By Victor Greto
I was in love for the first time in my life – this from a guy who “falls in love” every other day with some girl he meets.
But with Annie, it was so gradual it hurt. I mean, she was just a little girl, and such a pain in the ass at first, and it was because of her Dorothy and I broke up. Well, yes, it was really because of me that we broke up because I haven’t a clue about relationships and how to handle a child, and all the rest. But that’s not what I want to talk about at all.
One other thing I need to get out of the way right now. Because I’m certain you’ve already thought it. Is this dude a pervert? A sort of writing-impaired Lewis Carroll? No. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. Even if you still don’t believe me, I hope the truth lies somewhere within the story I’m telling.
Let me give you one example. When we came back to Colorado after living in Wisconsin for about a year, we lived way out on the east side of town. I worked in the evenings, so I had the mornings and early afternoons off. During the summer, Annie’s not going to school and we liked to take walks together.
I mean, it’s the best thing in the world, to take a walk with Annie. Holding hands, laughing about nothing. And, yes, at those times, anyway, I feel like she loves me. A lot. I learned to live for those times. And there’s nothing better than feeling Annie loves you. Because Annie wants nothing back. That’s what real love is, right? When someone wants nothing back?
It was those times when Annie loved me that I felt like me. Nothing like from Dorothy. That was as much about sex or some other sort of neediness that I’m not interested in talking about right now. This was just about giving. And we laughed out loud at the dumbest things when we walked. Ever laugh both consistently and spontaneously with someone?
We often went to the used record shop to look around for stuff. We were both into MGM musicals and bought High Society one day. We both loved the movie, and we practically skipped back to the town house we were renting at the time. In fact, we laughed so much coming back that, when we passed an older lady walking in the other direction, she said in genuine astonishment, “You both sound so happy!”
We had lots of times like that.
Okay, you’re thinking, that’s really cute, maybe even innocent, but so what?
The so what is that she grew to hate me just as much. And I grew to hate her, too, though I can’t stop loving her, and I don’t think she ever stopped loving me.
That’s what this is all about.
Maybe joyful moments exist to cheat reality. I’ve thought of that idea a lot, trying to make sense of why I love Annie so much. You want it to be that way all the time. That’s probably a sign of immaturity. I mean, after all, how could it be that way all the time? Still, sometimes I think that’s why most people go from love to love, or stay with one person while pouring themselves into a hobby or career or something, or do drugs and become addicts or drink a lot and become alcoholics. Because your brain is always moving, jumping, looking for that perpetual state of mind that affirms everything in a moment. And that’s what love does. That’s not corny; it’s truer than anything I know.
I lost Annie a long time ago. I don’t remember how old she was; maybe nine or ten. I can be cynical and say, maybe at the time she started thinking for herself. But I don’t think that’s true. Funny how a person ends up living her or his life: you have no choice but to concentrate on yourself because that’s what it seems you’re geared to do. It becomes tougher to give once you reach a certain age, maybe, because you’re so full of who you are and what you want to be. It seems natural enough, but I wonder about that now. There’s nothing inevitable about selfishness, is there?
I had an analogous situation. When I was growing up, my dad was always nuts and my mom was a martyr, and though she was very nice to me in a lot of important ways, I recall very early just crashing into myself and not giving a damn thing to anyone. I’m as lonely as I was when I was a kid – except for those times with Annie when, suddenly, out of the blue sky, I no longer concentrated on me and felt genuinely happy.
Sometimes I think that was the crux of my pain with Dorothy, but that’s another story. The thing with Annie is that when she stopped giving to me spontaneously, I stopped giving back, and it spiraled into petulance and bitterness.
