Anagrams (11 page)

“They’ll never learn that
a lot
is two words,” mutters Eleanor. “Or
no one
. Or
another time
. I had three students spell
another time
as if it were a season. Give me Gym class any day.”

“Anothertime and the living is easy.”

“Yeah. That’s for when Harry the Dean of Sophomores calls you up to go to the movies. ‘Thanks—
anothertime
.’” I had gone to the movies once with Harry, Dean of Sophomores. Afterward we ate chocolate sundaes and he told me about the Baltimore medical student he was engaged to. “She works hard,” he said. When Harry first came to FVCC, he was a music professor. “I teach Canon and Fugue,” he had said, and all I could think of was detectives, a TV show like
Starsky and Hutch
. Then he became Dean of Sophomores. Eleanor had gone out with him once, too, to a poetry reading. “Medicine is a fascinating profession nowadays,” he had said three times in the car on the way home. When she got out at her house, so did he, following her, attempting to kiss her. She didn’t know what to do, so she made some crack about the Taco Bell Canon and then electronically lowered the garage door onto one of his shoulders. Though he wasn’t seriously hurt, he never called her again. “A damn poor sport,” said Eleanor.

“By the way, didya hear we might get fired?” Eleanor’s expression is a cross between urgency and marijuana.

“Huh?” She’s switched subjects too quickly for me.

“Budget cuts. Distribution changes. Curriculum overhaul. They’re looking around at all of us non-tenured folk. They’re looking at the courses we’re teaching. They got cyanide in their eyes, sugar shoes.”

“
Sugar shoes?
When’s this supposed to happen?” I ask it
wearily. A woman named Phillie McCabe has put a poem in my department mailbox. It is about losing weight. “Oh diet, diet, they said / and I looked at the bread / trembling with dread / and said, ‘What color?’ / and then went to bed.” “Dye-it—get it?” she has scribbled at the bottom.

“Shortly before Christmas I guess they’re supposed to have it all squared away. Or us all squared away.” Her eyes are all bruisey turquoise. She can inhale a cigarette like no one I know. If Cleopatra had smoked Winstons she would have smoked them exactly like Eleanor. “Listen to this sentence,” she says. “ ‘They decided to go sledding on their rear ends where the incline was less steep. Then an audible burp sent a shudder from her pleated and powdered chin down to her buttocks, which hung inertly over the struggling and baffled chair.’ ”

“Is that Stacy or Tracy?”

“No, that’s Howard.”

“Eleanor, what are we going to do?”

Because the teacher didn’t have an official office, she had to have what she euphemistically called “office hours” in the Student Union Snack Bar on Thursdays from two to four. On this particular Thursday she trudged into the Union with way too much stuff, books crammed into bag and briefcase, department memos she had yet to read clutched with haphazard violence in one fist. She spotted an empty table in the back—not the one she usually liked, but close—and she trudged over and unloaded, books and papers on the table, briefcase on the floor. She put her rumpled gray blazer on the back of one chair, then got in the snack bar line, paid forty cents for a Styrofoam cup of coffee, grabbed some plastic half & halfs for her smarting, tripish stomach, and then wended her way back to the table. Sitting was a relief. She let the steam from the coffee float up and into the itchy, chalky corners of her eyes. She breathed. It felt good. She gingerly slurped her
coffee and stared out the window for a little while at the small hill which slid gently from the Union’s outer wall toward a stream at the bottom. There was an asphalt promenade built on either bank, which gave the stream a captive look, as if without the walks, someone had thought it would leap maniacally outward, take off through campus like a mad motorcyclist. Paths and roads always followed water—rivers, shorelines—but this promenade, thought the teacher, seemed so ugly, so senselessly competitive with nature. And because the walk took all the bends of the river, it was never the fastest way to get anywhere. It was usually frequented by students and teachers interested in a leisurely stroll. The teacher turned her attention back to her coffee and papers. She began reading through memoranda. New, more rigorous faculty review procedures, some department gatherings—both social and business, though who could really distinguish—some offers for small magazine subscriptions, and then someone was standing beside her.

“Hi, Ms. Carpenter. Do you mind if I join you?”

It was Darrel Erni, all laughlines and teeth, knitted hat and green fatigues.

