by Lorrie Moore
"What is his name?" asked the little girl. Her hand had found the scruff of the cat's neck and was kneading it. The cat stretched his throat up in enjoyment.
"Fluffers," said Jane.
The girl's voice went up an octave into cat range. "Hi, Fluffers," she half sang, half squeaked. "How are you feeling today, Fluffers?"
"Is he sick?" asked the boy.
"Oh, no," said Jane. "He just comes here for a special kind of bath."
"You getting a bath, Fluffers?" cooed the girl, looking directly into the cat's eyes.
"Our cat is having an operation," said the boy.
"That's too bad," said Jane.
The boy looked at her crossly. "No, it's not," he said. "It's a good thing. Then he'll be all better."
"Well, yes, that's true," said Jane.
"Fluffers licked my finger," said the girl.
Their mother now appeared behind them, placing a palm on each of their heads. "Time to go, kiddos," she said. "Beautiful cat," she said to Jane.
the cheese shop Jane worked at, in the new mall outside of town, was called Swedish Isle, and she had recently been promoted to assistant manager. There were always just two of them in the shop, Jane and an older woman named Heffie, who minded the register while Jane stood out in front with the cheese samples, usually spreads and dips placed in small amounts on crackers. Once the manager had come by and told her that Heffie should be doing the samples and Jane should be minding the register and doing the price sheets, but the store manager was also the assistant district manager for the chain and was too busy to come by all that often. So most of the time Jane simply continued doing the samples herself. She liked the customer contact. "Care to try our chive-dill today?" she would ask brightly. She felt like Molly Malone, only friendlier and no cockles or mussels; no real seafood for miles. This was the deep Midwest. Meat sections in the grocery stores read: beef, pork, and fish sticks.
"Free?" people would ask and pick up a cracker or a bread square from her plastic tray.
"Sure is." She would smile and watch their faces as they chewed. If it were a man she thought was handsome, she'd say, "No. A million dollars," and then chuckle in the smallest, happiest way. Sometimes the beggars—lost old hippies and mall musicians—would come in and line up, and she would feed them all, like Dorothy Day in a soup kitchen. She had read a magazine article once about Dorothy Day.
"A little late, aren't you?" said Heffie today. She was tugging at the front strap of her bra and appeared generally disgruntled. Her hair was thinning at the front, and she had it clipped to the top with barrettes she was too old for. "Had to open up the register myself. It'd be curtains if the manager'd come by. Lucky I had keys."
"I'm sorry," said Jane. "I had to take my cat into the vet's this morning, way over on the west side. Any customers?" Jane gave Heme an anxious look. It said "Please forgive me." It also said "What is your problem?" and "Have a nice day!" Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.
"No, no customers," said Heme, "but you never can tell."
"Well, thanks for opening up," said Jane.
Heffie shrugged. "You doing the samples today?"
"Thought I would, yes," said Jane, flipping through some papers attached to a clipboard. "Unless you wanted to." She said this with just a hint of good-natured accusation and good-natured insincerity.
Heffie wasn't that interested in doing the samples, and Jane was glad. It was just that Heffie didn't much like doing anything, and whatever Jane did apparently seemed to Heffie like more fun, and easier, so sometimes the older woman complained a little by means of a shrug or a sigh.
"Nah, that's OK," said Heffie. "I'll do them some other time." She slid open the glass door to the refrigerated deli case and grabbed a lone cheese curd, the squiggly shape and bright marigold color of it like a piece from a children's game. She popped it into her mouth. "You ever been surfing?" she asked Jane.
"Surfing?" Jane repeated incredulously. She would never figure out how Heffie came up with the questions she did.
"Yeah. Surfing. You know—some people have done it. The fiberglass board that you stand on in the water and then a wave comes along?" Heffie's face was a snowy moon of things never done.
Jane looked away. "Once a couple of summers ago I went water-skiing on a lake," she said. "In Oregon." Her lover, the daredevil toy-maker, had liked to do things like that. "Khem on, Jane," he had said to her. "You only live at once." Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life. She didn't like to do things where the trick was to not die.
