by Lorrie Moore
George bites into a strawberry so huge it looks painful to itself. Juice spurts down her fingers. I hand her a napkin. We are sitting together on a quilt on the living-room floor. “Even if I had to, Mom,” says George, staring at her strawberry, “I would never lay you off.”
Machinists are picketing in Ohio. Once when George was younger I made the mistake of telling her that her father and I had broken up because he hadn’t been doing his job and I had had to lay him off. At the time it seemed like the right thing to say, nifty with clarity, like a new mop. Then the economy got a giant, moaning cramp, and the phrase took on connotations, intimations, power; it buzzed troublesomely around our cracking house. “Would you lay me off?” she asks, both sad and hopeful.
I put my nose in her ear. She smells of sweet, fruity children’s shampoo. “Nope. Never, never, never.” She giggles and butts her head into my underarm. This is our language of reassurance. I’ve always imagined it would work quite well at summit talks, weapons negotiations. You could never dislike a nation whose ambassador kept giggling, nudging, bumping his head into your armpit.
The ants are crawling all over everything, dusting themselves in spilled Nestlé’s Quik, measuring the faucets and cabinets, squiggling over chrome and wood. I zap them with paper towels. I find one stomach-up in the toilet bowl, drowned from overzealous bathrooming, a fate I once feared for myself when I was a toddler and skinny and forced to sit on toilet seats that didn’t go all the way around. This ant must have slipped, and now it floats there on the skin of the water, a tiny, tragic, triptychtic leaf. I’ve found that you can best entrap ants with the corpse of another ant. A squashed one of their own in the middle of the floor, and boom, like stubborn Antigones, they rush out to bury their dead brother and get nabbed.
That’s probably why they’re called ants, says Eleanor.
Maybe I’m using up too many paper towels.
Maybe I’m actually enjoying this, this carnivorous hunting and trapping. The slow, inevitable rending of my house and theirs. I reach into the toilet bowl and lift out the ant body and place it on the floor under the sink.
On the first day of class the teacher, Benna Carpenter, marched into her classroom, flicked on the light, clunked over to the front desk, and heaved her briefcase up onto it. She removed her gray, baggy blazer and put it on the back of the chair, then remained standing, staring one by one at the twenty pale and attentive faces collected in the horseshoe of desks and chairs in front of her. They looked younger every year. Already she could feel herself spotting the types: the quiet redhead who would write not-bad sonnets; the curly-haired woman who was there for Benna’s jokes (she’d heard about them in bio lab); the guy in the Nike t-shirt who was there for his own jokes, ethnic and protracted (What do you call WASP foreplay? Washing dishes. What do you call Jewish foreplay? Begging. What do you call Irish foreplay? “Brace yourself, Bridget”); and two very clean Johnson & Johnson types who were there for an easy A-minus for their moms and dads. “Well,” she began. “This course is called The Reading and Writing of Poetry. I have one thing to say to you at the start: Ya wanna read and write poetry? You’re gonna have to go home and goddamn read and write poetry!” It came out in a shout.
Nobody moved. Two women exchanged glances.
The teacher opened her briefcase. She took out the Xeroxed class list and looked back up at their confused stares.
“The Reading and Writing of Poetry!” she barked again, loudly. “That’s why we’re here. We’re all a bunch of crazy people!” And then she looked down, called the roll, even the middle names and initials, her hands fidgety through her hair, at her side, around her pencil, her handwriting on the attendance sheet a shaky, old woman’s scrawl.
“I start off determined, but they make me nervous,” I tell my friend Gerard, a part-time carpet salesman and local jazz pianist who gigs in the motel-hotel nightclubs around town. He boasts privately of playing an exquisite broadloom. We are sitting in Hank’s, a favorite junk coffee shop downtown, a place where I join him almost daily in ceremoniously sending month-old grease, cigarette smoke, and mind-blitzing coffee in the direction of vital organs. Gerard has a way of alchemizing what is essentially self-destructiveness into a sort of quaint, homely charm. The world seems okay with Gerard; it seems comfortable even when sitting in the very “kitchen of its poisons,” Gerard’s phrase for Hank’s, the Pentagon, and certain parts of Queens, where he’s from.
