Ann checked the teapot. It was Japanese with little blue kimonos on it. Ann was Jimmy’s only real girlfriend. That thought reassured her.
“He said he had a fight with his dad,” she said. “I guess he meant argument. I don’t know what about.”
“It probably started with his hair and proceeded to how much money it’s costing to keep him in school and went on to why he didn’t enter a worthwhile field, like medicine or law. I think he makes Jimmy feel like shit.”
“Then why is he in Chicago?” Ann decided the tea was ready, and she poured it into the small blue cups that belonged with the kimono teapot.
“Do you have any milk?”
“No. I’m out.”
He shrugged and dipped his spoon into the sugar bowl.
“Chip, tell me, what do you think is going to happen? I can’t tell. I was afraid he wanted to break up, but in his letters he says he cares about me and he loves me. Why isn’t he here?”
“Jimmy’s very complex,” Chip said. He tested his tea. “He’s too sensitive.”
“What happened to him on that trip?”
“He got something in his head.” Chip bowed his head and shook it slowly. “I always think Jimmy’s younger than he is. He’s a kid. An idealist.”
“He’s all balled up inside,” she said. “That’s what my mother would say. I guess that’s a yarn metaphor. She’d say his hair wouldn’t fit in a bushel basket.”
Chip laughed. “What would she say about me if she met me?”
“She’d say you’re a sight for sore eyes. If you just got out of bed, she’d say you looked ragged.”
“That’s my natural look.”
Chip’s crooked lower teeth and sweet grin were endearing, Ann thought.
After he finished his tea and they had listened to some Joni Mitchell songs, Chip stood up to go. He said, “You call me if you need to talk, O.K.?”
“Thanks, Chip. That’s very nice of you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Do you want Jimmy’s TV? I’m not watching it.”
“Nah, I have too much studying to do, and I get the news from the radio.”
“It’s better not to look at the news.”
“Do you do all your studying here?” Chip surveyed her dismal digs. Still no curtains.
“Mostly.”
“Don’t you ever take your book outside or to the library—some other place?”
“Why?”
“It would be good to have a change of scene,” he said.
“All my notes and folders and notebooks and my typewriter? It’s too complicated.”
“Especially the typewriter,” he said, nodding at her blue Smith Corona.
“It weighs twenty-six pounds.”
“It’s odd that you know that.”
Chip’s bike was in the shop, so Ann drove him home. Seeing Jimmy’s little house again made her anxious. She could imagine moving into it with Jimmy when he returned. The front porch had a blooming vine she hadn’t noticed before, a bounty of pink flowers climbing up the column of the portico. A tuxedo cat dashed into the shrubbery when Chip closed the car door.
PIXIE WAS AT the door as soon as Ann returned. “Was that Chip?”
“Yes, I drove him home. He walked over here after his class.”
“I guess we’re really through, then,” Pixie said, with a sad-clown frown. “Did he mention me?”
“No, he came to check on me.”
Ann cleared the table and offered Pixie some tea. Pixie declined and Ann rinsed out the teapot.
Pixie edged toward the door. “I saw Jingles,” she said abruptly. “She’s filing an insurance claim. She says that dancer’s worth five thousand dollars. I would have said junk-shop rubbish.”
“I have no idea what things like that are worth.” Ann dried the exterior of the teapot. She knew Pixie had paid $4.99 for the tea set. The sticker was on the bottom.
“I grew up in an apartment full of knickknacks,” Pixie said. “Jingles said Sanjay brought her some curry. Humph! Curry.” Pixie twirled on her toes like a ballerina as she left.
THE VIETNAM WAR seemed nearer, like an approaching drumbeat. Everyone against the war was showing it in the way they dressed, the way they talked. Ordinary people didn’t know what was happening, did they? The Dylan song resonated with new meaning. With the Doors blasting on her stereo, Ann stayed up late with one or another archaic tome on the reading list. Sometimes she suddenly asked herself why she was reading this or that text. Why? Jimmy was right to question the reading list. All summer she was in limbo, longing for his return. She wondered if his mother was washing his pink underpants, or if they had a maid.
CHICAGO
July 31, 1967
Dear Ann,
You must stop bewailing your dearth of sophistication. First, it’s not true. You are sophisticated in your own way, even if your dad didn’t have two cars and you weren’t in a sorority and didn’t live in town. You know more than I do about a lot of stuff. Furthermore, I sense that you’re beginning to stand up to Pixie. Good for you!
I’d like to take you for a ride on the el, the elevated train that goes around the city. I love the city from that angle. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it. I want to show it to you sometime. I finished “Piers Plowman,” and it made me remember a time when I was in the hospital. I got very sick one winter. They thought I was going to die, apparently, but they didn’t tell me what was wrong with me. I overheard my dad say to Mom, “He won’t live to be fifteen if he doesn’t get over this.” I was about nine, so fifteen seemed positively ancient to me. I still don’t know what I had exactly, but I got over it and it never came up again. There was a man in the ward who had gangrene and they had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he lay there in a stupor, moaning now and then that he could feel his leg and that it was still in pain. What’s more, he could still smell the awful rotten odor of gangrene. I could smell it too! I told him so. I was in that room with him for a week. And the smell never went away. I’m still haunted by that man with gangrene. He was a farmer, from the cornfields down in Illinois, and he had caught his leg in some machinery. I will never forget how he lay there, with absolutely nothing to do. He didn’t like talking, and he wouldn’t read. He was a man who had never thought of reading a book. He was used to working, making things, fixing things, and his world was totally upended. I was there in my bed, a busy boy with my books and comics and games. I couldn’t even get him to play a game of chess with me. I was wide-awake and occupied with my childish pastimes, but they said I was sick. I think I had a cough, maybe pneumonia. I have thought about that man often, about what you would do if you couldn’t do what you were used to, or what you wanted to do. I blamed him and judged him for years. How could he be so narrow? But more recently—I think because of what you tell me about your dad—I’ve thought he must have had a lot in his head, a lot of wisdom that enabled him to lie there in bed and take what came, to accept it. He must have felt he had been stripped of his manhood. He must have felt a profound emptiness, his whole purpose gone. But he resisted with all his might. And I’ve come to admire him. He’d have to be very strong to be so stoic. I thought he should have been open to a game of chess, but now I see that he may very well have been embarrassed because he didn’t know chess.