Anagrams (27 page)

The train arrived in a clattering din and shrieked to a stop, all those little lighted rooms on wheels. The doors banged open, and she picked up her suitcase, readjusted her handbag, and scurried into the car directly in front of her. She was not a shopper. This was how she went through life. She took the first space she saw by the door.

She positioned her suitcase close to her legs. The train
clapped shut and jerked forward. And as some sort of inexplicable dread filled her like an ink, all she could think was that she would rather be someone, anyone, else: the skinny Oriental woman rocked to a nap across from her, or the woman further down dressed in dirty animal skins and reeking of urine. She wanted to be the blind cripple with the tin, who got on at Lexington, and to whom she had given five dollars. “Merry Christmas,” he said, and rolled off into the next car.

Mostly, she was surrounded by men, and soon they were all, all of them, tunneling under the East River.

She got off in Astoria, usually a festive place, she’d been told, but today it seemed foggy, even deadly. A man set up at a card table had a sign propped in front of him:
HELP KILL HENRY KISSINGER. DONATE A DOLLAR
. It was Christmastime. She asked no questions. She donated a dollar. Then she moved on, struggled down the metal stairs off the elevated platform and made her way up 31st Avenue toward Louis’s apartment, following the directions he’d given her over the phone and which she’d written in red ink on a now-smudged three-by-five card. It was only five-thirty, but it was dark and all the stores were closed. She put her suitcase down to rest. A bus alongside her suddenly pulled away, spewing exhaust, and she held her breath so as not to breathe it. A train rattled loudly across the el above and behind her. She gasped for air then picked up her bag and continued down the sidewalk. An unskinned goat was hanging in the window of the Acropolis Butchery. Two men shouted to each other from across the avenue. “Hey, Dinny, you do this. Right?” A fruit stand on the next block was open. “You like avocado?” asked a thick-necked woman with black hair. She wore a red sweater and a green apron, an old parka draped over her shoulders. Benna floundered, groped, like a high school girl, for a personality. “Yes, very much,” she said, and moved on.

·  ·  ·

“Eh, how you doing?” squeaked her brother Louis in a pitch too high for his age and body. Benna set her bag down and gave him a hug. “Merry Christmas,” she said. He remained in the doorway for a long moment, one of his feet holding open the door. He seemed a little balder, a little heavier, his nylon shirt unbuttoned too far down his chest, more because it had been overlaundered and no longer fit than because of anything else. Louis kissed her on the cheek. He smelled of cigarettes and small, yellowing teeth. “Let me take your bag,” he said finally, mimicking, she thought, someone else’s graciousness. He nudged up his slipping eyeglasses and then lifted her bag into the apartment. She stepped into a narrow hallway which connected two rooms. The rear room was dim, musty, and bluish with a double bed and a window that looked out onto a concrete wall. Off this room, in the back, was a kitchen with fluorescent lights and a large bag of trash that needed emptying. The front room to her right had a TV, a sofa, a chair, two windows. She could hear kids outside, shouting.

“Louis, this is really a nice place.” He was thirty-six, divorced, alone; this was the first apartment he’d ever had as a bachelor that wasn’t a six-month sublet. “Louis, I’m serious. I’m impressed.” She was, she realized, sounding like her mother, their mother.

Louis smiled and seemed pleased. He set her bag down in the dim, blue room. “It’s okay,” he said, suddenly rather seriously looking about.

“I brought you a Christmas present,” she said. It was a sweater vest. She would give it to him after dinner.

Louis looked guilty. “I don’t have one for you,” he said.

“That’s perfectly all right,” she smiled.

“So, what’s new with my little sister?” Louis self-consciously gulped from his beer can. Benna drank hers from an old jelly jar he had apologetically provided for her. “It’s fine, really,” she’d said. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

“What’s new?” she repeated. She thought about telling him about her wisdom tooth. In America, two adults under forty stuck for conversation could always talk about wisdom teeth. “Well,” she began, feeling the impossibility even of this. She looked at Louis. As a boy he’d always been a recluse and a moper, odd, lonely, fat. He’d sit in his little room in the trailer and eat fudge and play cards and daydream and snarl at any knocks at his door. Then he’d gotten married and it hadn’t worked out, as they say. For reasons she was never told, he wasn’t able to get custody of his daughter. Benna had always felt overwhelmingly sorry for him, though she knew that was wrong—distancing and finally dehumanizing.

