Anagrams (18 page)

Darrel, with a grin, reads me a new poem. It’s fraught, apparently, with meaning. He’s lost his diffident eyes. He leans back and gives me a twinkle. “ ‘To Bee,’ ” he reads. “ ‘Though sometimes I believe you’re black I’m told / you are a wasp / graceful, tiny, tired bird / I am afraid of you / your thrumming / and have you trapped / between my inner window and my summer screen / banging lady-quiet / at the wired sun / the difficult checkerboard of day / and dying green.’ ”

There is a long quiet.

“Good,” I say.

In the morning Darrel fumbles with his clothes. I lie in bed watching him. A sock falls from his shoulder. He turns his shirt right side in and underwear drops to the floor. “What are you doing?” I ask.

“Magic tricks,” he says.

“ ‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another …’ ” The teacher was reading this aloud, pointing out the significance of the commas. Stacy Harold and Tracy Fay were sitting to her left, trying on each other’s jewelry. (She recalled Tracy’s soul—it had been shaped like a lavaliere.) They wore sweat shirts and strings of pearls. Stacy’s crystal earrings refracted the afternoon sun. In every class the teacher had taught at Fitchville, there had been a Tracy or a Stacy who liked to try on other people’s jewelry in class. And a guy named Joe or Jim or Tom who slept, chin against chest, occasionally startled awake by something in his own dreams though never by anything happening in the classroom. Then there were those students who sat and listened and nodded like angels. They took notes. They were so wonderfully attentive it embarrassed her. She loved them. She was grateful. She wanted to buy them things—candy, pencils.

A black student named Darrel was late for class. He pushed open the door, nodded at the teacher, saying “Good afternoon,” then strolled the length of the class, nodding and saying “Good afternoon” to no fewer than five other students, until he reached his usual seat in the back. Everyone smiled at him. They liked him. He was popular.

“What are you doing, Darrel?” asked the teacher. “Running for president of the student council?”

Darrel took his coat off, sat down, and then leaned back in his seat. “I’m just being my usual friendly self.” He winked, and the teacher hoped no one had seen it.

Every year Fitchville has a Halloween parade, replete with band, floats, horses, and costumed schoolchildren. On Saturday I take George and we walk to the corner of Fitch Boulevard, the street of the parade. The crowd along the curb is fairly large. George taps me on the leg: “Is it coming, Mom? I think I hear it.” The wind blows hair into her eyes, in behind her new glasses. The autumn sun glares off the lenses, distorting the look of her face; she appears lost, or handicapped, a sweet, tiny, telethon child. I lift her up for a few minutes so she can look down the street over the heads of the people. Something is coming, an orange and black crepe paper dragon with people’s feet. “I can see a monster, Mom,” she says. People turn around to look at us and smile. Some of them have children, some of them don’t. I see the Shubbys with Isabelle about fifteen yards away, and I wave.

Because George is too heavy, I finally have to put her down. I stand her in front of me and play with her hair, tucking it behind her ears because I know she likes that. She leans her head all the way back and looks at me upside down, giggles. Behind the dragon are cowboys and horses whose hooves are shoed and clack heavily on the pavement. The palomino closest to us lifts its tail and defecates onto the street, never missing a step. George opens her mouth, covers it with both hands, looks up at me in delighted horror. Behind the horses come the ten winners of the children’s costume contest, and one of them, a very authentic-looking Heidi, while waving to her parents in the crowd, marches through the pile of manure. She looks down, visibly dismayed, and tries to shake clean her shoes and socks, scraping and scuffing her soles along the road, trying not to lose the beat. We can hear a band coming up, and soon it’s loud and upon us. It’s the Fitchville
High School Marching Band, and the percussion section all wear masks—E.T., Ronald Reagan, state-of-the-art stuff. We march in place and put our fingers in our ears. The parade is badly paced, however, and after the band is by us there is a strange lull. The band and humdrum have passed quickly. The trumpets now honk faintly in the distance to our right, like a memory, and the drums are a far-off thunder. What cars and floats remain behind, minutes later, trundle forward and by us in a slow, chilling quiet, an unfestive lag, a huge, guilty ooze like age.

