Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“I don’t know,” he whispers. “Benna, sometimes I just don’t feel capable of love — not the kind you’re talking about and want.”

“Oh, great,” I say. “That’s just what I need.” I know these kinds of men. They’re afraid you want to marry them or in some other way own them so that you can then provide them with a running commentary about the way their false and sniveling characters might be improved. They have a tendency to look at your hips in disgust, to take off through traffic without looking sideways.

“Benna. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what you need from me, but I feel numb, I’ve felt numb for years.”

“You’re numb ? Don’t tell me you’re numb when I’m lying here falling in love with you and jeopardizing my job to boot.”

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Well, then, don’t be numb.” I lie there, jiggling my legs. “Don’t think I couldn’t be numb too if I didn’t work so damn hard not to be. Numbness! That’s the easiest thing in the world. You don’t think I could be numb if I wanted to be?”

“No, actually, I don’t,” Darrel says slowly.

My voice is a whispered shriek. “Numb? You want numb? I’ll give you numb,” and I cross my arms tightly, cross my legs, throw my head violently back into the pillow, squeeze shut my eyes, fold in my lips, and burst into tears.

“How are you doing these days, Gerard?”

“I’m okay. I’m being Don José and getting a lot of shit for my high notes. The performance is December seventh.”

“Carpet Town going okay?”

“Hmmmm?”

I think he has a hangover. He’s perspiring and one eye is wandering. I smile. “Carpet Town? Remember that place you work? That’s going fine?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “That’s a breeze compared to the rest of my life.”

“They shoot breezes, don’t they?” quips Eleanor. She’s in a weird mood today. She’s dressed in a strange feathered hat and purple parachute pants. She feels like chatting; neither of us is concentrating. I’m clothed in brown and a sort of army green, the idea being camouflage. When your life’s a mess, I say, wear neutral colors. At either end of your life — infancy and old age — you can get away with reds and turquoises, but when you’re navigating the tumult in between, it’s best to blend into the landscape. Walking down a country road, for instance, you are more likely, if hit by a manure truck, to be lost, shoveled, scooped up without a trace, which would be the idea, which would be the essential point, which would be the best thing for everyone.

“Eleanor, you have to be more selective about your vices. You can’t be overbearing, self-righteous, dress like a maniac, and tell bad jokes. That’s being a hog. That’s like grabbing up all the best sections of the Times .”

“I’ll try to control myself,” she says. “Don’t you think they should paint this lounge a decidedly different shade of orange? And why don’t you come over for dinner sometime next week.”

“Sure,” I say. “Just let me know.”

“Great,” she says. “See you. I’m off to go aerobe .”

Why is Darrel numb? Why is Gerard drinking? What is the essential difference between men and women? — somehow I feel the answer to the first two, to almost all problems, lies there in the last, though I have no answer. Is there really a difference at all? And if there is, what should we do about it? Limit your answer to one page. When I was seven, Billy Adelsen screamed at me from the field across the street, “Boys have wieners, girls have popos.” No one I’ve met since has had it quite so clearly worked out and understood. Billy, however, as with all confident and shameless proclaimers of truth, was punished. His mother, who had been visiting my mother, heard his shouts through the screens of our porch and came charging out down our front lawn, off into the field, through which Billy had turned and fled. When she caught up with him, she dragged him by the ear as he howled the one hundred yards home. I’ve never heard the word popo since, though sometimes, still, I think about it. My mother was a nurse-social worker and always used the correct terms for things, like vulva or B.M. , names that sounded like foreign cars. When I’d been home sick from school and needed a written excuse from her, she would write mortifying things like “Benna had loose bowels” instead of “She wasn’t feeling well,” which is what the other kids’ mothers wrote. Unlike Billy’s mom, she never punished us but only pretended she didn’t understand when we used another more informal terminology. “ Bupper? I don’t even know what you’re saying. These are your buttocks .” My father didn’t care what we said. He was an underpaid, underworked fireman, a victim of downward social mobility at a time when for most Americans that was an impossibility. He had grown up in a large house in Philadelphia and was now raising his children in a trailer with additions: a porch and a family room. “Leave the kids alone, Jan,” he’d say. “You’re not letting them be kids.” This, I had to gather, was the difference between men and women.

There were other differences, too. Once I asked my mother what a Communist was. This was in 1957. “It’s a person who wants to help poor people,” she said, and then quickly turned her back and started washing dishes. I stared at her apron and thought about this. A week later I asked my father the same question. He scowled, sat me down at the family-room card table, and set up an exhibit using two cookies. “Here, Benna,” he said. “This cookie’s yours.” He placed it in front of me. “And this cookie’s mine.” He placed the other in front of himself. “An American says what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours, right? A Communist, though,” and my father gazed intently at me to make sure I was paying attention. I was hungry. I was thinking about the cookie. “A Communist says, ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine,’ ” and at that he snatched up both my cookie and his and shoved them in his mouth and chewed. I didn’t cry out, though I wanted to. Something was wrong. Maybe only lady Communists helped poor people. Men and women were different. I understood that. Men drove the station wagon too fast, and women said things like “Slow down, Nick. Your gonads are taking over.” Men were also more likely to complain about the cooking, and women were more likely to serve skimpy TV dinners in revenge — for three whole weeks or until the apology, whichever came first.

These were clear.

But these were little things and long ago. As I got older, I grew even more confused.

· · ·

The eight o’clock class was doing a group sestina. When in doubt, Eleanor always said, do a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen by the students themselves: arm-hair, Spam, motorcycle, plié, lounge, crash-helmet . The teacher wrote them on the board. The in-class assignment involved writing on a sheet of paper one line with the appropriate end-word and then passing it to the left. By the end of the period they would have twenty sestinas and everyone would have contributed. The members of the class were having a good time. The teacher could hear their giggles and their scribbling. It was a party game. It was ludicrous. It was the only way she knew how to teach.

The ten o’clock class was doing a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen and written on the board by the students themselves: paste, haste, drinking, typing, erasing , and mame , spelled like the Broadway musical. “What is this?” howled the teacher, pointing at the last. “ To mame? Is that ‘to coax the husk right off of the corn’?” And for a moment she burst, frighteningly, into song. “You’ve got to learn how to spell,” she said finally, “or it will make me hysterical.”