Anagrams (8 page)

Benna misses everyone.

Benna misses everyone she’s ever known and spends her weekends writing long letters, extravagant in their warmth, signed always, “Lots of love, Benna.” She used to pay attention to how letters people wrote her were signed, but now she tries not to notice when the letters she receives close with “Take Care” or “Be Well” or “See you Christmas”—or sometimes simply “Moi.” Look for “Love,” she jokes to herself, and you will never find it.

It is the eating dinner home alone that is getting to her. At first, because she had no furniture, she ate sandwiches over the kitchen sink, and in ways that was better than sitting down at her new dining-room table with a pretty place setting for one and a carefully prepared meal of asparagus and broiled chicken and pasta primavera. “I quickly exhaust my own charms,” she writes in a letter to her friend Eleanor, who has begun to seem more imagined than real. “I compliment myself on the cooking, I ask myself where I got the recipe. At the end I offer, insincerely, to
do the dishes. I then tell myself to just leave them, I’ll do them later. I find myself, finally, quite dull.”

“Things are going well,” she writes to her father, who lives in a trailer and goes out on dates with women from his square dance club. “I think you would be proud.”

There are children, beautiful, bilingual, academic children, who leave their mudpies on her porch, mud in Dixie cups with leaves and sticks splayed out at all angles. They do not know quite what to make of Benna, who steps out of the house and often onto one of their mudpies, and who merely smiles at them, as if she just wanted to please, as if they, mere children, had some say in her day’s happiness.

Where she often goes is to the all-night supermarket, as if something she urgently needed were there. And in a kind of fluorescent hallucination, she wanders the aisles with a gimp-wheeled shopping cart, searching, almost panicked, for
something
, and settles instead for a box of glazed doughnuts or some on-sale fruit.

At home, before bed, she heats up milk in a saucepan, puts on a nightgown, looks over her lecture notes for the next day—the old familiar notes about the childless Mary Cassatt giving herself babies with paint; the expatriate Mary Cassatt, weary and traveling, dreaming homes for herself in her work; woman Mary Cassatt, who believed herself no woman at all.

Benna sifts through this, sipping the milk and half-waiting for the inevitable eleven o’clock phone call from an undergraduate who has been delinquent in some way and who wants very badly to explain. Tonight the phone rings at ten forty-five. She brings it into the bathroom, where the air is warmer, and gazes into the medicine cabinet mirror: This way at least she’ll feel as if she’s talking to an adult.

“Hello?” she says.

“Hi, Benna. This is Gerard. I want to apologize for this afternoon.” His voice is careful, slow.

“Yes, well, I guess we got a little tense.” She notices her face has started to do what her mother called
bunch
—age making pouches at her mouth and eyes: Are there such things as character
bags
? Benna opens the medicine cabinet mirror so she can look instead at the aspirin, the spearmint dental floss, the razor blades.

There is some noise on Gerard’s end of the phone. It sounds like a whimpering child. “Excuse me,” says Gerard. “My daughter’s wiping something on my pant leg.” He covers up the phone, but Benna can still hear him say in a patient, Dad voice: “Now, honey, go back to bed. I’m on the phone right now.”

“Sorry about that,” he says when he gets back on.

“You have a
daughter
?” Benna exclaims.

“Unfortunately, tonight I do,” he says. “My wife’s at the library, so it’s my turn to stay home.”

I didn’t even know you were married, Benna almost says. A
daughter
? Perhaps he is imagining it. Perhaps he has only an imaginary daughter.

Her finger traces the edge of the cold water faucet.

“So … hello? Are you still there?” calls Gerard.

“Yeah,” says Benna finally. She envies the spigot in her hand: solid, dry, clear as a life that has expected nothing else. “Sorry. I was just, uh, hemorrhaging.”

She hears Gerard laugh, and she looks straight into the toothpasted drain and laughs too. It feels good to laugh. “Give to seizure what is seizure’s,” she adds, aiming for hilarity.

“You’re crazy, Benna,” Gerard says merrily.

“Of course,” she says, “I’m here,” though it sounds stale, like the hard rock of bread a timid child hurls into duck ponds, less to feed than to scratch at the black beads of the eyes.

