Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

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 schlock.” 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.