BEREA, KENTUCKY
June 3, 1966
Dear Ann,
If you go to Stanford, I want you to find El Palo Alto, the tall tree. It is a big redwood the Spanish explorer Portola camped under in 1769. Eventually the name of the tree became the city of Palo Alto. 1769 was the same year Daniel Boone first set foot in Kentucky. Think about the parallel movements of these explorers. It would give me pleasure to imagine you looking up at that great tree and contemplating how you as a Kentuckian are now in California, taking part in history.
I want you to meet my old pals at La Honda. They know just how to open up your head.
Albert
Although Albert was full of loosey-goosey advice, she couldn’t argue over the tree. In California she would learn all those flowers and strange trees. Maybe she would trip the light fantastic with his acid-head soulmates. She might bunk in a woodland commune.
PIXIE’S PARENTS RAN a little grocery in Brooklyn and had saved to send Pixie to college. Then a prestigious award propelled her to apply to Stanford. She was going into research rather than therapy because she didn’t want to listen to people talk about their problems. Ann could see that Pixie would easily have the patients diagnosed and out the door before the hour was up.
Ann made a Southern meal for Pixie, who had never had fried chicken, but the chicken was tough and the cornbread burned. Pixie complained that the food was too heavy and that she couldn’t imagine eating like that every day. She zipped down to her apartment for her jug of Chianti nestled in its cute basket. Used to drinking milk or iced tea with meals, Ann hadn’t thought of wine.
“Wine is the one thing I splurge on,” Pixie said. “That and Kleenex.”
Ann rarely bought Kleenex and had never bought wine. Pixie was just getting over a boyfriend and now had the hots for Sanjay, who had fed her biryani with dal paneer and naan and something with lentils. “I could become a vegetarian with somebody like him!” she said. “He grinds his own spices.”
“I had Indian food once in Louisville.” Ann was aware that Pixie was claiming Sanjay out from under her.
Pixie shook her dark, bushy hair like a madwoman. “He is so sexy. I’m so hot and bothered I can’t study. Jesus shit.”
Ann had heard people say “Jesus wept.” That had seemed an innocuous thing to say. But apparently people from New York were bold in their speech.
SCHOOL BEGAN. THE quiet did not burst into noisy throngs. It murmured into life. The flower-rimmed paths were not crowded. Except for the occasional swish of a bicycle, the atmosphere on campus was subdued. Stanford was a large, confident place, with a high-class history hidden to Ann. Among her fellow literary students were a Taiwanese girl with freckles, a California girl who always wore a gardenia brooch, a girl who cultivated her image of the model Twiggy, and a charming Irishman who was married with a baby. One of the lecturers was said to have a venereal disease; a former Stegner fellow had disappeared in the Amazon the year before. A couple named Jodie and Michael had fallen in love the day of orientation and were already shacking up in a little house on University Avenue. They discovered they had both written undergraduate papers with the same title: “Seeing and Perspective at Walden Pond.” Ann thought Henry David Thoreau would have easily belonged with her parents in Kentucky, hoeing beans and fishing. Ann had had enough beans and wanted something loftier. Everybody said the place to go for a carnal weekend was the hot springs at Big Sur. Jodie and Michael went there the first weekend of the term.
Ann had expected Yvor Winters to be haughty and condescending, but in the modern poetry seminar he was mild-mannered, with an affable detachment. The seven other students, all male with show-off vocabularies, seemed more imposing and opinionated than he was. She observed how they thrust themselves forward. Where she had curiosity, they expressed glib certainties. She kept quiet, on edge. The poetics class was more fun. The elderly professor, Dr. Parker, had Xeroxed his own translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. At each class meeting, they pored over the translation, bit by bit, sometimes accomplishing whole paragraphs in one class period. “That word is not a happy choice,” he would say. Or, “I am still debating whether catharsis is the correct word.”
“It seems tragic that Aristotle’s work on comedy was lost and all we have is his tragedy,” Ann said in class one day. Nobody laughed at what she meant to be funny.
Pity and terror, she thought. Aristotelian basics.
Old English was better. The words were dazzling. Mōd, ēagan, brēost, heorte, lufu: mind, eyes, breast, heart, love. Vital words. She loved their casual resemblance to modern words—a drunken typist hitting the wrong keys. It was amusing to imagine people centuries ago, in robes and tights, declaiming their heortes and mōds. She spent hours translating Aelfric and other literati of early England. She liked to imagine monks copying manuscripts in fancy lettering, with colorful little drawings. She had put her stamps away, but now she recognized her monkishness. She could see her future—absorbed in ancient texts, whispering the words to herself. She got chill bumps.
It was clear to her that she needed a husband if she was ever to have a house and any measure of comfort. Otherwise, she was going to have to earn her own living, and unless she could conquer and thrash a PhD, that probably meant office work. But the thought of John and Meredith’s marriage gave her the heebie-jeebies.
To avoid the need for a roommate, Ann advertised for typing jobs and soon found herself typing term papers for fifty cents a page. It was easy money. She could type a page lickety-split. She typed on floating-cloud-like erasable paper. Her blue-and-white Smith Corona electric had large, clear pica letters and a satisfying hum. During the first week of classes, she typed a novel about the explorers Lewis and Clark written in blank verse, and a long biographical essay on Stephen Crane. “Thank God that son of a bitch died when he was twenty-eight,” the Crane biographer said. “I spent two years on this thing.”
Before typing a science paper about pepper-plant experiments, she drove to the Stanford Shopping Center to buy a ream of typing paper. Outside the variety store she ran into the baby-doll-pajamas photographer. His cigarette was still stuck to his lip like a growth. He recognized her.
“Hey, babe. Boy, did I have a run of bad luck. Somebody broke into my car and made off with my gear bag and two cameras. I lost ten rolls of film I hadn’t developed yet. I got robbed.”
“All your display folders? And the pictures you took of me?”
“Yeah. Negatives. Rolls of film.” He shrugged. “I’ve told the police, but I don’t expect to get anything back.”
“That’s too bad.” Ann suppressed a spurt of glee. “Good luck,” she said, waving a little bye as she entered the store. Her knees were shaking. She imagined her photo showing up in a sleazy magazine, although probably no one would ever know it was her. They might think it was Natalie Wood.
WHEN THE AUTHOR of the pepper-plant paper, an undergraduate in red Little Orphan Annie curls, came to pick up the finished typing job, she asked to use the bathroom.
When she emerged, she said, “Wow! That bathroom is so neat!”
“It drives me up the wall,” Ann said.
“You wouldn’t be looking for a roommate, would you?”