The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “That’s okay,” Anna said. “I guess you’re pretty busy around here.”

  “It’s coming along.” The woman twisted her hands together. “It’s getting better. We’re into the possible around here, knowing it’s possible.”

  “That’s good,” Anna replied. “That’s a good idea.”

  The director took them on an elevator to James’s floor. He was waiting by the elevator door, looking frightened and unsure. An inmate, a sick boy, having been forced to admit he was not a god. The Hand men were raised to believe they were gods, expected to behave as if they were, expected to get it up and keep it up every day of their lives no matter what happened or who it inconvenienced or how much alcohol they had to consume to fuel it. Now, in this generation, it was coming to a stop. Here, on this ward of the chemical dependency unit of the Baptist hospital, one of them was having to admit that he was human. It broke Anna’s heart. She was put off by James’s vulnerability, his sadness, his need. She didn’t know how to act when a man was vulnerable or in need. She watched him being kind to his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s niece and nephew. She watched him being thoughtful to his mother and she kept wanting to find a reason to run away.

  “I’m no good at this,” she said, and James looked at her and laughed and she saw the spark, the thing she recognized in men, and felt better.

  “Jesus,” she added. “It’s very heavy in here. James, this is really an ordeal, isn’t it?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s better than what I was doing. It’s hard, if that’s what you mean. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Anna went to him and held him in her arms and was comforted. After lunch James’s girl stayed to go to a group therapy session with him and Putty and Anna took the small children home.

  “Is this what they will do for recreation?” Anna asked, when they were in the car. “The youth of America accompanying each other to AA meetings and group therapy sessions. It’s the wildest thing yet, Putty. It’s bizarre.”

  “James is an alcoholic,” the little girl named Treena said from the back seat.

  “Yeah, but now he’s going to get well,” her brother added.

  “Don’t go writing about this,” Putty said. “For God’s sake, Anna, don’t go putting this in some stories.”

  8

  It was Christmas Eve. “The season adulterers hate,” Anna said. She sat upon her couch looking out on the lake. Six pots of paperwhite narcissus were on a table by the door. She looked out past the beautiful fragrant flowers to the dark blue water of the lake and the white clouds low on the horizon and the sun about to go down on her forty-second Christmas Eve. The pots of narcissus were Anna’s Christmas tree. Six pots of paperwhite narcissus and a music box in the shape of a cathedral. She wound it up for the fifth time. It played “O, Come All Ye Faithful.” Anna was wearing a bathrobe. Her hair was half-wet. She didn’t want to get dressed. She didn’t want to go out to communion with her mother as she had promised. She didn’t want to go to dinner. She didn’t want to go out to Niall’s and watch people drink. She didn’t want to do a goddamn thing but ride this goddamn Christmas out to its logical conclusion. She didn’t want anything to eat or anything to drink or any presents. She just wanted to sit there and let her hair dry in the air and listen to her music box and watch the sunset on the lake.

  “Me and Emily Dickinson,” she said out loud. “Pining over married men. What a lot of bullshit. The conscious mind is the size of a screw on the doorframe of the house of the unconscious. What did this to me?” She got up and went into the kitchen and phoned her cousin LeLe. It was five in North Carolina. It was two on the West Coast. “LeLe,” she said, when her cousin answered. “It’s me. It’s Anna. Listen, I thought of the answer to why we love them. It’s because they’re babies and women are programmed to love silly, selfish egocentric maniacs. The wilder they are the better we like them. The more they drink the more we want to take care of them. And they know it. Down deep they know we don’t want them to be good. We want them ready to kill at a moment’s notice. Civilization is too new to be useful yet. How are you?”

  “Horrible. How are you?”

  “Terrible. I told Mother I’d take her to church.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Well, I’m not going to, so she will pout.”

  “You want to go to Europe in the spring? I have to go on an assignment in March. Come along.”

  “I might. It’s that old daddy, LeLe. Those old daddies. That’s who we love.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure it is. How are your folks?”

  “Just like always. They argue all evening. Over the television set if nothing else turns up. I haven’t been home in a while. So they’re mad about that.”

  “How’s the rugby player?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “What else is going on?”

  “Nothing I can talk about on the phone.”

  “Well, Merry Christmas anyway. I’ll think about Europe. I’ll let you know.”

  “I hope you get laid before the day is over. In honor of the Immaculate Conception.”

  “Is that all we think about?”

  “Yes. How many times are you going to ask me that?”

  “As long as you give me answers I admire. The problem with me is that I’m too particular. It has to be just so, I have to be in love.”

  “Write a book about it.”

  “I’m trying to. It’s very very funny when you write it down.”

  “Write about me. I’ve had an interesting life. I don’t know why you never write about me.”

  “I will write about the rugby player. How about that?”

  “I wish you would. Well, listen, have a Merry Christmas. Go on and take her to the church, Anna. You haven’t got anything better to do.”

  “Goodbye, LeLe.”

  “Think Europe over. For the spring.”

