by Lorrie Moore
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.
4
WATER
“SO, 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.
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.
“Things flow about so here!” she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a workbox, and was always in the shelf next above the one she was looking at.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls.
—Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
And—you say to yourself—what’s the harm? Who’s to say what happened really? What’s the truth, anyhow?
—Jerry Lewis in Person, with Herb Gluck
5
THE NUN OF THAT
IN 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 corrido
r 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.