I
N THE DICTIONARY
lumpy jaw
comes just before
lunacy
, but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.

Dub the imagination
pharmacist
, and then we can talk turkey.

These are things you might find yourself saying.

There is a crack moving around my house—from ants on the inside eating the beams. It fractures an inch every week or so, zigging across the stucco, steady as lead. It’s four feet off the
ground, beginning at the northeast corner of the house, and it moves west like Lewis and Clark. You could pull up chairs in the driveway and just watch it, turn it into a sort of apocalyptic theme party: a crack potluck. “Ha!” squawks my imaginary friend Eleanor in the FVCC faculty lounge, where we correct freshman writing together. I have given her an unusual double appointment: Gym and Anguish-as-a-Second-Language. FVCC is the third-largest community college in the country and still we have no office. We are what are called Junior Instructors. We never finished our dissertations. One day in graduate school we looked at what we had done so far and decided to face facts. “This isn’t writing,” said Eleanor, “this is drinking.” We dropped out of graduate school, worked for a while as legal secretaries in New York, and then moved here. We pretend the lounge is ours—and it’s true: No one else comes in here. “Crackpot luck! Ha!” squawks Eleanor again. She usually has snappier retorts than this, but sometimes the unfinished thesis affects her brain. Every time she passes the department sign for “outgoing mail,” for instance, she mutters, without fail, “I’ve had enough of those; I need a wan poet type.” Eleanor is overweight and can’t seem to convince her phys ed students (at whom she shouts aerobics instructions from a chair in the corner by a cassette box) that exercise does anything for your life but prolong it. Her students need the credits but obtain them insincerely. Eleanor herself doesn’t do a single exercise and instead spends too much time looking at her watch to see when she can go have a cigarette.

“Ha, ha!” Eleanor slaps her knee and dumps her papers onto the floor in a flamboyant gesture of despair, leans back in her chair and laughs some more. (These are pre-semester “orientation” papers; we are weeding out the illiterates in advance so that the department can herd them together, into their own classrooms, like a doomed and leprous people. We do this for extra, end-of-summer money.) Eleanor gets up and goes out to get a drink of
water from the corridor fountain. Ten seconds later, still swallowing, and wiping her mouth, she comes back in, picks the papers back up, sets them in her lap. She begins reading student sentences aloud. “Benna, get this: ‘He had lost his composer, and he put his hand to his borrowed forehead.’ I think they mean
furrowed brow
.”

“It’s video games,” I say. “Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s tap water.”

“Here’s another one,” says Eleanor. “ ‘The man began to speak in a sarcastic manor’—m-a-n-o-r.”

Things do overwhelm her. “Come on, we’ve got to do this,” I say, trying to concentrate. Meticulousness, I think. Compassion.

Eleanor puts her pen down, all histrionics, and gazes out the lounge window at the parking lot and the one tree. “You know, I just hate it when I lose my composer,” she says.

My imaginary daughter, Georgianne Michelle Carpenter, is six and will soon be in the first grade. She watches too much TV news, even for someone who’s not a kid, which has resulted in her adoption of one giant new fear a week. The house will burn up and cook her to a nugget. Soon she will be laid off and living in an abandoned car in Maryland. “Geeze, George. At least have interesting fears,” I tell her. I have ants, dogs, unemployment checks—I only pretend to be a fear snob. “Or switch to cartoons. When I was growing up there were cartoons on at this hour. Aren’t there any cartoons on?”

She digs a finger into her shoe to get at something itching there. She suspects I am only trying to have my way with the TV. “I dunno,” she says, eyes glued to Dan Rather, who looks like her school principal. I sip my beer. Perhaps he even
is
her school principal. Perhaps there are really only a hundred people in the whole world and they all have secret jobs as other people, rushing
to airports, switching outfits, chowing down small, packaged fruit pies in taxicabs. I press the chilled bottle against my temple. I gnaw a cuticle. I wonder who else is me, who else is George.

