Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“Cute, George,” I say, looking back at my onion. And then because she doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Tell me. What do you think of Darrel? Do you like him?”

She has opened her eyes and is playing with the buckle of her shoe, which she has taken off so she can fly it around like a spaceship. “He’s okay,” she says. “When’s Gerard comin’ over?”

The last argument I had with my husband was about intelligence and sexual fidelity in marriage. “An intelligent person does everything with ambivalence,” he said. “Strictly speaking, fidelity can never be a given.” We were in front of a drugstore. In the window was a Russell Stover candies display. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was this the difference between men and women? That women could never believe their ears?

“No!” I shouted. “That’s just not true. An intelligent person has an intelligent faith, and when an intelligent person decides to do something, it’s done unambivalently, unequivocally, intelligently. Why the hell did we get married? Sexual fidelity must always be a given!” Strictly speaking strictly. Whenever I’m furious, the only vocabulary I can come up with are words that have been spoken in the last thirty seconds. My sentences become anagrams of the sentences before. “Intelligent people are not ambivalent people.” He was being an asshole, so I would be one too. I would ask him to love me unambivalently, to love me in theory, to love me unambivalently in theory as I shouted at him in front of dozens of persons, persons in cars, persons with newspapers under their arms, and Russell Stover gift boxes and friction pour le bain in bags coming out of the drugstore, sick, ailing persons with unfilled prescriptions going in, persons walking by, putting up umbrellas, persons turning on their windshield wipers. How could he help but be ambivalent about our marriage? I think, in fact, that right then and there, in front of the drugstore, was where and when his ambivalence ended. I think that is when he became unambivalent and unequivocal and decided he didn’t want to be married to me anymore.

We never made it into the drugstore. I forget what we were going there to get. We went back to the car, to our Rabbit bandaged in bumper stickers. It was starting to drizzle, and we each slammed doors and didn’t talk to, look at, or touch each other. I stared at the glove compartment knob. He started the car, started the windshield wipers, and we drove home. He twitched in his jaw; I could see it in my peripheral vision. There was a purity to the hate, to the determination. It continued for twelve hours. Then, the next morning when both of us were in the bathroom, brushing our teeth and dressing for work, he said, “I never want to see you again,” only I misheard him at first and thought he’d said, “I want to see again.”

When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “ Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Cosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold , an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor , you got droop . It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things. When you wanted someone to say “I love you,” approximate assemblages— igloo, eyelid glue, isle of ewe —however lovely, didn’t quite make it. “You are my honey bunch” was not usually interchangeable with “You are my bunny hutch.” In a New York suburban bathroom, early in the morning, a plea for sight could twist, grow slightly, re-issue itself as an announcement of death.

“You want to see again?” I asked, incredulous. His vision had always been fine. And he looked at me. He was standing in front of the sink. Then he looked into the drain, the stopped-up drain. He shook his head and said, “I never want to see you again.”

“Oh,” I said, three syllables short, where had they gone? Zapped by the ray-gun of a mumble. “Oh. I thought you said, ‘I want to see again.’ ” And I grabbed some Merthiolate from the medicine cabinet and went back into the bedroom and painted peace signs all over my thighs. A few minutes later he came in and, looking like someone about to spit, lifted our largest red Samsonite bag down from the closet shelf and loaded it with as much stuff from his dresser as he could. He never came back for anything else. I had turned into a bitch, and he had turned into a man with a fire-engine-red suitcase marching off toward the commuter train, looking as if he might spit. The last thing he said was, “What the fuck are you doing to your legs?”

I did cry. I didn’t think I’d really turned into a bitch. I thought he was in love with someone else. And the Merthiolate took three days of hot baths to come off. Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.

Georgie and I go to Woolworth’s to buy barrettes. We walk almost aimlessly up and down the aisles, Georgie singing a song she thinks she’s heard on The Best of Broadway: “ ‘When you walk through a store hold your head up high …’ ”

In the housewares aisle she teaches me songs she has learned at school. Most of them have trees and flowers and animals in them. I think at peace talks and arms negotiations all those magisterial, overweight men should be forced to sing such rounds of “White Coral Bells” and “Lady Bug, Lady Bug.” It might save us. How afterward could those same men lumber gruffly off to go press buttons, lily of the valley decking their garden walks, checking their misfired testosterone.

I have fantasies. Such plans, such hopes. Walk on, walk on with holes in your heart.

George pulls a damp Band-Aid from her pinky and shows me the crinkled fish skin beneath. “Little white fish pinky,” she sings and dances it in the air, her finger sticking upright like a startled periscope.

At Hank’s I ask Gerard if he scribbled on my Mme. Charpentier . He looks at me and his mouth drops; a small cave opens up in his beard. He is clearly appalled. “Why the hell would I do something like that?”

I’m sorry I’ve asked him. I don’t dare tell him that George suggested it. She, of course, is the logical suspect.

“Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t really thinking, I just thought I’d ask, I wasn’t really serious.” I try to change the subject. “How’s the singing going?”

Gerard beams widely and I’m relieved. “Just the news I was going to break. I’ve landed a part with the Free Verdi Company. I’m Don José in Carmen .”

“But that’s not Verdi.”

“That’s not the point. Jesus, Benna. You’re supposed to say congratulations. I get to kill the soprano.”

“Congratulations,” I say. “You’re going to be great at it. I can feel it in my bones.” I lean over the table, my sleeve dragging in some coffee, and give him a kiss.

Thursday I take George to Dr. Nintz, the eye doctor. George has grown suddenly frightened. She doesn’t understand how she’s supposed to look into the eye machine. Dr. Nintz smiles and shows her. “Tell me what’s in the top row,” he says.