Lorrie Moore | from:English

How to Talk to Your Mother (notes)

Video: Yuval Ben Bessat
Introduction by Yaara Shehori
Lorrie Moore teaches us dance steps for that which is supposedly the most natural thing of all,
placing cutouts of feet on the floor and saying: like this, stand like this, now move. She offers
instructions on how to do something that allegedly needs no direction, something that comes
before language: how to talk to your mother. The instructions take on the form of a general
decree and are based on events that have taken place in the world, but they are in fact impossible
to follow, whether as an active user or as the one carrying them out. This is an extremely private
story, almost accidental and therefore fateful. Even if you follow this story’s instructions detail
by detail, even if you were born like the protagonist in 1939, baking your first apple cake in
1972, you still fail time and again to fulfil the urgent mission – talking to your mother.

It is no coincidence that the story has been written from finish to start, if only to teach us that the
will involved in outlining a clear path is, in itself, quite absurd. The literary act here can be
visualized as an engine spread out on the ground, a car engine (or a lawnmower) that has been
disassembled; it could even be a chemistry set that burst in your hands; or an artificial heart.
Now you have to start assembling, carefully piecing together. If anything works again, if the
electric circuit is closed, then the heart will probably beat outside the container; if there even is a
container.
The story first appeared in Self-Help and is not the only story in the collection that took the guise
of an instruction sheet: How to become a writer; How to be an other woman. Lorrie Moore’s
instructions put in order that which is devoid of and cannot have order, turning the pre-embedded
failure into a document that strangely invites cheerfulness and hope. As if every reading holds a
promise – if I relived my life, even only through literature, if I followed all the instructions to the
letter, maybe this time the conversation will be possible. A mother’s humming to her baby will
blend with the refrigerator’s vibrations, the talk of after death will join the primary speech that
has no words, just soft cooing. And instructions.

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1982. Without her, for years now, murmur at the defrosting refrigerator, “What?” “Huh?”
“Shush now,” as it creaks, aches, groans until the final ice block drops from the ceiling of the
freezer like something vanquished. Dream, and in your dreams babies with the personalities of
dachshunds, fat as Macy balloons, float by the treetops. The first permanent polyurethane heart is
surgically implanted. Someone upstairs is playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on the recorder.
Now it’s “Oklahoma.” They must have a Rodgers and Hammerstein book.

1981. On public transportation, mothers with soft, soapy, corduroyed seraphs glance at you, their
faces dominoes of compassion. Their seraphs are small and quiet or else restlessly counting bus
seat colors outloud: “Blue-blue-blue, red-red-red, lullow-lullow-lullow.” The mothers see you
eyeing their children. They smile sympathetically. They believe you envy them. They believe
you are childless. They believe they know why. Look quickly away, out the smudge of the
window.

1980. The hum, rush, clack of things in the kitchen. These are the sounds that organize your life.
The clink of the silverware inside the drawer, piled like bones in a mass grave. Your similes
grow grim, grow tired. Reagan is elected president, though you distributed doughnuts and
brochures for Carter. Date an Italian. He rubs your stomach and says, “These are marks of
stretch, no? Marks of stretch?” and in your dizzy mind you think: Marks of Harpo, Ideas of
Marx, Ides of March, Beware. He plants kisses on the sloping ramp of your neck, and you fall
asleep against him, your underpants peeled and rolled around one thigh like a bride’s garter.

1979. Once in a while take evening trips past the old unsold house you grew up in, that haunted
rural crossroads two hours from where you now live. It is like Halloween: the raked, moonlit
lawn; the mammoth, tumid trees, arms and fingers raised into the starless wipe of sky like burns,
cracks, map rivers. Their black shadows rock against the side of the east porch. There are dream
shadows, other lives here. Turn the corner slowly but continue to stare from the car window.
This house is embedded in you deep, something still here you know, you think you know, a
voice at the top of those stairs, perhaps, a figure on the porch, an odd apron caught high in the
twigs, in the warm-for-a-fall-night breeze, something not right, that turret window still you can
see from here, from outside, but which can’t be reached from within. The ghostly brag of your
childhood: “We have a mystery room. The window shows from the front, but you can’t go in,
there’s no door. A doctor lived there years ago and gave secret operations, and now it’s blocked
off.” The window sits like a dead eye in the turret. You see a ghost, something like a spinning
statue by a shrub.

1978. Bury her in the cold south sideyard of that Halloween house. Your brother and his kids are
there. Hug. The minister in a tweed sportscoat, the neighborless fields, the crossroads are all like
some stark Kansas. There is praying, then someone shovelling. People walk toward the cars and
hug again. Get inside your car with your niece. Wait. Look up through the windshield. In the
November sky a wedge of wrens moves south, the lines of their formation, the very sides and
vertices mysteriously choreographed, shifting, flowing, crossing like a skater’s legs. “They’ll
descend instinctively upon a tree somewhere,” you say, “but not for miles yet.” You marvel,
watch, until, amoeba slow, they are dark, faraway stitches in the horizon. You do not start the
car. The quiet niece next to you finally speaks: “Aunt Ginnie, are we going to the restaurant with
the others?” Look at her. Recognize her: nine in a pile parka. Smile and start the car.

