Ann declined. The pepper-plant paper was thoroughly boring. After the student left, Ann sang with the radio.
“Woolly Bully, Woolly Bully!”
She did a little dance.
“Watch it now, watch it now!”
HOPEWELL, KY.
September 25, 1966
Dear Ann,
We got a laugh out of your trouble frying chicken. The way I do it, you cut up a young fryer, and in a skillet you melt Crisco or use Wesson oil about an inch deep. Coat the pieces with flour on a plate. Fry on one side, then turn it, cover, turn down the heat and cook till it’s done. Uncover when you go to brown it. . . .
Love,
Mama
“ANN, YOU REALLY should be on the Pill,” Pixie said. “Saving yourself for somebody special? That’s a scream.”
Pixie had a cowlick, deep-set eyes, and a hefty but curvaceous shape. Ann learned to shrug artfully at her judgments, but she thought Pixie was harsh and manipulative. The cat, Nicodemus, was similar in temperament.
“Sanjay brought me biryani the other night, and I gave him some baklava,” said Pixie, propping her feet on her brass-bound steamer trunk—her coffee table. “His family sent him here to become a doctor, but they have a wife lined up for him at home. That was arranged when he was a child. Imagine? Now he’s in love with this undergrad history major from Wyoming, and he doesn’t know what to do.”
“Do you want to marry him?”
“Hell no. I just want to sleep with him.”
“I’ve known too many girls who had to get married,” Ann said. “I’d be terrified of ending up with the wrong person.”
Pixie rose from the table and scooped the ragged cat into her lap.
“Let me recommend a really good gynecologist,” she said.
“For me or for the cat?”
“The cat has been taken care of.”
“I heard the Pill causes heart attacks.”
“The gynecologist told me they’ve fixed that.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it.”
Pixie’s bathroom was burgundy like Ann’s, but it had a window, with a view of the parking strip. The light brightened the murky tile. A swath of lace curtain material was slung across a brass rod. The lace edges were raw. All that time Mama had spent hemming curtains and working those metal hooks into drape tops, Ann thought. So much work. Why bother? This hank of lace cut straight from the bolt made a more interesting aesthetic statement. Pixie was saying she wasn’t a slave to conformity or pointless labor.
You didn’t have to hem curtains! Or mess with drape hooks! Ann felt a little tug in her chest, like the loosening of a tight bra strap.
HOPEWELL, KY.
October 7, 1966
Dear Ann,
I hope you make a go of it with that teacher you’re so worried about. You always were smart and your daddy says they’ll be paying you forty thousand dollars a year someday just to think. . . .
Love,
Mama
SOMEONE HAD SAID Yvor Winters was a puppy dog beneath his classroom mask, but Ann wondered about that. She had seen him crossing the Main Quad, stumbling along obliviously, a frown twisting his face. In his class, students did not raise their hands to speak and they were not called on. It was supposed to be a conversation. Ann watched the seven males carefully, studying their deliberate, assertive gestures—the way they interrupted one another and didn’t take turns. The vigor of their debate reminded her of a Punch and Judy show—comic and terrifying. She could not squeeze a word in edgewise.
In the poetics class, Ann felt bolder. One afternoon Professor Parker probed William Blake’s visions of heaven and hell in humorless tones that seemed at odds with the riot of images on the page. After listening to thirteen ways of looking at a silly line—“The cut worm forgives the plow”—from Proverbs of Hell, Ann impulsively raised her hand.
“If you cut a worm in two, it will grow into two worms. So the worm may not merely forgive the plow, but be indifferent to it, or even thankful. Two for one.”
Professor Parker stared at her as if she had wandered in from the remote reaches of the zoology lab. A student who seemed to be about sixteen years old said, “The worm, of course, is the nameless objectification of the poet’s embrace of the universe. It is a rationalization, a feeble foray into the mystery of life eternal. It has nothing to do with the actual worm writhing in dirt.”
“That’s bullshit, Annie,” Stephen Chancery said to her after class. “Don’t you know bullshit when you hear it?”
“I ought to,” she said. “I’ve stepped in enough of it. Cow shit anyway.”
“Shit”—could she really say that? Pixie said it all the time. Stephen didn’t bat an eye. How could he call her Annie?
She had had her eye on Stephen, a second-year grad student who rode a motorcycle and who was rumored to be Yvor Winters’s star pupil the previous year. He was good-looking, tall and sturdy, with an appealing aloofness. Nobody called him Steve.
Now they became acquainted over Blake’s apologetic worm. They brought beer and pizza to his apartment. He rented a basement apartment from a dancer whose jetés jarred the ceiling. Stephen had an Australian sheepskin rug, a Navajo blanket, an Indian water pipe, a Chinese hookah, a fat stone Buddha, and a large plaster statue of a Siberian tiger. They seemed to be decorative objects, of no significance. Ann wondered if he was an atheist who was nevertheless covering the bases, in case. The narrow bed was made up hospital style, with a fuzzy blanket folded neatly at the foot. Ann had not followed Pixie’s advice about the gynecologist.
But Stephen spoke of the thrill of riding his motorcycle over the mountains, how it felt transcendent, even quiet. Ann told him about Albert’s friends out in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“I feel obligated to go and make their acquaintance, but I’ve put it off.” Ann expected them to be a dazed circle of potheads and girls in gingham frontier dresses. Albert had called them “freaks,” as if to be odd and offbeat were the highest aims.
“That would be a whacking good ride,” Stephen said.
THEY SET OUT on Saturday afternoon. She had talked to someone—a soft-spoken man called Hal—at the number Albert had given her.
“I don’t have a helmet for you.” Stephen shrugged. “But you wanted a ride.”
The motorcycle was bright red, so huge and heavy she didn’t see how anybody could keep it upright. She sat behind Stephen, holding on to his hard stomach. She wondered if he was ticklish. The whirl of the wheels hummed through her body.
He screeched to a stop at traffic lights and zoomed off when the light changed, reaching high speed in seconds. She wore her prescription sunglasses and no contact lenses. The wind burned her eyes. She had tied her hair back in a knotty little ponytail, but her head was cold in a madras kerchief with string ties. The wind cut through her wool cardigan. Her teeth chattered.
The highway over the mountains was narrow and shoulderless, with trees hugging the sides. Ann rocked behind Stephen as they careened around the curves toward La Honda. She held her legs ajar to avoid burning her calves on the hot pipes. They passed through small settlements as they climbed into the mountains. Tall redwoods lined the road for dark intervals, and then the view opened for a stretch. The motorcycle lurched around curves. She held on tightly but wondered if she clutched too hard, she would cause him to lose control.