Lorrie Moore: Anagrams

From across the hall I could hear Gerard’s phone ring, and I would listen and wait for him to pick it up and speak into it. The words were always muffled. Sometimes I could hear him laugh, as if he were quite ready to be happy again. A few times when he stayed out all night, his phone rang until three in the morning.

I stopped taking sedatives. The days were all false, warm-gray. Monoxide days. Dirty bathmat. Shoe sole. When I went downtown the stores all bled together like wet magazines. There was a noise in the air that changed with the wind and that could have been music, or roaring, or the voices of children. People were looking up into the trees for something, and I looked up as well and saw what it was: Not far from Marini Street thousands of dark birds had landed, descended from their neat, purposeful geometry into the mess of the neighborhood, scattered their troubled squawking throughout trees and on rooftops, looking the rainbowy, shadowy black of an oil spill. There were scientists, I knew, who did studies of such events, who claimed to discern patterns in such chaos. But this required distance and a study that took no account of any single particle in the mess. Particles were of no value. Up close was of no particular use.

From four blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls.

I walked slowly, away from Marini Street, and understood this small shred: Between large and small, between near and far, there was no wisdom or truce to be had. To be near was to be blind; to be one among so many was to own no shape or say.

“There must be things that can save us!” I wanted to shout. “But they are just not here.”

I got an abortion. Later I suffered from a brief heterosexual depression and had trouble teaching my class: I would inadvertently skip the number three when counting and would instead call out, “Front-two-four-five, Side-two-four-five.” Actually that happened only once, but later, when I was living in New York, it seemed to make a funny story. (“Benna,” said Gerard, the day I left. “Baby, I’m really sorry.”)

Because of the pregnancy, the lump in my breast disappeared, retracted and absorbed, never to sprout again. “A night-blooming-not-so-serious,” I said to the nurse-practitioner. She smiled. When she felt my breast, I wanted her to ask me out to dinner. There was a week in my life when she was the only person I really liked.

But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles.

If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.

And so before I left, I phoned Barney and took him out for a drink. “You’re a sweet girl,” he said, loud as a sportscaster. “I’ve always thought that.”

THERE ARE, I’VE NOTICED, THOSE IN the world who are born salespeople. They know how to transact, how to dispose. They know how to charm their way all the way to the close, to the dump. Then they get in their cars and drive fast.

“Every time I move to a new place,” Eleanor is saying, “I buy a new shower caddy. It gives me a nice sense of starting over.” She smiles, big and pointed.

“I know what you mean,” says Gerard, bending over in his lawn chair to tie a sneaker. We are in the side yard of the house, liquidating our affections, trading our lives in for cash: We are having a yard sale. Gerard straightens back up from his sneaker. His hair falls into his face, makes him look too young, then too handsome when he shakes it back. My heart hurts, spreads, folds over like an omelette.

It’s two against one out here.

Eleanor is trying to sell her old shower caddy for a quarter, even though the mush of some horrible soap has dried to a green wax all over it. Eleanor is a good friend and has come to our yard sale this weekend with all of the mangy items she failed to sell in her own sale last weekend. I invited her to set up her own concession, but now I wonder if she’s not desecrating our yard. Gerard and I are selling attractive things: a ten-speed bike, a cut-glass wine decanter, some rare jazz albums, healthy plants that need a healthy home, good wool sweaters, two antique ladderback chairs. Eleanor has brought over junk: foam rubber curlers with hairs stuck in them; a lavender lace teddy with a large, unsightly stain; two bags of fiberglass insulation; three seamed and greasy juice glasses, which came free with shrimp cocktail, and which Eleanor now wants to sell for seventy-five cents. She’s also brought an entire crate of halter tops and an old sound track of Thoroughly Modern Millie . She spreads most of this out on one of the low tables Gerard and I have constructed from cement blocks and two old doors hauled from the shed out back. Magdalena, our dog, has a purple homemade price tag somehow stuck (“like a dingleberry,” says the ever-young Gerard) to her rear end. She sniffs at the shrimp glasses and knocks one of them over. Gerard smooths her black coat, strokes her haunches, tells her to cool it. Eleanor once described Magdalena as a dog that looked exactly like a first-grader’s drawing of a dog. Now, however, with her ornamented rear end, Magdalena looks a bit wrong — dressed up and gypsied, like a baby with pierced ears. Her backside says “45 cents.” Magdalena has the carriage of a duchess. I’ve always thought that.

Eleanor places various articles of clothing — some skirts, a frayed jacket, the wounded teddy — in the branches of the birch trees next to us. Now we are truly a slum.

“That is just lovely, Eleanor,” says Gerard, pointing to the birch trees. Magdalena has run over and started woofing up at Eleanor’s clothes.

“Oh, go off and be a yuppie puppy,” says Eleanor to the dog. Sometimes, like a spooky ventriloquism act, Eleanor assumes, and overassumes, my anger. Gerard is a tired lounge pianist who is leaving in two days to start law school in California. He is taking Magdalena. He is not taking me. He says he needs to make Law Review so he can get some wonderful job somewhere. Eleanor likes to define yuppies as people who buy the expensive mustard and the cheap ketchup, while the rest of the world gets it the other way around. “Gerard, you’re too old to become a yuppie,” she says, though she is wrong. Gerard is one year younger than Eleanor, and almost two years younger than I.

Eleanor strolls over with a paper bag and sits down. “A watershed moment!” she announces, and reaches into the bag and pulls out an opened box of Frost ‘N’ Tip for Brunettes Only and places it on the table next to my beautiful Chinese evergreen and my wine decanter, which my brother gave me; I’m willing to pawn more than I realized. “My entire past, right here, and I’m only asking a dime.” Eleanor grins. She has recently rinsed her hair red. She and her husband, Kip, are moving in ten days to Fort Queen Anne, New York, where Kip got a better job, and Eleanor wanted to start over. “Dead town,” she said, “but you can’t beat the money with a stick.”

I stare at the frost kit. The lettering is faded and there are coffee cup rings, like an Olympics insignia, on the front. “Eleanor,” I say slowly. People walk by, look at the clothes in the trees, smile, and keep walking. I’m about to tell her her sense of retail is not ours. “Eleanor,” I begin again, but then instead I dig a dime out of my change cup and give it to her. “How do you think I’ll look?” I smile, and hold the frost kit next to my face like a commercial. I’m the only one here who’s not moving out of town, though I am taking a vacation and going to Cape Cod for two weeks to think about my life.