“Hello?” came Nana’s gentle voice. “Hi,” I said—I never knew whether to call her Nana to her face or not. “This is Liza—is Annie there?”
“Hello, Lize. Yes, Annie’s here. How you been? When you come see us?”
“I’m fine,” I said, suddenly nervous. I’ll come soon.”
“Okay. You not forget. Just a minute, I call Annie.” I could hear her calling in the background, and was relieved to hear Annie answer, and I closed my eyes, trying to visualize her in her apartment, only it was the beach that came back to me, and I could feel myself starting to sweat. But it still made sense to me; every time that scene came back to me, it made sense.
“Hi, Liza,” came Annie’s voice, sounding glad.
“Hi.” I laughed for no reason I could think of. “I don’t know why I’m calling you,” I said, “except this has been a weird day and you’re the only part of my life that seems sane.”
“Did you get it?”
“Get what?”
“Oh, Liza! Did you get reelected?”
“Oh—that.” It seemed about as far away as Mars, and about as important. “Yes, I got it.”
“I’m so glad!” She paused, then said, “Liza, I …” and stopped.
“What?”
“I was going to say that I missed you all day. And I kept wondering about the election, and …”
“I missed you, too,” I heard myself saying.
“Liza?” I felt my heart speed up again, and my hands were damp; I rubbed them on my jeans and tried to concentrate on the crack in the wall. “Liza—are you—are you sorry? You know, about—you know.”
“About Sunday?” I realized I was twisting the phone cord and tried to straighten it out again. I also noticed a bunch of juniors coming down the hall toward the phone booth, laughing and jostling each other. I closed my eyes to make them go away, to stay alone with Annie. “No,” I said. “I’m not sorry. Confused, maybe.
I—I
keep trying not to think much about it. But …”
“I wrote you a dumb letter,” Annie said softly. “But I didn’t mail it.”
“Do I get to see it?”
She hesitated, then said, “Sure. Come on up—can you?”
I didn’t even look at my watch before I said, “Yes.”
It was cold and very damp outside, as if it were going to snow, but it was warm in Annie’s room. She had some quiet music on her rickety old-fashioned phonograph, and her hair was in two braids, which by now I knew usually meant she hadn’t had time to wash it or that she’d been doing something active or messy, like helping her mother clean. We just looked at each other for a minute there in the doorway of her room, as if neither of us knew what to say or how to act with each other. But I felt myself leave Sally and school and the fundraising drive behind me, the way a cicada leaves its shell when it turns from an immature grub into its almost grown-up self. Annie took my hand shyly, pulled me into her room, and shut the door. “Hi,” she said. I felt myself smiling, wanting to laugh with pleasure at seeing her, but also needing to laugh out of nervousness, I guess. “Hi.” Then we both did laugh, like a couple of idiots, standing there awkwardly looking at each other. And we both moved at the same time into each other’s arms, hugging. It was just a friendly hug at first, an I’m-so-glad-to-see-you hug. But then I began to be very aware of Annie’s body pressed against mine and of feeling her heart beat against my breast, so I moved away. “Sorry,” she said, turning away also. I touched her shoulder; it was rigid.
“No—no, don’t be.”
“You moved away so fast.”
“I—Annie, please.”
“Please what?”
“Please—I don’t know. Can’t we just be …”
“Friends?” she said, whirling around. “Just friends—wonderful stock phrase, isn’t it? Only what you said on the beach was—was …” She turned away again, covering her face with her hands. “Annie,” I said miserably, “Annie, Annie.
I—I
do love you, Annie.” There, I thought. That’s the second time I’ve said it.
Annie groped on her desk-table and handed me an envelope. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t get any sleep last night and—well, I couldn’t tell you a single thing anyone said in school today, even at rehearsal. I’m going to wash my face.”
I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right—there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be—and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.
Dear Liza,
It’s three-thirty in the morning and this is the fifth time I’ve tried to write this to you. Someone said something about three o’clock in the morning being the dark night of the soul—something like that. That’s true, at least for this three o’clock and this soul. Look, I have to be honest—I want to try to be, anyhow. I told you about Beverly because I knew at that point that I loved you. I was trying to warn you, I guess.
As I said, I’ve wondered for a long time if I was gay. I even tried to prove I wasn’t, last summer with a boy, but it was ridiculous. I know you said on the beach that you think you love me, and I’ve been trying to hold on to that, but I’m still scared that if I told you everything about how I feel, you might not be ready for it. Maybe you’ve already felt pressured into thinking you have to feel the same way, out of politeness, sort of, because you like me and don’t want to hurt my feelings. The thing is, since you haven’t thought about it—about being gay—I’m trying to tell myself very firmly that it wouldn’t be fair of me to—I don’t know, influence you, try to push you into something you don’t want, or don’t want yet, or something. Liza, I think what I’m saying is that, really, if you don’t want us to see each other any more, it’s okay.
Love
Annie
I stood there holding the letter and looking at the word
“Love” at the end of it, knowing that I was jealous of the boy Annie’d mentioned, and that my not seeing Annie any more would be as ridiculous for me as she said her experiment with the boy had been for her. Could I even begin an experiment like that, I wondered, startled; would I? It was true I’d never consciously thought about being gay. But it also seemed true that if I were, that might pull together not only what had been happening between me and Annie all along and how I felt about her, but also a lot of things in my life before I’d known her—things I’d never let myself think about much. Even when I was little, I’d often felt as if I didn’t quite fit in with most of the people around me; I’d felt isolated in some way that I never understood.
And as I got older—well, in the last two or three years, I’d wondered why I’d rather go to the movies with Sally or some other girl than with a boy, and why, when I imagined living with someone someday, permanently I mean, that person was always female. I read Annie’s letter again, and again felt how ridiculous not seeing her any more would be—how much I’d miss her, too. When Annie came back from the bathroom, she stood across the room watching me for a few minutes. I could tell she was trying very hard to pretend her letter didn’t matter, but her eyes were so bright that I was pretty sure they were wet.
“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.
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 fundraising 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.”