LITMIR.BIZ

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sighed at Gary and swallowed more of his drink. Doc lit a cigarette and said, “Gary, you are a goddamn idiot and always will be.” Then he turned to me. “Tandy, you are terrible at notating the accounts of these meetings and you always will be.”

      “I thought I was the idiot,” I said, referring to his earlier comments regarding the extravagance of my coat.

      “You are an idiot also, and you are terrible at notating the accounts of these meetings.”

      “Should I write that down?” I asked.

      “Yes,” Doc said. “Please note for the record that Gary Mussman will remain an idiot in perpetuity, and that Tandy Caide is an idiot as well, and that she is not the World’s Greatest Accountant, despite what the trophy in her office says.”

      My fingers got tingly and then went numb. At the time I thought perhaps this was from dehydration due to my sweating so much in my coat. Later, I would hear that it is the stress of being on the edge of something dangerous that causes this.

      “I’m not going to write that down,” I said.

      They all looked at me.

      “Why not?” Gary asked.

      I didn’t have an answer.

      Huff made his face all fake-soft, like he cared about my feelings. “Are you afraid, little girl, that you aren’t the World’s Greatest Accountant?”

      “No,” I said, though the thought had run through my head more than once.

      “Because you’re not,” he said. “That’s not your trophy.”

      I wrote it down then. I wrote it down exactly the way they said it. I wrote: Tandy Caide is not the World’s Greatest Accountant.

      And then I stared at it, because there it was, in plain language, in my own handwriting even, recorded for posterity in official Order of the Pessimists meeting minutes.

      “Maybe we should talk about what we are thankful for,” Gary said.

      I didn’t want to talk about what we were thankful for. Something was churning inside me—something new, or maybe not new but something old that suddenly happened to be a lot closer to my mouth. Perhaps I did want there to be something to be thankful for.

      Doc said, “Okay then. I’ll go first.” He held up his lit cigarette. He said, “I am thankful for cigarettes. They mean I will suffer less time on this earth than the rest of you fuckers. Huff?”

      Huff held up his glass and said, “I am thankful for whiskey. It helps me forget the good things. Gary?”

      Gary took a drink of his beer, thought for a moment, and then said, “Friends?”

      Doc held his head in his hands and Huff groaned.

      Gary quickly found something more suitable. He said, “I’m thankful I never moved out of this piece-of-shit town when I had the chance ten years ago, because then I never had to make any friends with any goddamn optimists.”

      “Bravo!” Doc and Huff shouted.

      Then there was silence. We stared at one another’s face outlines.

      “Tandy?” Doc asked.

      The tingling again, from my elbows to my fingers.

      “I’m thankful the women’s toilet works in this place,” I said, “though it won’t by the time I leave.” Doc and Huff laughed. I continued. “I’m also thankful for the clients of mine that are still alive, though they won’t be much longer.” Doc and Huff laughed again and Huff pounded the table with glee.

      Our food came, which brought up the status of the checking account. “There is $272.14 in the account,” I said. “If our dinner checks remain at the same rate, and we don’t incur any more expenses, that’s enough for one more quarterly meeting, with $32.14 left over in April for a charitable contribution.”

      “Where should it go, do you think?” Gary asked.

      “How about vocational agriculture and the Future Farmers of America?” Doc asked, and all three of them stared me down yet again.

      I was not prepared for that.

      Oh, I should have been! This is how it is in our town. It’s not like in your towns closer to the river, where your artistic sensibilities allow you the ability to transcend your problems and your close intellectual friends support you and your efforts to make your life worth living!

      “I definitely know that Vo-Ag and FFA could use it,” I said, though I knew no such thing.

      “I imagine you have some special kind of information,” Doc said.

      “I am privy to that kind of information, yes,” I said, though at the time I was not.

      “Kids still take Vo-Ag? Kids still participate in FFA?” Gary asked. “Where the hell will they work?”

      Doc and Huff stared at Gary. Then Doc said, “Gary, I take back what I said about you being an idiot. You’re a goddamn genius. Tandy’s the true idiot. Put that in the notes, Tandy.”

      And I did.

      For posterity.

      That is how it started.

       II.

       THE VO-AG TEACHER

       2

      It was the next night that I met the new vocational agriculture teacher. He was standing at the east entrance to the high school auditorium under a big ANNIE sign someone had cut from cardboard and glued some glitter to.

      When I add up the total sum of that year, it is this particular line item that always gets me: it had to be an Annie year.

      You see, if there is a talented tall girl at the high school, they do Hello, Dolly! If there is a girl who is unusually ugly but funny enough to pull off Snoopy, they do You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. If a lot of boys get suspended from football early in the season for drinking and one of the star players—the quarterback or the lead tackle or whoever—can convince the rest of the team into singing in public, they do Guys and Dolls.

      They don’t do Annie that often because Annie requires a certain type of extraordinary talent. There must be a girl, usually a small one, with both spunky charm and believable innocence. That just doesn’t happen in this town.

      Probably there are Annies with spunky-yet-innocent dispositions on every busy street corner in your town. Here, you might get a believable innocence, and it may even come paired with a good strong church voice, but the spunky charm will have been beaten out of that girl before her tenth birthday, as was the case with Dee Dee Scarsdale, our Annie that year, and she had even been given the privilege of years of music lessons because her mother is the town’s band teacher.

      There are several children with only spunky charm here, though. They act like they invented spunky charm, throwing rocks at the Country Kitchen sign and then laughing obnoxiously while they toss their hair and their body parts around. They lack even a hint of the believable innocence Annie is supposed to have. The children in this town are like that woman sitting on the swing on Hee Haw, Kenny Rogers’s wife, pretending to be a virgin but with her breasts popping out of a tightly wound corset and the entire audience in on the joke.

      I was looking for my husband, Gerald, and so I didn’t notice the Vo-Ag teacher at first. I noticed Elmer Griggs, who owns the golf course, pretending to swing a golf club in the corner for Dave Oppegaard, the head volunteer fireman who also manages the grain elevator. They waved when they saw me. I waved back. Cindy from Prairie Lanes was standing behind the snack table,

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