Read Online Anagrams by Lorrie Moore - Free Book Online

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 getsdull 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