The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  On Sunday morning the girls got up early and saddled the horses and went off on a trail ride.

  “I think Jessie’s starting to like her,” Daniel said. “What do you think?”

  “I think she’s fascinated. You can always count on that, along with excitement. Yes, I think Jessie likes her; whether it inconveniences her to have a sister is another matter.”

  “It’s a long goddamn weekend, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “You need to spend some time with her alone,” Anna said. “You should give her a chance to get to know you. When is her plane leaving?”

  “At five.”

  “Take her to the airport alone. Leave Jessie with me at my apartment and take her to the airport. She might want to talk to you alone.”

  “She’ll have plenty of time for that. We’ll have her up again.” He reached up in the cabinet and took down a bottle of whiskey and fixed himself a drink. Anna knew better than to press him. She took a book from the dusty shelf and went into a bedroom and pretended to read until the girls returned.

  After lunch they packed up and left and drove back into Charlotte. Daniel let Anna off at her apartment. She went inside and took off all her clothes except her underpants and sat down in the exact center of a rose Karastan carpet and began to do yoga postures. She moved in and out of the ancient postures, cutting herself off, cutting herself out of the system. Breathe, she told herself. Only breathe. Breathe and move. After a while she fell asleep on the rug. When she woke it was night and the moon was shining in the windows. She moved into a sitting posture and thought about the moonlight and the distance to the moon, about the long years of her life and the wonder of men and women and of all existence, about DNA and RNA and protein molecules and replication and Olivia swimming Cyprian across the freezing pond and Jessie pouting on the couch, priceless and perfect in her jealousy and rage.

  Anna turned half a circle into the moonlight, thinking of a night long ago when she and Phelan and Helen and LeLe Arnold and Dudley Manning and five or six other people whose names and faces she had forgotten had gone in three cars out to an abandoned borrow pit to swim on the Ides of March. Phelan had just discovered Julius Caesar. Niall was a little boy that year, eleven or twelve. He had begged to come and threatened to tell on them if they left him behind, so Niall was there, with his scout knife in a scabbard tied around his waist and wearing his famous Australian bush hat.

  They had sneaked out and gone to the borrow pit at two o’clock in the morning, the very darkest part of night, and one by one had gone into the water. “Buddhist monks go swimming in the snow,” Phelan had kept on saying. “You can will yourself not to freeze.”

  Later that summer, when it was warmer, they had parties at the borrow pit and drank beer and the moonlight lay upon the dangerous deep water and Anna had always been the one who stayed in the water the longest. Never anything, she decided now, not even love, could equal the soft cold smell and feel and touch of that water. There was no world to contend with then, only night and excitement and water, night and the moon and danger.

  We were so terribly alive, she thought. How did I get so far away from that and from my brothers and my sisters?

  She got up and went to her typewriter and began to write.

  Dear Jessie, dear Olivia,

  There are two hands on each body. If the right hand gets hurt, the left hand takes over.

  There are supposed to be many children in a family. They may drive you nuts but they are your brothers and sisters. Tomorrow I’m going to take Helen out to lunch. She’s my sister. If I need a sister I know her phone number. If she needs me, she knows mine.

  Love, Anna

  In the morning Anna went over to Helen’s house and waited while Helen made phone calls to the plumber and the roofer and the gardener and the high school principal and the Junior League Thrift Shop. Anna sat in her sister’s kitchen and listened with great interest, real interest. She watched Helen move around her house in her sexy pink kimono making phone calls and putting things away and talking and getting dressed. She thought about what it must be like to make love to Helen, what did Helen do to men? What did she say?

  “Did you ever suck a man’s dick, Helen?” Helen was putting on a dress, the dress was halfway over Helen’s head. The answer was muffled. “Of course.” The dress came sliding down. Helen looked in the mirror and adjusted it. “But I don’t do it unless he eats my pussy and I mean good and as long as I want him to. He knows the rules.” She added a scarf to the dress. “How many have you sucked, Anna?”

