My mother and grandmother planted by the moon, but I never saw the good of that. You plant when the ground’s right.
We saw on the television a lot of commotion about the war. So many boys going off. Do you ever hear from that Jimmy you were so crazy about?
Love,
Mama
Upstate New York
1968–1970
ANN SHUT OFF MOST OF HER MEMORIES OF THE LONG PERIOD that followed—the dying end of the sixties. They were as elusive as nighttime clouds. Those months were dark and empty, and she glimpsed only fragments, like floaters in the eye. She was numb, absent, vacant. She remembered hiding in her apartment, which was only a glorified dorm room with its own bathroom—of a horror-movie hue.
She did not turn on the TV news.
Sometimes migrainous auras lit up her vision. Dime-sized blurry blobs danced around the pages of her book like afterimages from light shows at the Fillmore. A faint cross-patch design decorated the blobs. “Take an aspirin to prevent a migraine,” the ophthalmologist had advised. But she never had headaches, just anticipatory auras.
Yvor Winters died.
The Beatles broke up.
Jimmy . . .
SHE BARELY ACKNOWLEDGED her surroundings. School was a mystery. She hardly knew where she was. It wasn’t sunny California. She could withstand Binghamton winters, but she knew she might not have survived the academic rigors of Stanford University. California was only a dream, a place in a song. In 1970, after the student massacre at Kent State, Ann moved into a small house in Vestal. The burgundy bathroom had finally defeated her. Sanjay returned to India. Pixie landed a research job in Kansas. Ann heard from Chip often. After finishing his course work, he had moved to Oregon with an oceanography major who was a gourmet cook.
Chip said on the telephone, “Remember what Jimmy said about Wittgenstein?”
“No.”
“Something about how you live in the present, you live forever. That’s where you’re free—in timelessness.”
“Was Jimmy a hero or a fool?” she asked Chip.
“Nobody is one or the other entirely.”
“Could he have been both?”
“I wish I’d gone instead of him,” Chip said, not for the first time.
Ann was finished with male authority figures. She said that to Frank the psychologist, in their final meeting. LBJ, McNamara, Westmoreland, Dean Rusk. Nixon now. Yvor Winters. Not Yvor Winters. He was only a name on a textbook. Her real bête noire was a New Critic Joyce scholar who had cornered her in the Xerox room and told her she was cute. She didn’t mind being called cute, but she resented having her critical insights also termed cute.
“Jimmy thought he had a vision,” said Chip.
“It was stupid,” Ann said. “Childish.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“The only way I can go on is to forget him. It was so pointless what he did.”
“He thought he did it for you—in a way.”
“That’s so twisted,” she said. “I didn’t believe that.”
Chip said, “I just remembered the other day something Jimmy told me when we were roommates in Chicago. When he was a little kid, his mother got him a blue tricycle. He was happy with his tricycle, as kids are. His mother took him to the park to ride his trike. Jimmy’s dad was a doctor and they were well off, but some of the poor kids from the neighborhood on the other side of the park didn’t have things like tricycles. And Jimmy felt sorry for them, so he gave his tricycle to some poor kid. His mother was furious. She tracked down this snot-nosed skinny tubercular underweight raggedy kid and drove over to that family’s house—I don’t know, some poor shack—and she commandeered the tricycle. As Jimmy described it, his mom just marched in and snatched it. She probably claimed they stole it. Anyway, there it is, Jimmy in a nutshell.”
“Of course it was blue,” Ann said in a small voice.
March 31, 1969
Dear Jimmy,
Remember the first be-in at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco? I think it was in the winter of 1967, a couple of months before I met you. I found an old Newsweek in your house after Pixie split up with Chip. There was a story about the be-in. And there was a photo in the magazine of a guy browsing at a bookstall, a photo from the rear. I thought it was you. It was just like your duffel coat. It was exactly like you. Your coat, your hair. Rumpled and shaggy. Your build. Of course San Francisco would have been cold, but not as cold as Binghamton! Even in the summer I shivered in those thin Indian dresses, the short skirts.
I thought that was you in the Newsweek photo.
Please . . .
She did not know where to send the letter.
She seemed to be in a dream, but one more painful than waking truth. If she cried out in sleep, no one would hear. No one could wake her from the nightmare. She couldn’t conjure up memories of those final black months of the sixties, she realized now, so many years later.
She did remember John and Meredith’s moon party—July 20, 1969. They had been unfailingly sympathetic and helpful, as they had promised. Their boys had shot up like cornstalks and grown seriously competitive about a basketball hoop nailed above the garage door. Guests were laughing and drinking margaritas. The astronauts had landed and the excitement had died down. John circulated a tray of brownies. Ann carried an empty bowl, a heavy blue piece of Pfaltzgraff pottery that had held potato salad, from the deck to the kitchen, where Meredith was rinsing plates for the dishwasher.
“The moon is boring,” Meredith said.
“How can you say that?”
“Just think of what it cost.”
Ann checked the TV in the den to see what was happening. She rarely watched TV, but now she was alert to Walter Cronkite’s words. Apparently his whole life came down to this, and his excitement was palpable. The astronauts, resting, hadn’t yet emerged from the LEM. Only a few other guests were in the den with the TV, and they were talking about a beleaguered colleague at the Stanford Research Institute. Ann turned back into the kitchen.
“Imagine, being ordered to sleep before you can open the door and step on the moon,” she said to Meredith.
“They’re probably dead tired. I would be.” Meredith clanged silverware in the sink.
Ann called her parents, using the telephone in John and Meredith’s bedroom. She could hear the TV muttering in the den. She sat on the bed, evidently on John’s side. His corduroy pants lay across a wooden valet, and his tennis shoes were parked below. She had never seen a real valet in actual use. As she listened to the rings, she stared at the pants and shoes.
“The moon!” she said when Mama answered. Ann pictured her mother speaking from the kitchen wall phone and her father on the extension in the bedroom.
“There are men on the moon!”
Mama said, “I didn’t hear all of it. It commenced to sprinkling rain, and I had to run out and gather in the wash.”
Daddy said, “We saw it.”
“There are men on the moon!”
“You’re as far away as the moon,” he said.
“What?”
“You seem that far away.”
“I’ll be home soon,” she said.
Ann knew right then that she would always remember the sixties as the happiest time in her life, even though it had been so for only a few months of the decade.