Authors: Lorrie Moore
Dinettes, thinks Mack. That’s just what this world needs: a warehouse of dinettes.
“I once tried to write a book,” says Quilty, seated cozily in his booth, eating an omelette.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I had these paragraphs that were so huge, they went on for pages. Sentences that were also just enormous—two or three pages long. I had to shrink things down, I was told.”
Mack smiles. “How about words? Did you use big words, too?”
“Huge words. And to top it off, I began the whole thing with a letter I razored off a billboard.” He pauses. “That’s a joke.”
“I get it.”
“There
was
a book, though. I was going to call it
Dating My Sofa: A Blind Man’s Guide to Life
.”
Mack is quiet. There is always too much talking on these trips.
“Let’s hit Memphis on the way back,” says Quilty irritably. “For now, let’s head straight to New Orleans.”
“That’s what you want to do? Fine.” Mack has no great fondness for Memphis. Once, as a boy, he’d been chased by a bee there, down a street that was long and narrow and lined on one side with parked cars. He’d ducked into a phone booth, but the bee waited for him, and Mack ended up stepping out after twenty minutes and getting stung anyway. It wasn’t true what
they said about bees. They were not all that busy. They had time. They could wait. It was a myth, that stuff about busy as a bee.
“That way, coming back,” adds Quilty, “we can take our time and hit the Peabody when the ducks are out. I want to do the whole duck thing.”
“Sure,” says Mack. “The duck thing is the thing.” On the way out of Denny’s, Mack pulls slightly away from Quilty to look at another missing-child poster. A boy named Seth, age five. The world—one cannot drive fast or far enough away from it—is coming at him in daggers.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” says Mack, then adds absently, “a boy.”
“Really?” says Quilty.
Mack drives fast down through the small towns of the Delta: Eudora, Eupora, Tallula—the poorest ones with names like Hollywood, Banks, Rich. In each of them, a Baptist church is nestled up against a bait shop or a Tina’s Touch of Class Cocktails. The strawy weeds are tall as people, and the cotton puffs here are planted in soils grown sandy, near shacks and burned-out cars, a cottonseed-oil factory towering over the fields, the closest hamburger at a Hardee’s four miles away. Sometimes the cotton fields look like snow. Mack notices the broken-down signs:
EAT MAID-RITE EATS
or
CAN’T BEAT DICK’S MEAT
. They are both innocent and old, that peculiar mix, like a baby that looks like a grandmother, or a grandmother that looks like a girl. He and Quilty eat lunch and dinner at places that serve hush puppies and batter-fried pickles; it reminds Mack of his aunt’s cooking. The air thickens and grows warm. Sinclair brontosauruses and old-style Coke signs protrude from the road stops and gas stations, and then, closer to Baton Rouge, antique stores sell the same kinds of old Coke signs.
“Recycling,” says Mack.
“Everyone’s recycling,” says Quilty.
“Someone told me once”—Mack is thinking of Annie
now—“that we are all made from stars, that every atom in our bodies was at one time the atom of a star.”
“And you believed them?” Quilty hoots.
“Fuck you,” says Mack.
“I mean, in between, we were probably also some cheese at a sorority tea. Our ancestral relationship to stars!” says Quilty, now far away, making his point before some judge. “It’s the biological equivalent of hearsay.”
They stay in an antebellum mansion with a canopy bed. They sit beneath the canopy and play Trivial Pursuit.
Mack once again reads aloud his own questions. “Who was George Bush referring to when reminiscing: ‘We’ve had some triumphs; we’ve made some mistakes; we’ve had some sex’?”
Mack stares. The canopy bed looks psychotic. Out the window he sees a sign across the street that says
SPACE FOR LEASE AT ABSOLUTELY YOGURT
. Next to it, a large white woman is hitting a small black dog with a shopping bag. What is wrong with this country? He turns the card over and looks. “Ronald Reagan,” he says. He has taken to cheating like this.
“Is that your answer?” asks Quilty.
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re probably right,” says Quilty, who often knows the answer before Mack has read it to him. Mack stares at the bed again, its canopy like the headdress the Duchess wore in
Alice in Wonderland
. His aunt would sometimes read that book to him, and it always made him feel queasy and confused.
