Annie on My Mind

Two days later, on Wednesday, Annie managed to get out of her school long enough at lunchtime to smuggle me into the cafeteria—a huge but shabby room as crowded as Penn Station or Grand Central at Christmas. While we were sitting there trying to hear what we were saying to each other, a tall gangling kid unfolded himself from his chair, took at least a foot of heavy chain out of his pocket, and started whirling it around his head, yelling something nobody paid any attention to. In fact, no one paid any attention to the boy himself either, except for a few people who moved out of range of the swinging chain.

I couldn’t believe it—I couldn’t believe anyone would do that in the first place, and I also couldn’t believe that if someone did, everyone would just ignore him. I guess I must have been staring, because Annie stopped in the middle of what she was saying and said, “You’re wondering why that guy is swinging that chain, right?”

“Right,” I said, trying to be as casual about it as she was.

“Nobody knows why he does it, but in a few minutes one of the carpentry teachers will come along and take him away—there, see?”

A large man in what I guess was a shop apron came in, ducked under the flying chain, and grabbed the kid around the waist. Right away, the kid froze, and the chain went clattering to the floor. The man picked it up, stuffed it into his pocket, and led the kid out of the cafeteria.

“Annie,” I said wildly, “you mean he does that often? Why don’t they take the chain away from him—I mean permanently? Why don’t they … I don’t know, you did mean he does it all the time, didn’t you?”

Annie gave me a partly amused, partly sympathetic look and put down her chocolate milk carton. “He does do it all the time, once a week or so. They do take the chain away from him, but I guess he has an endless supply. I don’t know why they don’t do anything else about him or for him, but they don’t seem to.” She smiled. “You see why sometimes I prefer white birds.”

“And unicorns and knights,” I answered. “Good Lord!”

“When I first came here,” Annie said, “I used to go home and cry at night. But after about two months of being terrified and miserable, I found out that if you keep away from everyone, they keep away from you. The only reason I never tried to transfer is because when my mother works late I go home at lunch to check on Nana. I couldn’t do that if I went to another school.”

“There must be some okay kids here,” I said, looking around.

“There are. But since I spent my whole freshman year staying away from everyone, by the time I was a sophomore, everyone else already had friends.” She smiled wryly, criticizing herself. “It isn’t just that people in New York are unfriendly. It’s also that I’ve been unfriendly to people in New York. Till now.”

I smiled at her. “Till now,” I repeated.

After lunch, since I was going to meet Annie at her apartment late that afternoon, I went to the Guggenheim Museum and tried not to think too hard about what might be happening at her school while I was safely looking at paintings. But I kept thinking about it anyway, and about how depressing a lot of Annie’s life seemed to be, and about how I wished there was something I could do to make it more cheerful. The day before, after Annie got out of school, we’d gone to the New York Botanical Garden, where I’d been a couple of times with my parents, and Annie went wild walking up and down greenhouse aisles, smelling the flowers, touching them, almost talking to them. I’d never seen her so excited. “Oh, Liza,” she’d said, “I never even knew this place was here—look, that’s an orchid, those are impatiens, that’s a bromeliad—it’s like a place we used to go to in California—it’s so beautiful! Oh, why can’t there be more flowers in New York, more green things?”

As soon as I remembered that, standing halfway up the spiral ramp that runs through the middle of the Guggenheim, I knew what I’d do: I’d buy Annie a plant and take it to her apartment as a sort of thank-you present—thank you for what, I didn’t really know, but that didn’t seem to matter much as I rushed back outside to find a florist.

I found one that had some flowering plants in the window. “Do they have these in California?” I asked the man.

“Sure, sure,” he said. “They have them all over.”

That didn’t tell me much, but I was too nervous to ask any more questions—even to ask what kind of plant the one I wanted was—it had thick furry leaves and was covered with light blue flowers. By then I knew that blue was Annie’s favorite color, so I decided it probably wouldn’t matter what kind of plant it was. The pot had hideous pink tinfoil wrapped around it, but I took that off in the slow elevator in Annie’s building, and stuffed it into my pocket.

I remembered to knock at Annie’s door—she’d told me the buzzer didn’t work—and in a few minutes a quavery voice said, “Who is it?”

“Liza Winthrop,” I said, and then said it again, louder, because I heard something rattling under where the peephole was.

