Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“A nun?” I bat my eyelashes, place my hands in prayer position.

“You have a silly brain,” he says, and tweaks my nose, this new habit of his.

“ I have a silly brain ?” I act appalled. I cross my eyes, spread my lips crazily, pull my hair up on end. I want to be happy.

“Bonne nuit,” he waves and shakes his head. Some of the pink has left his eyes. He is smiling.

“Ennui.” I wave back.

“Mom?” Georgie has switched the light on in her room.

“Yeah?” I walk in and she is sitting on the edge of her bed with nothing on but her underpants. The edges of her hair are damp and sticking to her face like the chic hairstyles of 1930 or 1963. Her skin is white and warm as bread.

“Why did you take your pajamas off, honey?”

“Did Mrs. Kimball go home?”

“Yes, she did. Aren’t you feeling well?” In sickness and in sickness, till death do us part.

“I can’t sleep,” she says.

“I noticed. How come?” I locate her nightgown underneath her pillow and smooth her hair back with it, like a towel.

“I dunno.”

“You don’t know?”

“Uh-uh. Mary Merwin is going to have a baby brother or a baby sister.”

“Who’s Mary Merwin?”

“She’s a girl.”

I help her get back into her nightgown. “You know, it’s turning into winter out there.”

“Mr. Winter-binter.”

She’s not sleepy.

I stand up and do my Statue of Sleep-Liberty imitation. Yawning and holding a torch: “ ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ ”

George smiles and I lean over and give her a puffle , something my mother used to do with us: press mother’s mouth against child’s neck and blow out air. It’s warm and wet and tickles. George tenses, shoulders up by her ears in anticipation, her whole body in a scrinch — then she giggles and relaxes. “Do it again,” she says, and I do it twice more.

“See you tomorrow, schminker-schmunker,” I say, love dissolving language into funny sounds, non-words.

“See you tomorrow, schminkie-schmunkie,” she giggles.

I wrinkle my nose, make a face. She sticks out her tongue and makes a humming sound. I blow her a kiss from the doorway, and she does a Bronx cheer in parody, an arm puffle, and I turn off the light.

Herman—

Nice poem. I like especially the part about the “bouquet of irises gooey and rotted like the dead heads of birds” and the way “limp panting tongues” resonates at the end. Technical point: You cannot say “to lay down” unless you mean to copulate with feathers. You must learn lay from lie before you can graduate. (In addition to the swim test there will be a lay detector test.) Otherwise, fine .

B .

Gerard is having some hot affair with a woman named Merrilee. He thinks he may be in love.

“Arouse by any other name is still arouse,” I say. “Can I get — yeah, the ketchup. Thanks.”

“She ought to have a sign across her pelvis that reads ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ ” Gerard stuffs an egg into his beard.

“Personally, I always liked the one in The Wizard of Oz better: ‘I’d turn back if I were you.’ ”

Gerard looks at me from over his coffee cup, sets it down with a chipping clink, and sighs in joy. Gerard never sighs in joy. “I swear, it’s like sleeping with a Playboy magazine.” He smiles contentedly.

“Yeah, my brother used to do that,” I say. “Only with him it was really a magazine.” Under his bed my brother Louis had more pictures of nude women than an art museum. I remember hearing my mother say to him once in a loud, scolding whisper: “Louis! Don’t play with your genitals!” which I thought was the same word as gentiles —leaving me greatly bewildered as to whom we were supposed to play with.

“Well, Gerard,” I say, leaning back and fishing through my purse for cigarettes. “Congratulations.”

I am driving home from the supermarket. It took much longer than I would have liked. George wandered off by herself to stare at the candy, while I loaded up on canned goods and had my fruit weighed — something vaguely sexual-sounding, something that Eleanor might say. I also had to spend too much time in the meat department, having a turkey sliced in half (also something Eleanor might say). Roasting only half a turkey and freezing the other half is a trick I learned from my mother, something for small and/or budget-impaired holidays. The butcher takes it in the back room, where there are carcasses, fish smells, and lots of white jackets, and where he has some sort of electric blade that whips through the bones and the plastic wrapper. Then he loosely ties the two halves back together with string and brings them out and grins and thrusts them at you.

By the time we get home it’s a dark, denimish twilight. George has chocolate in the chap of her lips.

“Georgie, can you help me with the groceries?” I lean over and unlock the door.

“Yup,” she says, putting her mittens on.

I get out, go around back, unlock the hatch. I hear the telephone ringing in the house, grab a bag, and bound up the back steps into the kitchen. I put the bag down on the counter and it slips and falls into the sink, but no matter.

I want it to be Darrel. “Hello?” I’m breathless, I think from the dash in.

“Hi, it’s me,” says Gerard. “I was just about to hang up. Did you just get in?”

“Hi. Yeah,” I say, trying to hide my disappointment like a venereal disease, like someone sick from love. “Listen, can I phone you back? I’m bringing groceries in right now.”

“Actually, Benna my love, in about sixty seconds I’m leaving town for a family Thanksgiving with Maple at his parents’. I just wanted to phone and say bye.”

“Yeah, well: Have a good Thanksgiving, Gerard.”

“You, too,” says he. And then we hang up. I sigh and begin to pull groceries out of the sink, when I hear Georgianne crying outside. I hurry back out and see her sitting on the steps in the cold, sobbing into her knees. “Georgianne, honey, what’s the matter?” I say, sit next to her, put my arms around her and she tilts and leans into me, sobbing harder. I look and see that the bottom of a grocery bag she has struggled with has apparently ripped and various groceries including oranges and the two turkey halves, now unstrung and separated, have formed a small scatter about the driveway.

“Mom,” wails George, lifting her face and pointing out at the driveway. “Mom, I broke the turkey!”

Thanksgiving itself is not so cute. Almost everyone I know — Darrel and Gerard — have gone visiting moms and pops.

For dinner at my house it’s just Eleanor, George, and I. George is cranky and doesn’t set the table properly. “George,” I remind her, “the forks go on the left.”

“They don’t have to if they don’t want to,” she says, all knuckles and recalcitrance and averted gaze.

I’ve spent five hours peeling and chopping chestnuts for stuffing, while various parades have been blaring from the TV in the living room. Eleanor arrived an hour ago and has been helping me; now she’s at the table stirring chives into the sour cream so that we can eat elegant baked potatoes. My cuticles are shredded and sore; I shake a finger at Georgianne. “Don’t give me any lip, young lady.”

George makes a face. “Don’t give me any lip, young mleh-mleh.”

I put down the nutcracker I’m holding, bend over, grab her wrist, drag her near. “Do you understand ?”

George pulls her wrist and shouts, “Ow,” howls as if she’s been mortally wounded, something she’s staged for Eleanor’s benefit. Then she runs to Eleanor’s chair, stands next to it, and both of them are just there, staring at me from across the table, their eyes swirling far away like the surfaces of four complicit moons, four sour apples, four angry gods, four angry oh-my-gods, with their arms hugging, their mouths hung open, rubbery with flabbergast.