  Anna hung up the phone and went upstairs and started getting dressed for church. I could write about the time I asked Philip to marry me, she thought. Sitting by the ocean the first time we went to Maine. God, it was cold that day. I was having a hard time getting up the courage to ask him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep house for a man. Then he said no. My God, it never occurred to me he would say no. If I loved someone I would always marry them and live with them no matter what I had to do or whom I had to hurt. Well, I have paid the price for being the way I am. Collected my karma. Body blows.

  I can’t even go through New York City on my way to Europe without suffering it. He has ruined it for me forever. On the day I left there I went down to Central Park and rode that wonderful old carousel for hours. I must have ridden it a dozen times. Riding that goddamn carousel and crying. What a spoiled-rotten brat. Wearing a cashmere sweater that cost six hundred dollars and riding that goddamn carousel and crying. Romantic love is so pitiful. I should have been a shrink. If I had it to do over again I’d be a shrink. It’s all the mother-child relationship. I’ll just go take my real mother to church while she’s still alive and worry about the clones later. People are really something. We have the ability at any moment to work and play and sing and love each other and believe each other’s craziness and take each other to goddamn Christmas Eve communion and instead we just feel sorry for ourselves. I am alive and I feel all right. At any moment that could end. I must get this goddamn makeup on my face and put on my best dress and go and be happy with them. Eat their food, drink their goddamn eggnog, love them, love them, love them.

  9

  Anna had a recurrent dream that winter. She woke before dawn one morning and got out of bed and wrote it down.

  My dream in winter. I dreamed last night that I was back in New Orleans with a beautiful strong young lover. He wore a plaid shirt and a knit tie. He wore beautiful dark brown slacks and shoes of the finest leather. He was laughing and we rode the streetcar down to the Katz and Bestoff drugstore past Tulane, across the street from the Catholic nunnery and near the Methodist church where th
e preacher is from China and the signs are in Chinese and the people all look happy going in. I met one of the nuns once, at a pottery class. She wanted to build a kiln for the other sisters. I might have been a nun but I loved men too much.

  My dream. In my dream the beautiful young man and I are leaning down off the streetcar. We get off at the corner. The streets are full of happy people, all bundled up in the sort of gorgeous winter clothes people wear in New York City. It must have been close to Mardi Gras. We swung our bodies down from the streetcar and walked across the street. We met my ex-husband there. He asked us to help him search for the lost children. They are Helen’s children, all grown up and taking dope and drinking and being angry, lost and dying of ambitions they have no idea how to fulfill. No idea where to begin in the face of so much madness.

  My ex-husband had a scroll from a lawyer’s office. It had come out of the computer where they keep tabs on all of us. Helen’s children get a rating of 10 to 15 percent out of a possible one hundred, he said. I looked around me. I was stunned by the rudeness of him saying that, spoiling all our pleasure in the day. Don’t worry about it, the young man said. Let’s go find them. Let’s make them better than they are. I didn’t ask how. I just followed him across the street and through the crowd of college girls gathered in front of the Chinese Methodist church and we began to walk toward the park. We were holding hands and my ex-husband was with us now and I had forgiven him. He was only trying to help.

  “Help us find our children,” we kept saying. “We are looking for a girl in a green sweatshirt. We are looking for a boy in running shoes. We are looking for a fat little girl named Stacy. Have you seen DeDe? Have you seen James or Stacy or DeDe? If you could give us a minute of your time.”

  “We can pay you money,” Anna’s husband kept saying. “Would you be willing to take a check?”

  Anna looked up from what she had written. Across the lake the tops of the houses were powdered with snow. The coldest day of the year. She took the papers from the typewriter and put them on the pile of things she didn’t know what to do with yet. Then she went into her bedroom and dressed in warm slacks and a dark red sweater and boots and gloves and a hat and walked out into the beautiful cold morning. I have this day, she said to herself. Who knows how many more. Drink to the bird, the poet said. Well, Mr. Flood, since you insist, I will. She tramped down the outside stairs making bootprints on the rungs and turned her face up to the still falling snow. She tramped across the parking lot and started up the hill. As she passed the gates to the development she began to drag her feet, making tracks as she had done when she was a child. Then she walked to the store and bought a paper carton of chocolate milk and a package of small white sugar-covered doughnuts and ate that lovely stuff for her breakfast.

  She spent that afternoon writing letters. She wrote to Olivia and then she wrote to Adam.

  Dear Adam,

  The winter is long, and I miss you. Maybe I made all the wrong choices last year but remember that night we swore never to regret a thing? Maybe I swore and you did not. Your letter made me sad.