When the door opened, I had to look down suddenly, because I’d been ready to say hello to someone at eye level. But the person who opened the door was a tiny, fragile-looking woman in a wheelchair. She had wonderful bright blue eyes and a little puckered mouth that somehow managed to look like Annie’s, probably because of the smile.

“You must be Annie’s frien’.” The woman beamed at me, and as soon as I heard her accent I remembered that Annie’s grandmother had been born in Italy. Sure enough, the woman said, “I’m her Nana—her gran’ma—come in, come in.” Deftly, she maneuvered the wheelchair out of the doorway so I could step inside. “Annie, she help her mamma make the turk’,” Annie’s grandmother said. It was a second or two before I realized that “turk” was “turkey,” but the wonderful smell that struck me as soon as I was inside told me my guess was right. “We make him the day-before”—it was one word, beautiful: “day-before”; when she said it, it sounded like a song. “So on Thanksgiving we can have a good time. Come in, come in. Annie! Your frien’, she’s here. What a pretty flower—African violet, no?”

“I—I don’t know,” I said, bending a little closer so Annie’s Nana could see the plant’s flowers. “I don’t know a thing about plants, but I just found out Annie likes them, so I brought her one.”

I’d never have dared admit to most people—most kids, anyway—that I’d brought Annie a present, but this lovely old lady didn’t seem to think there was anything odd about it. She clasped her gnarled hands together—and it was then that I knew where Annie had gotten her laugh as well as her smile, because her grandmother laughed in exactly the same way.

“Annie, she be very happy,” Nana said, her bright eyes twinkling into mine, “very happy—you wait till you see her room, she loves flowers! Annie, look,” she said, turning her head toward Annie, who had just come out of the kitchen, her hair braided and wrapped around her head, a dish towel around her middle, and her face red from the heat of the oven. “Look, your frien’, she brought you a frien’.” Nana and I chuckled at her joke as Annie looked at the violet and then at me.

“I don’t believe this,” Annie said, her eyes meeting mine above her grandmother’s softly gleaming white hair. “You brought me an African violet?”

I nodded. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Oh, God, Liza, I suppose you’re going to tell me this is part of your real world, too, right?”

“Well,” I said, feigning modesty, “it’s real, all right.”

“Real world, what you talk?” said Nana. “Annie, you push me in the kitchen so I can help your mamma. Then you go with your frien’ and talk.”

Annie winked at me as she took the back of her grandmother’s chair, and Nana reached out and squeezed my hand as Annie started to wheel her past me. “I like you, Lize,” she said, pronouncing my name the way Chad often did. “You make my Annie happy. She’s so sad sometimes.” Nana made the corners of her mouth droop down like a tragedy mask. “Ugh! Young girls, they should laugh. Life’s bad enough when you’re grown, you might as well laugh when you’re young. You teach my Annie that, Lize, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, looking at Annie. I think I held up my hand when I said it.

“You promise, good! Annie, she’s laugh’ more this week, since she met you.”

Annie wheeled her grandmother into the kitchen and I stood awkwardly in the hall, looking down its dingy walls into the living room. I could see part of a very worn carpet that must once have been bright red, and a lopsided sofa with some stuffing working its way out around the edges of a couple of patches, and a faded photo of the Roman Coliseum hanging on the wall next to a cross with a dry palm leaf tucked behind it.

“Nana’s,” said Annie, coming back and pointing to the cross. “The rest of us aren’t very religious. My mother’s Protestant, and I don’t know what I am.” She’d taken the towel from her waist, but her face was still red and a little shiny from the heat. A wisp of her hair had begun to come loose. I wanted to push it back for her. “Nana adores you,” she said.

“I adore her,” I answered, as Annie led me through the living room and down a shorter but dingier hall to her room. “Listen, I take it as a solemn pledge,” I said, as Annie stepped aside in the doorway so I could go into the small room, “to make you laugh, like she said. Okay?”

Annie smiled, but a little distantly, sat down on the edge of her narrow bed, and motioned to the only chair, which was at a table that was piled high with books and music scores and seemed to be working as a desk. “Okay,” she said.

