Pages for You

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  But Anne never seemed to enjoy these memories. She had yet to evince any interest in Flannery’s mother whatever. Competition? Flannery sometimes wondered. Or just a pocket of indifference?

  “Flâneur. Benjamin writes about it in Reflections. He’s great, you’ve got to read him. I can’t believe Bradley didn’t put him on the syllabus. I’ll lend it to you.”

  “Thanks,” Flannery said without enthusiasm. The stack on her dorm room desk of Anne-required reading was growing steadily higher. It discouraged her. She sighed. “I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.”

  “It’s not a race, you know,” Anne said gently.

  “Oh. Isn’t it?” Flannery went back to her reading. Humming under her breath a childish song her mother used to sing to her, about the Flannel.

  Flannery, for her part, was first and most easily tempted by “Annery,” though she also tried “Flanne,” which eventually mutated, in a jealous moment, to Phil-Anderer, when she felt Anne was keeping from her the important stories about her past.

  “Anne the Philanderer,” she said in a mock tolerant tone. “I know all about it already. I just wish you’d have the courage to tell me yourself.”

  “As opposed to your hearing about it from everyone else?” Anne’s face was puckered up with a wry expression. No one, as far as either of them knew, had any idea about Flannery and Anne. They shared an uneasy assumption that it might be dangerous if anyone did.

  “God, yes. I get so tired of people coming up to me to tell me the stories. ‘Anne and Derrida this,’ ‘Anne and Hélène Cixous that.’ Someone claimed they’d seen you arm in arm with Harold Bloom. . .”

  Anne’s glance flicked out sharply, a sudden switchblade, and Flannery understood she’d taken the joke too far. Bloom was a critic Anne had only acid for, and Flannery wondered if her blind gibe had, inadvertently, landed somewhere true.

  Safer, on the subject of their names, was the nice simplicity of the two’s relation: “Yours is a subset of mine,” as Flannery thought of it; and “Mine is the succinct version: your name, carefully edited,” in Anne’s formulation. It suited the two of them, they agreed, that Flannery’s was the softer and chattier, while Anne’s was blunt, direct, and had a ‘Get to the point’ sound about it. “One syllable, that’s all we’ve got time for,” said Anne briskly, clapping her hands like a schoolmistress. “Let’s go, let’s go. Move along. Saying ‘Flannery’ can take all day.”

  One afternoon, when Flannery was trying to wrap her arms all around Anne as she lay curled up fetally on the bed (she was curious to see whether they could reach), Flannery said,

  “See? This is how it is. I can contain you here, all of you, right in my arms. The same way my name contains yours. See?”

  Anne pulled away. “Contain me? Is that what you want to do?”

  Flannery heard the warning, but decided not to let that stop her. “Yes,” she said. “My Anne here, where I can always have her.”

  Anne looked at her then through the eyes of a faint acquaintance. Not unfriendly; just distant, considering. “You know, babe.” Her voice had an older woman’s weary advice in it. “You’re so hungry. You want so much.”

  “Well.” Flannery shrugged. “So what? I’ll never get it.”

  “You might. If you stop asking.”

  “I’ll never stop asking.”

  “I know.” Anne touched her cheek. “It’s one of the things that makes you strangely lovable.”

  December only got darker and sicker, as huddled students with colds staggered around dreading finals and final papers. The library was fluorescently filled with busy notebooks and runny noses. First friendships got consolidated in the crisis mentality of the coming end: end of first semester, end of this grand beginning to Education. Flannery shared term-paper worries with Susan Kim at the bookstore/café; ate Cap’n Crunch with Cheryl one morning, lingering until the dining-hall staff glared at their delinquency. She even went to the ice cream joint with Nick one night. Normally Nick was much too cool for ice cream, but under this intense pressure personalities cracked and people allowed themselves to regress. Over two huge berry and candy bar-scattered scoops Nick said the same thing to Flannery that others had recently said: I hardly see you around anymore. Where have you been hiding? And: You look good—different, somehow. Have you changed your hair? Nick, who had the most immediate reason to have paid attention, seemed to understand that the change was not simply seasonal, that there might be a person behind Flannery’s new shape and movement. He had run into the two together once, at the all-night grocery. He was a good guy, though, Nick. What he suspected, he didn’t say.