But even when the petulance got bad, we broke through a couple of times. For instance, when I got a tape of Frank Sinatra at the house I bought. Like I said before, Annie and I like MGM musicals, so our tastes inclined that way, but when we first heard Frank sing Nice ‘n Easy at the very end of that tape, we just looked at each other and smiled stupidly. I mean, completely idiotically, and we danced! I still remember the moment. I used to iron my clothes in two-hour-long marathons, and that’s what I was doing when I was playing the tape. When I got sick of ironing, she’d actually take over for me for a couple of shirts, and then it would go back to me. So, she was doing a shirt when the song came on and, as I say, we looked at each other and smiled and both let out a short laugh. I held out my left hand to her and asked her if she would like this dance. She put the iron back up and took my hand and we danced around the room and it was like it was before without me thinking how it was like before because it was, once again, the moment, and I could feel my cheeks ache with redness, and looking down at her, she was smiling, too, and the room was spinning around and I held her hand.
But those moments became rare as time went on, especially after we moved into the house. But it really had started long before then, when I’d first moved in with Dorothy in the duplex she’d been renting, when I was just nineteen, for Christ’s sake. Then, Annie was just a sprite, with straight blond hair and chubby cheeks. She was all of four or five. And it must have been so strange for her to have this guy just start living in the same house. I still had pimples, and wanted to have sex all the time with her mother. That’s it in a nutshell. She meant nothing to me. I think she knew it, too, and it hurt her a lot.
I was as oblivious to her as my old man had been about me, at least when he’d been sick. I had no excuse, however. Because I was this big reader, I wouldn’t put up with any noise in the house when I was home. Although she was quiet a lot of the time, other times she wasn’t, and I’d holler for quiet while she played. Because she meant nothing to me, each little form of disobedience angered me to the point of rage. I hollered at her when she refused to do anything I asked, from cleaning up her room to turning up the stereo. I was a complete prick. Although I’d give her the occasional hug, mostly I just went my own way. She put up with me the way I must have put up with my old man: silently and with a thread of hope that, maybe, just maybe, things would get better if she was just patient enough.
Things changed after I married her mother. I took a little more interest in her, even as I started going to a college full-time and working at the library after classes. I had gotten a full scholarship at a private liberal arts college after my year-long community college stint, and both Dorothy and Annie were proud of me. Flushed with myself over this achievement, I began to see Annie differently, more intimately. For one thing, after I married her mother, she starting calling me daddy, which really knocked me out. I mean, me a daddy? Here I was at twenty-two and suddenly inherited a seven-year-old girl who called me daddy as though I had been the man in her life from the beginning of time. It was the way she said it – as an aside, a goes-without-saying term of endearment – that began to whittle away at me, my deliberate fixation on reading and doing well in school.
She began to look at me for long periods of time while I studied. She’d grab one of her own books and read next to me, cuddled close on the couch. After a time, I took to reading some of the more difficult passages in her books to her.
For the hell of it (because when I prowled the used bookstores I never thought of anyone else, and concentrated solely and almost involuntarily upon the books that would improve my reading and writing skills), I bought one of those old Modern Library books of Lewis Carroll’s works when I was at the used bookstore, took it home, and made a big deal out of reading it to Annie. I made so it was an event. Alice was seven in the book, and Annie had just turned seven. I said we’d call it Annie’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Annie Found There. I even wrote her name over Alice’s in the book. She was delighted.
She became entranced from the very beginning, including the poem Carroll wrote as a preface to the story, the one that shows the moment when he came up with the idea, floating off in a boat with Alice and her two sisters, beginning with
All in the golden afternoon/ Full leisurely we glide;/ For both our oars, with little skill,/ By little arms are plied,/ While little hands make vain pretence/ Our wanderings to guide.
And ending with the appropriate substituted name,
Annie! A childish story take,/ And, with a gentle hand,/ Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined/ In Memory’s mystic band./ Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers/ Pluck’d in a far-off land.
We grew curiouser and curiouser at our own enthusiasm, as puzzled at ourselves as we were at the Jabberwocky. But it wasn’t that hard to figure. She’d often blurt, “I love you, daddy,” as spontaneously as a meteorite in the night sky.
Little lamb, who made thee? I’d think stupidly as I watched her sweet profile and the artless curiosity of her eyes as they moved along in anticipation, thrilled at the unaffected touch of her hand on mine.