“I like your room,” I told her, looking around and trying to keep away the awkwardness I was beginning to feel again. The room was tiny, but full of things that obviously meant a lot to Annie, mostly the books and music scores, but also several stuffed animals—and, as Nana had said, plants, what seemed like hundreds of them. Because of them, you didn’t even notice right away that the desk-table was scarred and a bit rickety, that the bed was probably an old studio couch, and that one window had a piece of cloth stuffed in part of it, I assumed to keep out drafts. There was a big feathery fern hanging in the window and a pebble-lined tray with lots of little plants on the sill. On the floor at the foot of the bed was a plant so huge it looked like a young tree.

“Oh, come on,” Annie said, “it’s nothing like your room. Your room looks—shiny and, I don’t know—new.” Her eyes followed mine to the huge plant near the bed. “That’s just a rubber tree from Woolworth’s. I got it when it was little—only ninety-five cents’ worth of little.”

“Well, it must be a hundred dollars’ worth of big now. Hey, I mean it. I like your room. I like your grandmother, I like you …”

For a minute, neither of us said anything. Annie looked at the floor and then went over to the rubber tree and flicked something invisible off one of its leaves. “I like you, too, Liza,” she said carefully. She had put the African violet on the desk-table, but now she picked it up and took it over to the windowsill, where she made room for it on top of the pebbles. “Humidity,” she said. “They like that, and the pebbles help. I mean, the water you put in the tray for it helps—oh, damn.”

She turned away from me suddenly, but something in her voice made me grab her hand and pull her around to face me again. To my astonishment, I saw that she was nearly in tears.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, standing up, a little scared. “What’s the matter? Did I do something?”

She shook her head, and then she rested it for a second on my shoulder. But when my hand was still on its way up to comfort her, she moved away and went to her bedside table, where she fished a Kleenex out of a box and blew her nose. “Yes, you did something, you jerk,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed again. “You brought me a present, and I’m such a sentimental fool, it’s making me cry, and I’m upset because I don’t have any money to get you a present, but I wish I did.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, and I went over and sat next to her and put my arm around her for a second. “Look, I don’t want you to give me a present. That’s not what this is about, is it?”

“I—I don’t know,” Annie said. “I never really had a friend before—that’s what I was sort of trying to tell you today in the cafeteria. Well, I did in California, but I was a lot younger then, even if I did think I was going to die when she moved away—we were both in sixth grade then.”

“You’re the jerk,” I said. “Presents aren’t part of it, okay? I just knew you liked flowers, that’s all, and that was exciting to me because I never knew anyone who did and I can’t make anything grow to save my life. Maybe it’s a thank-you present for showing me Staten Island and—and everything.”

Annie sniffed loudly and finally smiled. “Okay—but that’s not what this is about, either, is it? Thank-you presents—that’s no good.”

“Right.” I got up and went back to the chair. “Tell me about your friend in California. If you want.”

“Yes,” said Annie. “I think I do.”

For the next hour or so, I sat there in Annie’s room while she showed me pictures of a pasty-faced, dull-looking little girl named Beverly and told me about how they used to go for walks on the beach and pretend they were running away, and how they used to sleep over at each other’s houses, usually in the same bed, and how they giggled and talked all night and sometimes kissed each other—“the way little girls sometimes do,” Annie said, reddening—I knew Annie had been pretty young then, so I didn’t think anything of it. And then I asked her about her grandmother, who turned out to have made all Annie’s clothes till her fingers got too stiff from arthritis. Annie said she sometimes listened to Nana breathe at night for fear she was going to die suddenly.

After a while, Annie and I went into the kitchen, where there were several cats milling around in that sideways way cats have. We sat at a round table with orange plastic place mats on it and sniffed the roasting turkey and talked to Annie’s mother, who was mousy and tired-looking but nice, and to Nana, who didn’t seem to me to be anywhere near dying. We drank grape juice and ate a whole plate of some wonderful Italian cookies filled with figs and dates and raisins. When I left, Nana made me take a bagful of cookies home to Chad.

The next day, Thanksgiving afternoon, the doorbell rang just as I’d finished my second piece of pumpkin pie, while Dad was telling the same story he told every year, about when he and his brother swiped a Thanksgiving turkey and tried to cook it over an open fire in the woods in Maine, where he grew up. I pushed the buzzer and ran down to see who it was—and it was Annie with a short, stocky man with a black mustache, who turned out to be her father. There was a yellow cab double-parked in the street.

Annie looked as if she’d rather be on another planet.

