Dear Ann Read online

  Pixie described how the Chinese originally used yarrow stalks that fell in patterns.

  “Pickup sticks!” cried Ann.

  Chip, growing excited, began a spiel about the wonders of Stanford University. The greatest minds were on a cusp, change was afoot, breakthroughs were in the offing; radical shifts in thinking were in exploratory stages, in the union of the intellect with technology and ancient wisdom. The I Ching was startlingly relevant.

  “Industrialization is old hat,” he said. “Computer science is in the ascendancy! We’re on the verge of postmodern, technological radical spiritual utopia! Remember that we are on a cusp. Cusp is the word.”

  “I like cusps,” Ann said. “They’re like lisps.”

  As if making an announcement, Chip said, “Here is my question for the I Ching: What is the alternative life of a military jumpsuit?”

  “Should I go get the Ching?” Pixie asked.

  No one answered, and Pixie didn’t budge from the deep reading chair she had claimed.

  “Let’s do horoscopes next,” Jimmy said to Chip.

  “But the I Ching is about how coincidence mirrors the subjective,” Pixie said, glaring at Jimmy.

  Jimmy shook his head. “It’s like hearing a song on the radio and you realize it is your song. It is saying exactly what you’re feeling. It’s subjective. That’s no mystery. But any song that comes on the radio would work. You can make something out of it.” He pointed to the stereo. “California Dreamin’” was playing. “There. Isn’t that a song for all of us?”

  “I don’t believe in magic,” Ann said. The conversation was going oddly. Although Pixie was being disdainful, Chip seemed attracted to her.

  “It’s synchronicity,” Pixie said. “When things come together for no real reason and they reflect the unconscious.”

  “There’s a function on your slide rule for that,” Jimmy said to Chip.

  “You can’t quantify everything,” Pixie snapped at Jimmy. “Serendipity is out of bounds.”

  “Let’s decorate my jumpsuit,” Chip said suddenly, as if the I Ching had just ordered an art project.

  MUCH LATER, ANN reflected that a string of pivotal events began on the night they decorated Chip’s jumpsuit. It would take her years to piece together a patchwork perspective on the breakdown of her innocence. But recalling Pixie’s snottiness that evening was illuminating. That night, absorbed in a frivolous pastime, lulled by just a little tangy dried grass—it contained some seeds that popped—and blinded by her adoration of her precious Jimmy, Ann began to feel like a chick pecking its way into the world. A hatchling. She would have to tell Albert. The paratroop jumpsuit was like a wrong note in a tune.

  Chip had worn the jumpsuit over a plaid shirt and jeans. He unzipped the suit, stepped out of it, and spread it on Ann’s desk. He had come prepared with an assortment of Magic Markers—blue, red, and black. He drew a peace sign on the left backside in black ink, and on the right he wrote, “Synchronicity. Out of Vietnam.” On a sleeve, Ann wrote, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” Jimmy drew a fly beneath, like a signature.

  They must have spent two hours decorating the jumpsuit.

  “I’m a peace freak in a hand-me-down war suit,” Chip said.

  Pixie was engrossed in drawing flowers on the leg pockets, and Chip was leaning onto her shoulder, scribbling close to her hand.

  Ann wrote, “The cut worm forgives the plow” and Jimmy wrote, “Three cheers for the objective correlative.”

  “What’s that?” asked Chip.

  “The fly and the worm,” said Jimmy. He drew a halved worm, like a mustache, beneath Ann’s Blake quote.

  The Mamas and the Papas were dancing in the street.

  On the right leg of the jumpsuit, Chip wrote, “The random is not random.” Pixie nodded knowingly and brushed her hand down his arm.

  Ann wrote, “‘Poetry is NOT conversation’—Yvor Winters.”

  “Yvor Winters said that?” Jimmy glanced up from an Escher-like drawing he was attempting.

  “He said it in class. I think he meant Robert Frost. He hates Robert Frost.”

  “You English majors,” said Pixie, rolling her eyes. “Living in your ivory tower.”

  “Hoover Tower, you mean,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh, you know who I saw at Hoo Tow?” said Chip. “Alexander Kerensky.”

