Anagrams

  “How is he?” Gerard says again.

  “Well. I think I blew it. It didn’t work out.” I realize that that is how everyone puts it: It didn’t work out. Like something that refused to exercise, to exert itself aerobically.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” says Gerard, opening his eyes. He tries to sit up more, but it hurts.

  “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 plan
ts,” he grumbles. The nurses call him Sal. Gerard says it’s short for Salvador.

  “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 t
he 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.

  Gerard has seemed in good spirits except for today. He’s no longer in traction, and they had taken him off the tubes, but he complained about the food (“the spit-pee soup”) and then threw up, so they put him back on. He has gotten thin, even in just the past few days. Today he’s griping more than usual about the ineptitudes and barbarisms of the medical staff. “What a medieval place this is,” he says. “I’m telling you, it’s like the nineteenth century in here.” I wonder if this is one of Gerard’s big problems, that he has a confused sense of history.

  Gerard’s head hurts worse. He feels feverish and nauseated.

  “Merrilee’s gone to California for Christmas,” says Gerard. He looks gray like a prisoner of war, like mangled grade-school clay. I worry that something’s wrong. He should be looking better than this. “And Maple phoned and wasn’t able to come today. My back is mush from lying here. Sometimes I think I’m going to die.” His eyes are off doing independent things. One eye is fixed on me, like something snapped to attention, and the other is lost and fatigued, floating toward the outside of his face like a crazy moon. He blinks, and the eyes switch, trade places.

  “Shut up, Gerard. You’re not going to die. Everyone says you’ll be out of here soon.” Though something, it’s true, is wrong. I sit on the edge of the bed. Life is sad; here is someone. “I’ll take care of you,” I say. “I mean, Gerard, you’re like a brother to me. You’re like the closest brother I ever had.” Gerard closes his eyes and begins to cry. I lean over and he presses his face into my breasts, the chenille of his eyebrows against my blouse. I kiss his wet eyelids and his lips shift into a sad smile. “Oh, well,” he says. “Thank you, my carpenter aunt, toppler of buildings.”