Anagrams (25 page)

I drag one from over by the partition, behind which is an old man reading a magazine. “Don’t mind me,” calls the old man.

“Don’t mind him,” says Gerard.

I sit down and cross my legs. Gerard looks smaller and smaller to me, fading in and out like a quasar. “Do you hurt?”

“Not really. I’m just a little dizzy. They’re probably not going to keep this apparatus on for very long. I’m okay. Maple was in earlier.”

“Yeah, I know. We arranged it that way, splitting up our visiting slots. We’re a two-act show.”

“Even Merrilee came.” He smiles, lost.

I attempt a skeptical, quizzical face, then let go of it. “Thank god for Merrilee, huh. Thank god for the staples in life.” I am thinking here of the zucchini bread, though the centerfold does, of course, come to mind.

“I don’t know what happened. One minute I was unlocking my apartment door, the next I’m here.”

“They shaved your beard.”

“
I
did that in my drunken stupor, somewhere between the front door and the tub. Not too many razor cuts even. I truly am an amazing fellow. In case you didn’t know.”

I put my palm to his face. He badly needs another shave. “The new Gerard,” I say, not coming up with anything better. “I brought some books to read to you.”

“I already know Habakkuk by heart.”

“I know, I know.” Gerard’s right eye is wandering off to one side, as it does when he’s tired, a lost Ping-Pong ball. The tooth makes him look like a pirate or a street kid. I look down at my lap; I’ve brought
Turkish Fairy Tales
and
Alice in Wonderland
. Perhaps my problem is that I try to turn everyone into a child.

“How’s lover boy?” asks Gerard. His eyes close for a moment. The question is teasing, like a brother, but the face is weary, like an old person visited insincerely by a young one. Maybe I’m not handling the visit energetically enough and am tiring him out. I dance the books around as if they’re playthings. I try to distract him. “Zoopty-doopty-doo,” I sing loudly, for a joke.

“How is he?” Gerard says again.

“Well. I think I blew it. It didn’t work out.” I realize that that is how everyone puts it:
It didn’t work out
. Like something
that refused to exercise, to exert itself aerobically.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” says Gerard, opening his eyes. He tries to sit up more, but it hurts.

“Yeah. I don’t know whether to shower him with gifts or go steal things from his apartment.” I hold up the books like an elementary school teacher. I dance them around again. “I think there must be a reason I’m going through life alone.”

Gerard takes my hand and says nothing, though he smiles just slightly, just sadly.

I don’t say anything either. I don’t know how to talk to people. Everyone else’s lives are far more complicated than mine and it makes me not know what to say to them. I bitch. I argue. I joke and clam up. I sing Broadway showtunes. I’m just an asshole from Tomaston.

“Benna, get yourself a pet,” says Gerard. “Why don’t you get a dog and name it Wazoo or Aretha Franklin Carpenter, something like that?”

“I don’t like dogs. You can’t trust them. They always look like they’re smiling.” I dance
Alice in Wonderland
around again. It’s getting less and less funny. Not that it was so great to begin with.

Gerard persists. “You need some other people in your life. Your husband’s dead, Verrie’s moved and re-occupied—who’ve you got in this dump town?” I keep noticing the jagged white of his tooth.

“I’ve got you.”

“No, not me,” he sighs. “That’s my point here. You need someone besides me.”

“I’ve got Georgianne,” I blurt out.

“Georgianne?” And suddenly I realize what I’ve said. The little piece of planet I’ve been operating on shudders and twists.

“Yeah. Georgianne.” I chew on my thumb cuticle. I’ve never confessed it before. Now I will have to confess.

“Who, praytell, is Georgianne?”

I hesitate. I’m a Beruban cliff-diver. I take a deep breath, and my feet push off. “I made her up.” I am sailing through air. “She’s, well, sort of my daughter.”

Gerard stares at me, uncomprehending. “You made her up? You made up an
imaginary
daughter?”

“Of course not,” I say. “What, you think I’m an idiot? I made up a
real
daughter. Yeah.” I can feel the sea, the heat behind my face. “I don’t go around making up
imaginary
daughters.” I pause. “That would get too abstract. Even for me.” I think of Pinocchio. Of Thumbelina. Of the children in
Hansel and Gretel
living much of their lives as baked goods.

