Название: The Annie Year
Автор: Stephanie Wilbur Ash
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Юмористическая фантастика
isbn: 9781944700256
isbn:
It was a mocking thing.
“I’m a CPA... Kenny,” I said, and I looked him right in the eye.
He raised his eyebrows nearly to his hairline, like he was overly surprised, like he was in some sort of play himself right then. He chuckled. He said, “Is that right?”
I said, “That’s right.”
He said, “Well, I’m terrible with money.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I guess we both know what’s right then.”
He was exhausting. Certainly you can see that!
“It must be fascinating to be a CPA in this town,” he said. “You must know the money secrets of everyone sitting in this auditorium.”
One of the big cafeteria doors swung open but it was not my husband, Gerald, just Jenny Finch, the checkout girl at Hy-Vee with the big boobs.
The Vo-Ag teacher leaned toward me, and I could feel a tickle in my ear from his whisper, “So who’s loaded around here? Bierbrauer? That farmer, Mueller? That crazy lawyer, Huff?”
I think that fight-or-flight thing they talk about on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom is true because I almost hit him, but the cafeteria door swung open again and Gerald came barreling in like a semi.
Gerald could be good like that.
I left that Vo-Ag teacher standing alone, doing a little tap dance in his clogs like some sort of hippie elf.
Gerald was too fat to fit in his seat. It used to be that his body fit into that seat the same way ice cream folds over a cone poured by a poorly trained Dairy Queen girl. But not last year, not that Annie year. I put my hands on his shoulders and I pushed down as hard as I could but that just made everyone in the auditorium laugh.
“Did these chairs get smaller?!” Gerald said extra loud, for everyone’s benefit. Huff piped up from two rows back—“Put him on the stage!”—and of course Dieter did. And of course Gerald walked right up to it and slowly backed himself into it like his ass was a dump truck. And of course everyone cheered him on.
There isn’t a single person in this town who did not like Gerald, except perhaps the high school students who rode his school bus that year.
I sat in my usual seat with quiet and normal-sized Bud Sweitzer on my right and Gerald’s empty seat on my left. Mueller, who is indeed loaded with money, sat silent behind me. Then the lights faded and Gerald’s face dissolved and Mrs. Scarsdale, the band teacher and mother of last year’s Annie, counted down 1, 2, 3, 4, and the high school band blew the first notes of the first song like a trickle, all wobbly, and then somewhere in the dark the voice of Mrs. Scarsdale’s ninth-grade daughter, Dee Dee Scarsdale, oozing fake innocence, sang out: Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby—
I pinched the skin on my right wrist hard. The stage lights came up, and I thought for a moment that maybe having Gerald onstage would actually be better because I wouldn’t have to look at the production itself. But I saw that though Gerald’s hands were still latched around his gut, his eyes were closed, and his head had already sunk into his chins.
I closed my eyes too. I tried not to look at our Annie.
And then a bump and a stumble and then hands on my knees and then hands around my shoulders, and I opened my eyes and just above my nose was the colorful cotton butterfly of the Vo-Ag teacher’s belt.
Just like that we were together.
He never asked.
He was just there.
Won’t you please come get your baby, maybe? she sang.
He smelled like fresh-mowed sage in a green and wet ditch, like a spice I knew from the kitchen of a long-lost relative, like early spring even though it was the beginning of winter.
From what had always been Gerald’s seat, the Vo-Ag teacher watched the stage as if it were a miracle and not a bunch of awkward small-town teenagers trying to live up to their makeup. His eyes got big and round, like eggs; his mouth got open, like a pancake—his face looked like a brand-new breakfast. And when, at intermission, he turned toward me, his eyes were wet.
I’d seen grown men cry, certainly, but only at funerals, and even then I’d seen only the shaking of grown men’s backs, which can look just like laughing if you don’t think about it too hard. But something about his wet eyes, the way he looked right at me with them, as if he had no reason to be ashamed. It dropped my bottom out.
I watched the whole show. Everything. I watched twelve little girls dance around in dingy underwear. I watched the Hendersons’ family dog, playing the part of Sandy, run up the aisle next to me to sniff the crotch of Karen Wilson, the speech pathologist at the hospital. I watched Warbucks’s staff dance around Annie wringing their hands, singing, We’ve never had a little girl! We’ve never had a little girl! I watched Punjab karate-chop a Bolshevik, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt get their hearts melted by Annie’s sunny optimism—“There’s a song I used to sing in the orphanage...” she says. “Think of the children!” Eleanor says. I watched Annie, who was really Dee Dee Scarsdale with her good strong church voice trying hard to show spunk, dream of her real folks. I watched her reject Daddy Warbucks in favor of the fake family, which promised to be a real family, but was really just a couple of criminals looking to make some money off her spunky, charming little heart.
I had never actually watched a show. This time, I watched it all. And for that one moment I believed that a little orphan girl could find promise in the sun.
Then Hope ruined it. The daughter of my estranged best friend ruined it. It was a tragic surprise, I suppose, and also not. It was the kind of inevitable sadness I had come to expect but kept forgetting to expect, the kind of sadness that continues to snap me back to the true order of things in my life.
Toward the end of the show—right before Annie and Daddy Warbucks have their big finale, right where she should not have been—she staggered onto the stage. She was in the long red nightgown that indicated her role as Ms. Hannigan, the drunken orphanage headmistress. It was split in the chest to nearly her belly button. She is tiny, like her mother, Barb. Her stomach was flat, pulled back to nearly her spine so that she was like a saltine cracker from the side. But all that exposed skin made her look larger. So did the way she swaggered around as the drunken orphanage tyrant Ms. Hannigan. She weaved in and out of that scene that wasn’t hers with an empty wine bottle. “Did I hear singing in here?” she slurred. It was a line from way back in Act I. She stumbled, and everyone leaned back, like in those old pictures of audiences wearing 3-D glasses in a movie theater when the monster jumps out for the first time.
Everyone but him, of course. The Vo-Ag teacher leaned as forward as he could. He buried his hands in the long brown hair of Andrea Bodinski sitting in the seat in front of him.
Hope swaggered toward Annie, who just stood there, frozen, and with one wide arc of her skinny arm slapped that Annie across the face.
From the side of the СКАЧАТЬ