Lookaway, Lookaway (18 page)

2007–2008

Annie

Annie was named Jeannette Jerene Johnston. Jeannette after her grandmother and Jerene after her mother, who, Annie reflected, was still looking to unload a century-plus of 
-initialed silver-service thingamajigs, tea towels, tonglets, olive spears, relish trays, gold-plated napkin holders, an attic full of aristocratic and pseudo-aristocratic junk. Her little sister Jerilyn had the triple-J initials too, like some kind of high-society cattle brand, Annie once announced.

After an elementary-school misfire with “Jeannie,” Annie told the teachers when she started at the Mecklenburg Country Day School that at home “she was called Annette” (which could be carved, arguably, out of Jeannette), and preferred “Annie.” Happily, she could count on her mother to take no interest whatsoever in her schooling, so half a year had come and gone before the Christmas pageant program gave her away to her family.

“And just what was wrong with ‘Jeannie’?”

“Like
I Dream of Jeannie
on TV? Everyone wants me to blink and make things disappear. Tara Brindley has a pony named Jeannie.”

Having tasted victory, Annie sought out all opportunities for rebellion. She joined a group of other ten-year-old girls who wanted to play soccer on the boys’ team. That made the
Charlotte Observer
as a cutesy item, with her mother naturally horrified to see the family name in the paper in that context. There was the issue of her grades. She willfully flunked and underperformed in most of her classes, yet everyone knew that Annie Johnston was the smartest girl in the school. The fall of 1988, a hapless student had been found in the vicinity of a badly hidden bag of marijuana, and in the ensuing witch hunt, even though Annie was not involved, she revved up a group of students who signed a petition that they would
all
choose to be suspended if the original innocent bystander was to be unjustly suspended. That too made the Charlotte newspaper.

“What kind of school,” her mother cried out at dinner, “is so unconnected with the local powers that be, that every time something untoward happens it ends up in the morning paper? I swear, you don’t read about the Charlotte Country Day kids in the paper—ever!—and they’re all drug addicts and drunk drivers. From the best families, too!”

Sunday was a weekly battle that Annie relished. She not only wanted to skip church, she wanted to elucidate other family members in the folly of their going. While others arrived at the breakfast table dressed for service, Annie would waltz down late, waving around a Blockbuster Video bag. “While you’re listening to the shaman drone on and on, I’ll be here enjoying the Sunday paper, my orange juice, and a Preston Sturges comedy.”

There was a short-lived attempt to coerce church attendance by grounding her or withholding privileges of some kind but Annie declared she would simply stand right up in church, interrupt the sermon anytime she felt something ignorant, fatuous, or demonstrably hypocritical was being preached with questions like:
If we’re so full of brotherly feeling, why aren’t there any black people in our gated community of a church?
Or:
In imitation of Jesus, I think we should have an outreach to the men’s shelter not four miles from here. I will draw up the flyers and arrange for transportation. Any Christian objections?
Her mother and father believed she would do it, too, so she got to stay home … which began the chorus of “Why does
sheee
get to stay home and
weee
have to go?” from Joshua and Jerilyn.

“Because one child bound for the Fiery Pit is enough,” Jerene would say, through a last sip of coffee.

“Won’t you come, sweetheart?” her father cajoled.

“Mother,” Annie asked, “if we lived out in the country and the only church was some clapboard old-timey thing without one single society member in attendance, you would never go. Why can’t you admit it’s entirely social? The central aisle of Sedgewood Presbyterian is like a fashion-show catwalk for you.”

“Everyone to the car now,” Jerene concluded, marshaling the family through the front door.

“Have fun going
ooga-booga-booga
before your long-dead island god!” called Annie from the couch.

Annie’s punishment, such as it was, was to be denied the buffet spread at the Charlottetowne Country Club. Oh she had a tractate prepared on the racist perfidies and bourgeois elitist sins of the CCC, and she never accompanied her family without making sure they understood the political implications of each bite of hoppin’ john and every shameful delectation of the famous Charlottetown Bread Pudding (featured in
Southern Living
and
Gourmet
magazines) … yet there was no denying the Club laid on a fabulous spread: haunches of Scottish Angus beef, slabs of prime rib, a superbly smoked and sugared ham done specially by some ancient farmer in his barnwood curing house, just for the Club, since forever, every Southern vegetable cooked intelligently (as opposed to the hamhock-bath favored by most Southern institutions), a salad bar green and blooming as any outdoor garden, a trove of canonical larded-up Southern dessert pies, cakes, puddings and custards … yes, Lord Jesus, Annie did miss that perk. Truth be told, the whole Johnston clan all thought of the excesses of the Club as a just and godly reward for two hours of public piety at Sedgewood Prez.

