But When She Was Bad Page 4

  So did Annie turn on my LITTLE-BOY-INSIDE? Not quite. I wasn’t in love with Annie; I was at best in like and occasionally in lust.

  Clearly I can’t speak for Annie at that juncture—or indeed for any woman at any time. A man who proclaims otherwise, who says he knows what motivates or fulfills a woman, is deluded. Men and women are different species and we just can’t know what it’s like for each other. Scoff if you’d like. Juries and even Senators get away with thumbing their collective nose at irrefutable evidence … so obviously we’re all free to believe whatever the hell we’d like. Facts be damned. This is the age of We-Be-Gods. Some clueless male schmuck can pontificate about Venus vs. Mars and everybody who’s desperate to know just what in hell is wrong in their lives laps it up, thinking there’s an answer there. Well, there isn’t. We can guess what’s with another species, but we can’t know.

  When we were making love Annie looked at me with the frightened eyes of a paralyzed deer caught in oncoming headlights. She didn’t truly enjoy the physical act … and we certainly weren’t communing on any spiritual plane beyond that. It was disconcerting with her, the whole sex thing. I’d do my very best to turn her on and follow her and wait for her but oftentimes I’d give up and finish and there Annie would be, finishing herself with her own hand. Other times she’d do her very best to imitate the fabled log of men’s lore or, worse still, trip over into a giggling jag.

  That’s not to say it was always this way. I’d surely have given up on Ms. Annie White had that been the case. But even in the best of times it rarely got beyond … nice.

  Clearly something was wrong. I wasn’t reaching that LITTLE-GIRL-INSIDE who wanted to come in from the cold … who wanted a home where she would be safely held and cuddled and loved happily ever after.

  13

  Annie’s mother cut her off within a month or so of our getting together. There were angry telephone calls, tearful confrontations, and then the ultimatum: it’s either your father and me or that son of a bitch who just wants you to play housekeeper for his three brats.

  For reasons I never could have guessed back then, Anne picked me and the brats.

  I wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events. I’d never met the old crone or the mute appendage known as her husband but I knew that Annie needed them desperately—as deeply and achingly as an abused cocker spaniel needs the master who kicks and whacks and yells … but who also throws redeeming scraps of food and affection.

  Selfishly speaking, too, this falling out was going to make it harder on me and the kids. Because surely Annie would resent us at some level for bringing about such an impasse. At the same time, we’d be responsible for Annie emotionally. So where was the escape hatch? What if the four of us really didn’t get along with her?

  It wasn’t the first time her family had disowned Annie. When she was 17 or so, Annie was tossed out of the house and virtually to the other side of the continent. The crone enrolled her in a Bible school and ensconced her with an uncle. The crime that time: getting pregnant.

  Annie never told me the who, what, and how of that pregnancy and I didn’t ask. Nor did she talk much about the abortion. Just that it was done.

  Billy Greckle, queenly and compassionate landlord, hugged Annie for endless hours after this latest disowning and then called me up to give me a piece of his mind.

  “Well, you’ve done it now,” he announced primly.

  “Done what?”

  “You just couldn’t keep little rover in your pants as I so urgently suggested, so you had damned well better do the honorable thing and rescue this girl.”

  I sputtered, I choked. Had H.G. Wells been by again? Had the old phoof set the time machine back to the Victorian age? “Billy,” I said, “let me adjust my set. I think I’m getting a bad transmission.”

  I took the phone away from my ear and banged it on the desk a few times, hard.

  “How’s that?” I said. “Any better?”

  Billy was silent a while. I think he was waiting for the deafness to pass. “There’s no need to be rude,” he said finally. “Or childish,” he added.

  “Billy, this is between Annie and me.”

  “I—”

  “Annie and I will work it out.”

  “I—”

  “Ask Annie to call me, will you?”

  With that I hung up.

  She and I worked it out by talking some about our respective lives and then deciding, for the moment, to do nothing beyond what we’d been doing all along. Which was the usual jockeying for position in that man-woman power struggle I’ve referenced: the ballet of the egos and the ids that tells a couple who’s to run this or that and who’s to decide what, when.

  Annie showed increasing comfort with my three kids, and they with her. Soulful Jack, my somber seven-year-old, took to climbing on Annie’s lap whenever it happened to be free. He’d look up at her to check whether it was okay to have climbed up and when he got a smile he closed his eyes, lay his head against Annie’s chest, and sneaked a thumb into his mouth. This was way beyond regression, because Jack had never sucked his thumb when he was younger. I fretted on it a while and then decided just to leave it all alone. What could it harm?

  Allegra took to standing next to Annie. That’s all—just standing there and once in a great while touching at her jeans or her skirt. Touching and looking up at her, checking. She and Jack are inveterate checkers. I guess that comes from being raised by a single, distracted Dad. They always had to verify for themselves if he’s actually paying attention or just zooming past on his way to some other chore around the house.

