Annie On My Mind (18 page)

Annie, what does being fair mean? I think they were trying to help me at school; I think even Mrs. Poindexter thought she was helping me, especially by talking about immorality. But what really is immorality? And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves? And doesn’t immorality mostly have to do with hurting people—if Sally had pierced people’s ears against their will, that would have been immoral, it seems to me, but doing it the way she did was just plain foolish. Using Ms. Stevenson’s and Ms. Widmer’s house without permission—that hurt them and was immoral as well as sneaky—but—

Liza stood; she crumpled what she’d written so far to Annie—but then smoothed it out again and hid it under the blotter on her desk. But, she thought, looking out again at the wet snow, what we used the house for—was that immoral, too? I’ve been saying yes, so far, because of the hurt it caused …

Before I went home that morning, I went down to the basement to clean out my locker. Luckily not too many kids were free first period. Still, there were a couple hanging around down there—including Walt. I tried to avoid him, but he gave me a kind of obscene grin, as if, even though he didn’t want me in the campaign, he now counted me as one of the guys; I could almost imagine him asking me how Annie was in bed. Then, when I thought a couple of other kids were looking at me funny too, I told myself I was just being paranoid, that Walt had probably grinned out of embarrassment only. But then when I got to my locker and opened it a note fell out that had obviously been slipped in through the crack. “
LIZA
LESIE
,” it said.

I didn’t get home till halfway through the morning because I’d been walking on the Promenade to put off facing Mom. As soon as I got in the door, I could see she had been crying. But she was really great to me, there’s no question. She tried quickly to put her face back together again, and she put her arms around me right at the door, without saying anything, and held me for a long time. Then she pulled me inside, sat us both down on the sofa, and said, “Honey, honey, it’ll be okay. Someday it’ll be okay, believe me.” I put my head down in her lap and for a while she just smoothed my hair. But then she put her hand under my chin and gently lifted me up. “Liza,” she said, “I know what it’s like to have no close friends and then suddenly to have one—it happened to me, too, when I was a little younger than you. Her name was June, and she was so beautiful I had to remind myself not to stare at her sometimes. We loved each other very much, the way you and Annie do—maybe not quite so intensely or quite so—so exclusively, but very much. There was one night …” Mom looked away, blushing a little, then said shyly, “There was one night when June and I slept in the same bed. At her house, it was. And we—we kissed each other. And then for a while we pretended one of us was a boy—until it got so—so silly and we got so giggly we stopped. Honey, lots of girls do that kind of thing. Boys, too. Maybe boys more than girls. It doesn’t mean anything unless—well, I don’t suppose I have to draw any pictures, you’re nearly grown up. But—what I think I’m trying to say is that feelings—sexual feelings—can be all mixed up at your age. That’s normal. And it’s normal to experiment …”

I couldn’t help it; I knew I had to leave or blurt out angry words I’d be sorry for later. She was making it impossible, impossible for me to tell the truth. I wasn’t sure I wanted to anyway, but how could I even think of it now? I wrenched myself away from her and ran into the bathroom, where I let the cold water flow till it was nearly ice, and splashed it on my face over and over again. I tried to think; I tried so hard to think—but there was only one word in my mind and that word was

“Annie.”

When I went back into the living room, Mom was standing at the window looking out at the new leaves on the gingko tree outside the window.

“Look,” she said, pointing to a small gray bird darting among the branches. “I think she’s building a nest.” She turned to face me, and put her hands on my shoulders. “Liza,” she said, looking into my eyes, “I want you to tell me the truth, not because I want to pry, but because I have to know. This could get very unpleasant—you know that. We can’t fight it with lies, honey. Now—have you and Annie—done any more than the usual—experimenting is, I know, a bad word, but I think you know what I mean. Has there been any more than that between you—more than what I told you was between me and June?”

Her eyes were somber; there was fear in them, such fear and such pain, and such love as well, that—I’m not proud of it, I make no excuses—I lied to her. “No, Mom,” I said, trying to look back at her calmly. “No, there hasn’t.”

