And then she waited.
She heard the pops first, a quick and irregular succession of loud cracking sounds. Then she saw the front door fly open. Incongruously, she could see through the open door that the interior of the house was brilliantly lit. It looked like every light in the place was on.
Annie suddenly emerged from the door at a dead run. She was screaming and heading for where the car had been. This caused Susan to scream back, “Over here, Annie! I’m over here!” giving the horn a series of little taps.
Annie stopped short and stumbled forward from the suddenness of it. Her head spun wildly to find Susan and the Corvette in a different place than where she’d left them, at which point she started running again, down the length of the driveway.
“I’m driving!” Susan yelled. “Get in the other side! I’m driving!”
Annie bolted to the passenger side of the car, grabbed the door and made a leap into the seat, as Susan was already screeching out of the driveway and turning onto the street, past the parked cars that neither girl had noticed on arrival.
Annie was crying full tilt and was, as Susan could now see, covered with blood. There was blood all over her, her face, her hair, her clothes—everywhere.
“Oh my God, Annie, what happened? Have you been shot?” Susan was driving wildly down the roads, making turns as she came to intersections, right and left, left and right. There was no rhyme or reason to it. “Annie, answer me! Have you been hurt? Have you been shot?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was Frankie!” At this Annie started to wail. “It was Frankie!”
“Frankie shot you?”
“They shot him!” She was hyperventilating and sobbing loudly.
“Who shot him?” Susan was driving in increasingly meaningless patterns.
“There were all these men. They all shot each other!”
“Oh my God!”
“Where are you going?” Annie was beginning to focus. “Where the hell are you going?”
“I have no idea!” Susan joined Annie’s train of thought and scanned the scenery around her. It would have been impossible for her to say how far they had gone from Frankie’s house or in which direction. It also felt impossible for her to alter her style of driving. Despite her mental chaos, Susan slowly became aware that a car was following them.
“Annie!”
Annie was not listening. She was whimpering in a world of her own.
“Annie!” Susan needed her now. She practically screamed in her ear, “Annie! Someone’s behind us! I think they’re following us!”
Annie looked at Susan, then swiveled her body fully around to peer out the small back window of the Corvette. Naturally, she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. “Holy shit,” was all she said.
“What should I do? I’m really lost! What’s the street name? Look, please! Can you see it?”
“It says Alter Road!” shouted Annie. “We’re going into Detroit.”
Alter Road, to the denizens of the East Side of Detroit and to Grosse Pointers, was well known as the dividing line between suburb and city. It was not as famous around the world as its big sister, Eight Mile Road, but it functioned in much the same way. Two different worlds faced each other from opposite sides of Alter Road.
Susan tore across it.
“Turn! Turn! Turn! Susan, you have to turn!”
“Okay!” Susan whipped the car around in a series of turns. The car behind them kept pace.
“Oh God! I think it’s someone from Frankie’s. I think they’re coming to kill us!”
All of a sudden, their car lifted up on some sort of road bump on steroids and came crashing, nose down, on the far side. Sparks rose from the front of the Corvette and both girls screamed. Susan managed to regain control of the vehicle, the back end of which had skidded perilously to the right when they landed. She kept driving.
Instinctively, Annie grabbed for Susan’s hand.
“What is that?” Susan screamed.
“What?” Annie twisted to look behind them again.
“On your wrist! What the fuck do you have on your wrist?”
“Are you nuts?”
“Goddamn it, Annie! Where did you get that watch! That’s my mother’s watch!”
“I found it on the floor at Frankie’s. Jesus Christ, Susan! Is this the time for this now?”
“This is not my life!” Susan wailed, to no one in particular. Not to Annie, who was only two feet away from her, but hailed from a different planet. Not to herself, whom she couldn’t locate if she tried. To the cosmos, to the gods, to the heavens above, she howled it again with full voice, “THIS IS NOT MY LIFE!!!”
“Susan!” Annie screamed. “Watch the road!”
Annie
“One alters the past to form the future.”
—A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
34
Monday, July 9, 1979
Suburban Detroit
Annie exhaled with a snort of derision as she spun her Corvette onto Leisure Drive. The only designation more ridiculous for the street on which she’d grown up would have been to call it Easy Street. She would not come back here anymore.
She was returning today only to retrieve some clothes she’d forgotten the last time she’d gone to her grandmother’s. Moving in and out of her grandmother’s house was something she’d done with frequency as a teenager, but she was determined that this was to be her last foray to Leisure Drive. If her mother wanted to see her, she could just drive herself over to Hazel Park.
Fat chance of that.
The screen door banged open and Angela bolted out in Annie’s sweater. “Hi, sis!” she bellowed, about three octaves too loudly. Angela always called her sis, whereas half sis would have suited Annie better. “Babysitting for the Harris kids! All six of them!”
“Ange, take off my sweater.”
“I’m already late.”
“I’m here for my stuff so just give it back.”
“Fine!” Angela ripped off the sweater and thrust it at Annie. She hopped on her bike and tore down the road. “You are not a nice sister!” she shouted over her shoulder.
