Anagrams (7 page)

“No, the dog’s not for sale,” says Eleanor, recrossing her legs. “But you know, you’re the very first person to ask that question.”

“Am I?” says the beautiful woman. The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal’s office: “So what’s this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?” You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.

“A clunker,” whispers Eleanor, noticing Gerard. “Get yourself a clunker.”

I’ll probably watch a lot of TV specials: Sammy Davis singing “For Once in My Life,” Tony Bennett singing “For Once in My Life,” everybody singing “For Once in My Life.”

“Can I interest you in a Liz Claiborne?” says Eleanor, pulling down the black skirt from the tree. “I don’t know much about designer clothes, but supposedly Liz Claiborne is good stuff.”

The beautiful raven-haired woman in the denim jumper smiles only slightly. “It’s okay except for the lint,” she says, gingerly lifting the hem of the skirt, then dropping it again. Eleanor shrugs and puts the skirt back up in the tree. “No one knows anything about
character
anymore,” she sighs, and lurches back toward the tables where she piles up old complimentary airlines magazines and back issues of
People
and
Canadian Skater
.

“Just this, then, I guess,” says the woman, and she hands Gerard a dollar for a record album. I look quickly and see that it’s a Louis Armstrong record I gave him last Christmas. When the woman has left, I say, “So what’s this, you’re selling gifts? I gave you that record last Christmas and now it’s in our yard sale?”

Gerard blushes. I’ve made him feel bad and I’m not sure whether I intended it. After all,
I
have sold the wine decanter my brother gave me last year, his foot jiggling, his entire impossible life printed on his face like a coin.

“I’ve got it on tape,” Gerard says. “I’ve got the Louis Armstrong on tape.”

I look at Eleanor. “Gerard tapes,” I say.

She nods. She’s looking through some old
People
magazines that she wants to sell for a dime apiece. “So, Billy Joel’s getting married to a fashion model,” she is saying, flipping pages. “What can you expect from a guy who writes ‘I don’t want clever conversation’ and calls that a love song.” Pretty soon Eleanor has lost it and is singing “I don’t want clever conversation, I just want gigundo buzooms.” “Kip loves Billy Joel,” she adds. “The man’s got the taste of a can opener.”

It’s every man for himself out here.

I will move to a new apartment in town. I will fill it with new smells—the vinyl of a shower curtain, the fishy percale of new sheets, the peppery odor of the landlord’s pesticides. I will take too
many hot baths—a sex and alcohol substitute and an attempt to get reoriented.

At work, suddenly, no one will seem to understand when I’m joking.

We are actually doing fairly well in the yard sale, though the sweaters aren’t a big hit since the weather’s warm. “I’m sorry about the record album,” says Gerard, putting his hand on the part of my thigh where the shorts end.

“That’s okay,” I say, and go into the house and bring out a lot of junky little presents he’s given me in the last two years: crocheted doilies, Crabtree and Evelyn soaps, a drawer sachet that says, “I Pine for You, and Sometimes I Balsam.” They are all from other yard sales. They have sat for years in someone else’s drawers, and then in their yards, and now I’m getting rid of them. I suppose I’m being vengeful, but I never really liked these presents. They are for an old maid, or a grandmother, and now’s my chance to dump them. Perhaps I’m just a small person. Sometimes I think I must love Magdalena more than I love Gerard, because when they both take off for California, I want Magdalena to be happy and I want Gerard to mope and lose his hair into his water dish. I don’t want him to be happy. I want him to miss me. That is not really love; I suppose I understand that. But perhaps it is like a small girl who for one baffled and uncharmed instant realizes her rigid plastic doll is not a real baby—before she resumes her pretending again. Perhaps it is like a football player who, futile and superfluous, dives in on top of the manpile, even after he knows the tackle’s over; even after he knows the play’s completed and it all had nothing to do with him; he just leaps in there anyway.

“Oh my god,” cries Eleanor, picking up the balsam sachet. “I’ve seen this in at least two other yard sales.”

“I got it down on Oak Street,” says Gerard. “Is that where you saw it?”

“I don’t think so.” She holds it up by two fingers and eyes it suspiciously.

