The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Anna, please don’t go.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, Arthur. We’ll go together to the funeral.” She let go of his arm and walked down the hall to the elevator. Leaving behind the tortured, starved, worn-out, distressed, dead body of her dearest friend. Into the stars with you, Anna said to herself. Dust unto dust and after dust to lie, sans song, sans singer, and sans end. Who knows what waits out there?

  Two hours later she was in Philip’s arms in a room in the Plaza Hotel. “Everything seems so fragile,” she said. “In the face of that I guess we at least get to spend a night together every now and then. You can stay all night, can’t you?”

  “I can stay all night. I’m in trouble over you, Anna. I think it’s going to get worse. Because after this nothing will happen.” He held her very close to him, her body was enclosed in his. He counted the seconds of his sadness and his happiness. He was enlarged and diminished and broken and made whole. It made no sense to him but he came when she called him. It did not happen often now.

  “I love you to the breadth, depth, height. I love you whether I see you or not. If I don’t see you I still love you. Remember that.” She leaned over him and kissed his forehead, his eyelids and earlobes and the hollow places of his neck. Then she got out of bed and turned on all the lights and came back to him and made love to him like a cheerleader of love, like a panther of love, in view of being alive, of breathing without pain, in the light of being cognizant and alive she took the married man along and they made love.

  Sometime during the night Anna hit her arm against the bedside table and it bled. She washed it off and tied her scarf around it. When she woke he was looking at it with his glasses on.

  “Don’t look at my arm,” she said. “I cut it.”

  “How?”

  “I hit it on something. I’m very thin-skinned lately. I told you that. It’s hereditary. My grandmother was like that. She always had Band-Aids on her wrists when I was little.” Anna stuck her arm under the sheet. “Stop looking at it.”

  “Are you taking estrogen?”

  “Hell, no. What for?”

  “It might help your skin.” He reached under the cover and took her arm and looked at it again. He was puzzled by it. She seemed so healthy, so alive. It didn’t fit in.

  “Would you like me to suck your dick?” she said, rolling over to the other side of the bed. “Or not?”

  “I would like you to take care of yourself and live a hundred years.”

  “Well, I probably won’t. There’s something wrong with me.” She sat up very straight with her legs out in front of her. She leaned down along her legs, a show-off yoga move. “I know I’m mortal, that’s the problem. I can talk myself into anything. I might decide to die.” She waited until he looked worried. “I might die to punish you. Would it work?” He wasn’t laughing. It wasn’t working. For a moment Anna thought she might tell him what was wrong, then she talked herself out of it.

  “You believe anything I say. You are wonderful, Philip. I apologize but it’s so easy to do that to you. I cut my arm on a sharp place in the bathroom in the night. It’s nothing. I was serious about sucking your dick, however. I really meant that part.” She pulled him over close to her and kissed him on the mouth instead. Gave him her old Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe kiss that she had practiced on her brothers when she was twelve. The French kiss to end all French kisses. Anna had taught it to all the Hand children, who had practiced it and perfected it in the garage with their McGruder cousins. It was some kiss.

  The funeral took two days to arrange. Writers Joel had represented from the Coast and people from Washington and relatives from Philadelphia all came to New York City and went in taxis to a church on Park Avenue and read things they had written and spoke in low voices and buried what was left of their friend. When the funeral was over, Anna went back to her apartment and sat on the bed and waited for the married man to come and tell her goodbye.

  This is it, she decided, the way the weather turns around, the thing we run from and never diminish, the long friends, the hosts of the dead, their legions have claimed Joel and will claim Philip and claim Arthur and Mother and Daddy and my sisters and brothers and me. What a fucked-up system. And while we live, no way to know each other, no way to connect. Misapprehensions, uneasy truces, loss.

  Then he was there and she forgot about systems and misapprehensions and death and took her married man to bed.