Not bothering to respond, Annie leapt up the porch steps and yelled for her mother as she opened the door. She moved down the hall to the room she shared with Angela. Wanting to get out before her stepfather, Joe, came home from work, she began stuffing clothes into the paper grocery bags she’d brought with her.
“Annie.” Her mother appeared in the doorway. The years since Laura had married Joe Nelson had not treated her kindly—drudgery had dimmed her youthful vigor. “Why were you yelling at your sister?”
“She took my sweater and I wanted it back.”
“Why can’t you be more sharing?”
“Because she’s fat and stretches it out.”
“Annie, that’s cruel.”
“How can it be cruel if it’s true?”
“It’s not right to say those things about people. And she’s not fat, she’s just going through puberty.”
“I went through puberty and I wasn’t fat.”
“Well, Annie, we can’t all be perfect like you.”
“Mom, I was thinking—I want to talk to my father.”
“Please don’t start that again. He’s never tried to find you. Never given a dime to support you. I don’t know why you return to this subject over and over.”
“Now who’s cruel?”
“Well, it’s true.”
“Do you even hear yourself? Contradicting yourself all over the place?” Annie continued to cram articles of clothing into bags. “You said his name was Bo. Is that Bo as in B-O? Or is it B-E-A-U?”
“You’ve asked me that a million times. I don’t know.”
“See, I don’t really understand that, Mother. How could you possibly not know how to spell your lover’s name?”
“Annie, don’t be crude!”
“You slept with him and you weren’t married to him or anything. Who’s the crude o
ne here?”
Laura stared at her daughter with a sad-puppy look. No wonder she drove her husband crazy. No wonder Annie’s father had left her. No wonder to any of it at all, when Laura played the victim all the time.
“I can’t keep having this same conversation with you. I need to cook dinner for Joe.” Laura sighed and walked down the hall.
“Mom, come back.” Annie followed, forgetting her urgency to get out. “Please tell me his last name. You said his family left Hazel Park, but I really want to find them.”
“Oh, Annie. I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”
“Well, it’s a little late for that!”
Annie had hit her mark and watched her mother’s face crumple. “You are ruthless. Get out.”
Annie did not move.
“Get out of my house! Go ask your grandmother to tell you all this ancient history! Go!”
Livid, Annie strode to the bedroom, grabbed the bags, and launched a syncopated march toward the door. She lifted each knee high, stomped her foot to the floor, and slammed the bunch of bags into the walls, shouting, “I hate you!” as she went. Down the hall she trudged—stomp, slam, “I hate you!” to the left, stomp, slam, “I hate you!” to the right-until she looked up and saw Joe bearing down on her.
She braced herself. The first blow was always the worst.
* * *
Annie slumped on the floor of her childhood room—the point of her haste dissipated. Joe was no longer a threat to her. She knew what he would be doing—what he always did after he beat her. Joe Nelson, specimen of Warren’s finest, Police Officer of the Year for three years running—1973, 1974, and 1975—would right now be screwing his wife. And her mother lay down for all of it. She did not intervene when her husband raised his fist to her daughter; she did not complain when he made his demands of her.
Annie rose to look at herself in the ratty old mirror above the dresser. Angela had colonized the edges of the glass with smiley-face stickers and magazine cut-outs of her favorite TV shows—Mork and Mindy, Three’s Company, The Love Boat. In the middle of that jumble, Annie’s face gazed back at her, perfect as it always had been. She had to hand it to Joe. It must be his cop training—he never left marks above the neck.
Annie had always relied on her face. Miraculously, puberty had given her a body that was her face’s equal. She hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but she was conscious of her favored status. Even when she was small, people had stared at her. As she grew older, the looks became bolder. Women gawked openly in her direction. Men found a way to approach her.
Annie defined herself by her desirability. She observed it, tested it, and eventually came to control it. When she entered a room, she paused slightly, imperceptibly to others, to gauge the attention of the group. It didn’t take long to command it. Her stepfather was the glaring exception to the sway of Annie’s charms. She suspected it was because she was the living embodiment of her mother’s amorous past.
Laura had married Joe when Annie was six, breaking up the tiny, happy household of Annie, her mother and grandmother in two little bedrooms in Hazel Park—the house that Annie had called home from the day that she was born.
One of Annie’s strongest memories of her grandmother, also named Annie, was of their weekly outings to church. On Sunday mornings, while Laura slept late, they would walk the few blocks to Saint Mary Magdalen, her grandmother holding her hand.
Church was Annie’s special place where she dropped the performance she put on for the world. No one looked at Annie in church. All eyes were trained forward, on the crucified Christ, the liturgy, the priest. Her grandmother sat, stood and knelt beside her, as the timeless ritual dictated, crossing herself, thumping her fist to her heart, touching her thumb to her forehead, her lips, her chest. Dominus vobiscum et cum spiritu tuo—the words drifted in and out of Annie’s head, like incense in a thurible. She did not need to understand them with her mind.
