“WILL THEY SHAVE your head?”
“I suppose so.”
“I don’t want to give up your magnolious hair.”
“I can cut it and give it to you before I go.”
He made her laugh. “It would be a pillowcase full,” she said.
She ran her fingers through his poodle locks. His hair was clean and feathery. She buried her head in it. The hair would have been so alarming to her parents if she had taken him to Kentucky. She dreaded the sight of his bare head, his curlicue curls shorn. Although she did not want to make him feel bad that he had joined the army, she found it hard to hide her disappointment, her hurt. She didn’t deserve this. Yet she couldn’t remain angry with him, for she saw how troubled he was, how difficult and earnest his decision had been. He seemed to share her own heartbreak, as if his choice finally was not a choice but an inevitability—like being drafted.
“Can’t you get out of it somehow?” she asked one evening.
“How? Go AWOL? Shoot my foot?” He grasped her hand a little too hard. “No, I have to do it. I said I would.”
“I’M GIVING YOU my car,” Jimmy said. “And will you keep my books and records for me?”
“Your beautiful car?”
“My ritzy, obscene luxury symbol. I should just give it back to my dad—or shove it off the Navy Pier. But you need a car, and I want you to have it.”
He seemed aware of how final these parting gifts might be. Although she insisted she was just keeping them for him, he made a point of signing the car registration over to her, just as she had signed away her oil-dry Chevrolet to Al the mechanic.
Jimmy showed her how to check the oil, and they drove to the beach with Ann behind the wheel. They said little. The day was sunny, a brilliant glare that seemed insulting. Fog would have been more appropriate.
On the return, they checked the tire pressure and picked up a pizza, but neither of them could eat.
She had a suggestion—a card game.
They played hearts, then gin rummy, which evolved into something like strip poker. They laughed all evening. How they loved to laugh, she thought later.
ON CAMPUS A marching band was practicing earnestly atop Hoo Tow. The season was turning, ever so slightly. When Ann parked the Mustang at her apartment, she saw Jingles gathering litter from the base of her weeping red pepper tree. The tree was loaded with pendulous clusters of rosy berries.
HOPEWELL, KY.
October 1, 1967
Dear Ann,
I reckon you’re lonesome now without your boyfriend. I imagine that was what was bothering you when you were here. I don’t know why he had to join up, but I know when your Daddy went in he felt he had to, there was so much meanness in the world. I went with him on the bus to Louisville and didn’t see him again for six months when he was on furlow. That was the hardest time of my life, and you were just a little thing, squalling. Everybody said you were squalling for your daddy. I wish we had met Jimmy before he left, but when he comes back I bet he will be ready to pop the question . . .
Love,
Mama
THE NEXT MONTHS seemed like the fog over the Bay. Pixie moved in with Chip at Jimmy’s house, and they invited Ann to share the place, but Ann wanted to be alone. On the roiling campus, demonstrations and teach-ins were continual. The antiwar crowd scorned the soldiers. Ann had never imagined herself with a soldier boyfriend. Now she had to defend a soldier—a soldier who was the unlikeliest fighter. She wondered if Jimmy’s notion of sacrifice and noble service was just a fantasy, like her own ideal of romance and marriage. On alert, she walked around campus as if she were a soldier herself. Ripe pomegranates falling from the trees on campus made a gory red mess on the ground.
Her classes staggered her brain. She had lost focus. Coffee wasn’t working. With a sliver of a pep pill, the first she had taken in months, she wrote a paper on T. S. Eliot—that stuffy old banker. She played Jimmy’s records. His Brubeck records. Saint-Saëns. Miles.
So many of the songs on the radio that autumn were insipid.
“Incense and Peppermint”
“Daydream Believer”
“The Letter”
FORT LEONARDWOOD, MISSOURI
October 28, 1967
Dear Ann,
Greetings from Fort Lost-in-the-Woods. Vietnam couldn’t be more desolate than these Ozark hills. We have to learn to navigate out there in the woods using our wits. It’s so easy to get lost. And the recruiters didn’t mention snakes! . . .
JIMMY’S HANDWRITING WAS thorny and irregular, like newspaper words spliced together for a ransom note. He wrote about the ordinary—the landscape, the mess hall, the rain. Ann couldn’t picture him in a barracks with a hundred young men training for war—slogging through mud in a swirling monsoon, with enemies hiding in the swamp grass. She wrote to him of pleasant things—books and music. She told him she listened to “Danse Macabre” over and over and read “Kubla Khan” and tried to hear his voice. She wanted him to think of her with warmth and longing. She wanted to be steady, strong, alluring—an Abyssinian girl in a song, a memory to be revived. There was no guidebook, no etiquette prescribed for writing to a soldier. She wanted to remind him of the redwoods, the Beatles, the beach, the movies, the car rides, the bookshelves. All of it was sentimental to her. The songs, the places, the arcades along the Quad—all he had left behind. She wondered if he had similar sentiments. Jimmy could be silly, but never trivial.
THE OZARKS
November 2, 1967
Dear Ann,
I told you I could shoot, but the first time I shot an M-14 it was like a cherry bomb going off in my face. I don’t know what happens to the hearing of soldiers who are out in the field for long periods.
But I will be finished with shooting at the end of eight weeks, and then I start the ultimate challenge—typing! Sorry about my handwriting. Tell me if you need help translating.
Don’t worry about what that Twiggy girl says to you. It sounds like she’s playing pretend soldier. You can’t support the soldiers by donning our garb, nor can you protest in a fatigue jacket without being a fraud, and you can’t wear the uniform and know anything about what it means until you’ve slogged a hundred miles through mud, and until you’ve had an M-14 cradled in your arms while a DI is yelling at you and calling you names until you truly want to blast him in the puss. Ha, don’t I sound like the professional grunt!
Of course Chip’s jumpsuit is exempt from all rules.
I liked what you said about some of Faulkner’s characters sounding just like your mom and dad. That makes them seem very real to me. What you said about your Faulkner seminar rings true. I think you’re right that such things seem ridiculous now. That is how I felt, but I know that you will become a good teacher, and teaching is a life-giving force. I don’t mean to sound shallow, or like I’m putting on a good front. I feel lucky to know you and to be close to you. I know I’ve caused you misery, but I’m hard-pressed to understand what true commitment is. It’s not defined by a ring or vows or some words you’re supposed to say. True commitment is not contained in symbols. And yet it is hard to know when it arrives full-blown so that it can thrive without its appurtenances. I’m not making any sense.