Dear Ann

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “Yeah, I think so.” The movie was still in her head, scenes flashing.

  “Chip, can you take me home and then take Ann home? I don’t feel so hot.”

  Jimmy told Chip that Ann would sleep with him. Chip shrugged.

  “Sure, that makes sense. Fair play.” But they were kidding.

  Ann somehow thought that would be all right even though she knew it wasn’t, but it was what people were doing—sharing with friends, from the goodness of their hearts. Jimmy hugged her goodbye silently and suddenly she was in the front seat with Chip. Chip, who had been the kind friend all day, was still kind to her as he drove her home. She tried to imagine going to bed with Chip, who was attractive enough, though the jumpsuit really was not flattering and she wouldn’t be able to get Porky Pig or Yvor Winters out of her mind. Then she remembered Pixie.

  “Don’t worry, Ann,” Chip said as he opened the car door for her. “Sometimes Jimmy ODs on altruism.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Surely you know that about him by now. Jimmy doesn’t think he should have anything for himself, so he tries to share everything.”

  Chip walked her up the stairs to her door. Ann unlocked her door and flipped on the kitchen light. Chip followed her.

  He said, “I think Jimmy had early lessons in self-doubt.”

  “That’s not all bad,” Ann said, picturing her and Jimmy, bowing to each other in a drawing with the tagline, “No, I don’t doubt you.”

  “Can I go get you anything, Ann? Do you need anything to eat? Donuts? Pretzels?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Chip was a walking palm tree, tall and thin, with a tufty head.

  “I’ll go back and check on Jimmy.”

  “Please.”

  “Let me take a whiz first.”

  While Chip was in her wine-dark bathroom, she lost track of him. When he reappeared, she was staring into her cupboard, mentally alphabetizing the soup cans and spices.

  “Your bathroom is like a cave,” he said.

  “‘Caverns measureless to man.’”

  “You poetry freaks.”

  “Good night, Chip,” she said at her door. “Thank you for taking care of us.” Chip gave her a warm hug and skipped down the steps, Porky Pig riding the jumpsuit piggyback. She watched as Chip pulled away in Jimmy’s Mustang.

  “Poetry is not conversation,” she whispered to the darkness.

  SHE DID NOT sleep right away, and the next day she was still tripping mildly. The normal chaos of her thoughts became bright colors, fragmented and sent through a kaleidoscope. She saw faces everywhere in the everyday patterns around her—book spines, windowpanes, shadowy maroon tub tiles. The cabbage roses in the carpet grimaced underfoot.

  Chip telephoned to check on her. He had stayed overnight at Jimmy’s.

  “Was he still awake when you got there?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He claimed he was O.K. I told him I got you home safely. He’s still asleep now.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know. Jimmy’s just strange sometimes. He gets a stubborn notion in his head. But remember what I said about his generosity. He would do anything for you.”

  ANN DIDN’T WANT Pixie to get the wrong idea in case she had seen Chip leaving the building the night before. But Pixie scoffed at Ann’s moral quibbling.

  “Sex is just sex,” Pixie said. “Jimmy’s only testing you.”

  “Haha.”

  “You know everybody’s sleeping with everybody. It doesn’t mean anything. It just means nothing.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. And it’s not true that everybody is sleeping with everybody. It would take somebody like Chip to solve the math problem of the exponential sum—”

  “That’s what I mean. Sex with him is science.”

  JIMMY APPEARED AT the door late in the morning.

  “Hey, Snooks,” he said.

  “Sheepish grin, if ever I saw one,” Ann said. She hadn’t combed her hair. She glared at him.

  He flopped onto the bed with a grunt.

  “When did you wake up?” he asked.

  “Seven or eight. I don’t know. Too early.”

  “Did you get enough sleep?”

  “I don’t really know. I’m too mixed up. It seems so odd that it’s daytime.”

  Jimmy reached for her hand and pulled her down beside him. He hooked his arm around her shoulders.

  “Was it all right yesterday?”

  “It was strange. It still is.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you along. Sorry I freaked out on you. You never know how it’s going to turn out. But you’re O.K.?”

  “I’m O.K.,” she said.