"Water-skiing, poohf," said Heffie. "That's nothing like surfing. There's not the waves, the risk!" Jane looked up from her clipboard and watched as Heffie waddled away, the tops of her feet swelling out over the straps of her shoes like dough. Heffie walked over to the Swiss nut rolls, put a fist down lightly on top, and gazed off.
"care to try some of our horseradish cheddar today?" Jane smiled and held out the tray. She had placed little teaspoonfuls of spread on some sickly-looking rice crackers, and now she held them out to people like a caterer with the hors d'oeuvres at a fancy party. Horses' douvers, her mother used to call them, and for years Jane had had her own idea about what a douver was. "Care to try a free sample of our horseradish cheddar spread, on special today?" At least it wasn't spraying perfume at people. Last month she had met the girl who did that next door at Marshall Field's. The girl, who was from Florida originally, said to her, "Sometimes you aim for the eyes. It's not always an accident." Malls, Jane knew, were full of salesgirls with stories. Broken hearts, boyfriends in jail. Once last week two ten-year-old girls, one pudgy, one thin, had come up to Jane, selling chocolate bars. They looked at her as if she were just a taller version of themselves, someone they might turn into when they grew up. "Will you buy a chocolate bar?" they asked her, staring at her samples. Jane offered them a cracker with a big clump of spread, but they politely declined.
"Well, what kind of chocolate bars are you selling?"
"Almond or crisp." The pudgy girl, wearing a purple sweatshirt and lavender corduroys, clutched a worn-out paper bag to her chest.
"Is this for the Girl Scouts?" asked Jane.
The girls looked at each other. "No, it's for my brother," said the pudgy one. Her friend slapped her on the arm.
"It's for your brother's team," the friend hissed.
"Yeah," said the girl, and Jane bought a crispy bar and talked them into a sample after all. Which they took with a slight grimace. "D'you got a husband that drives a truck?" asked the one in purple.
"Yeah," said the other. "Do you?" And when Jane shook her head, they frowned and went away.
A man in a blue sweater like one her father used to wear stopped and gently plucked a cracker from her tray. "How much?" he asked, and she was about to say, "A million dollars," when she heard someone down the mall corridor call her name.
"Jane Konwicki! How are you?" A woman about Jane's age, wearing a bright-red fall suit, strode up to her and kissed her on the cheek. The man in the blue sweater like her father's slipped away. Jane looked at the woman in the red suit and for a minute didn't know who she was. But the woman's animated features all stopped for a moment and fell into place, and Jane realized it was Bridey, a friend from over fifteen years ago, who used to sit next to her in high school chorus. It was curious how people, when they stood still and you just looked, never really changed that much. No matter how the fashions swirled about a girl, the adult she became, with different fashions swirling about her, still contained the same girl. All of Bridey's ages—the child, the old woman—were there on her face. It was like an open bird feeder where every year of her, the past and the future, had come to feed.
"Bridey, you look great. What have you been up to?" It seemed a ridiculous question to ask of someone you hadn't seen since high school, but there it was.
"Well, last year I fell madly in love," Bridey said with great pride. This clearly was on the top of her list, and her voice suggested it was a long list. "And we got married, and we moved back to town after roughing it on the South Side of Chicago since forever. It's great to be back here, I can tell you." Bridey helped herself to a cheddar sample and then another one. The cheese in her mouth stuck between her front teeth in a pasty, yellowish mortar, and when she swallowed and smiled back at Jane, well, again, there it was, like something unfortunate but necessary.
"You seem so… happy," said Jane. Heffie was shuffling around noisily in the shop behind her.
"Oh, I am. I keep running into people from school, and it's just so much fun. In fact, Jane, you should come with me this evening. You know what I'm going to do?"
"What?" Jane glanced back over her shoulder and saw Heffie testing the spreads in the deli case with her finger. She would stick her finger in deep and then lick it slowly like an ice cream.
"Oh," said Bridey in a hushed and worried tone. "Is that a customer or an employee?"