  “Take care of yourself, Jansen,” he concluded as he scraped rubbery almond pellets from the base of the Styrofoam dish. “Don’t burn the candle at both ends. They say it diminishes performance.” She eyed him, licking fruits of the forest from a plastic spoon, wondering if he meant the innuendo. He probably did. “Thanks for the tip,” she answered, allowing herself an uncharacteristic private query: would this boy, too, have left her lukewarm?

  There was, inevitably, a crushing stress that drew closer, the inexorable iceberg, along with the beckoning Christmas break and its promise of freedom. By Christmas Day, Flannery told herself repeatedly, by the time you’re eighteen (her birthday crowded around the twenty-fifth), this will all be over. You will have finished your first, shattering semester at college.

  She felt the stress. Of course she did. But she was protected from it, too. Wrapped in the arms of her girlfriend—hers—Flannery was fundamentally untouchable, even by exams and papers and the grueling needlepoint of footnotes. Whatever letters might collect on her transcript from this first series of professorial assessments, she was not going to panic.

  After all, such grades were nothing—invisible ink—next to the permanent imprint she’d wear on her skin from this passion. What marks could matter more than this love’s tattoo?

  As for the two of them, they had early-winter pleasures to enjoy. Late dawns and early dusks, the sweet taste of smoky kisses when the air outside is iced and salty; the joke of the fifteen-minute striptease, when coats and scarves and sweaters and long johns all have to be shed in a warm floor-bound bundle before flesh can finally meet flesh. Close embraces on late streets, in a lamplight two female figures (one older, one younger) had to hope would not expose them to unfriendly attentions. Day or night walks through ice-prettified wonderlands, against the ever-present kitsch of carols. Falalalalaing to each other, slyly, in the tinsel-glittered rooms of restaurants or in the naked seclusion of Anne’s off-campus apartment, at a safe distance from university eyes.

  Each had her own anxiety to inhabit—“You’ll do fine,” they emptily reassured each other—in a place quite separate from the juicy benevolence of their mutual affection. Anne wrung her hands and devoured cartons of Marlboros at the thought of the MLA ordeal, which would unfold just after Christmas in a fraught, overcrowded Chicago hotel. Sooner than that, Flannery had to walk straight into the source of her panic, somehow to sit in the right rooms at the right times and disgorge all the knowledge she had accumulated of Art History, World Fiction, and Revolution. For Criticism she wound a long skein of argument around the skunk-haired Susan Sontag; and did not let Anne read the result. They both agreed it was better that way. “I’ll have plenty of these to look at soon enough,” Anne groused. “The efforts of all your brilliant darling peers.” “Give Susan Kim an A,” Flannery said. She was brave enough to risk such cracks by now. “Unless you think she’s cute, obviously, in which case I think you’d better fail her.”

  Then the break was on them. Flannery packed for the reverse journey in the blue van with the irascible driver to the chaotic airport and from there west, to home. The dorms were a confusion of suitcases, deadline frenzy, and shouted seasonal greetings. People left before you’d said goodbye to them. Everyone was underslept. There was an escape-from-a-burning-building feel about the place, as students vibrated on their tense diets of caffeine and sugar.r />
  Anne would not do a pre-limo dorm goodbye. She didn’t want to say goodbye at all. “It seems overdramatic,” she said emphatically. “We’ll see each other again in a few weeks. I might be a human being again by then, after MLA. That or a vegetable. One or the other.” Anne advised against their spending Flannery’s last night there together and thought she’d gotten away with a “See you in a few weeks, babe,” parting after a shared spanokopita—nourishment that followed a brief and urgent afternoon encounter.

  Of course, this meant another short night for exhausted Flannery, who woke to take a dark dawn walk to Anne’s apartment. It brought on shadowed memories of her earlier pilgrimage to the train station, for Anne’s apartment was on the same route.

