The Annie Year. Stephanie Wilbur Ash

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      Doc and Huff stared at Gary. Then Doc said, “Gary, I take back what I said about you being an idiot. You’re a goddamn genius. Tandy’s the true idiot. Put that in the notes, Tandy.”

      And I did.

      For posterity.

      That is how it started.

       II.

       THE VO-AG TEACHER

       2

      It was the next night that I met the new vocational agriculture teacher. He was standing at the east entrance to the high school auditorium under a big ANNIE sign someone had cut from cardboard and glued some glitter to.

      When I add up the total sum of that year, it is this particular line item that always gets me: it had to be an Annie year.

      You see, if there is a talented tall girl at the high school, they do Hello, Dolly! If there is a girl who is unusually ugly but funny enough to pull off Snoopy, they do You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. If a lot of boys get suspended from football early in the season for drinking and one of the star players—the quarterback or the lead tackle or whoever—can convince the rest of the team into singing in public, they do Guys and Dolls.

      They don’t do Annie that often because Annie requires a certain type of extraordinary talent. There must be a girl, usually a small one, with both spunky charm and believable innocence. That just doesn’t happen in this town.

      Probably there are Annies with spunky-yet-innocent dispositions on every busy street corner in your town. Here, you might get a believable innocence, and it may even come paired with a good strong church voice, but the spunky charm will have been beaten out of that girl before her tenth birthday, as was the case with Dee Dee Scarsdale, our Annie that year, and she had even been given the privilege of years of music lessons because her mother is the town’s band teacher.

      There are several children with only spunky charm here, though. They act like they invented spunky charm, throwing rocks at the Country Kitchen sign and then laughing obnoxiously while they toss their hair and their body parts around. They lack even a hint of the believable innocence Annie is supposed to have. The children in this town are like that woman sitting on the swing on Hee Haw, Kenny Rogers’s wife, pretending to be a virgin but with her breasts popping out of a tightly wound corset and the entire audience in on the joke.

      I was looking for my husband, Gerald, and so I didn’t notice the Vo-Ag teacher at first. I noticed Elmer Griggs, who owns the golf course, pretending to swing a golf club in the corner for Dave Oppegaard, the head volunteer fireman who also manages the grain elevator. They waved when they saw me. I waved back. Cindy from Prairie Lanes was standing behind the snack table, and she waved when she saw me, and then she pointed me out to her best friend, Helen Sweeter, who also waved. I waved back. Howie Claus, the Methodist minister, was complaining to Clive Liestman, one of John Mueller’s farmhands, about who knows what, but Clive was looking at me instead of Howie. Mueller, who is my best client, walked out of the bathroom and then Clive pointed at me and soon all three of them were looking at me.

      I decided to keep my coat on.

      Doc and Huff held up the west wall by the famous picture of Gerald throwing the state-winning shot put in high school, back when he fit into tiny yellow shorts. Huff leaned toward Doc and whispered something to him. I could see Huff’s puffy lips flapping, how he bounced from one bowed leg to another. Doc listened with his spindly tobacco arms crossed, staring me down.

      Then Dieter Bierbrauer, the high school principal, waved me over. He was standing with the new Vo-Ag teacher under the ANNIE sign.

      And there he was: ponytail, bright red work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, tight faded jeans, man clogs, and that belt.

      Dieter said, “This is the new Vo-Ag teacher and Future Farmers of America adviser,” and said his name too, “Kenny Tischer,” and then, “Tandy is a great lover of the theater.”

      The Vo-Ag teacher said, “Is that right?” and smiled widely. His teeth were very white, like in a commercial for toothpaste. “Do you love all the arts, or just the theater?”

      “I give a hundred dollars every year to the Theater Boosters,” I said.

      Dieter nodded so fast his white-blond combover flapped.

      The Vo-Ag teacher said, “Principal Bierbrauer here was asking me about my belt... Tandy.”

      He said my name slowly, in what you might call a deliberate way. It sounded like he thought my name was special, like it was full of potential.

      No one had ever said my name like that before.

      “It is an unusual belt,” Dieter said. He was looking at the Vo-Ag teacher’s crotch.

      Perhaps this is okay with people like you, for a man to look at another man’s crotch, but this was brand new to me. Dieter actually bent down to get a closer look. And then, I don’t know why—I can’t explain it except to say this is the kind of effect the Vo-Ag teacher had on people, because I don’t think I could have helped myself, or maybe I was just a weak person then (I’m stronger now)—but I bent down to get a closer look.

      There I was, thirty seconds into meeting him, bending toward his crotch.

      I must say, though, that it was an unusual belt. It was made of cloth, not leather, and it had red, black, and green patterns and a row of tiny shells stitched along one edge. There was no buckle and no holes on the ends of the belt. Each end was stopped up with a tiny fringe, and the Vo-Ag teacher had simply tied these fringed ends together in a knot above his zipper so the ends waved out like some sort of cotton butterfly.

      Maybe you see these kinds of belts all the time where you live. I do not.

      I said that too. “I have never seen a belt like that before,” I said.

      I wanted to say, Why are you here? Why would a person like you with a belt like this and a ponytail like that and man clogs ever come to a place like this? But I didn’t.

      The Vo-Ag teacher squinted at me. He said, “I got it while I was serving in the Peace Corps in the country of Benin, in Africa. For the Yoruba people there, shells were once currency and art medium. The Yoruba believe art is inseperable from life.”

      Dieter and I nodded fast and hard like pecking chickens. Dieter’s combover flapped like a flag.

      The Vo-Ag teacher said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

       A stranger who tells you how beautiful his own belt is?

      I nodded in the direction of his clogs. They were wool. His feet would get very wet this winter, I thought. He should get himself a good pair of boots if he’s going to stick around. I had never heard of the Yoruba. I had never even met a person from Africa. I had only been to Des Moines a couple of times.

      Dieter sucked in a big breath, put his big white hands СКАЧАТЬ