  Anna was walking around the Upper East Side of Manhattan. One last long walk before the movers came and took her things out of the extravagant apartment and moved them back to the mountains. One whole day to walk up Madison Avenue and down Fifth Avenue and across Park Avenue and over to Second and Third. One last day to eat deli food and buy shoes and boots and sweaters and look in windows and breathe the strange miraculously clean air of New York City. She was in a good mood when she left the apartment. She was wearing comfortable shoes and a long navy blue raincoat with a hood. A bright yellow scarf and dark blue leather gloves. She had a handful of money and credit cards stuffed in a pocket of the coat, a comb and a lipstick. It was nine in the morning when she left the apartment, meaning to spend the day walking. At ten she was sitting in a chair in an internist’s office waiting her turn to talk to him. She had passed his office and walked on, then turned around and trudged back and opened the door and asked the receptionist if she could see him.

  “What’s wrong? What’s bothering you?” He stood up behind his desk when she came in. He had left someone who needed him when the nurse told him she was waiting. She looked at her hands, stared at the floor, then lifted her eyes.

  “I think there’s something wrong. Like I’m dreaming I’m sick. It’s probably aging.”

  “Are you going through menopause?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll schedule you for a physical.”

  “I can’t do that. I’m leaving town. I just wanted to talk to you. I want you to charge me for this, William.”

  “We’ll see. Well, take off your clothes and let me have a look.” He giggled. He was a really delightful man. Skinny, freckled, blond. Anna giggled back.

  “I can’t today. I have an appointment. I just wanted to stop by.”

  “Is something specific wrong? I’ll tell you what. Let’s have lunch. Tomorrow or the day after?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll call you later.” She stood up. He came around the desk. He walked her to the door. She told the receptionist goodbye. She went home and called Philip. Then she called and canceled the lunch with the internist. It was twelve noon. She told the maid how to pack the things in the bedroom. Then she went down the elevator and out onto the street and began to walk again. No doctors, she promised herself. No checkups. No hospitals, no operating rooms, no chemicals, no nothing. Nada, de nada, de nada. Keep walking. You are not sick. There is nothing wrong with you. You are not sick. There is nothing wrong and nothing that needs fixing.

  She was on Madison Avenue. A shop window was displaying beautiful cotton dresses made in China. Thick cotton in black and beige and white. Beautiful simple designs. Anna went inside and tried on the dresses. She mailed one to her youngest niece in North Carolina. Then she bought two beautiful scarves and mailed them to the girl in Oklahoma who might also be her niece. She bought a gold barrette and tied her hair back with it. She bought a silver barrette and mailed it to her sister Helen. Spending money like a drunken sailor, she told herself. Living like there’s no tomorrow.

  Philip was alone in his office in the late afternoon. On the wall behind him were the degrees that said he was a doctor of medicine, a healer of mankind and a scientist. That means I am supposed to stay close to the ground, he decided. I am supposed to be able to tell fact from dream, my wife from Anna, my desire from my career, my ass from a hole in the ground, my dick from my head.

  I can’t do any more today. The computer is going to cost half a million dollars and Steiner is going to quit and I’m not going to operate after this year. I w
on’t do it. Half of them die anyway.

  He got up and walked into the bathroom and looked at his face in the mirror. His freckles and his handsome face.

  I let it get away, he decided. The one we wait for. She’s right. We are all crazy. Let them blow it up.

  He walked over to the desk and unlocked a drawer. He took some money from a bank envelope and stuck it in his jacket pocket. He turned off the lights and left the room. He was forty-six years old and his dick didn’t get as hard as it used to get and he didn’t sleep as well and knowing why or pretending to be resigned didn’t change a thing.

  He walked over to the East River and watched the water for a while and then he went on home to a woman he hadn’t ever loved very much and they had dinner and watched some television and went to bed.

