Читать книгу The Annie Year - Stephanie Wilbur Ash - Страница 11

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It was the next night that I met the new vocational agriculture teacher. He was standing at the east entrance to the high school auditorium under a big ANNIE sign someone had cut from cardboard and glued some glitter to.

When I add up the total sum of that year, it is this particular line item that always gets me: it had to be an Annie year.

You see, if there is a talented tall girl at the high school, they do Hello, Dolly! If there is a girl who is unusually ugly but funny enough to pull off Snoopy, they do You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. If a lot of boys get suspended from football early in the season for drinking and one of the star players—the quarterback or the lead tackle or whoever—can convince the rest of the team into singing in public, they do Guys and Dolls.

They don’t do Annie that often because Annie requires a certain type of extraordinary talent. There must be a girl, usually a small one, with both spunky charm and believable innocence. That just doesn’t happen in this town.

Probably there are Annies with spunky-yet-innocent dispositions on every busy street corner in your town. Here, you might get a believable innocence, and it may even come paired with a good strong church voice, but the spunky charm will have been beaten out of that girl before her tenth birthday, as was the case with Dee Dee Scarsdale, our Annie that year, and she had even been given the privilege of years of music lessons because her mother is the town’s band teacher.

There are several children with only spunky charm here, though. They act like they invented spunky charm, throwing rocks at the Country Kitchen sign and then laughing obnoxiously while they toss their hair and their body parts around. They lack even a hint of the believable innocence Annie is supposed to have. The children in this town are like that woman sitting on the swing on Hee Haw, Kenny Rogers’s wife, pretending to be a virgin but with her breasts popping out of a tightly wound corset and the entire audience in on the joke.

I was looking for my husband, Gerald, and so I didn’t notice the Vo-Ag teacher at first. I noticed Elmer Griggs, who owns the golf course, pretending to swing a golf club in the corner for Dave Oppegaard, the head volunteer fireman who also manages the grain elevator. They waved when they saw me. I waved back. Cindy from Prairie Lanes was standing behind the snack table, and she waved when she saw me, and then she pointed me out to her best friend, Helen Sweeter, who also waved. I waved back. Howie Claus, the Methodist minister, was complaining to Clive Liestman, one of John Mueller’s farmhands, about who knows what, but Clive was looking at me instead of Howie. Mueller, who is my best client, walked out of the bathroom and then Clive pointed at me and soon all three of them were looking at me.

I decided to keep my coat on.

Doc and Huff held up the west wall by the famous picture of Gerald throwing the state-winning shot put in high school, back when he fit into tiny yellow shorts. Huff leaned toward Doc and whispered something to him. I could see Huff’s puffy lips flapping, how he bounced from one bowed leg to another. Doc listened with his spindly tobacco arms crossed, staring me down.

Then Dieter Bierbrauer, the high school principal, waved me over. He was standing with the new Vo-Ag teacher under the ANNIE sign.

And there he was: ponytail, bright red work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, tight faded jeans, man clogs, and that belt.

Dieter said, “This is the new Vo-Ag teacher and Future Farmers of America adviser,” and said his name too, “Kenny Tischer,” and then, “Tandy is a great lover of the theater.”

The Vo-Ag teacher said, “Is that right?” and smiled widely. His teeth were very white, like in a commercial for toothpaste. “Do you love all the arts, or just the theater?”

“I give a hundred dollars every year to the Theater Boosters,” I said.

Dieter nodded so fast his white-blond combover flapped.

The Vo-Ag teacher said, “Principal Bierbrauer here was asking me about my belt... Tandy.”

He said my name slowly, in what you might call a deliberate way. It sounded like he thought my name was special, like it was full of potential.

No one had ever said my name like that before.

“It is an unusual belt,” Dieter said. He was looking at the Vo-Ag teacher’s crotch.

Perhaps this is okay with people like you, for a man to look at another man’s crotch, but this was brand new to me. Dieter actually bent down to get a closer look. And then, I don’t know why—I can’t explain it except to say this is the kind of effect the Vo-Ag teacher had on people, because I don’t think I could have helped myself, or maybe I was just a weak person then (I’m stronger now)—but I bent down to get a closer look.

There I was, thirty seconds into meeting him, bending toward his crotch.