1977. She ages, rocks in your rocker, noiseless as wind. The front strands of her white hair
dangle yellow at her eyes from too many cigarettes. She smokes even now, her voice husky with
phlegm. Sometimes at dinner in your tiny kitchen she will simply stare, rheumy-eyes at you, then
burst into a fit of coughing that racks her small old man’s body like a storm. Stop eating your
baked potato. Ask if she is alright. She will croak: “Do you remember, Ginnie, your father used
to say that one day, with these cigarettes, I was going to have to ‘face the mucous?’ ” At this she
chuckles, chokes, gasps again. Make her stand up. Lean her against you. Slap her lightly on the
curved mound of her back. Ask her for chrissake to stop smoking. She will smile and say: “For
chrissake? Is that any way to talk to your mother?”

1977. At night go in and check on her. She lies there awake, her lips apart, open and drying.
Bring her some juice. She murmurs, “Thank you, honey.” Her mouth smells, swells like a grave.

1976. The Bicentennial. In the laundromat, you wait for the time on your coins to run out.
Through the porthole of the dryer, you watch your bedeviled towels and sheets leap and fall. The
radio station piped in from the ceiling plays slow, sad Motown; it encircles you with the
desperate hopefulness of a boy at a dance, and it makes you cry. When you get back to your
apartment, dump everything on your bed. Your mother is knitting crookedly: red, white, and
blue. Kiss her hello. Say: “Sure was warm in that place.” She will seem not to hear you.

1975. Attend poetry readings alone at the local library. Find you don’t really listen well. Stare at
your crossed thighs. Think about your mother. Sometimes you confuse her with the first man you
ever loved, who ever loved you, who buried his head in the pills of your sweater and said
magnificent things like, “Oh God, oh God,” who loved you unconditionally, terrifically, like a
mother. The poet loses his nerve for a second, a red flush through his neck and ears, but he
regains his composure. When he is finished, people clap. There is wine and cheese. Leave alone,
walk home alone. The downtown streets are corridors of light holding you, holding you, past the
church, past the community center. March, like Stella Dallas, spine straight, through the
melodrama of street lamps, phone posts, toward the green house past Borealis Avenue, toward
the rear apartment with the tilt and the squash on the stove. Your horoscope says: be kind, be
brief. You are pregnant again. Decide what you must do.

1974. She will have bouts with a mad sort of senility. She calls you at work. “There’s no food
here! Help me! I’m starving!’ although you just bought forty dollars’ worth of groceries
yesterday. “Mom, there is too food there!” When you get home the refrigerator is mostly empty.
“Mom, where did you put all the milk and cheese and stuff?” Your mother stares at you from
where she is sitting in front of the TV set. She has tears leaking out of her eyes. “There’s no food
here, Ginnie.” There is a rustling, scratching noise in the dishwasher. You open it up, and the
eyes of a small rodent glint back at you. Shriek, as in cartoons. It scrambles out, off to the
baseboards behind the refrigerator. Your mother, apparently, has put all the groceries inside the
dishwasher. The milk is spilled, a white pool against blue, and things like cheese and bologna
and apples have been nibbled at.

1973. At a party when a woman tells you where she bought a wonderful pair of shoes, say that
you believe shopping for clothes is like masturbation, everyone does it, but it isn’t very
interesting and therefore should be done alone, in an embarrassed fashion, and never be the topic
of party conversation. The woman will tighten in her lips and eyebrows and say, “Oh, I suppose
you have something more fascinating to talk about.” Grow clumsy and uneasy. Say, “No,” and
head for the ginger ale. Tell the person next to you that your insides feel sort of sinking and vinyl
like a Claes Oldenburg toilet. They will say, “Oh?” and point out that the print on your dress is
one of paisleys impregnating paisleys. Pour yourself more ginger ale.

1972. Nixon wins by a landslide. Sometimes your mother calls you by her sister’s name. Say,
“No, Mom, it’s me. Virginia.” Learn to repeat things. Learn that you have a way of knowing one
another which somehow slips out and beyond the ways you have of not knowing one another at
all. Make apple crisp for the first time.

1971. Go for long walks to get away from her. Walk through wooded areas, there is a life there
you have forgotten. The smells and sounds seem sudden, unchanged, exact, the papery crunch of
the leaves, the mouldering sachet of the mud. The trees are crooked as backs, the fence posts
splintered, trusting and precarious in their solid grasp of arms, the asters spindly, dry, white,
havishammed (Havishammed!) by frost. Find a beautiful reddish stone and bring it home for
your mother. Kiss her. Say: “This is for you.” She grasps it and smiles. “You were always such a
sensitive child,” she says. Say: “Yeah, I know.”

