The patrol car, with the CHP lettering, was long and sleek, with a busy dashboard. Mesh grid separated the front and back. The tall CHIP guy locked her door. He could have shut her in the back like a prisoner, she thought as he flew into traffic.
“Oh, you drive fast!”
“Routine,” he said. He adjusted his visor and rearview mirror.
“Where were you driving from?”
“Foothills Park.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“No. Should I have been?”
“Something to think about. You know, a young, pretty girl needs to be a little more careful. Things can happen.”
“What things?”
“I think you know what things.”
He zoomed through a yellow light and screeched to a stop at the next red light.
“Did you hear about the bombing?” he asked.
“No. Where?”
“LBJ bombed Hanoi. It’s about time, I say.”
“I don’t have a car radio. I may not even have a car.”
“I’ve got to hand it to him, supporting our guys like that. We have to remember what we’re fighting for.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re fighting against communism, of course! Don’t you follow the news?”
“You said we were fighting for something. Then you said against.”
“We’re fighting for the American way! What’s wrong with you college students? College kids are just afraid of getting drafted! I’d go if they’d let me.”
“Well, maybe that would suit you.”
The CHIP guy left her at the corner of her street, and she walked through the back alley. Her parking place seemed forlorn. She noticed an oily patch on the pavement where her car had been. The black spot was shining with rainbows.
ANN HAD TO pay fifty dollars to have her car junked. The oil had run dry, and the noise she had heard was thirsty pistons clanging, the death rattle of the car. She could not remember the last time she had checked the oil. She signed her car over to the mechanic, Al Wesson. She should have remembered his name. Her mother used Wesson oil to fry chicken. Was it synchronicity if you hadn’t noticed?
“I wish I could fix it for you, dear,” Al said. “But the engine’s shot. A car can’t run without oil, and if it runs out it just bangs itself to death.”
He offered her a ride home, but she said she’d walk.
“I’ll have to get used to it,” she said.
“I can round up a used car for you, dear. I can get you a good deal.”
Dear?
“WHAT WILL YOU do without a car?” Pixie asked. She was playing the Who and burning incense. Ann still didn’t get the incense fad, the point of it.
“I don’t know. Stay in my room and study, I guess.”
“I’ll take you anywhere you have to go. Just let me know. But you’ll need wheels sooner or later.”
“Will I? I can take the bus to campus, and the grocery is only two blocks.”
“What about a bike?”
“Maybe.”
Ann felt utterly foolish. She hadn’t grabbed the big picture—a working automobile. There was no excuse for being careless about her car, not thinking to check the oil. She had been sitting beneath a eucalyptus, oblivious to its majesty and its history. She had been reading books, retreating into another century.
HOPEWELL, KY.
August 10, 1967
Dear Ann,
Your daddy was out cutting down a dead tree in an electric storm. When he started in on it, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He was having trouble with it, trying to get it to fall the direction he wanted it, and he kept hacking at it, first one side then another. I was watching from the window when it come up a cloud and there was lightning and thunder before he could get it down. I was a wreck, watching from the window. But he got the job done! He come in soaking wet, saying his Sunday-School lessons (ha ha!). . . .
Love,
Mama
CHICAGO
August 20, 1967
Dear Ann,
Dad took me sailing Saturday. He got a new boat last year, a twenty-one-foot sloop. He’s very happy about it because the fittings are the latest. He has to keep up with the Davy Joneses, you know. I told him he should have a mermaid figurehead, or some scrimshaw work on the fiberglass prow, or at least a few whale teeth, but he just glowered at my blasphemy.
Out on Lake Michigan, you understand how Walden can be a mere pond, even though when you’re at Walden you’d call it a lake. When you go out a certain distance, Lake Michigan seems like an ocean, and it can be quite dangerous, but I always felt, even when I was a kid, that there was something landlocked about it. I always wanted to know why—why sail in a loop out in Lake Michigan? It was not fulfilling to me. It wasn’t like the Irish boarding those ships and escaping the peat bogs. They had a goal.
Although I realize now that I really love sailing—the challenge of dealing with the air and the wind and the water—when I was a kid it became just a matter of humoring Dad and his hobby. By the time I was in high school, summer Sundays on the boat got to be an obligation, and all through college I was contemptuous of it. Mom liked the sailing outfits and the picnic basket. She liked the idea of sailing more than sailing itself. She liked having cocktails at the yacht club, but on board she was likely to sneak down into the cabin and take a nap.
Dad and I must have sailed hundreds of hours together through the years, but I don’t remember ever talking about anything. He has the kind of assurance that means you don’t need to discuss anything since all the answers are laid out. That always stifled me. I was too full of questions. He’d complain if I tried to read a book when it was calm. Dad loved those books about lone adventurers like Joshua Slocum, who sailed alone around the world, but he wasn’t really an adventurer himself. He liked the equipment, outfitting the boat.
I thought about all that when we sailed on Saturday. We didn’t talk, just nautical terms like “coming about” and “jibe ho” and “shiver me timbers.” I liked the wind on my face and the physical sensations of working the sails. I liked seeing other boats come close, the people waving.
We were out there about three hours and we made small talk, and then we got into an argument about Martin Luther King. I told him how King linked racism and poverty to Vietnam when he spoke at Stanford. King said, “Riots are the language of the unheard.” And Dad just shrugged. And he said, “Think of where they’d be now if we hadn’t built this great nation with their help.” He said he didn’t mean anything critical. He was just saying that’s how it was, in slave times. He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. A remark like that just fills me with hopelessness.
When I questioned him, Dad did what he always does when you cross him. He closed his lips really tight and made his steely face. There was both rage and smugness on his face. It was impenetrable. I can’t think of any literary character like him. But I kept thinking about Odysseus and Columbus and the Vikings, all those great sea voyagers. I probably think too much in terms of epic journeys.
You said I shouldn’t hate my parents. I know I said once that I did.
I don’t really, I guess. You’re right that I’m tied to them. They are a major part of who I am, but that just makes me hate myself. I don’t want to turn into a boring yachtsman in a dapper cap spouting scuttlebutt from the poop deck.