“Do you know what you need?” he said, his voice rising as she slipped out the door. “What you need is a good, royal fucking.”
HOPEWELL, KY.
October 14, 1966
Dear Ann,
Oh, me, those trees you wrote about! You’d get a crick in your neck just looking up at them.
What you asked about the worm is true. If you cut a worm in two, both parts will grow into a new worm, with a head and tail. . . .
Love,
Mama
ANN FELT AS if she herself had been cut in two and left to grow in two directions. In Yvor Winters’s seminar room one late afternoon, she couldn’t help interrupting the class to point out the astonishing sunset. They were considering Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as a point of departure for a discussion of the bifurcation of the modern voice. Wordsworth was somehow deemed an antiquated revolutionary.
“We should honor Wordsworth by noticing this beautiful sunset,” Ann said.
It was Ann’s impression that she could not have uttered a more naive, girlish, unprofessional remark. The seven male students chuckled and nodded knowingly as their mentor glanced at the window, made a brief sweep of his left arm at the sight—both acknowledgment and dismissal—and returned quickly to the text.
BOB DYLAN WAS singing “Like a Rolling Stone” on the radio.
LBJ had ordered five thousand more troops to Vietnam.
The day was cloudy and warm. There had been no rain since Ann’s arrival in California.
Pixie brought Ann a brownie in a cocktail napkin. The brownie was round and tiny, like a Swedish meatball.
“It’s good for you,” she said. She had brought one for herself in a separate napkin.
Ann turned off the radio and set her Dylan album on the stereo. Dylan sang incomprehensibly while they watched flickering candles Pixie had brought. Her new Beatle haircut looked raw. Some curly tufts wouldn’t lie flat, and sprigs stuck out over her ears.
“I think Sanjay is used to long hair on women,” said Pixie. “Just my luck. I’m always on the wrong train.”
“But he probably thinks short hair is alluring. The girl from Wyoming probably has short hair.”
“I’ve seen her—long, blond, straight. Face like an apple pie. She probably irons her hair.”
The taste and texture of the brownie were exaggerated, too rich to eat quickly. Ann nibbled at it.
The Dylan album played loudly—strange and nasal wailing, like a preacher on a street corner addressing passersby. The music was both whiny and vigorous, a sort of contradiction. Ann stared at the candles, trying to count the flickerings.
“Is Dylan a poet or merely a songster? What are these words? What would I do with words like this in a graduate poetry class? What would Yvor Winters say?”
“You’re getting paranoid about that professor,” Pixie said.
Ann tried to explain. She was awkward in class, her memory stopping up when she was put on the spot.
“Then why are you at Stanford?” Pixie said sharply.
“I won’t have to get a job as long as I’m in school.”
“That sounds like a draft deferment. Are you afraid of getting drafted?”
Ann wouldn’t answer. She ate the rest of the brownie. It was chewy and unusual.
“What’s in this brownie? It’s crunchy like cow feed.”
“Oh, it’s a Mary Jane brownie. My specialty.”
“What?”
“Oh, Ann, you’re so naive.” Pixie laughed, crunching her napkin in a brisk move. “And for God’s sake, Ann, everybody’s fucking everybody. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to feel guilty. Go on and get the Pill.”
“Isn’t it against the law if you’re not married?”
“Just say you are—or will be next week. Or say you need it to regulate your period.”
Random sex was slutty. Ann felt undone, flattened like the Wyoming girl’s ironed hair.
ANN DID HAVE a pill for special occasions—half a bottle of Preludin, a diet pill, saved from senior year. Whenever she had to write a term paper, a quarter of a pill set her ablaze and kept her up all night in a raging fit of clarity. Crazed with concentration, bursting with focused energy, she shuffled her jumbled notes. Normally she didn’t think linearly or logically. Her thoughts tumbled around chaotically, but with pep pills, her ideas became orderly, like a tree, with all the supporting material hung like ornaments on the branches. Writing a paper was like diagramming sentences.
She spewed out a paper for poetics class on Ovid’s hilarious love elegy about the unattainable Corinna and her dead parrot. Ann always found it fascinating when something repeated itself—the girl’s parrot skirt at La Honda and Corinna’s dead parrot. It was only coincidence, but she liked the pattern such overlaps made. In his elegy, Ovid complains when Corinna dyes her hair or has an abortion. Ann wondered how an abortion worked in Ovid’s day. They probably didn’t have coat hangers. Toga hooks. An old song, “Corinna, Corinna,” played in her head.
She lingered on Ovid’s poem about cosmetics, with its ancient beauty tips. She pictured Ovid’s toga-clad Roman girlfriends at a beauty parlor, getting their hair treated while they complained about the plumbing and gossiped about laundresses and handsome serving boys. In elegiac couplets, they mourned lost loves.
“WON’T COFFEE DO the same thing?” Pixie demanded after Ann had spent the night enlarging her paper to include Ovid’s letters from heroines to the lovers who had abandoned them.
“I hate the taste. How can anybody drink that stuff?”
Pixie ran her hand through her unruly hair. She said, “If you’re trying to catch a guy, why don’t you learn how to make a pot of coffee?”
Ann was still mad at Pixie over the Mary Jane brownie. She recalled reading about a girl who drank acid-laced Tab and went berserk on a roller coaster.
Pixie said, “If you could make someone a passable cup of java, your fortunes might change.”
Nicodemus suddenly landed on Ann’s lap as if for emphasis.
OBTAINING THE BIRTH-CONTROL pill was easy, and at first opportunity Ann found herself spending the night with an eighteenth-century enthusiast named Ben. The next morning, she realized their dabblings meant nothing, and she knew that he felt the same. Empty sex was distasteful, she thought, remembering certain grating textures and smells.
Although she was eager to finish a typing job, she waited while Ben made breakfast. He cracked four eggs into a simmering skillet of water. He covered the pan and turned off the heat.
“There. Twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes?” She would die of boredom. “There are faster ways to cook an egg.”
“This is the way I do it.”
She perused his bookshelf. His science-fiction books were grouped with studies of Milton’s Paradise Lost. When she asked if there was a connection, he expounded on his theory of Paradise Lost as the original science fiction. Although blind, Milton had a vision of Eden that outshone any science-fiction movie today. Ben’s ambition was to make a film of Paradise Lost.
“I can just see Lucifer in the flames and Adam and Eve being cast out.” He was folding a tea towel fussily.
Surely twenty minutes had passed. The coffee smelled like motor oil. She survived three sips. Soon after the slowpoke, slow-poached eggs, she left.