Dear Ann Read online

  “What do you do with the pictures?” she asked.

  “I work with several magazines. Freelance.”

  She wondered how she could stand around in high heels for an hour. Still, ten dollars was stupendous pay for one hour. She had earned seventy-five cents an hour when she worked one summer at a dress shop.

  He placed her in front of the blank screen. Preoccupied with getting the shot right, he hardly spoke. The cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth while he adjusted his tripod and his camera settings. His rigging seemed professional enough, she thought, not that she would know. The room was small, with just a bed, a desk, and a tiny kitchenette. Two shabby duffel bags were squeezed into a space between the bed and the closet.

  He spoke vaguely of traveling around. He once worked in a zoo and before that in a photo lab with the famous Hotshot Hansen, whoever that was. In Blow-Up, David Hemmings had a nice pad and lived the high life.

  “That’s good,” the photographer said, after shooting several photos. “Anybody ever tell you you look like Natalie Wood?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you do.”

  “Really? She’s pretty.”

  “Could you change into this outfit?”

  More baby dolls, a different color, a different cut—cheap, not nice like she would wear. She changed, and when she came out of the bathroom, he went in.

  She waited, wishing she could get dressed and be gone, but her clothes were in the bathroom. And she had committed herself to earning ten dollars.

  He emerged finally. The water gurgled. He shut the door.

  “Now where were we?” he said.

  He fiddled with his camera, then lifted it from the tripod. He asked her to move along an imaginary line while he shot pictures rapidly. He had her raise her arms as though she were holding a volleyball. “Pout,” he said. “Do a rosebud with your mouth.”

  “How much longer will this take?”

  “Almost finished, babe.”

  Babe. She pouted a rosebud.

  “Hold still. There! That’s a good one.”

  When she returned to the bathroom to get dressed, she peered out the window at a playground. A quartet of small girls was seesawing behind a school. As she dressed, she realized that her slim-jims were slightly damp. The room was stifling. His shaving kit was on the windowsill. The seesawing girls still went up and down. Ann saw her face in the mirror. Caption: Chick from Sticks in over Head.

  He removed his billfold from his hip pocket and peeled out a ten.

  “As promised.”

  She snatched the bill and hurtled into the sunshine. She sped home and into the gloomy shower. She should have been reading Humphry Clinker.

  ANN GLIDED IN shadow through the cool arcades alongside the Main Quad, out of the sun. She had forgotten her sunglasses. She wore low heels, a dark flared skirt, and a blue cotton blouse with a Macmillan collar. She had ironed the blouse without scorching it. It was cold in the daytime in Palo Alto, and she wore a wool cardigan. From her large leather handbag with double handles, attached by small brass horseshoes, her Emily Dickinson paperback rose upright, the name visible.

  Ann almost bumped into Yvor Winters as he turned to enter his corner office. She recognized him from the photograph on his book jacket. She fled upstairs to the restroom, where she waited until the precise time of her appointment. She combed her hair and freshened her lipstick—Persian melon. It was really too orange for her, she thought. She tucked in her blouse.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, not lifting his eyes from a paper he was reading.

  She waited until he motioned her to the chair facing his desk.

  He was a round man in a donkey-gray suit, his wire-rimmed glasses like owl eyes. He appeared to be ill, his face saggy and pale.

  “Welcome to the graduate program,” he said, without emphasis. His voice was low and somber. “What are your plans with us here?”

  “Well, I’m here to study toward the PhD.” She was self-conscious about her accent.

  “That goes without saying.” He made a dismissive gesture, as if he were swishing off a fly. “Why? What are your research interests?”

  “I love to read,” she said, with a strong effort at perkiness. “I’m tackling the long list.”

  “The canon and then some,” he said, as if making a joke. An off rhyme? He tapped his pencil and fumbled through some papers.

  “I see from your transcript here that you are lacking in early studies. You’ll need to take Old English. Can’t get away from that. It won’t include Beowulf. You’ll need that too. And you should start out with the poetics course. That’s a good range of theory.”

  “I want to take your modern poetry seminar.”