We took long walks downtown, and she seemed to enjoy prowling the bookstores along with me. She didn’t exactly prowl, of course; she liked to find the titles I’d already had at home, and seriously point them out to me, then ask why I bought that one, say, over another by the same author. We often got silly as we walked to and from the bookstores, especially when we were tired. I’d often start it by shouting “Knee lock!” and then walk stiffly, as though I couldn’t bend my knees; she followed suit, then shout “Elbow lock!” and acted as if she were unable to bend her arms, and we’d stiffly walk like robots, giggling as people watched us.
She was awed at the number of books I had accumulated. She liked to read the titles. “Abelard,” she said once. “What kind of a name is Abelard?” And I told her the story of Abelard and Heloise, and she seemed enthralled at their plight. I used a euphemism for his castration, but she saw me wince, and gently smiled. “It’s okay, dad,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”
“You have four hundred and fifty-three books, dad,” she said seriously one Sunday afternoon after counting them out loud. I asked her what her favorite titles were. She took the question seriously and spent the next hour figuring, pulling the titles from the shelves. Pretending I was an art photographer, I snapped pictures of her in interpretive poses: for War and Peace, she posed with an open left hand a right hand gripping a plastic sword; for Les Misérables, she made an impossibly sad face and stared past the camera; for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, she gazed out from the shadows into the gauzy-glare of an open window.
I still got impatient with her. After all, I had such important work to do, books to read and texts to study, papers to write and theories to contemplate. Sometimes she understood, most times she didn’t, and my impatience hurt her.
But I knew how to soothe it. With or without her mother, I’d cook us tacos or hot dogs, anything simple, and we’d plop ourselves down in front of the television and watch our favorite movies together. They were usually one of two kinds, splashy and colorful musicals, or film noir. We lived in a 1940s- 1950s fantasy world. It was Broadway on the screen and at will: Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris, Top Hat, High Society, Meet Me in St. Louis; Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Murder, My Sweet, Stalag 17, A Streetcar Named Desire; and others, including Some Like it Hot, Rear Window, West Side Story. No one had seen those movies before; they were ours. We couldn’t imagine watching one of them without the other.
I adopted Annie when she was eight. You should have seen her up there on the witness stand in the courtroom, talking so seriously into the microphone when the judge asked her questions about me. Her voice echoed ingenuously around the room, and even the judge smiled when Annie told her we read Annie’s Adventures in Wonderland together a half-dozen times. That afternoon, after Dorothy had gone off to work, I took Annie to college to show her off to the people I worked with at the library. They gushed at Annie, which had been the whole point, and she had a great time listening to them coo at her. When we walked home holding hands I was the happiest I had ever been in my life.
It was over almost as soon as it began. I mean, from the time I adopted her, everything seemed to go downhill. I swear there were times I could feel the pain of her bones growing, her eyes becoming narrower and reflexive, her touch less sure.
It wasn’t just the inevitability of her growing up, though. I became distracted from her and home the last two years of my college life because I fooled around as much as I studied. Before my marriage to Dorothy, I had performed only one indiscretion with a lady named Rachel. But after I took my vows, it seemed that women came on to me in a flood, and I simply refused to resist. These were not relationships. They were quickies, from blow jobs in the stacks of the library, to sex in a studio after a student-artist (I forget her name) drew me in the nude. I even saw Rachel again. I saw her by chance at a bar one evening while I was out with a friend, and off-handedly told her to call me sometime; she did the following day. Luckily, Dorothy wasn’t home, but I told her she could meet me at the library where I worked. My boss, Glenda, was on vacation, and I had the office to myself. When Rachel came in (dressed in the same pale blue jeans she wore when we’d first met), we locked the door and made out right there on the floor. What was funny about all of that, is that though Rachel had at first hated me when I blew her off and got married two years before, now she didn’t say anything about that time.
I began to identify Annie with Dorothy, especially after the adoption, as a part of the home to which I was committed. Before the adoption, Annie was Annie, a sprite of perfect simplicity; now, she was my daughter, a part of her mother, someone to whom I had to return home. She knew it, too, and these facts, combined with her growing into her own person, destroyed our happiness.