  2

  Charlotte, North Carolina. In nineteen hundred and forty-two when Anna was born, right in the middle of the Second World War. And in nineteen hundred and forty-four, when her sister Helen came to join her, then James and Niall and Daniel and Louise. In the old Victorian house on Shannon Street, an old house painted sky blue with white gingerbread and shutters and trim, where the Hand children lived and grew and had their rooms and hid in the attic and the tower. The yard, where the playhouse was, a replica of the blue house and painted a darker, brighter blue. A playhouse with a real wood stove and a real sink with running water and rugs made out of their old dresses and sweaters, loomed by Mrs. Randall, who lived down the street and drank cough medicine to feed her madness and her art. Anna could look down at the playhouse rugs and see Helen’s old yellow playsuit or Niall’s red sweater or Daniel’s Sunday coat. Later, when she wrote books she would think of those rugs and what they were made of and what they meant.

  The yard on Shannon Street, the paved driveway with the basketball hoop above the doors to the garage, the incessant thump of Daniel’s basketball and Niall’s and James’s, which was quieter and went through the hoop without a sound.

  The neighborhood of Shannon Street, where the Hand children played Prisoner’s Base at dusk, after dinner, with the McGruder children and the Purcells and the Havertys and the Wilsons and the Cranes. With the earth growing dark, the moon and stars coming out, the planets, as Lannie McGruder called them, planets, he would say, think of that when you feel sorry for yourself. You’ll be up there when you’re dead.

  The children would run all over the neighborhood, hiding in bushes and each other’s garages, hiding in pairs, trembling with excitement, their hands touching in the spidery corners of sheds. It would grow quiet. They would begin to sneak in, one at a time, daring whoever was It. Anna was the one who could wait. She would come tearing in at the last moment, when all the rest were prisoners, screaming, Here I come, here I am. She would come tearing in on her long legs and beat everybody to the base, even Phelan Manning, when he would be staying with his grandmother. Phelan, the terrible and powerful and exciting Phelan Manning. He would take Helen with him to hide in the Purcells’ toolshed, run his hands up and down her legs. After he did it the first time she shaved her legs with a razor she stole from her father, the only thing Helen ever stole in her life. Phelan Manning, a boy you would steal for, if you want a key to his personality.

  Anna could outrun Phelan. She was eleven months older than he was and it was her territory. She lived on Shannon Street twelve months a year, year after year. Phelan only lived there in the summers and when his father was overseas or later for two years because only his grandmother could stand to have him around when he was seventeen. Anna could outrun him and when he was It, when he had captured all the other children and dragged them into the garage to sit on the prisoner boxes, when Helen and Daniel and James and Niall were captured and defeated, caught and shamed, they would sit with their hands on their knees and gaze out at the darkness falling all over their yard and all over Shannon Street. They would sit with their hands on their knees and wait for Anna to come tearing in from under the basketball hoop or from behind the garage. Here I come, she would be screaming and Ole ole in free, which meant, Everyone is free, all in free. The long hair she never let anybody cut and her long arms and legs and her famous brown safari shorts her uncle George sent her from Nigeria, screaming, Ole, ole in free. Who will save her brothers and sisters now? Chained to their jobs and their husbands and wives and ex-wives and children and habits and ideas and fears, closed and open doors and spidery corners. Who will save the Hand children now and set them free?

  3

  Quantum jumps. Anna as a child. If she ever was a child. She was so serious, so old for her age. In her dark blue uniform skirts, her starched white blouses. How the sisters praised her. Little Mother Superior they called her behind her back. Her brothers and sisters went to find her during recess, told her what had happened, asked her what to do, checked in.

  Then, when she was fourteen, she demanded to be put in a public school. Her parents caved in. She had made all A’s. She tested in the highest percentiles. She said she had to go to a public school and her parents caved in and she was lost to the Church. The sisters grieved over that. They had thought she had a calling.

  “I will always think of you with love,” she told Mother Elizabeth. She had gone to say goodbye and thank the sisters for the education they had given her. “I will always think of you and give you money when I grow up if I can.” She stood before the abbess. She was tall for her age, graceful and tall. Wearing her dark blue uniform skirt and white blouse, her hair tied back with a string. In those days it was her signature to be as plain as possible. She never enlivened her uniform with ribbons or pins or scarves. Even at fourteen she had a sense of herself as someone special, someone who could possess visions and make them manifest.

