Dear Ann

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “This material is too stiff. It’s for tents. How could you wear it?”

  “This will just be a prototype,” Chip said. “Science will follow.”

  He left the roll of photo linen and biked off to class. He hadn’t mentioned Pixie or his jumpsuit.

  ANN LIKED SHOWERING at Jimmy’s. His bathroom was bright white, not the gloomy color of stale blood. When she emerged and grabbed an extra towel for her hair, Jimmy was standing in the doorway with his camera.

  “I want to photograph you,” Jimmy said in a quiet tone that sounded almost worried.

  “Like this?”

  “I like the way you look, just coming out of the shower. I want to photograph you like this—clean, pure. But we should go outside.”

  “Outside?” She toweled a thigh.

  “No one can see back there, with all the trees. I go out and pee there all the time. There’s a fence.”

  She rubbed her hair with the towel. “My mama told me never to go outside with a wet head.”

  He doubled over laughing, as though he were suddenly naked, trying to hide his dog toys, or whatever he wanted to call his things.

  They stayed indoors. Posing for photographs was easier than standing stock-still and stark naked for a drawing. She thought her hair looked good. She was growing it long and straight, so she didn’t need brush rollers. Jimmy had waited while she fixed it. She wouldn’t have wanted to be photographed with stringy hair.

  Jimmy complained about her makeup—powder to reduce shine and liner to accentuate her eyes. Artificial, he said.

  “You don’t need lipstick,” he said, jabbing his finger at her mouth. “It’s not natural.”

  When Jimmy began aiming his camera she stuck her tongue out at him. She made faces. She marched around like a wooden soldier. She did deep lunges and pirouettes. She balanced Shakespeare’s tragedies on her head.

  Jimmy said. “That’s good.”

  “I’ve got good balance.”

  She clowned in the buff while Jimmy clicked his camera. He had a way with it, she thought, admiring his quick moves. He was adept with his hands. He was meticulous and delicate. Click-click-click. His hands were graceful but strong. She thought about her father’s hands—rough and hardened. She had seen him dehorn a cow.

  BESIDES PHOTOGRAPHS, JIMMY was experimenting with tape loops, making a sound collage of forties radio comedies and bubblegum rock tunes. Everyone seemed to be making things—and using the word authentic. Ceramic pots, furniture, clothing. The Twiggy girl was making bird sculptures out of thin wire. Ann tried making a collage from magazine illustrations. She realized she had a phallic theme in the display—lipsticks, rockets, bombs—all pointing away from the spiraling center of an oxeye daisy.

  LATER IN THE week, Jimmy brought his photographs to show her. He had printed four of them on photo linen and displayed them on her worktable. They were grainy. She was pleased, because her figure showed to advantage, and her pubic hair was light, not bushy. Her breasts were suggestive shapes. The photos seemed almost like drawings.

  “I like that they’re not literal,” he said, tracing the lines. “Do you think they’re artistic?”

  “Yes, very.” She was rather thrilled, thinking of some nude drawings by French artists she had seen in an art museum in San Francisco.

  Jimmy teased her about wearing one of the photos in public.

  “You could put them on a skirt—the front view on the front and the back view on the back.”

  “Or vice versa? Then I could twirl.”

  She was remembering the sign at the protest rally on White Plaza. It showed different messages on the front and back.

  “You wouldn’t really do this,” he said.

  “In the Quad, maybe. But not at the pancake place, for instance.”

  Of course she wouldn’t, but it was silly fun to imagine. The shock, the utter abandonment of self-consciousness. She pictured herself in a scene in a French movie.

  She excavated a dress from her closet—a plain black sheath that she had worn to a cocktail party senior year. Because her mother had made it, it had survived her Salvation Army purge. Now she showed Jimmy how the photos would fit. She basted them onto the dress and then modeled it while he snapped pictures of her.

  He folded a copy of the Oracle for her to use as a fan. It rattled and flapped clumsily as she tried to wave it provocatively.

  She said, “Artists in the twenties would have done this. Zelda.”