For a while I’ll find myself talking to myself, which will be something I’ve always done, I’ll realize, it’s just that when you’re living with someone else you keep thinking you’re talking to them. Simply because they’re in the same room, you assume they’re listening. And then when you start living alone, you realize you’ve developed a disturbing habit of talking to yourself.

As medication, I will watch a lot of HBO and eat baked apples with sour cream. The whites of my eyes will chip and crack with scarlet. Only once or twice will I run out into the street, in the middle of the night, with my pajamas on.

By three-thirty-five business really winds down. I have already sold my ladderback chairs and my Scottish cardigans. I’m not even sure now why I’ve sold all these things, except perhaps so as not to be left out of this giant insult to one’s life that is a yard sale, this general project of getting rid quick. What I really should have brought out is the food Gerard and I still have: potatoes already going bad, growing dark intestines; parsley and lettuce swampy in plastic bags; on the shelf above the stove, spices sticking to the sides of their bottles. Or I should have brought down all the mirrors—the one in the bathroom, the one over the dresser. I’m tired of looking into them and putting on so much make-up I look like a prostitute. I’m tired of saying to myself: “I used to be able to get better-looking than this. I know I used to be able to get better-looking than this.”

It all gives me a stomachache. “There goes my dowry,” I say when a ten-year-old girl actually buys the “I Pine for You” for a quarter. I feel concerned for her. She is mop-haired and shy, with a small voice that whispers “Thank you.” She walks with tiny steps and holds the sachet against her chest.

I’m looking at the sky and hoping it will rain. “This gets
dull after a while, doesn’t it,” I say. “I’d like to close up, except we advertised in the paper we’d stay open until five.” Very few cars drive past on Marini Street; some slow down, check us out, then rev up their engines and speed away. Eleanor shakes a halter top and shouts, “Same to you, buddy.”

“If we closed,” I continue, “could we get sued for false advertising? Perpetrating a public fraud?”

“Littering,” says Gerard, and he points to the lavender teddy again.

“Boy,” says Eleanor, oblivious. “I hate it when someone comes by and pokes through a box of clothes that you always thought were kind of nice, and they just poke and stir and sniff and then move on. I mean, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get rid of the Liz Claiborne skirt, but now that it’s been pawed over, forget it. There’s no way it’s going back inside my closet.”

I go inside and Magdalena follows, stays, lies down on the linoleum of the kitchen floor where it’s cool. I grab the remaining six-pack in the refrigerator and bring it outside. The pop and hiss of cans comforts me, the starchy bitterness bubbling under my tongue. Gerard strolls around the yard with his beer can. He is pretending to be a customer. He struts past the tables, past the birch trees, spins, and in some Brooklynesque, street-kid voice he picked up from the movies, he says, “Hey. How much will
you
pay
me
to take this stuff off your hands?” We laugh, resenting him for being cute. I swallow beer too quickly; carbonation burns and cuts my throat.

Eleanor jumps up, deciding it’s her turn. She grabs the fiberglass insulation and models it like a stole. She scuddles and swishes up and down the sidewalk, a runway model on drugs. “Dahlinck, don’t vurry about tuh spleentairs,” she is saying. “So vut, a leetle spleentairs.”

Gerard and I applaud.

·  ·  ·

My new apartment might be in a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, “Hi, do you have any kids?” and then, “Why not, don’t you like kids?”

“I like kids,” I will explain. “I like kids very much.” And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.

“Your turn, Benna,” Eleanor and Gerard are saying. “Be somebody,” they are saying. “Do something,” they are saying. “Some feat of characterization. Some yard sale drama. We’re bored. No one’s coming.”

The sky has that old bathmat look of rain. “Some daring dramatic feat?” I don’t feel quite up to it.

“Three feats to a yard.” Gerard grins, and Eleanor groans and smacks him on the arm with a
People
magazine.

I put my beer can, carefully, on the ground. I stand up. “All right,” I exhale, though it sounds edged with hysteria, even to me. I know what hysteria is: It is your womb speaking up for its own commerce. “This is your sex speaking,” it says. “And we are getting a raw deal.”