  “Better sign up now. There won’t be space.”

  He shuffled through some papers and marked something she thought was a sign-up sheet for the seminar.

  “Take these to registration,” he said, shoving two cards into her hand.

  “What poets are you reading now?” he asked abruptly.

  She nudged Emily Dickinson forward. “I might like to write my dissertation on her,” she said. A mouse talking. She straightened up.

  “Humph. I don’t know if you’ll get away with that here.” He scratched his nose and readjusted his glasses. “You’ll find some other enthusiasm by this time next year. It would be wrong if you didn’t.”

  Her armpits felt sweaty, unusual for her. Her face was hot. Had he actually said “humph,” or was it “harrumph”?

  A student in khakis and an Ivy League shirt waylaid her in the arcade outside the English department. “So you’re going to work with the celebrated Yvor Winters.”

  “He’s my adviser,” she said.

  “Did you get any good advice?”

  “Not really.”

  “Aha,” he said, glancing at Emily Dickinson. “Looking for brownie points, I see. He loves Dickinson. What do you think of his poem to her?”

  “I didn’t know he wrote one.”

  “He nods to tradition with the Spenserian stanzas but reaffirms his modernist penchant by twisting the scheme.”

  Ann crammed the book down into her bag. “I think she’s funny.”

  “I’m Peter,” he said. “Second year, seventeenth-century British. If you need me to show you around, let me know.”

  Although Peter had the slick, well-groomed appearance of a frat pledge, Ann was indifferent to seventeenth-century British. “You’re a little late for Winters,” he added when she didn’t reply. “They say he was at his best a few years ago. It was the heyday of Yvor Winters.”

  The heyday of Yvor Winters. The phrase lodged in her mind. It would be nice to have a heyday, she thought. Not mousy, she told herself as she scurried home. She stood in her studio room in her slip, then searched for something comfortable to wear. She pulled on an old pair of tan slacks and a light sweater. She could not imagine holding an exalted position of professional authority, much less having a heyday at it.

  Those Stanford boys! Young gods with money and smart talk and khaki pants. She feared them and lusted after them. What was she doing here?

  PIXIE KATSAROS, HER neighbor who lived downstairs next to Sanjay, had a lava lamp on her desk and a beaded curtain between her kitchen and the main room. She was in her second year at Stanford, and her apartment came with a stray cat, Nicodemus, who swished through the bead strings with the flair of a fan dancer. Pixie filled Ann in on the landlady, Maria Sokolov.

  “Her circus name was Jingles. Her husband died years ago, and she made a shrine to him. You’ve seen that awful living room?”

  “A funeral parlor.”

  “I was expecting to see him laid out in a goddamn casket in that alcove to the left.”

  “Ooh.” The cat brushed against Ann’s leg. She said, “With all the flowers in California, why a houseful of false flowers?”

  “Did you see the floral bower with the swing? And the trapeze overhead?”

  “No.”

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nbsp; “Her husband died falling from a trapeze. They were a famous high-wire duo.”

  Pixie was studying psychology on a Broadbent Fellowship. She was from New York and had a degree from Brooklyn College. They became friendly, even though Ann found Pixie’s abruptness disconcerting. Pixie could peel an orange with her teeth and eat it in twenty seconds. Her favorite musicians were Donovan, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Who. She said Herman’s Hermits were shit.

  MEREDITH AND JOHN, a couple from Kentucky who were relatives of Ann’s college roommate, Josie, had promised to watch out for her in California. Meredith and John’s modern bungalow in Menlo Park was decorated with African market baskets and tribal masks they had bought in Kenya. Ann thought of the pair as urban sophisticates.

  John, tall with a limber frame like a teenager, explained his research with mice in a lab.

  “Killed two hundred today,” he said. “You finish the experiment and you can’t use them for another experiment. They’re contaminated.”

  “You have to start with fresh, pure mice?” Ann asked. “Newborns?”

  “Not newborns.”

  “No, that would mean bottle-feeding, I guess.” Her wit escaped unnoticed.