When we moved to Wisconsin, the shit really hit the fan. Ironically or not, I didn’t fool around up there. On the surface, we three stuck close together because we lived in a foreign environment. But it became stifling for each us. We wore at each other’s nerves. And it was there where Annie shed her childhood and emerged as a young woman, resentful of my continued ignorance of her and of her mother.
There were, of course, moments together that I will never forget: walking outside our apartment building through a nearby wood in the evening to watch hosts of lightning bugs, showing her how to gently catch them and watch them crawl over her hands; explaining baseball to her while watching the World Series; taking her to her first day of school; and our walks, this time around Lake Mendota by the university. On occasion, she would even let me hold her hand. But it was not like it was before. I couldn’t look at Annie the same way. I waited for her to say something to me, to touch me in that unassuming way she’d had. But it never happened, and I got angrier at her loss as time passed, even as I held her hand.
She did, too. She began to subtly needle me by casually expressing a dislike for just about everything that was important to me, especially books. She watched television and listened to music constantly, no matter how often I told her she couldn’t; its sexual content disturbed me, not because it was titillating for me or an eleven-year-old, but because I knew Annie absorbed it, began to know it as matter-of-factly as she’d once known the joy of reading Lewis Carroll, of holding hands while walking. By degrees, she became preternaturally cynical and wry, self-consciously ironic.
When we moved back to Colorado within a year of going to Wisconsin, it got even worse; anything remotely genuine to her became grist for cynicism and satire. I hollered all the time, frustrated and unhappy. It was as though I realized she had somehow become corrupt, fallen, a part of the outside world I had so systematically and persistently despised.
One evening when I returned home, she told me she had seen Some Like it Hot that afternoon with a friend from school. I froze in my seat at the dinner table. I couldn’t even look at her. The meal half done, I went upstairs and into the bedroom, lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, panicked that I had lost control of my emotions, knowing I was devastatingly hurt because a preteen girl had watched a movie without me.
I walked into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. I had done that a lot when I was a kid, fascinated by my eyes and nose and mouth and the pores of my skin, thinking that if I did it long and hard enough, I would discover something I’d never known about myself before.
“Are you talking to me?” I whispered to myself, awed at my foolishness, watching my lips move and my mouth slowly curve into a smile. Then I caught the glint reflected in my eyes and I frowned.
“Dad,” I heard. I turned and saw Annie looking at me. I quickly turned the spigot and rushed water to my face.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
I gave myself one last look, water dripping from my face, and turned to her. Where once her hair had been a perfect gold, straight and long and playing over a child’s delicately chubby, mother-of-pearl face, it now grew shorter and dirty blond, and her eyes, more defined and darker, looked sorrowful but carefully distant.
“I love you so goddamn much,” I said without thinking.
She said nothing but hugged me as I buried my face in the soft space below her shoulder.
Nothing changed.
In fact, things got worse. It was as though I had tipped my mitt, became even more vulnerable than ever before. I was in love with something that no longer existed, and Annie, well, she was Annie, growing and not understanding my incessant anger to the point where she finally, inevitably, no longer cared.
Soon after this, we moved into another rental closer to downtown. Increasingly unhappy with the both of them, I began fooling around again. Dorothy and I continued to have sex, but it was a funny kind of sex; it got to the point where she would simply roll over, lift her leg, and let me do my thing. No sounds, hardly any touching, no nothing. I pumped her mechanically, shoving parts of the pillow case in my mouth to muffle any expression of feeling. When I pulled out, Dorothy would say nothing, and soon I’d hear her soft snore. I would then get up and begin reading, anything, really, to get me out of my context. I began reading as much history and philosophy as literature; then, more history than anything else. It became a gorgeous escape. Most nights I stayed up till at least two in the morning.
I was getting so much into history, I even started taking graduate courses at the local branch of the state university. Soon, the time I spent discussing dead people and events became my only happy hours. My job situation had been bad. Because I had a hard time finding a job at first, I went back to delivering beauty supplies for a while, before I found a part-time night job clerking at the only daily newspaper in town.
