Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  Annie didn’t tell Mitchell about Agnes Grace. He knew she spent afternoons volunteering out at the Baptist Children’s Home, and he knew there was one child in particular, a little girl, that Annie spent a lot of time with. But Annie kept most of it to herself. Agnes Grace was her own pet project, Eliza Doolittle to Annie’s Professor Higgins. She bought her new clothes, taught her how to speak correctly and how to use good table manners (Eatin’ regulations, Agnes Grace called them), and encouraged her in her schoolwork. Agnes Grace was a voracious reader, although she’d had little enough to read before she came to the home. But Annie bought her a complete set of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy mysteries, as well as the classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Treasure Island. Black Beauty was her favorite. When Agnes Grace read that book, it was the only time Annie had ever seen her cry.

  Still, despite her improvements, Agnes Grace clung stubbornly to some of her old ways. She still cursed like a sailor, and she was prone to episodes of physical violence. (One of the big boys had stomped a toad and Agnes Grace hit him in the head with a metal chair.) And she was clumsy, too. She was always breaking things, always knocking over iced tea glasses or dropping plates on the floor or leaning against chairs that toppled over. If there was a crash anywhere in the recreation hall everyone always said in unison “Agnes Grace!” Also she was stubborn and had a tendency to cling to her own opinions, even when she was wrong, an attitude that often landed her in the time-out chair.

  Annie brought Agnes Grace over to the house several times to swim, but only when Mitchell wasn’t home. Despite the girl’s improvements, Annie still couldn’t imagine introducing her to the naive Mitchell. Mitchell still labored under the old-fashioned impression that little girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice; what would he think of Agnes Grace? She’d be likely to give him a stroke, or a massive coronary. Nor could she imagine introducing Agnes Grace to the boys when they were home from college. They’d been raised like princes; they’d grown up with debutantes and cotillion queens, and were unlikely to have much knowledge of girls like Agnes Grace (or at least Annie hoped they didn’t; she hoped their expensive educations hadn’t gone to waste).

  No, the cultural differences between the girl and her own family were just too wide; bringing Agnes Grace into the bosom of the Stites family would be like introducing a pit bull pup into a family of poodles.

  And then, two and a half years after Annie and Agnes Grace first established their odd but mutually satisfying friendship, everything changed.

  They got word that Agnes Grace’s mother, Dee, was getting out of prison. She’d been released early for “good behavior,” which apparently, in prison, meant that she hadn’t stabbed anyone with a homemade knife. She was being released to a halfway house, and expected to see the girls in a few weeks. Agnes Grace and her older sister, Loretta Lynn, set about making themselves ready. They were the only two Sibley children being housed at the Baptist Children’s Home. Dee’s children had arrived in two distinct shifts, with the first five being born between Dee’s sixteenth and twenty-first birthdays. Thereafter occurred a five-year period of government-imposed birth control when Dee spent time in prison on a series of unrelated drug charges. When she got out, babies six through nine were born over a period of eight years. By the time Dee went to prison the second time, the older five children were either incarcerated themselves or trying to make it on their own, the youngest two were turned over to Dee’s mother, and that left only Agnes Grace and Loretta Lynn, who wound up at the home.

  Annie bought both of the girls new dresses for the occasion. She took them to the beauty parlor and had their hair cut and their nails done. The whole time Annie watched them excitedly getting ready for their mother’s arrival, she had a slight queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. A wobbly nauseous feeling, like morning sickness that lasted all day.

  She sat out front with the girls on the concrete stoop, waiting for Dee. Annie had offered to pick her up and drive her to the home but Dee had asked instead for taxi fare, which Annie had dutifully sent. She was supposed to arrive by two o’clock.

  It was a bright sunny day in late February. A cool breeze blew from the north but there was a hint of spring in the air. The trees were budding, and the forsythia along the edge of the yard had begun to sport green buds.

  At two-fifteen, Agnes Grace said jovially, “Mama never could be nowhere on time.”

  At two-thirty, she said, “Remind me to buy her a wristwatch.”

  At three o’clock, she said, “Maybe they got lost.” Loretta Lynn sat with her chin resting glumly on her knees. She was two years older, and she knew her mother better. She wasn’t going to get excited until she saw the taxi pull in to the yard.

  By now Annie’s queasy feeling had turned to anguish and then to outrage. It was hard to imagine a mother abandoning her own children this way. (But then, who was she to judge?)

  At three-thirty, Agnes Grace said, “I hope she wasn’t in a car crash.”

  At four, she said, “Ain’t this typical?”

  At five, she said, “Well, what do you expect? She’s nothing but a meth-head,” and got up and stomped into the house. Loretta Lynn sighed and got up to go after her. From the door she turned to look at Annie.

  “Hey, lady,” she asked. “Can we keep the dresses?” and Annie said, “Sure, honey, of course you can,” and wished now that she’d bought them complete wardrobes with rows and rows of matching shoes.

  That night, Annie had a dream.

