“I can’t see where I’m going,” she said, slowing to a crawl. “Where is the turn? Is this the right highway? Should I get off?”
“Just go with it!” he said. “Man! Man oh man. You couldn’t get this on psychedelics!”
She had the strange feeling that Leonard had just reached a climax.
She recalls the end of that year, going home to Kentucky. It was balmy on Christmas Day, and then came an ice storm. Remembering, she feels she is riding a seesaw of weather, but that is the tremble of the ship, behaving like a spirit level. She should head for the stateroom to make the tea. Domestic duties make her angry, and the calm blue sea seems spiteful in its placidity.
1967
IT RAINED. THE QUAD WAS PUDDLES. THE RAIN FELT ICY. Ann pulled up the collar of her trench coat and clutched her books against her chest.
“Join me in jail! Refuse to fight!”
A large crowd had gathered in White Plaza, and a tall student in an army fatigue jacket was hoisting a poster high on a stick. RESIST THE DRAFT. He twirled the sign around. The back read, SAVE AMERICA FROM VIOLENCE. Ann squeezed through the crowd and trudged toward the parking lot with her armload of books. Loudspeakers began to blare.
Even though it was midday, cars were turning on their headlights. Ann’s windshield wipers, long out of use, scraped hoarsely, and she drove slowly through the unaccustomed gloom. The eucalyptus trees waved, as if signaling for help.
The radio news that evening did not mention the protest, but the next day the Stanford Daily gave it front-page, above-the-fold coverage. The student-body president was calling for massive resistance to the draft. Ann had heard some students say they would go to Canada before they would comply with the draft, but now they were being urged to go to jail instead.
A jumpy mood was spreading over campus—louder voices and more desperate questions. To Ann, immersed in Victorian novels and the Irish Renaissance, the antiwar talk seemed disorienting. Sometimes she felt as if she had been tossed into a snowbank. Or she was sledding on a cafeteria tray down the hill behind the dorm.
But this is California.
In February, Vice President Hubert Humphrey spoke on campus. The auditorium was packed, and Ann could not enter. She listened to the loudspeakers outside in a noisy crowd. While Humphrey was still speaking, dozens of people began walking out of the auditorium. Ann saw a group of faculty members emerge from the side exit. They were all wearing white armbands. Yvor Winters? Was that Yvor Winters? He wore a white armband. It was passing strange that he should be in that crowd, she thought. He looked ill. Ann felt she hadn’t known him at all. She had been in his presence only twice since his seminar ended before Christmas. Outside the English department door, she had overheard him say to Wallace Stegner, “Now, Wally, you know that’s pure twaddle.”
Dozens more in white armbands streamed out. Eventually she had a glimpse of the vice president, who was being hurried to a car. Humphrey, his struggling potato face turning red, had not expected this hullabaloo.
“Humpty Dumpty!” someone shouted.
“Shame, shame!”
“Why don’t you stop killing children in Vietnam?”
Ann had thought it was a privilege to be at a university—a self-contained world, like the Vatican or a Pacific island. She couldn’t remember the difference between Viet Cong and Viet Minh or which side Ho Chi Minh was on, and the tumult on campus made her feel guilty. She was glad she didn’t know anyone in the military.
In late March, just after turning in her paper on The Playboy of the Western World, she flew to Kentucky.
HOPEWELL, KY.
March 30, 1967
Dear Ann,
We were tickled to see you here for a whole week. Sorry we had to put you to work in the garden, but we were behind this year. It come a heavy rain and washed out some of those beans, but I’ll get some more in. We still have black seeded Simpson lettuce and plenty of reddishes. Wish I could send you some wilted lettuce with bacon grease! . . .
Love,
Mama
WHAT HER MOTHER didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, Ann thought. Pixie was thinking of going to a nude encounter group. The Twiggy girl was having her own personal be-ins on weekends at her family property in Woodside. Even Sanjay bought a pair of blue-jeans.
AND THEN JIMMY appeared.
He isn’t supposed to be here. She feels a trace of vertigo from an almost imperceptible wobble of the cruise ship. But they are in California, she thinks, clutching the rail. It can be a different story.
JIMMY SAT ACROSS from Ann in the Kelly and Sheets class. That’s what he called the seminar on the poetry of Keats and Shelley. (That was probably an old joke, she thought later.) Whenever she glanced up from her notebook, he was gazing across the oval table at her, but he lowered his eyes when she noticed him. Her heart did a butterfly caffeine flutter, then revved up. He had long, shaggy hair like a poodle dog. Random ringlets framed his face.
At the end of the class, he shoved his books into a green canvas bag and slung it over his shoulder before he moved in her direction.
“Which is your favorite, Kelly or Sheets?” he asked.
“Keats, of course. How can that be a question?” She was trembling.
“Touché.” He grinned. He had nice, even teeth.
He was smoking a cigarette. They headed down the stairs.
“Where do you come from? I like your accent.”
“Kentucky. Can you hear my accent?”
“Yeah, can you hear mine?”
“Hmm. A little northern—Detroit?”
“Chicago.” He sucked in his cigarette and then blew little contrails out his nostrils. “Tell me everything about yourself,” he said.
“Everything?”
“Sure. What was your first word? First tooth. Stuff from your baby book.”
The sunlight on the Main Quad was blazing. As if they had a destination, they headed up Lasuen Mall toward Hoover Tower. She was glad it was her heretofore embarrassing accent he had mentioned instead of the fatuous remarks she had made in class about Shelley’s wind poems. Sitting on the steps of Hoover Tower, she told Jimmy things about her childhood she wouldn’t have expected to tell—about milking cows and cleaning manure from the barn. His childhood was Boy Scouts and Cubs games in suburban Dullsville, Illinois. He apologized for his humdrum history, which sounded alien to her. He smoked another cigarette.
“Let’s walk,” he said after a while. He stubbed out his cigarette on the sidewalk. “Give me your books.”
He stuffed her Keats and Shelley paperbacks and her notebook into his bag, then hoisted it over his shoulder. She thought of Johnny Appleseed.
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere, just walking around.”
They meandered around the library and back to the Quad. He zigzagged in and out of the archways. She was wearing the wrong shoes.
Ann asked him if he had been at any of the protests.
“No, but there’s going to be a big one in the city in a couple of weeks.”
“Are you going?”
“Yeah. I hate this goddamn war.” He pointed to a bird high in a palm tree. “Hark! Keats’s nightingale! Come on, Florence Nightingale, take my arm.”