Gerard sticks one whole fried egg into his mouth and speaks with his mouth full, as if with tempera paint. Yolk lines his lips. “Tell them they mustn’t bring their shotguns and machetes to class.”
“Gerard, you just stuffed one whole egg into your mouth.” I glance over at the waitress, who is new. It’s not Patti anymore. It used to be Patti.
“What can I say, I’m a gastronomical illiterate. You should see what I do when you’re not here.” He pushes toast into his mouth and grins.
Gerard has unusual eyes. He can only see out of one eye at a time, and often his sight will hop to the other eye without warning, always leaving the eye it has fled sitting in his head like a dead lightbulb. A fake window. A tiddly wink. He had eye operations when he was little, even woke up in the middle of one, he said, and, glimpsing the startled surgeons, screamed “The Bug Men, the Bug Men!” Until he was ten he had to do exercises to get the muscles in each of his eyes to work together, to get the good eye to lead the blind eye, so that the blind eye, whichever one it happened to be, didn’t stray off in some odd, independent direction, like a kid in Woolworth’s. He has no depth perception, yet has twenty-twenty vision. I often wonder when his vision switches eyes whether the storage and retrieval capabilities of his brain switch hemispheres. Perhaps whole experiences—dinners, songs, girl friends, entire books—are lost, unavailable to him, depending on which eye he’s looking out of. Sometimes I even try to imagine it for myself: I close one eye, imagine my corpus callosum frayed as an old jumprope, and try to wipe out things.
Gerard has bright crumbs in his beard. I smile. “How did the gig go last night?” I light my daily cigarette. One a day, I’m convinced, helps build antibodies.
“Same as always. I’m still competing with the bartender’s blender. I’ll be in the middle of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ and it’ll start crushing ice or something.”
“Christ,” I say, both my word and Gerard’s word of disgust and commiseration. I remember when it used to mean a person.
“Yeah, do you need a brown pile?” This is the punch line of a sick, old scatological joke of his. Gerard throws it out every time he wants to change the subject. It has become a kind of symbol of how much he hates what he does for a living, as if it were his very life he was offering you.
“Gerard, please.”
Georgianne came out of the bathroom this morning and said, “Ugh, Mom, don’t go in there yet. You’ll get dung lung.” I don’t know where she picks these words up from. She said she thought she’d “pumigated” things, sent the ants packing.
“Sorry,” says Gerard.
· · ·
The teacher had been assigned two additional sections of the same course. “My name is Benna Carpenter,” she shouted and turned and spelled it out on the board. “This course is called The Reeling and Writhing of Poetry, and I’m gonna pass out these index cards and on them I want your name and address and phone number. In the upper left-hand corner I want you to write down the name of your favorite poet, no friends or relatives, and on the back I want you to draw, as best you can, a picture of your soul as you imagined it when you were a child.” She told them, with mock solemnity, that for the rest of the semester they would be attempting to craft with words what they were right now drawing on their cards.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Gerard says later. “You told them that?”
Renoir’s Madame Charpentier and her daughters stare at me from over the sofa, all of them, even their cranky dog, a bit cross-eyed. Gerard calls the print “sentimental, prostituting sch
lock.” I smile and say, “Isn’t it wonderful?” Then I usually make fun of his Greece posters. He’s got about ten. His apartment looks like a coffee shop.
In the faculty lounge with Eleanor I look through the cards to see how my students had once imagined their souls. There were things that looked like flying saucers, like Oreo cookies, like milk bottles, like teardrops, ghosts, heads of ghosts, fire, tongues of fire, a television set, a bowl, a black ball, an anonymous “This class sucks,” a chair, a flower, several lightbulbs.
“I like the big cookie one,” says Eleanor with a cigarette in her mouth.
Before she was even all the way in the classroom, a student anxiously approached her from the back of the room. “Do you have the class list?” he asked. “I want to see if I’m here.”