  She’d found a baby in a basket floating in the rushes, like Moses, only this baby was a girl with ten sweet little fingers and toes, and a small, delicate face like a seashell. Annie reached down to pick the baby up but as she did, a sudden current plucked the basket and sent it floating toward the sea. Annie tried desperately to reach it, splashing through weeds that wrapped around her legs and pulled her down like hands. She struggled and cried out but each time they caught her more firmly. She awoke when the baby reached the sea, a tiny speck disappearing on the horizon.

  Chapter 33

  BEDFORD UNIVERSITY

  MOUNT CLEMMONS, NORTH CAROLINA

  isery. That’s what followed obsessive love. The two went hand in hand, as Annie soon discovered. Eight weeks after spreading her legs for Paul Ballard he began making excuses as to why he couldn’t see her. He was good at it (he’d had plenty of experience), and in the beginning Annie didn’t realize she was being given the brush-off. He was so charming when he called at the last minute to tell her he couldn’t make it that she never suspected a thing. But as the weeks wore on she began to realize that it had been a week since she saw him last, then two weeks, and then when she did run into him on campus, he seemed preoccupied and told her he’d “have to call her later.” Which he never did.

  Her pride kept her from calling him, at least initially; but then misery got the best of her and she couldn’t help herself. She left two messages with his secretary and he never returned either one.

  It was April, and the campus was ripe with spring. Trees put forth their green-leaved finery, azaleas bloomed in riotous color, and the skies were blue and cloudless. Everywhere people and plants seemed infused with the renewal of life but Annie walked around like she was dead inside. A blight on the bright landscape, a black hole of misery that sucked everything around her into its vortex.

  “Are you sick?” Mel asked, when she saw her moping around the house.

  “Did you fail a test?” Sara asked her.

  “Did I do something to upset you?” Lola asked her anxiously.

  Annie responded with a sharp “No!” to each of them. “It’s just been a crazy semester. I’m taking a lot of hours to try to finish up in May.” Which really wasn’t true. She was only taking nine hours, which left her a lot of time to lie around in her darkened bedroom thinking about Paul Ballard and feeling miserable.

  It was her fault, of course. She had known from the beginning that she shouldn’t fall in
love with him; she had counseled herself to think of this as only a “fling,” her last act of licentious freedom before settling down to marriage with Mitchell Stites. She had spent hours at the beginning of the relationship convincing herself that this was true. But sometime during the initial endorphin rush, the unthinkable had happened. Love had crept in like an oil slick, drenching her heart until it flopped around like a wounded seabird too swamped and bedraggled to fly.

  Now there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t see (she didn’t want to see) Mitchell Stites, and she couldn’t see (although she wanted to see) Paul Ballard. She was caught in a kind of lovers’ purgatory, and she couldn’t seem to find her way out. Lying on her bed and watching the sun slant through the closed venetian blinds, she thought (briefly and without any real compulsion) of throwing herself out a window. Bile rose suddenly in her throat, and a thick, viscous wave of nausea sent her running for the toilet.

  And now, to make matters worse, she seemed to have picked up some kind of unshakable stomach flu.

  It was Mel who first alerted her.

  Annie was lying on her bed one evening not long after supper when Mel rapped on the door and stuck her head in. “Hey, sorry to bother you, but you don’t happen to have an extra tampon, do you?”

  Annie took her arm off her eyes and looked at Mel. “No, I’m out.” Mel grinned. “That’s what we get for all having our periods at the same time. Bitches in heat.” She closed the door and Annie could hear her knocking on Sara’s door. It was a big joke, of course, the fact that their menses had become regulated over time. It had been the same when they lived together in the freshman dorm. But thinking about it now, on a warm spring evening in early April, Annie thought, That’s odd. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought tampons. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had her period.

  She sat up suddenly, dizzy and sick with fear. She got up and went across the hall into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She stood at the mirror, regarding herself carefully. She didn’t look any different, except for the fact that she had dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was a sickly, pallid color. She took her T-shirt off, and her bra.

  There was no doubt about it. Her boobs were definitely larger. And her nipples were huge and dark. Oh, God, she thought. Oh, God, no. She poked her belly gently with her thumb. It was tender. She slumped down on the toilet seat, jarring her teeth.

  A few minutes later she put her T-shirt back on and walked to the all-night drugstore. There was no use panicking, until she knew the truth.

  The truth was, she was pregnant. She took three separate home pregnancy tests and they all confirmed what Annie had known in her heart was true the minute she glimpsed her swollen breasts and enlarged nipples.

  She went to the dresser and checked her supply of birth control pills. She’d run out in December and hadn’t kept her appointment with the doctor to have them refilled. The thought that she needed to take care of that had nagged at her but she’d been too caught up in the excitement of falling for Professor Ballard to pay any attention. She’d been too intent on making herself available to him to think about anything else. Besides, he’d used a condom every time. She’d thought she was safe.

  After she’d finished crying, she went into the bathroom to wash her face, and then locked her bedroom door behind her. She had to figure out what to do. She took a piece of paper out and stared at it a long time, trying to figure out how to diagram a solution to her problem. She remembered her cousin, Lucy, the black sheep of the family. She’d gotten pregnant and run off to Atlanta with her boyfriend, a drummer in a punk-rock band, and was rumored to have had an abortion. She was rumored to be living in sin with the punk-rock drummer in Decatur. No one had seen her in four years, not even her own mother. That was the kind of family Annie came from. The wages of sin are death.

