Annie on My Mind

Chapter one

It's raining, Annie.

Liza--Eliza Winthrop stared in surprise at the words she'd just written;
it was as if they had appeared without her bidding on the page before
her. "Frank Lloyd Wright's house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania," she had
meant to write, "is one of the earliest and finest examples of an
architect's use of natural materials and surroundings to ..." But the
gray November rain splashed insistently against the window of her small
dormitory room, its huge drops shattering against the glass as the wind
blew. Liza turned to a fresh page in her notebook and wrote: Dear Annie,
It's raining, raining the way it did when I met you last November, drops
so big they run together in ribbons, remember? Annie, are you all right?

Are you happy, did you find what you wanted to find in California? Are
you singing? You must be, but you haven't said so in your letters. Do
other people get goose-bumps when you sing, the way I used to? Annie,
the other day I saw a woman who reminded me of your grandmother, and I
thought of you, and your room, and the cats, and your father telling
stories in his cab when we went for that drive on Thanksgiving. Then
your last letter came, saying you're not going to write any more till
you hear from me. It's true I haven't written since the second week you
were in music camp this summer. The trouble is that I kept thinking
about what happened--thinking around it, really--and I couldn't write you.

I'm sorry. I know it's not fair. It's especially not fair because your
letters have been wonderful, and I know I'm going to miss them. But I
don't blame you for not writing any more, really I don't. Annie, I still
can't write, I guess, for I already know I'm not going to mail this.

Liza closed her eyes, absently running her hand through her short,
already touseled brownish hair. Her shoulders were hunched tensely in a
way that made her look, even when she stood up, shorter than the 5'3"
she really was. She moved her shoulders forward, then back, in an
unconscious attempt to ease the ache that had come from sitting too long
at her drawing board and afterwards at her desk. The girl who lived
across the hall teased her for being a perfectionist, but since many of
the other freshman architecture students had arrived at
MIT--Massachusetts Institute of Technology--fresh from summer internships
with large firms, Liza had spent her first weeks trying doggedly to
catch up. Even so, there was still an unfinished floor plan on her
drawing board, and the unfinished Frank Lloyd Wright paper on her desk.

Liza put down her pen, but in a few moments picked it up again. What I
have to do, I think, before I can mail you a letter, is sort out what
happened. I have to work through it all again--everything--the bad parts,
but the good ones too---us and the house and Ms. Stevenson and Ms.
Widmer, and Sally and Walt, and Ms. Baxter and Mrs. Poindexter and the
trustees, and my parents and poor bewildered Chad. Annie--there are
things I'm going to have to work hard at remembering. But I do want to
remember, Liza thought, going to her window. I do want to, now. The rain
hid the Charles River and most of the campus; she could barely see the
building opposite hers. She looked across at it nonetheless, willing it
to blur into--what? Her street in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she'd
lived all her life till now? Her old school, Foster Academy, a few
blocks away from her parents' apartment? Annie's street in Manhattan;
Annie's school? Annie herself, as she'd looked that first November day...

Mrs. Widmer, who taught English at Foster Academy, always said that the
best way to begin a story is to start with the first important or
exciting incident and then fill in the background. So I'm going to start
with the rainy Sunday last November when I met Annie Kenyon. I've wanted
to be an architect since long before I could spell the word, so I've
always spent a lot of time at museums. That day, to help focus my ideas
for the solar house I was designing for my senior project, I went to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, to visit the Temple of Dendur and the
American Wing. The museum was so full of people I decided to start with
the American Wing, because it's sometimes less crowded, especially up on
the third floor where I wanted to go. And at first it seemed as if that
was going to be true. When I got to the top of the stairs, everything
was so quiet that I thought there might even be no one there at all--but
as I started walking toward the colonial rooms, I heard someone singing.

I remember I stood and listened for a minute and then went toward the
sound, mostly out of curiosity, but also because whoever it was had a
wonderful voice. There was a girl about my age--seventeen--sitting at a
window in one of the oldest colonial rooms, singing and gazing outside.

