The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore Read online

  THE SELECTED SHORT

  FICTION OF LISA MOORE

  LISA MOORE

  Copyright © 2012 Lisa Moore

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Jane Urquhart

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

  or any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or

  any other means without the permission of the publisher is

  illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of

  copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic

  editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2012 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Ave., Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Moore, Lisa Lynne, 1964–

  The selected short fiction of Lisa Moore : Open and Degrees of Nakedness / Lisa Moore ; introduction by Jane Urquhart.

  Short stories.

  eISBN 978-1-77089-256-9

  I. Title.

  PS8576.O61444A6 2012 C813’.54 C2012-903620-X

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939947

  Cover design: Brian Morgan

  Cover illustration: Genevieve Simms

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund .

  INTRODUCTION

  by Jane Urquhart

  I first read a short story by Lisa Moore twenty years ago in early September of 1992. And what an experience that was!

  I had arrived — just days before — in the city of St. John’s as the first “come-from-away” writer-in-residence at Memorial University. Poet and scholar Mary Dalton had rounded up a very special, and very small, group of local writers to participate in the seminar I would be holding, and these writers — whom I had not yet met — had provided samples of their work in advance of the first session. So, after I had walked up to Signal Hill and back down through the Battery, after I had wandered up and down Duckworth and Water streets and past the Harbour, after I had admired the Basilica and the statue of Saint Patrick blessing the city from the roof of the Benevolent Irish Society building — after I had recovered from all that, I sat down to take a look at the material.

  I was presumptuous enough at the time to assume I had a fairly solid notion of what Newfoundland literature would look like: there would be references to the First World War tragedy of Beaumont-Hamel, there would be significant storms and magnificent maritime disasters, there might be some hunger and fiddle music, and if the Newfoundlanders in the fiction were situated elsewhere in the world, there would be a lot of homesickness. And, indeed, there was some of that, though presented in a way that was much more rich and textured than I had naively anticipated. What I was fully unprepared for, though, was the combination of high realism and hallucinogenic imagery, fully realized characterization and pitch-perfect dialogue in the two stories in my file by a then-twenty-eight-year-old unpublished writer called Lisa Moore.

  Here were the young urbanites of St. John’s: their bars and their apartments, the taxis they rode in and the fraught love affairs they endured and celebrated. This was the membership of a whole new tribe, one as foreign and fascinating to me as the inhabitants of a Tibetan mountain village. And yet, as I followed these young people through marathon parties, interpersonal claustrophobia, breakups, childbirth, and world travels, they became a fully known and profound part of my emotional life. Every preconceived notion I had brought with me to St. John’s was so drastically blown apart by these two stories, reading them was like watching a conflagration in a fireworks factory. Here is a description of a couple on Signal Hill. “They made love on the grass, watching out for broken beer bottles, an aureole of amber glitter around their bodies.” I had just come back from Signal Hill but I had seen only sky, waves, and rock. There was so much about this place I didn’t know, and so much I would learn by continuing to read the stories of Lisa Moore.

  Moore’s characters are often artists, photographers, actors, writers, but not always. Her setting is often St. John’s, but not always. There are the departures and arrivals from and to St. John’s, the remembered trips to India with a best girlfriend, a brief affair with a German tourist, a Scottish swim team bursting in from a snowy night, tense holidays in tropical places. And then there is the world that comes into St. John’s over various wires: “The music of Jeopardy, a screech from the oven hinges as his mother took out the shepherd’s pie. The garburator eating a vibrant clot of carrot peelings — all of this was so altered by Rachel’s voice that he almost fainted for the second time in his life.”

  One of the many astonishing things about Lisa Moore’s stories is their immediacy: the reader is right inside the kitchen and on the phone with that teenager, right inside a hydroplaning pickup truck that has an eighteen-wheeler careering toward it, and right inside the middle-of-the-night bedroom of a crying infant whose mother is imagining “the whole universe being sucked into his tiny body, she and Lyle, their eleven-year-old daughter, Alex, the telephone poles, grimy snowbanks, loose pennies, Christmas presents, the Atlantic, asteroids.” Furthermore, the long, brilliantly wrought, and exhausting parties in Moore’s fiction are presented in such a visceral fashion that I myself have had the symptoms of a hangover after I put down the book in which they took place, as if I had been a full participant.

  This selection, comprising stories from her first collection, Degrees of Nakedness, her later book Open, and two new pieces, is a welcome compilation, and not only provides readers with the pleasure of encountering Moore’s startlingly vivid imagery and satisfying narratives, but also serves to indicate how assured and original her voice was right from the very beginning. Just as I realized that day after I had climbed Signal Hill for the first time. I had nothing to teach a writer as naturally gifted as Lisa Moore, nothing really to give to her. Like the night baby in the story “Natural Parents,” she had already inhaled it all. And, in these stories, “the world, ragged and inconsolable, (comes) back out.”