  “Tell me the rules.” Anna got up from the bed. She was amazed. Helen went to the dressing room mirror and worked on her hair. “Jesus, I never had rules.”

  “Well, why would you?” Helen was finished dressing now. She picked up her pocketbook and clutched it, good old matronly clutching style. “You never had them for anything else. Well, come on and tell me about Olivia. I know she came here. Momma and Daddy know it too. Everyone in town knows about it and about Daniel going out to Summerwood to hide it. He’s too silly to live. I give up on him about half the time.”

  “I’ll tell you about it. But that isn’t why I want to have lunch. That’s a secret. Come on, let’s go.”

  Half an hour later they were settled at a table overlooking the golf course at the country club. Helen was sipping a whiskey sour. Anna was drinking a martini. The story of Olivia’s visit had been told and questioned and retold. Now Anna took her sister’s hand.

  “This is a request, honey. I don’t want it to bother you in any way. It’s just a legality really, but important to me. I want to ask you a favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I want you to be my literary executor. To share it with a poet, an old friend in Boston. You see, Joel died, my agent, I told you when it happened, and there hasn’t been anyone to replace her. I’ve been derelict in not doing something about it. Mike couldn’t do it alone. If anything should happen to me, someone has to take care of my papers. It’s for the children, the money goes to them, so it has to be done right. Will you do it?” Anna lifted her hand, sat back.

  “Well, yes, if you want me to. I’d be honored, flattered, I mean.” Helen looked down, sipped her drink. “Yes, I will do that if you want me to. But don’t die.” She giggled. “I won’t do it if you die.”

  “I won’t die,” Anna said. “I’ll always be here.” The waiter appeared to take their order and they moved closer to each other and drank their drinks and then had another one and had wine with lunch and went home very drunk and very silly. The next day Anna had her lawyer rewrite her will and signed it in the presence of witnesses and a copy was sent around to Helen, who hid it in her desk. For some reason she felt like it should be a secret.

  “Dad wasn’t nice to her.” Jessie was watching Anna dress. Sitting on Anna’s bed with her legs wrapped up in a silk blanket cover, her shoes were off, she was wearing Anna’s sable jacket on top of a blue sweat shirt that said Esprit in pale yellow letters. “Can I have this coat when you’re tired of it?”

  “Yes, you can. I shouldn’t have bought that silly thing. Every time I see a nature film on television I’m sorry I bought it.

  “They’re going to die anyway.”

  “That’s one way to look at it. So what’s this about your dad being mean to Olivia?” Anna finished her makeup and began to look in her closet for something to wear. She was taking Jessie to the bookstore to find a book for a book report she had to write.

  “He didn’t even kiss her goodbye. She was trying to kiss him and he just held her away from him. I told him about it. I told him if my mother had run off to London with me he might be acting like that to me. I might go up there and visit her this summer.”

  “To Oklahoma?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think she had a good time? Was she glad she came?”

  “I guess so. I got your letter by the way. It was nice. So you should have seen Connie when I told her about it today. She said she’d give
anything to have a life as exciting as mine.”

  Anna watched Jessie’s reflection in the mirror. She snuggled her chin down into the fur. Her flawless skin and her soft light hair lay against the dark fur. Her lips assumed a wonderful thick pout. Anna had been tired all day, had been in bed all afternoon getting up the energy to get dressed to take Jessie to the store. Now she drew energy from the child, she remembered her own skin and hair at sixteen, the burning energy of her blood. How do we bear to be that powerful? Anna thought. To be sixteen.

  “Let’s go get your book,” she said. “And then let’s go buy some clothes. Let’s buy something sensational and wear it home from the store.”

  “Oh, Aunt Anna, you’re really nuts, you know it. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  13

  During April Anna was not feeling well. She was sleeping late in the mornings. She kept getting tired. She shook it off, drank pots of coffee, felt worse. One morning she felt so bad she went down to the drugstore and walked up and down the aisles looking for something to make her feel better. She picked up a package of over-the-counter diet pills, read the claims, remembering Dexedrine and Ritalin in the days when people took drugs for fun.