The relief on Mom’s face was almost physical. I hadn’t been aware that she’d looked older when I’d first come in, but now she looked herself again. She even seemed a little cheerful, at least in comparison with before, and she patted my shoulder, saying, “Well, then. Now let’s try to talk about what really did happen, and about why Ms. Baxter and Sally misinterpreted whatever it was that they saw …”

It was a good thing in a way that Dad came in soon after that, because I couldn’t concentrate on Mom’s questions. All I could do was say over and over in my mind: You lied to her. You lied to your own mother for the first time in your lite. You lied …

When Dad came in—Mom had called him at the office I found out later, and he’d come home in a cab, not even waiting for the subway—when he came in, his face was gray. Mom got up from the sofa immediately—I couldn’t move—and said, “It’s all right, George. Liza isn’t sure why Ms. Baxter and Sally got so mixed up, but it was all a terrible mistake. I imagine that both Ms. Baxter and Mrs. Poindexter overreacted, especially Mrs. Poindexter—you know how old she’s getting, and the campaign is so …”

But I could see right away that Dad wasn’t paying any attention to that; he wasn’t even hearing it. Mom sat back down on the sofa next to me and Dad looked at me, right at me, with his honest brown eyes and said, “Liza?”—and, oh, God, I said, “Dad—can I get you a drink?”

“No thanks,” he said, and he went into the kitchen and made drinks for himself and Mom. “Look,” Dad said carefully sitting down in a big chair, “this is hard to say. I don’t even know how to approach this, but I—first of all, I want you to know that I’ll go along with whatever you decide to do; Liza, I’ll support you, whatever’s true. You’re my daughter—I kept saying that to myself over and over in the cab on the way home: She’s my daughter, my …”

“George …” Mom began, but he ignored her.

“You’re my daughter,” he said again. “I love you. That’s the main thing, I—Liza, always.” He smiled weakly. “Ear piercing and all.” His smile faded. “But I have to tell you, Liza—and I’ve said even less to your mother about this than I’ve said to you, except when you’ve been late—that as much as I like your friend Annie and admire her singing voice—fond of her as I am, I haven’t been blind to how intense you are about her, how intense you both are …” My stomach felt as if icicles were forming in it.

“George,” Mom said again—she had taken only one small sip of her drink: she was holding it as if she’d forgotten it and any moment it would slip out of her hand, unnoticed. “George, adolescent friendships are like that—intense—beautiful.” She put her arm around me. “Don’t spoil it, don’t. This is awful for Liza, for all of us; it must be awful for poor Annie, too. And think of Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer.”

“Yes,” said my father a little grimly, “think of Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer.” Only mother looked surprised; the icicles in my stomach extended slowly to the rest of my body. “I’ve always wondered about those two,” Dad said.

Then he slammed his drink down. “Oh, look,” he said, “what difference does it make if a couple of teachers at Foster are lesbians? Those two are damn good teachers and good people, too, as far as I know. Ms. Widmer especially— look at the poems Chad’s written this year, look at how good Liza suddenly got in English. The hell with anything else. I don’t care about their private lives, about anyone’s, at least I …” He picked up his drink again and took a long swallow. “Liza, damn it, I always thought I was—well, okay about things like homosexuality. But now when I find out that my own daughter might be …”

“She’s not, she told me she and Annie are friends only,” Mnm insisted. I wanted to tell Dad then: I wanted to tell him so much I was already forming the words. And if I hadn’t already lied to Mom, if we’d been alone then, I think I would have.

“Liza,” my father said, “I told you I’d support you and I will. And right now I can see we’re all too upset to discuss this very much more, so in a minute or two I’m going to take you and your mother and me out to lunch. But, honey, I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but—well, maybe it’s just that I love your mother so much and you and Chad so much that I have to say to you I’ve never thought gay people can be very happy—no children, for one thing, no real family life. Honey, you are probably going to be a damn good architect—but I want you to be happy in other ways, too, as your mother is—to have a husband and children. I know you can do both …”

I am happy, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I’m happy with Annie; she and my work are all I’ll ever need; she’s happy, too—we both were till this happened …

