The Annie Year. Stephanie Wilbur AshЧитать онлайн книгу.
just there.
Won’t you please come get your baby, maybe? she sang.
He smelled like fresh-mowed sage in a green and wet ditch, like a spice I knew from the kitchen of a long-lost relative, like early spring even though it was the beginning of winter.
From what had always been Gerald’s seat, the Vo-Ag teacher watched the stage as if it were a miracle and not a bunch of awkward small-town teenagers trying to live up to their makeup. His eyes got big and round, like eggs; his mouth got open, like a pancake—his face looked like a brand-new breakfast. And when, at intermission, he turned toward me, his eyes were wet.
I’d seen grown men cry, certainly, but only at funerals, and even then I’d seen only the shaking of grown men’s backs, which can look just like laughing if you don’t think about it too hard. But something about his wet eyes, the way he looked right at me with them, as if he had no reason to be ashamed. It dropped my bottom out.
I watched the whole show. Everything. I watched twelve little girls dance around in dingy underwear. I watched the Hendersons’ family dog, playing the part of Sandy, run up the aisle next to me to sniff the crotch of Karen Wilson, the speech pathologist at the hospital. I watched Warbucks’s staff dance around Annie wringing their hands, singing, We’ve never had a little girl! We’ve never had a little girl! I watched Punjab karate-chop a Bolshevik, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt get their hearts melted by Annie’s sunny optimism—“There’s a song I used to sing in the orphanage...” she says. “Think of the children!” Eleanor says. I watched Annie, who was really Dee Dee Scarsdale with her good strong church voice trying hard to show spunk, dream of her real folks. I watched her reject Daddy Warbucks in favor of the fake family, which promised to be a real family, but was really just a couple of criminals looking to make some money off her spunky, charming little heart.
I had never actually watched a show. This time, I watched it all. And for that one moment I believed that a little orphan girl could find promise in the sun.
Then Hope ruined it. The daughter of my estranged best friend ruined it. It was a tragic surprise, I suppose, and also not. It was the kind of inevitable sadness I had come to expect but kept forgetting to expect, the kind of sadness that continues to snap me back to the true order of things in my life.
Toward the end of the show—right before Annie and Daddy Warbucks have their big finale, right where she should not have been—she staggered onto the stage. She was in the long red nightgown that indicated her role as Ms. Hannigan, the drunken orphanage headmistress. It was split in the chest to nearly her belly button. She is tiny, like her mother, Barb. Her stomach was flat, pulled back to nearly her spine so that she was like a saltine cracker from the side. But all that exposed skin made her look larger. So did the way she swaggered around as the drunken orphanage tyrant Ms. Hannigan. She weaved in and out of that scene that wasn’t hers with an empty wine bottle. “Did I hear singing in here?” she slurred. It was a line from way back in Act I. She stumbled, and everyone leaned back, like in those old pictures of audiences wearing 3-D glasses in a movie theater when the monster jumps out for the first time.
Everyone but him, of course. The Vo-Ag teacher leaned as forward as he could. He buried his hands in the long brown hair of Andrea Bodinski sitting in the seat in front of him.
Hope swaggered toward Annie, who just stood there, frozen, and with one wide arc of her skinny arm slapped that Annie across the face.
From the side of the stage, we all saw Mr. Henderson step forward and make a slicing motion across his neck. He mouthed, That’s enough. Hope hoisted that wine bottle into the air and threw it.
It hit him square between the eyes.
Everyone gasped, including me.
Hope bent over into a big belly laugh as all the lights went out.
Then he was laughing too, the only other one in the auditorium. The two of them were laughing while the rest of us sat in the dark. I will never forget that.
Behind me Mueller kicked my chair. Next to me, the Vo-Ag teacher’s hot breath was in my ear, saying, “Who is that?” He grabbed my arm and put his forehead on my shoulder. His ponytail swished around and grazed my neck. He laughed and laughed, and whispered into my ear, “What kind of a place is this?” while the rest of them, all of them, said, “Who’s that laughing? Who’s that laughing?” with Huff, loudest of all, shouting: “I SEE TANDY CAIDE HAS A NEW FRIEND.”
Later that night I lay down on the white eyelet comforter that had been on my bed since I was in the fourth grade. I listened to Gerald snoring in his bedroom across the hall. His bedroom is the one that used to belong to my father and mother. This whole cottage, the one on the go-around at the top of the hill on the north side of town, the one right next to Huff’s, used to belong to my father and mother. My father bought it in the fourth year of his business, the year I was born. I have been told by Doc and Huff that he painted the shingles shit brown to match the color of his soul. I have also been told by Doc and Huff that the three of them stalked this cottage like a pack of coyotes, and when old Edie Meier’s husband, Elmer, died, they convinced her kids that she was better off in the nursing home over in Fayette, where she could play bridge and eat meat every day and not have to shovel snow off the cottage’s driveway. Whether this story is true, and whether this was in Edie’s best interest, and whether my father’s soul was the color of shit, was always dependent on the drunkenness of Huff or the tenderheartedness of Doc. If the topic came up when Huff was drunk and Doc was simultaneously tenderhearted, I invented urgent work to do and left to do it. I would not wish that disagreement on anyone.
So nothing in this little cottage on the go-around has ever truly belonged to Gerald. It belongs to me only on the technicality of my birthright. But still that other bedroom—the one with wallpaper printed with tiny roses and those cherub babies you see on Valentine’s Day—is Gerald’s. He had been sleeping alone there since the second year of our marriage, when he decided to no longer wear underwear to bed because it crawled up his butt cheeks when he slept. Also, his snoring sounded like drowning.
I got up and opened the small window that faces out toward Doc and Huff’s place across the go-around, shingled in the same shit brown. Out there was that sagy smell again, just underneath the catpee smell of newly applied anhydrous ammonia. I thought about the Vo-Ag teacher with his colorful belt and the man clogs that would not survive winter. He seemed too good to be in a place like this.
I went back to my bed, and to stop myself from thinking about him I went over the order of the stripes on the wallpaper, timed to Gerald’s snoring—thick, thick, thin, thick, thick, thin, thick, thin—which had always worked for me in the past. It didn’t work anymore. The smell of sage and cat pee and my sweat mixed up together. It seemed like the smell of something about to happen.
The Vo-Ag teacher reminded me of Bruce Willis, when Bruce Willis was on that big wraparound farmhouse porch in that Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler commercial in the 1980s. In that commercial, the screen door of a farmhouse bursts open and Bruce Willis comes out of the house with a Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler in his hand. He’s got tight faded jeans on and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. There’s a band playing on the porch. He puts this bottle of Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler up to his mouth and uses it as a microphone, singing, Seagram’s Golden Wine Coolers. It’s wet and it’s dry. My, my, my, my. And everyone has a wonderful time.
My father hated that commercial. Every time it came on he would throw up his hands and yell, “Jesus Christ! What the hell does Bruce Willis know about farmhouse blues?!”
But I always thought, even then, before I had breasts or my full height or a driver’s license: How does my father possibly know the heart and mind of Bruce Willis?
Finally I went to Gerald’s bedroom and I woke him by touching his penis, and eventually we satisfied each other as best as we could, given Gerald’s size. I think it had been about seven months since we had done anything resembling that. Afterward, he