George bites into a strawberry so huge it looks painful to itself. Juice spurts down her fingers. I hand her a napkin. We are sitting together on a quilt on the living-room floor. “Even if I had to, Mom,” says George, staring at her strawberry, “I would never lay you off.”

Machinists are picketing in Ohio. Once when George was younger I made the mistake of telling her that her father and I had broken up because he hadn’t been doing his job and I had had
to lay him off
. At the time it seemed like the right thing to say, nifty with clarity, like a new mop. Then the economy got a giant, moaning cramp, and the phrase took on connotations, intimations, power; it buzzed troublesomely around our cracking house. “Would you lay
me
off?” she asks, both sad and hopeful.

I put my nose in her ear. She smells of sweet, fruity children’s shampoo. “Nope. Never, never, never.” She giggles and butts her head into my underarm. This is our language of reassurance. I’ve always imagined it would work quite well at summit talks, weapons negotiations. You could never dislike a nation whose ambassador kept giggling, nudging, bumping his head into your armpit.

The ants are crawling all over everything, dusting themselves in spilled Nestlé’s Quik, measuring the faucets and cabinets, squiggling over chrome and wood. I zap them with paper towels. I find one stomach-up in the toilet bowl, drowned from overzealous bathrooming, a fate I once feared for myself when I was a toddler and skinny and forced to sit on toilet seats that didn’t go all the way around. This ant must have slipped, and now it floats there on the skin of the water, a tiny, tragic, triptychtic leaf. I’ve found that you can best entrap ants with the corpse of another ant. A
squashed one of their own in the middle of the floor, and boom, like stubborn Antigones, they rush out to bury their dead brother and get nabbed.

That’s probably why they’re called
ants
, says Eleanor.

Maybe I’m using up too many paper towels.

Maybe I’m actually enjoying this, this carnivorous hunting and trapping. The slow, inevitable rending of my house and theirs. I reach into the toilet bowl and lift out the ant body and place it on the floor under the sink.

On the first day of class the teacher, Benna Carpenter, marched into her classroom, flicked on the light, clunked over to the front desk, and heaved her briefcase up onto it. She removed her gray, baggy blazer and put it on the back of the chair, then remained standing, staring one by one at the twenty pale and attentive faces collected in the horseshoe of desks and chairs in front of her. They looked younger every year. Already she could feel herself spotting the types: the quiet redhead who would write not-bad sonnets; the curly-haired woman who was there for Benna’s jokes (she’d heard about them in bio lab); the guy in the Nike t-shirt who was there for his own jokes, ethnic and protracted (What do you call WASP foreplay? Washing dishes. What do you call Jewish foreplay? Begging. What do you call Irish foreplay? “Brace yourself, Bridget”); and two very clean Johnson & Johnson types who were there for an easy A-minus for their moms and dads. “Well,” she began. “This course is called The Reading and Writing of Poetry. I have one thing to say to you at the start: Ya wanna read and write poetry? You’re gonna have to go home and goddamn read and write poetry!” It came out in a shout.

Nobody moved. Two women exchanged glances.

The teacher opened her briefcase. She took out the Xeroxed class list and looked back up at their confused stares.

“The Reading and Writing of Poetry!” she barked again,
loudly. “That’s why we’re here. We’re all a bunch of crazy people!” And then she looked down, called the roll, even the middle names and initials, her hands fidgety through her hair, at her side, around her pencil, her handwriting on the attendance sheet a shaky, old woman’s scrawl.

“I start off determined, but they make me nervous,” I tell my friend Gerard, a part-time carpet salesman and local jazz pianist who gigs in the motel-hotel nightclubs around town. He boasts privately of playing an exquisite broadloom. We are sitting in Hank’s, a favorite junk coffee shop downtown, a place where I join him almost daily in ceremoniously sending month-old grease, cigarette smoke, and mind-blitzing coffee in the direction of vital organs. Gerard has a way of alchemizing what is essentially self-destructiveness into a sort of quaint, homely charm. The world seems okay with Gerard; it seems comfortable even when sitting in the very “kitchen of its poisons,” Gerard’s phrase for Hank’s, the Pentagon, and certain parts of Queens, where he’s from.