Anything Is Possible

  Her brother kept looking at the comic book he held open. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. But when Annie sighed and turned to go, he said, “Of course she’s an old hag. And don’t worry about her. You always exaggerate everything.” He was quoting his mother, who said that Annie exaggerated things.

  The farm had belonged to Sylvia’s father. Elgin had lived three towns away, though he had originally come from Illinois; he had been raised in a trailer with a family that had no money, farm, or religion. He had worked on farms, though, and knew the business, and after he married Sylvia he took over the farm when his father-in-law died. At some point, before Annie’s memory, the house for her grandmother had been built. Until then she had lived in the main house with the rest of the family.

  “Listen to this,” Jamie had said, coming to Annie one day before supper, and they went to the barn and huddled in the loft. “I hid it under Nana’s couch before Ma came over.” The tape recorder clicked and whirred. Then there was the clear voice of their grandmother saying to her daughter, “Sylvia, it gags me. I lie here and I want to vomit. But you’ve made your bed. So you lie in the bed you made, my dear.” And there was the sound of their mother crying. There was some murmur of a question. Should she speak to the priest? Their grandmother said, “I’d be too embarrassed, if I were you.”

  It seemed to be forever, the white snow around them, her grandmother next door lying on her couch wanting to die, Annie still the one who chattered constantly. She was now an inch short of six feet and thin as a wire, her dark hair long and wavy. Her father found her one day behind the barn and he said, “I want you to stop going off into the woods the way you do. I don’t know what you’re up to there.” Her amazement had more to do with the disgust and anger of his expression. She said she was up to nothing. “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, Annie, you stop or I’ll see to it you never leave this house.” She opened her mouth to say, Are you crazy?, but the thought touched her mind that maybe he was, and this frightened her in a way she had not known a person could be frightened. “Okay,” she said. But it turned out she could not stay away from the woods on days when the sun was bright. The physical world with its dappled light was her earliest friend, and it waited with its open-armed beauty to accept her sense of excitement that nothing else could bring. She learned the rhythms of those around her, where they would be and when, and she slipped into the woods closer to town, or behind the school, and there she would sing with gentleness and exuberance a song she’d made up years earlier, “I’m so glad that I’m living, just so glaaad that I’m living—” She was waiting.

  And then she wasn’t waiting, because Mr. Potter saw her in a school play and arranged for her to be in a summer theater, and people in the summer theater took her to Boston, then she was gone. She was sixteen years old, and that her parents did not object, did not even ask her to finish high school, occurred to her only later. At the time there were various men, many of them fat and soft and with large rings on their fingers, who held her close in darkened theaters and murmured how lovely she was, like a fawn in the woods, and they sent her to different auditions, found her people to stay with in different rooms in different towns, people, she found, who were extraordinarily, unbelievably kind. The same compression of God’s presence she knew in the woods expanded into strangers who loved her, and she went from stage to stage around the country, and when she came back to visit the house at the end of the road she was really surprised by how small it was, how low the ceilings. The gifts she bore, sweaters and jewelry and wallets and watches—knockoffs bought from city sidewalk vendors—seemed to embarrass her family. Her very presence seemed to embarrass them. “You’re so thespian,” her father murmured in a voice coated with distaste.

  “No, I’m not,” she said, because she thought he had said “lesbian.”

  His face had gotten heavier, though he was still lean. He slid a watch across the table to her. “Find someone else who can use this. When have you ever seen me wear a watch?”

  But her grandmother, who looked just the same, sat up and said, “You’ve become beautiful, Annie. How did that happen? Tell me everything.” And so Annie sat in the big chair and told her grandmother about dressing rooms and small apartments in different towns and how everyone took care of one another and how she never forgot her lines. Her grandmother said, “Don’t come back. Don’t get married. Don’t have children. All those things will bring you heartache.”

  For a long time Annie did not come back. She sometimes missed her mother, as though she felt across the miles a wave of sadness lapping up to her from Sylvia, but when she telephoned her mother always said “Oh, not much here is new” and did not seem at all interested in what Annie was doing. Her sister never wrote or called, and Jamie very seldom. At Christmastime she sent home boxes of gifts until her mother sighed over the telephone and said, “Your father wants to know what we’re to do with all this rubbish.” This hurt her feelings, but not lastingly, because those she lived with and knew from the theater were so warm and kind and outraged on her behalf. The older members of any cast treated Annie with tenderness, and so without realizing it she stayed in lots of ways a child. “Your innocence protects you,” a director told her once, and in truth she did not know what he meant.

  —

  There is a saying that every woman should have three daughters because that way there will be one to take care of you in old age. Annie Appleby was everywhere, California, London, Amsterdam, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and the only place Sylvia could find her was in a gossip magazine at the drugstore, where her name had been linked with that of a famous movie star. This embarrassed Sylvia; people in town learned not to mention it. Cindy was nearby in New Hampshire; she’d had many children quickly and a husband who wanted her home. So it was Jamie who stayed at the farm, unmarried. Silently he worked alongside his father, who remained strong even with age. Silently Jamie tended to the needs of his grandmother next door. Sylvia often said, “What would I do without you, Jamie?” And he would shake his head. His mother was lonely, he knew. He saw how his father increasingly did not speak with her. His father began to eat sloppily, which he had never done. The sound of his chewing was notable; bits of food fell down onto his shirt. “Elgin, my goodness,” Sylvia said, rising to get a napkin, and he shook her off. “For Christ’s sake, woman!”