  As you’d expect, Wolfie was a whole different case. He’s been perverse from day one. Instead of tracking Annie (as all of us anticipated he would do), he took to hiding from her and everybody else as well. I was on the verge of calling 9-1-1 late one evening—after he’d been unseen and unnoticed since breakfast—when Gus, the terrified mutt who happened to be with Annie that day, let out a bloody yelp and barreled hell-bent from the far end of the house into the kitchen. He was whining and crying and when he spotted Annie he literally jumped into her arms, all 65 pounds of him quivering in abject terror.

  Allegra and I looked at each other and whispered it simultaneously: “Wolfie.”

  We found him hidden under a mess of stuffed animals in the far recesses of a closet way off the beaten path. He growled at me when I finally uncovered him. I said, “Get out of there, dammit! Do you know how long we’ve been looking for you?” I was steamed.

  Wolfie growled some more and said, “Lady.”

  “What the hell do you mean, lady?” I said. “Get out of there now or I’ll—”

  I felt Annie’s touch on an elbow. “Let me, Gil,” she said. She crouched down and went nose-to-nose with Wolfie and let out what to my mind was a very scary growl. Wolfie growled back and she growled again and Allegra and I left the room, disgusted with the whole thing.

  Thankfully, he reverted to form after Annie tracked him down that one time and he went back to being the screwball we were familiar with. He once again tracked everybody. Incessantly. It really was annoying.

  14

  It’s Day Two of Nine and I’m missing Todd. I call over to the day care center where he spends his weekdays and check that he’s actually there, then hop in the car and pick him up. It’s a little after 10:30.

  That lab somewhere out in the Midwest would have received the package this morning, the one with my blood sample and Todd’s “buccal” cells. Some minimum-wage clerk would have already laid out all the materials and checked the paperwork. By now a white-coated technician, sluggish with the morning’s Egg McMuffin churning in his or her stomach, would have started soaking the half-dozen cotton swabs from Todd’s cheeks in some restriction enzyme or other. My blood is easier. They would have put it aside for a while, waiting for the right machine to free up so they could cut a droplet of my blood into fragments from which its DNA can be extracted.

  High-tech is mind-boggling to me. I still
don’t believe the telephone much less understand how it works, so how am I supposed to fathom nucleotides and ligation reactions and biotin-avidin magnetic beads? People do all this stuff for us. Then they tell us what’s become of our lives.

  “Okay, sport, where would you like to go?”

  He thinks a while. The choice is among McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and Burger King.

  “Burger Gink?”

  “Gotcha.”

  We chatter at each other on the way over and then he remembers that he drew a picture for me that morning. He takes a crumpled yellow piece of construction paper from a coat pocket and proudly hands it to me.

  “Wow,” I say, flicking my eyes from the windshield to this scriggled mess of red and blue and purple crayon line. “That’s terrific.” I look some more. “What is it?”

  Todd reaches over and turns it in my hand. I’d been looking at it upside down. Now it’s a scriggled mess of purple and blue and red. “Aha!” I say. “That’s even better.”

  “It’s ’Oolfie and ’Legra and Yack.”

  “Of course,” I say immediately. “I knew that.”

  Todd grins at me and gives me a four-year-old’s best condescending look. “You were just teasing me, Dad.”

  “I know,” I admit. “And you always catch me at it.”

  Todd’s different from the other three. That’s rather a truism, sure, considering the reality of different mothers and different times and far different circumstances. But it goes beyond that, too. And not just his looks: he’s got his Mom’s blue eyes, of course. Nor just his coloring either: he’s dark-skinned, while Allegra, Jack, and Wolfie all share my light coloring in amidst their own late mother’s fair color. But, heck, Annie’s a little darker, so that could account for his coloring.

  No, it’s more than that. It’s the spirit in Todd that sets him apart from my other three children and from me as well. He’s a sprite from another dimension I’m not entirely familiar with. I see it in his eyes when he looks at me, I feel it in his breath when he whispers “I love you, Dad” in my ear, I feel it in his touch when he reaches up to grab my index finger as we walk into the Burger King.

  “The usual?” I ask.

  “I want a toy I don’t have already.”

  I order a kid’s value meal or happy meal or whatever they call it—the one with the vacuum-sealed toy shoved in there. He grabs at the bag and reaches inside for the prize. It’s some kind of weird plastic gizmo that seems to have eyes and legs and a waving antenna. I open the package and hand it to him.

  “What is it?” he asks, turning it over and around in his little hands.

  “Darned if I know. I thought you knew.”

  “It’s stupid,” he says.

  “It’s supposed to be stupid,” I say. “It’s just junk to distract you from how bad your cheeseburger is going to be.”

  He looks at me askance, indulging my foolishness. “Oh, Dad.”

  I smile and shrug. He’s right. I’m awfully foolish. Embarrassingly so.

  15

  Annie writes notes. I kept dozens, maybe hundreds of them, on all kinds of flowered papers and edges of envelopes and scraps of kid drawings that just happened to be laying around when inspiration moved her. They’re all very sweet. Let me choose one totally at random:

  Dear Gil:

  This is your first letter from the new nursery. This room feels so nice just sitting here in my rocker looking at all the pretty new things for the baby. I’m so happy it seems like a dream. In just eight weeks or so our new little person will be in that crib. Thank you for this beautiful life we lead.

