ANNA IN THE FIRST PLACE
by Peter Fortunato

Peter Fortunato, MFA, CHT

Kathy Wellford felt unsettled. She could almost see the word in quotes floating above her head as she made her way through the remaining audience and out the rear door of the auditorium. She looked back once over her shoulder toward the podium and the speaker, whom her imagination long ago had labeled “humanitarian.” Revising that on her mental screen, the letters were deleted one by one, and one by one, she retyped “bodhisattva.”

Anna Ahlgren clearly qualified for that. Her efforts on behalf of widows and orphans in Tanzania, where she had risked her life in various ways over the past ten years, placed her in the ranks of the spiritual heroes. Nor did Anna think of herself as a bodhisattva, if she even knew what the term meant. Kathy was now reviewing the language of her own introduction from an hour earlier, which she had delivered at that same podium. She thought with some pride that she might well be called upon again in the future to introduce Anna to another appreciative audience, and so Kathy wanted to remember the revisions she would make to her speech. Drop the references to their school days -- they were both too old for that now.

Kathy was on her way to the room reserved for Anna’s reception in another building on campus. She knew that of a little while longer the audience in the Chandler Redutton lecture hall would ask questions and express their admiration, that they would to seek and be given some form of benediction from Anna. Kathy’s teaching assistant Kareem had been instructed to intervene by 5:30 pm and to deliver the speaker to the Stilton Thoms House where Kathy would be hosting a public reception and then dinner with specially invited guests. What a lot of work to arrange this visit to her small, upstate New York college for Anna Ahlgren! She had underestimated her friend’s celebrity and how much she would be in demand during a rare visit to the States.
As Kathy climbed the stairs outdoors and away from the building that everyone at Orion College referred to simply as Chan, the heavy air, which had been collecting moisture all day, seemed all at once to condense into rain. Drops of water were kissing her face – it made her laugh to think so -- and felt refreshing. She hadn’t realized that her cheeks were so warm: did Anna still make her blush after all these years? With pride? With envy? It was enough that they had remained friends, it was, as she said to herself “a treasure” in her life. She could not hold the proverbial candle besides Anna’s stellar achievements.

Kathy gulped the air as she climbed, ran her tongue on her lips, sipped relief. Anna had always been a star, even when they were undergraduate roommates, and her record in graduate school back home in Sweden had of course been magnificent. Her thesis had been published almost at once, and now ten years later, she was the Field Director of an international human rights organization in Africa, and the author of several notable books.
By the time Kathy had hiked up the imposing driveway to the historic home of Orion’s first president and scaled “Thom’s steep stairs,” the misty rain was running in rivulets from hair across her face. It was late September, and unseasonably mild weather had been holding steady the entire month. The first wash of color was in the maples, the goldenrod and purple asters were blooming, and a week past the autumn equinox, it had until this morning still felt like summertime. Now she could sense the advance of a cold front, this cool rain its harbinger. Why had she been so stubborn, despite her husband Asa’s warnings this morning, and refused to bring along a coat and hat? Because she was an optimist, she had called back to him from her car door. “No, not that,” she had revised herself, swinging her bare legs into the Volvo. “Because I have faith.” It was because Anna was visiting, and she felt young as she drove off to fetch her at the hotel, where for a few moments they would be alone over coffee before the busy day subsumed them.

“Immersed” was more like it, she thought. 5:30 pm, and twenty five guests for dinner, Anna the star of the department’s speaker series this semester. The headline was in neon letters this time: “Unsettled?” it read. Answering herself, she said, “I can’t pretend.” But she wasn’t nervous because of the dignitaries who would be at the dinner.

One of her Buddhist teachers long ago had observed that Kathy liked to “ponder,” and this she could accept about herself, yet she had never been tedious or weighty: she was sensitive Kathy, intelligent, anxious Kathy, loving and concerned – or at least she tried to be. She tried hard and was always examining herself to see if she’d matched her ideals. Other people sometimes misconstrued her introspectiveness as diffidence, or its opposite, a sense of superiority. Why was it that people always wanted to categorize you? In order to know where they stood in relation to you? Meditation had taught her to observe her own tendency to be judgmental, especially about herself, and to let go of such troublesome thinking. Sometimes she labeled her passing thoughts with as much objectivity as possible and then in turn allowed the labels to dissolve. Kathy believed it made her less self-righteous, something that as an academic she had always seen as an occupational hazard. Still, it wasn’t always so easy to practice this objectivity and neutrality, especially with some of her more competitive colleagues. A few names came immediately to mind – but wasn’t that also judgmental thinking? She corrected herself immediately.

At Thoms house, she took a deep breath, settled into her center of gravity, and grabbed the brass handle of the heavy front door. When she entered the hallway, just as her thoughts turned to her physical appearance and what the rain had wrought, she was greeted by Brenda Donahue.

“Professor Wellford -- my goodness! Let me get you something to dry off with.” Brenda was a senior enrolled in Kathy’s research seminar, older than the others students, and rather too motherly to suit her. She soon returned from the kitchen with a white terry cloth towel that she handed to her professor. Thank goodness that “good Brenda” hadn’t actually started to mop off her face, Kathy thought, yet she was genuinely grateful for her student’s kindness. She took the towel with a smile of thanks, and began to daub at her dripping brows while Brenda waited, standing close by in case she could be of further assistance. Kathy wiped her pale freckled arms and then ran the towel down her bare legs and over the tops of her tee-strapped shoes.
“Wasn’t her presentation fantastic?” Brenda said as Kathy finished up. It was more of a pronouncement than a question, and it was indeed the reaction she hoped to hear from all of her students and guests. This was why she had invited Anna in the first place.

