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Breakfast With Annie
©2009 David Boyne
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“The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion."   ~Doris Lessing

1

Annie and George, each more than 80-years-old, lived in the apartment above mine. Sometimes they would have loud arguments. Newton, my golden retriever, would lift his head and prick his ears, an uneasy concern lifting and twisting his brows. Golden retrievers will fight with other dogs, when provoked. But anger between humans bewilders them.

Sometimes, Annie and George’s arguing went on so long and was so loud that I would leave my apartment, escorted to the front door by Newton, and walk up the outdoor stairs, alone, to knock on the front door of Annie and George’s apartment.

It was always Annie who came to the door. She would be sniffling, her eyes small and red from crying, but at the same time, she would smile at me, as if happy to have a visitor. She was no more than five feet tall and I could easily see over her into the apartment. George would always be sitting in the big easy chair and rocking it back-and-forth, making the inner springs screech. He would be scowling, staring straight ahead at the wall, and showing no awareness of me standing in the doorway.

“You two all right. Annie?”

"Oh, we’re fine. We’re fine. It’s just that George, sometimes he doesn't know me anymore. I don't know what I'm going to do with him. I just don’t know. I can't put him in a home. He won't have it. And I would miss him so.”

George, oblivious to our conversation about him, continued rocking the chair, staring straight ahead. Something in the way George was furiously rocking the chair made me see the edge of a memory that I could not quite recall.

“I know it’s the Alls-heimer's,” Annie said, tapping a crooked finger on her temple. “He yells at me, tells me I better get out before the woman who lives here comes home. I tell him, George, I live here! I live here with you! He says, Oh, no you don't! No you don’t! The woman who lives here has brown hair!”

These were the same words, shouted between a sobbing Annie and a raging George, which had finally brought me up the stairs to knock on their door.

"See?” Annie said, her gnarled hands patting her white hair, as she sniffled. “My hair was brown, dark brown, when I was young. He means me. He means me. But he don't know it."

I looked at George, lost in a separate world, rocking the big chair back and forth. And now I recalled what he reminded me of; the boy in the story The Rocking Horse Racer.


2

On a hot afternoon when I returned from taking Newton to Dog Beach, there was a police car parked in the driveway in front of our small apartment building. As I unlocked my door and a thoroughly soaked and happy Newton loped into our apartment, I looked up the outdoor stairs and saw a stout, red-haired police officer come out from Annie’s apartment. I watched as the officer assisted George down the stairs, while Annie stood on the landing in front of her door, staring at her feet. George leaned into the big cop, who easily supported George’s weight, almost carrying him. As they passed me, I noticed how thin and frail George had become, how big the bones of his wrists seemed.

“Everything okay?” I asked the cop.

“Oh, everyone’s fine, just fine,” he said, sounding jovial. After he helped George into the back seat of the patrol car, he said, “A little lover’s spat, that’s all. Right Annie?”

Annie did not answer, but started down the stairs by herself.

“Wait for me, Annie,” the cop said, hurrying to meet her. Annie reluctantly allowed the big cop to help her down the stairs, and help her into the back seat of the patrol car on the opposite side from George.

As the officer started the car, I watched Annie and George, married more than 50 years, sitting in the back seat, behind the wire mesh partition, not speaking, staring downward, looking like two reprimanded children.

Two weeks later, George died.

3

When George had been alive, he and Annie would leave their apartment every morning at 5:45am. They would walk together to University Avenue, sometimes arguing the whole quarter-mile journey. Once there, they would have breakfast in a small Greek restaurant.

After George died, Annie continued the morning walk to the restaurant, alone.

I told the landlords, Hendrik and Helmud, that I was willing to switch apartments with Annie, so she could have my ground floor place and not have to worry about the stairs. They later told me how they had presented this idea to Annie. She had told them to mind their own business.

So every morning, at 5:45am, Newton and I would lie in bed, half-asleep, half-hearing Annie leaving her apartment, fumbling the keys to lock the door, and starting her arduous journey down the long flight of outdoor stairs.

