Anagrams

by Lorrie Moore

  Because the teacher didn’t have an official office, she had to have what she euphemistically called “office hours” in the Student Union Snack Bar on Thursdays from two to four. On this particular Thursday she trudged into the Union with way too much stuff, books crammed into bag and briefcase, department memos she had yet to read clutched with haphazard violence in one fist. She spotted an empty table in the back—not the one she usually liked, but close—and she trudged over and unloaded, books and papers on the table, briefcase on the floor. She put her rumpled gray blazer on the back of one chair, then got in the snack bar line, paid forty cents for a Styrofoam cup of coffee, grabbed some plastic half & halfs for her smarting, tripish stomach, and then wended her way back to the table. Sitting was a relief. She let the steam from the coffee float up and into the itchy, chalky corners of her eyes. She breathed. It felt good. She gingerly slurped her coffee and stared out the window for a little while at the small hill which slid gently from the Union’s outer wall toward a stream at the bottom. There was an asphalt promenade built on either bank, which gave the stream a captive look, as if without the walks, someone had thought it would leap maniacally outward, take off through campus like a mad motorcyclist. Paths and roads always followed water—rivers, shorelines—but this promenade, thought the teacher, seemed so ugly, so senselessly competitive with nature. And because the walk took all the bends of the river, it was never the fastest way to get anywhere. It was usually frequented by students and teachers interested in a leisurely stroll. The teacher turned her attention back to her coffee and papers. She began reading through memoranda. New, more rigorous faculty review procedures, some department gatherings—both social and business, though who could really distinguish—some offers for small magazine subscriptions, and then someone was standing beside her.

  “Hi, Ms. Carpenter. Do you mind if I join you?”

  It was Darrel Erni, all laughlines and teeth, knitted hat and green fatigues.

  “Sure, have a seat,” she said, a bit scattered and harebrained, trying to clear a place, frantically making one towering pile of papers and books, which, finally, slipped, tumbled, crashed into the Styrofoam cup of coffee, milky brown spreading out, over, onto things, like a yearning but stagnant pond.

  “Oh my god, my nightmare!” howled Eleanor from three tables away, having a conference with a student but obviously not engrossed. She had caught this accident of caffeine and cream and paper and was clearly enjoying it. The teacher crossed her eyes, shook her head, and began mopping things up with napkins yanked from the dispenser on the table. Darrel, like Eleanor, was brimming with harmless bemusement, giving him a power over the situation, which the teacher couldn’t help but resent. He pulled over a chair and sat down. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked, some zany displaced hostess with soggy napkins.

  Darrel placed a full Styrofoam cup on the table. “I already have one, thanks,” he smiled.

  The teacher stared at his cup for a second. “Right,” she said.

  The teacher already knew that one student of hers was a Vietnam vet. He was in her ten o’clock class, a quiet blond named Robert, whom she would probably never get to know. He had written a synopsis of his life on the index card, along with the picture of his soul (a striped bowl) and his favorite poet (Jesus). Robert had a tendency to dash out of class the minute it was over, alone, like a man who has to go to the bathroom.

  She hadn’t known it about Darrel, though he, too, had been in the war. “A million years ago,” he said. They spoke about it carefully and the teacher hoped he would not tell her stories about ears and eyes—about pendants made from the shriveled leather of ears, how in the rain they changed from dried fruit to soggy recognizable flesh, how gouged eyes were placed on the foreheads of the dead, about how there were cash prizes. Anemically, she would have to muster that old horror and alongside it, another horror would not require mustering at all—the very familiarity of the tale, the survivor’s tale edged always with other survivors’ tales who got there first and told. Told first. Those who don’t get there first, before the books and poems and television shows, had stories no one ever really heard. Please not the eyes and ears, I won’t listen, I won’t hear, thought the teacher to herself, and shame leaped in like a commercial. This is a flaw in my character, she would think to herself later. This is what is known as peacetime.

  But he didn’t tell her about eyes and ears. He told her a long, complicated story about an officers’ party in Saigon, where he’d hurled a bottle of cognac against the wall and stomped out imperially. And though she didn’t catch exactly why he’d done it, she could imagine this tall, strong man, capable of such astonishing gestures, such huge moments, such moral angers. He also told her he wanted to be a dentist.