"Employee," said Jane.
"At any rate, I'm going to try out for Community Chorus," continued Bridey. "It's part of my new program. I'm learning German—"
"Learning German?" Jane interrupted.
"—taking a cooking class, and I'm going to get back into choral singing."
"You were always a good singer," said Jane. Bridey had often gotten solos.
"Ach! My voice has gone to pot, but I don't care. Why don't you come with me? We could audition together. The auditions aren't supposed to be that hard."
"Oh, I don't know," said Jane, though the thought of singing again in a chorus suddenly excited her. That huge sound flying out over an audience, like a migration of birds, like a million balloons! But the idea of an audition was terrifying. What if she didn't get in? How could she ever open her mouth again to sing, even all by herself at home? How would her own voice not mortify her on the way to work in the morning, when she listened to the radio. Everything would be ruined. Songs would stick in her throat like moths. She would listen to nothing but news, and when she got to work she would be quiet and sad.
"Listen," said Bridey, "I'm terrible. Truly."
"No, you're not. Let me hear you sing something," said Jane.
Bridey looked at her quizzically, took another horseradish cheddar sample, and chewed. "What do you mean? God, these are good."
"I mean just something little. I want to know what you mean by terrible. Cuz I'm terrible. Here. I'll get you started. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream…"
"Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily" continued Bridey rather plainly. Jane wondered whether she was holding back. "Life is but a dream" Bridey looked at Jane a little unhappily. "See, I told you I was bad."
"You're much better than I am," said Jane.
"Where are you living now?" Bridey pulled at the red jacket of her suit and looked around the mall.
"Out on Neptune Avenue. Near where it runs into Oak. How about you?"
"We're out in Brickmire Apartments. They have a pool, which is what sold us on the place." Bridey pointed back toward Heffie and whispered, "Does she always go snacking through everything like that?" Bridey had lifted yet another rice cracker from Jane's tray.
"You don't want to know," said Jane.
"You're right. I don't," said Bridey, and she put the rice cracker back on Jane's tray.
after work Jane drove back to the west side to pick up her cat at the vet's. She had promised Bridey that she would meet her at the auditions, which were at seven-thirty at their old high school, but her gut buckled at the thought. She tried singing in her car—Doe, a deer, a female deer—but her voice sounded hollow and frightened. At a red light someone in the car next to hers saw her lips moving and shook his head.
By the time she got to the vet's, the parking lot was full of cars. In the waiting room people were collected messily around the front counter, waiting their turn. Two employees behind the counter were doing all the work, one young man at the cash register, and the woman in the white shoes at the microphone, who was saying, "Spotsy Wechsler, Spotsy Wechsler." She put the microphone down. "She'll be right up," she said to a man in a jean jacket a lot like the one Jane's brother had worn all the while they were growing up. "Next?" The woman looked out at the scatter of pet owners in front of her. "Can I help someone?" No one said anything.
"You can help me," said Jane finally, "but this man was here before me. And actually so was he." One of the men ahead of her twisted back to look, red-faced, and then turned front again and spoke very quietly to the woman in the white shoes.
"My name is Miller," said the man, sternly, secretively. He wore a suit, and his tie was loosened. "I'm here to pick up the cat my wife brought in this morning for surgery."
The woman blanched. "Yes," she said, and she didn't ask for a first name. "Gooby Miller," she said into the microphone. "Gooby Miller to the waiting room." The man had taken out his wallet, but the woman said, "No charge," and went over and tapped things into her computer for a very long minute. A young high school kid appeared from the back room, carrying a box in his arms. "The Miller cat?" he said in the doorway, and the man in the suit raised his hand. The boy brought the box over and placed it on the counter.
"I'd also like to speak with the veterinarian," said the man. The woman in the white shoes looked at him fearfully, but the boy said, "Yes, he's waiting for you. Come right this way," and led the man back into the examination room, the door to which blinked brightly open to let them in, then shut behind them like a fact. The box sat all alone on the countertop.
"Can I help you?" the woman asked Jane.
