Annie on My Mind

Chapter fourteen

When I went back into the living room, Mom was standing at the window
looking out at the new leaves on the gingko tree outside the window.

"Look," she said, pointing to a small gray bird darting among the
branches. "I think she's building a nest." She turned to face me, and
put her hands on my shoulders. "Liza," she said, looking into my eyes,
"I want you to tell me the truth, not because I want to pry, but because
I have to know. This could get very unpleasant--you know that. We can't
fight it with lies, honey. Now--have you and Annie--done any more than the
usual--experimenting is, I know, a bad word, but I think you know what
I mean. Has there been any more than that between you--more than what I
told you was between me and June?"

Her eyes were somber; there was
fear in them, such fear and such pain, and such love as well, that--I'm
not proud of it, I make no excuses--I lied to her. "No, Mom," I said,
trying to look back at her calmly. "No, there hasn't."

The relief on
Mom's face was almost physical. I hadn't been aware that she'd looked
older when I'd first come in, but now she looked herself again. She even
seemed a little cheerful, at least in comparison with before, and she
patted my shoulder, saying, "Well, then. Now let's try to talk about
what really did happen, and about why Ms. Baxter and Sally
misinterpreted whatever it was that they saw ..."

It was a good thing in
a way that Dad came in soon after that, because I couldn't concentrate
on Mom's questions. All I could do was say over and over in my mind:
You lied to her. You lied to your own mother for the first time in your
lite. You lied ...

When Dad came in--Mom had called him at the office
I found out later, and he'd come home in a cab, not even waiting for
the subway--when he came in, his face was gray. Mom got up from the
sofa immediately--I couldn't move--and said, "It's all right, George.
Liza isn't sure why Ms. Baxter and Sally got so mixed up, but it was all
a terrible mistake. I imagine that both Ms. Baxter and Mrs. Poindexter
overreacted, especially Mrs. Poindexter--you know how old she's getting,
and the campaign is so ..."

But I could see right away that Dad wasn't
paying any attention to that; he wasn't even hearing it. Mom sat back
down on the sofa next to me and Dad looked at me, right at me, with his
honest brown eyes and said, "Liza?"--and, oh, God, I said, "Dad--can I
get you a drink?"

"No thanks," he said, and he went into the kitchen and made
drinks for himself and Mom. "Look," Dad said carefully sitting down in a big
chair, "this is hard to say. I don't even know how to approach
this, but I--first of all, I want you to know that I'll go along with
whatever you decide to do; Liza, I'll support you, whatever's true.
You're my daughter--I kept saying that to myself over and over in the cab
on the way home: She's my daughter, my ..."

"George ..." Mom began, but he ignored her.

"You're my daughter," he
said again. "I love you. That's the main thing, I--Liza, always." He
smiled weakly. "Ear piercing and all." His smile faded. "But I have to
tell you, Liza--and I've said even less to your mother about this than
I've said to you, except when you've been late--that as much as I like
your friend Annie and admire her singing voice--fond of her as I am, I
haven't been blind to how intense you are about her, how intense you
both are ..." My stomach felt as if icicles were forming in it.

"George," Mom said again--she had taken only one small sip of her drink:
she was holding it as if she'd forgotten it and any moment it would
slip out of her hand, unnoticed. "George, adolescent friendships are
like that--intense--beautiful." She put her arm around me. "Don't spoil
it, don't. This is awful for Liza, for all of us; it must be awful for
poor Annie, too. And think of Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer."

"Yes," said my father a little grimly, "think of Ms. Stevenson and Ms.
Widmer." Only mother looked surprised; the icicles in my stomach
extended slowly to the rest of my body. "I've always wondered about
those two," Dad said.

Then he slammed his drink down. "Oh, look," he said, "what difference
does it make if a couple of teachers at Foster are lesbians? Those two
are damn good teachers and good people, too, as far as I know. Ms.
Widmer especially-- look at the poems Chad's written this year,
look at how good Liza suddenly got in English. The hell with anything
else. I don't care about their private lives, about anyone's, at least I
..." He picked up his drink again and took a long swallow. "Liza, damn
it, I always thought I was--well, okay about things like homosexuality.
But now when I find out that my own daughter might be ..."

"She's not, she told me she and Annie are friends only," Mnm insisted. I
wanted to tell Dad then: I wanted to tell him so much I was already
forming the words. And if I hadn't already lied to Mom, if we'd been
alone then, I think I would have.

"Liza," my father said, "I told you
I'd support you and I will. And right now I can see we're all too upset
to discuss this very much more, so in a minute or two I'm going to take
you and your mother and me out to lunch. But, honey, I know it's not
fashionable to say this, but--well, maybe it's just that I love your
mother so much and you and Chad so much that I have to say to you I've
never thought gay people can be very happy--no children, for one thing,
no real family life. Honey, you are probably going to be a damn good
architect--but I want you to be happy in other ways, too, as your mother
is--to have a husband and children. I know you can do both ..."

I am happy, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I'm happy with Annie; she and
my work are all I'll ever need; she's happy, too--we both were till this
happened ...

We had a long, large lunch, trying to be cheerful and
talking about everything except what had happened. Then
my mother took me shopping, saying we might as well use the time to
start buying me clothes for MIT. But really I think she took me so Dad
would be the only one there when Chad came home from school. On the way
back to the apartment, Mom and I stopped at the fish store and she
bought swordfish, which I love, and she cooked all my favorite things
that night, as if it were my birthday. But it was a tense meal anyhow,
with Chad speaking only when somebody else talked to him--he wouldn't
meet my eyes, even when he and I were talking, which wasn't often. After
dinner I called Sally. I didn't know quite what I was going to
say--something like I'm sorry it got to you the way it did. But she hung
up on me. Later that night, when Annie called, I was so worked up that
all I could do on the phone with her was cry. So she called back later
and talked to Mom, who said yes, I'd be okay, and we'd all get through
this and things like that. I imagine it wasn't very reassuring.

The next morning when I woke up, the sun was shining in underneath my
window shade, and for a second, just for a second, everything was all
right.

I'd been dreaming--a wonderful dream about living with Annie--and when I
woke up, I think I really expected to see her beside me. But of course
she wasn't there. And then everything came crashing in again--Sally's
shocked face, Chad's, Mom's, Dad's--and it was as if the air were
heavy, pressing down on me and making it hard to breathe. I tried to
imagine what it would be like if people always reacted to Annie and me
that way--being hurt by us, or pitying us; worrying about us, or feeling
threatened--even laughing at us. It didn't make any sense and it was
unfair, but it was also awful. I could hear Mom moving around the
apartment, and I didn't want to see her, so I just lay in bed for a
while, watching the sun flicker under the shade and trying not to think
any more. But then I remembered I still had to give Sally my speech, so
I got up and dressed, wanting to get it over with as soon as I could.

Before I even got to Sally--I decided to wait for her outside school--I
passed two juniors in front of the main building, and one of them was
saying something like, "I'd rather have Ms. Widmer any day than a
dried-up old substitute." The other one said, "Yeah. But that one they
got to teach art--she's not so bad. I mean, at least she's young." I
didn't hear much more; either I turned it off or they stopped talking.

Of course, I told myself, since I'm suspended, Ms. Widmer and Ms.
Stevenson will have been suspended, too. If I'm having a hearing, so
will they, probably. Then there was Sally. It's funny, I remember it in
outline form, sort of, with Sally and me like shadow figures, facing
each other on the steps. I said "Hi," or something equally
noncommittal,