Free Anagrams by Lorrie Moore Page B

intimations, power; it buzzed troublesomely around our cracking house. “Would you lay
me
off?” she asks, both sad and hopeful.
    I put my nose in her ear. She smells of sweet, fruity children’s shampoo. “Nope. Never, never, never.” She giggles and butts her head into my underarm. This is our language of reassurance. I’ve always imagined it would work quite well at summit talks, weapons negotiations. You could never dislike a nation whose ambassador kept giggling, nudging, bumping his head into your armpit.
    The ants are crawling all over everything, dusting themselves in spilled Nestlé’s Quik, measuring the faucets and cabinets, squiggling over chrome and wood. I zap them with paper towels. I find one stomach-up in the toilet bowl, drowned from overzealous bathrooming, a fate I once feared for myself when I was a toddler and skinny and forced to sit on toilet seats that didn’t go all the way around. This ant must have slipped, and now it floats there on the skin of the water, a tiny, tragic, triptychtic leaf. I’ve found that you can best entrap ants with the corpse of another ant. Asquashed one of their own in the middle of the floor, and boom, like stubborn Antigones, they rush out to bury their dead brother and get nabbed.
    That’s probably why they’re called
ants
, says Eleanor.
    Maybe I’m using up too many paper towels.
    Maybe I’m actually enjoying this, this carnivorous hunting and trapping. The slow, inevitable rending of my house and theirs. I reach into the toilet bowl and lift out the ant body and place it on the floor under the sink.
    On the first day of class the teacher, Benna Carpenter, marched into her classroom, flicked on the light, clunked over to the front desk, and heaved her briefcase up onto it. She removed her gray, baggy blazer and put it on the back of the chair, then remained standing, staring one by one at the twenty pale and attentive faces collected in the horseshoe of desks and chairs in front of her. They looked younger every year. Already she could feel herself spotting the types: the quiet redhead who would write not-bad sonnets; the curly-haired woman who was there for Benna’s jokes (she’d heard about them in bio lab); the guy in the Nike t-shirt who was there for his own jokes, ethnic and protracted (What do you call WASP foreplay? Washing dishes. What do you call Jewish foreplay? Begging. What do you call Irish foreplay? “Brace yourself, Bridget”); and two very clean Johnson & Johnson types who were there for an easy A-minus for their moms and dads. “Well,” she began. “This course is called The Reading and Writing of Poetry. I have one thing to say to you at the start: Ya wanna read and write poetry? You’re gonna have to go home and goddamn read and write poetry!” It came out in a shout.
    Nobody moved. Two women exchanged glances.
    The teacher opened her briefcase. She took out the Xeroxed class list and looked back up at their confused stares.
    “The Reading and Writing of Poetry!” she barked again,loudly. “That’s why we’re here. We’re all a bunch of crazy people!” And then she looked down, called the roll, even the middle names and initials, her hands fidgety through her hair, at her side, around her pencil, her handwriting on the attendance sheet a shaky, old woman’s scrawl.
    “I start off determined, but they make me nervous,” I tell my friend Gerard, a part-time carpet salesman and local jazz pianist who gigs in the motel-hotel nightclubs around town. He boasts privately of playing an exquisite broadloom. We are sitting in Hank’s, a favorite junk coffee shop downtown, a place where I join him almost daily in ceremoniously sending month-old grease, cigarette smoke, and mind-blitzing coffee in the direction of vital organs. Gerard has a way of alchemizing what is essentially self-destructiveness into a sort of quaint, homely charm. The world seems okay with Gerard; it seems comfortable even when sitting in the very “kitchen