Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“A, F, T …” Her voice is a whisper, a speck. For someone just beginning to read, the wordless arrangement of the letters must be scary, jumbled together like a foreign language, like the names of Indian tribes.

“You’ll have to speak louder than that, dear,” says the doctor.

Afterward we go to the optician’s with Dr. Nintz’s prescription and pick out frames. She tries on five different kinds and looks in the mirror as if she’s not really seeing. Perhaps she’s perplexed at her own reflection. She doesn’t seem to care what frames she gets.

“Which do you like best, kiddo?”

She shrugs. “I dunno. Mom, you choose.”

“I like these.” I point to a pair of clear whitish frames with silver hinges.

“Okay,” she says.

I remember having to get glasses when I was young, though my mother always took me to an eye clinic for examinations. I had to stand in line with about a dozen other children, and then we were raced through the eye charts, holding, in turn, one hand over each of our eyes. We had to indicate which way the E was going by indicating up, down, left, right with the hand that wasn’t covering up the eye. I always thought that the E stood for “eye” and its different positions were the four different ways your eyes could be impaired. (That was also back in the days when I thought the ice cream man lived in his truck.) My mother had once worked at the clinic; she thought it a fine place. I hated it. Later, as an adult, I tried to justify my hatred philosophically if not economically: a clinic was an unfortunate symbol of our entire society, a stark, fluorescent hieroglyph; every experience and institution was a virtual clinic, always looking over its shoulder, saying “Next?” and diminishing us all; whether it was love or art or graduate school or genetics or history or Auschwitz, there were always too many forms, too many people both ahead of and behind you in line, so close you could hear their gurgling and breathing and the impatient shifting of their weight from foot to foot. If George had been scared at Dr. Nintz’s office, I certainly wasn’t ever going to take her to an eye clinic.

Five days later we pick up the actual glasses. She wears them out of the optician’s office, unsure and clutching my arm. “They feel funny, but I can see better, Mom. Wow.” And she begins itemizing things, the rags of leaves on trees, on sidewalks, the headlights of cars.

“You look very pretty,” I tell her.

· · ·

From the backyard I am taking in the evening: The trees on the horizon release the moon, upward, the electric egg of the moon in a slow ovulation across the sky, lone as a diamond, as one bad eye roaming.

The ants are my friends. They’re blowing in the wind.

When Darrel stays over, we don’t talk about our ex-spouses or the war or anything. We compare Donald Duck imitations.

“Yours is good,” I say, lying next to him, naked and goose-fleshed. Duck-bumped.

“Here,” says Darrel. “I’ll teach you how to do Donald Duck when he’s mad,” and he lets loose with a blustery duck noise that vibrates the whole bed. “Try it,” he says.

“What do you do?”

“You just do the same voice, only you shake your head back and forth real fast.”

I try, but it comes out with a lot of spit, and Darrel laughs at me. “Oh, well,” he says.

“Sorry. This is the sort of thing I’m usually quite good at. I must be having an off day.” And then I do my imitation of Julie Andrews at the automat — which Darrel finds quite astounding in its way.

I am walking to my last class of the day, my Darrel class. The October air is breezy and clear, like a day at the beach. The trees have shed a large crunchy tea all around campus and a few students are lying out on it, faces closed and aimed at the sun. The dogs love this kind of weather. They are out, also, frolicking around, nibbling at each other. I’m afraid of them and hope they stay where they are and don’t romp too close to the sidewalk. You can’t trust dogs. They always look like they’re smiling. They spot each other from blocks away and dash to put their noses in each other’s groin. They know things about you that no one else does, things you haven’t told them but that they sense — that you are menstruating, that you are scared — and they take advantage.

In class the teacher distributed a student poem which began: “The autumn of adulthood turneth brown.” These kids thought they were writing the Bible. It madeth her ill. It madeth her lie down in green pastures, it madeth her that ill.

In the back Darrel said something to Melanie Masters and they both laughed. She was young, dainty, pretty as a Seventeen magazine. She needed practice in the art of missing belt loops. The teacher felt herself flush, her heart pound, and she looked away, at someone else, at someone else who had his hand raised and was about to say that when talking about getting older you don’t need to say both autumn and brown, one implies the other.

How had this happened? One Kafkaesque day she’d woken up and discovered she was a teacher at a community college, the perpetrator of a public fraud. The faces all about her seemed suddenly to alter and flicker in the light like mother-of-pearl. She had nothing to say to them. She had nothing to say and ended the class early.

The teacher walked across campus toward where her car was parked. She was going to have her hair trimmed. Sometimes all her existential crises became focused on her hair; she would look in the mirror and see it zooping out all over the place and say in a level voice, “I don’t think that I can go on.” And then she would try to rescue her life, herself, by a visit to a beauty parlor.

She passed a student she had had last year, and smiled, said hello. The student, however, looked at her blankly, as if he’d never seen her before in his life. How is it, thought the teacher, that I can remember this guy — his first name, his last name, his ottava rima about “the chicken pox of the soul”—and he seems not to recall me at all?

In the hairdresser’s I smile at Yvette. I assume she remembers me, she’s done my hair before, but she seems to smile right through me, no ripple of recognition. Yet we’d worked up a kind of intimacy once, hadn’t we? We’d talked about men and ovaries and the effect of smoking on hair follicles. Now she doesn’t seem to know me from Adam. She massages my scalp, just as she did then. “What will it be?” she says. She runs her fingers through and through my hair.

At night my insomnia lies next to me, on the floor by the bed, like a cousin come to visit.

“I know you’re really crazy about me, kid,” I say to Darrel, who is also there and who doesn’t seem to notice the cousin. Darrel is on his side, turned away from me. I rest my head on his hip. “I know ya really are.” I have worked up a fake voice for this. It’s part Mae West, part pain reliever commercial. His eyes are closed. He turns to hold me, whimpers softly, then lets go, says nothing, rolls with all the blankets and slips promptly into sleep. I feel as if I’m in a war, lying in a trench with a dead person next to me, while the sky peels open in bright browns and reds like surgery.

Already we have settled into the tomb and heavy sleep of premature marriage. We brush our teeth in front of each other. We floss before bed.

I clasp my bare breasts to make sure that they’re still there.

Oh, where is the snooze of yesteryear?

Where are the negligées downtown?

II

“You have a choice,” she told her class. “The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth.” On the board she wrote the words horror, nothingness, onomatopoeia .

There are reasons why Darrel and I don’t talk about the war, not the least of which is my own past. While he was off fighting and choking and hurling cognac against walls, I attended one campus sit-in, chanted “Hell no we won’t go” a lot, and then went home and read Mademoiselle magazine. I never threw things, I never said “pig,” I voted, my first time ever, for Humphrey, which later I was told was consummately unhip (“Benna, he was Johnson’s stoolie!”). Two friends of a friend of mine were trotting around New York with pocketbooks packed with homemade bombs and leaving them at government buildings. I, too, hated the war. But I drank too much beer and took midday pajama naps. I memorized passages from Romeo and Juliet . I actually liked the song “Cherish.” I had a loose yarn bag with a long shoulder strap and in it I kept only Kleenex, a comb, blusher, and a pack of Salems. On our way to Woodstock my college boyfriend and I got stuck in traffic and never made it to the festival. We turned around and went home, had supper at a dairy bar. To this day when I think of the sixties, I think of ersatz jazz renditions of “A Taste of Honey,” of Sergio Mendes’s “Fool on the Hill,” of dairy bars with vanilla egg creams.