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.