  Ragged and inconsolable, yes, in the most wonderful of ways, and always completely life-enhancing.

  THE PACKAGE

  They were driving through all the cold dark cities of North America in the back of a transport truck with walls of Plexiglas two weeks before Christmas. The glass box was designed to look like a Caribbean beach. The fourth wall a backdrop of shimmering surf at sunset in front of which they were supposed to frolic and lounge. They were a live advertisement for Hot Vacations in the Festive Season.

  Laurie and two male bodybuilders wearing red sequined bathing suits and matching Santa hats posing in the sand and on the recliners or playing a little badminton. There was a beach umbrella. Sunlamps shone down from the ceiling of the glass box and up from the floor to keep them warm and make sure the glass didn’t fog.

  Basil lounged at Laurie’s feet and Max rubbed sunscreen into her shoulders. They danced to carols from an iPod dock. The Plexiglas was festooned with silver garlands; there were three inflatab
le palm trees smothered in tinsel.

  Keep it clean, Edward White had said. He was the manager of Hot Vacations. The audition had taken place during a snow squall that tore down Yonge Street, making the ropes of Christmas lights snap like whips. The wind forced people to hold their hats with both hands.

  Laurie had received a letter from the power company before setting out for the day’s auditions. It came in a prettily printed envelope that said Seasons Greetings! with a sprig of holly near a cellophane window that showed Laurie’s ex-boyfriend’s name.

  The letter said: FINAL NOTICE. They were sending out field staff, the letter said. They were going to discontinue services unless she paid the bill in full by such and such a date. Laurie didn’t read the date.

  She read the date but she was standing on tiptoe at the time, feeling around with one hand in the wooden salad bowl on top of the fridge for a banana, one with a withered stem and mottled and leathery skin and a slit in the peel where the moisture had risen up from the softly rotting fruit and had hardened near the slit causing the edges to pucker and blacken and parts of the fruit were bruised and the end of the banana had liquefied and squelched out when she peeled the skin down and a little cloud of drunken fruit flies circled and settled elsewhere. Then she found herself holding the limp banana skin and the banana was gone and she must have eaten it but she didn’t remember eating it.

  Laurie had come home from her last day of classes and half the furniture was gone. Even the oak desk — she’d found it on the side of the road at the beginning of the semester and had enlisted the goodwill of six boys in hoodies with piercings through their lips and noses and eyebrows, and one of whom had tattooed tears on his cheek, to help her carry it through the honking traffic and up the stairwell because it didn’t fit in the elevator — had disappeared. Only the four depressions made by the desk legs in the indoor/outdoor carpet remained.

  Laurie’s boyfriend was in love with someone else. Someone back home. He was going home for Christmas.

  Who?

  Never mind who, he’d said. The door of the apartment closed behind him with a solemn click.

  Who is it? Who? Laurie had screamed at the closed door and her voice bounced around the gutted apartment like the Snowy Owl in Hinterland Who’s Who, a frequent re-run on Channel 37. The female owl inhabits the desolate and bleak northern tundra and lays her eggs in a hole she scratches from the frozen ground all by herself and is not as spectacularly marked as the male, would never be as spectacular, in fact she was kind of homely by comparison, except for her eyes which were yellow and lazy-lidded, drooping and undrooping, a lot like her ex-boyfriend’s eyes after they’d made love or when he was smoking pot.

  Laurie had $165 in her bank account. The banana was the last thing she ate before leaving the apartment to search for work and it made her queasy.

  In the audition, she sat on an orange chair next to a man named Basil who was built like a bus and the only other person to show up.

  Laurie took a moment to come up with her motivation. What did her character want? She wanted some kind of sign from the universe is what she wanted. She wanted her boyfriend back or someone else to love, someone better, she did not want to spend Christmas alone.

  Laurie had a plastic bag of stocking stuffers on her lap that she’d purchased in the Dollar Store on the way to the audition. The bag crinkled loudly and she crunched it down and it sighed.

  The Dollar Store had been full of grey-skinned people who looked poor and they were combing the rows for tinned beans with pork and packages of crackers and sardines from Russia with an iron key glued to the side and the key had a little hole that fit a flange of metal that you could twist to open the tin and one old man who had fingerless gloves had done just that, right in the middle of the store, and had lifted a slimy silver fish from the oils and juices in the can that made his fingers gleam and it dripped into his beard and one drop hit the fibres of his herringbone coat and sat there solid as a jewel. The old man tilted his head back and his hands had a tremor and he dropped the jiggling fish into his open mouth and, noticing Laurie stare, her mouth opening involuntarily as his did, he held the tin out to her and she decided what the hell and dug a little fish out for herself. It mushed in her fingers and she caught it on the side of her hand and it was smoked and it had eyes and there was the fibrous bone or fin that had a hairy texture and subtle crunch and she thanked him with all she had in her.

  Go ahead, he said. Take, take. He held out the little tin. She helped herself again.

