Self-Help (Vintage Contemporaries) by Lorrie Moore

knowing each other at all.
    Make apple crisp for the first time.
    1971
. Go for long walks to get away from her. Walk through wooded areas; there is a life there you have forgotten. The smells and sounds seem sudden, unchanged, exact, the papery crunch of the leaves, the mouldering sachet of the mud. The trees are crooked as backs, the fence posts splintered, trusting and precarious in their solid grasp of arms, the asters spindly, dry, white,havishammed (Havishammed!) by frost. Find a beautiful reddish stone and bring it home for your mother. Kiss her. Say: “This is for you.” She grasps it and smiles. “You were always such a sensitive child,” she says.
    Say: “Yeah, I know.”
    1970
. You are pregnant again. Try to decide what you should do.
   Get your hair chopped, short as a boy’s.
    1969
. Mankind leaps upon the moon.
    Disposable diapers are first sold in supermarkets.
    Have occasional affairs with absurd, silly men who tell you to grow your hair to your waist and who, when you are sad, tickle your ribs to cheer you up. Moonlight through the blinds stripes you like zebras. You laugh. You never marry.
    1968
. Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, now must contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the held. Find more and more that you like to muse over things like this.
    1967
. Your mother is sick and comes to live with you. There is no place else for her to go. You feel many different emptinesses.
    The first successful heart transplant is performed in South Africa.
    1966
. You confuse lovers, mix up who had what scar, what car, what mother.
    1965
. Smoke marijuana. Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. It could be anything. The lid off the mayonnaise, Uncle Ron’s honey wine four years in the left corner.Broccoli yellowing, flowering fast. They are all metaphors. They are all problems. Your horoscope says: Speak gently to a loved one.
    1964
. Your mother calls long distance and asks whether you are coming home for Thanksgiving, your brother and the baby will be there. Make excuses.
    “As a mother gets older,” your mother says, “these sorts of holidays become increasingly important.”
    Say: “I’m sorry, Mom.”
    1963
. Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you’d spend your life with, and realize, a rock in your gut, that you don’t even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom, not coming out when he knocks. You can no longer trust your affections. People and places you think you love may be people and places you hate. Kennedy is shot.
    Someone invents a temporary artificial heart, for use during operations.
    1962
. Eat Chinese food for the first time, with a lawyer from California. He will show you how to hold the chopsticks. He will pat your leg. Attack his profession. Ask him whether he feels the law makes large spokes out of the short stakes of men.
    1961
. Grandma Moses dies.
    You are a zoo of insecurities. You take to putting brandy in your morning coffee and to falling in love too easily. You have an abortion.
    1960
. There is money from your father’s will and his life insurance. You buy a car and a green velvet dress you don’t need. You drive two hours to meet your mother for lunch on Saturdays. She suggests things for you to write about, things she’sheard on the radio: a woman with telepathic twins, a woman with no feet.
    1959
. At the funeral she says: “He had his problems, but he was a generous man,” though you know he was tight as a scout knot, couldn’t listen to anyone, the only time you remember loving him being that once when he got the punchline of one of your jokes before your mom did and looked up from his science journal and guffawed loud as a giant, the two of you, for one split