Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

The teacher took a walk before her afternoon class. Near the campus were several old houses rented by some of FVCC’s full-time students and from them blared radio jabber and stereo music. That is the difference between the young and the not-so-young, she thought. The young keep their windows open so that the world can fly in and out. By the time you hit your thirties, you’re less hospitable; you start closing up the windows. You’ve had enough of the world; you have, you think, everything you need for the wintry rest of life. You can’t let anything else in, for you will never understand it. And the nightmare, of course, is that as you slowly start shuttering up your house, you turn and suddenly see, with a gasp, that you are the only thing in it.

· · ·

The two o’clock class was doing a group sestina. The six end-words had been chosen: race, white, erotics, lost, need, love, leave . The teacher wrote them on the board, stretched them out in a long horizontal list.

“We don’t get to choose our own?” asked a student named Herb.

“You’ve got seven words there,” said a black student named Darrel, who always sat in the back by the window.

The teacher had to erase one. She hesitated, looked along the list, considering, putting her hands on her hips, a gesture of nonplussed authority. Then she reached over and erased love , but changed her mind again and wrote it back in. Then she walked over and erased white .

The students began writing the first line of a sestina.

The teacher looked out the window. It was too warm for November. They were having a spell of Indian summer. Outside in the sun there were dogs. A male dog had just hopped atop a female dog, piggyback. The female dog just stood there patiently, looking alternately glassy, bored, embarrassed. The teacher turned away. She chewed on a cuticle. “Men are outrageous,” she said to herself.

There is a thread dangling from the crotch of my jeans. I grab it tightly and yank it to snap it free.

“What on earth are you doing?” says Eleanor.

“This is my penis envy,” I say, holding up the thread.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” she says.

“Who’ve you been hanging around?” I construct an exaggerated wink.

Eleanor has made a wonderful fettuccine carbonara. We sit in the dining room of the half-of-a-house she rents. We chat amiably and, amazingly enough, manage not to bring up the subject of our lovers (it’s as if our sex lives have embarrassed us somehow, dragged us through indignities) until just before dessert.

“Trouble in Newton-land,” says Eleanor. Newton is the biochemist she’s been seeing for over a year now. “He’s having an affair with someone. He says he feels rejuvenated with her.”

“Oh, Christ. What is she, another biochemist?”

“No,” sighs Eleanor, stacking up dishes for the kitchen. “She works for AT&T.”

Sympathy is important at a time like this. “God,” I finally say. “I’m so glad I have MCI.” And then I take out a pen and a scratch pad from my purse and draw her a picture of a woman with large breasts and a t-shirt that reads AT&T: YOU BROKE US UP, NOW WE BREAK YOU UP. One needs to be a girl about these things. Graduate school can knock the girl out of you, and, really, sometimes you just need to be a girl.

Eleanor smiles restlessly. She says she knows we’re both doomed at FVCC. She wants to pack it all in and travel for a year. She has saved money. She’s thinking of Italy.

“Do it,” I say. I tell her I’m planning a trip to the Caribbean with Georgianne. I realize, after I’ve said it, that it sounds tacky and meager, not the same as Italy at all.

For dessert Eleanor serves cherries jubilee flambé. I watch the blue flame dance around the ice cream, quick and berserk. When it’s out and the ice cream’s melting, I dig in.

Eleanor watches me and smiles. She holds up one sticky cherry between two fingers. “No matter how many you eat, Benna,” she says, “you’ll never get it back.”

I wash dishes, she dries.

I need an annual check-up. I decide to go to a new gynecologist Eleanor has recommended. Eleanor is a woman who faints at the sight of a Q-Tip; she wouldn’t steer me wrong. “Don’t go to the clinic, whatever you do,” she said. “Last time I was there they told me I had a crook in my vagina and when I said, ‘Well, get him out, for godsakes,’ they didn’t even laugh.”

In the waiting room I read Good Housekeeping along with two other women. Occasionally we all glance up furtively from our magazines, smile, then look back down. An elderly woman comes into the waiting room and sits on the sofa next to me. “Is that you on the cover?”

“Excuse me?” I say. She is leaning over onto her lap, looking at me and then at my magazine.

“Is that you on the cover?” She smiles hopefully.

I turn my magazine over. A pretty brunette woman is beaming and holding triplets. “Oh my goodness, no,” I laugh politely.

“Oh,” says the older woman and pinches in her mouth. She smooths her skirt and looks straight ahead.

I resume flipping pages.

“Have you ever seen it rain on only one side of the street?”

I turn my head and stare. Her lipstick is on crooked. It’s a bluish pink and bleeds out beyond the lines of her mouth. “No, I don’t think so,” I say.

“I have.” She nods, very pleased. I, too, bob my head and together we bob our heads.

In the examination room Hazel Doyle the doctor presses my abdomen. “Some water retention,” she says, smiles, keeps pressing.

“I’ll do anything for retention,” I say. Now she starts to poke and prod a birthmark below my left breast. It’s a mark that I myself have never paid much attention to. I want to ask her about having a baby at the age of thirty-four, at the age of forty, about infertility, about artificial insemination, about test tubes.

“I think it’s a third breast,” she says. “Hmmmm, this is interesting.” She glances at me to note my reaction, which is not good. “You see, it’s in perfect line with the nipple above it.” She’s excited by this. She calls in two of her assistants who also bend over me to look at it. Everyone smiles and ooohs and aahhhs. It’s only a flat little beige thing I never much thought about. But now I’m upset. I don’t know why Eleanor has recommended this doctor to me. I pull my shift back on rather rudely and hop off the examination table. “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m due at the circus in three minutes.”

I drive home near tears, and when I tell the story to Gerard, he smiles and puts his arm around me. I tell Eleanor her doctor’s the hound of hell and she says “My word!” and I don’t breathe a note of it to Darrel.

My mother died when I was nineteen. She had some sort of strange disease where her organs began, mysteriously, to dry out. When the doctors caught it, she was gangrenous throughout her intestines. She was the one who told me about it first, sitting up in the hospital bed, strong, rigid, tall (she was a head taller than my dad), trying to fight the grogginess of painkillers, and using all the exact names for things. None of the names she told me registered. I sat down on her bed and cried into my knees. Then she lifted me up and we both cried together. When she brushed my bangs off my forehead I could smell garlic still on her fingers, in the grain of them, like a kitchen cutting board, that’s how fast she’d been rushed off. From the discovery of her illness until the funeral service was only six days. My father drank the whole time. Afterward Louis and I got him a dog — half-beagle, half-collie — to keep him company. I went back off to college and fell immediately and tearfully into the arms of my boyfriend. Ten days after my mother died I made love for the first time. Perhaps I’d been waiting for her to die, this woman whose slips I’d worn for childhood dress-up games, the bodice hollow and droopy like old breasts, this woman who in the name of perfect posture allowed her children no pillows. Perhaps I’d been waiting for all that terminology, that correctness, to die so that at last I could relax, with my sloppy carriage and careless parlance, my thrice-kissed shoulders, and my one pair of black nylon tricot underwear — of which she’d never have approved. Though she might have smiled and shaken her head about the underwear, standing there at the laundromat, holding them up. She might have said, “And whose fancy underlinens are these?” She might have done that.