by Lorrie Moore
Today is my husband’s birthday. He would have been thirty-six. I wonder what he would have looked like. I wonder if he would have been happy, if we would have been friends. I go right to Darrel’s poem. It is called “Dolphin.”
With my clicks and whistles
and 30,000 years
of history, the Iliad
and Minaoan prayers
and kisses hardened, curled
inside me like a coral reef,
it is music, the waves,
not the grinning angularity
of corners, coroners, sandwiches,
that washes, courts, and wins
me and my child’s rhymes. We
glide and scarcely touch for now,
desiring just the slick, silk share
of speed, the drink of seas,
oh love, the drink of seas.
I wonder if it’s about sex. If it’s about me. If it’s about why he’s not in love with me yet or never. Words, I think, words are all you need for love—you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting that way.
But these words—I don’t know. I circle Minaoan, which he’s spelled wrong, and write “Good!” at the top; then I turn off the light and, terrified of literature, go straight to bed.
The teacher was at her office hours in the Union, sipping coffee, staring off into space. She leaned over to get something out of her bag on the floor—a pen wrapped in a Kleenex in case it leaked. Looking up from her bag, she saw a young black woman in jeans and a red sweater, standing beside her.
“Ms. Carpenter?”
“Yes?” Benna sat up. She had never seen this woman before.
“I’m Ruby Olson. Can I bother you for a minute?”
“Sure. Have a seat.”
Ruby sat down. “This really will only be for a minute.” Ruby placed her own bag on the floor. “I’m here as a sort of emissary from the Black Women’s Equality Group.”
“Black Women’s Equality Group?”
“Yeah. BWEG.” It sounded like someone spitting out food. Ruby smiled. She was pretty. Dancing, almond eyes and good jewelry. “There’s only twelve of us, but we’re devoted.”
The teacher smiled back.
“The reason I’m here is this,” continued Ruby. “Do you know how many white women at FVCC are going out with black men?”
The teacher resisted the urge to look quickly into her coffee. She hated Fitchville. She hated this college. She hated coffee in Styrofoam cups. She could feel her cheeks burn. She took a deep breath and stared back at Ruby, stared at her with an intent to poison, wither, dismantle the eyes and jewelry. “Nohowmany,” she said, flat as medicine.
“Six,” said Ruby. “Do you know how many white men are going out with black women?”
“What is this, a quiz?”
“Zero. It just doesn’t happen. With white women taking virtually eighty percent of the black men on this campus, and white men just plain not interested in anything but a white girl, we black women are stranded.”
The two women glared at each other.
“Maybe your complaint should be with the black men,” said the teacher. “Or with the white men. Maybe you shouldn’t be taking this out on other women.”
Ruby shifted in her seat impatiently, then shouldered her bag as if to leave. “Sociologically it’s complex. Look, Ms. Carpenter, you’re a cool teacher. I’ve heard you are. I just thought I’d come to you with this. My basic point is that we women have to stick together.”
“And that,” announced the teacher, as Ruby stood up to go, “would be exactly my point as well.”
“Ruby Olson’s right,” says Eleanor.
“Oh great,” I say. “I’ll stop seeing Darrel because he’s black.” Perhaps everyone, when you got right down to it, was a racist.
“I’m not saying that,” says Eleanor. She inhales and blows smoke out through her nose. “I’m just saying think of the black women on this campus, that’s all. All twelve of them. I mean, this town is an Aryan breeding ground. Think of their situation.”
“But what about my situation?”
“Kill two birds with one stone. Dating a student, Benna, you’re probably the talk of dozens of impromptu department meetings held in the restrooms of both sexes.”
“You mean, kill one bird with two stones.” Everything conspires. Everything feels dizzy to me now. My voice has shrunk to a gaspy whisper. “Besides,” I say, helplessly. “Darrel’s way too old for Ruby Olson.”
“Look, you know how awful everyone is here. You should just watch yourself. The tenured shall inherit the earth. And even the crummy courses you’re teaching.”
“What should I do?”
“Actually,” says Eleanor, walking over to where I’m seated and putting her hand on my shoulder. This is what I need. This is what I have her do. “I’m not sure.”
· · ·
I’m in bed with Darrel. On a cold night a bed is a warm recoil, it is a pearly place, like heaven.
I am average in love. I say things like “I love you” and “I need you I really do.” I say them too quickly, like an asshole.
I don’t tell Darrel about things Ruby, Eleanor, or George have said. I don’t want to discourage him. I want us to figure things out for ourselves. We have become nocturnal animals. We coo wise things out into the night like owls.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I say in the dark. We can’t see each other. He doesn’t want to hold me. I wonder if I should get a bunk bed, a bed full of bunk—why not: The truth never sets you free.
Darrel is stalled. Stalled out and away from me, paces away from words, from love, from love words. God, only someone with no imagination would get stalled out there.
“I don’t know,” he whispers. “Benna, sometimes I just don’t feel capable of love—not the kind you’re talking about and want.”