  “Chip did a good job, didn’t he?”

  “Unh-huh.”

  “You were all right, weren’t you? You didn’t get depressed?”

  “No, but you seemed a thousand miles away.” She tousled his hair. “You split somewhere between the redwoods and the restaurant.”

  “Do you want to go get some waffles?”

  “No. I’m still a little whirly.”

  “I was feeling crazy last night,” he said.

  “Are you O.K. now?”

  “My head still hurts.”

  She massaged his neck for a while, and he moaned.

  “Is that better?”

  “Mmm. I’m sorry I had to send you away. It was getting weird for me. I just had to get by myself, and I knew I could trust Chip to make sure you were all right. He took care of us all day. He did a good job, didn’t he?”

  “You already asked that. But he shouldn’t have left you. He was our guide. I shouldn’t have left you either.”

  “I was O.K. I had some things to think about.”

  “What things?”

  “It was just some bad stuff, and I didn’t want you in the center of that. How about you? Do you feel changed like I said you would?”

  “I don’t know yet. Something happened. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Don’t you, Miss Ann?”

  SHE WAS STARING at a child’s socks. A simple pair of striped socks. The little girl was waiting for the bus with her mother. The mother eyed Ann suspiciously. The destination sign on the bus was like a label for the coming day. A chartreuse sign on the side of the bus said,

  (WHERE ARE YOU GOING?)

  At the supermarket, she gazed at beets—large jewels with hairdos. Outside, she noticed a curled leaf on a bush. The leaf was shaped exactly like a great blue heron. As she drew closer, she saw that it resembled a praying mantis. But it was neither, though both assumed prayer-like poses to seek prey. It was only a leaf, but it was also a heron and a mantis.

  ANN DELAYED HER summer trip to Kentucky, afraid to go—with her peculiar, revised mind.

  HOPEWELL, KY.

  June 28, 1967

  Dear Ann,

  Hope you’re coming home soon, but I know you’ve got your school work. Be careful, you’ll study so hard you’ll wear out your brain. And the airplane ticket costs so much. It come up a cloud this afternoon that was purely black. When it started sprinkling rain I had to run out and gather in the wash. I just rolled up the clothes and didn’t have to sprinkle them down to iron. . . .

  Love,

  Mama

  “WHAT DOES SHE mean? Jimmy asked.

  “She put a sprinkler head on a ketchup bottle and she sprinkles the clothes with water and rolls each one up into a ball and lets them sit in a basket for a few hours while the moisture distributes through the shirts and makes them ready to iron—a little bit damp but not wet. She calls it ‘sprinkling down.’” Ann was manhandling a soup can, grinding it open with a balky can opener. “That was exhausting to explain! And I never even thought about it in my life. I just knew it.”

  “Do you sprinkle your blouses with a ketchup bottle? That’s fascinating!”

  “No. I have a steam iron. I don’t need a ketchup bottle. Do you want some soup?”

  He nodded. �
�There are just so many things to know.”

  Ann imagined herself ironing Jimmy’s shirts, a domestic chore that would give her pleasure. Someday they would live in a house together and she would iron his shirts. She would cook their dinner. But she had sworn she would never pick up after a man the way her mother did. She could see her father’s dirty castoff farm duds making a path across the floor.

  She was living in a fairy tale. Jimmy hadn’t talked about his empty bucket lately, but since the acid trip something had changed in him. The change was abstract, as if he wasn’t always paying attention.

  “What’s going on in your heart, Jimmy?” she demanded. “What goes on in your mind?”

  Ringo’s voice ringing in her head, Mama wringing the wash.

  “Am I tearing you apart?”

  “Yes.” You are breaking my heart.

  It was only later in the day that she realized they had been speaking in song lyrics.

  ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON, a week after the acid trip, they were walking through the Arizona Garden on campus. In the past day or two, she had been losing the lingering hallucinogenic flashes, but the bizarre shapes of the cactus plants spooked her. Many of the cacti were tall and phallic—sentries, gate posts, Greek columns. Others were spheroid and bumpy. A myriad of pincushions. Pink round flowers were pasted onto shiny green surfaces like cake decorations. Some suggested the interior of millefiori paperweights.

