“But I love you without your hair anyway.”
“It’ll grow back, I promise.” Jimmy hugged her again. “I have another present for you.” He rummaged in his rucksack and brought out a grocery bag folded over.
It was his hair.
“‘That blows my heart!’” she blurted.
“What?”
“Shakespeare! I’m quoting Shakespeare.”
A grievous mistake—imagining him without his hair. If she could make his hair stay on his head, he never could be in the army. The army burrows through her mind, an inevitable course, like a worm through wood.
She stares out the window of the painted ship at the painted ocean. It is nearing twilight. She has been looking at her life through a porthole, like a peep show.
THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS in Hopewell were still on two weeks later, at the end of her visit with her family. Her father had driven her to the bus station before dawn, after he milked his cows. His hair was graying along his temples. “Don’t ruin your eyes a-studying all them books,” he said when they parted.
In going out into the world, Ann had rejected the ways of her family, however deeply she loved them. She regretted that her parents didn’t get to read Shakespeare. It pained her that she couldn’t share Emily Dickinson with them or tell them about Chaucer’s bawdy humor or Joyce’s verbal flips. The boundaries of the farm—the fences and creek banks—hemmed them in, kept them from the wonder of cities and libraries. And California.
The ride to Louisville was a familiar daylong, meandering journey. During the two-hour wait at the bleak bus station in Evansville, she climbed twice with her cumbersome Samsonite up the steep stairs to the restroom on the balcony. Then, during the jolting jaunt on the hilly Indiana side of the Ohio River, she tried to nap. Her head hurt. A man in the seat behind her snored.
She had not mentioned Fort Leonardwood. She didn’t want to argue about the Vietnam War with her father, who was wary of the protest movement. He had earlier applauded Jimmy’s enlistment, but Ann saw his fearful glance at Billy, her brother, who had received a hunting rifle for Christmas. Ann had brought him a copy of Moby-Dick. Now she wondered if he might want a harpoon next Christmas.
The sack of hair had been mashed, first in Jimmy’s rucksack, then in her suitcase. In a letter two days before, Jimmy had kidded her, suggesting she have his hair made into a wig. She recalled her mother’s brooch woven from her own mother’s hair. Hair craft made Ann cringe.
Albert met her at the bus station in Louisville. He greeted her effusively, embracing her and splatting a wet kiss on her cheek. He wore chinos and a plaid shirt and a fringed buckskin jacket. His brown hair hung in a ponytail. Daniel Boone himself.
Albert brought her a cup of coffee from a lunch counter. It tasted bad. Burned shoelaces. Groggy from the Dramamine she had taken for the bus ride, she needed the coffee.
Rubbing his hands together enthusiastically, Albert demanded that Ann tell him everything. Change was afoot all over the nation—inside and outside, he said, opening his arms wide. “Self-actualization,” he said. “‘Know thyself’ and then jump into the flux.”
She laughed and nudged the alarming cup of coffee away from her. She said, “I’m afraid self-actualization is not on my syllabus. It’s all I can do to go to my classes and write the papers. And I do typing jobs.”
She thought he was disappointed in her. She told him about her studies and they explored Moby-Dick for a while. But when she tried to talk about “Kubla Khan,” Albert lumped it with what he called the fuddy-duddy theory of education. He loved teaching, claiming it was about people, not books. He still got stoned on occasion. Their talk was pleasant. She avoided telling about Jimmy.
Albert went to the counter to check on her flight. As he turned, a man passing said, “Oh, I thought you were a girl.” The man tittered. Albert nodded and seemed about to curtsy, Ann thought. The man walked away, self-satisfied.
“Let people wonder,” Albert said, grinning.
THE FLIGHT WAS canceled. Ann had a choice. She could fly to Chicago and wait until tomorrow for a connection. Or she could remain in Louisville and take the flight at the same time the next day.
“Stay here,” Albert urged her, delight in his voice. “You can crash at our house in Lexington.”
“Will Pat mind?”
“No, not a bit.” Albert hadn’t mentioned Pat, and he rarely wrote of her in his letters. He said, “She’s still in Oregon with her family, but she won’t mind if you spend the night at our house. Come on, I’ll show you Kentucky again!”
They retrieved her bag and started off on the new highway toward Lexington, stopping frequently for tolls. The conversation was rich, filled with laughter and memories. It was a relief, after the heartache of the Ozarks and bus rides and the remorse and stasis of the family visit. Ann remembered with pleasure how Albert had encouraged her, had defended her when her Shakespeare professor told her she didn’t have a logical enough mind for graduate school. Her whirlybird way of thinking was her advantage, Albert insisted. When another professor made lewd suggestions to her, Albert warned him away from her and offered to take her side if she wanted to file a complaint.
Albert displayed an air of deliberate abandon, simultaneously with an overly serious adult sobriety. As her freshman teacher, he was electric, and she had been under his sway. Shockingly, he used the word sex frequently in class. Sex-crazed Henry Miller was on the syllabus. Later, as her mentor, Albert was sometimes manipulative, charged with purpose, insistent—such as his notion of California—but now as a friend beyond school he seemed vulnerable, Ann thought.
The drive on the new four-lane toll road revealed a different face of Kentucky. It was a broader view, an open landscape, not an intimate scene. Over the years to come, she would observe that Kentucky changed in her eyes every time she returned. And yet it was always its essential self. She recognized a tone of voice—not merely the distinct accent, but an underlying innocence, an outlook. Her own attitude toward it, more than the place itself, kept changing.
“I should always take your advice,” she said in the car, a stick-shift VW Bug.
“Why don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what you are, Ann? You’re perverse.”
“You always say that.”
“That’s another word for ornery. If somebody says your mind is fertile, you’ll dispute that, and start telling about how dried up and useless your mind is.”
“I never said any such thing.”
“See? You deny it.”
ON THE DRIVE to Lexington, Ann felt distracted by Albert’s forceful optimism and his blatant confidence in her. She had always trusted him, but now he seemed less a professor on a pedestal. His cheerfulness seemed strained. When they reached Lexington, he admitted he was worried about his sister, who was in the hospital. Albert, who was her caretaker, said he needed to stop there.
Ann had never met Iris, Albert’s younger sister, and didn’t know that she had been intermittently depressed over the last few years, since Kennedy was killed. Albert said she bounced out of it from time to time, with a burst of energy, but in the last year she seemed sunk in a hole. Then on Christmas Eve she had been apprehended out in the middle of New Circle Road, where she appeared to be directing traffic.