Newton, as used to the routine as I was, would not lift his head, but his ears would prick and his eyebrows would raise, then lower, in time with the rise and fall of Annie’s muttered words directed at each step of the concrete stairs. “Think you’re tough, eh? I’m tough. I’m tough. Oh! Almost had me on that one. Ha!” For Annie, coming down the stairs was both a torment, and a game.

Mixed with Annie’s muttered monologue was the raucous symphony performed by a vast orchestra of birds hidden in all the trees and hedges, or perched on all the fences and telephone wires, around us. My bedroom was still dark, but the two wide-open windows meeting at a corner of the room were like a pair of illuminated paintings. In the foreground were dense green vines sagging under the weight of violet and orange flowers, their fragrance filling my bedroom and filling my breaths. Past the flowering vines, I could see a section of the neighbor’s unpainted, grey wood plank fence, heavily draped by more flowering vines, only these were yellow and white. Above the battered fence, in a swath of still-dark northern sky, the rising sun’s light infused the underbellies of watery clouds with blood reds, pale oranges, dark golds, and deep purples.

On these mornings, lying beside Newton in bed, listening to Annie taunting the stairs, half-awake and half-asleep, I wondered where in the journey of my life I might be. I would feel both a thrilled anticipation, and an impenetrable loneliness. And I would smile, as I realized I had felt this way since I was a very young boy.

4

Within days of arriving in San Diego, I learned of a school within the community college system that offered high-quality classes in graphic design and web design—free to anyone who showed up. Classes began at 7am, and the line to get in to the classes formed as early as 6am.

I began taking classes, and I would be up and showered, finished walking Newton around the still-dark neighborhood, and off on my 15-mile commute to queue-up for a free class in Quark, or HTML, or Photoshop, before Annie would have opened her door and come muttering down the stairs.

But some mornings, having overslept after a difficult night at my 3pm to 11pm job, I would be driving to class see Annie, dressed all in black for mourning, on her hobbling walk to the Greek restaurant. I would pull over, get out, and stand beside her on the sidewalk.

“Good morning, Annie.”

“Morning, neighbor! Morning! Where’s that Nugent of yours?”

She must have heard me call my dog’s name hundreds of times, but to Annie, Newton was always Nugent. Annie also never called me by my name, the closest she came being, “neighbor,” or “kind sir.” I was never sure just how real I was to Annie.

I would offer Annie a ride to the Greek restaurant. At first, Annie would decline my offer. But I would gently insist. Then Annie would allow me to help her into my car. Soon, I didn’t have to persuade her; I would pull over, get out, and help her into the car.

On one of our short rides to the restaurant, soon after George’s death, I asked, “How you doing Annie?”

“I just can’t seem to sleep much any more. Sometimes I never sleep at night at all. I just cry and cry. I miss George so.”

She told me, “His body was all ‘et up. The cancer was in his chest, you know. He told the doctor he felt pain there. The doctor said it was just heartburn. He sent George home. Finally in the VA hospital they said George’s chest was all ‘et up by the cancer.”

I did not hear any anger or sadness in Annie’s voice, as is she were telling a story of something that had happened to someone else.

At the parking lot of the Greek restaurant, I got out to open the door for Annie and walked her to the entrance.

“Why don’t you come in and have breakfast with me?” she asked.

Annie always asked me to come in and have breakfast with her. I always declined her invitation. I would give a reason, sometimes true, more often a lie. I had to go to work, I had to go to a class, I had to meet a friend, and I had to take “Nugent” to the beach.

I did always have things to do. But the real reason I declined Annie’s invitations was that I thought having breakfast with my 84-year-old neighbor would be painfully boring.

5

One Sunday morning as I walked toward University Avenue to buy The New York Times, a weekly treat I gave myself, I caught up with Annie as she made her slow way to the restaurant. She was still dressed all in black, months after George’s death. I noticed she was using a cane.

“I’ve never seen you with that cane, Annie.”

“Oh, the doctor gave me it. I don’t need it, don’t need it. I use it for a weapon, see? Case anyone bothers me.” She stood still, yelled, “Ha!” and waved the cane about her, looking like a shaky, decrepit, Ninja.

I laughed, then asked, “Has anyone bothered you, Annie?”