Even though I knew that the only thing outside that window was a painted
backdrop, there was something about the girl, the gray cape she was
wearing, and the song she was singing, that made it easy to imagine
"Plimoth" Plantation or Massachusetts Bay Colony outside instead. The
girl looked as if she could have been a young colonial woman, and her
song seemed sad, at least the feeling behind it did; I didn't pay much
attention to the words. After a moment or two, the girl stopped singing,
although she still kept looking out the window. "Don't stop," I heard
myself saying. "Please." The girl jumped as if my voice had frightened
her, and she turned around. She had very long black hair, and a round
face with a small little-kid's nose and a sad-looking mouth but it was
her eyes I noticed most. They were as black as her hair and they looked
as if there was more behind them than another person could possibly ever
know. "Oh," she said, putting her hand to her throat--it was a
surprisingly long, slender hand, in contrast to the roundness of her
face. "You startled me! I didn't know anyone was there." She pulled her
cape more closely around her. "It was beautiful, the singing," I said
quickly, before I could feel self-conscious. I smiled at her; she smiled
back, tentatively, as if she were still getting over being startled.

"I don't know what that song was, but it sounded just like something
someone would have sung in this room." The girl's smile deepened and her
eyes sparkled for just a second. "Oh, do you really think so?" she said.

"It wasn't a real song--I was just making it up as I went along. I was
pretending that I was a colonial girl who missed England--you know, her
best friend, things like that. And her dog--she'd been allowed to take
her cat but not her dog." She laughed. "I think the dog's name was
something terribly original like Spot." I laughed, too, and then I
couldn't think of anything more to say. The girl walked to the door as
if she were going to leave, so I quickly said, "Do you come here often?"

Immediately I felt myself cringe at how dumb it sounded. She didn't seem
to think it was dumb. She shook her head as if it were a serious
question and said, "No. I have to spend a lot of time practicing, only
that gets dull sometimes." She tossed her hair back over the shoulder of
her cape. The cape fell open a little and I could see that under it she
was wearing a very uncolonial pair of green corduroy jeans and a brown
sweater. "Practicing?" I asked. "Singing, you mean?" She nodded and said
in an offhand way, "I'm in this special group at school. We keep having
to give recitals. Do you come here often?" She was standing fairly close
to me now, leaning against the door frame, her head tipped a little to
one side. I told her I did and explained about wanting to be an
architect and about the solar house. When I said I was going to the
Temple of Dendur, she said she'd never seen it except from outside the
museum, and asked, "Mind if I come?" I was surprised to find that I
didn't; I usually like to be by myself in museums, especially when I'm
working on something. "No," I said. "Okay--I mean, no, I don't mind." We
walked all the way downstairs, me feeling kind of awkward, before I had
the sense to say, "What's your name".

"Annie Kenyon, she said. "What ... what's that?" I said
"Liza Winthrop" before I realized that wasn't what she'd asked. We'd
just gotten to the medieval art section, which is a big open room with a
magnificent choir screen--an enormous gold-painted wrought-iron
grating--running across the whole back section. Annie stood in front of
it, her eyes very bright. "It's from a Spanish cathedral" I said,
showing off. "668 ..." "It's beautiful," Annie interrupted. She stood
there silently, as if in awe of the screen, and then bowed her head. Two
or three people coming in glanced at her curiously and I tried to tell
myself it was ridiculous for me to feel uneasy. You could walk away, I
remember thinking; you don't know this person at all. Maybe she's crazy.
Maybe she's some kind of religious fanatic. But I didn't walk away, and
in a couple of seconds she turned, smiling. "I'm sorry," she said as we
left the room, "if I embarrassed you."

"That's okay," I said. Even so, I led Annie fairly quickly to the Hall
of Arms and Armor, which I usually go through on my way to the temple.
The Hall is one of my favorite parts of the museum--one is greeted at its
door by a life-sized procession of knights in full armor, on horseback.
The first knight has his lance at the ready, pointed straight ahead,
which means right at whoever walks in. Annie seemed to love it. I think
that's one of the first things that made me decide I really did like
her, even though she seemed a little strange.

"Oh--look!" she exclaimed, walking around the procession. "Oh--they're
wonderful!"

She walked faster, flourishing an imaginary lance, and then began
prancing as if she were on horseback herself. Part of me wanted to join
in; as I said, I've always loved those knights myself, and besides, I'd
been a King Arthur nut when I was little. But the other part of me was
stiff with embarrassment. "Annie," I began, in the warning voice my
mother used to use when my brother and I got too exuberant as children.

But by then Annie had pretended to fall off her horse, dropping her
lance. She drew an imaginary sword so convincingly I knew I was admiring
her skill in spite of myself, and then when she cried, "En garde!

Stand and fight or I'll run you through!" I knew I wasn't going to be
able to keep from smiling much longer. "If you do not fight me, knight,"
she said, "you will rue the day that ever you unhorsed me here in this
green wood!" I had to laugh then, her mood was so catching. Besides, by