“Sure, have a seat,” she said, a bit scattered and harebrained, trying to clear a place, frantically making one towering pile of papers and books, which, finally, slipped, tumbled, crashed into the Styrofoam cup of coffee, milky brown spreading out, over, onto things, like a yearning but stagnant pond.

“Oh my god,
my nightmare!
” howled Eleanor from three tables away, having a conference with a student but obviously not engrossed. She had caught this accident of caffeine and cream and paper and was clearly enjoying it. The teacher crossed her eyes, shook her head, and began mopping things up with napkins yanked from the dispenser on the table. Darrel, like Eleanor, was brimming with harmless bemusement, giving him a power over the situation, which the teacher couldn’t help but resent. He pulled
over a chair and sat down. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked, some zany displaced hostess with soggy napkins.

Darrel placed a full Styrofoam cup on the table. “I already have one, thanks,” he smiled.

The teacher stared at his cup for a second. “Right,” she said.

The teacher already knew that one student of hers was a Vietnam vet. He was in her ten o’clock class, a quiet blond named Robert, whom she would probably never get to know. He had written a synopsis of his life on the index card, along with the picture of his soul (a striped bowl) and his favorite poet (Jesus). Robert had a tendency to dash out of class the minute it was over, alone, like a man who has to go to the bathroom.

She hadn’t known it about Darrel, though he, too, had been in the war. “A million years ago,” he said. They spoke about it carefully and the teacher hoped he would not tell her stories about ears and eyes—about pendants made from the shriveled leather of ears, how in the rain they changed from dried fruit to soggy recognizable flesh, how gouged eyes were placed on the foreheads of the dead, about how there were cash prizes. Anemically, she would have to muster that old horror and alongside it, another horror would not require mustering at all—the very familiarity of the tale, the survivor’s tale edged always with other survivors’ tales who got there first and told. Told first. Those who don’t get there first, before the books and poems and television shows, had stories no one ever really heard. Please not the eyes and ears, I won’t listen, I won’t hear, thought the teacher to herself, and shame leaped in like a commercial. This is a flaw in my character, she would think to herself later. This is what is known as peacetime.

But he didn’t tell her about eyes and ears. He told her a long, complicated story about an officers’ party in Saigon, where he’d hurled a bottle of cognac against the wall and stomped out imperially. And though she didn’t catch exactly why he’d done it,
she could imagine this tall, strong man, capable of such astonishing gestures, such huge moments, such moral angers. He also told her he wanted to be a dentist.

“A dentist,” she repeated dumbly, and her tongue fished back into her molars for crumbs, for the rot-nuggets of cavities.

“Probably an orthodontist.” He grinned. He had perfect teeth. As a kid, growing up in a trailer in Tomaston, she had nightly pressed her front teeth hard against the heel of her hand, to push them back: orthodontia for the poor and trailered.

“Braces,” she said.

“Yeah,” and he smiled like a king. He said he’d been doing mostly odd jobs for years, that he’d recently divorced.

“Me, too,” said the teacher. “Actually, uh, my husband died several years ago.” A sign by the window said
PLEASE KEEP WI DOWS CLOSED
.

“I know. I heard.”

“Huh?”

“Things get said. Students talking about the teachers and all.”

“Yes, I suppose,” said the teacher.

The black Vietnam vet student Darrel who wanted to be a dentist smiled again and said how about dinner sometime. The teacher’s office hours were almost over, he noted, and they still hadn’t discussed poetry very much. The teacher felt tense and moronic and smiled and said, “All right.” What did she know about poetry, about dinner, all her smarts tiny and jammed in the back of her mouth like a tooth. Impacted as wisdom. “Why not.”

“I think he’s cute.”

Gerard doesn’t say anything.

“I guess I’ll have dinner with him. What do you think?”

Gerard still doesn’t say anything, doesn’t give me even a look. He has a hangover, gulps orange juice like a dying plant.
He also has a cold, and has pulled the hood of his sweat shirt up over his head and tied it. “You look like the Little League version of
The Seventh Seal
,” I say. “How was the gig last night?” I was part of the first generation to grow up on television. I’ve learned how to change channels, switch stations, search through the snow for a new program.

“The Ramada,” Gerard says. “Rough place.”

“Gerard, are you okay?”

