The Appalachian Chronicles: Shades of Gray

by Seneca Fox

  Chapter XVI

  Reflection

  The year Anna and I graduated from college was the last time we spent more than a couple of weeks together. Anna was home for a month, but was scheduled to leave with a group of Amherst graduates for a year of missionary work in South America to study the aboriginal culture. While Anna was in college she traveled extensively. She spent the holidays, spring breaks, a few summer months and semesters working for different charitable organizations. While I was in college, the only place I traveled was to Fort Lauderdale during spring break. I always spent the holidays at my parents’ and hung out with friends from high school. During the summer I worked on a yacht that took hotel guests on dinner cruises. The elderly jet-set crowd I catered to didn’t need my charity.

  Late one warm June afternoon, before the oppressive humidity of summer arrived on the Chesapeake Bay, Anna and I were together at her home. Her parents owned a seventy-acre estate, befitting a double-dipping retired colonel. The estate was named Elmford, after what was reputed to be the largest American Elm tree in Virginia. It took three adults, with hands joined, to circle the trunk. The domed canopy of leaves was more than fifty feet in diameter. In the late spring, when the leaves matured, the branches bent low and touched the ground. There were several cables running through the branches holding the tree together. It was like a dinosaur struggling not to collapse under its own weight.

  Elmford was a peninsula that was bound along the northern, eastern and southern sides by more than a mile of shoreline of a tidal creek that drained into the Bay. The Foxhartes owned an ancient forty-two-foot Chris Craft appropriately named Anna. The Colonel was fond of the varnished wood look that went out of style when fiberglass became the primary building material of more modern speedboats and yachts. Anna was kept in a boathouse that looked conspicuously like the Foxhartes’ home. My mother often said, “The Foxhartes have more money tied up in that boat house than we have in our home.” She was probably right. Close to the boathouse were a heated swimming pool and a tennis court.

  The afternoon began with Anna and me playing tennis. We were fairly matched for skill but not for temperament. If I didn’t ace Anna with a good serve, she would volley me into fatigue with what I assumed were high-priced ground-strokes. Anna was an efficient tennis player; for every one step she took, I took three. She seemed to stand at the back of center-court patiently waiting for me to make a mistake, while I hustled around struggling to return her well positioned shots. She typically won, or perhaps more accurately, I typically lost. Our match that day was typical.

  We swam for a while after tennis; but as the sun set, the cool night air settled around us. As we dried off, we shivered with goose bumps and the hair stood upright on our skin. We glanced self-consciously toward her house to see if anyone was watching while we tiptoed into the boathouse and stepped giggling onto the boat. Sometime earlier, Anna had left a bottle of wine chilling in one of those ’60s vintage leather ice buckets. She stepped forward into the only stateroom on the boat to change. I changed in the head. We met in the galley and sat at the table where I watched as she opened the wine and poured two glasses. It was getting dark outside and the dim lights on board reflected warmly off the wood and earth tones inside the cabin and seductively off Anna’s golden tan. Her wet hair lay close to her head. She had combed it straight back and parted it down the center. Neat rows were left behind on either side by the teeth of her comb – her curls temporarily washed and brushed away.

  “A toast,” said Anna as she held her glass before me.

  I held out my glass and replied, “A toast.”

  “To everlasting friendship.”

  “To everlasting friendship,” I repeated.

  I smiled, and we delicately touched our glasses and poured the sweet wine into our mouths.

  Anna lifted her glass to offer another toast. “To lazy summer afternoons spent making memories.”

  “To lazy summer memories, I think.” We each sipped our wine again.

  “Today reminds me of the day we went to Digby Island,” said Anna.

  “Not the day you rescued me.”

  “Yes,” Anna replied with a smile of superiority.

  I remembered that day well. Anna and I were both about fifteen. Not old enough to drive, one way we could escape boredom and the seeming oppression of our parents was to take her father’s Boston Whaler and explore the many creeks and shorelines along the eastern border of our county. Digby Island was a small and uninhabited island with an inconsistent shoreline. The Bay side, which was under the constant influence of wave action, was sandy; but the other side, separated from the mainland by wide shallows, was muddy. The day that Anna and I walked around Digby Island, I ventured into the mud on the mainland side and was sucked down almost to my waist. Anna dragged the weather-worn remains of a small dead tree to within about fifteen feet of where I was stuck, lifted the tree straight up, and let it drop in front of me. I held on to one end of the tree and twisted and turned myself, while she pulled on the other end. After a few desperate minutes Anna and I were able to pull me to firmer ground.

