The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I know how to read,” she told her friends. “I’ll be happy learning things my own way.” The newlyweds moved into a duplex apartment six blocks from Anna’s parents and the next year Helen Hand married Spencer Abadie and moved half a block down the street.

  Anna was pregnant at Helen’s wedding. She was radiant with it. Never before or after in her life was Anna as beautiful as the months she carried that little boy. She carried him for six and a half months and lost him in a car on the way to the hospital emergency room.

  She went crazy. She was twenty years old and she was disconsolate. She thought she had done something wrong. She lay in bed and went over every step she had taken since the moment she learned she was pregnant, every cigarette she had smoked, every potato chip she had eaten, every walk she had taken, every car ride, each time she and Carter had made love. The priest started coming around. Anna hadn’t been to church in two years. Now she went every day. Also, she began seeing an old Freudian named Wilton who gave her bottles of the new tranquilizers, lithium and Valium, and when she complained that they made her sleepy he gave her bottles of Dexedrine and then phenobarbital to make her sleep off the Dexedrine.

  Helen gave birth to her first child a year later, a little girl named DeDe. That consoled Anna somehow. She quit the Freudian and stopped taking the pills and began to see her sister Helen. She would get up every morning and send her husband off to work and then go over to Helen’s house and hold the baby.

  Then Anna got pregnant again and again and again and again and again. Bloody miscarriages each time, the last two in bed. In the meantime Helen gave birth to Kenny and Winifred and Lynley.

  And all those years the thought of becoming a writer never entered Anna’s head. She had written poetry all her life and she wrote it now, poems she gave to other people and poems she kept for herself. But she never thought of giving her life away to words. Anna wanted to have a baby and keep it alive. There were six miscarriages during those years, although Helen always said it was seven and Mrs. Hand, Senior, thought it was five.

  There was a divorce finally and Anna moved back into her parents’ house and had her fallopian tubes tied so no more babies could be conceived to die. And then she met a poet and really fell in love and married him and when he died in a car wreck she pulled an old Royal portable typewriter out of a closet and set it up on a wooden card table in a sewing room and began to write. And all those years, from the time she was a small child until her death, she thought of herself as a fortunate person with a charmed life, blessed and indulged, lucky to have lived in a good place in the best of times. “If I looked out my window in the spring I saw twenty pear trees in full bloom and in the fall oaks and maples and in the winter the architecture of a dozen different species of trees,” she told the married redhaired baby doctor once and many years afterwards he drove alone down the street where she had grown up and lived and was amazed at how ugly and ordinary it all seemed.

  4

  “You aren’t immortal, Anna,” the married red-haired baby doctor told her, when he found out she hadn’t seen a doctor or had a checkup in years.

  “I don’t know. I might be. No one in our family dies of anything but strokes. Strokes in their nineties. I think you will your death, anyway. When you’re ready. Don’t talk about it.” She swung her long hair back from her shoulders and held a glass of wine up to the light. “The observing system,” she added. “Changes everything. Actualizes an aspect. Oh, well, forget that. You want to see a play if there’s time?”

  “The Royal Shakespearean Company is doing Lear. We could see that if there are tickets. Shall I call?”

  There had been tickets and they had gone together to the play and sat very close holding hands until their palms were sweaty and then continuing to hold hands because neither of them wanted to be the one to pull away, and afterwards Anna had been quiet, thinking of her father. “I am like Cordelia,” she said. “In my family I’m the one that tells the truth. My father secretly likes it, I think. I’m so far from all of them now. It’s a shame.” He took her home and stayed the whole night and was there in the morning and when he left the sun was barely up in New York City and the day was ruined for work.

  That afternoon she went to see her old psychiatrist, to tell him goodbye before she left the city.

  “I will be closer to them there,” she told him. “To Helen and James and Niall and Daniel and Momma and Daddy. The mountain house is only eighty miles from Charlotte. And there’s something else, a girl in Oklahoma I have to do something about. A child that might belong to Daniel. Well, that’s a long story. You don’t have time for that now.”

  “Of course I do. Tell it to me.”

  “Daniel married an Indian girl when he was pretending to be a hippie. He was only nineteen or twenty. I can’t remember. Anyway, he was out in California at a hippie commune and he married a Cherokee Indian and brought her home to Charlotte but she only stayed a few weeks. She ran away because Momma and Daddy were snotty to her. Everyone was. Even I was, I think. I can’t remember. Everything was so confused back then. Anyway, LeLe, my cousin on the West Coast I’ve told you about, LeLe and I have reason to believe the girl died having Daniel’s child and her sister raised it. The child has written to me. She’s fifteen years old. I have a picture of her. She looks like us. I need to do something about this soon.” Anna was curled up on the psychiatrist’s sofa. She had forgotten he was there. She was thinking of the letter she had received the week before and Daniel’s silence and disbelief.