We had a long, large lunch, trying to be cheerful and talking about everything except what had happened. Then my mother took me shopping, saying we might as well use the time to start buying me clothes for
MIT
. But really I think she took me so Dad would be the only one there when Chad came home from school. On the way back to the apartment, Mom and I stopped at the fish store and she bought swordfish, which I love, and she cooked all my favorite things that night, as if it were my birthday. But it was a tense meal anyhow, with Chad speaking only when somebody else talked to him—he wouldn’t meet my eyes, even when he and I were talking, which wasn’t often. After dinner I called Sally. I didn’t know quite what I was going to say—something like I’m sorry it got to you the way it did. But she hung up on me. Later that night, when Annie called, I was so worked up that all I could do on the phone with her was cry. So she called back later and talked to Mom, who said yes, I’d be okay, and we’d all get through this and things like that. I imagine it wasn’t very reassuring.

The next morning when I woke up, the sun was shining in underneath my window shade, and for a second, just for a second, everything was all right.

I’d been dreaming—a wonderful dream about living with Annie—and when I woke up, I think I really expected to see her beside me. But of course she wasn’t there. And then everything came crashing in again—Sally’s shocked face, Chad’s, Mom’s, Dad’s—and it was as if the air were heavy, pressing down on me and making it hard to breathe. I tried to imagine what it would be like if people always reacted to Annie and me that way—being hurt by us, or pitying us; worrying about us, or feeling threatened—even laughing at us. It didn’t make any sense and it was unfair, but it was also awful. I could hear Mom moving around the apartment, and I didn’t want to see her, so I just lay in bed for a while, watching the sun flicker under the shade and trying not to think any more. But then I remembered I still had to give Sally my speech, so I got up and dressed, wanting to get it over with as soon as I could.

Before I even got to Sally—I decided to wait for her outside school—I passed two juniors in front of the main building, and one of them was saying something like, “I’d rather have Ms. Widmer any day than a dried-up old substitute.” The other one said, “Yeah. But that one they got to teach art—she’s not so bad. I mean, at least she’s young.” I didn’t hear much more; either I turned it off or they stopped talking.

Of course, I told myself, since I’m suspended, Ms. Widmer and Ms. Stevenson will have been suspended, too. If I’m having a hearing, so will they, probably. Then there was Sally. It’s funny, I remember it in outline form, sort of, with Sally and me like shadow figures, facing each other on the steps. I said “Hi,” or something equally noncommittal, but Sally just stared at me, so I said, stiffly, “Here’s the speech. I’m sorry I forgot it yesterday. I’ll help you rewrite it if you want.” It was as if she hadn’t heard me. She was still staring at me, shaking her head and ignoring the speech, which I was still holding out to her.

“How could you?” she said very softly. “How could you—with a girl? I just can’t believe … i mean, think if someone else had found out,someone outside. Walt said it could kill the campaign. People should control themselves if they—if they feel that way. It’s—it’s so disgusting.”

I’d been wanting again to tell her that I was sorry she’d been so upset, but now I was too angry. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you, Sally,” I heard myself saying. “You don’t have to be disgusted.”

But she was still shaking her head. “Oh, yes, it does have to do with me,” she said. “Everything a person does has an effect on others. Everything. Look at the ear piercing.” I tried to tell her that the two things were different, that piercing ears wasn’t the same as loving someone, and that she was making all the wrong connections. But as I pushed my speech into her hands she said, “Loving! Lusting, you mean. Read your Bible, Liza. Ms. Baxter showed me it’s even mentioned there. Read Leviticus, read Romans x: 26.” I don’t know what I said then. Maybe I didn’t say anything. I’m not sure I was able to think any more. I do remember, though, that I went home and read Leviticus and Romans, and cried again.

One of the worst things that happened in that first week was that Mrs. Poindexter questioned Chad. After school on Wednesday, Chad didn’t speak to me; he seemed to be avoiding me, and I had no idea why. He didn’t say much at dinner either, but later, when Mom and Dad were watching TV, he came into my room, shut the door, and without sitting down or really looking at me said that Mrs. Poindexter had called him into her office that morning. He said she’d asked him in not very thinly veiled terms about me and Annie and other girls—whether I had more girlfriends than boyfriends, if he’d ever seen me touching a girl, especially Annie—things like that. And, still without meeting my eyes, he told me he’d said “No” to all the questions about girls and