Lorrie Moore - Anagrams

The river raced alongside them, a dog barking and chasing.

Ah, warehouse . It said warehouse .

Her brother Louis lived in Queens. He’d been there for two years now and she’d never visited. She was going to stay at his apartment overnight and then catch a cab to Kennedy the next morning. Her plane left at nine-thirty a.m., a silly charter flight dubbed “Carefree.” A close friend of hers had died and she was getting away. She was going to the Caribbean, a package tour of desert islands, all rimmed in glitz: casinos, discos, dancing girls at the Americana. She would step off the plane and the heat and sun would hit her like a hallucination. She would eat one native tomatoey-banana dish per island; she would dance with men who spoke a halting English; she would eat canapés that looked like the asses of gibbons; she’d drink piña coladas on the rumrunner cruise; she would feed the starving, gunk-eyed cats that came rubbing around her chair legs in the cafés — she would drop them bits of roast beef. When fellow tourists confided doubtful things, she would say, “Don’t make my shoes laugh,” an island idiom. She would watch her purse. She would get a tan.

She slept and dreamed of a man who poked paper clips through his bottom lip.

The bus coughed and rumbled into Port Authority. She opened her eyes. The nectarine woman smiled at her and said, “Wasn’t the skyline coming in just beautiful?” Benna smiled back, nodded, then heaved her bag off the overhead shelf and bumped her way off the bus. The bus driver winked and told her to have a Merry Christmas. She’d almost forgotten: Tomorrow was Christmas.

She followed signs and escalators up to Eighth Avenue, then walked the one block to the RR, the air cold and acidic. Taxis whizzed by in the slush. She had once lived in New York, not far from here, before the terminal had been renovated, and she could still remember the same half-tourist, half-resident feeling she’d had even when she’d lived here. She’d had two love affairs and had, with each of them, gone to the top of the World Trade Center for drinks.

She waited on the subway platform with two men, one of them reading a paper with a headline that said BRAIN-DAMAGED JFK HELD CAPTIVE IN SOUTH AMERICA, the other one pacing down at the opposite end, his steps echoing. Benna could hear other trains shuddering in the distance, above, but soon there was silence and only the man’s echoing steps. She stared at the tracks, glanced up once in a while at the Broadway show posters.

The train arrived in a clattering din and shrieked to a stop, all those little lighted rooms on wheels. The doors banged open, and she picked up her suitcase, readjusted her handbag, and scurried into the car directly in front of her. She was not a shopper. This was how she went through life. She took the first space she saw by the door.

She positioned her suitcase close to her legs. The train clapped shut and jerked forward. And as some sort of inexplicable dread filled her like an ink, all she could think was that she would rather be someone, anyone, else: the skinny Oriental woman rocked to a nap across from her, or the woman further down dressed in dirty animal skins and reeking of urine. She wanted to be the blind cripple with the tin, who got on at Lexington, and to whom she had given five dollars. “Merry Christmas,” he said, and rolled off into the next car.

Mostly, she was surrounded by men, and soon they were all, all of them, tunneling under the East River.

She got off in Astoria, usually a festive place, she’d been told, but today it seemed foggy, even deadly. A man set up at a card table had a sign propped in front of him: HELP KILL HENRY KISSINGER. DONATE A DOLLAR. It was Christmastime. She asked no questions. She donated a dollar. Then she moved on, struggled down the metal stairs off the elevated platform and made her way up 31st Avenue toward Louis’s apartment, following the directions he’d given her over the phone and which she’d written in red ink on a now-smudged three-by-five card. It was only five-thirty, but it was dark and all the stores were closed. She put her suitcase down to rest. A bus alongside her suddenly pulled away, spewing exhaust, and she held her breath so as not to breathe it. A train rattled loudly across the el above and behind her. She gasped for air then picked up her bag and continued down the sidewalk. An unskinned goat was hanging in the window of the Acropolis Butchery. Two men shouted to each other from across the avenue. “Hey, Dinny, you do this. Right?” A fruit stand on the next block was open. “You like avocado?” asked a thick-necked woman with black hair. She wore a red sweater and a green apron, an old parka draped over her shoulders. Benna floundered, groped, like a high school girl, for a personality. “Yes, very much,” she said, and moved on.

· · ·

“Eh, how you doing?” squeaked her brother Louis in a pitch too high for his age and body. Benna set her bag down and gave him a hug. “Merry Christmas,” she said. He remained in the doorway for a long moment, one of his feet holding open the door. He seemed a little balder, a little heavier, his nylon shirt unbuttoned too far down his chest, more because it had been overlaundered and no longer fit than because of anything else. Louis kissed her on the cheek. He smelled of cigarettes and small, yellowing teeth. “Let me take your bag,” he said finally, mimicking, she thought, someone else’s graciousness. He nudged up his slipping eyeglasses and then lifted her bag into the apartment. She stepped into a narrow hallway which connected two rooms. The rear room was dim, musty, and bluish with a double bed and a window that looked out onto a concrete wall. Off this room, in the back, was a kitchen with fluorescent lights and a large bag of trash that needed emptying. The front room to her right had a TV, a sofa, a chair, two windows. She could hear kids outside, shouting.

“Louis, this is really a nice place.” He was thirty-six, divorced, alone; this was the first apartment he’d ever had as a bachelor that wasn’t a six-month sublet. “Louis, I’m serious. I’m impressed.” She was, she realized, sounding like her mother, their mother.

Louis smiled and seemed pleased. He set her bag down in the dim, blue room. “It’s okay,” he said, suddenly rather seriously looking about.

“I brought you a Christmas present,” she said. It was a sweater vest. She would give it to him after dinner.

Louis looked guilty. “I don’t have one for you,” he said.

“That’s perfectly all right,” she smiled.

“So, what’s new with my little sister?” Louis self-consciously gulped from his beer can. Benna drank hers from an old jelly jar he had apologetically provided for her. “It’s fine, really,” she’d said. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

“What’s new?” she repeated. She thought about telling him about her wisdom tooth. In America, two adults under forty stuck for conversation could always talk about wisdom teeth. “Well,” she began, feeling the impossibility even of this. She looked at Louis. As a boy he’d always been a recluse and a moper, odd, lonely, fat. He’d sit in his little room in the trailer and eat fudge and play cards and daydream and snarl at any knocks at his door. Then he’d gotten married and it hadn’t worked out, as they say. For reasons she was never told, he wasn’t able to get custody of his daughter. Benna had always felt overwhelmingly sorry for him, though she knew that was wrong — distancing and finally dehumanizing.

“A good friend of mine just died.” She blurted it. Lately it felt like the only thing she knew, the only thing new.

“Howdy die?”

“Excuse me?”

“How did he die?”

“Oh. He — it sounds absurd — got drunk and fell in his own bathtub. Then at the hospital they fucked up with the painkillers and the I.V.’s, and he went into a kind of coma and died.”