"Yes. I'm here to pick up my cat from the groomer. My name is Konwicki."
The woman reached for the microphone. "And the cat's name?"
"Fluffers," said Jane.
"Fluffers Konwicki to the waiting room." The woman put the microphone down. "The cat'll be up in a minute."
"Thanks," said Jane. She looked at the cardboard box at her elbow on the counter. The box said dole pineapple. She listened for scratching or movement of any kind, but there was none. "What's in the box?" she asked.
The woman made a face, guilty with comedy, exaggerated. She didn't know what sort of face to make. "Gooby Miller," she said. "A dead cat."
"Oh, dear," murmured Jane. She remembered the children she'd met earlier that day. "What happened?"
The woman shrugged. "Thyroid surgery. It just died on the table. Can I help you, sir?" Someone was now bringing out Rex the poodle, who went limping toward his owner with a cast on his front foot. It was all like a dream: Things you'd seen before, in daylight, were trotted out hours later in slightly different form.
After Rex was placed in a child's toy wagon and wheeled out of the vet's, the groomer appeared bearing Fluffers, who looked dazed and smelled of flea dip laced with lilac. "He was a very good cat," said the groomer, and Jane took Fluffers in her arms and almost peeped, "Thank God they didn't bring you out in a pineapple box." What she said instead was: "And now he's all handsome again."
"Found some fleas," said the groomer. "But not all that many."
Jane quickly paid the bill and left. Dusk was settling over the highway like a mood, and the traffic had put on lights. She carried her cat to the car and was fumbling with the door on the passenger's side when she heard squeals from the opposite end of the parking lot. "Fluffers! Fluffers!" They were a child's excited shouts. "Look, it's Fluffers!"
The boy and girl Jane had spoken to that morning suddenly leaped out of the station wagon they'd been waiting in across the lot. They slammed the back doors and dashed breathlessly over to Jane and her cat. They had on little coats and hats with earflaps. It had gotten cold.
"Oh, Fluffers, you smell so good—yum, yum, yum!" said the girl, and she pressed her face into Fluffers' perfumed haunches and kept it there, beginning to cry. Jane looked up and saw that what little light there was left in the sky was
frighteningly spindly, like a horse's legs that must somehow still hold up the horse. She freed one of her hands and placed it on the girl's head. "Oh, Fluffers!" came another muffled wail; the girl refused to lift her face. Her brother stood more stoically at her side. His face was pink and swollen, but something was drying hard behind the eyes. He studied Jane as if he were reorganizing what he thought was important in life. "What is your name?" he asked.
it was a little thing, just a little thing, but Jane decided not to risk the audition after all. She phoned Bridey and apologized, said she was coming down with a bug or something, and Bridey said, "Probably got it from that Heffie, always taste-testing the way she does. At any rate, I hope you'll come over for dinner sometime this week, if possible," and Jane said that yes, she would.
And she did. She went the following Thursday and had dinner with Bridey and Bridey's husband, who was a big, gentle man who did consulting work for computer companies. He was wearing a shirt printed with seahorses, like one her ex-lover the toymaker had worn when he had come east to visit, one final weekend, for old times' sake. It had been a beautiful shirt, soft as pajamas, and he'd worn it when they had driven that Sunday, out past the pumpkin fairs, to the state line, to view the Mississippi. The river had rushed by them, beneath them, a clayey green, a deep, deep khaki. She had touched the shirt, held on to it; in this lunarscape of scrub oaks and jack pines, in this place that had once at the start of the world been entirely under water and now just had winds, it was good to have a river cutting through, breaking up the land. In the distance, past a valley dalmatianed with birches, there were larger trees, cedars and goldening tamaracks—and Jane felt that at last here was a moment she would take with her into the rest of life, unlosable. There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.
After dinner she actually went to a Community Chorus rehearsal with Bridey and sang through some of the exercises with everyone. When the sheet music was passed out, however, there wasn't enough to go around. The director took attendance and gazed accusingly out at the sopranos, saying, "Is someone here who isn't actually supposed to be?" Jane raised her hand and explained.