Read Online Anagrams by Lorrie Moore - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lorrie Moore
Tags: Contemporary, Adult
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map folded backagainst 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, todo 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
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, todo 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
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