Free Like Life by Lorrie Moore Page B

chest.
    “Is this for the Girl Scouts?” asked Jane.
    The girls looked at each other. “No, it’s for my brother,” said the pudgy one. Her friend slapped her on the arm.
    “It’s for your brother’s
team
,” the friend hissed.
    “Yeah,” said the girl, and Jane bought a crispy bar and talked them into a sample after all. Which they took with a slight grimace. “D’you got a husband that drives a truck?” asked the one in purple.
    “Yeah,” said the other.
“Do you?”
And when Jane shook her head, they frowned and went away.
    A man in a blue sweater like one her father used to wear stopped and gently plucked a cracker from her tray. “How much?” he asked, and she was about to say, “A million dollars,” when she heard someone down the mall corridor call her name.
    “Jane Konwicki! How are you?” A woman about Jane’s age, wearing a bright-red fall suit, strode up to her and kissed her on the cheek. The man in the blue sweater like her father’s slipped away. Jane looked at the woman in the red suit and for a minute didn’t know who she was. But the woman’s animated features all stopped for a moment and fell into place, and Jane realized it was Bridey, a friend from over fifteen years ago, who used to sit next to her in high school chorus. It was curious how people, when they stood still and you just looked, never really changed that much. No matter how the fashions swirled about a girl, the adult she became, with different fashions swirling about her, still contained the same girl. All of Bridey’s ages—the child, the old woman—were there on her face. It was like an open bird feeder where every year of her, the past and the future, had come to feed.
    “Bridey, you look great. What have you been up to?” It seemed a ridiculous question to ask of someone you hadn’t seen since high school, but there it was.
    “Well, last year I fell madly in love,” Bridey said with great pride. This clearly was on the top of her list, and her voice suggested it was a long list. “And we got married, and we moved back to town after roughing it on the South Side of Chicago since forever. It’s great to be back here, I can tell you.” Bridey helped herself to a cheddar sample and then another one. The cheese in her mouth stuck between her front teeth in a pasty, yellowish mortar, and when she swallowed and smiled back at Jane, well, again, there it was, like something unfortunate but necessary.
    “You seem so … 
happy
,” said Jane. Heffie was shuffling around noisily in the shop behind her.
    “Oh, I am. I keep running into people from school, and it’s just so much fun. In fact, Jane, you should come with me this evening. You know what I’m going to do?”
    “What?” Jane glanced back over her shoulder and saw Heffie testing the spreads in the deli case with her finger. She would stick her finger in deep and then lick it slowly like an ice cream.
    “Oh,” said Bridey in a hushed and worried tone. “Is that a customer or an employee?”
    “Employee,” said Jane.
    “At any rate, I’m going to try out for Community Chorus,” continued Bridey. “It’s part of my new program. I’m learning German—”
    “Learning German?” Jane interrupted.
    “—taking a cooking class, and I’m going to get back into choral singing.”
    “You were always a good singer,” said Jane. Bridey had often gotten solos.
    “Ach! My voice has gone to pot, but I don’t care. Why don’t you come with me? We could audition together. The auditions aren’t supposed to be that hard.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” said Jane, though the thought of singing again in a chorus suddenly excited her. That huge sound flying out over an audience, like a migration of birds, like a million balloons! But the idea of an audition was terrifying. What if she didn’t get in? How could she ever open her mouth again to sing, even all by herself at home? How would her own voice not mortify her on the way to work in the morning,