Mr. Kenyon took off his little squashed cap and said, “We don’t mean to interrupt, but Annie, she say she come down to see you this afternoon, and I say Thanksgiving is a family day and maybe you don’t want company, and she say maybe I don’t want her to go, so I bring her down. You gave her such a nice present—I thought maybe you and your mamma and poppa and your brother might like to come for a ride with us in the cab. That way all the families stay together and can get to know each other, too.”

I looked dubiously out at the double-parked cab and then I saw Nana’s cheerful face in the window, behind a fluttery wave.

“We always take my mamma for a ride in the cab on holidays,” explained Mr. Kenyon.

I could tell from Annie’s face that she was absolutely perishing with embarrassment, and I tried to signal her that it was okay, because it was. I could understand how she felt, but I thought her family was terrific.

“Let me go ask,” I said, and ran upstairs.

Annie came after me and grabbed me on the first landing. “Liza, I’m sorry,” she said. “He—he doesn’t understand this country—I don’t know, he’s been here since he was twenty, but he still thinks he’s back in some Sicilian village and …”

“I like him!” I shouted, shaking her. “I told you—I like your grandmother and the cats in your kitchen, and your mother, even though I don’t know her very well, and I like your plants and your room and you, except when you’re a jerk to be so worried that I’m not going to like—whatever!”

Annie smiled sheepishly and leaned against the wall. “I think it’s jerky, too,” she said. “I mean of me. It’s just that—well, I’m always worried that people are going to laugh at them.”

“Well, I’m not going to laugh at them,” I said. “And if you are, I’ll go live with them and you can come here and live in stuffy old Brooklyn Heights and go to Foster Academy and almost get expelled for piercing ears and—Annie?” I said, as soon as it struck me. “Are you jealous? Is that what this is really about? Do you envy me?”

“No,” said Annie softly. Then she laughed a little. “No, I don’t, not at all. You’re right that I don’t like the school I go to or the neighborhood I live in—but no, I wouldn’t want to—to swap with you or anything.” She smiled. “I guess you made me realize that just now, didn’t you?”

“Well, good,” I said, still angry, “because if you do want to swap—if that’s all I mean to you, forget it.”

I surprised myself, I was so mad.

“Oh, Liza, no,” Annie said. “No. That’s not what you mean to me. It’s not like that at all, not at all.” She edged away from the wall and then faced me, dropping a quick curtsy. “Will the Princess Eliza please to come for a ride in the magic wagon of the humble peasant? We will show her wonders—gypsies—seagulls—shining caves—the Triborough Bridge …”

“Oh, you nut!” I said, reaching for her hand. “You—unicorn.”

For a minute we stood there looking at each other, knowing with relief that it was all right again between us.

Dad and Mom and Chad decided to stay home, though they came downstairs at my insistence to meet Mr. and Mrs. Kenyon and Nana. I think I was trying to prove to Annie that they wouldn’t laugh at her family, either. Good old Chad—when he and Mom and Dad were going back in and Annie and I were standing by the door, he turned to Annie and said, “Your dad’s neat, Annie—what a neat cab!” I could have kissed him.

We drove all through Brooklyn and up into Queens that afternoon, and then back down through Central Park, and the whole time Mr. Kenyon and his mother told stories about Italy, and Mrs. Kenyon laughed and prompted them. Mr. Kenyon’s father, who had died in California, had been a butcher in his village in Sicily, and cats used to follow him all over because he fed them scraps. That was why the Kenyons still had cats; Mr. Kenyon said life just didn’t seem right without a cat or two around. Chad was right that he was neat.

I can’t really remember what Annie and I did during the next couple of days of vacation. Walked a lot—the Village, Chinatown, places like that. It’s Sunday that’s important to remember.

It’s Sunday that I’ve been thinking around the edges of …

Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can’t understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins? I think it was Sunday when that feeling began.

We’d been riding around on the subway, talking when it wasn’t too noisy, and had ended up at Coney Island. It was so late in the season that it was deserted, and very cold. We looked at all the closed-for-winter rides, and at a few straggling booth owners who were putting battered pastel-painted boards up over their popcorn or dime-toss or win-a-doll stands, and we bought hot dogs at Nathan’s. There were only a couple of grubby old men eating there, I guess because most people don’t have room even for Nathan’s the weekend after Thanksgiving. Then we walked on the empty beach and joked about hiking all around the edge of Brooklyn up into Queens. We did manage to get pretty far, actually, at least well away from the deserted booths, and we found an old pier sort of thing with a lot of rotting brown pilings holding back some rocks—I guess it was more or less a breakwater—and we sat down, close together because it was so cold.