  “This place is freaky,” she said.

  “And you’ve never been here?”

  “No.” She shivered. “It seems like a good place to be raped and then thrown into a patch of prickly pear.”

  “There’s no good place to be raped,” he said.

  Jimmy steered her to a bench. “Let’s sit here. I’ll watch out for roving cacti. I won’t let them accost you.”

  He let go her elbow. She touched his knee, but he did not react.

  She said, “When I was little, I cut my arm and needed stitches. At the hospital, while I was under ether, I dreamed about a horde of little cartoon figures jabbering in high voices. They resembled those little cacti over there.”

  She pointed to a grouping of small, round plants with random offshoots like thumbs.

  “Cartoons, huh? That’s odd. The Greek word for cactus is cardoon. Or maybe it’s Latin.”

  Ann thought that she and Jimmy both snobbishly insisted on using cacti as a plural because they had both had Latin in high school.

  “Ether,” she said. “Weird. I guess I started on drugs early.”

  She said that to be funny. Or ironic. But Jimmy said, “I have something to say.”

  This was an alarming place to hear some sobering news. “What?” she blurted.

  “I have to go to Chicago,” he said.

  “Is your family all right?”

  “Well, they’re never all right. Anyway, I have a few things to tend to there, and it seems a good time to go.” He placed his hand on her knee. “Ann. Snooks. Listen to me. I think it’s better anyway if we don’t see each other for a while.”

  She stared at what seemed to be a tragic theatrical mask, the face of a squat cactus.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just not ready,” he said. “For you.”

  “Why? What’s wrong? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t measure up to you.” Jimmy lifted his hand and slid a few inches away. “I’m sorry! I’m saying this badly. But we need to take a step back.”

  Her head was lowered. She couldn’t look at him, but he turned toward her.

  “I have to think things over. Oh, Ann. Ann. Ann, listen to me.” He lifted her chin and placed his other hand on her shoulder. He gazed straight into her eyes.

  “I think you agree with me too much,” he said. “It makes me feel I don’t know you.”

  “Of course I agree with you!” She grabbed his hand.

  “I think you expect too much from me.”

  Ann stared at pebbles on the path.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Jimmy said. “You know I have to be clear about things. I have to see where I’m going.” He turned and stared straight ahead, folding his hands in his lap. “Maybe the long drive cross-country will do me good,” he said. “Driving will help me to think.”

  “I can’t speak,” Ann said.

  “What a shithead am I,” he said. “I’m like a mud puddle in your way.”

  “You’re not a mud puddle. What a thing to say.”

  “Then you admit I’m a shithead.”

  “No!”

  “I don’t deserve you,” Jimmy said, and he stared off into a community of tall cacti that seemed to be encroaching like space aliens.

  Ann thought she would never understand why Jimmy felt unworthy.

  The average Stanford student or professor felt superior in some way. But both she and Jimmy felt something lacking in themselves, and together they tried to fit their broken pieces into a whole. She believed that this was the chemistry that brought them together. But now she imagined a multitude of microscopic cactus spines separating them.

  “I don’t deserve you,” he repeated.

  “Poppycock,” she said. Big, teary blobs ran down her face.

  ANN FLEW TO Kentucky for two weeks, taking with her Humphry Clinker, Tristram Shandy, and the one-volume complete tragedies of Shakespeare. Both she and Jimmy were taking the summer to read for the exam. Jimmy’s deferment wouldn’t be affected because he was still enrolled. Two weeks on the farm in a post-acid daze made Ann feel warmly attached to her family, as if she need never leave. She saw her parents through Jimmy’s eyes as she imagined bringing him there. But when she imagined hoeing tomatoes and canning green beans for the next fifty years, she was glad to return to California.

  HOPEWELL, KY.

  July 17, 1967

  Dear Ann,

  When you were here, you acted like you didn’t know us. I know your studies are a big responsibility and you have to keep your scholarship, but book learning’s not everything.

  You read your books all day and was up all hours, so I didn’t hardly get to see you. I wanted us to go to Paducah to the white sales. You can get some good prices this time of year, and I know you needed some towels.