  “A dentist,” she repeated dumbly, and her tongue fished back into her molars for crumbs, for the rot-nuggets of cavities.

  “Probably an orthodontist.” He grinned. He had perfect teeth. As a kid, growing up in a trailer in Tomaston, she had nightly pressed her front teeth hard against the heel of her hand, to push them back: orthodontia for the poor and trailered.

  “Braces,” she said.

  “Yeah,” and he smiled like a king. He said he’d been doing mostly odd jobs for years, that he’d recently divorced.

  “Me, too,” said the teacher. “Actually, uh, my husband died several years ago.” A sign by the window said PLEASE KEEP WI DOWS CLOSED.

  “I know. I heard.”

  “Huh?”

  “Things get said. Students talking about the teachers and all.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” said the teacher.

  The black Vietnam vet student Darrel who wanted to be a dentist smiled again and said how about dinner sometime. The teacher’s office hours were almost over, he noted, and they still hadn’t discussed poetry very much. The teacher felt tense and moronic and smiled and said, “All right.” What did she know about poetry, about dinner, all her smarts tiny and jammed in the back of her mouth like a tooth. Impacted as wisdom. “Why not.”

  “I think he’s cute.”

  Gerard doesn’t say anything.

  “I guess I’ll have dinner with him. What do you think?”

  Gerard still doesn’t say anything, doesn’t give me even a look. He has a hangover, gulps orange juice like a dying plant. He also has a cold, and has pulled the hood of his sweat shirt up over his head and tied it. “You look like the Little League version of The Seventh Seal,” I say. “How was the gig last night?” I was part of the first generation to grow up on television. I’ve learned how to change channels, switch stations, search through the snow for a new program.

  “The Ramada,” Gerard says. “Rough place.”

  “Gerard, are you okay?”

  “Last night,” he says, “I got two requests from people moving through the salad bar: the theme from Chariots of Fire and the theme from Rocky. Plus, the Ramada has a chimpanzee tune their piano. It breaks my heart.”

  “Why don’t you quit that place, Gerard? You don’t really need the money that badly, do you?”

  With two fingers he picks up a spoon by its middle and twiddles it up and down, a fast, stainless seesaw. “You know when I first wanted to be a professional musician?”

  “When the fifteen-year-old moss in your navel started talking back.”

  Gerard scowls, it isn’t funny. I trust his assessments of my jokes. When his eyebrows come together in a single quick caterpillar, I know it’s dumb. When he falls helplessly back against the booth, says “Christ, Benna,” and laughs out loud with a sort of pain, I know it’s still dumb. But I use it in class.

  “It was when I first met this aging hippie on the beach. I was just out of the ninth grade and had nothing to do. He was ten years out of graduate school and had nothing to do. His name was Buff. I went back with him to this old ramshackle beach house with creaky plank floors all covered with orange peels and sand. He had an old Steinway upright and he sat down and played and I thought he was God, man, I
did. He could do everything from Kabalevsky to “Moon River.” I never saw him after that. I went home and convinced my mother to rent a piano. We were the only ones in our building with a piano. I even tried to change my name to Buff, but it didn’t catch on. Everyone at the school still kept calling me Gerard.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Am I boring you?”

  “No.”

  “At any rate, the point is, well, if you promise not to laugh …”

  “I promise,” I say, planning a guffaw for no matter what he says. I am, essentially, a fourteen-year-old.

  “I want to sing opera. I’m trying to figure out how I can swing it.”

  The guffaw doesn’t materialize. I just stare at him, the anxious hope of his cheek and eye muscles. I see his vision switch eyes, one eye now going off slightly to one side.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Gerard, I think, does have a nice tenor voice, but so does my father. So does my Uncle Bob.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “It’s not that, Gerard. It’s just that, well, you’re thirty-three years old.”

  “No,” he smiles. “You’re thirty-three years old. I’m thirty-two.” He has a face like a parking meter.

