When Ann returned one afternoon from her Faulkner seminar, Sanjay stopped her at the stairs. “Did you hear what happened to Mrs. Sokolov?”
“No, what?” The woman was prone to trouble, Ann thought. Something was always happening to her.
“She found her dancer.”
“Where?”
“It was for sale in a classified ad. ‘Dancer statuette, like a Chinese ballerina.’ She did not tell the police. She has become impatient with the police, as you know. She called the phone number and went to find the dancer herself. She paid fifty dollars for it.”
“Jingles would rather pay the money than get mixed up with the police.” Ann had learned that Pixie had to pay Jingles three hundred dollars for the damage to the bathroom tiles. Ann did not know how people could throw money around so carelessly. She had saved almost enough money for her plane ticket and the bus ticket from St. Louis to Fort Leonardwood.
That evening Ann saw Jingles taking her trash through the alley. She was dressed in a kimono and a purple cloche. She beckoned to Ann to come indoors.
When Jingles showed Ann the recovered statuette, Ann realized she had seen it before, light-speckled against the lace curtain, like a Dalmatian dog. The dancer wore burdensome flounces, not typical of a Degas ballerina. Jingles had said Diaghilev! Not Degas.
“I’m happy now,” Jingles said, fumbling with the belt of her kimono.
ANN WENT TO see Pixie and Chip at Jimmy’s house. It wasn’t his house anymore, but the Stones poster was still on the wall. The bed was now neatly covered with an Indian bedspread. Beneath Pixie’s decorative ceramic roosters and cats, Jimmy was still there.
Chip was in class, and Pixie was writing a paper for her psych history class. Nicodemus was curled on the couch. Ann told Pixie about Jingles and the statue.
“Oh, Diaghilev! That makes sense.”
“Sanjay still calls her Mrs. Sokolov.”
“Didn’t they go out?” Pixie asked. “I’m sure they did.”
“Yes, I think so, once or twice,” said Ann. “He is very nice. He made me biryani.”
“He was meant to be my true love,” Pixie wailed. “But he’s saddled with that childhood sweetheart. I shouldn’t have moved in with Chip.” She addressed the cat. “Why did I do that, Nicodemus?” She stroked him for a moment, then asked Ann, “Why didn’t you move in here with Jimmy?”
“I don’t know.”
Ann’s eyes hit on a raw crack on the wall. She remembered that jagged line from when Jimmy was displaying his photos of her for the photo dress. She said, “I’m going to see him in Missouri when he finishes his basic training.”
“He makes me so angry,” Pixie said. “What a dork.”
“He had his reasons,” Ann said calmly. Then raising her voice, she said, “What do you know about him? What do you care?”
Although Ann thought of herself as storming out, Pixie probably saw her departure as a mild fit of pique. Pixie probably shrugged and resumed the rat mazes of her psych paper.
IN MID-DECEMBER, CHIP drove Ann to the airport in the Mustang. She was taking her largest suitcase because she was going to Kentucky for Christmas after she saw Jimmy at Fort Leonardwood, and she had all her presents for the family in the suitcase. A few days later, Chip would go to Chicago to spend Christmas with his family, and Pixie would fly to New York.
At the terminal, Chip walked with Ann to the gate. He said, “Be sure to give Jimmy a piece of my mind, if there’s any left.” He planted his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t worry, Ann. I’m glad you’re going to see him. It will do both of you good.”
The plane was on time. In a long, affectionate hug, Chip kept saying, “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”
As she waited to board, Ann considered what an old hand she was getting to be on airplanes. She counted up the number of trips she had taken by plane. A dozen takeoffs at least. Flying always seemed so urgent. Probably people were making sudden trips of bereavement, but she couldn’t discern which passengers were anxious about their destination and which were merely afraid to fly. Airplanes remained frightening, but Ann accepted the risk now. She felt modern, released from the farm fields where she had once been penned. She had tried to explain that image of liberation to Frank the psychologist, and he had said, “You’re Thoroughly Modern Annie.”
FOR A SECOND, Ann didn’t recognize Jimmy. His shorn head made him seem boyish and defenseless, although his hair had already grown out nearly an inch. But the shape of his head surprised her. His head was noble, she thought. His ears were cute.
He read her mind. “I look like a high-school senior,” he said.
“You would have been voted Most Clean-Cut.”
“Most Likely to Become a Clerk-Typist,” he said.
He wore faded jeans and an army T-shirt under a striped shirt and a zip-up winter jacket. As he toted her heavy suitcase down the street, she saw how much stronger he was now. She recalled the white bricks he had lugged awkwardly up the stairs for her bookshelves. The motel was not far, and he had already registered, so she was spared the desk clerk’s scrutiny. The room was near the end of the row, and the door was heavy and warped. The door-closing contraption at the top of the door struck her as medieval. Its arm contracted slowly and groaned into place. The dark drapes were pulled shut. Ann switched on a lamp. After bolting the door, Jimmy enclosed her in his arms. With his big new muscles, he squeezed her more tightly than before. They clinched each other, as they had done when they last parted, but now the hug seemed desperate, as if this closeness could harden into stone, or a jewel. The timelessness of that closeness hit her afterwards, many times, as something she could still possess, carry with her like a pebble in a pocket.
They were making love. It was never the same, Ann thought. Each sensation was new. Yet, as always, it was fleeting, elusive. They had learned the right timing for climactic events, which sometimes made them laugh with relief. Jimmy never smoked immediately afterwards, and before long she realized he wasn’t smoking at all. He had no cigarettes.
“I gave it up,” he said with a shrug.
“Why?”
“Didn’t want to do it anymore. Everybody here—everybody—smokes. It’s tiresome. And you can’t breathe.”
“Good. I hate it.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She pinched his cheek. “I’m glad you quit.”
She had taken a Dramamine to help her sleep through the excruciating swing and tumble of the bus ride from St. Louis and to quell her anxiety about seeing Jimmy. Now she fought the grogginess. The heavy bedspread was smothering, the dark orange floral design obtrusive. This cover was probably cleaned once a year, she thought. They weren’t the first to stain it. She didn’t comment on his alarming army-green underwear. It wasn’t funny.
“What do you think about when you are alone in your army cot?” she asked.
“I fall asleep before then.” He laughed. “Sex. It’s all anybody thinks about on base.”
He apologized. “No. I think about you. It’s more than sex.”
She thought he was crying. She was crying.
The next eight weeks he would be at advanced training, sitting at a typewriter, learning how to fill out forms. In basic, there were guys who couldn’t read or write. It sickened him that they had been cajoled to join up for the army with high-flown promises of literacy and good jobs after their service. McNamara’s morons, Jimmy said they were called. There was a guy named Milton from a little town in Texas who never got past eighth grade. The drill instructor barked in his face and taunted him, making him spell words like shitface and idiot.