  “Anna.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Okay. Well, anyway, it’s interesting and will give me something to think about in the mountains. I want to go and see her. I want to take Daniel and go and see if she’s ours.”

  “I think that might be your brother’s decision.”

  “I know. You’re right. It’s just that she wrote to me first. Because of the books. Her English teacher assigned her one of my stories and she started wondering about the name. They called her by our name. Why I don’t know since they never told us about her, if she’s ours.”

  “I think you better leave it to your brother.”

  “I know. I can’t stop mothering them. I think they’re mine.”

  “Why don’t you write about them instead?”

  “I always am. What else does a writer know? The day Helen was bit by a dog. The night Daniel was burned, how hard we all worked to keep Niall from failing, how sick Momma was after Louise, the kitchen and the huge stove Daddy had put in and how we all cooked all the time. Funny that I never cook anymore. Never make a sauce or a soufflé.”

  “You were your mother’s right hand. You told me that one day. Do you remember saying that?”

  “I used to rub her back while we waited for the babies to come. We would listen to Beethoven as the last days went by. The Sixth Symphony. Do you know, to this day, if I hear that music I want to rush down to a hospital and look at the newborns.”

  “Get back to work as soon as you can, Anna. You know where the satisfaction is. You’ve told me.”

  “I know. Well, it will be okay for me in the mountains. This didn’t work out for me up here. Taxicabs and stretch limos and television people, the married man. It was not a good idea.”

  “I’ll miss talking to you.” He stood up, the hour was almost over.

  “I will miss you too.” She sat up, rearranged her clothes, thought she might kiss him goodbye, touch him before she went away. She smiled at the thought and liked him better and looked up and they laughed at the things that had passed between them and the things that had not and Anna gathered up her coat and pocketbook and took her leave.

  Anna spent the next year in the Carolina mountains, in a house she had lived in with the poet. And did something she had never done. She had two lovers at the same time. The redhaired married baby doctor in New York City. He was the one she yearned for, dreamed about, tried not to think of, kept no pictures of, letters fr
om, souvenirs of any kind. She talked to her close women friends about him as though he were a character in a movie or a play. She thought it was very very funny that she had fallen into this trap. Oh, it was hilarious, wasn’t it? And her compadres and companions would agree, it was a riot.

  The other man was young. Violent and proud, brilliant and talented and poor. He was a carpenter and built houses in the mountains where she lived. When she called him he came, driving up in his baby blue pickup truck and swinging down out of the cab as if he owned the world. He would walk into her house and take her straight to bed. “You been doing any yoga?” he would say.

  “Yes,” she might answer.

  “Let me see,” and he would pull her to him and run his hands down the fine clean muscles of her back and legs. He never asked if she had other men. He never asked her where she was when she wasn’t with him. They went out to eat and killed time and made love and talked about themselves. He wanted to go back to school and get an engineering degree but he didn’t know where to begin. He wanted to be older and marry Anna and fuck her all night every night but he only told her that he loved to fuck her. “You always make me hard,” he said. “You make my dick so goddamn hard.”

  She was fascinated by the young man, whose name was Adam Halliday. He had captured her imagination from the start. She would lie in his arms after making love and wonder why she didn’t marry him after all, take him on, take care of him, be the mother he had never had. Then she would remember herself walking in the snow in New York City with the redhaired married man and know the heart can never be sounded. Looking for love in all the wrong places. No, not looking. Finding. Anna’s problem was finding. Love found her out and told her there are things we need that we cannot have.

  Strange lonely creatures that we are. Besides, the young man would remain young and Anna would grow old and a young woman would come along and who would set herself up for such a blow.

  She had left New York City and returned to the mountains in the late fall. The sugar maples had done their golden dance and then their red one. Winter came in a moment. There was deep snow and sleds and Adam built huge fires in her fireplace and they slept on futons before the fire and ate thick country stews and she helped him fill out the applications to Auburn and Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt. In April he received a scholarship and they got drunk for three days to celebrate. In May he left for Nashville for summer school. It did not make Anna sad to lose him. She had lost her desire to possess anything. He asked her to go with him, to be his wife or mistress or anything she liked but she would not go. She kissed him goodbye and sent him off to school and began to make plans to close up her mountain house and go home to Charlotte, North Carolina, to make her peace with her family.

  “I’m coming home.” She called her mother and told her to find her a place to live.

  “There are some wonderful new apartments not far

  from us. On a lake. You can live with us and have an office there.”

  “I can’t live with you, Momma.” “Why not?”

  “I might want to sleep with someone.”

  “Oh, Anna, don’t say that.”

  “Line up a realtor. I’ll be there in the fall.”

  “Your father will be so pleased.”

  “Tell him to get out his maps. I want to know everything he knows about rivers. I want to write about all the rivers of our state.”

