Self-help - Lorrie Moore

How to Be an Other Woman

Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight.  You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

What is Seized

Another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.
"Look," he sighed in a loud whisper.  "I really can't say that I'll never leave you and the kids or that I'll never make love to another woman -"
"Why not?" asked my mother.  "Why can't you say that?"  Even her anger was gentle, ingenuous.
"Because I don't feel that way."
"But... can't you just say it anyway?"
At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other's gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning.  But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, "Your father.  He was in a dance.  And he just couldn't dance."  Earlier that year she had written me: "That is what is wrong with cold people.  Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice.  They never learn the beauty or value of gesture.  The emotional necessity.  For them, it is all honest before kindness, truth before art.  Love is art, not truth.  It's like painting scenery."

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

How

And yet from time to time you will gaze at his face or his hands and want nothing but him.  You will feel passing waves of dependency, devotion, and sentimentality.  A week, a month, a year, and he has become your family.  Let's say your real mother is a witch.  Your father a warlock.  Your brothers twin hunchbacks of Notre Dame.  They all live in a cave together somewhere.

How to talk to your mother (Note)

You confuse lovers, mix up who had what scar, what car, what mother.

At a party when a woman tells you where she bought some wonderful pair of shoes, say that you believe shopping for clothes is like masturbation - everyone does it, but it isn't very interesting and therefore should be done alone, in an embarrassed fashion, and never be the topic of party conversation. The woman will tighten her lips and eyebrows and say, "Oh, I suppose you have something more fascinating to talk about." Grow clumsy and uneasy. Say, "No," and head for the ginger ale. Tell the person next to you that your inside feel sort of sinking and vinyl like a Claes Oldenburg toilet. They will say, "Oh?" and point out that the print on your dress is one of paisleys impregnating paisleys. Pour yourself more ginger ale.