Anagrams (13 page)

Gerard proffers a hand and shakes more warmly than he usually manages with strangers. Sometimes when new people enter the picture, he growls inside himself. Like a groundhog seeing his shadow, or like a thief, you see all of his features abscond, close, a window shade pulled down behind his face.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” says Darrel, turning toward me, “but would you like to dance?”

It’s another hug-your-honey number.

“Gee, I’m not sure.” I look at Gerard for advice. He nudges me gently, is probably winking at me behind his glasses.

“Go on,” he says quietly. “Go on, go on, go on.”

“All right, already.” I like saying that. It’s something I picked up in New York City, when I lived there. Like a sinus condition, or
something on sale. I follow Darrel out onto the floor. It’s less crowded now, the lighting dimmed to a television blue, couples pressed close as toast. Darrel smiles, very tall, very much at ease here, lightly taking my waist and my right hand and moving me surefootedly around the small corner of floor that is, apparently, ours. Where are Darrel’s sneakers? He is wearing what my brother Louis used to call “hard shoes”—leather shoes. And a slick shirt, slippery and nice. It has a dry, sweet smell, like bubblegum and cedar.

Whenever I have danced this way with Gerard, it’s always been sort of a joke: I lead and he pretends to swoon. With Darrel, there’s no joking. I try to catch Gerard’s eye every 360 degrees. To be reassured? Encouraged? Gerard lifts his glasses up onto his head and flutters his eyelids at me. His eyebrows wriggle up and down, crazed and wooly. Maple has turned up here and the two of them are leaning lazily against the wood lip of the bar and talking. A couple to one side of them are watching Darrel and me dance. I turn back, look up at Darrel, and feel my heart fluttering. It’s a Tennessee Williams heart. A bad Tennessee Williams heart. I don’t know what to say. The music urges love on you like food. I say, “Well, waddya know. Here we are.” I shout it. I’m out of breath. My feet are like turtles, my armpits ponds.

Darrel grins, listening to the music, not saying anything. He spins me around, pulls me close, then steps back, then moves close again. What is this jazz? I grew up in the country, in a trailer. We did things like stand far apart and ripple our stomachs in and out.

When the song ends, moving subtly into a faster one, we let go and I wipe my palms on my jeans and say, “Well, Darrel, thanks for the dance.” I thrust my hand at him and he shakes it, warm and dry. I follow him off the dance floor. When he turns around to say good-bye, I gaze up at his sad laughlines, the lashes,
the perfect keyboard of his teeth, and I say, “Let’s have dinner this week.”

“Absolutely,” says Darrel.

“He has a kind face,” I say to Gerard, riding home in his Datsun.

Gerard shrugs and then there is silence, the dark sky pricked with stars, dotted lines in the headlights pulled under and to the left of us, the black of trees running footlessly by. Gerard is speeding.

Finally he asks, “Why do you always sleep with your students?”

My vision leaves me for a minute, my brain grinds against my skull. I turn and glare at Gerard’s profile. “Fuck off, Gerard! I don’t always sleep with my students.” Gerard doesn’t say anything. We are approaching a stoplight. “Once. Once before, that’s all.” And only as I say it do I realize I’ve said “before.” “Goddamn it, Gerard. What are you trying to make me out to be? You know how many people I’ve slept with in my whole life? Six! Up until a year ago I could count them on one hand. I’ve had six lovers and I’m thirty-three years old, and I still send all of them Christmas cards and birthday cards. Still! And that’s even counting my husband and
you
, Gerard, which I think is rather generous of me.” Meanness flies around my brain like a spluttering balloon. “I don’t always sleep with my students.”

Gerard doesn’t say anything.

I slept with one of my students about a year ago. His name was Scott Hayden, a thin, pale, insensitive blond, and he stayed at my house twice and ate all the shredded wheat in the morning. Georgianne didn’t like him; she is into cereal monogamy—like me—and was annoyed about the shredded wheat. Eleanor, too, thought I was crazy. Verrie, in a postcard from Palo Alto, a colorful aerial view of strips and strips of motels and car dealerships, had simply written, “Honey, do what you want.” When I suggested
to Scott that we stop seeing one another, he stopped coming to my class. I gave him an Incomplete for the course and in June sent him a card for his birthday. At the end of August I saw him in the grocery store near campus and said, “Hey, you’ve got an outstanding Incomplete still, you know,” and he looked at me and said, “Oh, Benna, it’s not
that
good,” and charged up the soup aisle, turned left, and disappeared.