The sounds of the Mass—the incantations, the organ, the bells—vibrated deep in Annie’s chest cavity. Tone within, tone without, immanent and transcendent. She floated on the notes as she leafed through the tissue-thin pages of the missal. They filled her as she played with her grandmother’s hands, as papery as those pages, gently pinching the old skin into a ridge that took its time to settle back to the bones. Her grandmother never stopped her, never pulled her hand away, never made Annie feel self-conscious in any way. In church and with her grandmother, Annie lost herself. She found herself. In church, Annie was the seer and not the seen. She forgot about her face.
That life ended when Laura married Joe Nelson.
Annie knew that Laura and her mother had never gotten along, and it was something of a miracle that Grandma Annie had not rejected her daughter when she turned up pregnant at seventeen. Annie’s mother had told her the story more than once.
It was a cold January day in 1958. Laura was talking to the boy on the street—trying to sort out their future—and felt it within her grasp. Just a little more time and it would have been resolved.
Yet there had appeared her mother, calling to her from the porch. Laura spun and tried to hold her off, then she turned back to the boy. But she could see that he was drifting, their tether disconnected. He walked away before she did. As the boy moved in one direction, Laura had moved in the other. Her mother uttered her name again, sharply. Laura knew then that her mother could see it—could identify the bulk under her pea coat. She was amazed that her mother hadn’t noticed it before. She mounted the path flanked by overgrown red bayberry bushes. And, as she turned her head to look at the retreating boy, her mother’s hand cuffed her hard in the ear. She saw stars, she told Annie. She said that every time she repeated the story.
Then there was the happy part—the tale that her grandmother spun.
The child—a girl—was born in May. On Mother’s Day, to be precise. A scant month later, Laura had marched into St. Mary Magdalen, christened the child Annie, after her grandmother, and more or less, handed her over to the older woman.
That is where God had the last laugh because Annie Johnston loved that child, in all the ways she could not love the child’s mother and for the very same qualities that she bristled at in Laura. For little Annie was very much like her mother: loud, lively, and exuberant.
But there was a subtle distinction to be made between Laura and her daughter. While Laura’s awkwardness held a tentative thread, a palpable fear of the world’s disapprobation—which she perversely invited with her own behavior—Annie, instead, exuded confidence. Her grandmother loved her devotedly and the only cloud that marred the girl’s horizon was an inchoate awareness that it wasn’t quite fair that she was loved so much more than her own mother had been. The child that is born on the Sabbath Day is bonnie and blithe and good and gay.
Joe Nelson changed the world for the three Johnston women. For Laura, he meant escape and respectability. Her child’s father hadn’t bothered to marry her and liberate her from her mother’s house six years earlier. He had simply walked away. For Grandma Annie and little Annie, the beginning of Joe Nelson meant the end of an idyll.
Joe married Laura in November of 1964, at City Hall, on a frigid, blustery day. Chocolate cake and Cold Duck commemorated the occasion. Laura got a trip to Niagara Falls and Annie got one more week with her grandmother.
That Sunday, just like every Sunday before it, Annie and her grandmother went to church. To Annie’s astonishment, not being old enough to follow the Second Vatican Council, the Mass was in English. It was disorienting to hear those lofty chants brought down to earth and rendered in every day speech. The magic was gone. The lifetime she had spent with her grandmother was finished, two thousand years of Catholic ritual upended, and as a little girl she conflated the two, blaming Joe Nelson for all of it.
The next day, Joe and Laura came back from Niagara Falls, picked up Annie, and moved her from Battelle Street in Hazel Park to Leisure Drive in Warren.
Eight miles and light years away.
>
35
Monday, July 23, 1979
Mondays in the bar business were dead, but the Castigliones kept Frankie’s open seven days a week, in deference to the regulars. Diane, Annie, and Susan were new hires, at the bottom of the pecking order for shift preference, so Mondays belonged to them. Susan and Diane were uncomplaining, but the tedium grated on Annie, who hated boredom above all else.
This Monday was particularly slow, so one girl would be permitted to leave early. It was left to the three of them to determine which girl it would be.
Diane and Susan had launched a politeness contest. “You go,” Diane had said to Susan. “You have all that reading to do.”
“No, you go,” Susan had responded. “I’m sure they won’t keep any of us much longer.”
“Are you sure? There is a party I’m invited to.”
“Oh my God!” Annie couldn’t stand it. “I’m gonna scream if you keep this up. One of you, please go!”
Diane and Susan looked at her. “Would you like to go?” Diane asked.
“Nope. I’m sticking it out,” said Annie. “I want Frankie to take me out later.”
“Well, then, if you both don’t mind.” Diane gathered her things and walked out the door.
By ten p.m., the bar had been empty for an hour. Frankie sat at the corner table with Vito, Johnny Buscemi, and Danny the Cop, too deep in conversation to notice they were alone in the place.
For anyone unlucky enough to pull a shift on a Monday night, there was always a list of catch-up chores to perform. Annie’s technique was to procrastinate until an early closing time was called, thus sparing her anything even resembling completion. Susan’s method was to buckle down and get the job done. Tonight, Annie and Susan were sent to the cloakroom to do a little cleaning. The idea was to sort out the unclaimed items worth keeping from those ready for the trash bin.
Finding Mrs. Ford Page 15
