Lorrie Moore: Anagrams

“We need them for their Phillips-head screwdrivers,” I said.

Eleanor raised her eyebrows. “That’s right,” she said, “I keep forgetting you only go out with circumcised men.”

Gerard’s and my courtship had consisted of Sunday chamber music, rock concerts, and driving out into the cornfields surrounding Fitchville to sing “I Loves You, Porgy,” loud and misremembered, up at the sky. Then we’d come back to my apartment, lift off each other’s clothes, and stick our tongues in each other’s ears. In the morning we’d go to a coffee shop. “You’re not Czechoslovakian, I hope,” he would say, always the same joke, and point to the sign on the cash register which said, SORRY, NO CHECKS.

“He’d look great, legless and propped in a cart,” said Eleanor.

Actually Eleanor was pleasant when he was around. Even flirtatious. Sometimes they talked on the phone: He asked her questions about The Aeneid . I liked to see them get along. Later he would say to me in a swoon of originality, “Eleanor would be beautiful if she only lost weight.”

“It’s in the wing of your breast,” said the surgeon.

I hadn’t known breasts had wings, and now I had something waiting in them. “Oh,” I said.

“Let’s assume for now that it’s cystic,” said the surgeon. “Let’s not immediately disfigure the breast.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s not.”

And then the nurse-practitioner told me that if I had a child it might straighten out my internal machinery a bit. Prevent “Career Women’s Diseases.” Lumps often disappear during pregnancy. “Can I extend my prescription on the sedatives?” I asked. With each menstrual cycle, she went on to explain, the body is like a battered boxer, staggering back from its corner into the ring, and as the years go by, the body does this with increasing difficulty. Its will gets broken. It screws up. A woman’s body is so busy preparing to make babies that every year that goes by without one is another year of rejection that is harder and harder for it to recover from. Soon it could go completely crazy.

I suspected it was talk like this that had gotten women out of the factories and started immediately on the baby boom. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

One problem with teaching aerobics was that I didn’t like Jane Fonda. I felt she was a fickle, camera-wise, overconfident half-heart who had become rich and famous taking commercial advantage of America’s spiritual crises. And she had done it with such self-assurance. “You just want people to be less convinced of themselves,” said Gerard.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I think a few well-considered and prominently displayed uncertainties are always in order.” And uncertainty and fuzziness were certainly my mirrors then.

Barney adored Jane Fonda. “That woman,” Barney’d say to me after class. “You know, she used to be just one of those sex queens. Now she’s helping America.”

“You mean helping herself to America.” Oddly enough Jane Fonda was one of the few things in the world I did feel certain about, and she made me prone to such uncharacteristically bald pronouncements. I should beware of such baldness, I thought. I should think hedge, think fuzz, like the rest of my life.

“Aw go on,” said Barney, and then he filled me in on the latest regarding Zenia, who was chairing a League of Women Voters committee on child abuse.

I packed up my tape deck, took a sedative at the urinal-like water fountain in the hall, trudged downstairs and home. I went into Gerard’s apartment and spread out on his bed, to wait for him to come home from work. I looked at a black and white print he had on the wall opposite the bed. Close up it was a landscape, a dreamily etched lake, tree, and mountain scene, but from far away it was a ghoulish face, vacant and gouged like a tragedy mask. And from where I was, neither close nor far, I could see both lake and face, one melting into the other and then back again, competing for my perception until finally I just closed my eyes, tight so as to see colors.

Loving Gerard, I realized, was like owning a tomcat, or having a teenaged son. He was out five nights a week and in the day was sleepy and hungry and sprawled, eating a lot of cold cereal and leaving the bowls around. Rehearsals for Dido and Aeneas were growing more frequent, and on other nights he was playing solo jazz gigs in town, mostly at fern bars (one was called The Smokey Fern) with four-armed ceiling fans torpid as winter insects, and ferns that were spidery and crisp. He played guitar on a platform up front, and there was always a group of women at a ringside table who giggled, applauded adoringly, and bought him drinks. When I went out to see him at gigs , I would come in and sit alone at a table way in the back. I felt like a stray groupie, a devoted next-door neighbor. He would come talk to me on his breaks, but he talked to almost everybody who was there. Everyone got equal time, equal access. He was public. He was no longer mine. I felt foolish and phobic. I felt spermicidal. I drank and smoked too much. I started staying home. I would do things like watch science specials and Bible movies on TV: Stacy Keach as Barabbas, Rod Steiger as Pontius Pilate, James Farentino as Simon Peter. My body became increasingly strange to me. I became very aware of its edges as I peered out from it: my shoulders, hands, strands of hair, invading the boundaries of my vision like branches that are made to jut into the camera’s view to decorate and sentimentalize the picture. The sea turtles’ need to lay eggs on land , said the television, makes them vulnerable .

Only once, and very late at night, did I run downstairs and out into the street with my pajamas on, gasping and watering, waiting for something — a car? an angel? — to come rescue or kill me, but there was nothing, only streetlights and a cat.

At The Shirley School we wondered aloud about male hunters and female nesters. “Do you think there’s something after all to this male-as-wanderer stuff?” I asked Eleanor.

She made something of a speech. She said she could buy the social diagram of woman as nestmaker (large, round, see ovum) and man as wanderer, invader, traveler in gangs ( see spermatozoa), but that if she were minding the fort, she wanted some guests, a charging, grinning cavalry. Her life was misaligned, she said. The cavalry bypassed her altogether, as if the roadmaps were faulty, and she was forced to holler after them, “Hey, where’s everybody going?” Or a few deserters managed to stroll by, but then mostly just sat on the curb to talk about how difficult it was to save money nowadays. Her D.N.A. was in danger of extinction. What lovers she’d had had always depressed her. She preferred being with friends.

“Sex used to console me,” I said. “It was my anti-coma coma.”

Eleanor shrugged, gulped vermouth. She liked to yell out her car window at couples holding hands on the street. “Cut it out! Just cut it out!”

“How’s Gerard?” she said.

“I don’t think he loves me anymore.” I bit my fist in mock melodrama.

“Give that man a mustache to twirl and a girl to tie down to the railroad tracks. Look, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to end up with Perry.” Perry was a man she’d invented for my future. He was from Harvard, loved children, and believed in Marriage Equivalents. The only problem was that he was an epileptic and had had fits at two consecutive dinner parties. “Me,” said Eleanor, “I’ll probably end up with some guy named Opie who collects Pinocchio memorabilia and says things like ‘Holy-moley-pole.’ He’ll want me to dress up in sailor suits.”

In the senior citizens’ class it was hard to concentrate. One of the women there, Pat, had stained and streaked her legs orange with Q-T or something. Barney kept having trouble with his hearing aid. Lodeme spent a lot of time in the back row taking everyone’s pulse the way I had shown them: two fingers placed on the side of the neck. “Holy Jesus,” she shouted at them. “You must be hibernating!”