“Whatever you say,” chimes Gerard, all false conciliation, turning the corner onto my street.

“Gerard, why are you being such a bastard? You know I don’t sleep around. In fact”—I punch him in the arm—“you know what they called me in high school? Do you know what they called me in high school?”

“What did they call you in high school?” Gerard sighs, drags one palm down across his face, puts the car into park.

“The Nun of That. That’s what they call me. The Nun of—”

“You’re repeating yourself.”

“—That. Do you honestly think six men is a lot to have slept with in your whole life?”

Gerard tries not to smile. “Of course I don’t. But you do. That’s why you send them all cards.” We’ve stopped; we’re at my house. “And I’m not talking about numbers,” he continues. “That’s
your
weird little department. I’m just talking about the fact that you’re a teacher.”

“Leave me alone, Gerard.” I get out, slam the door. I’ll have to take Mrs. Kimball home myself. “Get the hell out of here.” The car hesitates, hiccups backward then lurches forward, whirrs away, past bushes and streetlamps, into the night, his
VIRGINITY IS FOR LOVERS
bumper sticker lit up like a fiery Band-Aid.

“Georgianne was crying a little there,” says Mrs. Kimball, all orange crinkle. “But she wouldn’t say why. She wanted to wait up for you.”

“Could be her fever,” I say, helping Mrs. Kimball on with her all-weather coat.

“She’s a sweet girl,” smiles Mrs. Kimball. I give her five dollars and drive her home, though it’s only six houses away, as she chats about her sister’s children, how day in day out they just listen to that noise.

When I get back home, George is standing at the top of the stairs in her nightgown. “Mommy?” she calls. I stand at the foot of the stairs, in the dark. To me, she is like an angel, a beautiful child ghost, looking down at me, for me, scared but hopeful, creamy with tears and sleep. I turn the front porch light off, lock the door, and go upstairs to be with her. I take her hand and walk her to her bed.

“How do you feel, honey?”

She presses suddenly against me, puts her arms around my waist, and crumples into inexplicable sobs. “We need to have some more babies in this house,” she cries. “Will you have another baby?” I lift her, and her arms circle my neck, her legs clamp around me. When I put her into bed, I climb in next to her, the covers over both of us, the nightstand lamps on low.

I have done this before. Sometimes I do this.

Sometimes as I’m drifting toward sleep, in the beginnings of that dissolution, I wonder where I am, when this is, and realize that at these moments I could be anywhere, anytime, for all I know: eight and napping in the trailer, my broken arm in a cast, or thirteen at night clutching a pillow to my neck, or twenty in the arms of my boyfriend, or twenty-seven in the arms of my husband, or thirty-three next to my imaginary daughter; at every place in the whole spinning shape that is my life, when I am falling asleep, I am the same person, the identical awareness, the same fuzzball of mind, the same muck of nerves, all along the line. I forage through my life and everywhere—there, there, and there—it is only me in it, the very same me, the same harmless lump, the same soggy weirdo, the same sleeping, breathing bun.
Georgianne, too, perhaps, even when she’s old, will be the same flanneled muffin as now, this snoring puff, this snoozy breath and heart always.

“Humans are the voice boxes of life,” the teacher told her classes that Friday. “They are protein’s means of speaking about itself. We owe the dumb, the inarticulate—the grass, the snails—that much.” What rot, she thought. What could be more articulate than a blade of grass, a lovely blade of grass scaled by an ant, what could be more superfluous than words, ghoulish and life-eating, for a snail, for a tree, for a wise man in a robe in a cave in Tibet? “I want you guys to keep notebooks. Record anything you want in them, any word or phrase or poem, but write! The difference between a poet and a non-poet is that a non-poet believes he will remember everything the next day without getting up, switching on the light, and writing it down.”

The weekend appeared before her like a lovely hammock slung between two wide weeks. The teacher had coffee alone and went home.

Saturday mornings in Fitchville the college radio station from eight-thirty to eleven plays only songs from Broadway musicals. I usually make it out of bed by nine, pull down the shredded wheat for Georgianne, then head back upstairs, turn on the shower, and scrub my back to something by Cole Porter, shampoo to Jerome Kern, rinse off to something snappy by Sondheim or Bernstein. I like to bee in Amhaireekha. I clap and stomp and try not to slip in the tub. There have been times when Georgie has abandoned her cereal, pulled off her pajamas and joined me to jiggle around under the shower spray. She has come to know lots of the words and does the complete “I’m Getting Married in the Morning,” in a cockney bellow impossible not to admire.