Clearly an ontological question. She looked quickly at him and said, “You’re here.” Then she stumped over to the front desk, heaved her briefcase up onto it, looked out at the wall at the other end, and said, “Good afternoon.” The anxious student returned to his seat. “This is The Reading and Writing of Poetry, if I’m not mistaken,” announced the teacher for the third time that day. “My name is Benna Carpenter and—”
“Donna who?”
“Benna. B. As in beer or bug or B-minuses. Which reminds me: No one is to hassle me about grades in here. If you’re afraid of C-pluses, take the course pass-fail or take sedatives. And I’m adamant about attendance; it’s mandatory. I’m going to be small, niggling, and unwavering on this.”
A guy with a gold chain: “We heard you were an easy grader. You’re just talking tough because it’s the beginning of the year.”
“I am talking tough,” the teacher said slowly, raising her voice, then bringing her fist down hard on the desk in front of her. Someone in the back gasped. “And yes, it is the beginning of the year.”
“These are their souls,” I show Gerard later that night. I pull out the index cards and spread them across the coffee table. He looks at each one thoughtfully, sipping scotch. He finally swallows and looks up, a look of tremendous seriousness.
“And you’re going to go on and try to work with these kids?”
I shrug. “Only fourteen more weeks. They’re not all kids. I have an escaped housewife and a Vietnam vet. It’s better than all eighteen-year-olds.”
Gerard shakes his head. “Look at this one, Benna.” He reaches to his left and holds up one of the cards. I look and see a big blue-inked cube with wavy lines coming out of it, swastikas at the end of each squiggle. “You’re gonna try to teach poems to this guy?”
“Hell, it’s only community college, Gerard.”
“Sounds like one of the circles Dante forgot to put in the Inferno.” Gerard believes the other forgotten circles are Carpet Town and the Ramada Inn.
“Look, if all else fails, I can always sing almost any Emily Dickinson poem to ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ ” I smile and flutter my eyelashes.
“You know so much about literature,” twinkles Gerard out of one eye. He grabs me for a fast tango about the room, the citrusy beard of him against my face. The tango isn’t quite right for “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” which I am now singing, country-western style, but we pretend not to notice.
“Yeah, I know,” I sigh. “Aren’t I devastating?”
Georgie’s first day of school is tomorrow. She needs cheering up so I drive us downtown to Children’s Clothes so that she can pick out a dress to wear. The store is small and the three saleswomen are all sisters, widows with different last names. The rods against the walls are loaded with dresses.
Mrs. Hazelstein knows Georgianne. “Well, Georgianne. Looking for something to wear to school tomorrow? I’ve got just the ticket. In fact, I’ve got many tickets.” Mrs. Hazelstein winks at me, and George follows her, silent, obedient, over to the size sixes, which, for some reason, are hanging from the highest, not the lowest, rod on the wall. Georgie looks up at the dresses, head dumped back, mouth hung flaccidly ajar like a kid in the first row of a movie theater.
Mrs. Hazelstein pushes clear the size eights and size fives and proceeds to glide each size six, one by one, slowly from left to right across the rod so that Georgie can view them.
“Oh, now here’s a nice one,” she says and lifts a very adult-looking purple knit dress down off the rack, holding it in front of George.
“Ya like that, George?” I ask dubiously.
George steps back, suddenly afraid of Mrs. Hazelstein. She hides behind my legs and slips a hand inside the rear pocket of my jeans. “I dunno,” she says softly.
Mrs. Hazelstein looks at me for advice. I have none. “Perhaps that’s a little warm for September, anyway. Tell me, Georgianne, if you see something you like.” Mrs. Hazelstein continues the slow sliding parade across the rod.
“That one,” whispers Georgie, finger in her mouth.
“Did she say something?” Mrs. Hazelstein asks me.
“Which one, honey?”
“That one,” she points. “The one with the babies.”
“This one?” Mrs. Hazelstein takes down a cotton dress printed all over with little peach-colored babies, their heads haloed in bonnets.
Georgie is entranced. She tries it on in the dressing room, comes out to get buttoned and tied, and swirls around shyly in front of the three-way mirror. It’s a hideous mud of pinks, blues, and yellows. Something’s crooked with the collar. George, however, is smiling, touching the little babies on her dress.