  “Who’s Alexander Kerensky?” Ann wanted to know.

  “He was prime minister of Russia and the Bolsheviks exiled him,” Jimmy said.

  Chip said, “I’ve seen him, big as life, walking along Sand Hill Road with his walking stick.”

  “Our landlady knows him,” said Pixie. “She said he’s half-blind but he walks everywhere.”

  “How in the world does Jingles know the prime minister of Russia?” Ann demanded.

  “She’s Russian.”

  Jimmy was humming “Music! Music! Music!” He sang,

  Khrushchev, Pravda, Mikoyan,

  Lenin, Trotsky, Bulganin,

  Dostoevsky, Nabokov,

  And Pushkin! Pushkin! Pushkin!

  “Would you be a Bolshevik if you lived in czarist Russia?” he asked Chip.

  Chip grinned and laid down his marker. Then he declared that he would wear his jumpsuit everywhere, every day, until the war ended. “Oh, wow, look at my suit! I’m going to parade across campus in this.”

  “No one will notice,” said Pixie, busy coloring the flaps of the leg pockets.

  Jimmy had abandoned the Escher drawing. The thick markers were the wrong tools. He used the word “tools” often, Ann noticed. He drew Porky Pig on the back of the jumpsuit. They flipped the suit over when they turned the album over. They lost track of time. Ann decided she was going with the flow, the warm camaraderie enveloping her like a bed of marshmallows. She hadn’t known Jingles was Russian. Chip yammered on, a cauldron of grand ideas bubbling out of his head.

  “You’re a good artist,” Ann said, admiring Jimmy’s abstract scribbles. He seemed very patient, dedicated to doing a job well. “What is that?”

  “Pluto the dog is baying at Pluto the planet.”

  “I should have recognized the Plutos.” She touched the blue circle with little rays coming from it.

  “I think Pluto is blue,” Jimmy said. “And the dog would know. They’re on the same wavelength.”

  Sounds were mixed with colors. Words moved like waves, peeking from the folds of the jumpsuit. Bolsheviks quoted Emily Dickinson, and Yvor Winters was on Pluto, where there was no conversation, only poetry.

  CHIP, HIS JUMPSUIT flapped over his arm, left with Pixie and her chair. She took her album with her. She said she’d drive Chip home. Ann was glad; that meant Jimmy didn’t have to leave. They were sharing the last piece of pizza, which was delicious, even cold.

  Jimmy touched a smear of tomato on her face and licked it from his finger. They kissed, sharing pizza flavors.

  “Pixie and Chip sure hit it off,” Ann said.

  “I don’t know about those two.”

  “She wasn’t nice to you.”

  “She could tell I think the I Ching is crap.” He smoothed his hair and fingered a ringlet. “I should have apologized to her.”

  Ann couldn’t figure people out, why Pixie was so judgmental, why Chip meandered intensely in all directions. And why Jimmy was often remote, as if he were trying to solve a grand philosophical problem. He wasn’t bothered by Pixie calling him Lassie.

  “Pixie has a Chip on her shoulder,” Ann burst out, but Jimmy didn’t laugh.

  He drained his beer and set the bottle on the sink drain.

  “She’s always critical,” Ann said. “And she called you Lassie!”

  “I like Lassie!”

  “Well, me too. You’re a nice Lassie, but she didn’t mean it that way. She says insulting things and sometimes I don’t realize they’re insulting till later.”

  “Don’t let her put you down.”

  Ann crammed the pizza packaging into her garbage bin.

 
“Will he really wear that jumpsuit in public?” she asked. “He said he would.”

  “Probably. He has no self-consciousness. The funny thing about Chip—he’s not after attention. He’s so full of ideas he can’t keep up with them.”

  For a while, they parsed Pixie and Chip and the jumpsuit. Jimmy didn’t want to assign profound meaning to the jumpsuit. Ann thought there must be something she didn’t know.

  WAS THIS BEING stoned? Her mind was in outer space, on a blue astral plane, when through the wall, bedsprings began jangling to the tune of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Apparently the couple next door had returned their bed to the wall between the apartments.

