Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“Christ, Gerard. You don’t know anything about it.” Gerard has done this before, seemed to imply that my husband must have driven his car deliberately into the Fallen Rock Zone. I spin the coffee cup around on the saucer. “You never met him, even. I don’t know why you think you know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I am smart.”

“You’re smart. That’s rich.” The words hover in the air like helicopters. In graduate school Eleanor and I used to say, “If we’re so smart, how come we’re not rich?” Then I got the house in outer suburbia, and I sat in it and wondered, “If I’m so rich, how come I’m not smart?” There’s more and more tension between me and Gerard these days. I keep wishing it would go away. I try to wipe out the last five minutes in my mind. I try to switch eyes.

“Benna. Look. I’m sorry.” Gerard suddenly feels bad. He gets up, comes around next to me on my side of the table. He puts his arms around me.

“Gerard,” I say quietly, pulling away. “Believe me. You just don’t know.”

Gerard picks up a lock of my hair, brings it straight up toward the ceiling, then lets it drop. “Let’s go,” he says.

· · ·

“Okay, now I hope all of you have purchased or acquired by some legal and ethical means the poetry anthology for this course. It’s in the campus store under English 210.” Because the book seemed sexist to her, the teacher sometimes referred to it as “The Ralph and Norton Anthology” and supplemented it with handouts. A young woman in a pink cardigan raised her hand.

“Yes?” the teacher asked hesitantly, afraid of contradictions, reluctance, insubordination.

“I looked yesterday and it wasn’t there. So I asked somebody working in the store and they showed me. It’s under English 120, not 210.”

“Oh, really,” said the teacher. Was the world dyslexic or was it trying to demote her. “Well, you’ve all heard what … what is your name?”

“Sharon Humphrey.”

“What Sharon has said and should consider yourselves edified or redirected or born again or whatever. Now—”

“The course itself is still 210, though, right?” interrupted the boy sitting closest to her. “Cuz I need a 200-level.”

“Yes, no matter what the store has done to us, we are still what we are.” The teacher sounded disheartened.

“How was school, honey?” I call to George when I hear her push open the front door. I am stirring cookie batter, trying to get the shortening to blend with the brown sugar and flour, single-handedly, I’m sure, defying several important scientific laws.

Unlike last year I will be home before her every day now, her school day running from eight-fifteen to three-thirty. Last year she went to kindergarten in the morning, then stayed at Mrs. Kimball’s down the street in the afternoon. Mrs. Kimball showed George how to draw pictures of farms and lighthouses and let George watch news on the TV all day.

“Rick Riley’s in my class. He thinks he’s so great.”

In my first-grade class, too, I remember, there had been a Riley.

“Why does he think he’s so great?” I ask, hoping to encourage the rationalization of irrational responses — you should learn these things early in life.

“Feats me,” she says, something she has taken to saying.

“George, it’s ‘beats me,’ not ‘feats me.’ ”

“Beats me?”

· · ·

“Yeah. How do you like your teacher, Mrs. Whatsername?”

“Mrs. Turniphead.” George throws her sweater and pencil case on the kitchen table. She is wearing her babies dress.

“Geeze, George, you’re beginning to sound like one of my students. Quick, say: ‘That’s dumb, why do we have to do that?’ ”

“That’s dumb,” she says. “Why do we have to do that?”

“Very good,” I say, still stirring cookie dough, arm aching. “Now you can go to college.”

The teacher shuffled through stacks of papers, called the roll, then distributed Xeroxed copies of “The Song of Solomon.” “This is love poetry of the highest order: ‘The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.’ It’s not in the anthology and pre-dates by many, many—”

“How many?” There was always one smartass, in the back playing with the window-shade pull.

“—many years the poems that are. In the anthology.” The teacher glanced apprehensively at the boy in the back by the window. His name was Steven. His soul was a ghost with a mustache. His favorite poet was Pink Floyd. “You can read this religiously, if you want, as a metaphor for the church or whatever, but that’s really more for institutional purposes, like those huge jars of mayonnaise you see in cafeterias.” She glanced at her notes. “As with all love poems, this is also a despair poem. I like to read it as the most powerful articulation available of a hormone-induced consciousness. How many people have read this before?”

One person raised his hand.

“How many people have read the Bible?”

The same person raised his hand, plus Sharon in pink again.

“Only two?” The teacher murmured to herself, weighing various diatribes. “Well, let’s at least read this. Would someone like to volunteer his or her voice?”

The boy in the front volunteered, stumbling through some of the lines because some of the photocopying was faint or smeared illegibly. At the line “I am a Rose of Sharon” someone nudged Sharon-in-pink and there were a few giggles. Christ, thought the teacher. I’m teaching congenital morons and savages.

“They haven’t read the Bible,” I say later to Gerard at breakfast at Hank’s. Hank is at the grill today, a bald, impish man, plowing homefries to one side with a huge spatula, making room for eggs. “Only two of them have.”

“Have you read it?”

“What is this, a quiz? Of course. Well, most of it. Have you?”

“Four times.”

“Oh come off it. Four whole times?”

“I camped in the Smoky Mountains one summer when I was nineteen. I only brought one book and that was it. I read it three times.”

“That’s only three.”

“I’ve read it once through since, as well.”

“Liar. Tell me. What is your favorite book in the Old Testament.”

“Habakkuk.”

“You’re just being cute.” That is Gerard’s way, cuteness. Also drunkenness.

“No, really. The first line of Habakkuk is ‘O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and thou will not hear?’ The last line is the standard note to the choirmaster: ‘with stringed instruments.’ ”

“A thousand violins.”

“Yeah. It pretends to be about violence, but it’s really only about violins. I’ve met people like that.”

“It sounds like a disease. He’s in advanced stages of Habakkuk. Or a casserole: Ham Habakkuk. Or a rock band: just plain Habakkuk. Live. Tonight.” I do my imitation of a badass guitarist.

“Had a rough morning, Benna?”

“God, I guess.”

I try to calm down. Gerard wants to quote some more. “ ‘Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, awake; to a dumb storm, arise!’ ”

“Now you know what teaching’s all about. Like Saint Francis preaching to the birds.”

“But Benna, dearie, sweet, you used to love teaching,” Gerard says in his put-on smarmy voice. It’s also his Aunt Emmadine’s voice and his impression of certain dental assistants.

I cross my eyes and tear off corners of napkin, shove them in my mouth, and chew on them to amuse Gerard, and Hank, who looks over at me from behind the counter and shakes his head. “She teaches college, this woman,” says Gerard, pointing at me.

“What is this?”

The teacher cleared her throat. “It’s ‘The Song of Songs.’ A sort of play, really, a—” She looked at her notes. “A passionate dialogue that reaches an emotional pitch so intense that if it were to continue for even one more stanza it would tumble out of itself and collapse. Its sharpest points are its most fragile.” She looked quickly around at the class, the little marble eyes, the tucked chins, the temples angled onto fists. “It dips in and out of an erotic despair, which it’s lifted finally out of by the very hope imparted by its sensuousness.” She looked out the window and winced.