For a moment a cloud passes over the sun and there is a short shower, a sprinkling of rain. We hold out our hands, palms up. We pull our sweaters tighter and squint up at the sky, until the sun suddenly bursts through again, lighting up the trees like an idea.

Halloween night I go trick-or-treating as the Bride of Frankenstein, and George goes as Joan Baez, with a small plastic guitar and peace-sign pins. The neighbors chuckle and put candy in our shopping bags and send us on our hypoglycemic way. We’ve gotten an early start. The Shubbys tell us we’re the hit of the street. George says, “Who’s Joan Baez again?” and walking along the sidewalk I teach her the words to “Kumbaya,” a cinch, and “Pretty Boy Floyd,” a bit harder. “I like Joan Baez,” she says. The air is cold and I hug her. We only do two streets.

At home George lays all her candy out on her bed and counts it.

Gerard phones on a break from the Ramada. “It’s wild here,” he says. “Someone’s dressed as a condom and someone else here who is six-feet-six and three hundred pounds is Nancy Reagan. Quick, guess what I am?”

“An opera singer.” I say it too quickly, without thinking. It’s unkind.

“Right,” he says and hangs up.

Eleanor calls from a party at her house. There is a lot of noise, like a television set. “Aren’t you coming?” she yells. “You should see me, I’m costumed as the Dean of Sophomores!”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yes, I’m kidding. Actually I’m dressed up as the Dissertation Muse. I’ve got a giant bedsheet around me and rhetoric books and job lists and cigarettes and photocopies of abstracts dangling around my neck. It’s very complicated. No one understands it. They ask me what I am and then say ‘Oh.’ You’re not going to come rescue me?”

“I don’t think so I—”

There is a sudden click and we are disconnected.

Darrel, too, calls from a party. “All kids at this party,” he says. “It’s a drag. I feel like an old man.”

“Why don’t you stop by here,” I say. “I like old men.”

“I just might do that,” he says. “I’ll be the one with the paper bag over my head. I’m going as the Unknown Negro.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t come up with anything else. I haven’t thought about it that deeply.”

“Shall I give you a trick or a treat?” I can hear him consider this. Someone, a woman’s voice in another room, shouts “Hey Darrel.” I want him to say, “Baby,
your
tricks
are
treats.” Something like that.

“Hmmmmm,” he says instead. “Let me think about this.” And he hangs up.

Only a few more trick-or-treaters come by: punk rockers, the requisite pirate, a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and a tiny, tiny child on whose head someone has put a huge and hideous rubber mask of Richard Nixon. The child hovers by my knees thrusting out a small twine-handled bag, the little hands squirmy and pink as shellfish.

“Have a nice night,” I say,
giving
them all Hershey bars. These are better than the cough drops and Northern Spy apples my mother—all sternness and cold prevention—used to give out. With Hershey bars, I feel I’m finally normalizing my life, making something up to the trick-or-treaters of the world.

The Shubbys come by with Isabelle. They are all dressed as rabbits, large and small. Irv Shubby actually looks the most like a rabbit.

“Say thank you to Benna,” says Mrs. Shubby, with her pink nose and painted whiskers, coaching Isabelle.

“Thank you,” she says, a pip in the night.

When I first went trick-or-treating I went with my brother Louis, and stayed at the very first house we went to, not understanding we were supposed to move on. I went into the house and instead of hovering in the doorway, getting my candy, and dashing out, I sat down in one of their chairs, quietly waiting and chatting a bit, as if I’d been invited for tea. My brother Louis ran on ahead to the next house, impatient and oblivious (the houses were fairly far between, there was no time to spare), which I thought was a bit rude since we’d been invited in and given candy. Some sort of conversation seemed in order. I stayed for over an hour before these neighbors, sweet and bemused, escorted me back home. “Where did you go?” I asked Louis when he came back, loaded with enough candy to last until Christmas.

This has been my problem in life: I don’t move on well. I don’t trick-or-treat well. I don’t understand. I sit in the sludge of my life and stay there. In a drawer somewhere I have six index cards for each of my former lovers, and I’ve drawn pictures of their souls there, wispy and dark—a thin stack: I believe in thin stacks, I believe it’s important to keep these things, like credit card bills, under control. The word
number
, I realized when I was ten, can be pronounced two ways. “You haven’t slept with enough
people to understand that none of it means anything,” said Gerard to me once, showing me a dictionary definition of
fuck
that read “in the present part., a meaningless intensive.”

But I had read in a novel when I was fourteen that more than seven and your soul goes.

At midnight when Darrel finally rings the bell, I open the door, step out and slip my head up under the paperbag with him, and we kiss, standing in the doorway like that.

“Are you crying?” he whispers. “What’s wrong?”

“No. I don’t know. Nothing.” And we go upstairs, leave our underwear dangling from doorknobs, Darrel whispering things while I try to speak while crying, doing the garbled hyena of weep-speak.

I awake at dawn, and it’s a beautiful irisy sky, like a movie set you don’t believe for one minute. Darrel reaches for me sleepily, all potion and skin, and I roll back into his arms like a child, this slow lovely grind that is love, that is the secret of bodies, private as grief.

“Are you mad at me for last night?” I ask Gerard on the phone. He is watching a football game on TV and this is half-time. Gerard says TV football is like watching cells under a microscope, that it’s all about conception and contraception.

“No, why? Are you mad at me?” he asks, as if puzzled. This is how we work, via amnesia.

It is All Saints Day evening. I sit on the edge of the bathtub, drying off Georgianne, marveling that the human race has managed to create such comforts for itself as the warm fluffy nubs of towels, the squirming, nearsighted silk of daughters.

“We’re going to Beruba for Christmas, I know,” she says, fogging the air with baby powder. She’s trying to bully me.

“How do you know?” I look at her and squint my eyes into small incisions.

George shrugs.

“Do you
want
to go?” I ask, rubbing her head dry, fishing for affirmations.

Beneath the moving towel she scrinches up her face. “Do
you
want to?” she squeaks, in imitation of someone, something, I don’t know what, and she tweaks my nose, my skinny merink, my bony pumpkin.

“Whatever happened to that little niece of yours?” asks Gerard.

“Niece?” I ask, disoriented.

“Yeah. Anna or Annie. The little one, your brother’s kid who used to come visit you.”

“Oh, Annie.” I’m quiet, take inventory, and then zip on ahead. “She and my ex-sister-in-law are off in Michigan. My brother Louis couldn’t even get joint custody. It’s very mysterious. Everybody misses her.” I lower my eyes. There’s a long silence. Gerard leans over and tweaks my nose. “What is this nose-tweaking jazz?” I grumble. I toss back orange juice like a gargle.

I am sitting at home with a pile of student poems. I have put the more interesting ones, usually the housewife poems, on the bottom, with Darrel’s at the very bottom, as a sort of reward. But now I’m looking at them in front of me, on the dining-room table, and I can’t read any of them. I have nothing to say, nothing to write, nothing registers in my brain. All these student lines fly away from me, scatter like pigeons in Venice, rise up around me like locusts. I can’t begin to get through this pile of poems. I would rather eat them than read them. I would rather do anything than read them.

Today is my husband’s birthday. He would have been thirty-six.
I wonder what he would have looked like. I wonder if he would have been happy, if we would have been friends. I go right to Darrel’s poem. It is called “Dolphin.”

I wonder if it’s about sex. If it’s about me. If it’s about why he’s not in love with me yet or never. Words, I think, words are all you need for love—you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting that way.

But these words—I don’t know. I circle
Minaoan
, which he’s spelled wrong, and write “Good!” at the top; then I turn off the light and, terrified of literature, go straight to bed.

The teacher was at her office hours in the Union, sipping coffee, staring off into space. She leaned over to get something out of her bag on the floor—a pen wrapped in a Kleenex in case it leaked.
Looking up from her bag, she saw a young black woman in jeans and a red sweater, standing beside her.