Free Anagrams by Lorrie Moore Page A

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 ofwater from the corridor 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, rushingto 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.
    George bites into a strawberry so huge it looks painful to itself. Juice spurts down her fingers. I hand her a napkin. We are sitting together on a quilt on the living-room floor. “Even if I had to, Mom,” says George, staring at her strawberry, “I would never lay you off.”
    Machinists are picketing in Ohio. Once when George was younger I made the mistake of telling her that her father and I had broken up because he hadn’t been doing his job and I had had
to lay him off
. At the time it seemed like the right thing to say, nifty with clarity, like a new mop. Then the economy got a giant, moaning cramp, and the phrase took on connotations,