I remember that for a while there was a seagull wheeling around above our heads, squawking, but then it flew off toward Sheepshead Bay.

I’m not sure why we were so quiet, except that we knew school would start again for both of us the next day, and we wouldn’t be able to meet so often or so easily. I had my senior project, and student council if I was reelected, and Annie had to rehearse for her recital. But we’d already worked out which days during the week we’d be able to see each other, and of course there would still be weekends, so maybe that wasn’t why we were so quiet after all …

Mostly it was the closeness. It made my throat ache, wanting to speak of it.

I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper—Three Musketeers, I think—blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.

Without thinking, I put my arm across her shoulders to warm her, and then before either of us knew what was happening, our arms were around each other and Annie’s soft and gentle mouth was kissing mine.

When we did realize what was happening, we pulled away from each other, and Annie looked out over the water and I looked at the candy wrapper. It had gotten beyond the pilings by then, and was caught against a rock. For something to do, I walked over and stuffed it into my pocket, and then I stayed there, looking out over the water too, trying to keep my mind blank. I remember wishing the wind would literally blow through me, cold and pure and biting.

“Liza,” Anne called in a quiet voice. “Liza, please come back.”

Part of me didn’t want to. But part of me did, and that part won.

Annie was digging a little hole in one crumbling piling with her fingernail.

“You’ll break your nail,” I said, and she looked up at me and smiled. Her eyes were soft and troubled and a little scared, but her mouth went on smiling, and then the wind blew her hair in wisps across my face and I had to move away.

She put her hand on mine, barely touching it. “It’s all right with me,” she whispered, “if it is with you.”

“I—I don’t know,” I said.

It was like a war inside me; I couldn’t even recognize all the sides. There was one that said, “No, this is wrong; you know it’s wrong and bad and sinful,” and there was another that said, “Nothing has ever felt so right and natural and true and good,” and another that said it was happening too fast, and another that just wanted to stop thinking altogether and fling my arms around Annie and hold her forever. There were other sides, too, but I couldn’t sort them out.

“Liza,” Annie was saying, “Liza, I—I’ve wondered. I mean, I wondered if this might be happening. Didn’t you?”

I shook my head. But somewhere inside I knew I had at least been confused.

Annie pulled her collar up around her throat and I wanted to touch her skin where the collar met it. It was as if I’d always wanted to touch her there but hadn’t known it.

“It’s my fault,” Annie said softly. “I—I’ve thought sometimes, even before I met you, I mean, that I might be gay.” She said the word “gay” easily, as if it were familiar to her, used that way.

“No,” I managed to say, “no—it’s not anyone’s fault.” I know that underneath my numbness I felt it made sense about me, too, but I couldn’t think about it, or concentrate on it, not then.

Annie turned around and looked at me and the sadness in her eyes made me want to put my arms around her. “I’ll go, Liza,” she said, standing up. “I—I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t think you want this, so I have hurt you and, oh, God, Liza,” she said, touching my face, “I don’t want to, I—like you so much. I told you, you make me feel—real, more real than I’ve ever thought I could feel, more alive, you—you’re better than a hundred Californias, but it’s not only that, it’s …”

“Better than all those white birds?” I said around the ache that was in my throat again. “Because you’re better than anything or anyone for me, too, Annie, better than—oh, I don’t know better than what—better than everything—but that’s not what I want to be saying—you—you’re—Annie, I think I love you.”

I heard myself say it as if I were someone else, but the moment the words were out, I knew more than I’d ever known anything that they were true.

Dear Annie,

I’ve just been remembering Thanksgiving vacation, and the beach near Coney Island. Annie, it makes me ache for you, it …

Liza crumpled the letter, then smoothed it out again, tore it to shreds, and went outside.

She walked beside the Charles River in the cold. The air was brittle with the coming winter; one sailboat struggled against the biting wind. The guy in that boat’s crazy, she thought absently; his sail will freeze, his hands will stick to the mainsheet and they’ll have to pry him loose …

Annie, she thought, the name driving everything else away, Annie, Annie …