“It’s teased,” she said. “In college I had a bouffant. A beehive do.”
“I bet you were cute. I want to see a picture of you in a beehive.”
“Take my word for it. You don’t want to see it.”
“You’re the most,” he said. “You’re tops.”
She grinned. “You’re stoned.”
Ann hoped for a future in which Jimmy would provide for her. They would be together, married. She would escape the persistent fear of becoming a cliché, an “old maid,” the caricature in the card game. They would have enough money to buy a few things. Maybe they could have a house someday. She hardly dared fill out this picture in her mind. They didn’t need matched furniture. They could drape lace over curtain rods, paint the woodwork red if they wanted to. Nothing had to be what it was supposed to be.
Her eyes roved his small house. He was surprisingly neat. His desk was clear, except for a pencil jar and a stack of Newsweeks. A photograph of an army general on the top cover caused her to choke back tears.
HOPEWELL, KY.
April 25, 1967
Dear Ann,
We had a scare the other day. Your daddy’s big Jersey he calls Hortense got out. He missed her and thought she probably went to the creek to find a place to have her calf, but come to find out she had got through the fence and was over in Mr. Martin’s field, down in the creek below. Sure enough, she had a little calf with her. He got them back to the barn and the next day she went right back to that fence. He had tried to fix it but she broke through. She was bound and determined. He followed her and if she didn’t have another little calf back there, I’m not here! It was still living and he’s feeding it with a nipple bucket. He felt bad that he didn’t realize she had two twins. I don’t know if he’ll keep dairy cows much longer. There just ain’t no living in it. . . .
Love,
Mama
ONE NIGHT THEY drove up to Skyline Boulevard, to look at the stars. Jimmy seemed to be driving a little recklessly—sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow. He tailgated. And he hummed the whole way. She held her breath, made tiny moans. Curves were the worst. But if she was going to die, there she was with him, not on a motorcycle with stuck-up Stephen.
Jimmy parked at an overlook and shut off the light and engine. He came around to the passenger door to open it for her. The night sky was bold and black.
“Behold, the Milky Way!” he said, his arm around her shoulders.
Ann didn’t remember anyone on the farm in Kentucky ever paying attention to the night sky. In grade school, she had learned that the moon revolved around the earth and the nine spinning planets traveled around the sun, but she recalled nothing of delight or wonder, no amazement from teachers. Why was this? It occurred to her that children had nothing to compare the stars to. Her own sense of wonder seemed to have increased with time, mostly through poetry. Now, beholding the universe with Jimmy was wondrous. The stars, flung across the sky willy-nilly, were beyond comprehension.
Pointing out Orion’s Belt, Jimmy said, “I used to think Orion’s Belt came from a prize in a cereal box. When I was a kid, I pretended I could go to the stars if I had a magic belt. It didn’t have to be a belt. It could be a ring. Or a bicycle.”
“I didn’t have a bicycle,” Ann said.
“Have you ever tried acid?” Jimmy asked.
“Of course not. Have you?”
“Once. I wanted to see what it was like.”
“What was it like?”
“There are zero words for that.” He tightened his grasp on her shoulder.
“You always say that.”
Ann had thought of taking Jimmy out to La Honda, but she recalled Stephen’s disdain. Albert had once described to her an “acid test,” where people unwittingly drank acid-laced Kool-Aid from a punch bowl. That scared her.
Jimmy was moving his free hand slightly, trying to summon the words to describe acid but giving up in one small gesture. Then he said, “You might try it, just to know.”
“That’s what my English teacher in Kentucky said. You know, the one who wanted me to see El Palo Alto, that tree.”
“Really? Your teacher wanted you to take acid? Well, it wasn’t against the law then, I guess.”
“No, he was just telling me about it. He was out here on a Stegner, several years ago, and he hung out with Ken Kesey and that bunch. He said the same thing as you—take it once and you’ll never be the same, he said.”
Jimmy loosened his grip on her and turned to face her. In the dim light, he seemed older.
“That’s true. It changed me.”
“How were you before? Was your hair curly? Did you have a habit of humming?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a way of seeing. It helped me get out of a mess in my head once.”
He was a million miles away, a distant star.
YVOR WINTERS RETIRED from teaching, and Ann had to get another adviser.
“Who are you going to work with?” Jimmy asked when he came over after swimming.
“Whom,” she said.
“We live in English-major hell,” he said. “Whom, then, my little cabbage flower of the Carpathians, with whom do you choose to work?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided my specialty yet.”
“What do you think you’ll do with your degree?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine.” His hair was wet on her face.
Jimmy had expressed doubts about the study of literature. He believed that reading literature deepened the human experience, but that critical study of it was a false direction. She agreed, but she had committed herself to that path.
“When I read a critic like Northrop Frye, I feel lost in molasses,” Jimmy said now.
“Well, I don’t want to work in a factory—or milk cows.”
“You’ll be all right teaching, but I don’t see it for me. I need to get out into the real world. I don’t know much about tools. I can barely change a tire. I can ride a bicycle, though.”
“You could get a paper route.”
“Why am I in school? I think I should dig ditches.”
“Why don’t you get yourself sent to prison? You could go out to work on a chain gang.”
“They make music,” he said. “That might be tolerable, yes.”
“You’re good with a camera.”
“Construction work would be satisfying. I never had a chance to work with my hands in any real way.”
She couldn’t tell if he was serious. But it seemed that everybody was working with their hands these days—pottery, découpage, clothing. Ann had tried macramé a few weeks before and made a plant hanger for her mother.
Dear Ann,
Oh, that contraption you sent! I had a time a-swinging it from the window frame. It wants to hang Annie Godlin.
“What does she mean—Annie Godlin?” asked Jimmy when Ann read him the passage. “Is that you?”
“It’s one of her sayings. Anti- something. It means whopper-jawed or catywampus. I don’t think it’s a real word. Anti-Godling, maybe?”
He had a laughing fit. “I want to meet your mama! She’s a poet.”