Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

I like Saturdays. Now that I’m a merry widow, they feel happy, aspiring. When I was married, my husband and I would always fight on Saturdays: That was when we had the most time. I remember one Saturday, after The Best of Broadway had done 1776, and after my husband had declared twice in a loud voice “I cannot abide this musical,” he asked me to get his glasses from the bedroom, since I was closer. I said no, and told him he was lazy and presumptuous and had no sense of moral outrage at anything, at which point he bolted up and said loudly, “You needling bitch, if you really believe I’m so despicable then you’re a masochistic scumbag in love with my prick.” Our marriage, I suddenly realized, wasn’t going well.

I hadn’t heard the word scumbag since I was a kid. Eddie across the road had yelled it at my brother Louis once and Louis had yelled it back. I stared at my husband. This was a man who could say subpoena duces tecum like it was soup. Scumbag? It terrified me. My heart did a fast crawl out and onto the hilly dirt road of aloneness and escape; it’s an image I have: a wide dirt road which undulates like a roller coaster. I think it’s somewhere in Lebanon.

Later we had an argument about his involvement with a woman at work, and I stormed into the dining room and took the plaster bust of George Eliot he’d given me for Christmas (George’s middle name was Eliot; this was his sense of humor) and broke it against the stereo he’d given me for my birthday. Two birds with one of the birds.

We were rotten and cruel. Especially on Saturdays. We’d say things like, “Blow it out your ass, Bingo-Boots,” though I’m not sure why.

The rest of the afternoon George and I clean the house. I wash the dishes and run the vacuum cleaner quickly through the living room. Georgie dusts: “These cobs sure do make webs,” she says. She thinks this is fun. Her friend Isabelle Shubby from next door is helping her dust, a volunteer from the neighborhood. The Shubbys’ house is separated from ours by two driveways and three trees. It’s a big turquoise split-level, the only one on a street of brick and stucco. Her parents have noisy parties, which they invite me to so that I won’t get annoyed and call the police. I’ve never gone, however, though someday I just might show up in lace and emeralds or something. Isabelle has brought her Labrador, Adams, and we put him in the bathroom with newspapers on the floor. I don’t like dogs, large bumping dogs. They have a crowd behavior like humans: They gang up and go straight for the genitals. Besides, Adams doesn’t like the vacuum cleaner, which I keep turning on and off and moving from room to room.

In the living room Mme. Charpentier and Her Daughters is crooked. It is dry-mounted and unframed and I have to balance it between push-pins. I turn off the vacuum, go to re-align it, and notice a small dark scribbling, as with a black felt pen, in the left corner. It looks like the sort of thing Georgie used to do to books and papers of mine when she was little.

“Georgianne,” I say. “Did you do this to the Renoir print?”

She comes closer. “Don’t yell at me,” she says. “How do you know it’s not Gerard? He coulda done it.” She looks at the black squiggle, then moves on, dusting the TV, her little arm making circular movements with the rag. Isabelle has stopped to look at a magazine.

“I’m not accusing you, I’m just asking you.” Neither of us says anything. After a minute I add, “What makes you think Gerard might have done it?”

“I dunno,” she shrugs. She’s still concentrating on her darkening dustcloth. “He was looking at it.” Isabelle glances at me fearfully. She says she’s wondering if Adams is okay.

“I’m sure he’s okay,” I say.

The dark line on the Renoir looks like a miniature of the crack on the side of the house, the seam of a jigsaw puzzle, a tear in the blue of a dress.

· · ·

The news tonight is about Congress and about polyps, both threatened by man. We watch, glued, frozen. We have ice cream for dessert. After the news George and I watch a sociologically minded talk show whose program tonight is on talented, autistic children. One of them, Donna, is in the studio audience, between her parents. She looks only twelve, but is seventeen. The host makes a mistake, tells the world she’s fourteen, then apologizes. Her black eyes dart around, and then she retreats into the sweatered hump of herself. Autistic or not, she knows this is a humiliation: to be called fourteen in front of millions of viewers, when you are really seventeen. Her mother next to her, I can see, in the corner of the screen, tries to console her by squeezing her hand. Donna has made something of a national reputation for herself drawing greeting cards. The silver-haired host bends down to compliment her, as if she’s a lobotomized dwarf, a midge, a worm; her features suddenly relax when the host says again, “Donna, you’re really very talented,” and her mouth and eyes fall into all the right places, and the voice that says “Thank you” is a low, strong, woman’s voice.

It’s as if I know the girl. She almost has my name, and I bet we know things about each other: slipping behind the hips and shoulders of our mother, squeezing her hand, we don’t want to talk to this silver-haired man, we see things clearly, we can sit here all day locked up yet seeing, our mouths unnecessary, though they may smile to be polite. I have been her: the darkness, the slump, the fat splotched cheeks, the frumpish skirts. People talk past us, we are invisible; when they say our name, if they really look at us, they don’t mean it, they only want us to say anything, anything stupid, but our dark woman’s voice, we know, would terrify.

Sometimes anything but cartoons is too real for me.

· · ·

Sunday is always a bad day. A sort of gray purgatory that resembles a bus station with broken vending machines. God is dead, and denied the last word on things, is acting like a real baby. Sunday is some sort of revenge. “And on the Seventh Day he was arrested,” Gerard likes to say.

Before class on Monday the teacher, who smelled of Emeraude and faintly of onions and who felt herself perhaps the sort of woman doomed in middle age to be always taking other people’s children for walks in parks, read a giant stack of student poems. The ones by a black student named Darrel Erni were the most interesting, mostly about women he’d known in Vietnam. The teacher picked at the sweater lint caught in the ragged edge of her fingernail and then stirred her coffee with a knife.

In class she grew dramatic. “You need to ask yourself questions,” she told her students in something that resembled a hiss. “I want you to ask yourself, ‘How is writing a public act? What does poetry owe the world? Are we all vagabonds at a cosmic dump or are we just not paying attention?’ ” Then she stomped around back and forth in front of the class and spoke of nuclear protest, presidential petitions, throwing pies with lots of whipped cream. “Do you know whether this college has investments in South Africa?”

Outside, the leaves that had not blushed or died were doing a dazzling fade, the gold, paper money of pirates.

“I want you to think about the sick luxury of your being,” she said. And then she lit up a cigarette.

Tuesday is a train station with one working vending machine filled with nothing but Mars bars. I meet Gerard for a fast breakfast. I walk in a little later than usual and he looks up from a newspaper and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. He smiles. “Didn’t think you’d be here today.” I climb into the booth, look at him from across the table and gently take his cigarette from his fingers, helping myself to a long drag. Then I too smile. We’re friends. I’m relieved.