I was still in my twenties but felt a complete failure. I watched Annie from afar, the way a disappointed patron might look at a failed work of art he had once commissioned with high hopes. The circumstance of working nights also helped us grow apart, since they both came home about the time I left for work. It worked out “practically,” though, because I’d be home when Annie came back from school, then, an hour or so after, I’d leave when Dorothy arrived.
One afternoon, Annie came home a little later than usual. It was during a period when we weren’t talking to one another very much. She lay her books down on the coffee table as I got ready for work. One of the textbooks was an Algebra book. Written across the top pages of the book was “suck me.”
“What the hell is this?” I said to her when she came back out of the bathroom.
She looked at the book, then at me, and looked away. “Nothing.”
“Do you even know what the hell this means?” I said.
She looked at the floor. “Of course I do, dad.”
“Well?” I said.
“Jesus,” she said, finally looking at me with disgust, “I’m not going to say it to you,” and stamped off to her room.
I held the book in my hand for at least five minutes. Then I left for work, without even saying goodbye to Annie, well before Dorothy arrived.
Look, here’s the thing about me that maybe you still don’t quite understand: I loved Annie, more than anyone I had ever loved before in my life. I mean that. With Dorothy, it was nothing. I could debase myself with her, feel like shit while we fucked the way monkeys fuck; I could humble myself with other girls who seemed to want sex the way I wanted it: quick and with no questions asked. But, I have to tell you, I knew even then that sex wasn’t about getting an orgasm, or even feeling good about someone coming on to you. Yes, of course it felt good to be wanted, and the orgasms were great; but they were byproducts. Sex had degenerated or risen to become simply a way to display power. When I saw those women touch me with an eagerness that bordered on hunger; when I saw their eyes as they looked up at me; when I saw them take my hand and caress, kiss and nibble ravenously at my fingers – I watched in awe, not of them, but of whatever I had that provoked their behavior. I know that sounds weird, but that was the feeling.
But, like I said before, my feelings for Annie seemed as though they had nothing to do with me, or her, for that matter. Annie and I were about meeting somewhere at the space between us. Now, that may have been an illusion, but it drove me during those years to the point where nothing else positively existed in my life.
As I began to lose her, as she transformed herself into just another person aware of herself and out of my control, my feelings turned ballistic. I realized that as she reached her teen years, she became just another girl, a person who could just as well have been one of the girls I fucked. It was as frightening and nauseating as it sounds.
After I began working full time at the newspaper the following year, Dorothy and I decided to buy a house. It was the dumbest fucking thing I could have done at that point in our relationship, but a house was something both of us had always wanted, especially Dorothy. The funny thing is, it turned out be even more a commitment than our marriage. I like to think we both secretly hoped it might heal the marriage, but everything was over from the time Annie entered puberty. I don’t think Dorothy saw it that way, of course. Maybe she just decided to fuck her way to a house, then wiggle out; she wouldn’t have been the first person to do it that way. Come to think of it, we did fuck a lot while we were searching for the house. As soon as we found the house we wanted, at the edge of the downtown area, as soon as I signed the papers, the fucking stopped.
Believe me, it was okay with me at the time; but like everything else, I’m just pissed now that I didn’t realize what was going on. You should have seen me the day I signed the papers for the house. I was so depressed. I knew I was making a mistake, but I signed my name about a hundred times, legally locking myself further into Dorothy’s and Annie’s lives. I had grown numb, I think. Except for brief moments with Annie, I grew to feel nothing for anything or anyone. Strangely enough for me, I also grew celibate; I felt as though my desire had somehow resigned itself; only the world of my mind comforted me.
As soon as we moved into our house, Dorothy pretty much took over everything. She even relegated most of my books, my desk and my keyboard – and me along with them – into a half-finished basement. I was so pathetic that I accepted or agreed to it without question. I mean, I don’t even remember the decision, though I do vaguely recall being happy with the way we did the upstairs and the bedrooms and all that. So, I did all my thinking and writing from a hole in the fucking ground every morning and night.
I apologize because this is all beside the point, another story. It’s what happened with Annie, after we moved to the house, that I want to talk about.