  “We had not thought to lose you so soon.” Mother Elizabeth searched the girl’s eyes.

  “I know you thought I had a calling,” Anna said. “Well, I don’t. I want to live in the world, one bigger than Charlotte. I want to go out and see everything that’s going on.”

  “I hope it pleases you.” Mother Elizabeth was smiling. Everything was very still. Outside the windows spring was cool and vital and new. A line of Bradford pear trees marched from the window to the gate, their brilliant white shook at the sky. A shaft of light fell from the window onto Mother Elizabeth’s hands. Anna picked one of them up and kissed it. She kissed the soft pale hand very gently, feeling the veins beneath her lips, then she handed it back. “You should not have the girls kneel in the gravel at the Feast of Saint Mary,” she said. “It is not a good thing to do and hurt my knees so much and Helen cut hers. I do not believe that Jesus wanted children to cut their knees and there wasn’t any gravel long ago when He lived. He put the names of flowers into the Bible and I saw a book with all the flowers from the Holy Land, real flowers pasted in it. It belonged to my aunt. You should concentrate on things like the flowers, not when He was nailed to the cross or kneeling in the gravel. The Stations of the Cross are terrible things to look at.”

  “Is this why you are leaving us?”

  “No, but it is part of it. I like it here, where things are very old and feel like part of the earth, but out there, at the public school, are other things I need to know. So I won’t get caught up in one thing. Like my mother. She does the same things every day. I wrote down what she did every day for six days. The same things every day. Like a snail going in a circle. A person should have a different life, with different things to do.”

  Then everything was quiet and when they spoke again it was in polite assurances and goodbyes and when Anna was gone Mother Elizabeth called in Sister Martha Teresa and told her of the conversation and they considered calling Mr. and Mrs. Hand and speaking with them but decided against it. The other children were still in the school. It would not do to create a problem.

  So Anna went to the public high school and was the editor of the yearbook and directed the senior play and was the class poet and the valedictorian and had six different boyfriends every year and could not love them very
much. You are made of ice, her friends told her admiringly. You never love anyone enough to get hurt.

  “I get hurt,” Anna said. They were playing Truth in the living room. Anna and her sister Helen and two friends of Anna’s from the public school, Dixie Lou and Janissa. Helen still went to the convent school, none of her friends would ever be named anything as silly as Dixie or Janissa.

  “When?” Helen asked. “When did you get hurt?”

  “I get hurt when people do stupid things I can’t understand. When Michael Wheaton came down here to see Ben and never wrote me back a letter. I got hurt over that.”

  “He’s twenty-two years old,” Helen screamed. “He’s in med school.”

  “So what?”

  “Medical students don’t write to high school girls.”

  “Well, you said I didn’t get hurt and I told the truth. Why are we playing this game?”

  “Because there isn’t anything to do in Charlotte in the summer. It’s a stupid game, you’re right.” Janissa got out a package of Pall Malls and lit one. She leaned back on her elbow. “So where are you going to college?” she asked. “Have you decided?”

  “She’s going to the University of North Carolina because that’s all Momma and Daddy can afford.” Helen was sorry it was true. She had wanted the stars for Anna. Vassar or Radcliffe or Berkeley.

  “Daddy wants us near to home,” Anna said. “He hasn’t been well lately. He doesn’t want me to go far away.”

  “She has a scholarship,” Helen said. “She could have had one anywhere she wanted.”

  “I want to go to Chapel Hill,” Anna added. “I am going to be very happy there.”

  Anna met her first husband at Chapel Hill. She was a freshman and he was the senior captain of the ROTC. He chose her to be the sweetheart of ROTC and she marched with the cadets at football games. Wearing a smart gray uniform and huge yellow and green chrysanthemum corsages, she marched up and down the field beside the captain and on the basis of that she fell in love with him and they were married the month he graduated from college. He was a cold young man with little to say that interested her but the perfection of the courtship swept her along. His name was Carter and he had an uncle in Charlotte who hired him to help run his real estate business and Anna quit college and came home to Charlotte to live. She was nineteen.