“They told stories,” Ann said. “They made up things, just like we do. See that turtle? It’s going to bump into that warthog over there.”
“That’s not a warthog.”
“Isn’t it? It’s covered with warts.”
“I see moles.”
ON A LOVE cloud, with a pot of coffee, Ann stayed up late, writing a paper on Percy Bysshe Shelley. She asserted that if Shelley hadn’t drowned at twenty-four he would have died inside anyway, at the rate he was going. He couldn’t have topped “Ozymandias,” she declared.
“Bysshe,” Jimmy said, when he read her paper. “Percy Bysshe Shelley. Snake sounds. Don’t you love that name?”
Jimmy had the faintest lisp, she realized. It was a subtle feature she found endearing.
SHE TICKLED HIS feet with a feather.
“Where did you get a feather?”
“At the beach—the day we went, remember?”
“That feels good.”
“What about this?”
“That feels nice.”
“Do you like this?”
“That’s good—that’s really good!” He pulled her hand to him. “What about this?”
“Oh, I like this texture, like a baby’s skin.”
“Are you coming with me? Hold on. There. Mm.”
“I could do this all night.”
“Oh, Ann, you’re so . . .”
There were zero words for this.
SHE WAS GIDDY and silly. She told Frank the psychologist that she felt happy, no longer confused, but he kept asking her, “What do you mean?”
What it was like. They were in on it at the beginning, Albert had said of his acid-freak pals. That was how Ann felt about falling in love. Everybody had a first time.
Ann and Jimmy swapped confessions of adolescent sex experiments. Jimmy told Ann about discovering girls at the swimming pool in junior high. By swimming stealthily underwater like a shark and zooming up behind an innocent swimmer, he could yank down a strap of her swim top, sometimes revealing a glimpse of nipple.
“I was such an ignoramus,” he said.
Ann told Jimmy about the time Billie Jean Maddox in fourth grade coached her in the secrets of the private parts of boys. They were at the playground at lunchtime, under the tall hickory trees. The swings and slides were in the woods, and the ground was scattered with large ripening hickory nuts the size of peaches, the outer husks brown and hard. Billie Jean informed Ann that boys had things in their pants approximately that size, two of them, and she talked Ann into putting a couple of the hickory nuts in her pants to see what it would feel like to be a boy. They sat at their desks in the afternoon with hickory nuts in their pants. It was uncomfortable, and Ann squirmed until the nuts rolled out from beneath her dress. One hit the floor. She reached for it and raised her desk lid and deposited it inside before the teacher saw. Billie Jean was on the far side of the room, coping more confidently with her own hickory nuts. Neither of the girls ever mentioned the nuts again.
Jimmy told Ann about his high-school initiation. Two of the older boys escorted a group of four into Chicago, a thirty-minute train ride. They planned to see a concert at the Chicago Theatre, Dave Brubeck in his prime. After the show, the older boys took the younger four to a hotel to visit someone—a fancy woman who initiated each of them, in turn. She was in a suite with a bedroom, where she entertained each privately. She wore a slinky outfit, very high heels, and a flashy necklace. She had short hair puffed up on top and bulbous red-purple lips that she repainted after each seduction. Afterwards, Jimmy questioned whether she could have been a regular downtown Chicago prostitute. She could have been arrested, especially for entertaining boys so young. It didn’t make sense, but who was she? Jimmy thought she must have been someone the older boys knew, maybe a relative. He never found out, but he confessed that what she had taught him had been useful.
“Brubeck was fantastic,” Jimmy added.
IN NEW YORK, war protestors were marching to the United Nations, and on the same day in San Francisco protestors were marching down Market Street to Golden Gate Park. The Stanford campus was quivering with spontaneous demonstrations and teach-ins. With the antiwar movement intensifying, Ann, who had never been a joiner, felt she had changed direction. Without Jimmy, she would have still been floundering among her stacks of books, with her coffee, her judgmental neighbor Pixie, and her threatening professors. But now she saw herself as one of many earnest young people, in jeans and long hair, who were out to change the world. Enter the clichés of fashion. She had flung most of her college wardrobe at the Salvation Army. With a flurry of new typing jobs, she was able to buy some embroidered blouses and a pair of bell-bottomed jeans. She liked the artistic way the flared sleeves paralleled the bell-bottoms. The clothing style sent a complex message, she thought, a shared sentiment against the war, in favor of youthful energy and honesty and against the conventionality of people like Jimmy’s parents. Her own parents lived in another world entirely and were not at all responsible for the war or the buttoned-down mentality of those in their generation who had more privileges. Jimmy said once that he hated his parents. She thought that was extreme, but she began to understand valid reasons to rebel against the materialism they represented. Jimmy often referred to them as WASPs, and he tossed the word phony around. He seemed to idealize Ann’s parents, because they lived close to the land and worked with their hands at something real. Still, his respect for them didn’t make her want to put out a corn crop.
On the way into the city in the Mustang they picked up Jimmy’s friend Chip, a grad student in computer sciences. Jimmy, who had roomed with Chip at the University of Chicago, told Ann that Chip was brilliant, a man of vision.
Long-legged, bushy-headed, mustachioed Chip folded himself into the back seat after declining Ann’s offer to sit in front. “Ann, you are a beautiful girl. Jimmy is lucky.”
Jimmy eased into the traffic toward Highway 101.
“Jimmy’s always been shy with the ladies,” Chip said, thumping Jimmy’s shoulder playfully.
“Knock it off,” said Jimmy.
“He’s not shy,” said Ann, twisting around to see Chip, who was sitting directly behind her. His hair, dark and unkempt, shot in all directions.
“He wants to talk about poetry, and that scares off most girls.”
“I talk about poetry,” said Ann.
“You’re his dream girl if you can talk poetry.”
Traffic was slow and thick. They passed several Volkswagens emblazoned with peace signs and daisy decals.
Chip shrieked. “Look at all these freaks going to the march! You can tell they are.”
Chip kept up a descriptive monologue about the traffic, and then Jimmy stopped for a pair of hitchhikers. Ann got out and pulled the seat back forward for them, but when she saw that the woman was pregnant, Ann let her have the front. Chip scooted over, and Ann clambered into the back.
“Thanks a million,” the hitchhiker said, squeezing in next to Ann. “Katie is seven months along, but I couldn’t make her stay home.”
“I’ll take the risk,” Katie said. “If we can stop the war, it will be worth bringing a new life into the world. Otherwise, I don’t know.”