1970. You are pregnant again. Try to decide what you should do. Get your hair chopped, short as
a boy’s.

1969. Mankind leaps upon the moon. Disposable diapers are first sold in supermarkets. Have
occasional affairs with absurd, silly men who tell you to grow your hair to your waist and who,
when you are sad, tickle your ribs to cheer you up. Moonlight through the blinds stripes you like
zebras. You laugh. You never marry.

1968. Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag
from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once
contained, now must contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the
held. Find more and more that you like to muse over things like this.

1967. Your mother is sick and comes to live with you. There is no place else for her to go. You
feel many different emptinesses. The first successful heart transplant is performed in South
Africa.

1966. You confuse lovers, mix up who had what scar, what car, what mother.

1965. Smoke marijuana. Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to
figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. It could be anything. The lid off the mayonnaise,
Uncle Ron’s honey wine four years in the left corner. Broccoli yellowing, flowering fast. They
are all metaphors. They are all problems. Your horoscope says: speak gently to a loved one.

1964. Your mother calls you long-distance and asks you whether you are coming home for
Thanksgiving, your brother and the baby will be there. Make excuses. “As a mother gets older,”
your mother says, “these sorts of holidays become increasingly important.” Say: “I’m sorry,
Mom.”

1963. Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you’d spend your life with, and realize,
like a rock in your gut, that you don’t even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom,
not coming out when he knocks. You can no longer trust your affections. People and places you
think you love may be people and places you hate. Kennedy is shot. Someone invents a
temporary artificial heart, for use during operations.

1962. Eat Chinese food for the first time, with a lawyer from California. He will show you how
to hold the chopsticks. He will pat your leg. Attack his profession. Ask him if he feels the law
makes large spokes out of the short stakes of men.

1961. Grandma Moses dies. You are a zoo of insecurities, a Las Vegas of neurosis. You take to
putting brandy in your morning coffee and to falling in love too easily. You have an abortion.
1960. There is money from your father’s will and his life insurance. You buy a car and a green
velvet dress you don’t need. You drive two hours to meet your mother for lunch on Saturdays.
She suggests things for you to write about, things she’s heard on the radio: a woman with
telepathic twins, a woman with no feet.

1959. At the funeral she says, “He had his problems, but he was a generous man,” though you
know he was tight as a scout knot, couldn’t listen to anyone, the only time you remember loving
him being that once when he got the punchline of one of your jokes before your mom did and
looked up from his science journal and guffawed loud as a giant, the two of you, for one split
moment, communing like angels in that warm, shared light of mind. Say: “He was O.K.” “You
shouldn’t be bitter,” your mother snaps. “He’s financed you and your brother’s college
educations.” She buttons her coat. “He was also the first man to isolate a particular isotope of
helium, I forget the name, but he should have won the Nobel Prize.” She dabs at her nose. Say:
“Yeah, Mom.”

1958. At your brother’s wedding, your father is taken away in an ambulance. A tiny cousin
whispers loudly to her mother, “Did Uncle Will have a hard attack?” For seven straight days say
things to your mother, like: “I’m sure it’ll be O.K.” and “I’ll stay here, why don’t you go home
and get some sleep.”

1957. Dance the calypso with boys from a different college. Get looped on New York State
burgundy, lose your virginity, and buy one of the first portable electric typewriters.

1956. Tell your mother about all the books you are reading at college. This will please her.

1955. Shoplift a cashmere sweater.

1954. Do a paint-by-numbers of Elvis Presley. Tell your mother you are in love with him. She
will shake her head.

1953. Smoke a cigarette with Hillary Swedelson. Tell each other your crushes. Become blood
sisters.

1952. When your mother asks you if there are any nice boys in junior high, ask her how on earth
would you ever know, having to come in at stupid nine-thirty every night.

1951. Your mother tells you about menstruation. The following day you promptly menstruate,
your body only waiting for permission, for a signal. You wake up in the morning and feel
embarrassed.

1949. You learn how to blow gum bubbles and to add negative numbers.

1947. The Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered. You have seen too many Hollywood musicals. You
have seen too many people singing in public places and you assume you can do it, too. Practice.
Your teacher asks you a question. You warble back: the answer to number two is twelve. Most of
the class laughs at you, though some stare, eyes jewel-still, fascinated. At home your mother asks
you to dust your dresser. Work up a vibrato you could drive a truck through. Sing: “Why do I/
Have to do it now?” and tap your way through the dining room. Your mother requests that you
calm down and go take a nap. Shout: “You don’t care about me! You don’t care about me at all!”

1946. Your brother plays “Shoofly Pie” all day long on the Victrola. Ask your mother if you can
go