Chapter Text
”I don't think imagination is my strong suit,” Diana admits to the redheaded girl as unfamiliar to her as the garden they are wandering is well known.
The girl seems appalled at that. "I don't know what I would do without mine! I like to imagine that I'm a princess in a tower or Joan of Arc riding into battle or a bride living by the sea who never speaks to anyone because her one true love disappeared." Her freckled face breaks into a wide smile.
Diana feels her own features mirror those of the girl. After all, it is only polite to make this newcomer feel welcome. "Wonderful! Do you think you could tell me a story right now?"
"I could tell you twelve!” The girl is all eagerness, until suddenly she is not. On the contrary, when she speaks again she is shy and hesitant. ”Diana… Do you think you could like me? Just a little?"
Diana tilts her head in confusion at the question. They are the same age, they are both girls; it is expected that they become friends. She reaches for the girl – Anne with an E – in a gesture of reassurance. "I already do!"
Anne keeps her promise and fills Diana’s life with stories.
In one story, they are grown up ladies having proper tea together. Diana switches into French, because it is the thing for a distinguished lady to do, and Anne is impressed. The fact that they end up inebriated and shout ‘bosoms’ and roll around in Anne’s bed together is an accident and as such of no importance.
In another story, based on the first, Anne imagines a farewell of such pathos it is as if they were characters in a book. They even call each other ”thee” and ”thou”. "Diana, will thou promise never to forget me?"
"I will never have another bosom friend. I don't want to. I could never love anyone as I love you.”
"Then I will always love thee, Diana. In the years to come your memory will shine like a star over my lonely life."
In yet another story, and in a fourth and fifth story, they pretend to be heroes of a poetic era long lost. Through Anne’s imagination, Diana becomes Lancelot, the knight. She becomes Wisteria, the dashing and slightly wicked prince. And she becomes a nameless romantic figure able to use words such as ”luscious” when describing Anne’s lips, just before she goes back to being her innocently inexperienced fourteen-year-old self.
To each other, Diana and Anne keep a promise of bosom friendship that might last a lifetime. For Diana, this requires no imagination as she can draw from her Aunt Josephine’s example.
”She has come to stay with us for at least a month. She is grieving the loss of her companion. Her best friend forever and ever,” she explains to Anne as they walk arm in arm to school through a snow-clad forest. ”Neither of them married, so they lived with each other their whole lives.”
"I'd live with you forever if I could," Anne says, tilting her head. "But," she adds, "I know you will leave me the day you get married to some wealthy, handsome gentleman. I hate him already."
Diana laughs and looks away. She enjoys Anne’s sense of humour.
* * * * *
“It’s unnatural, Anne!” The force pushing the words from Diana’s lips is so great she fears it might tear her apart. She hugs her knees to her chest trying to contain it, to keep herself whole, but the force will find another escape. She can already feel it leaking from the corners of her eyes, and unless she lets out more harsh words she will surely cry. “Aunt Josephine kept her lifestyle a secret! That must mean it’s wrong!” The outburst does little to quell the sensation of exploding from within.
Next to her, next to Aunt Josephine’s large guest bed, Anne is uncharacteristically quiet. Her hand still holds that of their mutual friend, Cole, but the pair’s impromptu dancing has frozen. The colourful scarfs and strings of pearls around Cole’s neck have stopped mid-motion, and the flowers sat on top of Anne’s short-cropped hair no longer look real. The two of them have fit right in at Aunt Josephine’s summer soiree held defiantly in the middle of winter. Diana herself has felt out of sorts since they arrived, but been unable to pinpoint why. Something about the way paper-flowers hung excessively from the ceiling. Something about the women in top hats and the men in bright costumes. Something about the utter lack of rules. At least Anne’s fantasies follow some sort of script, Diana thinks. Here everything is in free fall.