  She took the package of diet pills to the checkout stand. “Do these things work?” she asked the boy behind the counter.

  “To lose weight?”

  “No, to get you in a better mood.”

  “I wouldn’t take them if I was you,” he answered. “My sister takes them. She says they make her feel like shit. I mean, terrible

  “I guess I better not buy them then.”

  “Whatever you like.” He wasn’t annoyed. It was a slow morning anyway.

  “I’ll take them,” she said. “Ring them up.”

  She walked out of the drugstore and threw the package into a trash container. Then she got into the car and drove back home and poured herself a drink. It was ten thirty in the morning.

  This is just depression, she told herself. My lifetime of mania has finally caught up with me and now it’s time to be depressed. She sipped the drink, walked over to her desk, and began to sort through piles of mail. There was an anthology from Ireland containing one of her poems and a letter from LeLe Arnold and a card from Adam. In the middle of the stack of mail was the latest box of gold coins her father had sold her. She picked it up, shook her head. It made her feel better just to hold the box. That glorious old man, she thought. My God, I love him. Every man I ever loved is just a replay of those emotions. I remember every word he’s ever said to me. Indelible, never to be erased. Not to mention all those goddamn handwritten letters of advice that have followed me around the world. Those goddamn yellow legal pads. Every time I ever saw one I thought a piece of advice was going to jump out and grab me by the throat. Whatever goes on between that old man and me is the real thing.

  She sat down in a chair, feeling woozy and disoriented. The gin was not helping. The gin was making it worse. I think I’ll go bury these coins out at the cemetery where Phelan and I buried those medallions and silver dollars. I can’t keep a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins lying around an apartment. I’ll do it. I’ll bury them today. That ought to cheer me up.

  She got up, poured another glass of gin and drank it, put the package of coins in a canvas bag, and began to collect the other boxes from where she had hidden them around the apartment. One was in a pottery urn from Greece. One was in an old cosmetic kit. The rest were in a drawer with her nightgowns where she had put them hoping to remember to take them to the bank. She packed up all the coins and drove over to the hardware store and bought a shovel and started driving toward the country. I’ll make a geometric design, she decided. I will make a parallelogram. I always liked parallelograms. They were always my favorite geometric figure.

  By three that afternoon the coins were in the ground. When she had patted the last piece of earth down on the last box of coins Anna sat on a tombstone and drew a diagram of where they were. Then she translated the diagram into complicated mathematical formulas. Then she made a fake list of dates and amounts. Then she got up and walked around paying her respects to her grandparents and great-grandparents. Then she walked back to the more recent graves and stood by the grave of Francis Gautier. “I would have stopped by when we were here with Olivia,” she said. “But I didn’t want to make those young girls sad. I’m sorry the water has left your protein molecules, Francis, but I’m not mad at you for dying anymore. I don’t think I’m mad at anybody. I might be. Otherwise why do I feel so terrible all the time. I was drinking in the morning, Frank. Can you believe that? Well, what the hell. I love you and now I’m going swimming.”

  She walked back to the car. She drove down a dirt road and across a pasture and through a gate and came to a stop beside the Pond. She got out of the car and took off most of her clothes. She took off everything but a pair of cotton underpants and white silk T-shirt. She walked over to the Pond’s edge and waded in. She waded out until the water was waist deep. It was just cold enough to be exciting. Remembering excitement is better than no excitement at all, Anna decided. But goddamn the bottom of this pond is filthy.

  When the children were small Mr. Hand had kept sand poured for a beach but it was all gone now and the bottom was full of leaves and mulch. Anna walked out farther until she could stretch out in the soft muddy water. She floated for a minute, then began to swim. She swam out to the dam, gingerly at first, then with more abandon. When she reached the dam she pulled herself up onto it, scaring a pair of mud turtles from a log. Something’s wrong with me, she told the Pond and the turtles and sky. Why don’t I do something about it? Why don’t I care?