  “Yes, the day I rescued you.”

  “I don’t see any similarities.”

  Anna smiled and said, “No, I won’t say it.”

  “Say what?” I asked.

  “It’s too stupid.”

  “What?” I asked again.

  “Get your head out of the mud and maybe you could see.”

  “Anna the jokester. You’re right, it’s stupid.”

  “Shut up, you,” she said as she threw a balled up cocktail napkin at my face.

  After Anna rescued me from the mud that day, I chased her around to the other side of the island, pretending I was a mutant creature. On the bay side of Digby Island she swam as I washed the caked mud from my body in the cool water. Swimming in the bay at that time of the year was sometimes hazardous, as the water was often thick with jellyfish. We were fortunate that day because few days earlier a tropical depression had diluted the bay with fresh water. “Nettles,” as we called them, can’t survive in brackish water, so they had moved saltier water farther out, into the bay. We had great fun splashing around in the surf.

  Acknowledging the accuracy of Anna’s memory, I said, “That was a good day, and this is a good day.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said as I emptied the wine from my glass.

  “In a hurry?”

  “Sorry,” I responded. “Sometimes I forget what I’m drinking.” I poured myself another glass.

  “So tell me more about this girl you dated last summer.”

  “Jealous?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “I might be.”

  “You shouldn’t be. She was nice, but not really my type.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I seem to be clueless when it comes to women. They always seem to get too serious.”

  “Do we seem to be too serious?”

  “No, but I credit you for that, not myself.”

  “Why me?”

  “You seem to know how to keep it – how do I say this? – friendly is not the right word. Oh, I don’t know.” I paused and then added, “But you’ve never asked more of me than I can give. So it must be you, Anna.”

  “What are you ready to give now?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I believed that Anna was asking me if I was ready for a more serious relationship. Although I felt that I was, I was not ready to talk about it. I responded with the first excuse that came to mind. “Shoot,” I said, “I don’t even have a job.”

  “That’s not so important. You’re intelligent, you’ve got a college degree, you’ll work your way into a satisfying job.” Anna raised her eyebrows as though she had just stumbled upon some pleasant discovery. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you come with me?”

>   “Come with you?”

  “To South America.”

  “South America? You’re nuts.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about going away like that. That’s a – a big change of plans.”

  “What plans?” She asked knowing that I really had none.

  “You’ll be gone for a year.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know, I mean, I guess I could.” I thought quietly for a moment and took another sip of wine. “It could be a lot of fun.”

  “I think it would be great.”

  “Are you sure? You might get tired of seeing me every day. Besides, I’d be a liability”

  Anna reached across the table and placed her hand on mine and said, “You won’t be a liability; and no, I won’t get tired of seeing you. I’d love for you to come. It’s about time we stretch you beyond those provincial tendencies of yours.”

  “Provincial? Are you saying that I’m narrow-minded?”

  “Not exactly. You have an open mind, just limited experience. That’s all.”

  “You’re so kind,” I said. I flashed a smile.

  “Bear with me, Ian.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You know how you used to criticize your buddies in high school about thinking and acting as though the county line was the end of the world?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, where does your world end?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve traveled some.”

  “Traveling by itself doesn’t necessarily bring about changes in one’s perspective.”

  “What are you trying to say?” I asked.

  Anna was sitting sideways with her legs pulled up and feet resting on the galley bench. She was staring across the room. “How about Sam?” she said. “You spent a lot of time together in high school – right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever go into Sam’s house?” she asked.

  “No. I don’t think he wanted me to; and, how do you know that anyway?”

  “I just do,” she answered. “Why do you think he never asked you in?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a very nice house, but that didn’t bother me.”

  “Maybe not, but do you think it bothered him?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Okay.” Anna paused. “How about his dad?”

  “His dad?”

  “Yes, his dad.”

  “You mean that – that he was an alcoholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your point, Anna?”

  “My point is that people can live in different worlds even when they live in the same community. Many people would have said that you and Sam were friends. You lived in the same community and spent a lot of time together, but you were from different worlds. To others casually observing you from day to day, you looked like friends – the differences in your worlds weren’t so obvious.”