“Last night,” he says, “I got two requests from people moving through the salad bar: the theme from
Chariots of Fire
and the theme from
Rocky
. Plus, the Ramada has a chimpanzee tune their piano. It breaks my heart.”

“Why don’t you quit that place, Gerard? You don’t really need the money that badly, do you?”

With two fingers he picks up a spoon by its middle and twiddles it up and down, a fast, stainless seesaw. “You know when I first wanted to be a professional musician?”

“When the fifteen-year-old moss in your navel started talking back.”

Gerard scowls, it isn’t funny. I trust his assessments of my jokes. When his eyebrows come together in a single quick caterpillar, I know it’s dumb. When he falls helplessly back against the booth, says “Christ, Benna,” and laughs out loud with a sort of pain, I know it’s still dumb. But I use it in class.

“It was when I first met this aging hippie on the beach. I was just out of the ninth grade and had nothing to do. He was ten years out of graduate school and had nothing to do. His name was Buff. I went back with him to this old ramshackle beach house with creaky plank floors all covered with orange peels and sand. He had an old Steinway upright and he sat down and played and I thought he was God, man, I did. He could do everything from Kabalevsky to “Moon River.” I never saw him after that. I went home and convinced my mother to rent a piano. We were the
only ones in our building with a piano. I even tried to change my name to Buff, but it didn’t catch on. Everyone at the school still kept calling me Gerard.”

“Imagine that.”

“Am I boring you?”

“No.”

“At any rate, the point is, well, if you promise not to laugh …”

“I promise,” I say, planning a guffaw for no matter what he says. I am, essentially, a fourteen-year-old.

“I want to sing opera. I’m trying to figure out how I can swing it.”

The guffaw doesn’t materialize. I just stare at him, the anxious hope of his cheek and eye muscles. I see his vision switch eyes, one eye now going off slightly to one side.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Gerard, I think, does have a nice tenor voice, but so does my father. So does my Uncle Bob.

“Do you think I’m crazy?”

“It’s not that, Gerard. It’s just that, well, you’re thirty-three years old.”

“No,” he smiles. “
You’re
thirty-three years old. I’m thirty-two.” He has a face like a parking meter.

I slump, sigh loudly, look at the table, play with my spoon. “Gerard,” I say, syllables deliberate, tidy as needlepoint. “We should talk about this. Want to have dinner tonight?”

I do some reading at the library and then, noticing it’s almost time for George to be let out of school, dash off to pick up a few groceries and get home before she does. When I get in, however, she is already home sprawled out on the living-room sofa, her babies dress on again, wrinkled and untied. “George, my goodness, how come you’re home so early?”

“I don’t feel so good,” she says.

“You don’t feel very
well
?” I ask, pedagogy in me like a burglar. “What’s wrong, honey? Is it your stomach?” I put my things down on the piano bench and go sit next to her, stroke her hair. She is flushed red and her hair is in damp strings against her temples. I press my wrist to her forehead and can feel she is hot.

“Do I have a temperature?” she asks.

“Yup,” and though she is big and six-and-a-half already, I pick her up, legs dangling, lug her upstairs to her room, to her white room splotched pink with animals and dolls. I help her take off her dress, then tuck her into bed with just her slip on. I pull the shades. I sit on the bed’s edge, in the dark, rosy lap of the afternoon. I hold her hand.

“Was school okay? Was it the nurse that sent you home?”

George nods. “She had to fill out a form first. Then the nurse’s aide drove me.” Her fingers knead the satin edge of the blanket. “Mom,” she whispers. “What was my father’s name?”

I’m always startled when she asks about him. Once she asked me where he went after I’d “laid him off and he went and got killed.” I was stunned at her phrasing and simply said, “He went to Heaven,” though I’ve never believed it for a minute.

“What do you mean? His name was Mr. Carpenter.”

“No, but what was his first name?”

And here I hesitate. She has a fever. She shouldn’t ask about these things, she shouldn’t think, she should sleep. I pull the quilt up over her. “I’ve invited Gerard over for dinner tonight. But I’ll bring you up some of what we’ve had, and I’ll make sure he stands in the doorway and says hi.” George has always liked Gerard. “In the meantime, Miss Sickie, you get some rest.”