Free Birds of America by Lorrie Moore Page A

Nell-that-never-lived’s return. She wished to start over again, to be someone living coltishly in the world, not someone hidden away, behind books, with a carefully learned voice and a sad past.
    She missed her mother the most.
    ·  ·  ·
    The library Olena worked in was one of the most prestigious university libraries in the Midwest. It housed a large collection of rare and foreign books, and she had driven across several states to get there, squinting through the splattered tempera of insects on the windshield, watching for the dark tail of a possible tornado, and getting sick, painfully, in Indiana, in the rest rooms of the dead-Hoosier service plazas along I-80. The ladies’ rooms there had had electric eyes for the toilets, the sinks, the hand dryers, and she’d set them all off by staggering in and out of the stalls or leaning into the sinks. “You the only one in here?” asked a cleaning woman. “You the only one in here making this racket?” Olena had smiled, a dog’s smile; in the yellowish light, everything seemed tragic and ridiculous and unable to stop. The flatness of the terrain gave her vertigo, she decided, that was it. The land was windswept; there were no smells. In Vermont, she had felt cradled by mountains. Now, here, she would have to be brave.
    But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when she gave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up.
    She first met Nick at the library in May. She was temporarily positioned at the reference desk, hauled out from her ordinary task as supervisor of foreign cataloging, to replace someone who was ill. Nick was researching statistics on municipal campaign spending in the state. “Haven’t stepped into a library since I was eighteen,” he said. He looked at least forty.
    She showed him where he might look. “Try looking here,” she said, writing down the names of indexes to state records, but he kept looking at
her
. “Or here.”
    “I’m managing a county board seat campaign,” he said. “The election’s not until the fall, but I’m trying to get a jump on things.” His hair was a coppery brown, threaded throughwith silver. There was something animated in his eyes, like pond life. “I just wanted to get some comparison figures. Will you have a cup of coffee with me?”
    “I don’t think so,” she said.
    But he came back the next day and asked her again.
    The coffee shop near campus was hot and noisy, crowded with students, and Nick loudly ordered espresso for them both. She usually didn’t like espresso, its gritty, cigarish taste. But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility. She drank the espresso fast, with determination and a sense of adventure. “I guess I’ll have a second,” she said, and wiped her mouth with a napkin.
    “I’ll get it,” said Nick, and when he came back, he told her some more about the campaign he was running. “It’s important to get the endorsements of the neighborhood associations,” he said. He ran a bratwurst and frozen yogurt stand called Please Squeeze and Bratwursts. He had gotten to know a lot of people that way. “I feel alive and relevant, living my life like this,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve sold out.”
    “Sold out to what?” she asked.
    He smiled. “I can tell you’re not from around here,” he said. He raked his hand through the various metals of his hair. “
Selling out
. Like doing something you really never wanted to do, and getting paid too much for it.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    “When I was a kid, my father said to me, ‘Sometimes in life, son, you’re going to find you have to do things you don’t want to do,’ and I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘No fucking way.’ ” Olena laughed.