Annie on My Mind

Chapter seven

"I'd tear this up," I said
finally, "if it weren't for the fact that it's the first letter you've
ever written me, and so I want to keep it."

"Oh, Liza!" she said softly, not moving. "Are you sure?" I felt my face
getting hot and my heart speeding up again. Annie's eyes were so intent
on mine, it was as if we were standing with no distance between us but
there was the whole room. I think I nodded, and I know I held out my
hand. I felt about three years old. She took my hand, and then she
touched my face. "I still don't want to rush you," she said softly.
"I--it scares me, too, Liza. I--I just recognize it more, maybe."

"Right now I just want to feel you close to me," I said, or something
like it, and in a few minutes we were lying down on Annie's bed, holding
each other and sometimes kissing, but not really touching. Mostly just
being happy. Still scared, though, too.

9

That winter, all Annie had
to do was walk into a room or appear at a bus stop or a corner where we
were meeting and I didn't even have to think about smiling; I could feel
my face smiling all on its own. We saw each other every afternoon that we
could, and on weekends, and called each other just about every night,
and even that didn't seem enough; sometimes we even arranged to call
each other from pay phones at lunchtime. It was a good thing I'd never
had much trouble with schoolwork, because I floated through classes,
writing letters to Annie or daydreaming. The fund-raising campaign went
on around me without my paying much attention to it. I did pledge some
money; I listened to Sally and Walt make speeches; I even helped them
collect pledges from some of the other kids--but I was never really
there, because Annie filled my mind. Songs I heard on the radio suddenly
seemed to fit Annie and me; poems I read seemed written especially for
we began sending each other poems that we liked. I would have gone broke
buying Annie plants if I hadn't known how much it bothered her that I
often had money and she usually didn't. We kept finding new things about
New York to show
each other; it was as if we were both seeing the city for the first
time. One afternoon I suddenly noticed, and then showed Annie, how the
sunlight dripped over the ugly face of her building, softening it and
making it glow almost as if there were a mysterious light source hidden
inside its drab walls. And Annie showed me how ailanthus trees grow
under subway and sewer gratings, stretching toward the sun, making
shelter in the summer, she said, laughing, for the small dragons that
live under the streets. Much of that winter was--magical is the only
word again--and a big part of that magic was that no matter how much of
ourselves we found to give each other, there was always more we wanted
to give.

One Saturday in early December we got our parents to
agree to let us go out to dinner together.

"Why shouldn't we?" Annie had
said to me--it was her idea. "People go out for dinner on dates and
stuff, don't they?" She grinned. and said formally, "Liza Winthrop, I'd
like to make a date with you for dinner. I know this great Italian
restaurant ..."

It was a great Italian restaurant. It was in the West
lage, and tiny, with no more than ten or twelve tables, and the ones
along the wall, where we sat, were separated iron scrollwork partitions,
so we had the illusion of privacy if not privacy itself. It was dark,
too; our main light came from a candle in a Chianti bottle. Annie's
face looked golden and soft, like the face of a woman in a Renaissance
painting.

"What's this?" I asked, pointing to a long name on the menu
and trying to resist the urge to touch Annie's lovely face. "Scapeloni
al Marsala?"

Annie's laugh was as warm as the candlelight. "No, no,"
she corrected. "Scaloppine. Scaloppine alla Marsala."

"Scaloppine alla Marsala," I repeated. "What is it?"

"It's veal," she said. "Vitello.
Sort of like thin veal cutlets, in a wonderful sauce."

"Is it good?" I asked--but I was still thinking of the way she'd said
vitello, with a musical pause between the l's. Annie laughed again and
kissed the closed fingers of her right hand. Then she popped her fingers
open and tossed her hand up in a cliche but airy gesture that came
straight out of a movie about Venice we'd seen the week before. "Is it
good!" she said.

"Nana makes it." So we both had scaloppine alla Marsala, after an
antipasto and along with a very illegal half bottle of wine, and then
Annie convinced me to try a wonderful pastry called cannoli, and after
that we had espresso. And still we sat there, with no one asking us to
leave. We stayed so late that both my parents and Annie's were furious
when we got home.

