Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

Saturday morning and I have to call my father. I have to find out what’s he doing for Thanksgiving. He still lives alone in the trailer in Tomaston. He’s named the dog Elizabeth (for five years she was just “Dog”), and she is now so old she does little but sit in the family room and breathe, her whole body moving in and out, her eyes looking up at you, a glassy black.

The last time I spoke to my father he was talking about finally getting circumcised and about having all his moles removed. For health reasons.

“Dad? Hi, guess who this is?”

“Now let me see. Is this my favorite daughter?”

We always do this. “This is your only daughter. How’s it going?”

“Just fine. How are things in Fitchville?”

“Okay. I’m calling to find out what your plans are for Thanksgiving, if you’d like to come down here for dinner. I’m planning a big turkey with chestnut dressing.”

There is a pause, then some muffled noises. “I’ve got some news, Benna,” he says. “I’ve got a girl friend.”

There is a dictionary on top of the phone book, and I flip through it nervously, as if looking for something to say: My father has a girl friend, my father has a girl friend. In the dictionary, after sild , a type of sardine, comes silence .

“Oh, my goodness,” I manage. “Congratulations.” That is, I’m certain, what my mom would say. She would say it in a hearty voice and thrust out her hand. Quid pro quo comes just before quiescence . “I hope, gee, that doesn’t mean the two of you won’t be coming here for Thanksgiving?” There’s some scuffling and some clicking noises.

“Hello, Donna, dear.” There’s now an older woman’s voice on the other end of the phone. She sounds like the woman in Dr. Doyle’s office who thought it was me on the magazine.

“Hi, who is this?”

“It’s Benna , Miriam,” coaches my dad in a loud whisper. “Benna,” he says, “this is my girl friend, Miriam. Miriam-Benna, Benna-Miriam.” Being introduced on the phone like this, what is one supposed to say? “Delighted I’m sure”? I never really knew what that meant. Delighted, I’m sure, what ? “Nice to meet you”? I can hear my father say, “Here, Miriam, now you speak.” They must be passing the receiver back and forth, two old people who have pulled up card-table chairs by the phone. I can see them leaning forward, heads cocked, faces sparkling with holiday.

“Hello, Benna, dear,” she tries again. “This is Miriam.”

“Hi, Miriam.”

“My, you do have a sweet voice. Your father’s told me all about you.”

“The part about the awards and prizes is true.” I’ve just made this up; I don’t know what else to say. I can hear a hand, like a seashell, over the phone.

“She says the part about the awards and prizes is true, Nick. What part about the awards and prizes?” Miriam then gets back on the phone. “Hello, this is Miriam.”

“Hi, Miriam. Only part of the part about the prizes is true. And I was just kidding about the awards.”

“Yes,” she says. “Your father and I are planning on taking a lovely trip to Florida for Thanksgiving, aren’t we, Nick?”

“Yes, that’s true,” says Nick, my father.

“How nice,” I say.

“My son and his family are down there and they love to have grandma for holidays, you know how that is.”

“Of course.” I’m feeling lost, floating.

“Nick, do you want to say more to Donna?”

Afterward I put on a sweater and go for a walk. I try to breathe deeply and can’t. My breath won’t catch and turn over; it stops prematurely in a panic and I have to breathe shallowly, off the top of my lungs. My nose has gone numb. Though it’s sunny for November, my nose has gone cold as meat. I touch the tip and it feels not like a nose but like a strange, fleshy bump, like a cervix through a diaphragm, a distant knob. I feel a pain in my chest and in my head. I wonder if I’m having a stroke. I keep walking, thwarted and dizzy. A girl is trying to roller skate in the big chunky gravel of her driveway and can’t. She stumbles around, an image of all the impossibilities of everyone’s life, ridiculous and heartbreaking. I used to do that, skate around like that in the driveway and fall, stones sticking in the pus of my scraped knees, like something necessary.

Even walking I am disoriented. I must get outside of myself, I must extend myself, communicate with the world. I stare at a squirrel up ahead and, without thinking, call, “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.”

“What is this scar?” I’m tracing a long, pale train track along Darrel’s leg. “Is that from the war?”

“No. I was in a bicycle accident when I was ten. I smashed into the bumper of a car and landed on pavement and glass. I had to have fourteen stitches.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“You didn’t disappoint me.”

“Of course I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. I know what it is you want me to be.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’m figuring you out, Carpenter.”

I look him straight in the shoulder blade. “No you’re not,” I say. “Buster.”

When I think of my father dying, both of my parents gone, it somehow becomes important to remember my childhood and that’s when, of course, I can’t. It all becomes evaporated, like a doomed planet in a science-fiction movie. Sometimes, though, I remember bits and it’s like finding a few odd pieces of lost jewelry. I remember visiting my father at the fire station, trying on his hat; playing dress-up with my mother’s old lingerie (I sometimes modeled for my father when he was home); trying on secondhand things my cousin in Boston had outgrown, sweaters with Filene’s and Jonathan Logan tags. My mother would stand me on a chair—“Ta-da!”—and we would have a fashion show.

These are all connected with clothes, with trying to be someone else; that’s mostly what people remember — that effort to leave themselves. Although there are a few other things I remember, odd lodgers in the rooming house of my recall. I remember my paper route, my trombone lessons, summers spent squeezing open the throats of snapdragon blossoms and pretending they growled and really snapped. I remember a friend named Sarah Garrison coming over to play, fascinated that we lived in a trailer. She stayed for dinner, and when her mother came to pick her up, Mrs. Garrison came to the door with a pale, bewildered face: “Is Sarah there?” The trailer appalled her, maybe frightened her. Here, I knew, was an adult I was stronger than. I showed her my monster finger puppet. “This is a snap dragon,” I said.

And I remember playing with Louis: Flying Horses, Astronaut, Wedding. When we were flying horses we would flap our wings and whinny and gallop down the road. The neighbors worried. We would make nests in the field across from where we lived, and we would lay eggs in them and then spring up and rejoice in horse language. We would do little dances with our hooves and teach our babies how to look for worms in the ground. For Astronaut we hiked a hot mile and a half down the road to the junkyard, where we climbed, like gleeful astronauts, into the old abandoned cars, steering them, making motor noises, squealing tires, squinting out through the smashed windshields which had been splintered into stars. When we played Wedding, we would go out into the woods with gauzy curtains draped over our heads. Louis consented to this mostly because he was lonely and had nothing else to do. We were both brides. We would pronounce our ersatz vows to one another and throw our fern bouquets (made by grabbing the bottom of the fern and moving our hands slowly up the stem, denuding the entire fern). I would sing the wedding music — something I deemed romantic, a song my father had learned in the army and would sometimes sing around the house: “… She’s got a pair of hips/Just like two battleships / Hot dog, that’s where my money goes.”