  Privately Sylvia said, “What’s wrong with your father?” But Jamie shrugged and they did not talk about it again until Jamie, going through the books, realized what was happening. Terribly, it all made sense: his father’s querulousness, his sudden asking repeatedly where Annie was, “Where is that child? Is she in the woods again?” All this fell into Jamie’s stomach with the silence of a stone falling into the darkness of a well. Within a year they could not care for the man; he ran away, he started a fire in the barn, he drove them insane with his questions, “Where’s Annie? Is she in the woods?” And so they found him a home, and Elgin was furious to be there. Sylvia stopped visiting because he was so angry when she came, one time calling her a cow. The sisters were informed, and Cindy came home for a few days, but Annie could not. She said she could be there by spring.

  When she turned off Route 4, she was surprised to find that the dirt road had been paved and was no longer a narrow road. A few new and large houses had been added near the Daigle place. She barely recognized where she was. Cindy was in the kitchen, which seemed even smaller than the last time Annie had come home, and when Annie bent to kiss her, Cindy just stood without moving. Their mother, said Jamie, was upstairs; she would be down after the kids had talked. Annie felt the physical, almost electric, aspects of alarm and sank slowly into a chair as she unbuttoned her coat. Jamie spoke carefully and directly. Their father was being asked to leave the home he was in; he was abusive to the orderlies, Jamie said, making sexual passes at all the men, grabbing at their crotches, and was altogether disruptive. A psychiatrist had seen him, and their father had given permission for their talks to be shared,
though how a man with dementia could give permission Jamie did not understand, but as a result Sylvia had learned that for years Elgin had had a relationship with Seth Potter, they were lovers, Sylvia said she had often suspected this, and Elgin was, demented as he might be, referring to himself as a raging homosexual, and he was very graphic in things he said; they would most likely have to put him in a far less pleasant place, there was no money unless they sold the farm, and no one was buying potato farms these days.

  “All right,” Annie finally said. Her siblings had been silent for many minutes, and their faces had seemed so young and sad although they were middle-aged faces with middle-aged lines. “All right, we’ll deal with this.” She nodded at them reassuringly. Later she went next door to see her grandmother, who seemed surprisingly unchanged. She lay on the couch and watched her granddaughter go about turning on lights. “You came home to deal with your father? Your mother’s had a hell of a time.”

  “Yes,” Annie said, and sat in the big chair nearby.

  “If you want my opinion, your father went mad because of his behavior. Being a pervert. I always knew he was a homo, and that can drive you insane, and now he’s insane, that’s my opinion, if you want it.”

  “I don’t,” Annie said gently.

  “Then tell me something exciting. Where have you been that’s exciting?”

  Annie looked at her. The old woman’s face was as expectant as a child’s, and Annie felt an unbidden and almost unbearable gash of compassion for this woman, who had lived in this house for years. She said, “I went to the ambassador’s home in London. They had the whole production there for dinner. That was exciting.”

  “Oh, tell me everything, Annie.”

  “Let me sit for a minute.” And so they were silent, her grandmother lying back down like a young person trying to be patient, and Annie, who up until this very day had always felt like a child—which is why she could not marry, she could not be a wife—now felt quietly ancient. She thought how for years onstage she had used the image of walking up the dirt road holding her father’s hand, the snow-covered fields spread around them, the woods in the distance, joy spilling through her—how she had used this scene to have tears immediately come to her eyes, for the happiness of it, and the loss of it. And now she wondered if it had even happened, if the road had ever been narrow and dirt, if her father had ever held her hand and said that his family was the most important thing to him.

  “That’s right,” she had said earlier to her sister, who had cried out that were it true they would have known. What Annie did not say was that there were many ways of not knowing things; her own experience over the years now spread like a piece of knitting in her lap with different colored yarns—some dark—all through it. In her thirties now, Annie had loved men; her heart had often been broken. Currents of treachery and deceit seemed to run everywhere; the forms they took always surprised her. But she had many friends, and they had their disappointments too, and nights and days were spent giving support and being supported; the theater world was a cult, Annie thought. It took care of its own even while it hurt you. She had recently, though, had fantasies of what they called “going normal.” Having a house and a husband and children and a garden. The quietness of all that. But what would she do with all the feelings that streamed down her like small rivers? It was not the sound of applause Annie liked—in fact, she often barely heard it—it was the moment onstage when she knew she had left the world and fully joined another. Not unlike the feelings of ecstasy she’d had in the woods as a child.

  Her father must have worried she would come across him in the woods. Annie shifted in the big chair.

  “Did they tell you about Charlene?” her grandmother said.

  “Charlene Daigle?” Annie turned to look at the old woman. “What about her?”