  I slump, sigh loudly, look at the table, play with my spoon. “Gerard,” I say, syllables deliberate, tidy as needlepoint. “We should talk about this. Want to have dinner tonight?”

  I do some reading at the library and then, noticing it’s almost time for George to be let out of school, dash off to pick up a few groceries and get home before she does. When I get in, however, she is already home sprawled out on the living-room sofa, her babies dress on again, wrinkled and untied. “George, my goodness, how come you’re home so early?”

  “I don’t feel so good,” she says.

  “You don’t feel very well?” I ask, pedagogy in me like a burglar. “What’s wrong, honey? Is it your stomach?” I put my things down on the piano bench and go sit next to her, stroke her hair. She is flushed red and her hair is in damp strings against her temples. I press my wrist to her forehead and can feel she is hot.

  “Do I have a temperature?” she asks.

  “Yup,” and though she is big and six-and-a-half already, I pick her up, legs dangling, lug her upstairs to her room, to her white room splotched pink with animals and dolls. I help her take off her dress, then tuck her into bed with just her slip on. I pull the shades. I sit on the bed’s edge, in the dark, rosy lap of the afternoon. I hold her hand.

  “Was school okay? Was it the nurse that sent you home?”

  George nods. “She had to fill out a form first. Then the nurse’s aide drove me.” Her fingers knead the satin edge of the blanket. “Mom,” she whispers. “What was my father’s name?”

  I’m always startled when she asks about him. Once she asked me where he went after I’d “laid him off and he went and got killed.” I was stunned at her phrasing and simply said, “He went to Heaven,” though I’ve never believed it for a minute.

  “What do you mean? His name was Mr. Carpenter.”

  “No, but what was his first name?”

  And here I hesitate. She has a fever. She shouldn’t ask about these things, she shouldn’t think, she should sleep. I pull the quilt up over her. “I’ve invited Gerard over for dinner tonight. But I’ll bring you up some of what we’ve had, and I’ll make sure he stands in the doorway and says hi.” George has always liked Gerard. “In the meantime, Miss Sickie, you get some rest.”

  “But what was his name?” she whimpers. Sleep is pulling on her face.

  I pause for a long time. “George. It was George,” I say.

  “George Carpenter? Like me?”

  “Yes,” I say, and it makes me sad, though I can see her smile a little, seeming to find something nice in this news, this new news. The sing-song of an ambulance on the street hollers and fades. I sit there and say nothing. I watch George. I watch George’s eyes close.

  I make a special kind of macaroni and cheese. It has three kinds of cheese and doesn’t turn out quite right, but Gerard doesn’t seem to mind, although he doesn’t want seconds. I give him some more anyway. He is talking about amateur competitions at the Met; applications to voice programs; the voice teacher he has now, a guy named Gil who has one arm; trying to sing Loggins and Messina at the Holiday Inn while the football game on the TV over the bar drowns him out. I try to listen fairly. I don’t want necessarily to discourage him. He says he has always loved Verdi and Puccini, Buff had tempted him astray, he needs to be in touch with serious music. “At least what you’re doing,” he says, “has something to do with what you’re serious about, something to do with poetry.”

  My mouth is full of macaroni. I try not to choke. “What I’m doing,” I say between swallows, “has very little to do with poetry.” And the remark, the truth of it, sits there in front of me, shivering, like a funny old Italian man with no clothes, like a tepid macaroni from my lips.

  “Gerard and I have decided to go out dancing for an hour or so,” I whisper to Georgianne. I have brought her juice and a small cup of pasta and placed them on the night table without turning on the light. She is mumbling something in her sleep. She turns toward me, eyes closed, and puts her face against my hand. I brush her dark hair off her forehead. She is not as feverish as before. “Mrs. Kimball is downstairs if you need anything. I’ll give you more aspirin when I get back.” Mrs. Kimball does crossword puzzles, eats Kraft caramels, and wears tangelo-colored pantsuits. She has a constant crinkle about her, perhaps from the Dacron or the caramel wrappers. She has a terrific red mouth, a huge crocket of a nose, and one very serious strawberry mole. She loves my daughter. She adores her.