  They laughed and laughed, holding each other. They might have been stoned, but they weren’t. She felt so reckless. She didn’t know what she would do next. What she would do for Jimmy. She glimpsed the familiar mole on her breast in one of the photographs. What was happening to her?

  Over the years, she has been filled with questions about the photo dress, most of them beginning with why. She has, shockingly, imagined it as a wedding dress.

  AT JIMMY’S, THEY made omelets and opened a can of tomato soup and ate on his couch with the stereo playing Peer Gynt. During “The Hall of the Mountain King,” Jimmy said, “I was thinking—you’re always typing and typing. And you leaped at the chance to model for ten dollars an hour.”

  “Ha. One hour. Then I got cold feet.”

  Jimmy suggested that instead of typing, she could earn money making photo shirts.

  “People wouldn’t have to be in their birthday suits! You’d be making something with your hands. Like that macramé stuff you did.”

  But Ann didn’t want to sew. It was women’s work. So was typing, but she liked that better.

  “You know I don’t want anyone else to see your picture on that dress,” he said.

  “No, it’s for you. It’s just something between us.”

  Jimmy finished his omelet and set the plate on the coffee table, a red octagonal stop sign, a curb discard he had salvaged and screwed legs on. The trolls and gnomes had finished their wild dance and now were creeping through the Mountain King’s castle. At least that was what Ann pictured. She was roaming through Jimmy’s Newsweek and Ramparts magazines. She admired his bookshelves made from concrete blocks and raw pine planks.

  “Where did you get concrete blocks?” she asked.

  “That builders’ supply place out on El Camino.”

  She fingered the rough texture of one of the blocks. “I can’t get over how simple it is.” It wouldn’t have occurred to Ann to stack up some scraps of wood and blocks. “Authentic,” she said, testing the word.

  And then she felt ingenuous, seeing how conventional it was to think books had to be shelved in regulation bookcases. The Troll Kings were frisky again, going at top speed before collapsing.

  ANN WAS TROUBLED by Jimmy’s suggestion about sewing. For the most part, this feeling was vague, nothing that could stop the train she was on. She didn’t feel a sense of danger, yet she often felt that nothing was ever for sure with Jimmy. Sometimes she felt a momentary foreboding, a fear that they would not end up together, but then he would suddenly thrust his face in hers and grab her and pull her into the pillow of his shaggy hair and hold her close with what genuinely felt like love and affection. And kindness.

  PIXIE HAD COVERED the floor of her burgundy bathroom with pink pebbles, a layer two inches deep. She must have lost her mind, Ann thought.

  “The tiles will be all scratched up. Jingles will have a fit!”

  “I knew just what you’d say!” Pixie laughed, chortled in fact. It was as if she had staged the scene just to hear Ann fuss.

  Pixie said, “This is so sensuous. I put lotion on my feet and then saunter around in here. The pebbles buff the feet!”

  “How can you clean the floor?”

  “Oh, Ann, you’re so practical.”

  Ann figured Pixie would get bored with the novelty by the time the floor got dirty. The surface would be covered with scratch marks, making an accidental artwork.

  “Jingles will kick you out!” Ann said.

  She wondered why she was incapable of thinking up something s
o outrageous, unless the photo dress counted. But that was Jimmy’s idea. She wondered if she should get a load of pebbles for her bathroom. It was an original thing to do, and she rather liked the effect, just as she had liked Pixie’s bathroom lace swath. But she couldn’t chance having to pay the cost of replacing floor tiles. And she felt that Pixie had been laughing at her.

  JIMMY BANGED ON Ann’s door the next afternoon. She had just finished reading and underlining some passages in a critical essay about Keats’s odes. Poor Keats, dead from TB in his twenties. A spunky redhead with a spicy sense of humor and a love of cats and a tragic awareness of his fate.

  “Special delivery,” said Jimmy, with a grin. “I’m the Bookshelf Man.”

  He carried several bricks in his arms. He set them near the wall where Ann’s books languished and teetered in random piles. The pristine white bricks were like slices of cake.

  She helped him haul twenty-four more white bricks and three redwood planks up the stairway. He stacked the bricks and laid the planks, making four complete shelves, counting the floor.