“Not yet. Oh, but they will. They will. They prey on the old people, you know.” She looked straight at me. “You got to go to work today?”

“Not today, Annie. It’s Sunday.”

“Well, come and have breakfast with me. My treat.”

I was caught off guard. Not being in my car, I could not lie that I was driving somewhere else. And the only place to get my coveted Sunday Times was at the same Greek Restaurant Annie was now inviting me to.

“Come have breakfast with me,” Annie repeated. “I’m buying. My treat.”

I heard myself saying, “Okay, Annie.”

She beamed, tapped her cane on the sidewalk, and said, “Follow me, neighbor!”

I adjusted my pace, slower, then slower still, until I matched Annie’s steps. The slow speed reminded me of watching a video—frame by frame. It gave me a lot of time to look around, and I saw things I had never noticed when driving past in my car. A sun-faded, insanely grinning lawn gnome, fallen over in high weeds beside a mailbox; a lime green stuffed frog perched on the back window ledge of a lime green car; a baseball glove, red aluminum bat and blue bicycle, all lying where dropped last night beside the front steps of a house.

Annie began talking non-stop, like a tour guide, pointing out the features of the terrain, from her perspective. “See this curb here? It’s higher than the others. Too high for me. Too high. Got to walk out into the street, here.”

I held Annie’s arm and we walked onto the shoulder of the road.

“Then I cut back in, over here.” She tapped her cane on a low spot in the curbing where she could easily step up from the road, back onto the sidewalk. As we performed the maneuver together she warned, “You got to watch out for these drivers. They don’t stop for nobody or nothing. Run you right down.”

When we reached the busy intersection of Texas Street and University Avenue, I pressed the button for the walk sign. I had learned, through volunteering to build a website for a new organization called WalkSanDiego.org, that this particular intersection was one where San Diego’s drivers did their best to maintain the city’s pedestrian death rate at twice the national average, well above even Manhattan’s mean streets.

“Now get ready, get ready,” Annie urged me. “Here it comes.”

She knew the timing of the light perfectly. The moment the walk sign flashed on, Annie carefully, yet with urgency, stepped down from the curb, into the crosswalk. “Don’t dilly-dally!” she scolded over her shoulder.

I stepped forward and held her arm, walking as slowly as I could, even though my survival instinct screamed for me to run across the street.

I kept pace with Annie, my left hand softly gripping her arm to steady her, my head turning so I could make glaring eye-contact with the impatient drivers thinking of charging through the open crosswalk ahead of us.

The red Don’t Walk signal started flashing before we were halfway across the street. Annie was unperturbed; she kept her head down, concentrating, careful of her footing on the wildly uneven tar of the rutted and broken and patched-up asphalt. When the light turned red, we were still several feet from the curb and drivers had begun their turns, edging their two-ton vehicles to within inches of us. A long moment later, we finally stepped up onto the safety of the far sidewalk.
“Whew!” Annie exhaled. “Record time!”

6

“I like to sit at the windows,” Annie told me. “There in the corner. So I can keep an eye on things.” About half tables in the small restaurant were already filled by early-morning customers. Annie raised her voice above the conversations and rasped, “Where the hell is that Ruth?”

I was not the only person who was shocked.

The waitress, a black-eyed woman of thirty with long black hair pulled into a loose ponytail, and skin the color of caramel, appeared beside our table. “Morning, Annie!” In one hand she carried a cup of steaming water, a tea bag steeping in it; in the other hand she carried a pot of coffee. She set the teacup down by Annie and without asking, she poured coffee into a cup in front of me. I decided I liked Ruth very much.

“The usual, Annie?”

Annie snapped, “Don’t rush me.”

Her sharp tone deepened my surprise. I watched as she used both hands to lift one of the oversized menus left on the table. She opened it, and pointedly said nothing, paying intense attention to scanning its wide, laminated pages.

Ruth, seeing my confusion, winked at me, and said. “Our Annie’s a feisty one. Cindy, the waitress during the week, has the hardest time with her. But Annie and I have found a way to get along. Isn’t that right, Annie?”

“That Cindy is a slut. She hussies up to the men for tips. Ignores paying customers like me. You should fire her.”

