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Anniversary

T. G. Metcalf

In tenth grade, in the school cafeteria, Anna, the only child of an alcoholic insurance salesman and an alcoholic real estate agent in Des Moines, Iowa, started to eat her lunches at a table where a girl named Erin always sat. Anna thought that Erin’s sapphire-blue eyes were the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen.

Anna began to have sexual fantasies about Erin, and there were moments at the lunch table when she thought maybe Erin sensed that those fantasies had taken place behind the brown eyes of the shy, nerdy girl who was sitting across from her. In some ways Anna hoped Erin did sense that. But whether she did or didn’t, it was great for Anna, finally, after so many years of loneliness, to have somebody to talk with, smile with, and laugh with. Erin sent funny texts to Anna, and Anna sent funny ones back to Erin.

That same year, during a Friday-night sleepover at Erin’s house, Erin told Anna how beautiful her eyes were. They made love. Before Anna fell asleep that night she decided she had fallen in love with Erin.

The next morning Anna felt that the arrival of Erin in her life had made up for all of her years of friendlessness. ‘I’ve waited all my life for her’, she thought. ‘The reason I was born was to be put on a path that would eventually lead me to Erin. I never could have dreamed that life could be so beautiful’.

Anna and Erin became committed to each other. They became study buddies. The sleepovers at each other’s houses happened every weekend, and sometimes on weeknights. They shared an us-against-the-world attitude toward school spirit, jockdom, and stupid fashion fads. According to a list Anna made, there were 17 cliques in their high school, and neither she nor Erin wanted anything to do with any of them. “We’re outlaws, in a way,” Erin said. “In a good way. We’ll never be phonies or hypocrites, like our parents are. We can’t be bullied into being straight and we can’t be bullied into conforming. But nobody deserves to know we’re queer. Keeping it a secret makes it feel more special.”

Their decision to distance themselves from everybody else made them love each other all the more intensely, and motivated them to excel in academics, so they could get scholarship offers from the same university. They felt that by getting scholarships and thereby eliminating their financial dependence on their parents, they’d be able to ignore their parents’ opinions about where they should go, and they wanted to go to a university that was as far from Des Moines as possible. To strengthen their college applications, they joined the Math Olympiad Club, the Environmental Club, and the Literary Magazine Club. They earned spots on the girls’ varsity field hockey team, though not as starters.

They took the PSAT in tenth grade and both of them got perfect scores – 1520. At the end of that school year their GPAs were in the top five in their class. Everything seemed to be going the way they had planned. Anna got a job that summer at a McDonald’s, and Erin worked as a server at a country club. Sometimes they expressed astonishment at how little curiosity their parents had, about the nature of their relationship, but they reminded themselves that self-absorbed people with bad drinking problems seldom noticed anything outside their little worlds.

In their junior year, in early November, Erin told Anna that she had to go to Key West with her family during the Christmas break. Erin had asked her parents if Anna could come along with them, and they had said no, because if they included Anna they’d have to allow Erin’s two brothers – the older one, who was a senior at her school, and the younger one, who was in eighth grade – to bring along friends as well, and there simply wouldn’t be enough room for three extra kids in the townhouse they had rented on the beach.

A week into their vacation at Key West, on an unseasonably cool day in the last week of December, Erin and her older brother rented a 16-foot sailboat. They had sailed together before several times, during a two-week summer vacation on Cape Cod, where they had taken a sailing course together, and the two-person sailboat they rented in Key West that day was almost identical to the ones they’d learned to sail on at the Cape.

When Erin and her brother had been out on the water for about an hour, the shoreline was still visible but it was a long way off, and Erin became insistent that they were too far out. Her brother disagreed with her. She told him if he refused to head in she’d simply jump in the water and swim in. He didn’t believe her. He laughed at her, and said she’d be crazy to do that. She took off her life vest and her canvas deck shoes, pulled off the T-shirt she was wearing over her one-piece swimsuit, jumped in the water, and started to swim toward the shore.

What Erin hadn’t realized was that the water that far out was quite cold, and although she wanted desperately to swim toward the shore she could not see far enough above the surface of the waves to be sure she was headed in that direction, so after every ten or fifteen strokes, and after being knocked off-course by strong waves, she would stop swimming, tread water momentarily, use her arms and legs to propel herself straight upward – to raise herself far enough above the waves to see where the shore was – and adjust her course, as needed, before she started to swim again.

