Annie on My Mind

Chapter five

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.

"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 ..."

"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 i 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.