As I said a long time ago, Annie and I still had our moments, whether it was dancing around an ironing board, or watching a movie. But then, as Annie reached fourteen, fifteen, even that stuff pretty much ended. She began staying out later (though never late enough for it to matter), smelling of tobacco smoke, wearing black, staying in her room listening to music; in short, achieving a level of cynicism even I hadn’t dreamed at her age. We both hated one another.
Toward the end of everything, I took off some time to just sit and vegetate; to read out on the porch and watch the world go by. I had started doing that ever since we’d bought the house. It faced a fairly busy street, but its porch was nice and big, and we’d bought a glider, and I loved to read and rock, occasionally zone out and watch the traffic, or drink beer and listen to music.
It was a couple of days in January, when Colorado gets a little weird and thinks it’s spring time. You have to plan it just right, but there will be several days up to a week of sixty-, seventy-degree days that are as crystal clear as diamonds. I was gratefully unimportant at work, so I could always grab a few days at a time, especially after I had taken a couple weeks the previous year to go to Italy with Dorothy. That is, we had no further plans for a vacation together, so my days off were solely mine.
I was in the middle of re-reading Shakespeare. I know that sounds a little whacked and maybe even hoity-toity, especially now (to me), but, at the time, I hadn’t picked it up since undergraduate college, which was then something like six, seven years before. I was on a sonnets kick, reading and re-reading all of them, sometimes passionately, other times disinterestedly, getting into the rhythm of the words, then the meaning, then just reciting them, as though if I said them long enough, like my mom fingering and mumbling her rosary, I’d have a revelation of some kind. Well, I didn’t, but I did have a good time.
I was especially getting into sonnets 49 and 94. I was so fucked up at the time that I began to feel a growing mystical sense of the numbers’ reciprocity and how the sonnets were trying to tell me something about my own life. It was all bullshit, of course, but I’m just trying to tell you how I was feeling at the time. Regardless, both of those sonnets related so closely to how I was feeling about Annie, and how I wanted to be as an individual, either against her or the idea of back home (always shorthand for my old man), that I memorized them until I was blue in the face. That was a great feat for me. You’re reading the words of a guy who can’t memorize a damn thing.
I remember being in a school play about the nativity, in the third grade or something, and I had to memorize one lousy line (I was a shepherd), and I just couldn’t do it, and old Miss Romero was pissed at me, even embarrassed (she picked me first to be Joseph, but I told her no, not because of the lines, but because Joseph was a sissy), and she told me afterward that I did it on purpose just to attract attention to myself. And, of course, there was catechism class and memorizing all the long-paragraph answers to bullshit questions such as, What is love? or What is God? I just couldn’t do it, and got my ass kicked for not saying it when called upon.
The point I’m trying to make (finally!) about the sonnets is that they directly hit me below the belt; it was like reading about me, how I felt, the irony of understanding in a flash what was going on. It was as though Shakespeare was tapping me on the shoulder, I turned around, and there he was, winking.
Against that time – if ever that time come –/ When I shall see thee frown on my defects,/ Whenas thy love hath cast his utmost sum,/ Called to that audit by advised respects;/ Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass/ And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,/ When love converted from the thing it was/ Shall reasons find of settled gravity:/ Against that time do I ensconce me here/ Within the knowledge of mine own desert,/ And this my hand, against my self uprear,/ To guard the lawful reasons on thy part./ To leave poor me thou has the strength of laws,/ Since why to love I can allege no cause.
I whispered it to Annie’s ghost. I had to read it a hundred times to accept its flawless expression. Its letters cluttered the page like autumn leaves in the yard, and walking, there was no place to go but on them. I felt absurdly comfortable knowing what it said and how it applied to me, but I hated the knowledge itself. Ensconced, I thought, I had no choice but to be a world unto myself. This was pathetic self-estrangement.
I threw Shakespeare down to the floor and drummed my fingers on the glider. Then I began drinking, and as the morning turned into the afternoon, the air cooler, the light brighter, I began feeling good again.
