Annie On My Mind (8 page)

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 brome]iad—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 Guggen-helm, 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?”

“
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. Okayy?”

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, in the 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 weeds 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 wanted to signal her that it was okay, because it was. I could understand how she felt, but I thought her family was terrific.