Ruth rolled her eyes in mock exasperation and told me, “I’ll be back for your orders whenever you’re ready.”

As I sipped my coffee, I watched my 84-year-old neighbor seated across the small table from me, studying the menu as if it were written in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and not a menu she probably knew by heart.

It occurred to me then, that her loud rudeness was an act. I had no idea why, and I wondered just what had I gotten myself into.

7

Annie dropped the large menu on the table and looked straight at me. “I like that Ruth,” she said. Her deeply sun-tanned and creased face seemed to audibly crack into a smile. “A hard worker. And a good mother. Takes good care of her two little ones. She’s pushy. She’s pushy. But a woman’s got to be pushy these days.”

It was becoming apparent, even to my under-caffeinated brain, that all my assessments and judgments of my 84-year-old neighbor were rooted in the dark loam of ignorance. I sipped more coffee, and glanced out the windows at the intersection that Annie and I had crossed minutes before—just as a car going 50 miles-per-hour blasted through a red light.

I looked at Annie, but whatever I had been about to say, I forgot, as I watched Annie methodically rip open and empty seven packages of sugar into her cup of tea.

“See that one over there,” she said to me conspiratorially, tilting her head to the right.

“Who?” I said, looking over the other tables of customers.

“The lard butt with the sweaty bald head.”

I easily located the one man fitting Annie’s description.

“Comes here every Saturday, every Sunday, ‘cause he’s got the hots for Ruth. Ruth only works weekends, see. She won’t ever go out with him. The dope. She won’t have nothing to do with him. She’s got a beau. A nice young fella. Ol’ Lard Butt is barking up the wrong tree. Hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell.”

I listened, even as I wondered if I had imagined seeing the car rocketing through the red light, and was now imagining the enthusiastically crude conversation of my elderly neighbor. I drank the rest of my coffee in a gulp, and as I set the cup down, Ruth appeared and refilled it.

I said, “I think I love you.”

Ruth rewarded me with a professional waitress frown. And another wink. “Annie,” she said, “The Greek omelet is on special.”

Annie grunted, then sipped her tea, and I repressed a burst of laughter when I saw that her pinky was extended, like a clichéd parody of gentility.

Ruth was already gone, an angel of mercy filling coffee cups at other tables, clearing plates, doling out frowns and winks and never doing less than three things at one time.

Annie leaned forward toward me, “I bet you five bucks that slut Cindy would go home with old Lard Butt for a twenty-dollar tip!”

And then, for the first time, I heard Annie laugh. She made a rapid series of ha-sounds, like an overheated dog panting hard., “Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

As often happens when surprised, caught off-guard, or drunk, I told the truth. “Annie, I’m having a blast.”

She called out, “Can’t a paying customer place an order here?”

I noted how other customers would whispered to their companions, no doubt explaining that the ancient white-haired woman dressed in black and with the loud, raspy voice and rude manner could be found here at this time every morning.

Ruth appeared beside our table, refilling my coffee even as she asked, “What’ll it be, Annie?”

“You can take my neighbor’s order first, I’m still deciding.”

I ordered the Greek omelet special.

Then Annie ordered pancakes, and two eggs over well, “so they’re not snotty” with bacon, “and you tell that Mexican in the kitchen not to burn it this time,” and more tea “with a fresh tea bag,” and whole wheat toast “don’t skimp on the butter,” and a bowl of oatmeal, “with some cream to put in it, not milk, cream.”

Ruth said, “Got it, Annie.” As she topped off my coffee, she stage whispered, “That’s her usual.”

8

Annie did not actually tell me her life story over breakfast. What she did was to sketch random, disconnected scenes, each one a spare yet vivid picture, unrelated to the scene that came before it or came after it, other than to have as its central character, Annie, at every stage of her long life, from a very young child, to a very old woman.

The scenes flooded out of Annie like the runoff from a summer thunderstorm draining into too narrow a pipe. She would laugh, and for half-a-minute, she would be panting like a happy dog, ha-ha-ha-ha.

Somewhere during the long narrative deluge, I, and not Annie, paid for breakfast. We left the restaurant, crossed the treacherous corner of Texas Street and University Avenue, and we walked—so awesomely slowly that time turned to cold syrup—until I suddenly came to, holding open the screen door as Annie unlocked her apartment door.