  The other night we were talking about how it seemed as if we’ve been together much longer than three years. But looking at that calendar you keep around from five or six years ago (the one with all the snapshots of the kids on each month’s page) makes me feel differently. It makes me feel sad. The pictures of the children make me feel sad because I’ve missed so much with them. The pictures of you make me feel sad because you look so distant, as if you had no aura, were not in your body. If only it were possible to reach into the past and give you a message. “There’s someone coming who is going to love you, share your life, your dreams, someone who wants to be there on your lousy days as well as your good days.”

  I look forward to the everydayness of our lives together, making babies, making love, drinking coffee on the patio, PTA, little league, enjoying the fireplace, bringing home the Christmas tree.

  Maybe feeling cheated out of the past makes me treasure the present.

  I’ll love you always,

  Annie

  Funny I would have picked this one. Because even though it’s well out of sequence in the story (being almost three years into the future) it does offer some intriguing clues as to the why of Annie. There’s the jealousy and resentment, first of all, of the times that came before—and at the same moment the denigration of those times. As if they had no value because Annie wasn’t there to elevate them from the “no aura” limbo the kids and I were so obviously in. “Snapshots,” too: that’s important. Despite the fact that my photography, while to my mind not in the realm of great art, was at least competent … Annie was rather dismissive of the skills that went into it. “Nice” was as far she would go when she was moved to comment at all.

  Nice. How fitting.

  16

  We’d met in June, had a lunch or two in July, made love for the first time in August, backed off for a while, then picked up with a vengeance in October. By Thanksgiving, Annie was about to move in.

  She looked very good that night. She was wearing a low-cut green dress, a slim strand of white pearls and heels that showed her legs to their best advantage. No question about it: when Annie puts on the makeup and fixes the hair and flashes that wonderful smile, men can melt at the thought of the further charms hidden underneath it all.

  The three kids were in bed, exhausted after the heavy dinner my mother puts on for Thanksgiving and fulfilled from all the terrorizing they can do with eight cousins of similar age. Annie and I were just sitting there on a couch in the living room, recovering. She had her legs tucked up under her and she was brushing at the hair at my temples. I was mellowed out, feeling that things were, by and large, okay. Of course, there was that pile of work back in the studio that I’d have to get out by Monday morning and …

  “I love you as much as life itself,” Annie whispered.

  “I—”

  She put her finger to my lips. She looked into my eyes and whispered some more. “I want to be with you and the kids all the time. I want to move in and be an old-fashioned wife and mother. Because when I’m around all of you I couldn’t possibly want anything more out of life.”

  “This is sudden,” I allowed.

  “No,” she said. “It’s out of time, it’s apart from time. Because I will love you for all time and I want us to not waste any more of it. I want us to—”

  There was a growl just to the edge of the couch and I grimaced. Wolfie. “Get back in bed, Gaynor,” I barked. “Right this minute or I’ll smack your bottom real good.”

  I heard a quick scurry down the hall and I turned back toward Annie. Her eyes were narrowed in a smolder of resentment. She caught my look and quickly turned away. When she turned back it was all gone and the Annie who could make me melt was there again.

  I didn’t process that look for a long while. I should have, but I think that more often than we’d care to admit we react to what we want to hear and what we want to see rather than what’s actually in front of us. As far as I could see at the moment, sitting with me on the green living room couch on that Thanksgiving night was the kind, attractive, energetic answer to my prayers. Someone who not only didn’t mind three young children but who said she could love them like her own. Someone who didn’t need or want any children of her own—“Absolutely not”—because her love for me and them was so encompassing. Someone, on top of all that, who relished the prospect of being an “old fashioned” wife a
nd mother.

  Glory be. You’da thought I died and went to heaven.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s try it for a while.”

  It’s amazing how casually we give our power away.

  17

  We agreed that Annie should quit her job if she was going to devote all her time to the house and the kids and she did quit, within days.

  Since the kids were all (finally) in school, I had only a part-time housekeeper at that point and we let her go with a couple months’ bonus in hand. Annie fell into her new role with great energy. She cleaned, she washed, she cooked—she even brought home books from the library on how to do all this.

  How To Keep A Really Spotless House was one of them, I remember. I saw it on her night table and I kidded her, “This is a sequel, isn’t it? It’s the followup to First Get Rid of Your Kids and Husband.”

  Annie was sitting on the bed, reading. She stared blankly at me for a few seconds, then sprang off the bed and bolted into the bathroom. I could hear her crying softly and I smacked myself in the head for being such an insensitive lout.

  “I’m sorry, Annie,” I told the bathroom door very quietly. “I was just kidding, you know.”

  She emerged eventually and gave me a look I thought was reserved for people who killed pet gerbils with baseball bats. She said, “It’s not funny, your teasing me all the time.”

  “Annie, I don’t teas—”

  “You’re always picking on what I do or don’t do and how long it’s taking me or what I should do first or when I should do it.”

  “No, I—”

  “I’ve never done this before, you know, so it’s not my fault if everything isn’t perfectly the way you want it, and you shouldn’t take it out on me if something isn’t precisely right or done perfectly or done the way Jillian would have done it or, or …” The tears moved in again and she stopped, shuddering into hands that masked her face.