We Are Water. Wally Lamb

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       Chapter Five

       Annie Oh

      Viveca has left the prenup on her desk in the study: six legal-size pages with little cellophane flags to indicate the places where my signature’s supposed to go. She’s signed it already in her deliberate, forward-slanting penmanship. I haven’t signed it yet and may not. What’s she or her father’s lawyer going to do if I don’t? Stop the wedding? No, she wouldn’t do that. I’m not powerless in this relationship. Gallery owners need artists more than artists needs gallery owners … But that’s not fair. I mean more to Viveca than those commissions. She loves me. I know she does. But I also know that she envies me my creativity, my treacherous rides inside the cyclone. “Other agents have approached you. Haven’t they, Anna? You can tell me,” she’s said more than once. That’s where my power comes from. I know what her professional insecurities are, and also her personal secrets: that she terminated a pregnancy by a former lover, a man who refused to leave his wife; that she was not an only child like she tells everyone but had a mentally retarded brother who was hidden away at some training school. Profoundly retarded, she told me. She used to hate it when her parents made her go with them on those visits and she had to look at him, drooling and wearing a dirty helmet, banging his head against the wall. I’ve made it my business to know these things but have told Viveca very little about my own history. I hold my cards close to the vest, the way I did all those years with Orion. I may have been powerless against those floodwaters. Powerless against Kent’s secret visits to my room. But I learned about power the day that I got on that Greyhound bus and the driver pulled out of the depot and carried me away from the black hole that had almost sucked me in. The black hole that my life was about to become with Albie Wignall …

      I’m seventeen again, stuck in Sterling because that’s where my foster family lives. I’m dating Albie, not because I like him very much, but because one thing has led to another. Two of those snooty girls from my high school, Holly Grandjean and Kathy Fontaine, finally have noticed me—well, not me so much as what we sell at Jo-Jo’s Nut Shack. “Oh, wook. Gummy bears! I wuv Gummy bears,” Kathy says, and Holly says she “wuvs” them, too. I’m not sure why they’re talking baby talk. Are they making fun of me? But then, I decide they aren’t because Holly looks up from my merchandise to me and says I look familiar. “Don’t you go to Plainfield High?” she says, and I nod and tell them that all three of us were in the same gym class freshman year. I’m so grateful that they’re acknowledging my existence, these girls I thought I hated, that I shovel scoop after scoop of gummy bears into an open bag and tell them to just take them instead of paying for them. And then, at the end of my shift, my boss, Leland, points up at the surveillance camera mounted over the entrance to Jordan Marsh. It’s aimed right at my kiosk. Leland tells me to take off my Jo-Jo’s apron and not come back because I’m fired.

      But a week later, I get another, better job waitressing at Friendly’s. My manager, Winona Wignall, assigns me to the take-out window, which the newest waitress always gets. But within two weeks, Priscilla is the new girl, and I’m serving people at the counter and making tips. Over the next weeks, Priscilla and I become friends, bonded by the fact that, out of all the Friendly’s waitresses, Winona likes us two the least.

      Winona’s son, Albie, is twenty-three but he acts younger. He works at the Midas Mufflers down the road. After work, he comes over to Friendly’s to eat and hang around. He starts picking my section to sit at every time, and it’s kind of flattering, although he’s not much of a tipper. One time all he leaves me is eleven stacked pennies. Albie’s over six feet tall, and he’s blond and broad but not really fat, which is a miracle because СКАЧАТЬ