Then came Annie. Annie was keen on horses, Jesus, letter-writing, and, for some reason, neck scarves. She had auburn hair, a child’s nose, skin the color of buttermilk, and she was taller than I. She always smelled fleshy. It was not entirely an unpleasant smell. She had also been keen on my older brother, C., for a while. But her attentions and interest quickly turned to me. She had already deserved the name Annie Oakley long before I met her. And while she laughed when I called her that a few times in the beginning, I knew she didn’t like it, and I gave it up. Annie always smiled.

She wasn’t from my school which, from the start, endeared her to me even more. She might not have known how much of a nerd I was. When she was attempting to court my brother and then me, she would come to my house on a horse. This wasn’t completely odd. I lived on a farm on the edge of town. Not that so many people would ride a horse through town, hardly; but still, it wouldn’t have caused too much attention.

Annie was always well-mannered and good-natured and was known to my father who approved immediately but always made a face like he was in on a joke I didn’t get. Perhaps it was her stature. Or perhaps it was that she was two or three years older. Or perhaps it was that, while I had by then turned my back on agriculture, I was being pursued by a farming girl. There was no question that she was the aggressor. Or perhaps he knew something I didn’t and still don’t know.

We wrote letters to each other often like young French lovers. I never throw out a letter but I have been unable to find any of them. We must have had a lot to say but I cannot remember a word of it. Young lovers always think they have a lot to say. Old lovers, little to say. I was hardly ever at her house and for the life of me, I can’t remember why. And on one disastrous occasion, she attempted to get me to ride a horse. It went very badly. You would think, raised on a farm, that I would know how to ride a horse and I had, a handful of times, when I was really young, but I had never got the hang of it. I think it’s because I felt so entirely ridiculous that spoiled it. And even though I’m sure she must have put me on her gentlest mount, I didn’t like it and she rescued me from the animal, and the animal from me, very shortly after I had got on. And mocked me but in such a gentle way that I couldn’t have been mad.

That summer there were a number of times we traveled together, the tall smiling girl on her horse, and me, younger, shorter, on my bicycle. We must have looked very odd but I was not in the least concerned what people thought. And she wasn’t either.

I had no car. And there was very little to do in my small town and it so happened that I would go out with my mother and her friend with Annie to dinner. And, near the end of that summer, to a movie. She showed up at my house that night so eager with anticipation and, in a fancier neck scarf than I had seen so far. And, besides her regular note of fleshiness, she also smelled of rose petals. Annie had only been to a couple of movies in her life I think. She had very little use for the city. Yes, I remember this well, it took some convincing to get her parents? her father? to allow her to go to a movie. She had that kind of life, where, at 18, she still needed her father’s permission to go to a city, to go to a movie and she wouldn’t have gone if she wouldn’t have won that permission. We really should have picked a better movie then. Since it was so important. I think it was Legal Eagles. I don’t remember anything except that it had some god-awful Rod Stewart song in it and that it was just terrible. It didn’t matter. I was with Annie and she was completely amused to be in the city.

But it’s after the movie that I remember most. Mom and her friend stopped the car somewhere in the night and went for a walk and a smoke, no doubt. I was going to go for a walk with Annie but she suggested, making a new face at me, that we should stay where we were – in the backseat. I shrugged my shoulders and said sure.

A silly unprepared young boy, I was, in the backseat of a Hyundai Pony, pretending to be much more of a man than I nearly was, suddenly set upon by the woman — for that is what she was – I couldn’t mistake it now. Her scent, fleshiness and rose petals, was on me. Her weight was on me. Her kiss was on me. I kept up as much of my part of this kissing bargain as I could muster. It was wetter, bigger, heavier, than I would have guessed. It was our first kiss and nearly our last.

When my mom returned to the car she must have seen the blush on my skin and the fog on the windows. And she made a joke that would have dispatched my sorry life if I would have had my way. I don’t know why it should have surprised me so. She was an 18 year old girl. And she had had boyfriends before. And we had spent the entire summer together. Still, the whole scene gave me the creeps. And it just got creepier when I started to think that the whole thing had been set up beforehand between my mom and Annie. I never asked, of course. And then, as I was apt to do, I over-thought it, and became mad and embarrassed that I was mad and embarrassed.

My letters to Annie got shorter and more infrequent. After school started it was easier to end it. Or rather to allow it to end. Later that year the song, “I Wanna Be a Cowboy,” was painfully popular.

When, in University, I had to write an essay on Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, in which Hero, the worldly woman pretending to be a chaste virgin, seduces Leander, the chaste virgin man pretending to be a worldly man, it was really quite easy for me to imagine, and easy for me to write. And I did quite well on that paper.

Meanwhile, Annie has married quite well and is now somebody’s mother.

SS