“Oh, great,” I say. “That’s just what I need.” I know these kinds of men. They’re afraid you want to marry them or in some other way own them so that you can then provide them with a running commentary about the way their false and sniveling characters might be improved. They have a tendency to look at your hips in disgust, to take off through traffic without looking sideways.
“Benna. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what you need from me, but I feel numb, I’ve felt numb for years.”
“You’re numb? Don’t tell me you’re numb when I’m lying here falling in love with you and jeopardizing my job to boot.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“Well, then, don’t be numb.” I lie there, jiggling my legs. “Don’t think I couldn’t be numb too if I didn’t work so damn hard not to be. Numbness! That’s the easiest thing in the world. You don’t think I could be numb if I wanted to be?”
“No, actually, I don’t,” Darrel says slowly.
My voice is a whispered shriek. “Numb? You want numb? I’ll give you numb,” and I cross my arms tightly, cross my legs, throw my head violently back into the pillow, squeeze shut my eyes, fold in my lips, and burst into tears.
“How are you doing these days, Gerard?”
“I’m okay. I’m being Don José and getting a lot of shit for my high notes. The performance is December seventh.”
“Carpet Town going okay?”
“Hmmmm?”
I think he has a hangover. He’s perspiring and one eye is wandering. I smile. “Carpet Town? Remember that place you work? That’s going fine?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “That’s a breeze compared to the rest of my life.”
“They shoot breezes, don’t they?” quips Eleanor. She’s in a weird mood today. She’s dressed in a strange feathered hat and purple parachute pants. She feels like chatting; neither of us is concentrating. I’m clothed in brown and a sort of army green, the idea being camouflage. When your life’s a mess, I say, wear neutral
colors. At either end of your life—infancy and old age—you can get away with reds and turquoises, but when you’re navigating the tumult in between, it’s best to blend into the landscape. Walking down a country road, for instance, you are more likely, if hit by a manure truck, to be lost, shoveled, scooped up without a trace, which would be the idea, which would be the essential point, which would be the best thing for everyone.
“Eleanor, you have to be more selective about your vices. You can’t be overbearing, self-righteous, dress like a maniac, and tell bad jokes. That’s being a hog. That’s like grabbing up all the best sections of the Times.”
“I’ll try to control myself,” she says. “Don’t you think they should paint this lounge a decidedly different shade of orange? And why don’t you come over for dinner sometime next week.”
“Sure,” I say. “Just let me know.”
“Great,” she says. “See you. I’m off to go aerobe.”
Why is Darrel numb? Why is Gerard drinking? What is the essential difference between men and women?—somehow I feel the answer to the first two, to almost all problems, lies there in the last, though I have no answer. Is there really a difference at all? And if there is, what should we do about it? Limit your answer to one page. When I was seven, Billy Adelsen screamed at me from the field across the street, “Boys have wieners, girls have popos.” No one I’ve met since has had it quite so clearly worked out and understood. Billy, however, as with all confident and shameless proclaimers of truth, was punished. His mother, who had been visiting my mother, heard his shouts through the screens of our porch and came charging out down our front lawn, off into the field, through which Billy had turned and fled. When she caught up with him, she dragged him by the ear as he howled the one hundred yards home. I’ve never heard the word popo since, though sometimes, still, I think about it. My mother was a nurse-social worker and always used the correct terms for things, like vulva or B.M., names that sounded like foreign cars. When I’d been home sick from school and needed a written excuse from her, she would write mortifying things like “Benna had loose bowels” instead of “She wasn’t feeling well,” which is what the other kids’ mothers wrote. Unlike Billy’s mom, she never punished us but only pretended she didn’t understand when we used another more informal terminology. “Bupper? I don’t even know what you’re saying. These are your buttocks.” My father didn’t care what we said. He was an underpaid, underworked fireman, a victim of downward social mobility at a time when for most Americans that was an impossibility. He had grown up in a large house in Philadelphia and was now raising his children in a trailer with additions: a porch and a family room. “Leave the kids alone, Jan,” he’d say. “You’re not letting them be kids.” This, I had to gather, was the difference between men and women.
There were other differences, too. Once I asked my mother what a Communist was. This was in 1957. “It’s a person who wants to help poor people,” she said, and then quickly turned her back and started washing dishes. I stared at her apron and thought about this. A week later I asked my father the same question. He scowled, sat me down at the family-room card table, and set up an exhibit using two cookies. “Here, Benna,” he said. “This cookie’s yours.” He placed it in front of me. “And this cookie’s mine.” He placed the other in front of himself. “An American says what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours, right? A Communist, though,” and my father gazed intently at me to make sure I was paying attention. I was hungry. I was thinking about the cookie. “A Communist says, ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine,’ ” and at that he snatched up both my cookie and his and shoved them in his mouth and chewed. I didn’t cry out, though I wanted to. Something was wrong. Maybe only lady Communists helped poor people. Men and women were different. I understood that. Men drove the station wagon too fast, and women said things like “Slow down, Nick. Your gonads are taking over.” Men were also more likely to complain about the cooking, and women were more likely to serve skimpy TV dinners in revenge—for three whole weeks or until the apology, whichever came first.
