Anagrams (17 page)

Gerard beams widely and I’m relieved. “Just the news I was going to break. I’ve landed a part with the Free Verdi Company. I’m Don José in
Carmen
.”

“But that’s not Verdi.”

“That’s not the point. Jesus, Benna. You’re supposed to say congratulations. I get to kill the soprano.”

“Congratulations,” I say. “You’re going to be great at it. I can feel it in my bones.” I lean over the table, my sleeve dragging in some coffee, and give him a kiss.

Thursday I take George to Dr. Nintz, the eye doctor. George has grown suddenly frightened. She doesn’t understand how she’s supposed to look into the eye machine. Dr. Nintz smiles and shows her. “Tell me what’s in the top row,” he says.

“A, F, T …” Her voice is a whisper, a speck. For someone just beginning to read, the wordless arrangement of the letters must be scary, jumbled together like a foreign language, like the names of Indian tribes.

“You’ll have to speak louder than that, dear,” says the doctor.

Afterward we go to the optician’s with Dr. Nintz’s prescription and pick out frames. She tries on five different kinds and looks in the mirror as if she’s not really seeing. Perhaps she’s perplexed at her own reflection. She doesn’t seem to care what frames she gets.

“Which do you like best, kiddo?”

She shrugs. “I dunno. Mom, you choose.”

“I like these.” I point to a pair of clear whitish frames with silver hinges.

“Okay,” she says.

I remember having to get glasses when I was young, though my mother always took me to an eye clinic for examinations. I had to stand in line with about a dozen other children, and then we were raced through the eye charts, holding, in turn, one hand over each of our eyes. We had to indicate which way the E was going by indicating up, down, left, right with the hand that wasn’t covering up the eye. I always thought that the E stood for “eye” and its different positions were the four different ways your eyes could be impaired. (That was also back in the days when I thought the ice cream man lived in his truck.) My mother had once worked at the clinic; she thought it a fine place. I hated it. Later, as an adult, I tried to justify my hatred philosophically if not economically: a clinic was an unfortunate symbol of our entire society, a stark, fluorescent hieroglyph; every experience and institution was a virtual clinic, always looking over its shoulder, saying “Next?” and diminishing us all; whether it was love or art or graduate school or genetics or history or Auschwitz, there were always too many forms, too many people both ahead of and behind you in line, so close you could hear their gurgling and breathing and the impatient shifting of their weight from foot to foot. If George had been scared at Dr. Nintz’s office, I certainly wasn’t ever going to take her to an eye clinic.

Five days later we pick up the actual glasses. She wears them out of the optician’s office, unsure and clutching my arm. “They feel funny, but I can see better, Mom. Wow.” And she begins itemizing things, the rags of leaves on trees, on sidewalks, the headlights of cars.

“You look very pretty,” I tell her.

·  ·  ·

From the backyard I am taking in the evening: The trees on the horizon release the moon, upward, the electric egg of the moon in a slow ovulation across the sky, lone as a diamond, as one bad eye roaming.

The ants are my friends. They’re blowing in the wind.

When Darrel stays over, we don’t talk about our ex-spouses or the war or anything. We compare Donald Duck imitations.

“Yours is good,” I say, lying next to him, naked and goose-fleshed. Duck-bumped.

“Here,” says Darrel. “I’ll teach you how to do Donald Duck when he’s mad,” and he lets loose with a blustery duck noise that vibrates the whole bed. “Try it,” he says.

“What do you do?”

“You just do the same voice, only you shake your head back and forth real fast.”

I try, but it comes out with a lot of spit, and Darrel laughs at me. “Oh, well,” he says.

“Sorry. This is the sort of thing I’m usually quite good at. I must be having an off day.” And then I do my imitation of Julie Andrews at the automat—which Darrel finds quite astounding in its way.

I am walking to my last class of the day, my Darrel class. The October air is breezy and clear, like a day at the beach. The trees have shed a large crunchy tea all around campus and a few students are lying out on it, faces closed and aimed at the sun. The dogs love this kind of weather. They are out, also, frolicking around, nibbling at each other. I’m afraid of them and hope they stay where they are and don’t romp too close to the sidewalk. You can’t trust dogs. They always look like they’re smiling. They spot each other from blocks away and dash to put their
noses in each other’s groin. They know things about you that no one else does, things you haven’t told them but that they sense—that you are menstruating, that you are scared—and they take advantage.