I must say, though, that it was an unusual belt. It was made of cloth, not leather, and it had red, black, and green patterns and a row of tiny shells stitched along one edge. There was no buckle and no holes on the ends of the belt. Each end was stopped up with a tiny fringe, and the Vo-Ag teacher had simply tied these fringed ends together in a knot above his zipper so the ends waved out like some sort of cotton butterfly.

Maybe you see these kinds of belts all the time where you live. I do not.

I said that too. “I have never seen a belt like that before,” I said.

I wanted to say, Why are you here? Why would a person like you with a belt like this and a ponytail like that and man clogs ever come to a place like this? But I didn’t.

The Vo-Ag teacher squinted at me. He said, “I got it while I was serving in the Peace Corps in the country of Benin, in Africa. For the Yoruba people there, shells were once currency and art medium. The Yoruba believe art is inseperable from life.”

Dieter and I nodded fast and hard like pecking chickens. Dieter’s combover flapped like a flag.

The Vo-Ag teacher said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

A stranger who tells you how beautiful his own belt is?

I nodded in the direction of his clogs. They were wool. His feet would get very wet this winter, I thought. He should get himself a good pair of boots if he’s going to stick around. I had never heard of the Yoruba. I had never even met a person from Africa. I had only been to Des Moines a couple of times.

Dieter sucked in a big breath, put his big white hands on his thick waist, looked over to somewhere else and then walked there.

“So, what do you do... Tandy?” The Vo-Ag teacher did that thing with my name again, and that time I heard what was under it. I’m not such a dull tack.

It was a mocking thing.

“I’m a CPA... Kenny,” I said, and I looked him right in the eye.

He raised his eyebrows nearly to his hairline, like he was overly surprised, like he was in some sort of play himself right then. He chuckled. He said, “Is that right?”

I said, “That’s right.”

He said, “Well, I’m terrible with money.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I guess we both know what’s right then.”

He was exhausting. Certainly you can see that!

“It must be fascinating to be a CPA in this town,” he said. “You must know the money secrets of everyone sitting in this auditorium.”

One of the big cafeteria doors swung open but it was not my husband, Gerald, just Jenny Finch, the checkout girl at Hy-Vee with the big boobs.

The Vo-Ag teacher leaned toward me, and I could feel a tickle in my ear from his whisper, “So who’s loaded around here? Bierbrauer? That farmer, Mueller? That crazy lawyer, Huff?”

I think that fight-or-flight thing they talk about on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom is true because I almost hit him, but the cafeteria door swung open again and Gerald came barreling in like a semi.

Gerald could be good like that.

I left that Vo-Ag teacher standing alone, doing a little tap dance in his clogs like some sort of hippie elf.

Gerald was too fat to fit in his seat. It used to be that his body fit into that seat the same way ice cream folds over a cone poured by a poorly trained Dairy Queen girl. But not last year, not that Annie year. I put my hands on his shoulders and I pushed down as hard as I could but that just made everyone in the auditorium laugh.

“Did these chairs get smaller?!” Gerald said extra loud, for everyone’s benefit. Huff piped up from two rows back—“Put him on the stage!”—and of course Dieter did. And of course Gerald walked right up to it and slowly backed himself into it like his ass was a dump truck. And of course everyone cheered him on.

There isn’t a single person in this town who did not like Gerald, except perhaps the high school students who rode his school bus that year.

I sat in my usual seat with quiet and normal-sized Bud Sweitzer on my right and Gerald’s empty seat on my left. Mueller, who is indeed loaded with money, sat silent behind me. Then the lights faded and Gerald’s face dissolved and Mrs. Scarsdale, the band teacher and mother of last year’s Annie, counted down 1, 2, 3, 4, and the high school band blew the first notes of the first song like a trickle, all wobbly, and then somewhere in the dark the voice of Mrs. Scarsdale’s ninth-grade daughter, Dee Dee Scarsdale, oozing fake innocence, sang out: Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby—

I pinched the skin on my right wrist hard. The stage lights came up, and I thought for a moment that maybe having Gerald onstage would actually be better because I wouldn’t have to look at the production itself. But I saw that though Gerald’s hands were still latched around his gut, his eyes were closed, and his head had already sunk into his chins.

I closed my eyes too. I tried not to look at our Annie.

