Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“By the way, didya hear we might get fired?” Eleanor’s expression is a cross between urgency and marijuana.

“Huh?” She’s switched subjects too quickly for me.

“Budget cuts. Distribution changes. Curriculum overhaul. They’re looking around at all of us non-tenured folk. They’re looking at the courses we’re teaching. They got cyanide in their eyes, sugar shoes.”

“ Sugar shoes? When’s this supposed to happen?” I ask it wearily. A woman named Phillie McCabe has put a poem in my department mailbox. It is about losing weight. “Oh diet, diet, they said / and I looked at the bread / trembling with dread / and said, ‘What color?’ / and then went to bed.” “Dye-it — get it?” she has scribbled at the bottom.

“Shortly before Christmas I guess they’re supposed to have it all squared away. Or us all squared away.” Her eyes are all bruisey turquoise. She can inhale a cigarette like no one I know. If Cleopatra had smoked Winstons she would have smoked them exactly like Eleanor. “Listen to this sentence,” she says. “ ‘They decided to go sledding on their rear ends where the incline was less steep. Then an audible burp sent a shudder from her pleated and powdered chin down to her buttocks, which hung inertly over the struggling and baffled chair.’ ”

“Is that Stacy or Tracy?”

“No, that’s Howard.”

“Eleanor, what are we going to do?”

Because the teacher didn’t have an official office, she had to have what she euphemistically called “office hours” in the Student Union Snack Bar on Thursdays from two to four. On this particular Thursday she trudged into the Union with way too much stuff, books crammed into bag and briefcase, department memos she had yet to read clutched with haphazard violence in one fist. She spotted an empty table in the back — not the one she usually liked, but close — and she trudged over and unloaded, books and papers on the table, briefcase on the floor. She put her rumpled gray blazer on the back of one chair, then got in the snack bar line, paid forty cents for a Styrofoam cup of coffee, grabbed some plastic half & halfs for her smarting, tripish stomach, and then wended her way back to the table. Sitting was a relief. She let the steam from the coffee float up and into the itchy, chalky corners of her eyes. She breathed. It felt good. She gingerly slurped her coffee and stared out the window for a little while at the small hill which slid gently from the Union’s outer wall toward a stream at the bottom. There was an asphalt promenade built on either bank, which gave the stream a captive look, as if without the walks, someone had thought it would leap maniacally outward, take off through campus like a mad motorcyclist. Paths and roads always followed water — rivers, shorelines — but this promenade, thought the teacher, seemed so ugly, so senselessly competitive with nature. And because the walk took all the bends of the river, it was never the fastest way to get anywhere. It was usually frequented by students and teachers interested in a leisurely stroll. The teacher turned her attention back to her coffee and papers. She began reading through memoranda. New, more rigorous faculty review procedures, some department gatherings — both social and business, though who could really distinguish — some offers for small magazine subscriptions, and then someone was standing beside her.

“Hi, Ms. Carpenter. Do you mind if I join you?”

It was Darrel Erni, all laughlines and teeth, knitted hat and green fatigues.

“Sure, have a seat,” she said, a bit scattered and harebrained, trying to clear a place, frantically making one towering pile of papers and books, which, finally, slipped, tumbled, crashed into the Styrofoam cup of coffee, milky brown spreading out, over, onto things, like a yearning but stagnant pond.

“Oh my god, my nightmare! ” howled Eleanor from three tables away, having a conference with a student but obviously not engrossed. She had caught this accident of caffeine and cream and paper and was clearly enjoying it. The teacher crossed her eyes, shook her head, and began mopping things up with napkins yanked from the dispenser on the table. Darrel, like Eleanor, was brimming with harmless bemusement, giving him a power over the situation, which the teacher couldn’t help but resent. He pulled over a chair and sat down. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked, some zany displaced hostess with soggy napkins.

Darrel placed a full Styrofoam cup on the table. “I already have one, thanks,” he smiled.

The teacher stared at his cup for a second. “Right,” she said.

The teacher already knew that one student of hers was a Vietnam vet. He was in her ten o’clock class, a quiet blond named Robert, whom she would probably never get to know. He had written a synopsis of his life on the index card, along with the picture of his soul (a striped bowl) and his favorite poet (Jesus). Robert had a tendency to dash out of class the minute it was over, alone, like a man who has to go to the bathroom.

She hadn’t known it about Darrel, though he, too, had been in the war. “A million years ago,” he said. They spoke about it carefully and the teacher hoped he would not tell her stories about ears and eyes — about pendants made from the shriveled leather of ears, how in the rain they changed from dried fruit to soggy recognizable flesh, how gouged eyes were placed on the foreheads of the dead, about how there were cash prizes. Anemically, she would have to muster that old horror and alongside it, another horror would not require mustering at all — the very familiarity of the tale, the survivor’s tale edged always with other survivors’ tales who got there first and told. Told first. Those who don’t get there first, before the books and poems and television shows, had stories no one ever really heard. Please not the eyes and ears, I won’t listen, I won’t hear, thought the teacher to herself, and shame leaped in like a commercial. This is a flaw in my character, she would think to herself later. This is what is known as peacetime.

But he didn’t tell her about eyes and ears. He told her a long, complicated story about an officers’ party in Saigon, where he’d hurled a bottle of cognac against the wall and stomped out imperially. And though she didn’t catch exactly why he’d done it, she could imagine this tall, strong man, capable of such astonishing gestures, such huge moments, such moral angers. He also told her he wanted to be a dentist.

“A dentist,” she repeated dumbly, and her tongue fished back into her molars for crumbs, for the rot-nuggets of cavities.

“Probably an orthodontist.” He grinned. He had perfect teeth. As a kid, growing up in a trailer in Tomaston, she had nightly pressed her front teeth hard against the heel of her hand, to push them back: orthodontia for the poor and trailered.

“Braces,” she said.

“Yeah,” and he smiled like a king. He said he’d been doing mostly odd jobs for years, that he’d recently divorced.

“Me, too,” said the teacher. “Actually, uh, my husband died several years ago.” A sign by the window said PLEASE KEEP WI DOWS CLOSED.

“I know. I heard.”

“Huh?”

“Things get said. Students talking about the teachers and all.”

“Yes, I suppose,” said the teacher.

The black Vietnam vet student Darrel who wanted to be a dentist smiled again and said how about dinner sometime. The teacher’s office hours were almost over, he noted, and they still hadn’t discussed poetry very much. The teacher felt tense and moronic and smiled and said, “All right.” What did she know about poetry, about dinner, all her smarts tiny and jammed in the back of her mouth like a tooth. Impacted as wisdom. “Why not.”