In class the teacher distributed a student poem which began: “The autumn of adulthood turneth brown.” These kids thought they were writing the Bible. It madeth her ill. It madeth her lie down in green pastures, it madeth her that ill.

In the back Darrel said something to Melanie Masters and they both laughed. She was young, dainty, pretty as a
Seventeen
magazine. She needed practice in the art of missing belt loops. The teacher felt herself flush, her heart pound, and she looked away, at someone else, at someone else who had his hand raised and was about to say that when talking about getting older you don’t need to say both autumn and brown, one implies the other.

How had this happened? One Kafkaesque day she’d woken up and discovered she was a teacher at a community college, the perpetrator of a public fraud. The faces all about her seemed suddenly to alter and flicker in the light like mother-of-pearl. She had nothing to say to them. She had nothing to say and ended the class early.

The teacher walked across campus toward where her car was parked. She was going to have her hair trimmed. Sometimes all her existential crises became focused on her hair; she would look in the mirror and see it zooping out all over the place and say in a level voice, “I don’t think that I can go on.” And then she would try to rescue her life, herself, by a visit to a beauty parlor.

She passed a student she had had last year, and smiled, said hello. The student, however, looked at her blankly, as if he’d
never seen her before in his life. How is it, thought the teacher, that I can remember this guy—his first name, his last name, his ottava rima about “the chicken pox of the soul”—and he seems not to recall me at all?

In the hairdresser’s I smile at Yvette. I assume she remembers me, she’s done my hair before, but she seems to smile right through me, no ripple of recognition. Yet we’d worked up a kind of intimacy once, hadn’t we? We’d talked about men and ovaries and the effect of smoking on hair follicles. Now she doesn’t seem to know me from Adam. She massages my scalp, just as she did then. “What will it be?” she says. She runs her fingers through and through my hair.

At night my insomnia lies next to me, on the floor by the bed, like a cousin come to visit.

“I know you’re really crazy about me, kid,” I say to Darrel, who is also there and who doesn’t seem to notice the cousin. Darrel is on his side, turned away from me. I rest my head on his hip. “I know ya really are.” I have worked up a fake voice for this. It’s part Mae West, part pain reliever commercial. His eyes are closed. He turns to hold me, whimpers softly, then lets go, says nothing, rolls with all the blankets and slips promptly into sleep. I feel as if I’m in a war, lying in a trench with a dead person next to me, while the sky peels open in bright browns and reds like surgery.

Already we have settled into the tomb and heavy sleep of premature marriage. We brush our teeth in front of each other. We floss before bed.

I clasp my bare breasts to make sure that they’re still there.

Oh, where is the snooze of yesteryear?

Where are the negligées downtown?

“You have a choice,” she told her class. “The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth.” On the board she wrote the words
horror, nothingness, onomatopoeia
.

There are reasons why Darrel and I don’t talk about the war, not the least of which is my own past. While he was off fighting and choking and hurling cognac against walls, I attended one campus sit-in, chanted “Hell no we won’t go” a lot, and then went home and read
Mademoiselle
magazine. I never threw things, I never said “pig,” I voted, my first time ever, for Humphrey, which later I was told was consummately unhip (“Benna, he was Johnson’s stoolie!”). Two friends of a friend of mine were trotting around New York with pocketbooks packed with homemade bombs and leaving them at government buildings. I, too, hated the war. But I drank too much beer and took midday pajama naps. I memorized passages from
Romeo and Juliet
. I actually liked the song “Cherish.” I had a loose yarn bag with a long shoulder strap and in it I kept only Kleenex, a comb, blusher, and a pack of Salems. On our way to Woodstock my college boyfriend and I got stuck in traffic and never made it to the festival. We turned around and went home, had supper at a dairy bar. To this day when I think of the sixties, I think of ersatz jazz renditions of “A Taste of Honey,” of Sergio Mendes’s “Fool on the Hill,” of dairy bars with vanilla egg creams.

