up, closed the windows. Then he sat down and held her—who else was there to hold her?—and she held him back.
he bought her a large garnet ring, a cough drop set in brass. He did the dishes ten straight days in a row. She had a tendency to go to bed right after supper and sleep, heavily, needing the escape. She had become afraid of going out—restaurants, stores, the tension in her shoulders, the fear gripping her face when she was there, as if people knew she was a foreigner and a fool—and for fifteen additional days he did the cooking and shopping. His car was always parked on the outside of the driveway, and hers was always in first, close, blocked in, as if to indicate who most belonged to the community, to the world, and who most belonged tucked in away from it, in a house. Perhaps in bed. Perhaps asleep.