  There were chocolate Santas with marshmallow filling at the Dollar Store, and chocolates in gold foil stamped to look like ancient coins, and cap guns and extra cartridges of caps, sold separately, which made Laurie think about that smell of smoke and phosphorus that hung in the air over a cap gun when she was a kid and how it smarted a tiny nerve in the back of her nose and the sharp crack of the gun and sometimes super-white threads of light that escaped through hairline fissures in the body of the metal pistol and the round burnt hole in the coiled paper that curled out of the top of the gun where before there had been row upon row of perfect red dots of gun powder and Silly Putty and Crazy String that wiggled out of aerosol cans, glitter glue, pipe cleaners, Popsicle sticks, candy necklaces, rocket candy, lollipops with bubblegum centres, jewels with peel-off adhesive backing, and a herd of life-size plastic reindeer that galloped across the top shelves, shelves covered in cotton batting embedded with opalescent sparkles, one reindeer glancing back over his shoulder as if something menacing were coming from behind, Christmas crackers, envelopes of tinsel, mini-lights, and wind-up snow globes that tinkled out “O Holy Night.”

  Laurie had bought a red yo-yo that flashed with sparks as it rolled down and shot back up, for Seraphim, who had just arrived from Sudan, and who was eight and whose sisters Chastity, Purity, Hope, and Lorraine all lived in the apartment across from Laurie. And for their mother, Elizabeth, who was in hospital being treated for cancer, Laurie had picked up Santa and Mrs. Claus salt and pepper shakers which turned out to be $4.50, not a dollar, and, also for Seraphim — whom Laurie had first seen coming down the street at dusk in a snowfall trying to catch the snowflakes on her tongue, her first snowfall Laurie was told when she asked. Really, your first? Yes. The first time you’ve ever seen snow? Yes. You’ve never seen it before now? Ever? Except on tv, I never. And what do you think? I think it’s amazing. Flakes swirling under a streetlamp substantial as tissue, each snowflake, who had walked or been carried — Seraphim — through at least three war-torn countries before getting to Canada and who knew all the prime ministers and the provinces and their capitals and had become a citizen and whose whole village had been murdered the day after her family got out — a rhinestone bracelet that she had tried on herself and that winked and shot out needles of light but pinched the skin on the inside of her wrist.

  And Laurie bought a package of Heroes of War playing cards (featuring George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, with Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as the Jokers) for her nephew Wallace, who was twelve.

  Wallace also collected trolls, the rubber dolls with big tufts of pink hair that became a fad in the early ’80s, but a woman in a green polyester uniform and a Christmas corsage with a pricing gun that ka-chunked out orange stickers and who was down on one knee in front of a wall of merchandise said the trolls were out of stock. There had been a rush on trolls that nobody could have foreseen, she’d said.

  Laurie had just come from the day’s first audition — job interview, really — which required the successful applicant to dress as an elf who would toil in Santa’s workshop/on-site photo studio. She had employed, that morning, what she understood of the Stanislavski acting method, which they had covered in her first semester — a method that required rigorous self-analysis and reflection, a method that understood acting as an art that demanded an inside-out approach to character exploration.
r />   Laurie had tried to brush her teeth as though they were the teeth of an elf. She imagined them ultra-white and pointy, like a tiger shark’s, a set of which her ex-boyfriend’s parents had brought back for her from a trip to Mexico. The whole jaw, connected by stiffened cartilage, smelled faintly of ammonia and rot, and what the hell kind of gift was that? She’d found herself foaming at the mouth, toothbrush held in the air in front of the mirror. Her face appeared to be equal parts jilted lover and zealous Christmas elf. She remembered that the thinking had changed on Stanislavski and he was considered outdated. It was better now, her teachers felt, to stick to the surface of your character and to forget all the furrowing into the murky psychological make-up of an elf or whatever.

  What makes you think you’re the right person for this job, the interviewer in Santa’s workshop had asked.

  I am a trained actress, Laurie said. I almost have my degree.

  Says here “waitress,” the guy said. He gave her resumé a little snap so it stood up straight in his hand. What happened to that job?

  I put a red thong in the wash with my waitressing blouses by accident and they came out pink and the owner took me off the schedule, she said. The guy looked up from the resumé and ran his eyes all over her. She cocked her hip and folded her arms and drummed the toe of her boot on the tiles.

  Basically you have to dress up as an elf and push a button on the camera when the kid climbs onto Santa’s lap, he said. Think you can handle that?

  Will I have to stay in character for the whole shift, she asked. They were standing in front of a cordoned AstroTurf stage near the escalators with a revolving Christmas tree and presents and a workshop with icicles hanging from the eaves and a big red velvet throne blinking with strings of led lights and there was already a long line of parents and kids in fancy clothes, one mother spit-cleaning pizza sauce off a chin. There was a camera on a tripod. The Santa had bifocals smeared with fingerprints and he was inquiring about a smoke break.