  “Shh! They’ll hear us!”

  “They won’t notice if we do it at the same time,” Jimmy said. “We’ll all come together,” he said. “That’s synchronicity.”

  “Making love,” she whispered at the end. She had throbbed with mirth throughout. “I love making love.”

  “I love you,” he said, or she thought he said.

  HOPEWELL, KY.

  May 1, 1967

  Dear Ann,

  Had to take your daddy to the doctor yesterday. He was wheezing, couldn’t hardly breathe. I thought it might be azma, but the doctor said it was just something in the air. He had been out cultivating all day. He wouldn’t have gone to the doctor, but I was afraid he was going to lose his breath. He feels better now, and the planting is over with. . . .

  Love,

  Mama

  “THAT’S A RELIEF,” Ann said to Jimmy, after reading him the letter. The letter was longer, with details about the garden and her brother’s eighth-grade graduation.

  Jimmy was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling. He had been reading The Portable Nietzsche, which was not an assignment. He sat up and swung his legs to the side of the bed. It was dim in the room, and he went to the window to raise the shade. He didn’t hold the edge precisely, and it suddenly flew up on its roller with a snap.

  “Can I trust you?” Jimmy asked her.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I’m trying to understand what is meant by trust.”

  “I think with trust you don’t ask questions.”

  “But that might be naive. How do you know you can trust in someone or something? And how does a person earn trust?”

  “You’re full of questions.”

  She brought him a peach and a paring knife on a saucer.

  “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

  “Unless you’d rather not disturb the universe.”

  He sat in her reading chair, with the saucer set on the wide arm.

  “Wouldn’t just touching this peach be a disturbance of its own?” He held the peach up to the light. “Say there’s another universe that’s identical to ours except for one small detail—this peach. There’s a universe where this peach is not ripe, another one where there is no peach, one where you eat the peach, and one where I eat it. And it’s true for everything right on down to variation at the atomic level. The mind can’t hold this!”

  He laid the peach on the saucer and ran his hands through his hair.

  “There! That loosened up my brain. Now, where was I? Infinite peaches, infinite universes. And maybe each universe is only a mote—”

  “I know—in God’s eye. How many peaches could you fit on the head of a pin?”

  “With or without dancing angels?”

  “Try it both ways.”

  “Infinite. Infinite would be the same number, regardless of peaches or angels. If the angels ate the peaches, would they still count?”

  Ann gave Jimmy an affectionate bop on the head.

  “Isn’t this the stuff you think of when you’re ten?” she asked. “Don’t tell me this is the nitty-gritty of Nietzsche.”

  “Is this a true peach or only an illusion?” he asked. He bit into the peach. “I’m baffled. That old question makes me really uncomfortable.”

  “You’re eating the peeling! It’s fuzzy!”

  “Its delicate beard delights my lips.” He chomped again. “Oh, I think there’s a worm in it! Is that a worm?”

  “Don’t worry, the cut worm forgives the gnashing molars.”

  “What about the canines?”

  She patted him on the head. “Nice doggie.”

  Jimmy had been tantalized by the concept of the multiverse, she remembers. In one alternate universe, she never met him. In another, they strolled easily down an entirely different path towards the sunset. The road not taken could well lead to California.

  “YOU’RE WIGGLY,” HE said.

  “I can’t keep still. My back is killing me.”

  She was thinking about the baby-doll-pajamas photographer and how different this was. Not for money but for art. And private, for Jimmy. She still shuddered whenever she remembered changing in that rooming-house bathroom, stepping forth in high heels and little Dacron shorties with elastic hems, the frilly chemise like a maternity top. It was the pastel colors that seemed so indecent, she thought now.

  But she was surprised by how boring it was to stand nude before someone she was intimate with. Sitting fully clothed, Jimmy was being thoughtful, even meditative, as he sketched meticulously, filling in tiny details of her body. She was reminded of her mother examining a bolt of material at a fabric store—feeling its texture, searching for flaws in the weave. Mama would hold out a length of material from her fingertips to her nose. That made a yard. Ann felt Jimmy’s eyes exploring her body, measuring it. He kept saying this or that line of her body was beautiful.

