Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

The minutes were long highways. The teacher began to pace, three steps each way, back and forth in front of the blackboard, which was really a greenboard; she remembered when they all had been black, not too long ago though long enough. These kids had probably never seen a blackboard, probably wouldn’t know who Jim Morrison was, or Huey Newton, or the song “Cherish.” They probably wouldn’t remember Colleen Corby, a fashion model whose career barely made it into midis. They probably had no idea that greenboards had once been black, that Mia Farrow had once been married to Frank Sinatra, that life had not always been like this. “For Friday I want you to bring in one of your own love or despair poems. If you don’t have one already, I want you to write one.”

Amos White, his name emblazoned across his t-shirt, shot up his hand, grinning wildly. “What if we’re virgins, man, and we’ve never known no real love or no despair?”

The teacher had taught community college too long. “See me after class,” she said.

The teacher’s last class of the day was in another building on the opposite side of the Fitchville Community College campus. It was a five-minute walk. This particular day she noticed that signs had been spray-painted: DO NOT ENTER at the truck-loading drive by the administration building had become DO NOT ENTER U.S. WARS; DEAD END had been cleverly transmogrified to read GRATEFUL DEAD HEAD; one STOP sign now read STOP IN THE NAME OF LOVE; another read simply STOP, YOU BITCH.

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“ ‘Thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Mount Gilead’? Who is this asshole?” Somebody else in the back, dressed all in orange burlap, frowned.

The teacher had already passed out the photocopies and given the assignment. “It’s God,” she said. “Would someone like to read this aloud for us?” She looked around the classroom. Twenty faces with the personalities of cheeses and dial tones. “Well, then,” she continued. “I’ll read it.” And she began, dangerously: “ ‘The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth / For your love is better than wine …’ ” The teacher raised her eyes slightly to note any squirming, any gasps. They looked inert, frozen as fish sticks.

It took a long time to read, though people did seem finally to be listening, silently reading along.

“ ‘Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices.’ ” The bell rang on “stag.” “Okay,” she commanded, damp with perspiration. “Don’t forget: Your poems next time.” There was a clumping and galumphing, a sliding of chairs across the floor. The teacher looked down, shuffled papers. A black student named Darrel Erni paused by her side as everyone drifted past him.

“Ms. Carpenter?” he said.

The teacher looked up. The student was smiling. She had noticed him before, on Monday. He seemed older or wiser or was it merely that he was more battered and less worried about it. It was all the same, she guessed.

“I just wanted to say that I liked the poem very much. And I liked the way you read it.”

The teacher knew asskissers from way back. They lingered after the period was over, they separated themselves from the rest of the huge cryogenic experiment that was the class, they cooed, they beamed, they twinkled. They wanted you to make them your assistant. Yet something was different here. He nodded. She liked nodders. His eyes were slightly pink, slightly shiny. Had he really been moved? Or was he on drugs like the rest of the class? “Well,” she said, all helpful teacherliness. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“It’s beautiful, you know, just beautiful.” He had an old fatigue jacket on and the anthology tucked up under one arm. He hunched up his shoulders, put his hands in his pockets, and sauntered backwards toward the door. He winked and gestured with his head. “This is a neat class.”

“Glad you’re enjoying it,” she said, something almost happy rushing to her face. She liked this Darrel Erni. But then he turned and was off down the hall with a quick padding and bounce of sneakers.

George and I send out for pizza. When it arrives, we eat in front of the TV, watching the news. “So what did you talk about in class today, George?” Cheese stretches like delicate tusks from bitten wedge to mouth.

She sighs. “We did reading groups — redsies and greensies. Then we talked about going to a dairy farm to see the cows.” George picks off the bits of green pepper and anchovies. “No cat food pizza for me,” she says. The commercial is Oil of Olay and everyone in it, though old, is happy and smooth.

“You should eat the peppers, George. They have vitamin A in them. They help you get A’s.”

She ignores me, continues vegetableless through her piece.

“I get it. You’re a redsie not a greensie, is that it?”

“Redsies are the dumb ones,” she says. “I’m a green for green light. That’s what Mrs. Turners said.”

“What’s the red? Red for red light?” How unsubtle of Mrs. Turniphead. How meanly self-fulfilling, like a churlish fortune cookie.

“No. They’re red for tulips.” And she puts her two lips together and makes a joke, a big pizza kiss in the air.

Dan Rather speaks of a volcano in the Dutch Antilles. Two-thousand-degree lava flows and bubbles thick as chowder across our TV screen.

“Poor Beruba people,” mispronounces George. Then she switches the subject. “We do fire drills next week. Lauren says there’s never any fire and all you do’s get yelled at by teachers for talking in line.”

“Didn’t you have fire drills last year in kindergarten?”

“Uh-uh.”

“No fire drills?”

“Nope.” She shakes her head then stops. “Opes. That’s right, I forgot.”

An ant is checking out the oil stains on the pizza box. I pinch it between a napkin and the cardboard.

“Can we go to Beruba someday?” asks George with her mouth full. I have taken George on two vacations — once to Toronto, a city of manufactured whimsey suited only to shoppers, and once to Cape Cod to see the ocean, at which she was much astonished and at the age of three raced exuberantly up and down the beach, arms spread, shouting at the water, “Juice! Juice! Look at all the juice!”

To me the ocean, so loaded with seafood, is more like a loud and giant bouillabaisse.

“To all that lava? Into the eye of the potato? You want to?”

“Yeah. We could be hula girls.”

“That’s Hawaii, George. We would have to be Beruba girls.” I stand up to throw the ant napkin away but instead wave my arms and wiggle my hips. George stands up and pulls the bottom of her shirt up through the neck so that her belly button and midriff are bare. She sways and rimples and giggles around the pizza box. Dan Rather is signing off, getting the hell out of our living room, a living room of Beruba girls. Sometimes I wonder if I try too hard to be George’s playmate, or if it comes naturally to me, if it comes like the easiest thing in the world.

“They’ll never learn that a lot is two words,” mutters Eleanor. “Or no one . Or another time . I had three students spell another time as if it were a season. Give me Gym class any day.”

“Anothertime and the living is easy.”

“Yeah. That’s for when Harry the Dean of Sophomores calls you up to go to the movies. ‘Thanks— anothertime .’” I had gone to the movies once with Harry, Dean of Sophomores. Afterward we ate chocolate sundaes and he told me about the Baltimore medical student he was engaged to. “She works hard,” he said. When Harry first came to FVCC, he was a music professor. “I teach Canon and Fugue,” he had said, and all I could think of was detectives, a TV show like Starsky and Hutch . Then he became Dean of Sophomores. Eleanor had gone out with him once, too, to a poetry reading. “Medicine is a fascinating profession nowadays,” he had said three times in the car on the way home. When she got out at her house, so did he, following her, attempting to kiss her. She didn’t know what to do, so she made some crack about the Taco Bell Canon and then electronically lowered the garage door onto one of his shoulders. Though he wasn’t seriously hurt, he never called her again. “A damn poor sport,” said Eleanor.