Free Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

resinous sweat smell of dance, the parsed, repeated movement. Cal and Simone are into it. They jiggle and link arms. “This is it!” In the middle of the song, Eugene suddenly sits down to rest on the sofa, watching the grown-ups. Like the best dancers and audiences in the world, he is determined not to cough until the end.
    “Come here, honey,” I say, going to him. I am thinking not only of my own body here, that unbeguilable, broken basket, that stiff meringue. I am not, Patrick, thinking only of myself, my lost troupe, my empty bed. I am thinking of the dancing body’s magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed—this body, these bodies, that body—so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?
    “Stand next to me,” I say, and Eugene does, looking up at me with his orange warrior face. We step in place: knees up, knees down. Knees up, knees down. Dip-glide-slide. Dip-glide-slide. “This is it!” “This is it!” Then we go wild and fling our limbs to the sky.

COMMUNITY LIFE
    When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one. She had originally wanted to teach English literature, but when she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories—a vocabulary of arson!—she’d transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls.
    She had learned to read at an early age. Her parents, newly settled in Vermont from Tirgu Mures in Transylvania, were anxious that their daughter learn to speak English, to blend in with the community in a way they felt they probably never would, and so every Saturday they took her to the children’s section of the Rutland library and let her spend time with the librarian, who chose books for her and sometimes even read a page or two out loud, though there was a sign that said PLEASE BE QUIET BOYS AND GIRLS . No comma.
    Which made it seem to Olena that only the boys had to be quiet. She and the librarian could do whatever they wanted.
    She had loved the librarian.
    And when Olena’s Romanian began to recede altogether, and in its stead bloomed a slow, rich English-speaking voice, not unlike the librarian’s, too womanly for a little girl, the other children on her street became even more afraid of her.
“Dracula!”
they shouted.
“Transylvaniess!”
they shrieked, and ran.
    “You’ll have a new name now,” her father told her the first day of first grade. He had already changed their last name from Todorescu to Resnick. His shop was called “Resnick’s Furs.” “From here on in, you will no longer be Olena. You will have a nice American name: Nell.”
    “You make to say ze name,” her mother said. “When ze teacher tell you
Olena
, you say,
‘No, Nell.’
Say
Nell
.”
    “Nell,” said Olena. But when she got to school, the teacher, sensing something dreamy and outcast in her, clasped her hand and exclaimed, “Olena! What a beautiful name!” Olena’s heart filled with gratitude and surprise, and she fell in close to the teacher’s hip, adoring and mute.
    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