Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

In the windows of health food stores there are advertisements for Vietnams. Or so it seems at first glance — as if whole decades were just odd, imperfect anagrams of one another. George watches Dan Rather and at night asks me about the Vitamin War Memorial in Washington. “Vietnam,” I correct her, and then I explain it to her carefully, the birds and bees of America. “Hush,” I say afterward and hope she’ll go to sleep.

I’m just checking on her before I go to bed, but she hears me and stirs. “Mom?” She’s all creamy and rose with sleep. Her nightgown smells of Tide. “Can I have some honey milk?”

Honey milk is what I make when the weather gets cold: warm up some milk and add honey. “All right,” I say after some hesitation. I know sometimes I’m not a good parent. “But then you have to go to bed for good.” Milk, I rationalize, is a mild soporific.

“Goody,” says George, leaping out of bed with astounding energy. Maybe she was never asleep at all.

Downstairs we sit at the kitchen table and drink honey milk, me and the little minker mumper. She holds the mug with two hands and it covers most of her face. She talks into it. “We’re going to Beruba after Christmas, right?” I can barely hear her.

“Maybe,” I say. I’ve been halfheartedly to travel agencies, checking out package deals. I’ve priced the bus versus the train to New York, the cab to Kennedy. I’ve scrounged around and finally located an unused passport and my birth certificate in a shoebox full of appliance warranties.

George’s attention span is flibberty. She yawns. “Mom, what can I be for Halloween?”

When I was thirteen I bought a long black fall and went as Joan Baez. No one in Tomaston had ever heard of her. She was only just starting out in Boston cafés then, had only two albums out. Everyone thought I was a witch.

Gerard smiles at me. “You could make a belt out of old spice tins and go as a waist of thyme.”

“Thanks.” I’m drinking too much coffee, I can feel it.

“Or stick yourself all over with romaine and go as a honeymoon sandwich.”

“What’s a honeymoon sandwich?”

“Lettuce alone.” He slaps the table and guffaws.

“These are pretty bad, Gerard.”

“You could get a giant gray veil and go as an innuendo.”

“I could Scotch tape pretentious words and literary references to a fuzzy sweater and go as a book review.”

“That’s good,” he says, all positive reinforcement. “We could both dress up as puppets and sing ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart’ and ‘You Made Me Love You.’ Then we could beat each other up.”

“What would that be, besides weird?”

“Punch and Judy Garland!”

“Oh, my god.” I have to put my head down in my arms to get control of myself, I’m suddenly laughing that hard. “What’s wrong with us?” I’ve come back up for air. Hank is looking our way and smiling, shaking his head.

“Or,” Gerard is saying, “you could dress all in green and sing ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”

“Good grief, who would that be?” I can barely get the words out.

“Elvis Parsley!” Gerard’s pleased he’s entertaining me. My laughing is noiseless like pain. I accidentally knock over a water glass.

“God, Gerard. I think I’ll just cover myself with spots and go as a social leopard. Something like that.”

“What do you think of my villanelle?” asks Darrel. “Do you like it?”

“I do. I like it,” I say. One of the repeating lines is about the tongue of the tongue. I can’t read poetry anymore. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what it means. Darrel glances sheepishly up at me from beneath his eyebrows. He does this on purpose. “What do you think of this line here?” He points to the second line of the poem. It has a nice image in it, an ant trying to get to the other side of a bathroom mirror. He’s good.

“You’re good,” I tell him.

“I have a series of poems about insects in your bathroom.”

“You’re kidding. You’ve found inspiration in my bathroom?” Insects, yes, but inspiration? Among the plumbing and the creams and the tweezers and the friction pour le bain? In that embarrassing shrine to my insecurities? In that church of What Is Wrong with My Body? How could he have done it? Though once, now, I recall I did see something remarkable in the bathroom: A big fly buzzed right through a spider web and instead of getting caught in it, the fly ended up dragging the spider along on about six inches of spider silk torn from the web; they flew around the bathroom like that together all day, the spider a kind of astonished kite trailing behind. The whole thing seemed emblematic of something — though I wasn’t sure what.

“Remember that groggy wasp last weekend?” Darrel is saying.

In fall my house is particularly susceptible to insects looking for summer, confused, wondering where it has gone. When it gets cold outside, they reel, stumble, come into my house to die.

Darrel, with a grin, reads me a new poem. It’s fraught, apparently, with meaning. He’s lost his diffident eyes. He leans back and gives me a twinkle. “ ‘To Bee,’ ” he reads. “ ‘Though sometimes I believe you’re black I’m told / you are a wasp / graceful, tiny, tired bird / I am afraid of you / your thrumming / and have you trapped / between my inner window and my summer screen / banging lady-quiet / at the wired sun / the difficult checkerboard of day / and dying green.’ ”

There is a long quiet.

“Good,” I say.

In the morning Darrel fumbles with his clothes. I lie in bed watching him. A sock falls from his shoulder. He turns his shirt right side in and underwear drops to the floor. “What are you doing?” I ask.

“Magic tricks,” he says.

“ ‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another …’ ” The teacher was reading this aloud, pointing out the significance of the commas. Stacy Harold and Tracy Fay were sitting to her left, trying on each other’s jewelry. (She recalled Tracy’s soul — it had been shaped like a lavaliere.) They wore sweat shirts and strings of pearls. Stacy’s crystal earrings refracted the afternoon sun. In every class the teacher had taught at Fitchville, there had been a Tracy or a Stacy who liked to try on other people’s jewelry in class. And a guy named Joe or Jim or Tom who slept, chin against chest, occasionally startled awake by something in his own dreams though never by anything happening in the classroom. Then there were those students who sat and listened and nodded like angels. They took notes. They were so wonderfully attentive it embarrassed her. She loved them. She was grateful. She wanted to buy them things — candy, pencils.

A black student named Darrel was late for class. He pushed open the door, nodded at the teacher, saying “Good afternoon,” then strolled the length of the class, nodding and saying “Good afternoon” to no fewer than five other students, until he reached his usual seat in the back. Everyone smiled at him. They liked him. He was popular.

“What are you doing, Darrel?” asked the teacher. “Running for president of the student council?”

Darrel took his coat off, sat down, and then leaned back in his seat. “I’m just being my usual friendly self.” He winked, and the teacher hoped no one had seen it.

Every year Fitchville has a Halloween parade, replete with band, floats, horses, and costumed schoolchildren. On Saturday I take George and we walk to the corner of Fitch Boulevard, the street of the parade. The crowd along the curb is fairly large. George taps me on the leg: “Is it coming, Mom? I think I hear it.” The wind blows hair into her eyes, in behind her new glasses. The autumn sun glares off the lenses, distorting the look of her face; she appears lost, or handicapped, a sweet, tiny, telethon child. I lift her up for a few minutes so she can look down the street over the heads of the people. Something is coming, an orange and black crepe paper dragon with people’s feet. “I can see a monster, Mom,” she says. People turn around to look at us and smile. Some of them have children, some of them don’t. I see the Shubbys with Isabelle about fifteen yards away, and I wave.