  Later: Daddy is selling me my inheritance. Is that wild? He is making me buy these goddamn gold coins from him, these Krugerrands and Canadian Gold Leaf things. This is true. This is not some southern story in a book. He nags me and nags me and nags me and gives me junk to read about the collapse of the financial structure of the world and then he starts over again in this very reasonable voice about the crash of 1929 and the stock market and he is so convincing. One of Daniel’s business associates said he was the single most convincing human being he had ever met in his life. Anyway, he just wore me down and finally I said, well, then sell me some. If I have to have some goddamn gold coins that much, you get them for me. I thought he would give me some, of course. But instead we have instigated this thing where he sells me these coins that eventually would belong to me anyway. He comes and gets me in the early morning and we drive by the back roads in his old diesel Mercedes out to the county to this bank he likes out there, a little country bank, and we wait in the parking area until the bank opens. Then we go in and get the coins out of a safe deposit box. They are wrapped up in thick butcher’s paper with rubber bands around them. We unwrap them and count them several times. However many he is selling me on any given day. Then we wrap them back up and put the rubber bands back around them. This takes dozens of rubber bands. Then we put them in small white cardboard boxes and mark them with the date and the amount. 18 Krugerrands, 15 Canadian Gold Leaf. Dad to Anna, September 13, 1985. Or some such label. He writes it out very carefully in his beautiful old script. His hands are so beautiful and freckled and strong. I want to kiss his hands when I look at them. I love him so much and can never tell him so. I think he knows it now. It is very cozy going with him to get the coins. Anyway, then we put more rubber bands around the boxes and put the boxes in his briefcase and then we walk out of the bank nodding to people he knows. There goes old Mr. Hand with some of his coins, I guess they are saying. It scares me to death that someone will try to rob him. They did steal a safe full of the damn things several years ago. Out of his office, Daniel told me about it. Daddy never would tell anyone how much he lost. Of course they weren’t insured. Anyway, we get into the old white diesel car and drive the back roads through the county back into Charlotte. I’m supposed to call the insurance people and insure them but I never do. I think I’ll dig a hole and put them in the ground. It is the funniest thing I have ever done in my life and takes up a lot of time. It was right for me to come home at this time. I needed to ride in his old white car and let him tell me what to do.

  I hope your studies are going well. Everything is always hard to do. I love you, but not the way you want me to. Not enough. And I am too old to be your wife.

  Love, Anna

  She sealed the letter in an envelope and addressed it and then addressed the one to Olivia and pulled on her old gray jacket and walked down to the corner to mail the letters in a box with a late pickup. She saw the Episcopal bishop of North Carolina riding by in a Volvo station wagon talking on a car phone as he drove and she took that for a sign that all was reasonably well with the world on this particular winter day.

  10

  When Olivia got home from school from school the following Friday, the letter from Anna was waiting for her, propped up on the table with the salt and pepper shakers. Also, a package from a bookstore in Charlotte. She read the envelope a dozen times before she opened it. My aunt Anna loves me, she was thinking. Someday she’ll call me up and take me on a trip with her, one of her trips to give a speech. I wish she could have heard my debate speech in Tulsa. She would have loved hearing it. If she got sick I could go on for her. This is Ms. Hand’s niece, Olivia, they will say. She travels with her aunt and if her aunt gets a cold or is very tired she will read to you instead. Yes, she is named for the actress Olivia de Havilland, but there is no relation. No, she cannot be in a movie at this time as she is in college in Austin getting her degrees in law and aviation. Thank you. She is getting her degree in anthropology. She is studying to be a writer, she is a writer.

  Carrying the letter and the package Olivia went through her bedroom and out onto the small unused patio. It was cold on the patio but protected by the walls of the house and Olivia often sat out there to read, even on cold days. She kicked the gathered leaves into a corner and pulled an old dilapidated yard chair around to face the sun. She dusted off the chair, then lowered herself into it, as though she were already in the fabulous drawing rooms of the places she would travel to with Anna.

  Well, go on and open the letter, she told herself. It will be good news. All her letters are good. She has seen me and she likes me. She likes me and she writes to me and sends me presents. She said she wanted to borrow life from me. Well, she can have it. I have plenty of it if she needs it.

  The letter was still unread. I can hold it to the count of one hundred without opening it, Olivia decided. But why should I? The sun came out from behind a cloud.
It cast the shadows of the walnut trees across the yard and onto the patio and the walls of the house. Olivia took that for a sign and opened Anna’s letter.

  Dear Olivia,

  I am so proud of you. The best debater in the whole state of Oklahoma. Tomorrow, the world. I wish I was there to tell you how proud I am of you. Write me more about the play. What play? What part? I used to act when I was young but I wasn’t much good at it. I always wanted to rewrite my lines.

  Listen, Olivia, please don’t be bothered by your father, or by not coming here to visit. He isn’t strong enough to love you and besides, this goddamn family is more trouble than it’s worth.

  None of it has anything to do with you and the wonderful life you are creating for yourself. Don’t worry about college yet. You are going to have scholarships everywhere. Love and kisses from your very very very proud,

  Aunt Anna

  I am sending a book you might like to read.

  Olivia unwrapped the package. It was a book called West with the Night. A photograph of a woman in an aviator’s helmet was on the cover. Olivia caressed the book with both hands. The sun beat down on the patio and the chair. She opened the book and began to read. When her grandmother called her to dinner an hour later, she was still reading.

  “Your dinner is ready. You must come in now.” Her grandmother stood in the doorway, her dark eyes watching the child as if she were the sun itself.

  “This book is by a woman who flew an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean all by herself. A long time ago before they even had radios.”

  “You could do it,” the old woman answered. “If they showed you how.”

  “I could. I know I could.”

  “You will fly like an eagle. But not if you freeze to death. And not unless you fill your belly when it calls to you.”