Gerard tries to be kind. “What is she like?”

The late afternoon light tinkerbells around the room. I want to talk about something else. I feel embarrassed. “Would you like me to read or pour you some ice water or something? You’re too injured to be interested in this.”

But Gerard’s interested. “Do you imagine having conversations and everything?”

“Everything. Babysitters, the whole bit.” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice. I wonder if he thinks I’m mad. “Since my brother got divorced and my niece Annie lives off with her mother in Michigan, I don’t get to be Aunt Benna very much—so I made up Georgianne to keep me company. She’s a cross between Annie and my husband George. I pretend she’s his child and sometimes we talk about things. It seemed one of the few decent ways to bring someone into the world.” I shrug. “I just kind of gave in to the idea of her. You know how kids can be.”

“I’ll bet you’re very cute together.”

“We’re disgustingly cute together.”

“Do you plan things in advance? Or does she pretty much take care of things on her own?”

I hesitate, not knowing what he’s asking and whether he’s asking it seriously. I twist my watch around on my wrist. “You know what the Bible says:
Even the lilies of the field, um, make
it the hell up as they go along
. I also have a friend named Eleanor.”

Gerard’s right eye has come back and both of them are trying to fathom me, scrutinizing like a couple of old concierges. “Do I dare ask who
she
is?”

“She’s, uh, a very heavily made-up woman. Heavily, heavily made-up.”

Gerard laughs and I’m relieved. “What is she like?”

“Like me only with a wig. She tends to shout things like, ‘What, wait until I’m forty and have a Mongolian idiot?’ Things like that.”

“Is there anyone else you’ve made up?”

People come and go so quickly here. “No,” I say, doubt at my lips like an old breakfast.

Gerard lifts up one puppeted arm and places it on my knee. “You’re sort of neat and sort of crazy, Benna,” he says.

What he means, I think, is that I’m depressing the hell out of him. Out the window the sky has gone all hazy slate. There are churchbells playing at the Christ Methodist church across the way. “How embarrassing. I can’t believe I told you.” I’m determined not to cry. “I can’t believe you fell in a goddamn bathtub.” I put my hands to my face, then peek out at him from between my fingers.

“I have secrets, too, you know,” says Gerard, growing thoughtful. “Things about my past I’ve never told you. I have a real nightmare that took place in a restaurant years ago. I’m surprised to this day that I can even go out to dinner anywhere. I know how it is needing to make things—”

“Gerard, you don’t have to go into this. You’re in the hospital, for pete’s sake.”

He looks at me, startled. I suddenly know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say, “That’s it with you, isn’t it? You don’t really want to talk about anything, do you? You know invention
and indignation and slamming car doors, but what about serious conversation, Benna? People have lives. As difficult as your own has been, there are others whose lives have been even more so.”

But he doesn’t say this. What he says is, “You know, don’t you?” I try not to look at him. “Maple told you.” Gerard’s face, his bare scrubby face, grows tight and sad. He looks down at his bedsheets, then he looks back up at me, tries to look insouciantly amused. “I never knew you knew.”

“I knew.”

“And all this time you liked me because you felt sorry for me.”

“Yup, that’s the only reason.” I want here to be able to tell Gerard how it is that I care for him. But I remain still, like someone being mugged, while the church chimes land on the last vibrating note of “Silent Night.”

“Mom, watch me hold my breath.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“Why?”

“It’s not good for you.”

“How come?”

“It affects your personality.”

“What are we having for dinner?”

“Donuts. I thought we’d go to Donut-O-Donut.” She used to love to go there for dessert. I figure if we go there for the main course, she will love me for life, though her skeletal system will suffer and fail to grow.

Instead she says, “That’s no fun. Can I eat at the Shubbys’ tonight?”

And though I hesitate, I finally say, “Sure,” and let her go, though it’s hard.

·  ·  ·

Eleanor, too, seems to have become unavailable. Perhaps both she and George are simply being resentful. I have exposed them, like opening an oven door on a couple of soufflés: They will never forgive me.

I phone Darrel, but there’s no one home.

I go to the hospital over the weekend and read kiddy-lit to Gerard. “Dis kid Alice,” says Gerard, doing a bad Marlon Brando imitation. “She really had like some life.” He seems to be doing fine. They are talking about letting him out before Christmas, perhaps even later this week, though he still has tubes in his arms and throws up once a day.

