Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

“He’s had a life that makes yours and mine look like Jack and Jill,” Gerard adds in a portentous whisper, though he doesn’t tell me more about it, and I don’t ask. Maybe I’m afraid to hear. Maybe I’m thinking about Jack and Jill, how they had it pretty rough themselves. “I know for somebody else my life might seem easy,” Eleanor said once. “But for me it’s extremely difficult.” It wasn’t stupid people who managed to be happy in life; it was people who were extra clever.

Monday was the teacher’s last day of classes, and there were puddles all over the floor. Students stomped snow from their boots, and winter coats slipped from the backs of chairs. The teacher passed out cookies and cups and wine and then course evaluations. “Be as honest as you feel is absolutely necessary,” she said.

“You forgot napkins,” someone wailed.

An older, black student named Darrel arrived late after not having been there for a week. He spent twenty minutes filling out the evaluation and refused offers of wine.

At the front of the room the teacher was calling: “When you’ve finished with the evaluation you can put it face down on the front desk and go. Those of you who still owe me work, get it in by Thursday. Otherwise, have a wonderful Christmas break and it’s been nice working with you this semester.” She had always been told that nice was an empty, insipid word, but lately she’d come to rely on it quite heavily. If you can’t say something’s “nice,” you can’t say anything at all, she decided.

Someone on their way out left a carefully wrapped present and a card on her desk. She would take it home. It would be either a coffee mug or some Charlie cologne. “Thank you,” she said.

The student Darrel was one of the last to leave, but when he did, he dropped his evaluation face down on the front desk, smiled at the teacher, and said, “Merry X-mas. I’ll phone you in two months.” Then he placed a gift-wrapped bottle of something in her hands and said, “For you.” Perhaps it was cognac, she thought, something she would not hurl against the wall but drink in a single terrible sitting. For now she tried to smile in a way that spoke in part of love and in part of something else, though she wasn’t sure what. She made little tentative swimming motions with her fingers, and the student Darrel did likewise, nodding, two sea anemones saying farewell.

At home the crack side of the house is drafty, so I make hot chocolate.

I look out the front window, sipping. The sky is a charcoaled cantaloupe, some oranges and pinks caught in the night clouds like gases. Between the road and sidewalk is a snow hill leading down into the driveway, and some neighborhood kids, including Isabelle Shubby, have taken sleds to it. The snow has melted and refrozen into ice. I can hear their shouts: “Ready or not, here I come!” “Hold your horses!” “Yoweee!” It has started to snow almost like sleet, and it patters against the windows like the staticky glitches in an old record. All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can’t see because you don’t have your glasses on. That is what it seems.

Although she was not supposed to until after she had given grades, the teacher read the evaluations the students had written. Most of them were perfunctory, favorable, and dull. Under What did you like best about the instructor? someone had written “Real pretty” and someone else “Knows a lot of swear words.” Someone else had written “Obsessed with sex.” Someone else had written, “Your mind is a swamp. Your heart is a swamp. Your soul is a swamp.” And then there was a picture of a swamp. Near the bottom of the pile from her afternoon class was handwriting she recognized. “Dear Benna,” it said in the space allotted for Other Comments . “You don’t know a flying fuck about poetry.”

The rest of the night the teacher spent at an all-night diner called Hank’s where she consumed coffee and homefries until her gut burned and where she sat making homemade Christmas cards that read SEASONS GRITS AND HAPPY NOWHERE or else JOLLY X-MAS FROM SANTA AND HIS SUBORDINATE CLAUSES. She drew pictures. She wrote special, little notes on the ones she was sending to her former lovers. And sometimes, in trying to think up merry little words, she would glance at the faded photo of fried chicken over the counter: six pieces, dead and breaded, arranged carefully in a circle on a plate with parsley and cranberry sauce, red and green, like Christmas.

· · ·

On Thursday I get a note in my department mailbox. It is what I was afraid of: I no longer have a job. It has been necessary to cut down on the number of writing courses. The Reading and Writing of Poetry is being eliminated entirely. There’s an additional informal note about my “questionable personal conduct”—it says that although that is not the reason I’m being laid off, I should be more aware of this in conjunction with future academic employment. It’s signed by the department chairman, Standish Massie, a Marxist with a hilltop Tudor house that has a great view of the Fitchville proletariat.

I get out of the mailroom fast. I get out to think, to walk, to head for my car.

I’m looking forward to the unemployment checks. What is teaching, anyway? Nothing more than babysitting, like some failed, old wet nurse. You eat too much, snoop and poke around the kitchen, see what’s there. Soon the parents come home. And they catch you, always, napping on the sofa in a snore and a ring of cookie crumbs.

I try to think of the proper, dignified way to depart: Shake hands with the department chairman, hug the secretary, give some books to the faculty library. The upstairs faculty library, I’ve always been told, is where teachers donate their books when they leave.

And so right then and there I go home, pack up a box of old paperbacks I don’t want, and bring them back to campus, march them upstairs to the faculty library. The librarian sees me coming down the corridor and stands, slowly, behind her desk, like a sheriff in a western.

I set the box down on her desk and look around: The place is small, in need of books. “Here are some faculty books,” I tell the librarian. The titles include Sheena, The Case of the Grinning Gorilla , and How to Make Love Without Really Trying . “Looks like you could use a few.”

Close up the librarian is young and sexy as a starlet. “This is a library for books written by faculty members, not simply owned by them at one time.”

I look at her, look toward the window, look back at her, her perfectly lashed eyes and blink. “Oh my god,” I whisper. It is, after all, a library. “I’m sorry. I thought it was like a summer cottage, you know, like after you’ve read something you leave it for the next person.”

“This isn’t a summer cottage.”

“Right. God. You are so right.” And I take the books back up into my arms, like a mother, like a mother of books, and I turn and clunk back down the three flights of stairs, my coat over one arm, the metal fire door slamming behind me. Out in the parking lot the sky is dark and spitting snow. I stand by my car for a second, out of breath, lean the books onto the hood, and struggle with my coat. When I get it on, when I am in the car with my coat on and my books, I look up through the windshield at the square fluorescent eyes of the library. “You’re damn right this is no summer cottage,” I practically shout. I practically shout in my car! And without warming up I tear home through two yellow lights and a stop sign.

When I pull into the driveway, I can hear noise from a party over at the Shubbys’. It leaks out at me through the windows of their turquoise home like a fume. The Shubbys are good people, I have to remind myself. They have probably never hurt a soul in their lives. They are generous. They love life. They have a beautiful daughter. And when I get inside and can still hear their party noise I phone the police and register a public nuisance complaint—“I can’t sleep,” I say, “I can’t think!”—and then I hang up and a minute later phone again; this time I change my voice, high and a bit southern, like a different neighbor. “They’re disturbing the entire block,” I say, and then I sit in the living room, with the lights out and my coat on, waiting for the police, for the flashing red lights, for the sergeant who will put them all in handcuffs, gruffly issue summonses, slap Isabelle up against the wall in a frisk, though she is only seven.