Again and again when Erin stopped to do that she discovered she had been swimming parallel to the shore, or even away from it. She was exhausted from fighting the waves and from repeatedly thrusting herself upward in the water. She panicked when the coldness of the water brought on an extremely painful leg cramp.

Her brother saw her repeatedly swim in the wrong direction. He shouted to her, and said he’d decided to head in. He shouted that she should swim toward him, not the shore, but he could tell she couldn’t hear him because of the water splashing against her ears. He tried to sail toward her, but without her in the boat to help him he was unable to maneuver it in her direction – in fact, he was drifting farther from her. He shouted at her again, but a small airplane was flying overhead and noise from its engine drowned out his shouting. After the airplane passed by he could no longer see Erin. The whitecaps on the slate-colored water, in all directions, were indistinguishable from the splashes her hands, arms, and feet had made when he’d still been able to see her.

Fifteen minutes later, Erin’s father stood on the shore and used his binoculars to look for the sailboat his two oldest children were sailing on. He saw one, far out, lying on its side, but he couldn’t tell if it was the one his children had rented, and he didn’t see anyone clinging to it. He found the number for the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue office, and less than half an hour later one of their crews pulled Erin’s brother from the water next to the capsized sailboat.

Two days later, shortly after sunrise, a surf fisherman was walking along the beach and came upon Erin’s body, face-down in shallow water, rocking gently, from side to side, with the approach and retreat of each wave.

▪

CAN ANYTHING BE MORE CRUEL than an accident that simultaneously ends a young life, sends a family into lifelong mourning and crippling feelings of guilt, and destroys a love affair at the apex of its intensity and joyfulness?

Anna was broken. Suicidal. She couldn’t bring herself to attend the funeral. She wept herself into exhaustion many times. She refused to leave her bedroom. She skipped meals. Her grief had no effect on her alcoholic parents, whose arguments in the evenings before and after the funeral were as regular as they had always been.

‘How could something so terrible have no effect on them?’ Anna wondered. ‘I hate them’.

One night, when she was upstairs in her bedroom and her parents were downstairs, she heard her father shout “She’s overreacting. She’ll get over it.”

Her feelings of rage and hatred toward her father that night briefly overwhelmed her desire to die. It was a remark she would never forget or forgive. In the years to come she would consider the night he made that remark as a turning point in her attitude toward her parents. Until then she had resented their disinterest in her, but she hadn’t pitied them. From that night on, little by little as her rage and her hatred subsided, and she saw more clearly how empty their lives were, she began to pity them. They were simply two pathetic drunks who were damned lucky to have enough money to keep them from being homeless.

When school resumed after the Christmas break Anna still refused to leave her bedroom. Her mother and father left her alone, feeling that their overachieving daughter’s worries about missing classes, being unprepared for tests, and not doing well on them would eventually get her to return to school. They were right.

After missing a week of school Anna returned to her classes. No one expressed condolences to her because no one knew that she and Erin had been lovers, and by that time Erin’s death had become old news: the school’s protocol for addressing such events had been completed a week earlier, and that was that.

Anna remained ever-hypervigilant at school, on the lookout for Erin’s brother – in the hallways, the cafeteria, and outside, when she was getting on or getting off the school bus – and she planned to walk away from him if he ever seemed to be headed in her direction. He never did come close to her. She saw him from afar many times, and concluded that he was trying just as hard as she was to avoid the possibility of making eye contact.

She received a full scholarship to Princeton, majored in economics, graduated summa cum laude, and went on to receive an MBA from Wharton.

In all the years after her high school graduation she returned to Des Moines only twice – first for her father’s funeral, and then for her mother’s.

▪

SHORTLY AFTER 9:00 P.M., three nights before New Year’s Eve, the front edge of a rain front that covers three counties in New Jersey moves east across the Hudson River. The temperature is in the high 30s. Snow is expected on New Year’s Day.

Anna and the man with her have finished dinner at a small gourmet restaurant in Manhattan, between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue, in the upper sixties. They are seated at her usual table in the right rear corner. She is now forty-seven years old, single, and for six years she has been the chief operating officer of an investment management firm that is known for its consistently high returns. She is a tall, thin, stately woman who looks like she might have been, and might still be, a dancer or a model. The man she’s with is the Executive Vice President of the firm Anna has hired to audit her company. Anna had asked him to dinner so that she could clarify for him certain expectations that weren’t explicit in the contract for the audit, which will begin on January 4^th.

Anna asks for the check, thanks the Executive VP, and tells him he needn’t stay. He gets up from the table, thanks her for the dinner, and leaves, so he can get home to his wife and two children on Long Island.

