Free Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore Page A

rides, but Sam sensed their cruelty. “They speak a language,” he said. “We shouldn’t ride them.”
    “They look happy,” said Kit.
    Sam looked at her with seriousness from some sweet beyond. “They look happy so you won’t kill them.”
    “You think so?”
    “If dolphins tasted good,” he said, “we wouldn’t even know about their language.” That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could only understand something if you did not desire it. How did he know these things already? Usually girls realized this first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond Kit’s comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase “cinnamon M&M’s” repeated six times fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carriedwands. “I’m a big brother now,” Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes, silently, Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bail, as they buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. Anyone near, on a towel, reading of holocausts, turned and smiled. In this fine, far compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable. She went to the central office and signed up for a hot stone massage: “Would you like a man or a woman?” asked the receptionist.
    “Excuse me?” asked Kit, stalling—after all these years of marriage, which
did
she want? What did she know of
men
—or
women
? “There’s no such thing as
men
,” her friend Jan used to say, until recently. “Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is—well—a capacity for horrifying violence.”
    “A man or a woman—for the massage?” Kit asked now, buying time. She thought of the slow mating of snails, an entire day, being hermaphrodites and having it all be so confusing: by the time they had it figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.
    “Oh, either one,” she said, and then she knew she’d get a man. Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas—tobacco, incense, cannabis—exhaling and swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed, he had the Dickensian name of Daniel Handler, and he did not speak. He placed hot stones along her back and left them there in a line up her spine—did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by thelikes of him? Are you
crazy
? The mad joy pulsing in her face was held over the floor by the table headpiece and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out her nose, which she realized then was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. He left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat she could no longer feel it even there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and feel it only then, at the end; though this wasn’t the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean—perhaps in embittered rage about his own life—but that more likely had no intention at all. “That was nice,” she said at