  5

  There was one last book to write. And the summer to be lived through. She worked on the book in a desultory manner, writing odd disjointed pieces at strange times of the day, dating them like journal entries, although they had nothing to do with the days on which they were written. They were pieces of the past, a history of obsessions, endowments, angelizings, as Phelan Manning once called falling in love. But Anna wasn’t thinking about the men out of her past. She was thinking about the married redhaired baby doctor. She woke up thinking about him and she went to sleep thinking about him and she dreamed of him. How strange desire is, Anna thought. If you would ask me why I needed him I would reply, So I could look at the freckles on his hands. Reckless reckless reckless. Stop. Soon I will leave and go home to Charlotte and this will dissipate and go away. I have to learn to control my mind. No. Examine it, that’s all you get, Anna. All you get to do is watch. Then watch.

  She made a list of the things she was thinking about:

  1. The married redhaired baby doctor.

  2. The girl in Oklahoma.

  3. The box of coins Phelan and I buried at Summerwood for a joke.

  4. Why the skin keeps peeling off my fingers when I type. Key to relationship between physical and mental. Be sure to call Collis Garen at the university and tell him about it.

  5. Write to Adam. Call Adam. Introduce Adam to woman he can breed with. Stop wanting to control Adam or anyone.

  She was trying to think of number six when the phone rang. It was Philip calling from Washington.

  “I had to come down here for a consultation. It’s an hour’s flight to Asheville. Can I come there tomorrow?” “No. It wouldn’t do any good. It makes things worse.” “We wouldn’t have to make love. We could talk. I want to see you, Anna. I’m lonely for you and I can’t sleep and I’m worried.” “Then divorce your wife.” “Oh, Anna.”

  “Goodbye.” She hung up the phone and took it off the wall jack and walked outside and put it in the firewood shed. “The very heart of loss. The very heart of loss.”

  The next day was Thursday. A glorious spring day. Small fledgling birds and chipmunks, rabbits and squirrels, honeysuckle, all the flowers of late spring. Anna walked out across the stone porch and down the stone stairs Adam had built for her and down across the lawn where rabbits watched her without moving and on down past the swing and the rose trellis to the garden Adam had planted the summer he stayed with her. She stopped by the garden thinking of him. How good to have fucked a man who could always make her come. Make me come just walking into a room, she thought, lapsing into the language of the black women who had nursed her when she was young, the soft laughing language of the Gullah natives. Make me come just thinking about it, she decided. Adam or the land. Wide fields and strong black faces, mornings, evenings, afternoons, the river, days with no time, body all hot and starched dresses wilting on my fat little waist, pot liquor and cornbread and black-eyed peas, butter melting in my hands. Bruden and Lannie and William Claire. I’ve got to go and see them when I get home. See how they’re doing, if they need anything, where their children go to school.

  Make me come. I never said that to the married man. Never had to. It was all so hurried and desperate and intense. Anna knelt in the damp moist soil. She picked rosemary and thyme and mint. She picked six violets and holding the little bouquet she walked back to her house and picked up the phone and called the number he had given her in Washington.

  “Please come to see me. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’ll be there this afternoon.”

  “Let’s be happy. Can we be happy?”

  “We can try.”

  He came on a plane to Asheville and she drove him to her house. A house of wood and stone and glass, furnished haphazardly with bits and pieces of all the lives Anna had led. A handmade rug of many jewel-like blues and greens. Wicker chairs from a beach house. Philip dropped his bag on the rug and turned to her, waiting to see what she would tell him next. She had already told him that the culture was dead, that no one in the United States could read, that there were no heroes, that she had stopped smoking, that her lost niece was writing to her, that Bill Bradley would make a good president, that Knight-Ridder had bought the Charlotte newspaper, that fission releases the energy that gives matter its form, that she was tired of the West Coast and wasn’t going there anymore. That she was moving home to write a memoir.

  “I love thee,” she said now.

  “I love thee,” he answered and they went into the bedroom and lay down upon the bed and cu
ddled up with their clothes on. “You smell so wonderful,” she said. “Like yourself and no other. Lewis Thomas says we might do the whole thing by smell and not know it. Pheromones. But you know all that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Make love to me as though you would never have to leave. I want it to be different and not frantic and hurried and sad.”

  “It is frantic and hurried and sad. I’ve been waiting to fuck you for three days.”

  “Then fuck me.” She took off her blouse and then her brassiere and then her slacks and underpants and she tilted her head to one side and waited for him to get in bed. He walked over to her bookshelf and took down a book and held it in his hands. Then he replaced it on the shelf. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Come to bed. It will come to you.”

  She dreamed about the lake where she had spent weekends with Adam. It was October in the dream. The leaves were gold and red and burgundy and the wind caught them and whirled them around and Anna thought they looked like coins. Treasure spread out on the floor of the woods.

  “We will be here always,” Adam said. “Now we never have to leave.”

  “But, the married man is here. He’s in my house. I have to cook breakfast for him.”