Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries)

Acclaim for
LORRIE MOORE
and
SELF-HELP

“The most astute and lasting [writer] … of her generation.”


The New York Times Book Review

“Moore’s narrators have comic yet dark stories to tell: they fire off crisp, De Vriesian one-liners and then, when you least expect it, sneak in wrenching revelations.”


The New Yorker

“Lorrie Moore is a terrifically beguiling writer.”

—The Plain Dealer

“The stories are uncommonly funny, unpredictable, and have a real edge of pain.… She walks an amazing line, balancing wild humor and anguish.”


Newsday

“A remarkable debut by an original, gifted writer.… Her wry stories make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.”

—Alison Lurie

“Merits frequent reading.… Moore’s mastery lies in the short story.”


The Village Voice

“A gift for going to the heart of heartache, for details that make your own skin tingle in recognition and for finding the absurd humor in human endeavor.”


Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

“Moore is a talented writer—startlingly talented.… Her micro-managed descriptive prose shows genius, precisely pinning fluttering phenomena.”


New York

“She is a true original … a Fred Astaire with words, she makes them dance so nimbly to her inner tunes.”

—The Sunday Times
(London)

“Lorrie Moore is dazzling, funny, and smart.”

—John Casey

“Here are wit, charm and an underlying seriousness, all handled with a discretion many a more mature writer would find hard to match.”


The Guardian
(London)

“America’s most wry and radiant comic writer.… Her books [are] compact, perfectly sculpted comic masterpieces.… Moore’s piquant wit and intellectual grace mesh beautifully.”


Harper’s Bazaar

“Lorrie Moore’s stories are dazzling exercises in an ingenious wisdom.”


New Statesman

“A collection of nine lucid, terse, witty and often tragic stories.… She writes exceptionally well, implies a great deal more than she says, and has real style.”

—Financial Times

LORRIE MOORE
SELF-HELP

Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections
Birds of America, Self-Help
, and
Like Life
, and the novels
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
and
Anagrams
. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories
, and
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards
. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

ALSO BY LORRIE MOORE

Anagrams

Birds of America

Like Life

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH
2007

Copyright © 1985 by M. L. Moore

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1985.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and
Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Some of the stories were previously published in
Fiction International, MSS Magazine
, and
Story Quarterly
.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition
as follows:
Moore, Lorrie.
Self-help : stories / Lorrie Moore.—1st ed.
p.    cm.
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.O6225 S4     1985
813′·54—dc19      84-48498

eISBN: 978-0-307-81689-4

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

The purpose of this book is to direct attention to the various ways in which non-backboned animals reproduce … Some animals reverse sex, some shoot stimulant darts at each other, and some lose an arm while mating.

—Haig H. Najarian                                 
Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones

If you start to shake hands with someone who has lost an arm, shake his other hand. If he has lost both arms, shake the tip of his artificial hand (be quick and unembarrassed about it).

—The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette

Give some bones to the dogs and bury the rest around fruit trees …

—Phyllis Hobson                     
Butchering Livestock at Home

CONTENTS
HOW TO BE
AN OTHER WOMAN

M
eet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.

He emerges from nowhere, looks like Robert Culp, the fog rolling, then parting, then sort of closing up again behind him. He asks you for a light and you jump a bit, startled, but you give him your “Lucky’s Lounge—Where Leisure Is a Suit” matches. He has a nice chuckle, nice fingernails. He lights the cigarette, cupping his hands around the end, and drags deeply, like a starving man. He smiles as he exhales, returns you the matches, looks at your face, says: “Thanks.”

He then stands not far from you, waiting. Perhaps for the same bus. The two of you glance furtively at each other, shifting feet. Pretend to contemplate the chemical snow. You are two spies glancing quickly at watches, necks disappearing in the hunch of your shoulders, collars upturned and slowly razoring the cab and store-lit fog like sharkfins. You begin to circle, gauging each other in primordial sniffs, eyeing, sidling, keen as Basil Rathbone.

A bus arrives. It is crowded, everyone looking laughlessly into one another’s underarms. A blonde woman in barrettes steps off, holding her shoes in one hand.

You climb on together, grab adjacent chrome posts, and when the bus hisses and rumbles forward, you take out a book.
A minute goes by and he asks what you’re reading. It is
Madame Bovary
in a Doris Day biography jacket. Try to explain about binding warpage. He smiles, interested.

Return to your book. Emma is opening her window, thinking of Rouen.

“What weather,” you hear him sigh, faintly British or uppercrust Delaware.

Glance up. Say: “It is fit for neither beast nor vegetable.”

It sounds dumb. It makes no sense.

But it is how you meet.

At the movies he is tender, caressing your hand beneath the seat.

At concerts he is sweet and attentive, buying cocktails, locating the ladies’ lounge when you can’t find it.

At museums he is wise and loving, leading you slowly through the Etruscan cinerary urns with affectionate gestures and an art history minor from Columbia. He is kind; he laughs at your jokes.

After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music. He tells you his wife’s name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm. When he says, “How do you feel about that?” don’t say “Ridiculous” or “Get the hell out of my apartment.” Prop your head up with one hand and say: “It depends. What is intellectual property law?”

He grins. “Oh, you know. Where leisure is a suit.”

Give him a tight, wiry little smile.

“I just don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about this,” he says.

Say: “Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough.” Show him your bicep.

When you were six you thought
mistress
meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

You walk differently. In store windows you don’t recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: “Hello, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.”

It is like having a book out from the library.

It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

You meet frequently for dinner, after work, split whole liters of the house red, then wamble the two blocks east, twenty blocks south to your apartment and lie sprawled on the living room floor with your expensive beige raincoats still on.

He is a systems analyst—you have already exhausted this joke—but what he really wants to be, he reveals to you, is an actor.

“Well, how did you become a systems analyst?” you ask, funny you.

“The same way anyone becomes anything,” he muses. “I took courses and sent out resumes.” Pause. “Patricia helped me work up a great resume. Too great.”

“Oh.” Wonder about mistress courses, certification, resumes. Perhaps you are not really qualified.

“But I’m not good at systems work,” he says, staring through and beyond, way beyond, the cracked ceiling. “Figuring out the cost-effectiveness of two hundred people shuffling five hundred pages back and forth across a new four-and-a-half-by-three-foot desk. I’m not an organized person, like Patricia, for
instance. She’s just incredibly organized. She makes lists for everything. It’s pretty impressive.”

Say flatly, dully: “What?”

“That she makes lists.”

“That she makes lists? You like that?”

“Well, yes. You know, what she’s going to do, what she has to buy, names of clients she has to see, et cetera.”

“Lists?” you murmur hopelessly, listlessly, your expensive beige raincoat still on. There is a long, tired silence. Lists? You stand up, brush off your coat, ask him what he would like to drink, then stump off to the kitchen without waiting for the answer.

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