The man with the magazine behind the partition is always telling us not to bother with him, to pretend he’s not there. Nonetheless I read the stories loud enough for him to hear. Sometimes he asks to see the pictures. His wife has brought him a poinsettia. “Hate plants,” he grumbles. The nurses call him Sal. Gerard says it’s short for Salvador.

“He’s had a life that makes yours and mine look like Jack and Jill,” Gerard adds in a portentous whisper, though he doesn’t tell me more about it, and I don’t ask. Maybe I’m afraid to hear. Maybe I’m thinking about Jack and Jill, how they had it pretty rough themselves. “I know for somebody else my life might seem easy,” Eleanor said once. “But for me it’s extremely difficult.” It wasn’t stupid people who managed to be happy in life; it was people who were extra clever.

Monday was the teacher’s last day of classes, and there were puddles all over the floor. Students stomped snow from their boots, and winter coats slipped from the backs of chairs. The teacher passed out cookies and cups and wine and then course evaluations. “Be as honest as you feel is absolutely necessary,” she said.

“You forgot napkins,” someone wailed.

An older, black student named Darrel arrived late after not having been there for a week. He spent twenty minutes filling out the evaluation and refused offers of wine.

At the front of the room the teacher was calling: “When you’ve finished with the evaluation you can put it face down on the front desk and go. Those of you who still owe me work, get it in by Thursday. Otherwise, have a wonderful Christmas break and it’s been nice working with you this semester.” She had always been told that
nice
was an empty, insipid word, but lately she’d come to rely on it quite heavily. If you can’t say something’s “nice,” you can’t say anything at all, she decided.

Someone on their way out left a carefully wrapped present and a card on her desk. She would take it home. It would be either a coffee mug or some Charlie cologne. “Thank you,” she said.

The student Darrel was one of the last to leave, but when he did, he dropped his evaluation face down on the front desk, smiled at the teacher, and said, “Merry X-mas. I’ll phone you in two months.” Then he placed a gift-wrapped bottle of something in her hands and said, “For you.” Perhaps it was cognac, she thought, something she would not hurl against the wall but drink in a single terrible sitting. For now she tried to smile in a way that spoke in part of love and in part of something else, though she wasn’t sure what. She made little tentative swimming motions with her fingers, and the student Darrel did likewise, nodding, two sea anemones saying farewell.

At home the crack side of the house is drafty, so I make hot chocolate.

I look out the front window, sipping. The sky is a charcoaled cantaloupe, some oranges and pinks caught in the night clouds like gases. Between the road and sidewalk is a snow hill
leading down into the driveway, and some neighborhood kids, including Isabelle Shubby, have taken sleds to it. The snow has melted and refrozen into ice. I can hear their shouts: “Ready or not, here I come!” “Hold your horses!” “Yoweee!” It has started to snow almost like sleet, and it patters against the windows like the staticky glitches in an old record. All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can’t see because you don’t have your glasses on. That is what it seems.

Although she was not supposed to until after she had given grades, the teacher read the evaluations the students had written. Most of them were perfunctory, favorable, and dull. Under
What did you like best about the instructor?
someone had written “Real pretty” and someone else “Knows a lot of swear words.” Someone else had written “Obsessed with sex.” Someone else had written, “Your mind is a swamp. Your heart is a swamp. Your soul is a swamp.” And then there was a picture of a swamp. Near the bottom of the pile from her afternoon class was handwriting she recognized. “Dear Benna,” it said in the space allotted for
Other Comments
. “You don’t know a flying fuck about poetry.”

The rest of the night the teacher spent at an all-night diner called Hank’s where she consumed coffee and homefries until her gut burned and where she sat making homemade Christmas cards that read
SEASONS GRITS AND HAPPY NOWHERE
or else
JOLLY X-MAS FROM SANTA AND HIS SUBORDINATE CLAUSES
. She drew pictures. She wrote special, little notes on the ones she was sending to her former lovers. And sometimes, in trying to think up merry little words, she would glance at the faded photo of fried chicken over the counter: six pieces, dead and breaded, arranged carefully in a circle on a plate with parsley and cranberry sauce, red and green, like Christmas.