On the nightstand, there are sachets of peach and apricot pits, the sickly sweet smell of a cancer ward. Everything here now in this room reminds him of his aunt.
“What former Pittsburgh Pirates slugger was the only player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988?” Mack reads. It is Quilty’s turn.
“I’ve landed on the damn
sports
category?”
“Yup. What’s your answer?”
“Linda Ronstadt. She was in
The Pirates of Penzance
. I know
it went to Pittsburgh. I’m just not sure about the Hall of Fame part.”
Mack is quiet.
“Am I right?”
“No.”
“Well, you never used to do that—land me on those sports questions. Now you’re getting difficult.”
“Yup,” says Mack.
The next morning, they go to a Coca-Cola museum, which the South seems to be full of. “You’d think Coca-Cola was a national treasure,” Mack says.
“It’s not?” says Quilty.
Individual states, Georgia and Mississippi and whichever else, are all competing for claims: first served here, first bottled there—first thirst, first burst—it is one big corporate battle of the bands. There is a strange kind of refuge from this to be found in driving through yet another cemetery, this one at Vicksburg, and so they do it, but quickly, keeping the trip moving so they will not feel, as they might have in Tapston, the irretrievable loss of each afternoon, the encroaching darkness, each improvised day over with at last—only to start up again, in the morning, oppressively identical, a checker in a game of checkers, or a joke in a book of jokes.
“They seem to have all this organized by state,” says Mack, looking out over the Vicksburg grounds, the rolling green dotted as if with aspirins. He looks back at the park map, which he has spread over the steering wheel. Here he is: back in the Bone Zone.
“Well, let’s go to the Indiana part,” says Quilty, “and praise the Hoosier dead.”
“Okay,” says Mack, and when he comes upon a single small stone that says
Indiana
—not the proper section at all—he slows down and says, “Here’s the section,” so that Quilty can roll
down the window and shout, “Praise the Hoosier dead!” There are kindnesses one can perform for a blind man more easily than for the sighted.
Guapo barks and Mack lets loose with an incongruous rebel yell.
“Whose side are you on?” scolds Quilty, rolling his window back up. “Let’s get out of here. It’s too hot.”
They drive some distance out of the park and then stop at the Civil War Museum they saw advertised the day before.
“Is this a fifty?” Quilty whispers, thrusting a bill toward Mack as they approach the entrance cashier.
“No, it’s a twenty.”
“Find me a fifty. Is this a fifty?”
“Yeah, that’s a fifty.”
Quilty thrusts the fifty toward the cashier. “Excuse me,” he says in a loud voice. “Do you have change for a great American general?”
“Do believe I do,” says the cashier, who chuckles a bit, taking the fifty and lifting up the drawer to his register. “You Yankees are always liking to do that.”
Inside, the place is dark and cool and lined with glass display cases and mannequins in uniforms. There are photographs of soldiers and nurses and “President and Mrs. Davis.” Because almost everything is behind glass and cannot be touched, Quilty grows bored. “ ‘The city of Vicksburg,’ ” Mack reads aloud, “ ‘forced to surrender to Grant on the Fourth of July, refused to celebrate Independence Day again until 1971.’ ”
“When no one cared anymore,” adds Quilty. “I like a place with a strong sense of grudge—which they, of course, call ‘a keen acquaintance with history.’ ” He clears his throat. “But let’s get on to New Orleans. I also like a place that doesn’t give a shit.”
In a restaurant overlooking the river, they eat yet more hush puppies and catfish. Guapo, unleashed, runs up and down the riverbank like a mad creature.
In the dusk, they head south, toward the Natchez Trace, through Port Gibson: “
TOO BEAUTIFUL TO BURN”—ULYSSES S
.
GRANT
, says the
WELCOME
sign. Quilty is dozing. It is getting dark, and the road isn’t wide, but Mack passes all the slow-moving cars: an old VW bus (northern winters have eliminated these in Tapston), a red pickup piled with hay, a Plymouth Duster full of deaf people signing in a fantastic dance of hands. The light is on inside the Duster, and Mack pulls up alongside, watching. Everyone is talking at once—fingers flying, chopping, stretching the air, twining, pointing, touching. It is astonishing and beautiful. If only Quilty weren’t blind, thinks Mack. If only Quilty weren’t blind, he would really like being deaf.