  The bookshelves were beautiful—Danish modern, Ann thought. Jimmy began placing her books on the shelves.

  “Do you want them in alphabetical order?”

  “No. Groups—Old English, Victorian novels, Romantic poets.”

  “How about color? The blue ones here and the yellow ones. I could make a color wheel.”

  “You’re weird.”

  Together they organized her books, with running commentary on whether they had both read a given book. Ann pointed out Norman O. Brown’s exhilarating Life Against Death.

  “I read this, but Pixie thought it was drivel. ‘Pop pap,’ she called it.”

  “Pixie pooh-poohed it as pop pap? Stop the presses!”

  Jimmy always made Ann laugh. She hadn’t mentioned the book to Frank the psychologist.

  With satisfaction, she surveyed the small unit of Old English texts and the large Irish section. Jimmy devised new subcategories such as Modernist Poets and Scribner Editions. Her art books were too tall, so he laid them horizontally on the open end of the lowest shelf. On the top shelf, he made a bookend by setting her large volumes of Freud and Jung horizontally next to the books on mythology. They seemed to belong together.

  “There,” said Jimmy, standing back to admire his work. “See, I’m good for something.”

  ANN WORE BLUE bell-bottoms, a peasant blouse, and water buffalo sandals the night she brought Jimmy to Meredith and John’s for dinner. Meredith had insisted that Ann bring her new boyfriend over. Ann felt she would be bringing him on approval, and she was watchful, a little nervous, seeing Jimmy through their eyes—overly serious, too shaggy. And she saw them through Jimmy’s eyes—straight and prissy, fatally conventional. Jimmy was eager to meet Kentuckians, although Ann had insisted they were not at all like her parents.

  John had smoked a salmon in an outdoor contraption like a baby spaceship, and Meredith made a complicated sauce, which she explained in detail to Ann in the kitchen. Ann doubted that she would ever make such a sauce or smoke a fish. As Meredith neatly fitted a Tupperware container together and burped it, Ann tried to describe how she and Jimmy were suited for each other, free to imagine something new together.

  Meredith said, “Wait till you have kids.” The two little boys had been put to bed, but they reappeared in the kitchen, underfoot.

  “You may not have a cookie,” she said to the older one. “You’ve already brushed your teeth. Now go to your room and read. In five minutes, I’m coming to tuck you in.”

  Ann recalled the way Meredith had swaddled the little boys into bed. She had asked Jimmy at what age boys started to play with themselves, and he didn’t remember. He thought it was always, probably even in the womb. “Why not?” he said.

  Jimmy sat between a rubber plant and a dieffenbachia, and Ann sat across from him on a striped love seat. John installed himself in a high-backed chair like a king on a throne. Meredith was looking at Jimmy as if he were an overgrown kid. She must have been thinking she would like to take her scissors to his hair, Ann thought. Jimmy was smoking more cigarettes than usual.

  They drank Manhattans and tackled bowls of pistachios peeping like clams from their bright green shells. Ann was aware of the color-coordinated family of furniture. Small lights beamed up like admirers at some reproductions of abstract expressionism on the walls. The surroundings struck her as strange—the pale green shag rug, the orange drapes pulled shut across the sunset. It was more luxurious than any place she had ever lived, but she saw it now through Jimmy’s eyes—ordinary, artificial, meaningless. She realized that the African market baskets had been seized from their source like elephants or lions—for show. These insights made her feel a bit smug.

  John served the salmon. It lay on its side, staring at the ceiling, on a fish-shaped platter, with sprigs of greenery adorning it.

  “Sprigs of greenery, like it’s caught on seaweed when you reeled it in,” said Ann, the cocktail clogging her brain.

  John laughed. “I doubt if the seaweed would have made it upriver.”

  Strains of unidentifiable classical music played low on the stereo in the living room. As they ate, in the bay-windowed dining room, John and Jimmy picked up an earlier conversation about the war. They wandered down several obscure trails. The salmon was delicious.

  John said, “I don’t agree with you, Jimmy. Johnson has to escalate. I don’t like this war any more than you do, but he can’t leave the others there to take all the risk. With more troops, it will be over sooner.” He waved his fork in the air.