"You never call any more, Liza," my father said,
muttering something about wishing I'd see other people besides Annie. "I
don't want to set a curfew," he said, "but two girls wandering around
New York at night--it just isn't safe." Dad was right, but time with
Annie was real time stopped, and more and more often, we both forgot to
call. Chad kept kidding me that I was in love, and asking with whom, and
then Sally and Walt did, too, and after a while I didn't even mind,
because even if they had the wrong idea about it, they were right.

Soon it wasn't hard any more to say it--to myself, I mean, as well as
over and over again to Annie--and to accept her saying it to me.
We touched each other more easily--just kissed or held hands or
hugged each other, though--nothing more than that. We didn't really
talk much about being gay; most the time we just talked about ourselves.

We were what seemed important then, not some label. The day the first
snow fell was a Saturday and Annie and I called each other up at exactly
the same moment, over and over again, tying our phones with busy
signals for ten minutes. I don't remember which of us got through
first, but around an hour later we were both running through Central
Park like a couple of maniacs, making snow angels and pelting each
other with snowballs. We even built a fort with the help of three little
boys and their big brother, who was our age, and after that we all
bought chestnuts and pretzels and sat on a bench eating them till the
boys had to go home. Some of the chestnuts were rotten. I remember
that because Annie said, throwing one away, "It's the first sign of a
dying city--rotten chestnuts." I could even laugh at that, along with
the boys, because I knew that the ugly things about New York weren't
bothering her so much any more. Annie and I went ice skating a few
times, and we tried to get our parents to let us go to Vermont to ski,
but they wouldn't. Mr. Kenyon took us and Nana and Annie's mother out to
Westchester in his cab just before Christmas to look at the lights on
people's houses, and they all wished me
"Buon Natale" when they dropped me off at home. On Christmas afternoon,
I gave Annie a ring.

"Oh, Liza," she said, groping in the pocket of her
coat-- we were on the Promenade, and it had just begun to snow. "Look!"
Out of her pocket she took a little box the same size as the little box
I'd just handed her. I looked around for people and then kissed the end
of her nose; it was almost dark, and besides, I didn't really care if
anyone saw us. "Is the silly grin on my face," I asked her, "as silly as
the silly grin on your face?"

"Jerk," she said. "Open your present."

"You first."

"I can't-- my hands are shaking. You know what happens to my gloves if I
take them off."

"What happens to your gloves if you take them off is you lose them. But
you don't lose them if you give them to me." I held out my hand. "I'll
hold your gloves, Unicorn, okay?"

"Okay, okay," she said, and stripped them off and fumbled with the
metallic ribbon on the box with a wonderful clumsiness that I have never
seen anyone else as graceful as Annie have.

"Oh, for God's sake," I said. "I'll bite it off if it's stuck!"

"You will not! It's my first Christmas present from you and I'm going to
keep every scrap of it forever, ribbon and all--oh, Liza!" By then she
had the box open and was staring down at the little gold ring with the
pale blue stone that I'd found in an antique shop on Atlantic Avenue, at
the edge of Brooklyn Heights. "Liza, Liza," she said, looking at me--no,
staring--with wonder. "I don't believe this." She nodded toward the box I
was holding. "Open yours."

I gave Annie back her gloves and stuffed my
own into my pockets, and I opened the box she had handed me and
found a gold ring with a pale green stone--no, not identical to the ring
I'd given her, but almost. "I don't believe it either," I said. "But I
also do."

"It's some kind of sign."

"Come On."

"It is, Liza; you know it is."

"The occult sciences," I said, intentionally pompous, "are the only ones
that would even attempt to explain this kind of coincidence, and the
occult sciences are not ..."

Annie flung her arms around my neck and
kissed me, even though there were four kids galloping down the snowy
path from Clark Street to the Promenade, showering each other with
snowballs. "If you don't put that ring on this minute, I'm going
to take it back," Annie whispered in my ear. "sciences, indeed!"

She leaned back, looking at me, her hands still on my shoulders, her
eyes shining softly at me and snow falling, melting, on her nose. "Buon
Natale," she whispered, "amore mio."

"Merry Christmas, my love," I answered.

My parents and Chad and I went
up to Annie's school to hear her recital, which had been postponed till
right after Christmas because of snow. Annie had said many times that
the only decent teacher in the whole school was her music teacher and
the only