This morning the program is devoting a full hour to the
music of
Kiss Me Kate
, and George and I, in the shower, act out parts from it, contriving gestures for all the words, something we call the Eensy-Weensy Spider School of Singing. On “I Hate Men” we soap each other’s shoulder blades and scowl. (“If they can send one man to the moon,” Eleanor’s always saying, “why can’t they send them all?”) On “Why Can’t You Behave” I shake my finger like a good, offended mother-slash-lover, and on “Too Darn Hot” Georgie giggles and stands behind the angle of the water and fiddles with the faucets and the temperature, which is when I say, “Yikes, this is where I get out,” push aside the curtain and drip out onto the bathmat. Georgie is in a giggle fit, like a little girl who hasn’t laughed for a long time. When she, too, finally steps out, she puts her hands on my hips and says, “You’re getting fat, Mom. You’re turning into a hippie!” and she giggles some more and I say, “Gee thanks,” and her eyes are wet with laughing, her skin pink from steam and heat, her tiny nipples like two thin slices of hot dog, and we powder each other’s backs with a blue-gingham powder mitt, which was on sale last week at Woolworth’s, wrap our heads and bodies in red, clean towels, and return to the shredded wheat downstairs in the kitchen, bring bowls out into the living room, turn on the TV, and watch cartoons.

At around noon the phone rings. It’s Darrel.

“Hi,” he says.

I tell him I’m watching Saturday morning cartoons, all space heroes and ray guns, and he’s clearly impressed. He wants to know if I’d like to have dinner tonight, and because I really want to spend tonight with Georgianne, I say no but can we make it for next Saturday? and he says all right how about seven o’clock and I say great.

I like Saturdays. Now that I’m a merry widow, they feel happy, aspiring. When I was married, my husband and I would always
fight on Saturdays: That was when we had the most time. I remember one Saturday, after
The Best of Broadway
had done 1776, and after my husband had declared twice in a loud voice “I cannot abide this musical,” he asked me to get his glasses from the bedroom, since I was closer. I said no, and told him he was lazy and presumptuous and had no sense of moral outrage at anything, at which point he bolted up and said loudly, “You needling bitch, if you really believe I’m so despicable then you’re a masochistic scumbag in love with my prick.” Our marriage, I suddenly realized, wasn’t going well.

I hadn’t heard the word
scumbag
since I was a kid. Eddie across the road had yelled it at my brother Louis once and Louis had yelled it back. I stared at my husband. This was a man who could say
subpoena duces tecum
like it was soup.
Scumbag?
It terrified me. My heart did a fast crawl out and onto the hilly dirt road of aloneness and escape; it’s an image I have: a wide dirt road which undulates like a roller coaster. I think it’s somewhere in Lebanon.

Later we had an argument about his involvement with a woman at work, and I stormed into the dining room and took the plaster bust of George Eliot he’d given me for Christmas (George’s middle name was Eliot; this was his sense of humor) and broke it against the stereo he’d given me for my birthday. Two birds with one of the birds.

We were rotten and cruel. Especially on Saturdays. We’d say things like, “Blow it out your ass, Bingo-Boots,” though I’m not sure why.

The rest of the afternoon George and I clean the house. I wash the dishes and run the vacuum cleaner quickly through the living room. Georgie dusts: “These cobs sure do make webs,” she says. She thinks this is fun. Her friend Isabelle Shubby from next door is helping her dust, a volunteer from the neighborhood. The
Shubbys’ house is separated from ours by two driveways and three trees. It’s a big turquoise split-level, the only one on a street of brick and stucco. Her parents have noisy parties, which they invite me to so that I won’t get annoyed and call the police. I’ve never gone, however, though someday I just might show up in lace and emeralds or something. Isabelle has brought her Labrador, Adams, and we put him in the bathroom with newspapers on the floor. I don’t like dogs, large bumping dogs. They have a crowd behavior like humans: They gang up and go straight for the genitals. Besides, Adams doesn’t like the vacuum cleaner, which I keep turning on and off and moving from room to room.