Anna couldn’t help but inspire. She was born to shine, had even chosen the right parents to whom to be born: a pair of pediatricians in Stockholm who constantly wrote books and published medical papers in the best journals. Anna’s latest book, from whose manuscript she had read today, was already out in Swedish, and while she was in the States she would be meeting with an agent to discuss its upcoming publication in English. Of course, Anna herself had done the translation. It seemed to Kathy she must not ever sleep, or else it was that Anna’s work and life and writing simply flowed together as one steady stream of energy. As well as producing three daughters and consuming two husbands, Anna had also given birth to four books -- five, if you counted Walking With the Wounded, the current manuscript that would likely give Anna her first best seller in America. She was leaving Orion tomorrow for her agent’s in New York City, and she had asked Kathy if she wanted to be her guest at the hotel where she would be housed. Between business engagements they could spend some time together in Manhattan, just as they had done years ago when they were college roommates.
Kathy folded the tea towel and passed it back into Brenda’s waiting hands. “You’re a life saver,” she said. Brenda smiled and departed, leaving her professor to arrange her damp hair before the antique mirror in the foyer of the elegant mansion. She knew that she had only a few moments before Kareem and Anna and the rest would be arriving. Kareem had his car, thank goodness, and glancing at her watch she thought that at any moment he ought to be pulling up into the circular drive at Thom’s house. She saw that heavy rain was now falling and sensed some slight apprehension just below her breast bone. She named it “concern,” but then revised that to “justifiable concern” in tiny black, block letters that she saw running around her wrist like a bracelet. She could manage it. Anna would be fine, Kareem was very reliable, they would be here along with all the other happy, moist guests momentarily. She focused on her hair at the mirror. Actually, it look good like this, wet and rather wild. She smirked. She remembered that it was she who years ago at Bryn Mawr first bedded “Lawrence Perfect”; Anna had picked him up afterwards.

“Bodhisattva.” She thought about the word again in connection to the Buddhist vows she regularly chanted, pledging to save all sentient beings and deliver them to nirvana. This was impossible in any quantifiable way, as all intelligent practitioners had to admit. Still, it was a promise Kathy renewed regularly, and if anyone asked her, she was unapologetic about her idealism. “Don’t think about numbers and time,” her Zen roshi had told her. “How will you save all those beings right now?”

It was inevitable, Kathy thought, this comparison of herself to Anna -- and how predictable, all the mental captioning that she was indulging: a familiar expression of her neurotic nature that flared up whenever she was unsettled. “Nervous” was more like it. She was a nervous person, she had finally admitted to herself, years after her husband Asa had told her that he loved her no matter how many concerns she had, no matter how many times she condemned herself for being neurotic or anxious or apprehensive. How petty she seemed to herself right now, looking for any tiny aspect of her friend’s life that Kathy might feel she had bested, and yet she had to admit that her marriage was something that Anna didn’t have: Asa and Kathy had been wedded only to each other for eighteen years, they had two children, a girl and a boy, beautiful children, and they lived in a wood-crafted home that her husband, manly, kindly Asa Standish had built with his own hands. As well, two years ago Kathy, had been promoted to Associate Professor at a prestigious private college. She was indeed living a life that she could call the picture of success.

“Composed.” That’s what she saw typed in the air above her reflection in the mirror. It was immediately replaced with “Happy?” She turned her head away from the looking glass. A lock of damp hair that she had just attempted to wrap into her bun slipped loose and tumbled down moist across her right eye. This was too much disarray, she thought: she looked bedraggled. Immediately she set about reassembling her hair-do, combing out the remains of the twist with her fingers, deftly plucking her hair pick from the air when it fell free. She shook her head vigorously, and her long auburn-colored mane, shot through here and there with strands of gray, shimmered wavy and lovely under the foyer chandelier.

Asa loved to pull her hair down when they went to bed, and he said he found it “a big turn-on” that she had never colored it nor relied on “face paint.” Of course they were happy together, they were. She would not engage in an endless discussion with herself about categories of happiness, as once she did with Anna who was at that time preparing to jettison her second husband.

Anna was always in the midst of some transformation or other, and Kathy had noticed right away when she’d picked her up at the airport yesterday how she was nowadays wearing her hair much shorter than ever and dyeing it a blond color it had never naturally been. Anna was as magnetic as ever, yet the lines around her mouth looked hardened into place, her eyes puckered and tired from something more than jet-lag. Friends noticed such things about each other. In a word, she was careworn, which was understandable in someone who gave so much to those in need, but for the first time in all the years they’d known each other, Anna did not seem happy with herself. “There,” Kathy thought, “I’ve said it.”

Did she care any less about other people than Anna? She was peering into her own eyes at the hallway mirror, fussing with her hairdo, watching her thoughts arise and dissolve, when at the front door she heard Kareem and Anna being greeted by Brenda. She paused with her hands suspended over the crown of her head. Then she abandoned the idea of putting her hair up and shook her head from side to side. No, she was nobody special.

 

Peter Fortunato holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina –Greensboro, and is certified as a hypnotherapist by the New England Institute for Neurolinguistic Programming. He has taught at Cornell and Ithaca College for many years and has been a Buddhist practitioner for most of his life. He can be reached in Ithaca at 607 273 6637. His public Facebook page is <facebook.com/peterfortunatopoet> His recent book of poetry,