A few minutes later Anna adds her usual thirty percent tip to the bill. She thanks the server, gets up from the table, and walks between tables covered by white linen tablecloths. Some of the people she passes look up at her and wonder whether she is somebody famous.

A man in a black suit, at the front of the restaurant, sees Anna approaching. He steps to the front door, stands to the side of it as he pushes it open for Anna, and tells her that he had called the chauffeur, as always, when she and the man with her turned down dessert. Anna thanks him, steps outside, under the long, narrow, pine-green awning that extends almost to the curb, and sees her chauffeur standing under the end of it. As she approaches him he opens a black oversized umbrella, raises it, and then holds it over them as they step to the right-rear car door; he opens it, and Anna gets in. He closes the door, walks around the back of the limo, gets in, puts the umbrella in front of the seat to his right, and closes his door. He looks in the rearview mirror.

“I’d like to drive around for a while, Billy,” Anna says.

“Anyplace in particular, ma’am?” Billy says.

“Anywhere I can see people out having fun,” Anna says. “I’m in no hurry to go home.”

“We can go to Times Square,” Billy says, “and then down to The Village. How does that sound?”

“That sounds fine,” Anna says.

As the limo pulls away from the curb, Anna stares out the window. When they stop at a traffic light, Anna closes her eyes. She is exhausted. Billy adjusts the rearview mirror slightly, looks in it, sees that Anna has closed her eyes, and then adjusts it back to where it was.

Anna is in her own world now. Today is the thirty-first anniversary of Erin’s death.

The limo slows down and moves into the far-right lane. Anna opens her eyes. She looks at the way the beads and streaks of rain on the window take on the glints and smears of colors from lightboxes and Christmas lights on the fronts of the stores, restaurants, and bodegas they pass. She opens her window all the way, to clear the rain from it, and closes it. She watches as new beads and streaks appear on the window and break downward, in starts and stops. She focuses on one of the little streams, which has stopped halfway down. The limo hits a bump and the stream breaks for the bottom of the window.

Half of the people on the sidewalks have their umbrellas up. Anna sees a woman who sticks her free hand out from under her umbrella, with her palm facing upward, to check whether it’s still raining. She keeps walking and doesn’t close the umbrella.

A man flicks a still-lit cigarette butt into the street.

Very few of the people who are walking together are talking to each other. Many of them look down at their phones intermittently, or hold them to their ears. Each of them has a destination, Anna tells herself. Each of them inhabits an inner secret reality. In that respect they’re exactly like me. There are as many different inner secret realities as there are people. They are headed to places where they will get in out of the rain. They will carry in out of the rain their inner secret realities, just as I will. We carry realities we never asked for. Some of us carry realities we wish we could destroy. Some of those realities we carry don’t really belong to us. We belong to them, and most of us can’t modify any of the realities that enslave us.

When they get to Times Square Billy sees a waiting line outside a comedy club. The line for the 10:00 p.m. show wraps around the block. He pulls the limo into the far-right lane, slows it down to five miles per hour, and he and Anna look over at the people in the line. Some of the people are laughing. Two people have stepped out of the line and are pantomiming something to the people they’re with. Anna’s eyes are drawn to the people who watch the pantomimists rather than the pantomimists themselves. The people who watch the pantomimists seem detached and unamused.

They pass a row of theaters, and a bottleneck ahead of them forces them to stop.

Anna looks over at a large woman who is asleep, sitting up against a building, in a recessed, unlit area that is out of the way of the people who pass by. She sits on a large piece of brown cardboard. Her head hangs down. She is wearing a pink stocking cap and a black woolen coat. A blue tarp covers her legs, and another blue tarp, held down by bungie cords, covers the shopping cart next to her. It is unclear to Anna whether the rain is falling on her.

‘It only takes one thing to kill whatever was once best in any of us’, Anna thinks. ‘Would things have been different if Erin hadn’t died?’

She opens her small clutch purse, takes out a money clip, and removes five folded twenty-dollar bills from the clip.

“Billy,” she says, “would you please pull over to the curb and hand me that umbrella you have up there?”

“Of course, ma’am,” Billy says. He pulls over to the curb and puts the hazard lights on. He grasps the handle of the umbrella, which was leaning against the passenger-side seat, taps its tip against the floor a few times, to knock the remaining moisture off of it, squeezes the ribs together, tears off a piece of paper toweling from a roll he keeps on the passenger’s seat, wipes off the outside of the umbrella, and hands the umbrella back to Anna.

