Anagrams

by Lorrie Moore

  “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.

  In the morning she called the cab and it came in ten minutes. Her clothes were wrinkled and clammy, but she didn’t care. Louis stumbled out of the front room, seemed tired and irritable, perhaps achey from having slept on the couch, but he helped bring her bag out to the cab anyway. The air was cold and quiet. The cabbie got out and opened up the back trunk.

  “Good-bye, little sister,” Louis said, aiming for some weird jocularity, inappropriate as flowers. “Have fun.”

  “Thanks,” said Benna. “I’ll send you a postcard.” They quickly kissed good-bye, their mouths breakfastless and clouded with the potatoey, dishwater-breath of sleep.

  “Goinda Kennedy?” asked the cabbie.

  “Yeah.” Benna heaved her handbag into the backseat and got in after it. On the other side of the street, to her right, some teenaged boy, up early or out late, walking by with a leather jacket and a dangling, bent cigarette, called “Hey, jiggle-butt” and waved. He looked, for a minute, like Gerard, like some teenaged ghost of Gerard.

  On her left Louis was closing the door. He waved, then scuffed back toward the tiny collapsing stoop that was his. He had no socks on, and his heels were on top of his shoes, mashing the backs. He was wearing the same pants and shirt as the night before, she noticed, rumpled and misbuttoned, his coat thrown on over them. His breath floated out into the wintry morning in puffs. She watched him disappear. She knew he hadn’t a friend in the world. The two of them: How had they come to this?

  The cab moved forward. She suddenly realized she’d forgotten to give Louis his Christmas present, but she said nothing, and the cab turned right and kept going.

  The sun was only just coming up, and the driver was still high on his first coffee of the day. He wanted to talk. “You look glum,” he said. “Tough to say good-bye to that guy with the shoes?”

  Benna closed her eyes, leaned back into the seat. It was Christmas. Santa Claus is a spirit that lives in your heart, her mother had told her, not believing it right to hoodwink children. But perhaps her mother had been wrong. Perhaps sitting in a taxicab like this on Christmas there was no spirit in your heart. Perhaps there was only an old man, ridiculous and fat, who came into your house through your chimney, too moronic even to use the door.

  The sky’s striated blush began to look like a parfait behind the apartments and stores of Astoria. The roads were empty and clear as days and days. “My brother and I,” Benna said. “It’s just that we never get a chance to see each other very much.” Perhaps, she was thinking, there was nothing in which anyone might intelligently place their faith. Perhaps there was only rubble and sleep. It’s all hopeless, said Fred Astaire in a movie once. But it’s not serious. That was the only line she remembered.

  “Ah, brothers,” smiled the cab driver. “Do I know that. Hey, my brother and me?” He took a sharp left and double-checked the rearview mirror to catch Benna’s eye. “We’re like this.” And he held up two crossed fingers.

  V

  When the train stops, the lights stop flickering, and the doors bang open, George is the first to set official foot on Grand Central soot. She stops to sniff and exclaim, “Pooey-mcphooey,” in a tone that makes me wonder whether I’ve taught her to be polite, and, even if I have, what that means, how it really helps.

  We have to grunt and lug bags out the door, over the metal ridge, on
to the dank cement of the platform. We have ball bearings on the bottoms of our suitcases and from here on in it looks to be a sweatless trundle out to the hivey cathedral of the main concourse. We are off to be Beruba girls. People pour out from behind us, bumping, pushing, greeting friends and relatives with hugs and handclasps and sweaty cheek-to-cheeks. There are shouts of “Happy New Year,” although it’s still a week away. “It’s like Grand Central Station in here,” I say to George. I cap my hand over her head and steer her in front of me like a basketball or a mail cart.

  “It stinks like trains, Mom,” she says over the hiss of engines. It’s a harsh, queasy, burn smell, with its suggestions of hell and carcinogenesis. I think, This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just sit there like a bunch of schoolkids with their hands raised and uncalled on—each knowing, really knowing, the answer.

  Life is sad. Here is someone.

  “Knock, knock,” whispers Georgianne. She takes two steps to my one. “Knock, knock,” she repeats.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Me.”

  “Me who?”

  “Just me!” she says and giggles wildly.

  I shake my head. “You made that up, didn’t you.”

  “Yup.” She tugs at her bag. Passing the diesel at the front, we are suddenly hit with a steamy, acrid smoke billowing out from underneath it. People around us cough. George leans her head on my arm, mock-weary, Pre-Raphaelite. She is a gift I have given myself, a lozenge of pretend. Pretend there’s a child dozed between us, wrote Darrel once, and the city’s parch and chill is not the world, and the world’s not hurtful as a fist holding us sternly, always here and down.

  George fiddles with my coat cuff. “Sometimes,” she sighs into the steam, “I feel like I’m right in the mist of things.”

  I swear, she is a genius.