  An ash-gray, crotchety face appeared at Anne’s door; her hair was almost colorless from lack of sleep. But those loved lips did manage a smile when she took in the sight of her up-and-ready, travel-anxious lover.

  “You crazy girl,” she said affectionately, and opened her arms for an embrace.

  “I didn’t have time to write you anything this time,” Flannery clarified, before stepping in to take up the invitation. “So this is a substitute for a poem.” And for the last time in that banner year, she kissed Tuesday Anne, in a long and eloquent farewell linger.

  Vacation was an agony of absence.

  Her mother was pleased to see her—“I’ve missed you so much, honey,” in a fervent hug at the airport—and Flannery suffered a mild guilty heartbreak that the feeling wasn’t mutual. There was a deep, primal comfort in being around this familiar life-giving body again, and she did love the harmless trot of her mother’s conversation; but she was no longer the essential woman in Flannery’s life. She was not the woman Flannery heard when she closed her eyes, or inhaled still in the warm wintry scents of her clothes; she was not the woman Flannery figured as the soft pillow she held close to herself at night, in an empty effort to fill the hollow of her curved, sleeping stomach.

  Flannery had never considered that the word “ache” might be meant literally, when applied to the heart. “Heartache” was a fancy, surely, a gift for songwriters and a handy rhyme for “heartbreak.” They weren’t serious? But no, they were. It was something else to learn. The heart did ache, actually. She felt a dull grind of lack somewhere near her diaphragm, a pain that occupied the space of something removed. A phantom limb. A scratchy hunger. The wasting muscle fatigue of want.

  Flannery listened and talked with her mother and her friends, and their friends. She told funny stories to these older women, as if she’d just returned from a war. College! What a mad lark it was. She enjoyed these reunions; they were meaningful to her. But she remained separated from her company the whole time by the screen of their ignorance, and her knowledge. They thought—and why shouldn’t they?—that this was just Flannery they had in front of them. Same old smart and loping Flannery, sheltered and friendly, cautious and curious, maybe one day a writer. She charmed, in her modest, wise-eyed way. It would be interesting to see what she’d become.

  It was only Flannery who knew she was already becoming it. It was she who knew that this eighteen-year-old in front of them was someone else entirely. She felt like an elaborate impostor, as if her lines had been carefully rehearsed to sound authentic—the kinds of things Flannery, the girl we used to know, might say.

  Christmas Day they spent as usual with her mother’s sister’s family at a Better Homes and Gardens spread of gifts and foods produced by Flannery’s shiny hostessy aunt. Sometime after gingerbread and ice cream, Flannery suddenly felt faint with her contained silences and the sharp pain of missing Anne. She couldn’t focus anymore on the conversations around her, which had nothing to do with the only person she felt like talking to. She excused herself, saying she had to take a walk.

  Her older cousin Rachel joined her. This wasn’t part of Flannery’s plan. It was solitude she was after, a moment restored to the detailed adorations of her Anne-fixed mind. Now, with coiffed Rachel walking crisp-heeled beside her, more hiding and dissembling would be required.

  They walked up the quiet suburban hill, toward the bend from which they could watch the bay. Rachel, not an especially sensitive creature, launched into a complaint about her stuffy parents and from there, seamlessly, into a long account of her college boyfriend, and how freaked out her mother would be if she knew that Rachel had been having sex. Flannery, half-listening, pulled out a packet of Marlboros from inside her down jacket.

  “God! Flannery. When did you start smoking?”

  “Recently.” It was an experimental habit she had just taken up for a specific reason: she wanted to make her mouth taste like Anne’s.

  “I can’t believe it. You’ve always been so clean-cut.”

  Flannery nodded noncommittally. Hoping her careless (unpracticed) smoking might put a dent in that image.

  “So,” said Rachel, suddenly more interested in her younger cousin, who’d always seemed a bit stiff and studious before. “Has college back East turned you into a wild child? A party animal?”

  Flannery smiled. “Maybe. A little.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend out there?”