“Are you sure now? You’re the one that’s going to have to wear it.” My mother: That is what my mother always said to me.
“Yup.”
Mrs. Hazelstein shrugs.
We put it on my charge account there, and Georgie wears it home, her old shirt and jeans in a plastic Children’s Clothes bag that draws shut with a string. She fastens her seat belt carefully and continues staring at her dress.
When we get home she takes the dress off, lays it carefully on her bed, looks at it awhile, and then takes a Mr. Bubble bath. “Don’t forget your ears!” I call and then go into the kitchen to fry chops, boil potatoes, make a salad. Ten minutes later, however, there is a howling. “Georgie?” I call and dash to the bathroom, push open the door. Not since my husband left have we ever really latched it.
Georgie is sitting in the tub amidst quickly dissipating suds. She has lather on her face, her eyes squinted shut, and is blowing her nose into a washcloth, but stops and begins to wail as giant soap bubbles bloom forth from her nostrils. I grab a clean towel and wipe soap off her face. “What’s going on here? Didja get soap in your nose?”
Georgie nods. She holds up a little soap chunk she has broken off the bar. She is crying. “I put it up my nose,” she sobs. “I wanted to be all clean for tomorrow for school and now it won’t come out.”
“A friend of mine put soap bits up her nose last night,” the teacher told her ten o’clock class. “So I didn’t get a chance to memorize your names. I know some of you have these reversible jobs like James Russell or Jay Kim, so you’re going to have to help me out a bit here, okay?”
My husband was a lawyer. I met him at the firm I worked for in New York, right after I dropped out of grad school. I got married, not because I’d met Mr. Right, but simply because I felt like getting married. That was also back in the days when I would shave one leg and not the other, just to see what would happen. But I had, I thought, figured it out. People didn’t get married because they had found someone. It wasn’t a treasure hunt. It was more like musical chairs: Wherever you were when the music of being single stopped, that’s where you sat. I was twenty-six when the notes started winding down and going minor. A dark loneliness, in a raincoat and fedora, scuffed in instead. Or maybe I was just tired of saying I was twenty-six years old and having it sound like “I am a transsexual.” Also, two different people in the office had asked me if I was married. When I said no, they acted very surprised. To me it was a preposterous question, like grown-ups at a wedding, trying to be funny and asking the fl
ower girl if her husband’s in town. But these people were serious. They asked me if I’d ever been married. I had, they said, some sort of married look. The thought burrowed in me like a fever tick: a married look. When I met my husband, the old musical-chair music had already begun to skitter to a halt. I clutched and sat. He was new at the firm and liked me because I typed his briefs faster than anyone. (“Yeah, I’ll bet you did,” says Eleanor, still.) After work he and I would head out for drinks. He knew a lot about food, fish, planets—he was an information fetishist, and I was impressed. He knew that a pound of a certain smoked fish in Iceland was the equivalent in benzopyrene to four thousand cigarettes. He was the first person I’d ever heard pronounce Reykjavik out loud. He knew that human beings never dream smells. Later, of course, I discovered the dust bunnies under the bed of his soul: He liked to do weird things with cameras; he could never say anything sweet or romantic; his heart was frozen as a winter pipe—it was no wonder he knew so much about Iceland. By the end of our marriage I was sitting in our house in outer suburbia, wondering, Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said Fuck it and given up. It doesn’t go anywhere special, it’s just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much. Three days after my husband walked out of the house, his rented Mazda veered off into a wall of blasted-out rock, on his way to the airport. He’d been planning a trip to the Caribbean somewhere. I got the house in outer suburbia and an imaginary ankle-biter. Actually, once I thought we’d brewed up a real ankle-biter and when I phoned my husband at work to tell him that it looked like the rabbit had died, he’d started cursing and shouting because he thought I meant our car, our VW with the RUST IN PEACE, the POETIC LICENSE, and THE MORAL MAJORITY IS NEITHER bumper stickers. Later he took me for a drink—“a drink with milk in it,” he insisted—and spent a lot of time joking around with the waitress. This is what happens to a marriage.