Annie valued unpredictability above all else, so there would be the Sunday morning surprise when Annie would appear dressed in her churchgoing best—with some tiny thing askew, a black corsage, an anarchist button affixed to a lapel—sitting at the breakfast table waiting for them. “It’s just to get to the Club, you understand,” she said. “I might get a bite in before we’re surrounded by your shameless neo-Confederate sycophants.”

“Hm. And you’ll be quiet in church?”

“I will be the model of Christian womanhood.” A long screed on what comprised Christian womanhood occupied the drive to Sedgewood Presbyterian, concluding with, “Let’s see if we can find a man to marry me off to who will demand my complete obedience and subjugation—maybe even beat me.”

“We’d all like it very much if you found that man,” her father mumbled.

Annie would cast aside whatever weight concerns haunted her preceding week of salad-ridden lunches and diet-milkshake dinners, for two and three runs through the buffet line. After lunch, when they were all near comatose, her father’s Civil War re-enactment cronies would descend and sit at their big round table in the corner. Annie berated her father for his cadre of Civil War devotees but, in reality, she loved to see these old codgers pay court to her father, who, nursing an after-Sunday-dinner scotch, relaxed and easy, simply glowed with quiet authority and charisma.

“The bravest thing Lincoln did,” her father was saying, “was not freeing the slaves or reinforcing Fort Sumter—”

“And starting the Civil War singlehandedly,” said Benjamin Badger, whose ancestor fought with the South Carolina Third in defense of Charleston.

“It was firing General McClellan,” her father continued. McClellan was a real showboat, a highly popular general with the troops, despite never winning anything. Lincoln was warned that the Northern Army, 120,000 strong, would turn on Washington and depose Lincoln in a coup if he sacked their beloved general. And when McClellan was sacked there were men who offered to undertake that coup—there were maybe members of Lincoln’s own cabinet who would have quietly supported it. “McClellan was a Southern Democrat. He would have signed a peace with the Confederacy and there would have been no five-year war, no Reconstruction, no breaking of the South.”

Lionel Haslett cleared his throat approvingly; he wore his snow-white beard in flowing nineteenth-century fashion, all the better to portray his many-times-removed ancestor, General Jubal Early. He and Mrs. Haslett would move into their RV and do the circuit of battle re-creations each autumn.

Annie broke in: “But the CSA would have been nearly alone in being a modern democracy with slaves. We’d have ended up like South Africa with some miserable apartheid; we’d have all died in the eventual uprisings and race wars.”

Mr. Haslett clearly thought it charming that Duke’s daughter had troubled herself to have an opinion. “Oh I think the South would have solved the slave problem on its own.”

“No we wouldn’t have. We’d still have them.” She bent forward to whisper. “We
still do
have them, except they’re wage slaves, like the black kitchen workers in here. And the Mexican busboys, paid a fraction of what they should be paid—”

“Annie, sweetheart,” said her father, raising a gentle hand. “Let’s try to enjoy our Sunday now.”

The white supremacist country club, the inequalities of black and white life in the South, the disgrace of being descended from a Civil War general—these topics were perennials, and Duke and Jerene let her carry on and fume, talk herself hoarse in the car, but there was a more serious showdown of wills ahead: Annie’s debut.

A debut had been dangled before Annie with promises of cash, jewelry, heirlooms, trips abroad … other times it was shaken at her like a stick, an obligation that in no way could be undone. “You can dye your hair lavender purple-pink for all I care,” declared Jerene Johnston, “but you shall be in attendance, looking like a young lady, when your father escorts you to the center spotlight at the Raleigh Convention Center.”

All the threats merely bolstered Annie’s resolve. When she was sixteen she regularly floated ideas about not debuting, surely other girls didn’t have to do this claptrap, what nonsense, what a throwback—why don’t we have black people in slave attire carry us in on litters?