  She looked at the ground. She was a little dizzy; the nicotine made her head spin. “No.”

  “Really?” Rachel, charitably, looked surprised. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. You probably will soon. But you know what?” She lowered her voice as if to share an important, helpful confidence. “Maybe you should quit smoking. Guys might find it off-putting—it makes your breath stink.”

  Flannery coughed and crushed her Marlboro underfoot. She couldn’t answer for a minute. Instead, she looked out over the bay’s serene spread of water and suppressed a small yelp of helpless longing.

  Then, one miracle night, a phone call.

  Flannery had given Anne her number and address before leaving, but the mailbox and phone line had so far remained voiceless, so by this late December ringing Flannery had stopped hoping. She sat at the kitchen table paging through the course book, trying to figure out into which new bright fields of literature and ideas the next semester might lead her. Renaissance Poetry? The Age of Enlightenment?

  “It’s for you, honey. Someone named Anne.”

  Flannery jumped in her seat, and out of it. “Can I take it—?” she said, reaching for the phone—but there was nowhere else to take it. The bedroom phone was broken, so there was only this one in the kitchen, where her mother sat placidly reading her favorite Jane Austen. Flannery had to wrap herself around the receiver with her whole eager body, in an effort to create a place of her own in which she might enjoy a bodiless reunion with Anne.

  “Hello?” She sounded so quiet and tentative, she hated herself for it.

  “Hey, babe.” The other end of the line had no such hesitation: Anne was there at once, in all her huskily sexy divinity. Flannery leaned into the wall as her knees weakened beneath her.

  “Hi,” she managed. Hoarsely. “How—how are you?”

  “I’m good. How are you?”

  “Okay.”

  “I can hardly hear you.” Flannery caught generic crowd noise beyond Anne. Scholars at conference. Ambient bustle. “Here, why don’t I close this door and see if that’s better,” Anne said. The background receded. “So. What have you been doing?”

  “Not much. Visiting friends and family mostly. My mother’s here, you know, so—”

  “I get it. So you can’t really talk?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll talk for both of us.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve been missing you, babe.”

  “Me too. I know. Me too.”

  “They have lovely big beds here at this hotel.”

  “Really?” Flannery swallowed. “Not here. Here they’re—here it’s pretty small.” She kept her voice peppy and reporterish in case her mother was listening, as she no doubt was. Anne’s got even sultrier.

  “I’ve been imagining what we could be doing across it. If you were here.�
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  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Sounds—sounds good.”

  There was a pause, in which Flannery could hear Anne’s heavy breathing. It was a joke, though. Anne laughed. “Is your mother really right there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well. Give her a kiss for me. Listen.” She became brisker. More professorial. “I’ve got some good news. People seemed to love my Cather paper, and I’ve got callbacks at two places. NYU, job of my dreams, and—University of New Mexico. I doubt I have a prayer at NYU—it’s not really my field. But the New Mexicans seem to love me.”

  “That’s great! God. Congratulations.”

  “It is pretty good. There are so many morose corpses around here going home empty-handed.”

  “So. New Mexico. For next year, right?” Flannery’s voice became even peppier. Less convincingly. She looked at the serene back of her mother, who was apparently absorbed in Eleanor’s big-sister dilemmas. It was Sense and Sensibility, for probably the tenth time. “That’s pretty far away.”

  There was a pause, a space of dead air, which Flannery filled completely with the hope that she hadn’t wrecked this phone call.

  “Flannery?” came an unreadable voice from the other end. “Flannery Jansen? You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Because I love you.”

  Oh. “You too. I mean, me too. That is—”

  It was the first time they had said it.

  And that made the vacation.

  Days later they met up at the Anchor Bar. Anne chose the time and place; Flannery chose her outfit, carefully. An elegant, sea-colored jacket, cut straight and short in a way that complemented her slender height (Rachel had certified it as “nice,” a recommendation Flannery hoped was trustworthy), straight Levi’s, and a chic new pair of boots, her mother’s Christmas present to her, which might now put Flannery’s own feet on the map.