  “She’s started a chapter for incest people. Incest Survivors, I believe they’re called.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Soon as that father died, she started it. Ran an article in the newspaper, said one out of five children are sexually abused. Honestly, Annie. What a world.”

  “But that’s awful. Poor Charlene!”

  “She looked pretty good in her picture. Heavier. She’s gotten heavier.”

  “My God,” Annie said softly.

  Cindy had said quietly, “We must have been the laughingstock of the county.”

  “No,” Jamie had said to her. “Whatever he did, he hid.”

  Annie had seen how their distress showed in their guarded faces. “Oh,” she had said, feeling maternal, protective, toward them. “It doesn’t really matter.”

  But it did! Oh, it did.

  Back in the main house, Sylvia sat with her children for supper in the kitchen. “I heard about Charlene,” Annie said. “It’s unbelievably sad.”

  “If it’s true,” answered Sylvia.

  Annie looked at her siblings, but they looked at the food they moved into their mouths. “Why would it not be true? Why would someone make that up?” Jamie shrugged, and Annie saw—or felt she saw—that Charlene’s burdens were nothing to them; their own universe and its wild recent unmooring were all that mattered now. Sylvia went upstairs to bed, and the three siblings sat talking by the wood stove. Jamie especially could not stop talking. Their once silent father in his state of dementia seemed unable to keep himself from spilling forth all he had held on to secretly for years, and Jamie, who had been silent himself, now had to tumble all he heard before them. “One time they saw you in the woods, Annie, and he was always afraid after that that you’d find them.” Annie nodded. Cindy looked at her sister with a pained face, as though Annie should have more of a reaction than that. Annie put her hand over her sister’s for a moment. “But one of the strangest things he said,” Jamie reported, sitting back, “was that he drove us to school so he could, just for those moments, be near Seth Potter. He didn’t even see him, dropping us off. But he liked knowing he was close to him each morning. That Seth was only a few feet away, inside the school.”

  “Oh God, it makes me sick,” Cindy said.

  Jamie squinted at the wood stove. “It puzzles me, is all.”

  The vulnerability of their faces Annie could almost not bear. She looked around the small kitchen, the wallpaper with water stains streaking down it, the rocking chair their father had always sat in, the cushion now with a rip large enough to show the stuffing, the teakettle on the stove that had been the same one for years, the curtain across the top of the window with a fine spray of cobwebs between it and the pane. Annie looked back at her siblings. They may not have felt the daily dread that poor Charlene had lived with. But the truth was always there. They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.

  Gift

  Abel Blaine was late.

  A meeting with directors from all over the state had gone too long, and all afternoon Abel had sat in the conference room with its rich cherry table stretching like a dark ice rink down the center, the people around it trying to sit up straighter the more tired they became. A young girl from the Rockford region, who Abel felt was carefully dressed for her first company presentation—he was moved by this—had talked on and on, people looking at Abel with increasing panic—Make her stop—because he was the man in charge. Perspiring lightly, he had finally stood and put his papers into his briefcase, and thanked the girl—woman, woman! you could not call them girls these days, for the love of God—and she blushed and sat down and didn’t seem to know where to look for a few minutes until people on their way out spoke to her nicely, as did Abel himself. Then Abel was finally in his car, on the expressway, then
steering through the narrow snowy streets, and pleased, as he so often was, by the sight of his large brick house, which tonight had a tiny white light twinkling from each window.

  His wife opened the door and said, “Oh, Abel, you forgot.” Above the collar of her red dress, little green Christmas ball earrings moved.

  He said, “I got here as fast as I could, Elaine.”

  “He forgot,” she said to Zoe, and Zoe said, “Well, you can’t eat, Dad, we had to feed the kids and we’re really late.”

  “I won’t eat,” Abel said.

  Zoe’s tightened mouth caused a brief cramping of his bowels, but the grandchildren were clapping their hands and yelling “Grandpa, Grandpa!” and his wife was telling him to hurry, please would he hurry, dear God. Abel had entered a period in life in which he acknowledged that the Christmas season tended to make people irritable, yet his own sense of Christmas—lit trees and happy children and stockings that sagged from the mantel—he could not seem to give up.

  Walking through the lobby of the Littleton Theater, he saw that he did not have to give anything up, for here it was: the town together as it was each year, little girls in plaid shiny dresses, boys wide-eyed and wearing shirts with collars as though they were miniature men; there was the priest from the Episcopal church—soon to retire and be replaced by a lesbian, which Abel gamely accepted, though he’d have liked Father Harcroft to stay on forever; there was the head of the school board; and there was Eleanor Shawtuck, who had been at the meeting today, now giving Abel a wave with a widening of her smile; they were all getting settled into their seats, murmurs and shushes, the final diminution of sound. A whisper: “Grandpa, my dress is getting squished.” His sweet Sophia, who held her plastic pony with its pink hair tightly in her fist; he moved his already cramped leg and let her shake out her skirt, whispering to her that she was the prettiest girl there, and she said, a little too loudly, “Snowball has never seen a play before,” bouncing the pony on her knee. The lights dimmed, the show began.