And then a bump and a stumble and then hands on my knees and then hands around my shoulders, and I opened my eyes and just above my nose was the colorful cotton butterfly of the Vo-Ag teacher’s belt.

Just like that we were together.

He never asked.

He was just there.

Won’t you please come get your baby, maybe? she sang.

He smelled like fresh-mowed sage in a green and wet ditch, like a spice I knew from the kitchen of a long-lost relative, like early spring even though it was the beginning of winter.

From what had always been Gerald’s seat, the Vo-Ag teacher watched the stage as if it were a miracle and not a bunch of awkward small-town teenagers trying to live up to their makeup. His eyes got big and round, like eggs; his mouth got open, like a pancake—his face looked like a brand-new breakfast. And when, at intermission, he turned toward me, his eyes were wet.

I’d seen grown men cry, certainly, but only at funerals, and even then I’d seen only the shaking of grown men’s backs, which can look just like laughing if you don’t think about it too hard. But something about his wet eyes, the way he looked right at me with them, as if he had no reason to be ashamed. It dropped my bottom out.

I watched the whole show. Everything. I watched twelve little girls dance around in dingy underwear. I watched the Hendersons’ family dog, playing the part of Sandy, run up the aisle next to me to sniff the crotch of Karen Wilson, the speech pathologist at the hospital. I watched Warbucks’s staff dance around Annie wringing their hands, singing, We’ve never had a little girl! We’ve never had a little girl! I watched Punjab karate-chop a Bolshevik, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt get their hearts melted by Annie’s sunny optimism—“There’s a song I used to sing in the orphanage...” she says. “Think of the children!” Eleanor says. I watched Annie, who was really Dee Dee Scarsdale with her good strong church voice trying hard to show spunk, dream of her real folks. I watched her reject Daddy Warbucks in favor of the fake family, which promised to be a real family, but was really just a couple of criminals looking to make some money off her spunky, charming little heart.

I had never actually watched a show. This time, I watched it all. And for that one moment I believed that a little orphan girl could find promise in the sun.

Then Hope ruined it. The daughter of my estranged best friend ruined it. It was a tragic surprise, I suppose, and also not. It was the kind of inevitable sadness I had come to expect but kept forgetting to expect, the kind of sadness that continues to snap me back to the true order of things in my life.

Toward the end of the show—right before Annie and Daddy Warbucks have their big finale, right where she should not have been—she staggered onto the stage. She was in the long red nightgown that indicated her role as Ms. Hannigan, the drunken orphanage headmistress. It was split in the chest to nearly her belly button. She is tiny, like her mother, Barb. Her stomach was flat, pulled back to nearly her spine so that she was like a saltine cracker from the side. But all that exposed skin made her look larger. So did the way she swaggered around as the drunken orphanage tyrant Ms. Hannigan. She weaved in and out of that scene that wasn’t hers with an empty wine bottle. “Did I hear singing in here?” she slurred. It was a line from way back in Act I. She stumbled, and everyone leaned back, like in those old pictures of audiences wearing 3-D glasses in a movie theater when the monster jumps out for the first time.

Everyone but him, of course. The Vo-Ag teacher leaned as forward as he could. He buried his hands in the long brown hair of Andrea Bodinski sitting in the seat in front of him.

Hope swaggered toward Annie, who just stood there, frozen, and with one wide arc of her skinny arm slapped that Annie across the face.

From the side of the stage, we all saw Mr. Henderson step forward and make a slicing motion across his neck. He mouthed, That’s enough. Hope hoisted that wine bottle into the air and threw it.

It hit him square between the eyes.

Everyone gasped, including me.

Hope bent over into a big belly laugh as all the lights went out.

Then he was laughing too, the only other one in the auditorium. The two of them were laughing while the rest of us sat in the dark. I will never forget that.

Behind me Mueller kicked my chair. Next to me, the Vo-Ag teacher’s hot breath was in my ear, saying, “Who is that?” He grabbed my arm and put his forehead on my shoulder. His ponytail swished around and grazed my neck. He laughed and laughed, and whispered into my ear, “What kind of a place is this?” while the rest of them, all of them, said, “Who’s that laughing? Who’s that laughing?” with Huff, loudest of all, shouting: “I SEE TANDY CAIDE HAS A NEW FRIEND.”