  She slid back down into the water, feeling better than she had felt in days. It’s the end of April, she thought. I’m a month late. We have turned into pussies, Phelan. We have turned into pussies in our sleep.

  That was April. In May and June and July Anna worked on a new book, keeping the phone off the hook, working very carefully, agonizing over details, more serious than she had been in years about her work. It was a strange tangled manuscript, written in several voices. It was called Winter and it was about Jessie’s mother. Sheila, Anna would say to herself as she worked. Our Richard. The winter of our discontent. When I finish this I could write the history of Olivia, a girl named Tree whose mother was named Summer.

  “What’s going on with Olivia?” she asked Daniel whenever she saw him. “When are you going there to visit?”

  “Before too long,” he would answer. “When I can take time from work.”

  By August Anna was feeling better. She felt better for many weeks. She went to New York and got drunk with her editor and told him about the book. “It better not really be her mother,” he said. “Is it really her mother, Anna?”

  “No, only my perceptions. Do you know the line from The Tempest, ‘Come, Spirit, it is time to deal with Caliban’? That’s the theme of it. I want to explore evil and Sheila MacNiece is evil. She’s the closest thing to evil I have ever known. I want to sort it out, try to understand it.”

  “Has anyone seen it?”

  “No, it’s in a suitcase. It’s the kind of manuscript that needs to be kept in a suitcase.”

  “Are you seeing Philip? Do you want to bring him out to dinner?”

  “Yes. No. Do you want to see the book?”

  “Whenever you want to show it to me. Whenever you are ready.”

  She stayed in New York for several weeks, seeing Philip, buying clothes, feeling good in the clear fall weather. She even started making plans to go to London to do research for the book.

  “I will make it up,” she told her editor. “I will make up every word of it.”

  “You better,” he answered.

  In October she went home and canceled the plans to go to London. She had begun to sleep in the daytime again.

  “What’s going on with Anna?” Mrs. Hand asked Helen.

  “How would I know? I’d be the last to know.”

&nb
sp; “I don’t like the way she looks. She looks tired. She’s too thin.”

  “I begged her to go to Brian and get a checkup or vitamins or something, but you know Anna, Mother. She doesn’t do anything unless she thinks it up.”

  “I would go over there and see about her but she always acts like I’m in her way.”

  “You are in her way. Everyone’s in her way. She just stays over there like a hermit.”

  “What did I ever do to raise someone to be a hermit. Just tell me that. To raise someone who doesn’t have time for other people.”

  “It’s all right,” Helen said. “Maybe it’s just a stage she’s going through.”

  14

  November, nineteen eighty-five. It’s getting worse. The cuts don’t heal. Every time I scratch my leg it takes forever to get well. I’ve got to take some vitamins or something. No, this is stress. This is some sort of stress and all I need to do is some yoga and get a new lover. Or an old lover. I should call Adam at Vanderbilt and have him come down for the weekend. I should do that. But it isn’t right to make him love me. Why did I go and fall in love with Philip? Why is it taking so long to get over it? I almost fainted the other day and my hair is getting thin, it is, I’m not imagining things. I am imagining every bit of this. It’s all imagination. The whole thing. Reality is our conception, all of it, Philip, Adam, and even the memory of Francis, I dreamed he came to me and wept for the loneliness of my life. I dreamed he begged me to forgive him for dying. Hit, hit, hit. Where is that from? Never mind, I’ll go back to New York and see Philip and be happy for a few days. I’m happy now. Go to sleep. I’m my mother’s child. She is right around the corner, loving me. And Daniel and Jessie and Olivia and James and Niall and Louise the runaway and Helen, God bless her little bourgeois heart, and so many. LeLe and Phelan and Crystal and that crazy little girl of hers, Crystal Anne, my God. I had not known life had undone so many. Sleep, Anna, close your eyes and sleep. Stop thinking.