Anne and Cole exchange glances, before Anne carefully sits next to Diana. Without looking up Diana feels her friend’s eyes on her, can sense how Anne is searching for the right words until she eventually settles for somebody else’s: “To my Gertrude. Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time. Forever you have my heart. Jo,” she reads from a worn book. Her look, when Diana finally dares to meet it, is pointed as if Diana were a particularly dense and stubborn child. She might as well act the part.
“But it doesn’t make any sense! Two women could never have children!” she yells. She is on the brink of hysteria, and Anne and Cole seem taken aback and unable to follow her. Anne cannot even look at her right now. Diana is clearly alone in this, drifting in solitude on a ridiculously oversized bed.
Cole recovers first. "If your aunt lived her life feeling broken, defective, or-” he pauses, then repeats Diana’s word back to her ”-unnatural.” The word shimmers before them, above the bed, and to Diana it is larger than life. She might have spoken the word, but it must be a quote even if she does not know its source. Cole either ignores it or does not see it. ”Then one day your aunt met someone that made her realize there was nothing wrong with her. Shouldn't we be happy for her?"
It is a rhetorical question, Diana knows; she is supposed to agree with Cole, but she cannot. Because that would mean answering a different question simultaneously: the one pressing on her lungs and the back of her eyes, the one requiring an imagination she always thought she lacked. Now, however, that imagination has been handed right to Diana by Aunt Josephine and her dear Gertrude; her lover.
”I think it’s spectacular! There is so much more possibility,” Anne says right next to Diana, but it is as if she speaks through water and from afar. Diana is not hearing her friends. She is looking neither at them nor any of Aunt Josephine’s furniture. Rather, she is seeing something invisible to anyone else in the room: Her own history in a new, clear light she never asked for.
* * * * *
”I don't think imagination is my strong suit,” Diana admits to the redheaded girl who is as unfamiliar to her as the garden they are wandering is well known. She finds herself wishing for imagination for perhaps the first time in her thirteen years of existence. Something about this girl, who calls herself Anne with an E, is making her curious in ways no other person has.
"I don't know what I would do without my imagination, life would be an agony!” Anne breaks into a wide smile as she relays her favourite fantasies. They all cast her as a romantic heroine that sound nothing like the passive princesses of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. On the contrary, every part of Anne is in motion as she swings the imaginary sword of Joan of Arc. Diana feels herself being pulled in not so much by the stories as by this strange girl herself. She is wiry and flat chested, her hair wild, and the freckles covering her face seem to be dancing. The latter is probably a trick of the light, but Diana has an urge to place her palm on Anne’s cheek and feel for herself. If the girl would stand still long enough, that is, which seems unlikely.
”Do you think you could like me? Just a little?”
The question feels out of the blue, because Diana is already long past liking Anne. She knows they will become important to one another, not simply because they are girls of the same age, but because Diana is magnetically drawn to Anne. This is why she touches Anne’s hands; not to reassure her new friend, but because her fingertips tickle with a restless energy that does not dissipate until skin is upon skin.
Anne keeps her promise and tells Diana imaginative stories, but to Diana they are always more than scenes from a book.
When they have tea together, the way distinguished grown up ladies would, Diana switches into French not so much because it fits with Anne’s story, but because she wants to impress her friend in the real world. Her wish is fulfilled when a wide-eyed Anne responds with: "Could there be anything better than you speaking a romantic language? My two favourite things together…" At that point Diana has not had enough cherry wine to blame the heat in her cheeks on anything other than the way Anne is looking at her.
She could blame it on the wine later on, when she shouts out ‘bosoms’, but the truth is her gaze has been lingering on the barely there slopes of Anne’s chest for a while. Likewise, it is not the warm sensation of the wine in Diana’s belly, but the restless energy in her fingertips that make her pull at Anne until they stumble into bed in a pile of limbs so uncoordinated that one of Diana’s hands accidentally graze that small slope which proves softer than anyone, imagination or not, could have foreseen.