“The debut of a young woman,” her mother interjected, “is not merely a Southern thing, it is a centuries-honored cultural practice that goes back to England when women were presented to the king or queen at St. James’ Palace, if you read your Jane Austen. It says you have arrived in society; you are ready to receive the attentions of a young man.”

Annie, fuchsia hair, two unauthorized pierced ears with massive hoops, curled up in the backseat, making eye contact with her mother through the central rearview, huffed. Annie’s eyes were defiant, her mother’s cold steel. “Mother, I would faint dead away if you had actually read one word of Jane Austen. I’ve never seen you as much as hold a book in your hand. Besides, I already receive
attentions
from men. I don’t need this high-society bullshit to turn up someone to screw.”

“I have no doubt you receive all the attention you can handle in tops like the one you’ve chosen to wear today.”

Annie was already thirty pounds overweight, but it was youthful buoyant weight and lots of it was in her breasts which she displayed in tank tops, low-cut blouses. Her cleavage was the subject of repeated dress code violations (warnings from the assistant headmaster, calls to home) but Annie had managed to dodge suspension for this offense by carefully arranging and buttoning and shifting her uniform when called for. She saw herself like one of those bare-breasted figureheads on old schooners, dividing the sea of students during class changes, bounding down the hallways with a big loud personality commensurate with the biggest boobs in the school.

“I have no intention of marrying,” Annie presently brought out, “until I’m thirty, if I ever marry at all. And if I do marry, I won’t marry one of the Mecklenburg Country Day boys who’s going to end up like Daddy’s friends, wearing checkered golf pants and yellow sports coats, breathing booze-breath on everyone at eleven
A.M.
at some lily-white-people’s country club.” Failing to elicit a response, she added, “Maybe I’ll live openly as a lesbian.”

“You spend way too much time on the phone with boys for me to buy that, young lady.
Every
young woman does this, Annie,” Mrs. Johnston said, rejoining the battle. “My land, I debuted at the height of the 1960s with all kinds of hippie-dippie nonsense and love-in debuts and flower-power debuts, but by God, whatever the noise and fuss, when it came time, those girls took their fathers’ arms and marched like generations of women before them, because it is not about ‘wanting’ to do it. It is about duty to the generations before and after.”

“Whoa lady, take a Valium—good God. Well, that convinced me: no way I’m going to do it. Save your money.”

“You are doing it for your grandmother and for me, and for all your extended family, all of the aunts and great-aunts who will be there and will write a check and give bountiful gifts. Maybe I can appeal to your greed.”

“‘Every young woman’ does this? The women in the women’s shelters downtown? Did Alma get a debut?”

Alma, their housekeeper. “You know what I mean.”

“Oh yes I surely do. And I’m sure I’ll give every cent of my debut
blood
money away to some women’s shelter. What do I care what all these great-aunts think? You say the most hateful things about them—why should any one of us kowtow to those dried-up old hags? And they all made
terrible
marriages, far as I can see. You want me married to Uncle Lloyd? Aunt Dillie had a debut and she married, in your oh-so-Christian words, ‘white trash’ anyway, didn’t she? You’re living in one more Southern fantasyland, Mother.”

At that, Mrs. Johnston pulled the Mercedes over to the emergency-lane shoulder of Independence Boulevard, stopped the car, and turned around in her seat. “You think a debut and all this society stuff is bullshit,” she began. Annie certainly was surprised to hear her mother say it,
booolshit,
with her melodic cadences. “Well, I agree with you. You want to be a rock ’n roller or some kind of revolutionary? I have news for you: there’s bullshit in those worlds too. In every walk of life, there are senseless rules, payoffs and shakedowns, quirks, unjust rituals … Ask your little friends in their rock band about the people who put on the shows and—what do they call them?—the people who deal with the finances. You want to go work in a women’s shelter and give away all your debutante money? Go see what kind of dreadful politics and chicanery reigns in those charitable organizations. I’ve heard you say you wanted to be a historian. Do I have to tell you what academic politics are like? I know from my involvement in years and years of committee work that the
booolshit
you are too good for is lying thick on the ground in all aspects of life.”