There are, in New Orleans, all manner of oysters Rockefeller. There is the kind with the spinach chopped long and coarse like seaweed, scabs of bacon in a patch on top. Then there is the kind with the spinach moussed to a bright lime and dolloped onto the shell like algae. There is the kind with spinach leaves laid limply off the edge like socks. There is the kind with cheese. There is the kind without. There is even the kind with tofu.
“Whatever happened to clams casino?” asks Mack. “I used to get those in Kentucky. Those were great.”
“Shellfish from a landlocked place? Never a great idea, my dear,” says Quilty. “Stick with Nawlins. A city no longer known for its prostitutes quickly becomes known for its excellent food. Think about it. There’s Paris. There’s here. A city currently known for its prostitutes—Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Washington, D.C.—is seldom a good food city.”
“You should write a travel book.” Was Mack being sarcastic? Mack himself couldn’t say.
“That’s what
Dating My Sofa
was going to be. A kind of armchair travel book. For the blind.”
“I thought
Dating My Sofa
was going to be a novel.”
“Before it was a novel, it was going to be a travel book.”
They leave behind the wrought-iron cornstalk fence of their little inn for a walk through the Quarter. Soon they are at the wharf, and with little else to do, they step aboard a glittering paddle wheeler for a Plantation River cruise. Quilty trips on a slightly raised plank on the ramp. “You know, I find this city neither big nor easy,” he says. The tour is supposed to be beer and sun and a little jazz band, but there is also a stop at Chalmette, the site of the Battle of New Orleans, so that people can get off and traipse through the cemetery.
Mack takes Quilty to a seat in the sun, then sits beside him. Guapo lifts his head and smells the swampy air. “No more cemeteries,” says Mack, and Quilty readily agrees, though Mack also wonders whether, when they get there, they will be able to resist. It seems hard for them, when presented with all that toothy geometry of stone and bone, not to rush right up and say hi. The two of them are ill-suited to life; no doubt that is it. In feeling peculiar, homeless, cursed, and tired, they have become way too friendly. They no longer have any standards at all.
“All the graves are on stilts here anyway,” says Mack. “The sea level and all.” The calliope starts up and the paddle wheel begins to revolve. Mack tips his head back to rest it against the seat and look at the sky all streaked with stringy clouds, bird blue cracked fuzzily with white. To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their days! “Look at it this way,” people used to say to Mack. “Things could be worse”—a bumper sticker for a goldfish or a bug. And it wasn’t wrong—it just wasn’t the point.
He falls asleep, and by the time the boat returns to the wharf, ten thousand anesthesiologists have invaded the town.
There are buses and crowds. “Uh-oh. Look out. A medical convention,” says Mack to Quilty. “Watch your step.” At a turquoise kiosk near the pier, he spots more missing-children posters. He half-expects to see himself and Quilty posted up there, two more lost boys in America. Instead, there is a heartbreaking nine-year-old named Charlie. There is a three-year-old named Kyle. There is also the same kid from Denny’s up north: Seth, age five.
“Are they cute?” asks Quilty.
“Who?” says Mack.
“All those nice young doctors,” says Quilty. “Are they good-looking?”
“Hell if I know,” says Mack.
“Oh, don’t give me that,” says Quilty. “You forget to whom you are speaking, my dear. I can
feel
you looking around.”
Mack says nothing for a while. Not until after he’s led Quilty over to a café for some chicory coffee and a beignet, which he feeds pieces of to Guapo. The people at the table next to them, in some kind of morbid theatrical contest, are reading aloud obituaries from the
Times-Picayune
. “This town’s wacko,” says Mack. Back at the hotel, someone in the next room is playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the kazoo.
They speed out the next day—across the incandescent olive milk of the swamps, leafless, burned trees jutting from them like crosses. “You’re going too fast,” says Quilty. “You’re driving like goddamn Sean Penn!” Mack, following no particular route, heads out toward the salt marshes: grebes, blackbirds, sherbet-winged flamingos fly in low over the feathery bulrushes. It is all pretty, in its bleak way. Lone cattle are loose and munching cordgrass amid the oil rigs.
“Which way are we going?”
He suddenly swings north toward Memphis. “North. Memphis.” All he can think of now is getting back.
“What are you thinking of?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing. Scenery.”
“Hot bods?”