“Thank you, Billy,” Anna says. She gets out of the car and walks up to the woman.

The rain has become a light drizzle.

“Ma’am?” Anna says. “Ma’am,” she says again with more force.

The woman raises her head slowly. She squints up at Anna. As she squints she raises her upper lip. Her top middle teeth are missing. She stops squinting. Her face relaxes.

Anna is struck by the deep blue of the woman’s eyes, and suppresses the sudden urge to cry. She holds the umbrella out, for the woman to take. “I want you to have this,” she says.

The woman raises a gloved hand. The black knit of the glove is missing from the first two fingers.

Anna looks at the bare, slender, girlish fingers as they curl around the end of umbrella.

“Thank you,” the woman says in a soft, high voice.

The woman places the umbrella on the pavement next to her, then uses her two bare fingers to push a stray bit of hair off her forehead and tuck the hair up under the front of her pink stocking cap.

Anna hands the hundred dollars down to the woman. “I want you to have that too,” she says.

The woman remains still. She looks up into Anna’s eyes again.

“Please take it,” Anna says.

The woman reaches up and gently takes the money. “Thank you, ma’am,” she says.

“You are very welcome,” Anna says. She returns to the car and gets back in.

“I would happily have done that for you, ma’am,” Billy says.

“I know you would have,” Anna says. “I wanted to do it myself.”

Billy pulls out into traffic. They turn down a side street and up ahead of them a police car has all of its lights flashing. The traffic in front of them, narrowed into one lane, is backed up. Billy looks in the rearview mirror. Someone behind them honks a car horn. They pass to the right of the police car, which is empty.

They drive on and Anna sees up ahead the lighted flags that flank the Fifth Avenue entrance to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She looks at the sparkling rain in front of the floodlights that illuminate the flags.

The way the woman used her two fingers to push a stray bit of hair off her forehead reminds Anna of how Erin, when she would drift off into her own inner world, would tilt her head, raise the index finger of her hand up near her temple, and use it to twirl, slowly, however much of her curly black hair would let itself be moved in circles around that finger – first in one direction, then the other, back and forth, while her mind was away somewhere – far, far away. ‘Is it possible’ Anna wonders, ‘that the last thirty-one years since Erin died have unreeled the way they have, at least in part, because of the way her death changed me?’

Anna wants to hear sounds, to distract her from her thoughts, so she lowers her window a few inches. She hears a siren. She hears someone honk a horn. She hears a woman’s laughter and looks around, but they have passed whoever was laughing. She hears the squeal of brakes somewhere ahead of where they are.

They stop at a traffic light, with two cars ahead of them. A woman on a motorized scooter appears from behind them, on their right, on the sidewalk near the curb. That woman passes them, passes the two cars ahead of them, and turns right at the intersection. Anna closes her window.

They turn left on Seventh Avenue. Four blocks later they stop at a traffic light.

Anna has traveled the world for her company, always alone, and has never bought anything of consequence during her trips. “You live so modestly,” her tax lawyer has told her, “for someone who could buy anything she wants.” He has also commented on how rare it is, in his experience, to have a client who gives so much money to charitable organizations.

The limo slows down, moves over two lanes to the right, and they pass a construction truck in the middle of the avenue, under bright overhead lights, where men in reflective yellow rain gear look down into a hole in the street.

A traffic light changes to green. The rain has stopped.

Billy turns left, into the West Village.

Anna watches the people walking along the sidewalks.

She sees a man and a woman laughing.

‘I might as well be looking at fish in an aquarium’, she thinks as she looks at that couple. ‘Tonight I’m as different from those people, and from all other happy people, as I am from fish in an aquarium’.

▪

ANNA GOES INTO HER BEDROOM, changes into her nightgown, gets into bed, turns off the lamp on the nightstand, and lies on her side.

An hour later she is still awake. She can’t stop thinking about the woman she gave the umbrella and the money to – those eyes, those fingers, that soft, feminine voice.

‘Was I seeing myself in her?’ she wonders. ‘Was Erin behind my decision to try to help her? Did I really help her?’

Anna closes her eyes, rolls over on her other side, and tries to stop thinking about that woman, and Erin.

▪ ▪ ▪

T. G. Metcalf’s most recently published short stories include “A Life Made of Words,” in the Jan. 2025 issue of The Write Launch, and “The Reason the U.S. No Longer Exists,” in the Feb. 18, 2025 issue of Sage Magazine. “Dr. Thayer” will appear in the June issue of Plexus Magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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