  “But why send these yokels who have no idea where Vietnam is?” Jimmy was louder than usual. “That’s not fair. It’s a con, a trap, the draft.”

  Ann recognized Jimmy’s style of argument.

  “John, Ann’s glass is empty.” Meredith gestured at the bottle.

  Ann hadn’t realized she had drained the glass. Time had slipped away during this perplexing gabfest about the war.

  John filled Ann’s glass, saying, “I would call for a volunteer army.”

  “Would you go, then?” Jimmy asked.

  “I’m over thirty. They wouldn’t want me.”

  “Then you can argue anything you want to since you wouldn’t have to be part of it.” Jimmy forked a hefty chunk of salmon. “All the old guys in charge can just decide whatever they want to make young guys do. They could have us dig a canal from here to San Francisco Bay if they wanted to. They could make us build highways. But they’d rather send us to war. To get us to be patriotic and fight for our country, they set up a bogeyman—communism.”

  “Oh, we have to have communism to be against!” John laughed, as if communism were a joke.

  “I’m not sure about the domino theory,” Ann piped up, but no one noticed.

  Meredith sent around the basket of bread. With the basket poised above his plate, John said, “If Johnson doesn’t send more troops, then it will be dribs and drabs for years—one step up and two steps back. I think we need to end it fast. Johnson needs to send more or risk losing the ones he’s already sent.”

  “But it’s not fair to protect the kids in college,” Jimmy said.

  “Kids like you shouldn’t go. You need to take advantage of your privilege.”

  “But I’m able-bodied.”

  John laughed. “Did you hear that, Meredith?”

  Meredith said, “Most kids would be aiming for a 4-F.”

  Ann was alarmed. “Jimmy, your education gets you out of the draft!”

  Jimmy stared across the table at her. “Does that mean people who haven’t been to college are expendable?”

  “No. I didn’t mean that.” Ann was confused.

  John said, “If it was a volunteer army, you wouldn’t have so much ruckus. It would be a job that some people agreed to do. And it would be like any job.”

  “Not like any job,” said Jimmy, wide-eyed. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Well, no, I take that back. But it
would be efficient.”

  “The army right now is two-thirds volunteers anyway,” said Jimmy. “That still doesn’t make the war right, and it doesn’t stop the protests.”

  “But the problem is the draft, that other third. That’s the reason for the protests.”

  Jimmy, to Ann’s surprise, argued against draft deferment. She always admired how natural and at ease with himself he was when he got passionate about an idea, but it seemed now that he must be playing devil’s advocate.

  “It’s not right that mostly lower-class guys are drafted while students get off scot-free,” he said. “Read the CORE report.”

  Jimmy had never mentioned the CORE report before.

  “You suburban kids aren’t good draft prospects. You’ve been sheltered,” John said. “They give you the deferment because they know you wouldn’t last over there. If you’re scared enough you’ll stay in school. And if you drop out of school, then you’re a risk taker, more likely to make a good soldier.”

  “That’s screwy reasoning,” Ann said. She wondered how John could tell Jimmy was from the suburbs.

  Jimmy and John continued down a wilderness path. Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Congress. Ann never knew how to argue with men. Meredith wasn’t making a peep.

  Ann ventured, “Maybe student protestors can have an effect. People working in factories don’t have the time.”

  “Students aren’t going to end the war,” John said. “That’s foolish.”

  “How do students have the time?” Jimmy asked Ann. “You said yourself you didn’t have time to pay attention to the news.”

  Ann knew her face was so red from the wine that nobody could tell she was blushing. But she felt angry. Men always ganged up on her, she realized then. Men decided wars.

  “The fish is delicious,” she said to Meredith. “Maybe I should learn how to make that sauce.” Meredith was eyeing the plates and offering seconds. The fish is delicious, Ann thought. A ridiculous rhyme.

  “HERE’S WHAT BOTHERS me personally,” Jimmy said later in the car as they were heading up University Avenue to his house. “Those guys going over there, they know how to do things. They know how to clean their rifles, they can carry a hundred pounds on their backs, they know what it means to risk everything.”