Anagrams by Lorrie Moore

Author:Lorrie Moore [Moore, Lorrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Adult, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780571147472
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1986-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

“Writing is a safari, dammit,” exclaimed the teacher. “It means going out there and spotting, nabbing, and bringing home to the cage of the page the most marvelous living stuff of the world.”

Timothy Robinson sat right in front of the teacher. He was doodling scenes from Conan in the margins of his notebook.

“But those cages are small and expensive,” the teacher continued, searched, groped, not knowing quite what she was talking about.

Conan’s pectorals were like concrete slabs and in Timothy Robinson’s margins Conan’s biceps and triceps had begun to make his arms look like large croissants. Now he suddenly was getting sunglasses. Now striped thighs.

“Don’t bring back any dim-witted mooses,” she said. “Don’t put a superfluous dumb cluck of a line in your poem.” She had used her lifeboat simile in the last class: A line is like a lifeboat—only a limited number of words get to go in it and you have to decide which word-lives are most valuable; the rest die.

It was ridiculous, but the only thing she could think of to say.

When no one said anything in response, she stared out into the center of the room and said, “So, Tim. How the fuck is Conan?”

· · ·

The small, dingy P&C by campus is unusually crowded and not just with jean-jacketed students buying beer, bananas, hamburger. There are even families in here, as if from some other neighborhood. Perhaps there’s a sale. The three available shopping carts by the door are gritty with black grease, spangled with lettuce bits like a rabbit’s cage. They are all jammed into each other, a copulation of stainless steel. I unhitch the one with the least grease but the most lettuce and proceed to wheel it into the mayhem. People are crashing into each other in the narrow produce aisle, scrambling zigzag for plastic bags.

“Excuse me,” says a male student in a white turtleneck. He doesn’t have a cart, only a beige knapsack of books over his shoulder. He isn’t interested in produce. “Excuse me,” he says to me again. “I saw you outside and followed you in here because I thought you were beautiful and I wanted to tell you that.”

“Oh, my god,” I say and turn away, suddenly startled into a weird sort of terror. I fumble with the cabbage heads. Who does this guy think he is? I try to glide voicelessly away.

“Are you a student here?” the guy persists.

I can feel myself pale, jittery, glaring at a point slightly to the left of one of his ears. His heart, I know, is all chutzpah and photography. “No, I’m an instructor.” I try to pronounce it like a baroness, but it comes out faltering and wrong. “Excuse me,” I say to the student, then squeeze past him, between a center-aisle mustard display and someone else’s cartload of dog food and frozen orange juice. I cross the aisle to the apples.

The student follows. “I hope I didn’t offend you,” he says. I keep my back to him, studying the apples.

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