  She blew her nose and wrote down, #1—Marry Mitchell Stites and raise the child as his own. This would be the most logical solution although it would involve some fudging on her part because she hadn’t actually slept with Mitchell since Thanksgiving and by her rough calculations, she was only two months gone.

  But how could she do that to a fine upstanding boy like Mitchell Stites, a boy who loved and trusted her, who sang in the church choir and rose every day believing in the simple goodness and grace of God? How could she lie beside him every night knowing that proof of her infidelity, of her sin, lay just down the hallway in a wicker bassinet? How could she live with that gnawing away at her insides, year after year, swelling like a tumor?

  Besides, she didn’t love Mitchell anymore, and try as hard as she might, she couldn’t imagine herself marrying him.

  She wrote down #2—Marry Professor Ballard. After that, she wrote Anne Louise Ballard. Annie Ballard. Paul and Anne Louise Ballard. Dr. and Mrs. Paul Ballard.

  There was no doubt about it. She was a sick puppy.

  After that, she went around in a daze, trying to figure out what to do. She wanted to tell someone, but she couldn’t tell Mel or Sara or Lola without telling her mother, too. And she couldn’t bear the thought of telling her mother, she couldn’t bear the thought of her mother’s face crumpling in pain and disappointment. Annie had never in her entire life caused her mother shame, and she couldn’t imagine laying this burden at her door now, at this time of her life.

  That left only one choice. She would have to marry Paul Ballard.

  Over the last few days the flights of fancy she had engaged in while writing her name as Anne Louise Ballard had begun to soar higher and higher. She was like a woman in a fever-induced delirium. She even managed to convince herself that once he heard the news, Paul Ballard would be happy. (Although what he would tell his shadowy wife and children she had yet to work out.) She imagined herself traipsing around campus in a long diaphanous dress, carrying the baby in a sling, the envy of all the freshman English girls. She and Paul would become a kind of campus myth; their May-December (well, May-October at least) romance sighed over by starry-eyed undergraduates. Bedford’s very own version of Persephone and Hades.

  Once she started on this tack, her mind ran round and round in circles so that after a while it was easy to convince herself that he had never truly meant for their relationship to end at all. Overburdened by work, he had simply been unable to call. Or perhaps he had become frightened of his feelings for her, and had decided to take a break to give himself time to regroup (oh, yes, that must be it!). Perhaps she had touched him in a way all his other conquests had not and he was simply giving her time to determine whether her feelings were as strong as his (how noble his silence seemed to her now).

  By the end of the week she’d managed to work herself up into a frenzy of unrequited love, and when he didn’t return her calls (silly goose!) she set out to waylay him on the department steps.

  It was a beautiful evening. Nightjars fluttered against the twilit sky, and all along the campus masses of honeysuckle and ginger lilies were blooming. Annie sat down on the grass in front of Carter Hall to wait. She hadn’t taken his class since last semester but she’d kept up with his schedule and knew he had an evening class on Thursdays that let out at 8:30. She plucked blades of grass from the warm earth and let them fall through her fingers. Behind her a knot of boys played Frisbee on the lawn. It felt odd looking up at the face of Carter Hall, the place where she’d spent so many happy days last semester. It had felt odd, too, when the semester had ended and she’d realized she wouldn’t see him again in class, she wouldn’t be able to hang around his office door waiting for his arrival like a student anxious to discuss an essay assignment. She’d picked up her grades (she’d made an A, of course) and hung around hoping he’d show up, but he didn’t. Still, at the time, this hadn’t seemed ominous. She’d felt like one chapter of her life was ending, and another was beginning.

  And that’s how she felt now, waiting for him to appear on this twilight evening so she could tell him her happy news. The shadows grew longer, and the air took
on the slight damp chill of evening. The boys stopped playing Frisbee and went in to dinner. One of the doors swung open and several students bounded down the steps, laughing, followed by other students straggling out in ones and twos.

  Annie stood up, wiping the back of her jeans with her hands. The rush of students trickled to one or two, and then stopped. Annie stood staring at the brightly lit double doors, willing him to appear.

  She put her head back and stared at the sky. The lights of the campus twinkled merrily in the gathering gloom. She heard the doors open and she stepped forward, then stopped, hidden in the shadows of a magnolia tree.

  Professor Ballard was standing beneath the dim glow of an overhead light, his arm around the shoulders of a tall blond girl. She was giggling loudly, and he leaned and put his hand on her mouth, then followed that with a long, deep kiss. He seemed entirely besotted with the girl, dangerously so, as he stood there kissing her on the steps of Carter Hall. Anyone could have seen them, and he didn’t seem to care.

  They came down the steps together, his arm still resting across her shoulders. He stopped again and kissed her, moaning, and when she tried to break away, laughing, he pulled her back. After a few minutes, they dropped their arms and walked on side by side without touching, very proper, a professor and his student deep in an academic discussion.

  Annie stood watching in the darkness until they had disappeared from sight. Then she turned, and walked slowly home.