I walk over and pretend to be interested in the black skirt. I yank it down out of the tree and hold it up to myself. I step back and dance it around in the air. I fold back the waistband and look at the tag. I point at it theatrically, aghast. I glance over my shoulders, then look front at Gerard who is waving and at Eleanor who is laughing. I make a horrible face. “Liz Claiborne?!” I yell, pretending to be outraged.
“Liz Claiborne?!”
I toss the skirt off toward the street; it lands on the curb. “Liz Claiborne’s nothing but a hooker!”

And then there is a guffawing, hiccuping sort of laughter, but it seems to be coming mostly from me, and I have collapsed, squatted on the grass, holding my stomach, this thing that might
be laughter coming insistently, in gulps and waves. I lift my head, and in the distance I see Eleanor and Gerard—Eleanor worried and coming toward me, Gerard afraid and not coming toward me, and jutting into my line of vision is the edge of my own body, fading from the center first like a bloodstain or a bruise, only my outlying limbs, my perimeter lingering. That is all I can see, the three of us, here, small and vanishing, and caught in the side yard, selling things.

“S
O, YOU DON’T LIKE THE LIFE
you’re leading?” asks Gerard, unbelieving as the police. He is an art history graduate student, a teaching assistant of Benna’s, although they are about the same age. They are sitting in Benna’s office, which could use some potted plants and more books. The art history department, she thinks, must be wondering about her empty shelves, whether this suggests an attitude problem. She has tried to joke and say that she’s going to fill the shelves with Hummels and porcelain horses with gold chains connecting their hearts. But no one seems to find it funny. “You’re Impressionist scholarship’s new golden girl,” Gerard is saying. “I don’t get it.”

Benna considers this.
Leading a life
always makes her think of something trailing behind her in a harness, bit, and reins. “You can lead a life to water, but you can’t make it drink.” She smiles at Gerard. Her books are all at home, still in boxes.

Gerard’s grin is a large plastic comb of teeth, the form his fury has taken. “You’re being ungrateful,” he says. Benna has
what he hopes someday to have: free pencils, department stationery, an office with a view. Of the lake. Of the ducks. Not the glamour bird, she has said. How can Benna suggest she’s unhappy? How can she imply that what she’s really wanted in her life is not this, that her new position and her oft-quoted articles on Mary Cassatt have fallen into a heap in her lap like, well, so many dead ducks. How can she say that she has begun to think that all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind?

“Maybe I’m being ungrateful,” bristles Benna, “but you’re being insubordinate.” Yet she likes Gerard, is even a bit attracted to him, his aqua sweaters and his classroom gift for minutiae; like a Shakespearean’s pop quiz, he surprises everyone with years, dates, the names of dogs and manservants. Now Benna regrets a bit having said what she’s just said. Even if Gerard is behaving badly. Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

“Well, I guess that’s a signal I should leave,” says Gerard, and he gets up and does a stiff swagger out of her office, without even saying good-bye, the blues and greens of him bleeding like Giverny lilies.

Benna takes a bus home, which she usually resents, tending, as she does, to think of buses as being little more than germs-on-wheels. But today, because of the October chill, the peopled humidity of the ride is comforting. In the city back east where she went to graduate school, everything was within walking distance: school, groceries, laundry. She lived in a house with a large group of friends and was known for her carrot soup and her good, if peculiar, sense of humor. Then in August, she packed up her car and drove out here alone, feeling like a map folded back
against its creases. She stopped overnight at motels in Indiana, Nebraska, and Montana (where she danced in the cocktail lounges with truckers), and blinked back tears through prairie after prairie and towns that seemed all to have the same name: Watertown, Sweet Water, Waterville. She came to this California university for one reason, she reminds herself: the paycheck. Although every time the paycheck arrives the amount taken out in taxes for a single woman with no dependents is so huge it stuns her. The money starts to feel like an insult: For this, she thinks, I’ve uprooted my life? Whatever money she might save, moreover, she usually spends trying to console herself. And it is hard to make any job financially worth its difficulties, she realizes, when you’re constantly running out to J. C. Penney’s to buy bathmats.