The Annie Year. Stephanie Wilbur Ash
Vo-Ag teacher, or Clive, I hid it in the long skinny drawer of my big desk, the one you are supposed to put pens in.
Then I put my big black coat on and I opened the curtains and stood for a while looking at the lights of the Country Kitchen across the street from my waiting room window. At night the letters of the Country Kitchen sign are lit up, but the kids in this town keep throwing rocks at the O, R, Y, and K until the bulbs in those letters go out. At night the sign reads: C UNT ITCHEN.
Of course I had laughed about this before. Mueller and I laugh about it all the time, even now. Doc still thinks it is the greatest thing this town has going for it. He wants to print it on a T-shirt and sell it during our town’s Fourth of July celebration.
Doc and Huff used to joke in particular about how it is right across the street from my office. Of all the things you could look at all day long, little girl!
But this time I laughed about it differently. I don’t know if you will understand this or not, but this time it was my kind of laughter.
Inside Cunt Itchen, Barb flew around, coffeepot strong in her hand. Hope sat in a booth at the back, carving something into the table with a butter knife. I waved to Barb to get her attention, but what could she see? Nothing, or at least she didn’t look, so instead I said to my stale office air and my dusty waiting room window, “Good night, Barbie. I love you. I am sorry. It looks like I may be leaving soon.”
I walked home in the dark, looking in at all the people in their little houses, wondering for the first time if they really were like me, as I had always been led to believe. I had been taught we were mostly the same, some of us just meaner and some of us just stupider, and me and my little village on the go-around just a tiny bit better. Some of the people in this town once had businesses and jobs and land and real estate and history here, but they have lost these things or are about to and they are broken by it. I was hanging on to these things. Was I better, or just lucky? Some of the people in this town never had those things, and some had shown up here recently for reasons unknown to me but were clearly not good ones. Some of these new people were the kind who drank beer with high school kids and gave them hickeys and rides to Kum & Go for cigarettes. Some of the high school kids here were the kind who were waiting for just such opportunities.
And who can blame them? What reason would a young person have to not seize whatever opportunity presented itself? Who among us is in a position to stop young people from seizing opportunity?
But there was something about the way the Vo-Ag teacher liked me, and the way he liked the things I said. He made me think that perhaps I was different, more like him. More, I don’t know, special, more above it all. I wanted to believe I was the only one he made feel this way. But this was not the case.
Through their windows that night I could see that the people in this town mostly watched television. But sometimes they made decaf coffee, or played with their babies, or wiped their kitchen counters. Maybe the same things you do, maybe not. I really don’t know what you people in your towns closer to the river do in the privacy of your own homes when you’re not out in your public spaces winning friends and influencing people. But I can say, without a doubt, that at least, in my perception, the people in this town did look happy doing the small, quiet things they were doing that night.
And this surprised me. I do not exactly understand this yet. But I liked how this surprised me. That night, as I walked home in the dark and looked into the Little Clipper at the corner of Main and Anderson, I was even surprised to see Cathy Claus, Howie Claus’s daughter, sitting in the hair-cutting chair she rents from Mandy Lancer. Cathy had her feet on the hair-washing sink and her nose in a People magazine and all the lights up, though it was well after seven and she was closed. She was still wearing plastic gloves from setting some perm, but her shoes were off and she wasn’t wearing any socks, just stretching her toes with her heels on that sink.
I am capable of surprise. I am capable of seeing interesting things and enjoying those interesting things. And I was suddenly and inexplicably proud of this.
Gerald had a hot tub put in the backyard. Gary and some of his out-of-work friends from the railroad pulled a truck up to the backyard and dumped it out. It wasn’t one of those nice hot tubs either. It was one of those round, cedar-planked hot tubs that is basically a giant wooden can, kind of like the troughs farmers keep heated for cows in the winter. You had to walk up a little stepstool to get into it. And when you sat in it, the water came right up to your neck. You looked like a disembodied head.
That’s what I saw of Gerald for nearly a week. He sat in that hot tub every day after his after-school bus route, right up until Thanksgiving, stewing in his own juices. He stood up only to pee off the side of it, and he got out only to sleep and drive to Subway. The night before Thanksgiving he even ate a footlong meatball sub in the hot tub and then washed the sauce from his face with the water.
“It’s okay, Candy Cane,” he called to me through the kitchen window. “The chemicals in the water keep it clean.”
An hour later he was still calling to me: “Come out! Please?”
What choice did I have?
And besides, I was curious. In the interest of accuracy I can admit that now.
Haven’t you ever been curious in your life?
It was very hot. The air was cool. I was naked. We did make love in there. His theory about buoyancy was correct. And yes, I enjoyed it. Certainly I am allowed to enjoy myself occasionally.
But I did not enjoy it later, as I lay with Gerald in his bed. His drowning snore made me feel like I was drowning too. I got up and went to my own bedroom and lay down in my own bed.
But I was still drowning.
I was out the door before Gerald woke up that morning, even though it was Thanksgiving Day.
It was so pleasant! No one was up. No lights were on. There was no movement. I walked downtown. I got a story in my head: if anyone came out of their home and asked me why I was heading to the office on a holiday, I would tell them it was urgent work for Mueller. By the time I got to the office, I had even convinced myself of this story and I sat down and turned on my computer to do it.
I pulled the multicolored beaded belt out of the drawer, but instead of laying it on top of my computer, I threaded it through the belt loops of my black work pants.
Why not? It’s a holiday, I thought.
I was very productive that morning—I did all of Mueller’s payroll for the month, four days ahead of schedule.
At lunch I went to Prairie Lanes, which is always open on Thanksgiving, and I bowled the same way I always do: over the air vent, my first two fingers rubbing together until they make a whisper sound. My fingers into the ball’s holes, lifting it out of the ball return. Forward to the foul line, find the center, walk backward five steps. Three large steps forward. Swing the ball behind me, before me, release.
The ball: airborne, then dropping just right of center, which is how I avoid the 7-10 split. Then it rolls straight home, the little engraved 10 on the ball appearing and disappearing with no tilt until the ball hits pins 1 and 3 with a clean smack, followed by all the others.
Almost always. Sometimes the 10 pin is left behind.
That Thanksgiving of that Annie year, Cindy came down from behind the shoe counter and shook her finger at me. She said, “You could really be somebody big in bowling if you could put some spin on that thing.”
It was something she had said to me dozens of times. I nodded and smiled in the way that’s good for business. But I wanted to say, Why would I ever chase a wild spin, Cindy? If I ever got higher than a 260, you would take my picture with your little pink camera and pass it to Terry at the paper, who would put it in the sports page, which Pat Lancaster would read on the radio. And then Doc and Huff would crack loud jokes about it at the Chamber of Commerce meetings on Wednesdays. Doc might even get