“A good friend of mine just died.” She blurted it. Lately it felt like the only thing she knew, the only thing new.

“Howdy die?”

“Excuse me?”

“How did he die?”

“Oh. He—it sounds absurd—got drunk and fell in his own bathtub. Then at the hospital they fucked up with the painkillers and the I.V.’s, and he went into a kind of coma and died.”

Louis whistled a glissando of amazement and shook his head.

Benna pressed one finger into the corner of her eye. She was going to say something about its being dumb and pointless, about its being something she would never get over, but her jaw locked and her eyes were too quickly awash for her to get anything out but a wobbly “Yeah.”

Louis got up, came forward, and bent over Benna to hug her, but it was awkward and made her feel uncomfortable. “Don’t want my little sister to get upset now.” She could feel his sideburns, his breath, his arms.

“Louis, really. I’m okay. Listen, can I use your bathroom to wash up before we go to dinner?”

Louis let go. “Anything you want, anything you want,” he stammered, attempting a grand theatrical gesture with his arms.

“Mr. Host,” said Benna, trying to smile.

In the bathroom there was only one towel, the size of a bathmat. It was stained a brownish gray and was draped at a careless angle on an aluminum rod.

“Louis, do you have another towel?” Benna called out the door.

“No, I don’t.” Louis’s voice cracked sheepishly from the living room. He had turned the TV on, a basketball game.

“Oh.” Benna poked her dripping face out. “Do you have paper towels?”

“Yeah. In the kitchen,” he grunted.

“I’ll get them.” She dripped out to the kitchen, tore sheets of toweling from a roll on top of the refrigerator, and dried her face and hands with them.

“Ah, good.” She found herself smiling self-consciously at Louis, who had come out to the kitchen to watch. She threw the towels away in an open brown grocery bag, next to the overflowing one.

“Where you wanna eat?” he said.

They put on coats and walked five blocks to a dark Italian steak house called The Charcoal Lounge. It was full of piped-in Christmas music and festoons of garlands, red and green. Louis kept announcing that the dinner was on him. “All right, already,” she smiled, finally. She liked to say that. It was something which growing up upstate she had never heard anyone say.

Louis suddenly seemed edgy, his voice loud. “Get what you want, get what you want! Drinks? You want a drink first? Get a drink.”

The waiter looked at Benna. “A drink?”

“A scotch and soda, please,” she said. She put her napkin carefully in her lap.

Louis ordered a beer. “So this friend of yours who died, he was a good friend?”

“Yes,” said Benna. She thought about Gerard for a minute, imagined him in a floaty pastel heaven where there was no opera, only church and church music, and knew he’d hate it there. “It’s so weird to talk about somebody who’s died. It seems to make them more dead,” she said.

“It’s rough,” said Louis, shaking his head again. He reached across the table, took her hand, held it for a while. They were long minutes. She squirmed, then gently slipped her hand from his and put it in her lap with her napkin.

When the food came—salads, veal cutlets, spaghetti—Louis ate quickly. When he finished he leaned back and belched, said excuse me, and then talked about his bookkeeping job, how much he made, what it was like having a woman for a boss, how much he thought he’d make in three years, how much the government took out of his paycheck in taxes. “When we get back home,” he said, “I’ll, I’ll show you a check stub. Three hundred dollars they take out. Three hundred dollars!” he squeaked and his eyebrows went up. His eyes rounded and his glasses slipped a bit on his nose.

“Wow,” said Benna, chewing.

“Would you like another scotch?” asked the waiter.

“God, no. It’ll go right to my hips,” she said, although no one laughed. Louis ordered a second beer and the waiter nodded and left.

“Yeah, I’m thinking of becoming a Big Brother,” announced Louis, lighting up a cigarette. Louis was the sort of person who, when changing the subject, lit up a cigarette and started his sentences with a long, drawn-out
Yeah
.

“The organization? Where you sort of adopt a little kid?”

“Yeah. I go, go for the interview next Monday.”

“Well, Louis, that might be great for you.” It was curious to her, this announcement to a younger sister that he was off to try to become a Big Brother, this announcement of loneliness and terror, of failure and of hunger for the most meager redemption—that of brother, even fake-brother. Benna thought of something she’d heard on a nature documentary once, something called The Stone Egg Theory, which said if you put a stone egg in the chicken’s nest, it’ll be encouraged to lay a real one.