When Diana’s mother wants to keep them apart and Anne suggests they bid each other farewell in the way romantic protagonists would, there is nothing made up about Diana’s confessions. Instead of saying ”thee” or ”thou” as if quoting a book, she slips up repeatedly and simply speaks her mind.
"I will never have another bosom friend. I don't want to. I could never love anyone as I love you.”
And for a moment it seems Anne, too, is slipping up. "Do you love me?” Her eyes are wide, her language her own. ”I thought you liked me, of course, but I never dared to hope you loved me," she stammers, and Diana feels her heart sore.
"I love you devotedly, Anne," Diana says to assuage Anne’s obvious insecurity, but mostly because she means it.
Anne’s blue eyes stare back at her with no big words to distract either of them. Then Anne blinks, and the words are back. When she promises to "always love thee, Diana,” Diana is not sure whether she is hearing Anne or Anne’s imagination. But Diana accepts her friend’s embrace just the same; clings to her, breathes her in, allows restless fingertips to settle on the small of Anne’s back.
Diana cannot help but notice how Anne always casts her as the male lead in spite of the fact that Diana’s puff sleeves are larger than Anne’s will ever be. She also notices that she herself never minds.
As Lancelot, the noble knight, Diana has an excuse to bend over Anne and kiss those freckles she can barely keep her eyes off.
As Wisteria, the wicked prince, she can defy the norms of her upbringing and take the romantic initiative rather than wait for someone else to do it, some boy whose initiative Diana is not in the least interested in.
As a member of The Avonlea Story Club, Diana gets a thrill not so much out of words, but of Anne’s way with them. How they sound from her lips; how they make her eyes twinkle. Diana does not master language in quite the same playful way. To her, words are a means of communicating truth. Like when Anne is chewing her plump bottom lip deemed ”a fat caterpillar”: to Diana those lips truthfully are ”perfectly pink and luscious.” When Anne responds in kind with: “You without a doubt have the most kissable Cupid’s bow,” Diana does not delight in the metaphor as such; she thinks of kissability literally and has to avert her eyes from the lips that elicited the thought. Then she has to look up again, because the magnetism present from their first meeting has since then grown in strength. Anne is smiling gently at her; there is a freckle at the corner of one of those luscious lips and Diana wants to taste it. But what if she got the actual kissing wrong? When she voices this concern, the other girls in their circle on the floor assume Diana is thinking of a boy, and she is both annoyed and relieved when Anne goes along with them.
To each other, Diana and Anne keep their promise of a bosom friendship that might last a lifetime. Diana will never want another bosom friend; she has told Anne as much, and as they walk to school arm in arm Diana thinks of her aunt who spent her life with a bosom friend. She knows Anne likes Aunt Josephine, so perhaps through her example she can make Anne see the appeal.
”She has come to stay with us for at least a month. She is grieving the loss of her companion,” Diana explains. Then, to make sure Anne understands the parallel, she gives her a meaningful look: ”Her best friend forever and ever.”
Anne seems to follow. She grants Diana a shy smile, and Diana is so thrilled at being understood that she dares to rest her temple against Anne’s. In spite of the snow beneath their feet she feels warmth spread from that small point of contact; it is as if all the wild and lively energy that is Anne seeps into Diana’s head, then neck, then side.
”Neither of them married. They lived with each other their whole lives,” she says quietly as the warmth settles in her lower stomach. It is comforting and unsettling at the same time; this very physical connection she has with Anne. So strong, apparently, it lets Anne sense what is in Diana’s heart:
"I'd live with you forever if I could,” Anne says, and Diana’s hands want to reach out, to solidify their bond beyond words. Until Anne adds: ”But I know you will leave me the day you get married to some wealthy, handsome gentleman!”
Of all the times for Anne to turn to realism instead of using her imagination, Diana thinks to herself. Then she forces a laugh and looks away, because she, too, lacks the imagination necessary to protest; to suggest they might forget handsome gentlemen entirely and marry each other instead.