Lorrie Moore: Anagrams

“The terror of Truro,” she says. “You’ll dazzle.” She rips off a hangnail with her teeth. “Gerard’ll rue the day.”

It’s two against one out here.

Gerard sits back down next to me on the other side. Eleanor, suspecting she’s been overheard, reaches over and pats Gerard on the thigh, tells us again about the ketchup and mustard.

Gerard isn’t smiling. He stares off at the trees. Magdalena has settled at his feet. “Looks like someone was murdered in that thing, Eleanor,” he says, pointing at the lace teddy.

I reach next to me, under the table, and clasp Gerard’s hand, in warning, in rescue. It’s two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.

“No, we’re not getting married,” I told my mother on the phone when she asked. “He’s going to California and I’m staying here.” Usually she doesn’t phone. Usually she just does things like send me notes with histrionic scrawlings that read, “Well, you know, I can’t use these,” and along with the notes she encloses coupons for Kotex or Midol.

“Well,” said my mother. “The advice I hear from my women friends nowadays is don’t get married until you’re thirty. Just take your time. Have fun gallivanting around while you’re young. Get everything out of your system.”

Gallivanting is a favorite word of my mother’s. “Mom,” I said slowly, loudly. “I’m thirty-three. What on earth do you think I’m getting out of my system?”

This seemed to stump her. “You know, Benna,” she said finally. “Not every woman thinks like you and I do. Some just want to settle down.” This yoking of mother and daughter was something she’d taken to doing of late — arbitrarily, without paying attention. “No, you and I are kind of exceptional that way.”

“Mother, he said he thought it would be hell to live with me while he was in law school. He said it already was a kind of hell. That’s what he said.”

“I was like you,” said my mother. “I was determined to be single and have fun and date lots of men. I didn’t care what anyone thought.”

· · ·

Everyone keeps asking about Magdalena. “Dog’s for sale?” they say, or “How much ya asking for the dog?” as if it’s their own special joke. Then they laugh and stay around and poke through our belongings.

The first thing to go is my ten-speed bike. It is almost new, but it’s uncomfortable and I never ride it. “How much?” asks a man in a red windbreaker who has read about our sale in the classifieds.

I look at Gerard for assistance. “Forty-five?” I say. The man nods and gets on the bike, rides it around on the sidewalk. Gerard scowls at his sneakers, walks off, circles back. “Next time,” he whispers, “ask for sixty-five.” But there isn’t a next time. The man comes back with the bike. “I’ll take it,” he says, and hands me two twenties and a five. Gerard shrugs. I look at the money. I feel sick. I don’t want it. “I don’t think I’m good at these things,” I say to Gerard. The man in red loads the bike into his Dodge Scamp, gets in and starts the ignition. “It was a good bike, but you didn’t feel comfortable with it. The guy got a great deal,” says Gerard. The Scamp has already lumbered off out of sight. Now I own no bike. “Don’t worry,” says Eleanor, putting her arm around my shoulder and leading me off toward the birch trees. “It’s like life,” and she jerks a thumb back toward Gerard. “You trade in the young spiffy one and then get yourself an old clunker and you’re much happier. The old clunker’s comfortable and never gets stolen. Look at Kip. You have the old clunkers for life.”

“Forty-five dollars,” I say and hold the money up in front of my face like a Spanish fan.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” says Eleanor. There is now something of a small crowd gathering by Eleanor’s box of halter tops, by Gerard’s records, by my plants. Not the plants, I say to myself. I’m not sure I should be selling the plants. They are living things, even more so than Eleanor’s halter tops.

Eleanor is being a saleswoman by the birches. She indicates the black skirt. “This is a Liz Claiborne,” she says to a woman who may or may not be interested. “Do you know who she is?”

“No,” says the woman, annoyed, and she moves off toward the jazz records.

“We’ll take the plants,” says a teenaged girl with her boyfriend. “How much?”

There’s a small ficus tree and the Chinese evergreen. “Eight dollars,” I say, picking a number out of the air. The sick feeling overtakes me again. The Chinese evergreen is looking at me in disbelief, betrayed. The couple scrounge up eight dollars, give it to me, and then take the plants in their arms, like kindly rescuers of children.

“Thanks,” they say.

The branches of the ficus tree bob farewell, but the Chinese evergreen screeches, “You’re not fit to be a plant mother!” or something like that all the way out to the couple’s car. I put the eight dollars in my cup. I’m wondering how far you could go with this yard sale stuff. “Sure,” you might say to perfect strangers. “Take the dog, take the boyfriend, there’s a special on mothers and fingers, two-for-one.” If all you wanted to do was to fill up the cash cup, you might get carried away. A nail paring or a baby, they might all have little masking-tape price tags. It could take over you, like alcoholism or a religion. “I’m upset,” I say to Gerard, who has just sold some records and is gleefully putting cash in his cup.

“What’s the matter?” Again I’ve unsweetened his happiness, gotten in the way, I seem to do that.

“I sold my plants. I feel sick.”

He puts one arm around my waist. “It’s money. You could use some.”

“Gerard,” I say. “Let’s run off to New Hampshire and wear nothing but sleeping bags. We’ll be in-tents.”

“Ben-na,” he warns. He takes his arm away.

“We had a good life here, right? So we ate a lot of beans and rice.”

“Take your eight dollars, Benna. Buy yourself a steak.”

“I know,” I say. “We could open a lemonade stand!” The evergreen still shrieks in the distance like a bird. In the birch trees the stain on Eleanor’s teddy is some kind of organic spin art, a flower or target; a menstrual eye bearing down on me.

I know what will happen: He will promise to write every other day but when it turns out to be once a week he will promise to write once a week, and when it becomes once a month and even that’s a postcard, he’ll get on the phone and say, “Benna, I promise you, once a month I’ll write.” He will start saying false, lawyerly things like “You know, I’m extremely busy” and “I’m doing my best.” He will be the first to bring up the expense of long distance calls. Words like res ipsa loquitur and ill behooves will suddenly appear on his tongue like carbuncles. He will talk about what “some other people said,” and what he and “some other people did,” and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are.

“Sure, I’ll take a check,” Eleanor is saying. “Are you kidding?” Miraculously, someone is buying Thoroughly Modern Millie . A man with a swollen belly and a checkbook but no shirt. The hair on his chest is like Gerard’s: a land very different from his face, something exotic and borrowed, as if for Halloween. He picks up the wine decanter. It’s ugly, a hopeful gift, expensive and wrong, from my lonely and overweight brother. “You can have it for a dollar,” I say. Once I found a fairly new book of poems in a used bookstore, and on the inside cover someone had written, “For Sandra, the only woman I’ve ever loved.” I blushed. I blushed for the bitch Sandra. Betrayals, even your own, can take you by surprise. You find yourself capable of things.