“Yeah, I think it’d be good for me.”

“I take it you don’t hear from Annie or Fran much.”

“Christmas card,” he sighed. “I’ve sort of given up on them.”

“Perhaps it’s better.”

“Yeah.” He dragged deeply, looking at his cigarette as he did, appearing almost cross-eyed.

Some people came in and Louis looked suddenly toward the door. “I think there’s someone here I know,” he said, and his face went brilliant with hope and recognition. He began to stand. Benna looked over her shoulder. There was a group of people standing at the door. None of them was looking Louis’s way. Benna looked back at her brother. A hesitant flicker appeared in one dark iris and then he scowled and sat back down, shaking his head. “Wope. Mistake. A case of mistaken identity.”

“Oh,” said Benna, and she felt disappointed for him. Someone should have been there. Someone should have waved and strode over, shook his hand, slapped his back, and said, “Louis, hey, howsit goin?—Merry Christmas, guy.”

They ate cheesecake and then walked home. Two blocks from his apartment he put his arm around her. “My little sister,” he said, and hugged her close to his side. She could smell the nicotine and onion sweat of his armpits, the damp heat of him beneath his coat.

·  ·  ·

Louis continued drinking beers. He showed Benna the paycheck stub. They sat in front of the television for a while silently watching a bad sitcom about two people who meet when one locates and adopts the other’s lost poodle. The two “owners” battle it out for possession, the poor dog yanked and pet-knapped and shuttled back and forth, abused and as miserably beside the point as a baby brought to Solomon. Her mind wandered. She thought of pets growing tired and committing suicide, what notes they would leave: “Dear Benna: It’s all a crazy game. Farewell, Max, Your Schnauzer.”

“I’m sleepy, Louis. I’ve got to call the cab place tomorrow at six-fifteen to make sure I’m at Kennedy by seven-thirty.”

Louis got up. “Well, I put brand-new sheets on the bed. I went out and bought them today.”

“You bought new sheets? You shouldn’t have done that.” Benna thought it odd that he’d have brand-new sheets yet no towels.

“Nothing but the best for my sister.” He lifted her hand and kissed it, wetly, several times, like some hideous courtier, looking out at her from over his glasses.

“Louis.” She pulled her hand away. He’s confused. He’s bought a woman dinner and now he’s confused: He’s forgotten who I am. “Listen, I can sleep on the sofa, if you’d rather. I can sleep here, no problem.” She bent over and patted the thatchy plaid of the couch cushion. Then she straightened and backed away from him.

“Hey, you know your brother loves you, right?” He grinned drunkenly, arms wide, coming toward her. She was supposed to hug him. She attempted it, lightly, briefly, but his arms clamped around her stubbornly. She wriggled her arms free and began pushing him away. “Come on, Louis,” she said, and twisting to get out of his hug, she found herself trapped, the small of her back against his spongy gut, his arms still locked now pressing
against her breasts. She squirmed and pushed down hard on his arms. He let go.

“Well, hey,” he said, and stepped toward the TV and turned the volume down.

“See you in the morning, Louis,” she said.

“Of course, of course,” and he kissed her hand again.

“Well. Good night,” she said, and he followed her into the room with the double bed and the window facing the blocked wall. She went over to the dresser, set his alarm, turned off the lights. Her bag sat by the blocked window, unopened. Louis stood in the doorway and watched. She kicked off her shoes and got into bed with all her clothes on. The sheets were rough and canvasy; Louis had bought them, but he hadn’t washed them. They had the chemical popcorn smell of five-and-dimes.

“I’m going to sleep now, Louis, thanks for everything. I’ll see you in the morning.” She tried to act as if he weren’t there still in the doorway, stubborn and lonesome and pushing up his glasses. But she could feel his largeness and breathing still close, and she pulled the covers up to her neck, squeezed shut her eyes, and retreated to someplace very far back in her head, and when she got there she sat in it like a child in a far place and said to herself over and over again, “Please, God, please.”

She wasn’t sure how long it was before Louis went back into the front room to watch TV, but after some time she could hear the unfamiliar TV voices turned up louder, the false, cooing women, the desperate laugh tracks, the snapping open of beer cans, and she knew then that he was there. Outside on 31st Avenue there were sirens all night.