Anything Is Possible(48)
“Get back to the Annie girl,” Dottie said.
Shelly’s face took on a quickness of expression. “She was hardly a girl. But she did seem it. She did seem like a girl.” And Shelly talked on quietly and steadily. It was getting dark by the time the door opened and her husband came in, and Dottie could see immediately how dismissive he was of his wife and the B&B proprietor sitting in the living room chatting over cold undrunk cups of tea. He spoke briefly, then went straight to their room, and Shelly, with a rather furtive and quick smile toward Dottie, gathered her things and followed.
Annie Appleby was much as Shelly had described her: Dottie found interviews and reviews and blogs and of course photographs, and the girl was really exceptional. She did not have that open-faced shiny thing that actresses so often had, as though they wanted to beam their way right out of the photo and into your lap. Very childlike, Dottie thought actors were, from what she saw on TV when they had their silly interviews, and on the Web too, but Annie didn’t look like that. She looked like you could stare at her forever and not know something you wanted to know that she was not going to let you know. It was a very attractive quality; Dottie could see a psychiatrist having trouble with the likes of her each week staring at him across the room, or lying down, or whatever it was a patient going to a psychiatrist did. Annie seemed to have stopped being an actress for quite a while, though. Dottie couldn’t find anything about what she was up to now.
Shelly had said that she and Annie had walked around the lake the last time Annie and David had visited, which was the first time Annie and David had seen the new house. The new house had a visitors’ suite downstairs where Annie and David had right away taken their bags, and Annie had said, Oh, how beautiful, Shelly, what an amazing job you’ve done! So then they had taken a walk around the lake, the men walking ahead of the women, and Shelly told Annie things. Of course Dottie wondered: What things? And of course Shelly told her without being asked. “What I told Annie was that I was older now, and it made life different. I mean,” Shelly said, straightening the top of her trousers, “Annie had this quality that made you feel you could really talk to her, and so that last day, that last time they were at the lake, I told her how I remembered years ago, when I was a young girl, a man passed me in the concert hall and said, Well, you’re a pretty thing, and I told Annie this. And I said, No one will ever tell me I’m pretty again.”
Dottie had to allow a minute for this to sink in. “And what did she say?” Dottie asked.
Shelly cocked her head. “I don’t really remember. She had the gift of not saying much, just listening, and you thought it was all going to be okay.”
Dottie thought that Shelly had put Annie in quite a tight spot that day, saying no one would ever again tell her she was pretty. Shelly Small did not have the remnants of pretty on her. Perhaps she had once had the remnants of pretty, but Dottie could not see it.
“And I told her other things,” Shelly said. “I told her how worried I was about my children’s marriages. My younger daughter, well, she’d become quite…overweight, and I really didn’t understand it. And just the weekend before they had been at the lake and I’d watched while her husband encouraged her to eat more. I told Annie all about it. I said, Why would he do that? And Annie said she didn’t know. And I told her how my other daughter was just desperate for a different job— Well, I told her private things.”
“Yes, I see,” said Dottie.
“But here’s the thing—” Shelly pressed her legs together and leaned forward, her hands held together in her thin lap. “After Annie and David broke up, I called Annie and said she could come to the lake herself, we’d be happy to have her anytime, I left a message, and she never called back. Never called me back. And so when David arrived in one of his weeping states—just weeping away, like he did after Isa left him—I told him this, that Annie had never called me back, and he said, ‘Of course she didn’t call you back, Shelly. Annie thought you were pathetic! She thought you were an idiot!’?”
She didn’t think that, Shelly had answered, and even Richard told David to go easy. “She did,” said David. So Shelly, of course shaken, said, Oh, David, the whole thing was a little unrealistic anyway, you know. Just with the age difference alone. And David said, staring out at the water, “The age difference. Here’s what I have learned about the age difference. People think girls like older men because they want a father. Classic theory. But girls want older men so they can boss them around. They’re wearing the pants, I can tell you that. She was nothing but a whore.”
This made Shelly very uncomfortable, and she told the men she was going to start dinner, and then she hesitated and said, David, I put your stuff downstairs in the guest suite, but maybe you don’t want to stay there because, you know—that’s where—
“That’s where nothing,” David said. “That’s where Annie recoiled from me and said she hated this huge new house. She said, ‘This house is Shelly’s penis.’ That’s what she said.”
Here Shelly stopped telling the story. Unmistakably, tears popped into her eyes.
Dottie wanted to laugh out loud. Oh, she really did. Dottie thought it was one of the funniest things she’d heard in a very long time. And then she glanced up at Shelly and saw that in spite of what Dottie always thought was a placid front that she—Dottie—presented to the world, Shelly Small had felt Dottie’s desire to laugh, and she was furious. Well, she would be furious, Dottie understood. After all, the point of the woman’s story was that Annie had humiliated her. Humiliation is not to be laughed at; Dottie knew that well.