I deliberately didn’t eat. It just felt too damn good. I knew, of course, that after a few hours of mindless bliss, I would get depressed, cranky and sleepy – but that was so far in the fucking future that it just didn’t matter. I could lean over on to the metal railing of the porch and look out into the street and think, I’m happy, I’m free, it’s beautiful to be alive; you name it, I thought it.
In fact, it was times like these, when I saw things as clear as diamonds, that I felt a surge of knowing how easy it was to love everything and everyone. Not abstractions, such as mankind or a god or even ideas, but people, real individuals, including Dorothy and Annie, my old man, specific acquaintances I’d known briefly.
Have you ever had that feeling? It is a feeling, I know, but, at the time one feels it, its foundation is poured in concrete. You could almost feel the energy of the world pulsing through your head and hands, both open to everything and everyone. Things fall apart only after they’ve fallen together, and at these times they reassemble themselves like the fixed solution of a jigsaw puzzle. In fact, you realize, it was only a puzzle because you had been a pizzle all along, lashing yourself into sadness and doubt. It was time now to lose myself within an epiphany of the world and me, when my smallness and finitude just didn’t fucking matter.
I was right at that point, hearing the cars go by, looking into the blue sky, when Annie came home from school.
I haven’t described her to you in a while, so you’re just going to have to be patient with me.
She was fifteen now. Her face had grown both hard and sharp, more like Rachel’s than Dorothy’s. But her almond eyes were like her mother’s, and her nose, slightly turning up at the end, also mimicked Dorothy’s. Her dirty blond hair stopped just above her shoulders; it was straight and thin, wispy; her lips were thin, too. She had a tiny black mole just to the left of her upper lip; on her pale face, it looked stunning, and when she licked her lips, it looked like she was trying to flick away a last bit of chocolate cake. Her eyelashes were long, and the bangs of her hair were cut irregularly above them. Everything about Annie seemed to be in her face. Her body, lanky and awkward, stuck with her as an afterthought.
She walked boldly. When she saw me looking at her with narrowing eyes, she hesitated, but then kept walking as boldly, or, rather, determinedly as before, her eyes mirroring mine.
She said nothing as she walked up the steps to the porch. I drank and watched her out of the corner of my eye. Shakespeare lay on the floor, its pages sounding like fingers snapping in the breeze.
I’d had the door open, but she closed it behind her. After waiting a minute or two, I opened the screen door and then the wooden door.
“Don’t close the door on me, young lady,” I said into the living room. I heard her moving around in the bedroom, the echo of a “Jesus Christ!”
I walked in.
It was Dorothy’s house. Everything was pastels, from the light peach walls to the powder blue valences. The windows were relatively small, but as the tiny living room became the dining room, three of the smaller windows came together and looked rather nice, streaming light on to the dining room table. The baseboards were a bright white, and the furniture accented the colors of the walls and windows gently. The couch was placed against the front window, out of the way.
“Annie,” I said softly, almost pleadingly.
The door to her bedroom was closed. I could hear Madonna plaintively singing. I knocked gently on the door, and said, “Annie, please.”
“Go away, dad,” she said.
Her voice knifed through the door, as hard as a kitchen appliance under a bright fluorescent light.
I allowed my legs to collapse beneath me, and began bawling my eyes out, thinking how fucked up everything had become with my life and with Annie, looking at the closed door as though it were her, right there, looking out at me with a fixed and unfeeling stare.
“Please stop,” I heard her say. She had turned down the music and, on cue, my sobs grew shorter and louder. I felt foolish, even manipulative, but also curiously out of control, as though Annie had plucked every string inside me. When she opened the door with a rush, I felt breath on my neck. I could barely see her face for the tears in my eyes. I sobbed harder, more determined.
She went down on one knee and touched my hair, gently pushing it off my matted forehead. When I said, “I love you, kid,” I felt only the sensation of her touch and my own helplessness.
She sat next to me and held me in her arms and began rocking me. She kissed my cheek and, with a surprisingly large hand, placed my head against her. I could hear her heart beat fast.
I don’t know how long it was, but when I finally looked up, she seemed a mirror of myself, tired, near to sobbing, exhausted.
© 2026 Victor Greto