As I walked down the stairs to my own apartment, it occurred to me that I had forgotten to buy the Sunday Times.

In the days that followed, at odd moments in class or at my job or when driving or when playing with Newton at the park, my mind would continue the project of cataloging and putting into chronological order the stories Annie had told.

I imagined I could see the young, skinny girl that had been Annie, nearly eighty years ago, running with the youngest of her 9 brothers and sisters, all “brown as nuts from the sun,” and barefoot, “we have Cherokee blood, you know” in the hills and fields of small wild flowers that had long ago been ploughed under and covered with the concrete and glass, tar and of inner San Diego. I created images to match the words Annie had told me, and vividly imagined her youngest brother, who started drinking whiskey at age eleven and simply disappeared at age thirteen. “None of us ever knowed if he was dead or just went away. But he was always my favorite. I think he must’ve had his reasons. But sometimes I hate it when I think terrible things maybe happened to him and him all alone with no one.”

I watched Annie quit high school. I watched her working in the cellar laundry of the Naval hospital. “Made more money than my daddy, still he took it all from me just like he was the one that earned it.” I watched as Annie met a young sailor with “big strong arms but he was always so tender with me.” George, a new Navy enlistee during World War II and in San Diego just three days before meeting Annie, and three months before marrying her, would come back from the war “all hardened up,” his former tenderness only showing once in a long while, when he would bring flowers and chocolates home on a Friday evening and sit with Annie watching television and talking. “George bought us the nicest ranch house in El Cajon. I still remember him driving me up to it not even telling me it was ours. I was walking around inside and I was yattering on about how much I wanted a home of our own someday. Then he said, Annie, this is our home. This is ours.”

I imagined the house, imagined it with gray walls and pink shutters, don’t ask me why. In a flashing movie, I saw George and Annie living through decades in that ranch house in a raw new development in El Cajon. I saw them raise three children, all of whom George and Annie would outlive. I saw Annie, older than the young Navy wives in the neighborhood, at first inviting couples over on Sundays. She had described to me a fondly remembered fondue set and backyard barbecue, “gas barbecue and it cleaned itself.” George always had his “man friends” over for barbecues, and always drank too much beer and always stayed until closing at a local bar. “He’d come stumbling drunk into the house and horny,” Annie said. She told me she was usually happy to accept George’s rough advances, but George, too drunk, more often than not “couldn’t hold up his end of the bargain! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

I told myself I would invite Annie to breakfast, very soon. But, as willing an audience as I had become, there would never be an encore breakfast with Annie.

9

Our landlords, Hendrik and Helmud, were spending several months in Germany. I was spending my days in class, learning web design, and my afternoons and nights inside the copy room of a large downtown law firm. But from the outside world, the reverberations from the bursting of the “dot com bubble” reached me loud and clear. As the program that was supposed to gain me an entry-level job with an internet company neared its end, people with five years of internet experience were waking up not to go to their offices, but to queue up in unemployment lines, and interview for jobs running copiers at night inside law firms.

Somewhere on the periphery of this, I watched an unreeling montage as Annie, my earthy, raspy-voiced 84-year-old neighbor, slipped into dementia.

In one scene, some neighbors, not having seen Annie for several days, and her phone giving a busy signal every time they tried it, called the police, who called the firemen, who swiftly broke the lock to Annie’s front door. The apartment was empty. Annie came home while the police and firemen were inside her apartment. After the experience of having breakfast with Annie, it was not difficult to picture what the neighbors described to me as “Annie went ballistic on us, and then she tore into the cops and firemen, too!”

In another scene, leaving for class late, I saw Annie hobbling along the sidewalk, leaning heavily on the cane that she had claimed was only a weapon. I drove her to the restaurant, but in an angry, fragmented outburst, Annie told me Ruth had insulted her and she now ate breakfast at the small donut shop in the same little strip mall. Annie told me how she had promised to give $850 to a young, pregnant girl who worked in the donut shop. “So she don’t loose her apartment.” I could not discern from Annie’s ranting if the woman’s husband was in jail, or in the marines, or a marine in jail; if he was somewhere on a ship, or somewhere in Saudi Arabia, or just up the road in Oceanside. But when Annie went to withdraw the $850 form her bank account, a bank teller, aware of scams targeting old people, had made Annie come back the next morning at 10am. And when she did, a police officer was in the bank, waiting to “interview” her. Annie was furious, still. But I never heard the end of the story, as we had reached the donut shop by then. I walked Annie to its door, then drove to class.

