This is the kind of thing you dwell on when you go home for a while! You can’t go home again. I know.
Love,
Jimmy
ANN, GRATEFUL FOR his encouragement, wrote Jimmy pages and pages of thoughts about her reading, while trying not to be too forward about her feelings for him. She didn’t want to pressure him. After Mama’s anguished letter, Ann renewed the biblical vow to honor parents. Jimmy’s contempt for his parents was unthinkable to her. She tried to encourage him to see their good points. But in his view, his parents were basically dishonest. The way his father laughed about his patients as though they were gullible guinea pigs, his mother’s fake hospitality, the hypocrisy of their suburban mores. They wore false-faces like pagan gods.
CHICAGO
August 6, 1967
Dear Ann,
I have to look at things straightforwardly, without playing games, and yet I know that I am always withholding, always courting mystery and hiding what I’m thinking. I know that. It is one reason I didn’t want to be with you for a while. It is so embarrassing to be this way, to recognize my deficiencies and to make you put up with them or even to deceive you with things I don’t say. I struggle with this and wish I could be as honest as I expect everyone else to be. Sound effect: big sigh. How did you ever get involved with me, Sugar Snooks? I’m nuts—you know I am. I look at the world and expect it to have some standards and consistency, and yet I know I fall short myself.
Please bear with me. I will keep working at it. I appreciate what you say about the enormous privileges I’ve had, and maybe I’m not grateful, but is it really a privilege to be conditioned by these maniacs who worship the almighty dollar and think they’re better than other people? I know it’s indecent to complain about being well off, but I think money is the root of the problem. My dad is raking in the dough while gossiping behind his patients’ backs. That’s wrong. I know I should be more forgiving, as you suggest, and I’m giving some thought to that. . . . Here I am, reading Eldridge Cleaver’s prison diaries in Ramparts and wondering, will there ever be justice in this world? . . .
Love,
Jimmy
ANN WAS QUESTIONING everything too—questioning authorities, rejecting expectations. She was still angry with Yvor Winters for ever making her feel small, angry with Frank the psychologist for questioning her love for Jimmy, angry with Pixie for being so critical. But she was afraid her rebellious streak was flimsy.
When she went to pay rent to Jingles, who was surly and sullen, Ann thought about how difficult it would be to be a landlady. Jingles not only had been robbed but was being deceived. She didn’t know that Ann had repainted the pink walls or that Pixie had dumped pink rocks on the bathroom tile. It seemed that there was a big-top show taking place and that Jingles the erstwhile acrobat was missing it. Ann got a whiff of incense inside Jingles’s house. It was the same fragrance that came from Pixie’s apartment.
“Is that incense?” Ann asked. “It seems familiar.”
“Sandalwood. I bought it in the Haight. I went there with Sanjay, your downstairs neighbor.” Jingles regarded her skeptically, as if realizing she had told too much.
“I went there with Pixie last week,” Ann said. She had not seen Sanjay’s girlfriend, Paula, in many weeks.
The Haight-Ashbury hubbub was appealing, yet daunting. Ann and Pixie had sauntered through head shops and Indian import stores. They bought cheap jewelry, sniffed the grass fumes in the air, surveyed the extravagant costumes. Psychedelic music drifted from doorways.
Jingles, standing with arms akimbo, said, “I don’t know why those kids in the Haight want to be so dirty.”
“Any word of your ballerina?” Ann asked.
“I’ll never see it again.”
She folded Ann’s check and saw her out the door. The plastic flowers in the hallway seemed dusty and grubby. The rear window had been repaired.
AFTER TYPING SEVERAL term papers for sixty cents a page, Ann was able to buy two embroidered tunics from the India store next to the restaurant in Palo Alto where she had eaten with Jimmy and Chip the night of the acid trip. She bought a puzzle ring and an Indian bedspread, which she understood already to be clichés. She taped a poster from the Fillmore to her wall.
She was jotting down ideas for a paper, “From ‘Kubla Khan’ to Sgt. Pepper.” It might lead to her dissertation. But Professor MacLean, her new adviser, told her she would have to take more courses in nineteenth-century British before she could ever presume to travel that road between two disparate time periods. Not disparate at all, she fretted. They overlapped intriguingly. She remembered Jimmy playing with tape loops.
Meredith and John invited her to a patio party, a cookout, but Ann declined, saying she had to write a paper. Instead, she wrote a six-page letter to Jimmy about her new psychedelic interpretation of “Kubla Khan.”
CHICAGO
August 10, 1967
Dear Ann,
I will be in Chicago a while longer. My grandmother is not doing well. Mom is distraught and doesn’t see how she is affecting everybody with her delusions. But my grandma is a wise old soul, and I think Mom just couldn’t live up to her example. When Grandma was in her twenties, she was a flapper, or at least that’s how I’ve imagined her, straight out of a Fitzgerald novel, but now I realize she was too old to be a flapper. She must have been born way back in the nineteenth century. During the Depression, she worked at Midway Airport, and during World War II, she worked on the Navy Pier, where they were training sailors. I try to get her to talk about those old days, but it exhausts her.
I would like to have her grace and emotional strength. Her skin is sort of yellow, and she shakes. She’s really old, over eighty, I think. When I was little, she used to take me to the airport to watch planes take off and land. “One day you will fly a plane yourself,” she said. But somehow that never appealed to me. I am so restless in my flight. Always searching for the meaning of things. Never satisfied!
I’m intrigued by what Hesse says about nature, how each thing always has an opposite and you can’t have one without the other. It’s chilling to think that a peach is both real and an illusion. I still feel bad that I jumped all over Pixie and the I Ching. I’m not for a minute mystical or religious. I’m more interested in ethics and possibility—what should one do? On what basis? How do we decide what is true, or what is the right thing to believe? Is there a right belief? My head spins around sometimes. Sometimes I feel Heraclitus was the wisest—you can’t dip a paw in the same river twice.
Yesterday Grandma told me some extraordinary things, which only underline everything I’ve been saying about this fucked-up family.
Mom always said her father died when she was an infant and she had no memory of him, but Grandma told me he died when Mom was twenty. So what was going on? I probed Grandma a bit, and she blurted out the whole story. Apparently my mother’s older sister, my Aunt Betty, got pregnant in high school. There was so much shame. The young man was a poor immigrant, a Czech. And her father, my grandfather, forced her to leave home. He made her go away and put the kid up for adoption. Grandma thought that was extreme and she tried to get him to relent, but he wouldn’t. Aunt Betty went off to some town in Wisconsin for several months. Grandma was heartbroken, and I think she indulges me because she never got to know her other grandson. She doesn’t think Aunt Betty ever told the man she eventually married—Uncle Ross, a real-estate lawyer. She settled into a quiet, repressed suburban existence where everything is swept under the rug. Or sucked up with the Electrolux.