Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

There is a birthday cake. Candles like spikes in a large 34. Now being in my thirties is getting serious. Now the second number is larger than the first. Someone gives me a card that says, “You’re not getting older, you’re getting bitter.” Darrel leans over and kisses me.

Gerard also leans over and kisses me, apologizes for the birthday card, reminds me not to drink too much I have to teach tomorrow, says, jokingly, “You’re almost as drunk as I am,” and soon Gerard and I are up and doing Motown Shakespeare. Verrie has requested it. “As you from crimes would pardoned be / Let your indulgence set me free why don’t you babe.” We do footwork and spins like the Temptations.

All the world’s a stage we’re going through.

The ants are fewer, sluggish and wintry, perhaps swacked with schnapps. Some of their bodies are tinged with gray. They stumble under worm husks, still scale the stucco. The crack has reached the rear kitchen window, and the sky spits snow. Madame Charpentier has a new black tangle at her throat. Her children have mustaches.

Eleanor is back with Newton and has changed her mind about Italy. I tell her again about going to the Caribbean with George. “Wanna come?” I ask. “It might be fun.”

“Not me,” she says. “I’ll throw the going-away party.” She toasts me with her coffee cup. “Happy going away.”

“Please, I’m not going away yet .” I nibble at my cuticle.

“Sorry,” says Eleanor, proposing a new toast. “Happy will be going away.”

We sip our coffee. We smack our lips. “Yes,” I say. “That is probably true.”

Gerard says he bombed out at the Met auditions. He says he doesn’t want to talk about it. I oblige him but then wonder what sort of complicity with his demons and my own weak, ignoble ease that entails. Tomorrow night is his big debut in the Free Verdi Company’s Carmen . Some directors of various opera company apprenticeship programs are supposed to be there. Perhaps they’ll come backstage afterward and give him their cards.

“Wait until you see it, Benna. The best Don José ever: Carlo Bergonzi meets Neil Sedaka meets Zelda Fitzgerald.” He regales me with some vocal calisthenics that sound inhuman, worse than fog horns. He laughs at my wince. Hank shambles over and asks him if he could not “make these such noises.”

“I have to have a wisdom tooth removed this afternoon. I’ve scheduled it now while I’m still employed and have insurance to cover it, so I suppose I should,” I say to Gerard, my mouth gluey with egg.

“Poor you.”

“But listen, I’ll be there tomorrow, munkface and all. I’ll come backstage and give you a rose and a cough drop.”

“Thanks,” says Gerard.

Darrel offers to pick me up from the dentist’s office, but I tell him nah, not to worry, I’ll be fine.

“Are you sure? I’m actually fond of dentists’ offices. They’ve got great chairs.”

And I say, “Sure as squash.”

He narrows his eyes. “I’ll try to be there just in case.”

The air downtown is slate cold, Christmas-shopping air. I step into Dr. Morcutt’s office ( “Morcutt?” hooted Gerard. “You would go to a dentist named Morcutt?”), and it’s stuffy and chemical, as if the place had just been painted and no one had opened the windows. It gives me a slight headache. I walk up to the receptionist and say, “I’m a little early for my appointment. Should I come back, walk around in the fresh air for a while, rather than wait in here?”

The woman at the desk, a Mrs. Janice Felds, according to a bar pin high on her left breast, looks at me, suddenly concerned. She stands up and presses my hand between both of hers. “You don’t look well,” she says, probing my eyes with hers, attempting to locate something in them, something serious in them, she’ll never find it. My face feels hot, my stomach bruised, my back clammy as a dock. Mrs. Janice Felds presses her hand against my forehead like she’s the school nurse.

“Come with me,” she says, and leads me into one of the examination rooms.

“Really, it’s no big deal,” I’m saying. “It’s only just the paint smell.”

“Sit down. Lie back,” says Mrs. Janice Felds, and I sit in the big dental chair, lean back while she cranks it into a horizontal position; someone walking by could see up my skirt.

The examination room looks suddenly odd to me. Instead of being crammed with dental equipment, it is big, with one long empty counter on the side — like at a vet’s, where everything is put away, out of sight, protected from the thrashing of terrified animals. It feels like a roller skating rink with just this spare dental chair at the center.

Now there are other people in the room. There is murmuring. I detect it. Someone presses a cold wet washcloth to my forehead. I begin to feel foolish, begin to sit up. “Really,” I say. “None of this is necessary.”

“Just rest,” says the other nurse, and I am made to recall a lover I had once who also hovered over me and commanded things: Here, here, no here; relax, damn it. I look up and see three sets of nostrils and an ebony birthmark. The dentist comes in and takes my pulse. I close my eyes wearily.

“Really,” I continue to protest. “It’s only that you just painted in here. I sometimes get a little dizzy around fumes is all.”

Dr. Morcutt is troubled. He looks at me, like Janice Felds, searches vainly for a trace of substance in my face, in the smudgy, silly, crayoned and stained-glass windows of my soul. “But we haven’t just painted in here,” says the doctor. “We haven’t painted in here for two years.”

The extraction is a rape. Or a Caesarean. Some sort of untimely rip. Due to Dr. Morcutt’s concern for what he calls “patient management,” I’m given only the minimum local anesthetic, no general, no laughing gas, no funny business. He’s afraid I may have allergies.

“Hey. Do I have allergies,” I say, though I really don’t. I have fears.

It’s only one tooth, but it takes an hour to get it. Not only is it impacted, it’s committed as hell to remaining with the rest of my body and rather than surrender, it self-destructs, crumbles into twenty tough little bits and slivers, and the doctor sweats, says shit, chomps his fruit gum harder. A nurse behind keeps pulling up on my jaw, as if its attachment to my skull or neck were an irritating superfluity. To communicate my body’s complete disapproval of these goings on, I make low groaning sounds, which after a while I’m afraid sound like sex, so I stop. The tugging, scraping, snapping in my mouth is a war, a huge mean war, this is what it is to die, to be fighting dying, to be snatched, gouged. I keep thinking I’ll swallow my tongue or even that I already have. My jaw aches and bends. “Her jaw can’t take this,” the nurse behind me warns. “The bone’s giving way.”

“Uuuuuuuhhh,” I say in agreement, will I faint I may faint.

After it is all done, the dentist and I look at each other: We’ve been through something together.

“You have the bones of a woman twice your age,” he says into my eyes.

“You don’t like that?” I ask softly. He rubs a smooth finger naillessly around in my mouth, like a lover.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says. And he walks through one of the side doors that leads to an adjacent room with another patient in it, a blonde maybe, someone from Radcliffe with a completed thesis, awaiting his services.

I rinse with water. I spit. Then I stumble out of the chair, turn, and shake hands with the nurse, whose eyes are all atwinkle. “Take care of yourself,” I say.

Darrel is in the waiting room. He sees me and stands up, extends an arm my way. I have a prescription for codeine clutched in one fist; I can feel my bangs damp against my temples. I must look funny, swollen and bedraggled, for Darrel gives me a gummy, toothy grin, and shakes his head, like I’m cute, like I’m not his teacher. He puts his arm around me. “You okay?”