  “Want a cocktail?” John asked.

  “A Kentucky girl might rather have iced tea,” said Meredith to John. “Wouldn’t you, Ann?”

  “I guess so. Yes. Iced tea, please.”

  Meredith, a slim blonde in a short pleated floral dress with a dropped waist, a style popular when Ann was a freshman, said, “When Josie told me about you, I was so thrilled. It’s hard to get to know people here. I think I had more friends in Africa.”

  “I had a pet monkey in Africa,” John said. “I don’t mean Meredith.”

  They made faces at each other.

  “He called his monkey Lucille Ball,” Meredith said. “I was so jealous.”

  Their two little boys darted about in matching cowboy pajamas.

  “No cavorting before bedtime,” Meredith said. “Calm down.”

  She tugged at the taller boy’s pajama top. “Take a deep breath, William,” she said. “Your face is red.”

  “Your face is red!” taunted the other boy, Christopher.

  Christopher and William, Ann repeated to herself. She wasn’t used to kids. Meredith spoke to the two boys in the tone of a college professor. Later, Ann observed that when Meredith said good night to them, she packed them tightly into their beds and folded the covers straight across their chests, leaving their arms stranded outside. The boys’ room had red curtains printed with cowboys. Ann still had no curtains, just the ugly old shades on rollers. Out in the hall, Meredith said to Ann, “I definitely don’t want them to have their hands under the covers.”

  John opened a bottle of pink wine. Meredith and John used cloth napkins, with napkin rings. Lah-dee-dah. Dinner was a casserole of shrimp and rice with mandarin oranges, avocado slices, and hulled pistachios arranged on top.

  “I’ve never had avocados,” Ann said.

  “You should take some to Kentucky next time you go,” Meredith said, smiling. “A bit of California.”

  Ann was sure her mother would have no use for such tasteless green pulp.

  “I’m rosy . . . like the wine,” she said, feeling her cheeks flush.

  “Heavens, you can’t be drunk on a little rosé.” Meredith tittered and dabbed her napkin to her lips.

  As he escorted her to her car later, John said, “The friends you make in graduate school are the ones you will always have. Remember that.”

  He opened the door for her. “Anything you need, Ann, please let us know. I promised Josie I’d look after you if you ever get in trouble or need something.”

  What could she need from John and Meredith? A hangover remedy? They had hinted that graduate school was a great place to find a compatible mate, as if they thought she was desperate. When she got home, she flopped on her bed, still dressed, and woke up when the bedsprings next door began squeaking. Her head buzzed from the rosé.

  Meredith had gone into detail about her wedding, with her sorority sisters as bridesmaids. Ann had never even been to a large wedding because she hadn’t been in a sorority. She couldn’t imagine a bridal shower or a gaggle of giggling bridesmaids in identical dresses. She seemed to be blazing a trail that forked off from the wedding march. What good would Eliot’s Four Quartets do a bride? How would reading Emily Dickinson help her? Apparently Emily had been stuck in a house, not venturing far, but she probably didn’t have to do all the housework herself, so she had time to fool around with poems. Ann did not want to waste her time on domestic detail, so what could she offer in a marriage? Prince Charming would walk right past her. She wanted to be married, but not like Meredith and John. She thought about her Kentucky professor Albert, and his wife, Pat. They didn’t appear to be tied down. They had a camaraderie she admired. They seemed bohemian, open to surprise. Pat was a potter.

  BEREA, KENTUCKY

  June 3, 1966

  Dear Ann,

  If you go to Stanford, I want you to find El Palo Alto, the tall tree. It is a big redwood the Spanish explorer Portola camped under in 1769. Eventually the name of the tree became the city of Palo Alto. 1769 was the same year Daniel Boone first set foot in Kentucky. Think about the parallel movements of these explorers. It would give me pleasure to imagine you looking up at that great tree and contemplating how you as a Kentuckian are now in California, taking part in history.

  I want you to meet my old pals at La Honda. They know just how to open up your head.

