Free Anagrams by Lorrie Moore

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
    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 theground, 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,