In the windows of health food stores there are advertisements for Vietnams. Or so it seems at first glance—as if whole decades were just odd, imperfect anagrams of one another. George watches
Dan Rather and at night asks me about the Vitamin War Memorial in Washington. “Vietnam,” I correct her, and then I explain it to her carefully, the birds and bees of America. “Hush,” I say afterward and hope she’ll go to sleep.

I’m just checking on her before I go to bed, but she hears me and stirs. “Mom?” She’s all creamy and rose with sleep. Her nightgown smells of Tide. “Can I have some honey milk?”

Honey milk is what I make when the weather gets cold: warm up some milk and add honey. “All right,” I say after some hesitation. I know sometimes I’m not a good parent. “But then you have to go to bed for good.” Milk, I rationalize, is a mild soporific.

“Goody,” says George, leaping out of bed with astounding energy. Maybe she was never asleep at all.

Downstairs we sit at the kitchen table and drink honey milk, me and the little minker mumper. She holds the mug with two hands and it covers most of her face. She talks into it. “We’re going to Beruba after Christmas, right?” I can barely hear her.

“Maybe,” I say. I’ve been halfheartedly to travel agencies, checking out package deals. I’ve priced the bus versus the train to New York, the cab to Kennedy. I’ve scrounged around and finally located an unused passport and my birth certificate in a shoebox full of appliance warranties.

George’s attention span is flibberty. She yawns. “Mom, what can I be for Halloween?”

When I was thirteen I bought a long black fall and went as Joan Baez. No one in Tomaston had ever heard of her. She was only just starting out in Boston cafés then, had only two albums out. Everyone thought I was a witch.

Gerard smiles at me. “You could make a belt out of old spice tins and go as a waist of thyme.”

“Thanks.” I’m drinking too much coffee, I can feel it.

“Or stick yourself all over with romaine and go as a honeymoon sandwich.”

“What’s a honeymoon sandwich?”

“Lettuce alone.” He slaps the table and guffaws.

“These are pretty bad, Gerard.”

“You could get a giant gray veil and go as an innuendo.”

“I could Scotch tape pretentious words and literary references to a fuzzy sweater and go as a book review.”

“That’s good,” he says, all positive reinforcement. “We could both dress up as puppets and sing ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart’ and ‘You Made Me Love You.’ Then we could beat each other up.”

“What would that be, besides weird?”

“Punch and Judy Garland!”

“Oh, my god.” I have to put my head down in my arms to get control of myself, I’m suddenly laughing that hard. “What’s wrong with us?” I’ve come back up for air. Hank is looking our way and smiling, shaking his head.

“Or,” Gerard is saying, “you could dress all in green and sing ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”

“Good grief, who would that be?” I can barely get the words out.

“Elvis Parsley!” Gerard’s pleased he’s entertaining me. My laughing is noiseless like pain. I accidentally knock over a water glass.

“God, Gerard. I think I’ll just cover myself with spots and go as a social leopard. Something like that.”

“What do you think of my villanelle?” asks Darrel. “Do you like it?”

“I do. I like it,” I say. One of the repeating lines is about the tongue of the tongue. I can’t read poetry anymore. I don’t
know what to say. I don’t know what it means. Darrel glances sheepishly up at me from beneath his eyebrows. He does this on purpose. “What do you think of this line here?” He points to the second line of the poem. It has a nice image in it, an ant trying to get to the other side of a bathroom mirror. He’s good.

“You’re good,” I tell him.

“I have a series of poems about insects in your bathroom.”

“You’re kidding. You’ve found inspiration in my bathroom?” Insects, yes, but inspiration? Among the plumbing and the creams and the tweezers and the friction pour le bain? In that embarrassing shrine to my insecurities? In that church of What Is Wrong with My Body? How could he have done it? Though once, now, I recall I did see something remarkable in the bathroom: A big fly buzzed right through a spider web and instead of getting caught in it, the fly ended up dragging the spider along on about six inches of spider silk torn from the web; they flew around the bathroom like that together all day, the spider a kind of astonished kite trailing behind. The whole thing seemed emblematic of something—though I wasn’t sure what.

“Remember that groggy wasp last weekend?” Darrel is saying.

In fall my house is particularly susceptible to insects looking for summer, confused, wondering where it has gone. When it gets cold outside, they reel, stumble, come into my house to die.