These were clear.
But these were little things and long ago. As I got older, I grew even more confused.
· · ·
The eight o’clock class was doing a group sestina. When in doubt, Eleanor always said, do a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen by the students themselves: arm-hair, Spam, motorcycle, plié, lounge, crash-helmet. The teacher wrote them on the board. The in-class assignment involved writing on a sheet of paper one line with the appropriate end-word and then passing it to the left. By the end of the period they would have twenty sestinas and everyone would have contributed. The members of the class were having a good time. The teacher could hear their giggles and their scribbling. It was a party game. It was ludicrous. It was the only way she knew how to teach.
The ten o’clock class was doing a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen and written on the board by the students themselves: paste, haste, drinking, typing, erasing, and mame, spelled like the Broadway musical. “What is this?” howled the teacher, pointing at the last. “To mame? Is that ‘to coax the husk right off of the corn’?” And for a moment she burst, frighteningly, into song. “You’ve got to learn how to spell,” she said finally, “or it will make me hysterical.”
The teacher took a walk before her afternoon class. Near the campus were several old houses rented by some of FVCC’s full-time students and from them blared radio jabber and stereo music. That is the difference between the young and the not-so-young, she thought. The young keep their windows open so that the world can fly in and out. By the time you hit your thirties, you’re less hospitable; you start closing up the windows. You’ve had enough of the world; you have, you think, everything you need for the wintry rest of life. You can’t let anything else in, for you will never understand it. And the nightmare, of course, is that as you slowly start shuttering up your house, you turn and suddenly see, with a gasp, that you are the only thing in it.
· · ·
The two o’clock class was doing a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen: race, white, erotics, lost, need, love, leave. The teacher wrote them on the board, stretched them out in a long horizontal list.
“We don’t get to choose our own?” asked a student named Herb.
“You’ve got seven words there,” said a black student named Darrel, who always sat in the back by the window.
The teacher had to erase one. She hesitated, looked along the list, considering, putting her hands on her hips, a gesture of nonplussed authority. Then she reached over and erased love, but changed her mind again and wrote it back in. Then she walked over and erased white.
The students began writing the first line of a sestina.
The teacher looked out the window. It was too warm for November. They were having a spell of Indian summer. Outside in the sun there were dogs. A male dog had just hopped atop a female dog, piggyback. The female dog just stood there patiently, looking alternately glassy, bored, embarrassed. The teacher turned away. She chewed on a cuticle. “Men are outrageous,” she said to herself.
There is a thread dangling from the crotch of my jeans. I grab it tightly and yank it to snap it free.
“What on earth are you doing?” says Eleanor.
“This is my penis envy,” I say, holding up the thread.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” she says.
“Who’ve you been hanging around?” I construct an exaggerated wink.
Eleanor has made a wonderful fettuccine carbonara. We sit in the dining room of the half-of-a-house she rents. We chat amiably and, amazingly enough, manage not to bring up the subject of our lovers (it’s as if our sex lives have embarrassed us somehow, dragged us through indignities) until just before dessert.
“Trouble in Newton-land,” says Eleanor. Newton is the biochemist she’s been seeing for over a year now. “He’s having an affair with someone. He says he feels rejuvenated with her.”
“Oh, Christ. What is she, another biochemist?”
“No,” sighs Eleanor, stacking up dishes for the kitchen. “She works for AT&T.”
Sympathy is important at a time like this. “God,” I finally say. “I’m so glad I have MCI.” And then I take out a pen and a scratch pad from my purse and draw her a picture of a woman with large breasts and a t-shirt that reads AT&T: YOU BROKE US UP, NOW WE BREAK YOU UP. One needs to be a girl about these things. Graduate school can knock the girl out of you, and, really, sometimes you just need to be a girl.
Eleanor smiles restlessly. She says she knows we’re both doomed at FVCC. She wants to pack it all in and travel for a year. She has saved money. She’s thinking of Italy.
“Do it,” I say. I tell her I’m planning a trip to the Caribbean with Georgianne. I realize, after I’ve said it, that it sounds tacky and meager, not the same as Italy at all.
For dessert Eleanor serves cherries jubilee flambé. I watch the blue flame dance around the ice cream, quick and berserk. When it’s out and the ice cream’s melting, I dig in.
Eleanor watches me and smiles. She holds up one sticky cherry between two fingers. “No matter how many you eat, Benna,” she says, “you’ll never get it back.”
I wash dishes, she dries.
I need an annual check-up. I decide to go to a new gynecologist Eleanor has recommended. Eleanor is a woman who faints at the sight of a Q-Tip; she wouldn’t steer me wrong. “Don’t go to the clinic, whatever you do,” she said. “Last time I was there they told me I had a crook in my vagina and when I said, ‘Well, get him out, for godsakes,’ they didn’t even laugh.”
In the waiting room I read Good Housekeeping along with two other women. Occasionally we all glance up furtively from our magazines, smile, then look back down. An elderly woman comes into the waiting room and sits on the sofa next to me. “Is that you on the cover?”