Whatever is bothering you, let me remind you that a major thing is for you to develop a truer sense of Kentucky, for one day you will return and you will see it, as Buddha or somebody says, for the first time. You must always remember where you came from. You will need to know that one day.
For now, you need to shake loose. Introduce yourself to a jazz musician and learn about improvisation. Listen to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and seduce that Indian guy. Explain Highway 61 to him. I mean the real highway, the one that cuts down through the U.S. like an arrow. Go out and talk to a tree. Ask yourself, what is important? Go to Walden.
By the way, I heard that Yvor Winters wrote a mean letter to the Kenyon Review.
Your pal,
Albert
A FEW TIMES Sanjay invited Pixie and Ann to eat with him and the girl from Wyoming, Paula, who was often there on weekends. Ann enjoyed their company but thought it odd that he would invite two girls besides his girlfriend. Paula didn’t seem jealous, though. She teased him affectionately. She had long blond hair and wore dungarees and mannish sandals with socks. Sanjay cooked kimchiri, a kind of spicy mush, and something with spinach and cheese. Pixie, realizing that Sanjay was off-limits, had been trying on boyfriends as if she were shopping at Macy’s. Ann glimpsed them coming and going at dusk and dawn. Pixie had apologized for the brownie while pointing out that Ann had not complained about its salubrious effects. Ann could see how attractive Sanjay was now that Paula from Wyoming was there, indulging him with hand-fed bites of naan and laughing at his gentle humor. Paula was taller than Sanjay.
Ann attended a few grad-student gatherings, and she was friendly with Elise, who bleached her hair to resemble Twiggy and complained that she couldn’t get thin enough. (Cupcakes.) Ann had heard that she was a pet of Yvor Winters. Ann saw Meredith and John again but had trouble placing herself in their realm, where they seemed guided by the stern certainties of adulthood. On campus, Ann saw the undergrads acting silly. She had never gone in for frivolous group behavior, yet she didn’t want to be a grown-up. Grown-ups were serious in the wrong ways. She felt most herself when she was alone, in a strange place. She thought about returning to La Honda to see Albert’s friends, but she didn’t want to sit around watching people trip. Somebody said LSD was out of favor, but she knew Pixie had taken it, and the Twiggy girl had too. Ann was aware that she was casting lines in all directions and not finding a clear path for herself.
Instead of returning to La Honda, one Saturday Ann drove to Monterey—a long way to drive without music—and walked out on the pier. She gazed at the sky and felt a nothingness. The whole day was blank. She could not have reported a thing about it. She watched the pelicans swoop in and land with their mouth-loads of fish. They reminded her of her mother lugging a load of wash.
THE ROUND TRIP to Monterey had taken most of the day. With half a pep pill, Ann stayed up all night in a euphoric rush, writing a paper on Dylan Thomas. She ate nothing but a packet of graham crackers in a bowl of milk—dipping them one by one so they wouldn’t get soggy. Toward dawn, when she was trying to sleep at last, her heart turned a somersault. It stirred and fluttered like a butterfly and then revved up. It began to beat loudly, as if someone had turned the volume knob. When she switched on the lamp, she could see her nightgown pulsating. Pulling it up, she observed her stomach jumping with the force of her wild heartbeat.
Before eight on Sunday morning, Ann bounded into the infirmary with her runaway heart. She hadn’t slept all night. A skinny intern asked her to run in place for one minute and then switch to jumping jacks. He watched her as she bounced until she was breathing heavily. He listened to her chest again.
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll have a heart attack jumping like that?”
“You’re all right,” he said.
She wasn’t sure. Why would her heart do that? What if the pep pills had harmed her heart? Or could it be the birth-control pill? Embarrassed, she mentioned Enovid but got no reaction. She didn’t volunteer that she had taken Preludin.
Wanting someone to know what had happened in case she did have a heart attack, she stopped in at Pixie’s. Pixie came to the door with a hair-dryer bonnet on her head.
Handheld blow dryers weren’t in general use yet.
“Why don’t you just drink coffee instead of taking those diet pills?” Pixie asked. “Coffee will wake you up.”
“Maybe I will. But I need some sleep now.”
“You won’t smoke a joint and you turn your nose up at wine, but you’ll take speed like it’s candy. I don’t think that’s very smart.”
“I’m not very smart,” Ann snapped. She left abruptly.
Her heart had calmed down after the jumping jacks. Somehow they seemed to recalibrate the rhythm.
In the bathroom, the dark sea of tile accentuated the blankness of her face in the mirror. Would she recognize herself on the street? Possibly not.
Ann thought she was having an identity crisis. Was she a farm girl raising a calf for the county fair, a typist, a wallflower, a Stanford scholar, a budding spinster? On the one hand, she sank in obedience to trends and class syllabi, flustered by academic challenges, and on the other, she remained resistant, perverse, willful. Mistress Contrary.
She stared at her vacant face in the mirror. Was she defined by others, or was she behind a plow, shoving her way through muddy furrows? She could hear her father saying to her, “You gee when you oughter haw.” She couldn’t remember now if gee was right or left. Her mother was saying, “Do it this a-way; that’s not the way to do it. Hold the paring knife like this. You’re a-grabbing it Annie Godlin.”
Mistress Contrary.
She listened to “Tomorrow Never Knows” from Revolver over and over until she could feel sleep coming. Some of the words were from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. She wondered what it would feel like to be dead. Maybe it would feel like this—anonymous, blank, colorless.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Pixie brought a pot of coffee. Smiling brightly, she said, “I know you can learn to like it.”
Ann gave in. Pixie was trying to be a friend.
“I have to put milk and sugar in it,” Ann said.
“I expected that. Southerner.”
Ann shrugged and removed the milk bottle from the refrigerator. She plopped two spoons of sugar in the cup and added milk to the coffee Pixie had poured.
Ann sipped the coffee.
“How is it?” Pixie asked.
“Bearable.”
Pixie laughed. “I get a kick out of you,” she said.
“You’re a student of psychology. You can probably figure out my problems.” Ann sipped more coffee. It wasn’t bad.
“You’re depressed and repressed,” Pixie pronounced. “You need a cat.”
She told Ann about a psychologist she had heard was good. She had heard this from a girl who had tried to commit suicide but who had conquered her negative impulses through therapy and was getting married in June. Ann didn’t like Pixie judging her this way, but school insurance covered the cost, and she was curious.
The psychologist was a behaviorist of an obscure variety with roots in Europe. Pixie said he was influenced by the Bandura school of thought, which had something to do with redirecting aggression and involved punching a doll. When Ann protested, Pixie claimed that everybody was aggressive in some way, whether they knew it or not.