Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“Yeah. I don’t know whether to shower him with gifts or go steal things from his apartment.” I hold up the books like an elementary school teacher. I dance them around again. “I think there must be a reason I’m going through life alone.”

Gerard takes my hand and says nothing, though he smiles just slightly, just sadly.

I don’t say anything either. I don’t know how to talk to people. Everyone else’s lives are far more complicated than mine and it makes me not know what to say to them. I bitch. I argue. I joke and clam up. I sing Broadway showtunes. I’m just an asshole from Tomaston.

“Benna, get yourself a pet,” says Gerard. “Why don’t you get a dog and name it Wazoo or Aretha Franklin Carpenter, something like that?”

“I don’t like dogs. You can’t trust them. They always look like they’re smiling.” I dance Alice in Wonderland around again. It’s getting less and less funny. Not that it was so great to begin with.

Gerard persists. “You need some other people in your life. Your husband’s dead, Verrie’s moved and re-occupied — who’ve you got in this dump town?” I keep noticing the jagged white of his tooth.

“I’ve got you.”

“No, not me,” he sighs. “That’s my point here. You need someone besides me.”

“I’ve got Georgianne,” I blurt out.

“Georgianne?” And suddenly I realize what I’ve said. The little piece of planet I’ve been operating on shudders and twists.

“Yeah. Georgianne.” I chew on my thumb cuticle. I’ve never confessed it before. Now I will have to confess.

“Who, praytell, is Georgianne?”

I hesitate. I’m a Beruban cliff-diver. I take a deep breath, and my feet push off. “I made her up.” I am sailing through air. “She’s, well, sort of my daughter.”

Gerard stares at me, uncomprehending. “You made her up? You made up an imaginary daughter?”

“Of course not,” I say. “What, you think I’m an idiot? I made up a real daughter. Yeah.” I can feel the sea, the heat behind my face. “I don’t go around making up imaginary daughters.” I pause. “That would get too abstract. Even for me.” I think of Pinocchio. Of Thumbelina. Of the children in Hansel and Gretel living much of their lives as baked goods.

Gerard tries to be kind. “What is she like?”

The late afternoon light tinkerbells around the room. I want to talk about something else. I feel embarrassed. “Would you like me to read or pour you some ice water or something? You’re too injured to be interested in this.”

But Gerard’s interested. “Do you imagine having conversations and everything?”

“Everything. Babysitters, the whole bit.” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice. I wonder if he thinks I’m mad. “Since my brother got divorced and my niece Annie lives off with her mother in Michigan, I don’t get to be Aunt Benna very much — so I made up Georgianne to keep me company. She’s a cross between Annie and my husband George. I pretend she’s his child and sometimes we talk about things. It seemed one of the few decent ways to bring someone into the world.” I shrug. “I just kind of gave in to the idea of her. You know how kids can be.”

“I’ll bet you’re very cute together.”

“We’re disgustingly cute together.”

“Do you plan things in advance? Or does she pretty much take care of things on her own?”

I hesitate, not knowing what he’s asking and whether he’s asking it seriously. I twist my watch around on my wrist. “You know what the Bible says: Even the lilies of the field, um, make it the hell up as they go along . I also have a friend named Eleanor.”

Gerard’s right eye has come back and both of them are trying to fathom me, scrutinizing like a couple of old concierges. “Do I dare ask who she is?”

“She’s, uh, a very heavily made-up woman. Heavily, heavily made-up.”

Gerard laughs and I’m relieved. “What is she like?”

“Like me only with a wig. She tends to shout things like, ‘What, wait until I’m forty and have a Mongolian idiot?’ Things like that.”

“Is there anyone else you’ve made up?”

People come and go so quickly here. “No,” I say, doubt at my lips like an old breakfast.

Gerard lifts up one puppeted arm and places it on my knee. “You’re sort of neat and sort of crazy, Benna,” he says.

What he means, I think, is that I’m depressing the hell out of him. Out the window the sky has gone all hazy slate. There are churchbells playing at the Christ Methodist church across the way. “How embarrassing. I can’t believe I told you.” I’m determined not to cry. “I can’t believe you fell in a goddamn bathtub.” I put my hands to my face, then peek out at him from between my fingers.

“I have secrets, too, you know,” says Gerard, growing thoughtful. “Things about my past I’ve never told you. I have a real nightmare that took place in a restaurant years ago. I’m surprised to this day that I can even go out to dinner anywhere. I know how it is needing to make things—”

“Gerard, you don’t have to go into this. You’re in the hospital, for pete’s sake.”

He looks at me, startled. I suddenly know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say, “That’s it with you, isn’t it? You don’t really want to talk about anything, do you? You know invention and indignation and slamming car doors, but what about serious conversation, Benna? People have lives. As difficult as your own has been, there are others whose lives have been even more so.”

But he doesn’t say this. What he says is, “You know, don’t you?” I try not to look at him. “Maple told you.” Gerard’s face, his bare scrubby face, grows tight and sad. He looks down at his bedsheets, then he looks back up at me, tries to look insouciantly amused. “I never knew you knew.”

“I knew.”

“And all this time you liked me because you felt sorry for me.”

“Yup, that’s the only reason.” I want here to be able to tell Gerard how it is that I care for him. But I remain still, like someone being mugged, while the church chimes land on the last vibrating note of “Silent Night.”

“Mom, watch me hold my breath.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“Why?”

“It’s not good for you.”

“How come?”

“It affects your personality.”

“What are we having for dinner?”

“Donuts. I thought we’d go to Donut-O-Donut.” She used to love to go there for dessert. I figure if we go there for the main course, she will love me for life, though her skeletal system will suffer and fail to grow.

Instead she says, “That’s no fun. Can I eat at the Shubbys’ tonight?”

And though I hesitate, I finally say, “Sure,” and let her go, though it’s hard.

· · ·

Eleanor, too, seems to have become unavailable. Perhaps both she and George are simply being resentful. I have exposed them, like opening an oven door on a couple of soufflés: They will never forgive me.

I phone Darrel, but there’s no one home.

I go to the hospital over the weekend and read kiddy-lit to Gerard. “Dis kid Alice,” says Gerard, doing a bad Marlon Brando imitation. “She really had like some life.” He seems to be doing fine. They are talking about letting him out before Christmas, perhaps even later this week, though he still has tubes in his arms and throws up once a day.

The man with the magazine behind the partition is always telling us not to bother with him, to pretend he’s not there. Nonetheless I read the stories loud enough for him to hear. Sometimes he asks to see the pictures. His wife has brought him a poinsettia. “Hate plants,” he grumbles. The nurses call him Sal. Gerard says it’s short for Salvador.