In another scene, on a weekend afternoon, while driving to the beach with Newton, we passed Annie as she pushed a shopping cart along the sidewalk. But there were groceries in the cart, only torn and dirty plastic bags, yellowed newspapers, a piece of wood, maybe five feet long, sticking straight up. Annie was still dressed in black mourning, despite the 80-degree weather. Her cane was hooked on the handle of the cart. realized that Annie was using the cart as a kind of walker. After sunset, when Newton and I came home from the beach, the shopping cart was pushed into the hedges at the bottom of the stairs to Annie’s apartment.

I saw less and less of Annie. We would hear her come home, sometimes near midnight. One Sunday afternoon, coming back from a romp with Newton at the dog park in Morley Field, I chanced to meet Annie as she arrived home, pushing her shopping cart down the sloping driveway. I watched her let go of the loaded cart. It ran down the driveway and rammed into the hedges at the base of the stairs.

Annie turned to me, “Now that’s a parking job!”

I laughed. And then, I don’t remember why, or what I may have had in mind, I said, “Annie, would you mind if I took your photograph?”

“You want to take a picture of me?”

“I do. But only if it’s all right with you.”

“Okay. That’s okay.”

I put Newton inside and brought my camera outside. I asked Annie to stand near some flowering hedges that would make a good backdrop. I was surprised to see how shy, yet eager for the attention she was. She fussed with her hair, shifted her feet, and smiled up at me.

I could not know it at the moment I took her photograph, but that would be the last time I would see Annie.

10

Hendrik and Helmud returned from Germany. About a week later, I came home from work at midnight and saw in the dim moonlight, the ghostly shadow of the George’s rocking chair, set beside the trashcans. The trashcans were overflowing with household items.

The next morning, Helmud told me what had happened

Our landlords, not seeing Annie for days, her phone off the hook when they called, and no reply when they knocked on her door to collect the rent, had, as the neighbors before them had, called the police. The police came, then the firemen, who once again broke the lock on Annie’s door. This time they found her on the floor of the back bedroom, dehydrated and incoherent, too weak to get up, or to speak above a hoarse whisper.

When released from the hospital, Annie was no longer in control of her own life. She was sent to live with her only surviving relative, a middle-aged niece and her husband, in Florida.

A moving company hired by the niece had removed Annie’s furniture from the apartment. Apparently the movers had judged George’s chair, and a lot of other stuff, to not be worth transporting. They had thrown it all in or beside the garbage cans.

In the small mountain of detritus from the long lives of Annie and George, I found a six-inch thick, leather bound book. It was a family bible, and in the blank pages at the front, different hands had written the names and dates of those born into the family, and those who died. The earliest date, written in fading brown ink, the lettering ornate with serifs and curls, was in the 1890s.

I found a framed certificate that looked like a high school diploma. But on reading it, I was shocked to discover it was a government certificate recognizing that George, while serving on a naval warship, had been ordered, along with the entire crew, to stand on deck and be an eye-witness to the detonation of an above ground nuclear bomb.

The next day, the garbage cans were empty. But I had kept the bible and the framed certificate.

I wrote a letter to Annie, Helmud having given me the address of her niece in Florida. But there was never a reply. I hadn’t really expected one.

Thinking of Annie and George, I began to see my own life, along with all the lives around me, like falling snowflakes. The geometric pattern of each, at a glance, appears repetitive. But looking closer, looking deeper, each life is unique unto itself, yet designed in such a way as to make linking with the lives falling around it natural.

Annie and George had left traces of themselves in my memory. As they had in Ruth’s, and Hendrik’s, and Helmud’s, and even Newton’s.

When all of us were gone, nothing of Annie and George would remain.

But the snow would continue falling.