  Albert

  Although Albert was full of loosey-goosey advice, she couldn’t argue over the tree. In California she would learn all those flowers and strange trees. Maybe she would trip the light fantastic with his acid-head soulmates. She might bunk in a woodland commune.

  PIXIE’S PARENTS RAN a little grocery in Brooklyn and had saved to send Pixie to college. Then a prestigious award propelled her to apply to Stanford. She was going into research rather than therapy because she didn’t want to listen to people talk about their problems. Ann could see that Pixie would easily have the patients diagnosed and out the door before the hour was up.

  Ann made a Southern meal for Pixie, who had never had fried chicken, but the chicken was tough and the cornbread burned. Pixie complained that the food was too heavy and that she couldn’t imagine eating like that every day. She zipped down to her apartment for her jug of Chianti nestled in its cute basket. Used to drinking milk or iced tea with meals, Ann hadn’t thought of wine.

  “Wine is the one thing I splurge on,” Pixie said. “That and Kleenex.”

  Ann rarely bought Kleenex and had never bought wine. Pixie was just getting over a boyfriend and now had the hots for Sanjay, who had fed her biryani with dal paneer and naan and something with lentils. “I could become a vegetarian with somebody like him!” she said. “He grinds his own spices.”

  “I had Indian food once in Louisville.” Ann was aware that Pixie was claiming Sanjay out from under her.

  Pixie shook her dark, bushy hair like a madwoman. “He is so sexy. I’m so hot and bothered I can’t study. Jesus shit.”

  Ann had heard people say “Jesus wept.” That had seemed an innocuous thing to say. But apparently people from New York were bold in their speech.

  SCHOOL BEGAN. THE quiet did not burst into noisy throngs. It murmured into life. The flower-rimmed paths were not crowded. Except for the occasional swish of a bicycle, the atmosphere on campus was subdued. Stanford was a large, confident place, with a high-class history hidden to Ann. Among her fellow literary students were a Taiwanese girl with freckles, a California girl who always wore a gardenia brooch, a girl who cultivated her image of the model Twiggy, and a charming Irishman who was married with a baby. One of the lecturers was said to have a venereal disease; a former Stegner fellow had disappeared in the Amazon the year before. A couple named Jodie and Michael had fallen in love the day of orientation and were already shacking up in a little house on
University Avenue. They discovered they had both written undergraduate papers with the same title: “Seeing and Perspective at Walden Pond.” Ann thought Henry David Thoreau would have easily belonged with her parents in Kentucky, hoeing beans and fishing. Ann had had enough beans and wanted something loftier. Everybody said the place to go for a carnal weekend was the hot springs at Big Sur. Jodie and Michael went there the first weekend of the term.

  Ann had expected Yvor Winters to be haughty and condescending, but in the modern poetry seminar he was mild-mannered, with an affable detachment. The seven other students, all male with show-off vocabularies, seemed more imposing and opinionated than he was. She observed how they thrust themselves forward. Where she had curiosity, they expressed glib certainties. She kept quiet, on edge. The poetics class was more fun. The elderly professor, Dr. Parker, had Xeroxed his own translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. At each class meeting, they pored over the translation, bit by bit, sometimes accomplishing whole paragraphs in one class period. “That word is not a happy choice,” he would say. Or, “I am still debating whether catharsis is the correct word.”

  “It seems tragic that Aristotle’s work on comedy was lost and all we have is his tragedy,” Ann said in class one day. Nobody laughed at what she meant to be funny.

  Pity and terror, she thought. Aristotelian basics.

  Old English was better. The words were dazzling. Mōd, ēagan, brēost, heorte, lufu: mind, eyes, breast, heart, love. Vital words. She loved their casual resemblance to modern words—a drunken typist hitting the wrong keys. It was amusing to imagine people centuries ago, in robes and tights, declaiming their heortes and mōds. She spent hours translating Aelfric and other literati of early England. She liked to imagine monks copying manuscripts in fancy lettering, with colorful little drawings. She had put her stamps away, but now she recognized her monkishness. She could see her future—absorbed in ancient texts, whispering the words to herself. She got chill bumps.