“What was wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. Jimmy’s just strange sometimes. He gets a stubborn notion in his head. But remember what I said about his generosity. He would do anything for you.”
ANN DIDN’T WANT Pixie to get the wrong idea in case she had seen Chip leaving the building the night before. But Pixie scoffed at Ann’s moral quibbling.
“Sex is just sex,” Pixie said. “Jimmy’s only testing you.”
“Haha.”
“You know everybody’s sleeping with everybody. It doesn’t mean anything. It just means nothing.”
“I don’t think that’s true. And it’s not true that everybody is sleeping with everybody. It would take somebody like Chip to solve the math problem of the exponential sum—”
“That’s what I mean. Sex with him is science.”
JIMMY APPEARED AT the door late in the morning.
“Hey, Snooks,” he said.
“Sheepish grin, if ever I saw one,” Ann said. She hadn’t combed her hair. She glared at him.
He flopped onto the bed with a grunt.
“When did you wake up?” he asked.
“Seven or eight. I don’t know. Too early.”
“Did you get enough sleep?”
“I don’t really know. I’m too mixed up. It seems so odd that it’s daytime.”
Jimmy reached for her hand and pulled her down beside him. He hooked his arm around her shoulders.
“Was it all right yesterday?”
“It was strange. It still is.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you along. Sorry I freaked out on you. You never know how it’s going to turn out. But you’re O.K.?”
“I’m O.K.,” she said.
“Chip did a good job, didn’t he?”
“Unh-huh.”
“You were all right, weren’t you? You didn’t get depressed?”
“No, but you seemed a thousand miles away.” She tousled his hair. “You split somewhere between the redwoods and the restaurant.”
“Do you want to go get some waffles?”
“No. I’m still a little whirly.”
“I was feeling crazy last night,” he said.
“Are you O.K. now?”
“My head still hurts.”
She massaged his neck for a while, and he moaned.
“Is that better?”
“Mmm. I’m sorry I had to send you away. It was getting weird for me. I just had to get by myself, and I knew I could trust Chip to make sure you were all right. He took care of us all day. He did a good job, didn’t he?”
“You already asked that. But he shouldn’t have left you. He was our guide. I shouldn’t have left you either.”
“I was O.K. I had some things to think about.”
“What things?”
“It was just some bad stuff, and I didn’t want you in the center of that. How about you? Do you feel changed like I said you would?”
“I don’t know yet. Something happened. I don’t know what it is.”
“Don’t you, Miss Ann?”
SHE WAS STARING at a child’s socks. A simple pair of striped socks. The little girl was waiting for the bus with her mother. The mother eyed Ann suspiciously. The destination sign on the bus was like a label for the coming day. A chartreuse sign on the side of the bus said,
(WHERE ARE YOU GOING?)
At the supermarket, she gazed at beets—large jewels with hairdos. Outside, she noticed a curled leaf on a bush. The leaf was shaped exactly like a great blue heron. As she drew closer, she saw that it resembled a praying mantis. But it was neither, though both assumed prayer-like poses to seek prey. It was only a leaf, but it was also a heron and a mantis.
ANN DELAYED HER summer trip to Kentucky, afraid to go—with her peculiar, revised mind.
HOPEWELL, KY.
June 28, 1967
Dear Ann,
Hope you’re coming home soon, but I know you’ve got your school work. Be careful, you’ll study so hard you’ll wear out your brain. And the airplane ticket costs so much. It come up a cloud this afternoon that was purely black. When it started sprinkling rain I had to run out and gather in the wash. I just rolled up the clothes and didn’t have to sprinkle them down to iron. . . .
Love,
Mama
“WHAT DOES SHE mean? Jimmy asked.
“She put a sprinkler head on a ketchup bottle and she sprinkles the clothes with water and rolls each one up into a ball and lets them sit in a basket for a few hours while the moisture distributes through the shirts and makes them ready to iron—a little bit damp but not wet. She calls it ‘sprinkling down.’” Ann was manhandling a soup can, grinding it open with a balky can opener. “That was exhausting to explain! And I never even thought about it in my life. I just knew it.”
“Do you sprinkle your blouses with a ketchup bottle? That’s fascinating!”
“No. I have a steam iron. I don’t need a ketchup bottle. Do you want some soup?”
He nodded. “There are just so many things to know.”
Ann imagined herself ironing Jimmy’s shirts, a domestic chore that would give her pleasure. Someday they would live in a house together and she would iron his shirts. She would cook their dinner. But she had sworn she would never pick up after a man the way her mother did. She could see her father’s dirty castoff farm duds making a path across the floor.
She was living in a fairy tale. Jimmy hadn’t talked about his empty bucket lately, but since the acid trip something had changed in him. The change was abstract, as if he wasn’t always paying attention.
“What’s going on in your heart, Jimmy?” she demanded. “What goes on in your mind?”
Ringo’s voice ringing in her head, Mama wringing the wash.
“Am I tearing you apart?”
“Yes.” You are breaking my heart.
It was only later in the day that she realized they had been speaking in song lyrics.
ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON, a week after the acid trip, they were walking through the Arizona Garden on campus. In the past day or two, she had been losing the lingering hallucinogenic flashes, but the bizarre shapes of the cactus plants spooked her. Many of the cacti were tall and phallic—sentries, gate posts, Greek columns. Others were spheroid and bumpy. A myriad of pincushions. Pink round flowers were pasted onto shiny green surfaces like cake decorations. Some suggested the interior of millefiori paperweights.
“This place is freaky,” she said.
“And you’ve never been here?”
“No.” She shivered. “It seems like a good place to be raped and then thrown into a patch of prickly pear.”
“There’s no good place to be raped,” he said.
Jimmy steered her to a bench. “Let’s sit here. I’ll watch out for roving cacti. I won’t let them accost you.”
He let go her elbow. She touched his knee, but he did not react.
She said, “When I was little, I cut my arm and needed stitches. At the hospital, while I was under ether, I dreamed about a horde of little cartoon figures jabbering in high voices. They resembled those little cacti over there.”