Free Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore

her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn’t look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring—which did look like a typical wedding ring—a year earlier because he said it “bothered” him. She had thought at the time he’d meant it was rubbing. He had often just shed his clothes spontaneously—when they had first met he was something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.
    “What if I can’t get my ring off,” she said to him now on the plane to La Caribe, the gringo enclave Rafe had chosen. She had gained a little weight in their twenty years of marriage but really not all
that
much. She had been practically a child bride! “Send me the sawyer’s bill,” he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye
was
gone!
    “What is wrong with you?” she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space alien values, space alien thoughts, and the hollow shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.
    “What is wrong with
you
?” he snarled. This was his habit, his space alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.
    More than the girls, who were just little, she was worried about Sam, their sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the extremely progressive divorce laws—a boy needs his dad!—she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle and float a little off and away like paper carried by wind. With time he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d’ suspecting the arrival of riffraff. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on. They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs—a family about to break apart forever—didn’t look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local children from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it there and downplay the creases—to appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once looked at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had gotten lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop—the words LA CARIBE emblazoned across every single thing.
    On the beach people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the guards and barbed wire, throwing rocks. When a cruise ship temporarily docked in the bay,and then departed, she joined some other tourists on the beach to shout at the boat, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass!” as if they were different and not all of them tourists, seeking to console themselves with hierarchies of tourism, to keep the stone-throwing boys from one’s thoughts.
    There were ways of making things temporarily vanish. One could disappear oneself in movement and repetition. Sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin