Anagrams (23 page)

“Uuuuuuuhhh,” I say in agreement, will I faint I may faint.

After it is all done, the dentist and I look at each other: We’ve been through something together.

“You have the bones of a woman twice your age,” he says into my eyes.

“You don’t like that?” I ask softly. He rubs a smooth finger naillessly around in my mouth, like a lover.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says. And he walks through one of the side doors that leads to an adjacent room with another patient in it, a blonde maybe, someone from Radcliffe with a completed thesis, awaiting his services.

I rinse with water. I spit. Then I stumble out of the chair, turn, and shake hands with the nurse, whose eyes are all atwinkle. “Take care of yourself,” I say.

Darrel is in the waiting room. He sees me and stands up, extends an arm my way. I have a prescription for codeine clutched in one fist; I can feel my bangs damp against my temples. I must look funny, swollen and bedraggled, for Darrel gives me a gummy, toothy grin, and shakes his head, like I’m cute, like I’m not his teacher. He puts his arm around me. “You okay?”

My tongue’s dead in my mouth, thick and swollen, like something hit by a car. There’s Christmas music in this room, piped in from the ceiling: and quiche lorraine forever and ever. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I lean my head against Darrel’s arm. It is slippery with nylon; already it is parka weather. “Why, it’s one of the three wise men,” I say, trying to smile. I look up at him. “And I think I know which one.” I wonder if I should have the tooth put back in. “I love you,” I say. Forever. And ever.

Darrel smiles. “You’re on drugs,” he says.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

“Poor mumpy-mom,” coos George when she sees my swollen cheek. She wants to touch it, the way people always want to touch
the stomach of a pregnant woman. She brings me a glass of milk. “Can I look inside?” she asks.

“It’s like giftwrap,” I say, and I open my mouth so she can look at the black threads.

“Eeeyow.” George looks both mesmerized and ill. “Does it hurt?”

“Uh-uh,” I shake my head, my mouth still open for her to see.

George turns away. “That’s enough,” she says and I close my mouth and she takes a sip of my milk, peering out at me from over the glass rim. Like an owl. Like a suspicious owl.

“Hello, Mrs. Carpenter?”

No one calls me
Mrs
. “This is Benna Carpenter, yes.”

“Mrs. Carpenter, this is Rita Milnheim from the Lertoma Club, and we’d like to know if you’d be interested in donating eighteen dollars to send four mentally retarded children to see
Hansel and Gretel
performed by an authentic New York theater group.”

The voice is chilly and mechanical. Eighteen dollars sounds like a lot. “The what club? What’s the name of your club?”

“The Lertoma Club, Mrs. Carpenter. We also have the nine-dollar plan which will allow us to send two mentally retarded children to see
Hansel and Gretel
.” Once an insurance salesman came to my door. “Mrs. Carpenter,” he said, shaking my hand, “my name is Dick Helm and I’m here to find out if you’re covered.” I stared at him. Then I glanced down at myself. “Gracious, I think so,” I said. At which point I sent him over to the Shubbys. Which is a habit I have.

“Well,” I said, “the nine-dollar plan sounds a little better, but I just had a wisdom tooth removed and can’t really talk very well. Could you send me brochures or something? I would just like some more information on your organization before I give any more money away.”

“Certainly. Thank you very much for your pledge, Mrs. Carpenter. You’ve made two handicapped children very happy. Good night.”

She hangs up before I get to protest. First of all, I haven’t officially pledged anything, and I resent being rushed, bullied, misunderstood into it. Second of all, why would two retarded children ever want to see
Hansel and Gretel
, a play about the abandonment of children? What if I refused to give the Lertoma Club my money. Certainly most of it benefits the theater group and not the kids at all. Why not nine dollars for, say, beer and M&M’s? If I were retarded—hell, even if I weren’t—that’s what I would want. What if I don’t pay? Would two kids be left standing out in front in a lobby somewhere, teary-eyed, wondering why Missus Carpenter didn’t send in the money? “We don’t like Missus Carpenter! We don’t like her!” they would chant in unison. Would they be stuck there while all their friends went on in? Would this be the real
Hansel and Gretel
? Would this be what they should see?

“Mom, a long time ago I put a tooth under my pillow, but the tooth huvvah didn’t come and give me anything.”

Huvvah
is Georgianne’s baby word for fairy. I don’t know where she got it; I think it just kind of developed on its own, like marsupials in Australia. For some reason we’ve kept it in circulation.

“Really?” I say, wondering if I should wrench her out of infancy, get rid of this tooth-and-money jazz. My mother had told us right from the start that there was no tooth fairy, sorry kids, and that Santa Claus was simply a spirit in your heart that prompted you into present-giving. The Easter Bunny, however, I knew really truly existed, though he was crucified on Friday and had to wait until the third day to rise and pass out jelly beans. What could I say to Georgianne? “Honey, there’s no such thing
as the tooth huvvah”? It wasn’t compelling. It wasn’t a spirit in your heart.

“Why don’t you try again?” I suggest and cup my hand over my jaw. “The tooth huvvah owes me quite a bit of money, too. Maybe the tooth huvvah will come visit tonight.” Maybe Darrel, I thought, was the tooth huvvah.

“Nah,” says Georgianne.

“Why not?”

“Cuz in school I made a ring with it.”

“A ring?”

“Yeah. Wanna see?” And she whips out from behind her back a tiny pipe cleaner twisted and curled into a circle. Glued to it, rather precariously, is her tooth, the blood in it now brown as a body part. It looks like some horrible thing that got done in Vietnam and people never talked about until ten years later.

“My,” I say.

George slips it on. “It’s very pretty. I just have to be careful.”

“What did your teacher say?”

George shrugs. “She said I just shouldn’t wear it to church. But I tole her we didn’t go to church, we went to Donut-O-Donut, and she said, ‘Well then I guess you could wear it there.’ ”

The dentist calls, as he said he would.

“How are you?”

“It’s supposeta hurt, right?”

“
Uncomfortable
is the word we use.”

“I’m uncomfortable then. Yeah. I’m okay.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.”

“How are
you
?”

“All right, thanks.” He pauses. “After you I had five more.”

I think about this. It sounds like something I said once to my first boyfriend, in a bad coffee shop, over beers, in my imagination, in New York:
After you I had five more
.

But what does one say to a dentist?

“Eye-yi-yi.”

“That’s teeth for you.”

“Yes,” I say, “it certainly is.”

“Come in on Tuesday, and I’ll remove your stitches.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Yes. Well. See you then.”

“Right,” I say. This is like every divorce. You get tears in your eyes and think, “God, all that oral sex and now we’re talking to each other like bureaucrats.”

My face is puffed up like a boxer’s. I know Darrel secretly finds me irresistible this way but just isn’t letting on. When I mention this he rolls his eyes and exhales in an exhausted fashion. Then he, too, asks to see my stitches.

Benna Carpenter’s morning classes had nothing to say about poetry. They had nothing to say about sex either when she switched the subject to that. They merely wanted to be told what to know. They wanted to know what they should be writing in their notebooks. “This class is supposed to be full of lively discussion,” she said to her eight o’clock class. “I’m going to start bringing in pots of coffee.” To her ten o’clock class she said, “It’s people like you who were responsible for the Holocaust.”

The Free Verdi Company performs at Baker High School, a few miles outside of Fitchville. I arrive a little late and have to tiptoe into the auditorium, which is a large room, perhaps used in the daytime as a cafeteria, with a stage at one end and rows of folding chairs, unfolded and arranged in meticulous lines. The cast is already on stage, singing. There are no costumes, no sets, no orchestra: This is what the Free Verdi Company means by
free
. There is a piano, and the cast reads the music from books they
hold in front of them. And
Carmen:
This is what they mean by Verdi.

The auditorium is only half-dark and half-full, mostly, I assume, with friends, parents, senior citizens who in the middle of Carmen’s arias squeak in their chairs, or readjust them loudly across the floor. The woman singing Carmen is a pale, wheat-haired woman named Dixie Seltzer. She tries to look seductively Spanish, but ends up steamily emoting like a Kansas housewife with the vapors. Gerard hasn’t really prepared me for the amateurishness of this production. Mediocrity alone never surprises me, but this particular example, unheralded by the usually shrewd and cynical Gerard, comes as a painful surprise, like a car accident. I’m probably being unkind. I adjust to my seat, slip off my coat, re-cross my legs. Perhaps it’s not all that bad. The rest of the audience seems to be enjoying it, smiling and applauding and glancing down at their programs to see who’s singing whom. Perhaps it’s just my unpreparedness for this that has made it seem so quickly awful, or perhaps it’s the Jewish mother in me, wanting only the best for Gerard (“My son! My son the musical genius is drowning!”). What the hell do I know about opera?

The lights go up. There will be three intermissions. The cast is allowed to meander the corridors, linger at the water fountain, chat pleasantly with relatives. An older man, strikingly white-haired and in a red turtleneck, brushes by me, in a hurry to leave. He has his car keys in his hand. “I for one am not sticking around for the rest,” he says to me meanly, stagily, because I am the nearest person at the moment. He stops and smiles at me, as if I’m supposed to agree. I look away. I look for Gerard, spot him by the stage door with his back to me, scurry up behind him and then give him a big hug. “You’re terrific,” I say, though I’ve hardly heard him sing a line yet. “Act two,” I remember him saying, “act two is where I turn into Placido Domingo.”

Gerard turns and beams. His eye wanders off to one side like
a haywire satellite. “Thanks for coming. Let’s walk.” He takes my arm and we march loudly off down the corridor to the left. It’s one of those hallways with a long glass wall on one side. Outside it’s night and bushes. “I just need someone to pace with,” says Gerard, and our legs are close, brushing and in step, identical, like pals, like siblings. “Two siamese twins,” says Gerard. “Tragically joined at the hip.”

“I like this,” I say. “I’m absconding with the leading man. I think it’s something that with a little practice I could learn to do very well.” Gerard isn’t really listening. He seems nervous, a slight rose flush behind his forehead and eyes. “Are you nervous?” I ask. “You don’t really seem nervous.”

“There’s a guy in the audience from City Opera. It might be nice to impress him, you know, shake his hand backstage, all that gladhanding stuff. He’s got white hair and is wearing a red turtleneck—I saw him from the stage. Did you happen to notice him?”

“No.”

Gerard looks at me, clearly tense, this the ravage of ambition. “You think this is all bush league, don’t you?”

“No, of course not, Gerard.”

“Where’s my rose?” he grins.

“Damn. I forgot it. I’m sorry.” We have stopped walking. We are both looking at each other’s feet.

“Well,” says Gerard, looking up, hopeful as a fisherman. “I still say this is better than the Ramada. What’s wrong with your face?”

“Thanks a lot, Gerard.”

“No, I mean your cheek. It’s swollen.”

“My wisdom was removed. I told you about that.”

“That’s right,” he smiles. “Now I remember. You taking funny pills?”

“Yeah, but they’re never funny enough. This morning I told my students they were responsible for the Holocaust. They
never looked up, just wrote it in their notebooks. I’ll buy you a drink after you kill that bitch Carmen.”

“I’ll need one,” he sighs, and then we walk back up the corridor. When we get to the stage door, the corridor is emptying and I take Gerard by the elbow and say, “Well, good luck!”

“I don’t believe in luck,” he says. “I believe in miracles.” He stops and tucks in his shirt. “That’s just part of my personality.”

The chorus is really the weakest element. It wobbles around and gets way ahead of the pianist. Gerard’s voice, for the most part, is clear and strong. He’s a fairly confident Don José and rarely looks at the score, until a bad note undoes him. I can see him redden, hesitate, lose his place, flounder back into his book.

Nonetheless, everyone loves the Flower Song, that song of the not-forgotten rose.

Gerard keeps insisting on buying the drinks. I have to fight and argue and end up having to say belligerent-sounding things to the waitress, who refuses to run a tab. “If I ever have kids,” he says, “I’m going to name them Methyl and Ethyl.” He toasts and swigs.

Something’s tired between Gerard and me. It’s as if we have disappointed each other into irritation; we have witnessed the other’s failures for too long, and it has made us cranky.

“You really thought it was okay?” asks Gerard again.

“Yes, Gerard, I thought it was okay.” I am on the verge of a sigh or a snap or a shout.

We try speaking of other things, of the decline of the world, how humanity is done for, how Gerard has been seeing Darrel around town with another woman, how Gerard thought I should know, and how Gerard seems a little too eager to tell me, how Gerard drinks way too much, and how Gerard felt our goddamned
friendship was about truth and honesty, and how some things are better not to know or tell like for instance the man in the red turtleneck who left early because the whole production was a joke how’s honesty if you like honesty. And how I’m so volatile, and how it is that all this is happening, how I shouldn’t have to sit and listen to some drunk musician tell me about Darrel screwing around, and how sorry Gerard is, he really shouldn’t have said anything he just thought it would be for the best, and how Gerard is just a washed-up, no-talent Huck Finn or should we say
Hack
lounge act playing at everything and just because he’s drunk he’s pretending he’s hurt, don’t pretend you’re hurt, for godsakes he should just drink himself to death, and how I just don’t have the character for alcohol, it requires too much sweetness and commitment, and how Gerard should just go fuck himself, and how so should I.