  “I didn’t exclude Sam from my world. He excluded me from his.”

  “Did you ever ask yourself why?”

  “He was embarrassed, maybe jealous; I don’t know.”

  “Was Sam ever happy?”

  “Sure, I saw Sam laughing and having fun plenty of times.”

  “Was it happiness, or pleasure?”

  “Both. He experienced pleasure, but there were times, many times, when he was happy.”

  “Could you have been happy if you lived in the same environment Sam lived in – in a run-down house and with an alcoholic father?”

  “I don’t know. What’s your point, Anna?”

  “I’m not making myself very clear am I?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. She sat for a moment before she continued. “Let’s try something different. What do you think of when I say ‘the human condition’?”

  “A boring philosophy teacher,” I told her.

  “Seriously.”

  “Suffering?”

  “Is it all suffering?”

  “No, but I’m suffering right now.”

  “Cute,” replied Anna. “So if it’s not all suffering then what else characterizes the human condition?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think all people experience pleasure and happiness?”

  “Many do, but not all.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Some of those folks in South America. They suffer from poverty and who knows what else. There can’t be much happiness in their lives.”

  Anna’s eyes widened and she smiled. “That’s where you’re mistaken. They know happiness. What one discovers among people that are so clearly different, different in the way they look, speak, in their customs and values, the laws that they live by and living conditions is that these people really aren’t that different from us. They experience sorrow when someone is hurt or dies, and they experience pleasure and happiness. In third world countries pleasure and happiness can be hard to come by, but it’s not as rare as one might think. Providing people have food, shelter and other people around who care about them they experience pleasure and happiness. Even when disease or tyrannical leaders threaten their lives, they experience pleasure and happiness. Pleasure and happiness are relative – for one who is poor it doesn’t take much to bring a smile and smiles often come without it costing anyone anything.” Anna picked up her glass and took a sip of wine. I sat quietly considering what she had just said. I thought I was beginning to understand her point. She set down her glass and said, “Ian, you said you couldn’t have been happy if you lived in Sam’s world, but how do you really know?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “It’s not so easy to believe that people who live in a hot and humid, impoverished environment can really be as happy, but you would know better than I.”

  “I’d like you to know, too. I’d like you to come see for yourself. Like I said, it’s time to ‘stretch you’ a bit. Time to learn from living in another world, one that’s out of your comfort zone.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Great,” replied Anna. “That’s all I ask, but don’t take too long. We’ll have to formally add your name to the list in the next few days.”

  We sat silently for a moment and it soon became apparent that Anna was ready to change the subject. I looked into the wine glass as I twirled it in my fingers, watching the wine climb the sides of the glass in a thin film of liquid that would trickle back down when I held the glass still. I didn’t know what to say, so I looked up at Anna and smiled, hoping she would help me with the conversation. She smiled but left me sitting self-consciously searching for the right words. My first thought was to say that I was lucky to know her. I knew these thoughts to be true, but I was afraid that my intent would be misconstrued. I was concerned that if I did not express my thoughts carefully she would think that I was insincere. Finally I told myself to just say it; after all, this was Anna.

  “Anna, I’m a lucky guy.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’m lucky to have a friend like you.”

  Anna smiled. She stretched out her legs beneath the table and rested her warm feet against the insides of my thighs.

  The next morning I was at home still trying to make sense of the conversation I’d had with Anna as well as trying to think of the best way to talk to my parents about spending a year in South America. I was still living with my parents while I was looking for a job. I knew they would not object to me going to South America, but they would no doubt have many questions – especially about money. In four years of college, I had accumulated over twenty-five thousand dollars in debt and the first payment was due in a few months. I was reading the loan contract to see if I might be eligible for a deferment.

  The phone rang, but I did not answer it – my mother was downstairs and I knew she would answer. A few moments later she came to my room with her hand over the receiver. I hoped it was Anna; I was ready to tell her that I wanted to go to South America.

/>   The caller was the personnel manager from the inn where I had worked during the summers while I was in college. He was calling in response to a job application I had dropped off two days earlier. We talked for few minutes before he asked if I would come in for an interview. I interviewed the next day, he offered me the job, and I accepted. I talked with Anna soon after and again the morning she left for South America. She said she understood my decision, but I could tell that she was disappointed.