  She told Jimmy about the photographer, how she was attracted by the offer of ten dollars an hour and thought she would be fashion modeling.

  “He was a creep,” she said.

  “Were you in danger?” Jimmy asked, laying down his pad.

  “No, I think he was just somebody trying to make money. But so was I. I don’t know why I did that. I jump into things.”

  “Sometimes that’s good. I like that in you—mostly.”

  Maybe she shouldn’t have blurted out the baby-doll-pajamas incident. But Jimmy did like her impulsiveness, he said.

  Jimmy smudged his sketch with a thin piece of charcoal, then lifted his drawing pencil again. He said, “If you knew you were going to die, what book would you want to read first?”

  “Ulysses,” she said.

  “I’d read War and Peace if there was time.”

  “It’s not on the exam,” she said. “Aren’t you going to take it?”

  “I won’t have to take it if I’m going to die!” he said. “What a relief! What would you miss most—if you knew you were going to die?”

  “I’d miss you. What would you miss?”

  “Riding the cable cars.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  She would miss home, of course.

  She said, “How could you miss anything before it’s gone? And if you were dead, you wouldn’t miss anything.”

  Jimmy said, “The question is how do we value an experience? What is important?” He held his pencil aloft and stared at it, as if it might provide the answer.

  She said, “There’s too much that’s important. I can’t hold it all.”

  Jimmy worked on his drawing, as if in deep thought. Then, raising his head, he gazed directly at her. “Is Ulysses something you really want to read or something you feel you should read?”

  “It’s hard to tell the difference.”

  “You can’t go through life on should,” he said. “Sometimes you just have to grab a moment. And sometimes you just have to leave it. Otherwise, you’re only a consumer, taking in everything indiscriminately. Ingest, regurgitate.” Nibbling the end of his pencil, he stared at his drawing and then closed the sketchbook.

  She pulled on the long blue plaid shirt he had given her.

  SHE LIKED JIMMY’S patience, his dedication to doing something well, but he said he felt most alive when he was roaming around wi
th no particular purpose. Riding the cable cars made him feel receptive, open to possibility. Ann began thinking that she might devalue the wrong things. Cable cars—too many people, too much time, unpleasant sensations. But Jimmy said he liked the sounds and gravity-defying movements of the cars. He liked watching the people. She’d rather read a book than be in any kind of uncomfortable situation.

  At the Laundromat, waiting for her clothes, she attempted to sit and watch, leaving her Shelley text in her purse. A woman and a little girl came in, pushing a cartload of laundry. The woman had light brown skin and wore a bandana twisted around her dark, wavy hair. The child began banging on the vending machines. The woman tossed laundry into the washer indifferently, mixing colors and whites. She poured detergent from a box without measuring. She called to the child in Spanish and then sat her down. They sat, side by side, the child swinging her feet against the chair rung. Opening a magazine, the woman fingered a glossy picture and showed it to the child. Ann retrieved her Shelley book and began to read “Ode to the West Wind” for the hundredth time.

  SHE WAS AT Jimmy’s place. He had been swimming, and his hair was still wet. Chip was there, unloading some new ideas. He had brought a stock of stiff white textured cloth on a roll like her window shade.

  “This is called photo linen,” he explained. “You can print pictures on it. See this? I made it in the darkroom in the art building.”

  He held up an eight-by-ten photograph of Mick Jagger, his rubber pout larger than life.

  “It’s a silk-screening process, à la Warhol. Wouldn’t it be fun to wear a shirt with Mick on it?”

  Jimmy said, “That would be even better than the designs on your jumpsuit.”

  “The Beatles,” Ann said. “Or T. S. Eliot.”

  “Sheets and Kelly!” said Jimmy.

  “You could wear your own picture,” Ann said.

  They were laughing. She imagined Yvor Winters wearing his own photo. Or Emily Dickinson’s.

  “A million possibilities,” Chip said. “You can sew, can’t you, Ann? We could make a sample and offer it to a big company.”