  Moths hang on the screen like bats. George has begun snoring, a small rattly whistle in one nostril. I kiss her and get up quietly, like someone leaving church.

  I first met Gerard three years ago at the movies, a bad science-fiction thing about an electric guitar that takes over the universe. I was there with my friend Verrie, who viewed the whole thing as a Hitler metaphor, and has since gone to Palo Alto to teach. Gerard was there with his friend Maple. They sat in front of us. Verrie and Maple knew each other from dance class. Verrie was stunning—tall, blonde, Plantagenet-looking—and so was Maple, though he was male and fond of earrings and Verrie was neither. Apparently they both had the same color leotard in class, some weird sort of crimson, and often they stood next to one another at the barre, cracking jokes and knees. They looked illegal together. Gerard and I were necessarily darker and scruffier than they, and had a certain small but immediate understanding of each other which came simply from that fact.

  After the movie ended, while we were standing to go and Maple and Verrie were oh-helloing it, Gerard and I introduced ourselves. “Can you believe how much alike these two look alike?” asked Gerard, under his breath.

  I’ve always been drawn to people who misspeak. I consider it a sign of hidden depths, like pregnancy or alcoholism.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it,” I said. Gerard kept looking at Verrie. I think he was attracted to her. He leaned against the back of a theater seat and for a long moment, while I was talking about when the electric guitar had taken over the army, he regarded her legs. I decided he was a jerk.

  Afterward we all went for drinks. We sipped whiskeys in a booth made from two church pews, in a smokey fern bar called The Smokey Fern. The place was noisy and had too few waitresses. I don’t know precisely how we got on to it—I guess we were talking about the necessity for gun-control legislation—but suddenly Gerard was wildly insisting on government tanks in the streets of New York, automatic searches and arrests of anyone and everyone in order to enforce, effectively, gun-control and curfew regulations.

  “Curfews?” I hooted. “What do you want? A city-sized version of Annette Funicello’s dormitory?”

  He ignored me. He was inexorable, generally advocating the transformation of the entire metropolitan area into a police state. Anyone with a gu
n should be shot on sight.

  “That’ll show them,” I said. Who was this guy? He was so crudely fascistic, I didn’t know whether we were to take him seriously. Perhaps it was the movie. Surely he was being ironic. Verrie looked at me and shrugged. I was speechless, though I tried to speak anyway and it came out in vehement splutters and thought bubbles as in comic books: loaded with the upper register of a typewriter’s top row. How could he presume the incorruptibility of such a state? What liberties did we enjoy that totalitarianism would subsume? He didn’t care, he said (though I saw Maple wink at me); the government was for the protection of citizens and their property and if it didn’t perform that function it didn’t do anything at all. I was aghast. What sort of property did he own?

  Maple leaned forward, smiled, put his hand on mine. “Gerard likes to try out extreme positions on people he’s just met, just to see how the words sound.”

  Verrie was quiet. She was watching me.

  Gerard shook his head. “No, I mean this. I’ve had a gun at my ass and at my head, and that should never happen in this country, no matter what has to be done to ensure it. It should never happen.”

  Maple chewed on his bottom lip and there was a morguish lull, a murderous wave arching back getting ready to break and strike, and then Gerard was quickly up, saying, “Who would like another round?” waiting for the nods, and “I would’s,” and then bounding across the room toward the bar.

  “You’ll have to excuse Gerard,” Maple said to me and Verrie, though mostly to me. He knew I was tense, inarticulate with rage. “Do you remember last winter reading about a restaurant on Fifty-ninth Street getting held up by some stockinged men with sawed-off rifles?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “I remember,” said Verrie.

  “Gerard was there. Two people had their heads blown off. Gerard was forced to strip and have sex with the woman he was with. He had a gun butt up his ass the whole time.” Maple paused. I suddenly felt sick. I looked up at the bar and could see the back of Gerard, the sweater, the patched corduroys, waiting for drinks. “The worst thing, in Gerard’s mind, was that she was the first woman he’d gone out with in years who really interested him, and afterward they couldn’t speak to each other, they were too reminded of the incident. He called her a few times, but they finally never saw one another again.”