  You didn’t hardly mention your boyfriend, just that you weren’t going to see him for a while. I know you must be heartbroke, but you’ll get over it.

  But I have to tell you that you hurt me when you said I couldn’t possibly understand what you were doing in school. That book you had your nose in the whole week—all I did was ask a question.

  You said it so quick maybe you didn’t mean it, but you made me feel dumb. You made me feel like I didn’t know you. I was so full I couldn’t say anything then. I know I haven’t got an education, but we worked hard to make sure you did so your life won’t be as hard as ours. I don’t know if an education can teach everything you need to know. Maybe there are some things that are not in those books.

  I was hurt, but I’m not mad. I’ll get over it.

  Love always,

  Mama

  CHICAGO

  July 18, 1967

  Dear Ann,

  I don’t know how long I’ll be in Chicago. My grandmother is sick and I want to see her as much as I can. I was always very fond of her, and I’m worried. And my dad has kept me busy. I’m doing some research for him on the history of medical malpractice, so I go to the library every day, and here at home I get the chance to swim twice a day, so that’s a boon.

  I’m glad we didn’t part on bad terms. I didn’t want to make you cry. You were so understanding, and I know I can always trust you. I liked what you wrote about trusting me to figure out what I’m doing. I hope we are both taking the time to reflect on our relationship while we devour that scrumptious reading list. What a crock. I can’t fathom what is the good of knowing some of this vapid, jejune, submental folderol from bygone days. “Thanatopsis!” But Chekhov is good. And “Piers Plowman” is unexpectedly hilarious. A vision of a “fair f
ield full of folk” is irresistible. I thought of your father, the quintessential yeoman farmer, tilling and reaping.

  I’m reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It’s not on the list, I know, but what the hey. . . .

  Patience and prudence,

  Jimmy

  SHE WAS SURPRISED to learn of his attachment to his grandmother, and she wondered if he was making an excuse for staying away. She realized that although he criticized his parents mercilessly he was tied to them just as she was to her own parents. She had been shocked by her mother’s letter, but it was true that in some ways her mother didn’t know her. She felt Jimmy had misunderstood her too. She did not really believe he could break up with her. It would be like denying a sunrise. It had already happened; it couldn’t be rerouted. Frank the psychologist said she was being melodramatic.

  “What can I do to help him with that feeling of worthlessness?” she wailed.

  Frank didn’t want to hear about Jimmy. “Shouldn’t we be looking at you? If he does want to break up, then how are you prepared to deal with it?”

  Frank hadn’t made her cry like that before. It seemed cruel. She believed Jimmy loved her. If he said he wasn’t ready yet, by the end of the summer he surely would be. Or if not, she would be ready to assist him, to take on the burden of his indecisiveness and despair. She had not lost him, after all. It made sense that they spend some time apart. He had told her she should feel free to see others, but she wouldn’t. She wondered if he would see other girls, but she couldn’t believe he would. She didn’t want to think about that.

  THE WAR HUMMED its familiar refrains. Hey, hey, LBJ. Jimmy had left his TV with her, but the news of body counts was depressing, so she stopped paying attention. Ann didn’t need coffee that summer. She tore into the stacks of books she had accumulated for the exam. Her mind seemed clearer now, her reading more confident. Instead of cramming material to regurgitate, she read attentively, without becoming diverted by longing for Jimmy. It took effort to tear herself away from an absorbing novel. She read slowly, drawn in by the astonishing brutality of an Icelandic saga, or the quiet beauty of a Shakespeare sonnet. Her old habit had been to grasp the gist of a work and go on, hurtling through bundles of material like an Evelyn Wood speed-reading demon. But now every facet of the kaleidoscopic display of Western literature shimmered with psychedelic significance, sensory impact, uniqueness. Bites of catnip, the opposite of Jimmy’s “submental folderol.” Folles de rôles, she thought. The languorous rhythms of Dylan Thomas made her forget to eat. She could halt on a glittering passage and imagine the author dreaming it up—trampolining for joy. Whitman and the lilacs, Woolf and the lighthouse, Poe and the raven.