“Humph. I don’t know if you’ll get away with that here.” He scratched his nose and readjusted his glasses. “You’ll find some other enthusiasm by this time next year. It would be wrong if you didn’t.”
Her armpits felt sweaty, unusual for her. Her face was hot. Had he actually said “humph,” or was it “harrumph”?
A student in khakis and an Ivy League shirt waylaid her in the arcade outside the English department. “So you’re going to work with the celebrated Yvor Winters.”
“He’s my adviser,” she said.
“Did you get any good advice?”
“Not really.”
“Aha,” he said, glancing at Emily Dickinson. “Looking for brownie points, I see. He loves Dickinson. What do you think of his poem to her?”
“I didn’t know he wrote one.”
“He nods to tradition with the Spenserian stanzas but reaffirms his modernist penchant by twisting the scheme.”
Ann crammed the book down into her bag. “I think she’s funny.”
“I’m Peter,” he said. “Second year, seventeenth-century British. If you need me to show you around, let me know.”
Although Peter had the slick, well-groomed appearance of a frat pledge, Ann was indifferent to seventeenth-century British. “You’re a little late for Winters,” he added when she didn’t reply. “They say he was at his best a few years ago. It was the heyday of Yvor Winters.”
The heyday of Yvor Winters. The phrase lodged in her mind. It would be nice to have a heyday, she thought. Not mousy, she told herself as she scurried home. She stood in her studio room in her slip, then searched for something comfortable to wear. She pulled on an old pair of tan slacks and a light sweater. She could not imagine holding an exalted position of professional authority, much less having a heyday at it.
Those Stanford boys! Young gods with money and smart talk and khaki pants. She feared them and lusted after them. What was she doing here?
PIXIE KATSAROS, HER neighbor who lived downstairs next to Sanjay, had a lava lamp on her desk and a beaded curtain between her kitchen and the main room. She was in her second year at Stanford, and her apartment came with a stray cat, Nicodemus, who swished through the bead strings with the flair of a fan dancer. Pixie filled Ann in on the landlady, Maria Sokolov.
“Her circus name was Jingles. Her husband died years ago, and she made a shrine to him. You’ve seen that awful living room?”
“A funeral parlor.”
“I was expecting to see him laid out in a goddamn casket in that alcove to the left.”
“Ooh.” The cat brushed against Ann’s leg. She said, “With all the flowers in California, why a houseful of false flowers?”
“Did you see the floral bower with the swing? And the trapeze overhead?”
“No.”
“Her husband died falling from a trapeze. They were a famous high-wire duo.”
Pixie was studying psychology on a Broadbent Fellowship. She was from New York and had a degree from Brooklyn College. They became friendly, even though Ann found Pixie’s abruptness disconcerting. Pixie could peel an orange with her teeth and eat it in twenty seconds. Her favorite musicians were Donovan, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Who. She said Herman’s Hermits were shit.
MEREDITH AND JOHN, a couple from Kentucky who were relatives of Ann’s college roommate, Josie, had promised to watch out for her in California. Meredith and John’s modern bungalow in Menlo Park was decorated with African market baskets and tribal masks they had bought in Kenya. Ann thought of the pair as urban sophisticates.
John, tall with a limber frame like a teenager, explained his research with mice in a lab.
“Killed two hundred today,” he said. “You finish the experiment and you can’t use them for another experiment. They’re contaminated.”
“You have to start with fresh, pure mice?” Ann asked. “Newborns?”
“Not newborns.”
“No, that would mean bottle-feeding, I guess.” Her wit escaped unnoticed.
“Want a cocktail?” John asked.
“A Kentucky girl might rather have iced tea,” said Meredith to John. “Wouldn’t you, Ann?”
“I guess so. Yes. Iced tea, please.”
Meredith, a slim blonde in a short pleated floral dress with a dropped waist, a style popular when Ann was a freshman, said, “When Josie told me about you, I was so thrilled. It’s hard to get to know people here. I think I had more friends in Africa.”
“I had a pet monkey in Africa,” John said. “I don’t mean Meredith.”
They made faces at each other.
“He called his monkey Lucille Ball,” Meredith said. “I was so jealous.”
Their two little boys darted about in matching cowboy pajamas.
“No cavorting before bedtime,” Meredith said. “Calm down.”
She tugged at the taller boy’s pajama top. “Take a deep breath, William,” she said. “Your face is red.”
“Your face is red!” taunted the other boy, Christopher.
Christopher and William, Ann repeated to herself. She wasn’t used to kids. Meredith spoke to the two boys in the tone of a college professor. Later, Ann observed that when Meredith said good night to them, she packed them tightly into their beds and folded the covers straight across their chests, leaving their arms stranded outside. The boys’ room had red curtains printed with cowboys. Ann still had no curtains, just the ugly old shades on rollers. Out in the hall, Meredith said to Ann, “I definitely don’t want them to have their hands under the covers.”
John opened a bottle of pink wine. Meredith and John used cloth napkins, with napkin rings. Lah-dee-dah. Dinner was a casserole of shrimp and rice with mandarin oranges, avocado slices, and hulled pistachios arranged on top.
“I’ve never had avocados,” Ann said.
“You should take some to Kentucky next time you go,” Meredith said, smiling. “A bit of California.”
Ann was sure her mother would have no use for such tasteless green pulp.
“I’m rosy . . . like the wine,” she said, feeling her cheeks flush.
“Heavens, you can’t be drunk on a little rosé.” Meredith tittered and dabbed her napkin to her lips.
As he escorted her to her car later, John said, “The friends you make in graduate school are the ones you will always have. Remember that.”
He opened the door for her. “Anything you need, Ann, please let us know. I promised Josie I’d look after you if you ever get in trouble or need something.”
What could she need from John and Meredith? A hangover remedy? They had hinted that graduate school was a great place to find a compatible mate, as if they thought she was desperate. When she got home, she flopped on her bed, still dressed, and woke up when the bedsprings next door began squeaking. Her head buzzed from the rosé.
Meredith had gone into detail about her wedding, with her sorority sisters as bridesmaids. Ann had never even been to a large wedding because she hadn’t been in a sorority. She couldn’t imagine a bridal shower or a gaggle of giggling bridesmaids in identical dresses. She seemed to be blazing a trail that forked off from the wedding march. What good would Eliot’s Four Quartets do a bride? How would reading Emily Dickinson help her? Apparently Emily had been stuck in a house, not venturing far, but she probably didn’t have to do all the housework herself, so she had time to fool around with poems. Ann did not want to waste her time on domestic detail, so what could she offer in a marriage? Prince Charming would walk right past her. She wanted to be married, but not like Meredith and John. She thought about her Kentucky professor Albert, and his wife, Pat. They didn’t appear to be tied down. They had a camaraderie she admired. They seemed bohemian, open to surprise. Pat was a potter.