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.