Like Life by Lorrie Moore

wets, when it cries, when it throws up.” Zoë had bought a mint-greenranch house near campus, though now she was thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have. It was hard to live in a house. She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. The day she moved in, she had tacked to her tree a small paper sign that said
Zoë’s Tree.
    Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a Congratulations card. Her mother had even UPS’d a box of old decorating magazines saved over the years, photographs of beautiful rooms her mother used to moon over, since there never had been any money to redecorate. It was like getting her mother’s pornography, that box, inheriting her drooled-upon fantasies, the endless wish and tease that had been her life. But to her mother it was a rite of passage that pleased her. “Maybe you will get some ideas from these,” she had written. And when Zoë looked at the photographs, at the bold and beautiful living rooms, she was filled with longing. Ideas and ideas of longing.
    Right now Zoë’s house was rather empty. The previous owner had wallpapered around the furniture, leaving strange gaps and silhouettes on the walls, and Zoë hadn’t done much about that yet. She had bought furniture, then taken it back, furnishing and unfurnishing, preparing and shedding, like a womb. She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children’s coffins, so she returned them. And she had recently bought an Oriental rug for the living room, with Chinese symbols on it she didn’t understand. The salesgirl had kept saying she was sure they meant
Peace
and
Eternal Life
, but when Zoë got the rug home, she worried. What if they didn’t mean
Peace
and
Eternal Life?
What if they meant, say,
Bruce Springsteen.
And the more she thought about it, the more shebecame convinced she had a rug that said
Bruce Springsteen
, and so she returned that, too.
    She had also bought a little baroque mirror for the front entryway, which she had been told, by Murray Peterson, would keep away evil spirits. The mirror, however, tended to frighten
her
, startling her with an image of a woman she never recognized. Sometimes she looked puffier and plainer than she remembered. Sometimes shifty and dark. Most times she just looked vague.
You look like someone I know
, she had been told twice in the last year by strangers in restaurants in Terre Haute. In fact, sometimes she seemed not to have a look of her own, or any look whatsoever, and it began to amaze her that her students and colleagues were able to recognize her at all. How did they know? When she walked into a room, how did she look so that they knew it was her? Like this? Did she look like this? And so she returned the mirror.
    “The reason I’m asking is that I know a man I think you should meet,” said Evan. “He’s fun. He’s straight. He’s single. That’s all I’m going to say.”
    “I think I’m too old for fun,” said Zoë. She had a dark bristly hair in her chin, and she could feel it now with her finger. Perhaps when you had been without the opposite sex for too long, you began to resemble them. In an act of desperate invention, you began to grow your own. “I just want to come, wear my bonehead, visit with Charlie’s tropical fish, ask you about your food shoots.”
    She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying.