Dear Ann

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  CHICAGO

  July 24, 1967

  Dear Ann,

  I had a fight with my dad, who I think is a hypocrite and a coward. But never mind. My mother is the nutcase! The pair of them deserve each other. I’m starting to see the dark humor in their marriage. I’m in my old room, with all my model trains and planes. It’s a kid’s room. They still see me that way. And they don’t see how obvious their lies are beneath their smooth facade. If the country club knew the TRUTH, they would have to kill themselves, I guess. I’m exaggerating, but it’s like Mom would flip out if someone thought she hadn’t made the bed that morning or sent a thank-you note for some crappy present. I embarrass them no end. In the living room Mom has a framed graduation photograph of me in a suit. She introduced me to a golfer lady and then showed her the picture. She said, “This is what my son really looks like—if he’d cut that hair. Blah blah.” I just walked out of the room. . . .

  Chip sent me a Grateful Dead album. Oh man!

  Love,

  J

  JIMMY WASN’T A great writer of love letters, she realized. He could have quoted a whole Shakespeare sonnet by heart if he had wanted to. She wished he would declare his feelings more effusively; his reticence made her restrained, not wanting to push herself at him. Girls traditionally were supposed to play hard to get, but this was Jimmy, she reasoned, and with Jimmy it was always real, not games.

  WHEN ANN PULLED into her parking spot, she saw a police car driving away from the landlady’s house. Jingles, standing on the side porch next to her giant pot of elephant ears, was speaking with Sanjay. She clutched a light, frothy shawl around her sunflower sundress.

  “Mrs. Sokolov had a robbery,” Sanjay said when Ann approached. “She is very upset.”

  Jingles barely glanced at Ann. “It was my husband’s favorite possession. He bought it in Spain, when we worked there. It reminded us of Russia.”

  “A sculpture,” Sanjay said. He indicated the broken window near the back of the house.

  “You’ve seen it,” Jingles said to Ann. “You see it every time you pay the rent.”

  “Have I?”

  “The ballet dancer. It was like a Degas, only better. Georgiy always thought it was superior.”

  There was so much clutter in Jingles’s house, Ann could not call the dancer to mind. Apparently the burglar had reached through a lace curtain and grabbed the statue. Jingles surmised that little barbed buttons on the dancer’s bodice had clung to the curtain and the robber ran off—curtain rod, curtain, and all.

  “He didn’t expect the curtain to stick to the dancer,” Jingles said.

  “The curtain rod was found in the alley,” said Sanjay.

  “Did you hear a car drive off?” Ann asked.

  “I heard the window break and then a thud like a stone when the table fell. I had to make my way from the front room upstairs and down the stairs. I wasn’t very fast. And I wasn’t scared, until now.” She coughed, then adjusted the decorative tortoiseshell comb in her bleached hair.

  “Don’t be frightened, Mrs. Sokolov,” said Sanjay. “It appears that the burglar had seen the dancer and knew where it was. That was his goal.”

  “Everyone here has seen my little dancer,” Jingles said. “I keep the curtain there so no one can see it from outside, so whoever stole it has been in the house.”

  Jingles seemed to be growing more upset even as Sanjay tried to reassure her. She dusted an elephant ear with two fingers.

  “It could be in one of the apartment units right now.”

  Ann and Sanjay looked at each other. Sanjay turned to Jingles, who was teetering on the top step.

  “Mrs. Sokolov, I am going to bring you my special curry this evening. You must lie down and rest, and do not worry about your dinner. I will bring it.”

  PIXIE REMEMBERED THE ballerina statue.

  “It was nothing like a Degas dancer,” she told Ann. “It was made of plaster or something. Ceramic, maybe, and it was bright colors. The skirt was orange and the girl had a pigtail coiled around the top of her head like a bird’s nest. Unforgettable.”

  Ann said, “I never noticed it.”

  ONE AFTERNOON, CHIP dropped by to check on Ann. He was staying at Jimmy’s place and teaching a course called Cybernetics through the Ages at the Free University. He wasn’t seeing Pixie now. He was going out with a girl named Amy, an undergrad history major who he said could whistle Brahms concertos and had a tattoo on her butt. “She’s into growing orchids,” he had said. “I don’t know how she does that in a dorm.”

  Chip sat at the table. Ann wiped up spilled sugar.

  “I know you like hot tea, so I’m going to make some for you.”

  “Sure thing, thanks.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “What are you listening to these days?” he asked.

  “The Airplane, the Doors. The usual.” But Sgt. Pepper made her anxious, plunged her into uneasy thoughts about the day of the trip. “Jimmy likes that Grateful Dead album you sent him.”

  Chip recommended some new Bay Area groups. In her flurry of reading for the exam, Ann had not been listening to the radio.

  “What do you think is going on with Jimmy?” she asked after she had poured boiling water onto the tea. The tea was loose leaves of Darjeeling. Pixie had given her the teapot, an apology for saying Jimmy was a jerk for going to Chicago without Ann.

  “I’ve known Jimmy three years, and he’s always been restless, full of questions.”

  “Did he have another girlfriend?”

  “Oh, he went out with plenty of girls, but he didn’t seem to get serious about one till there was you.”

  “Really? Why is he in Chicago? I was afraid there was some girl back home.”

  “No. He never wants to go there.” Chip ran his hand through his unruly hair. “I talked to him long-distance the other day.”

  “He hasn’t called me.”

  “I called him to find out something about the gas stove. I should have just called the landlord.”

  Ann checked the teapot. It was Japanese with little blue kimonos on it. Ann was Jimmy’s only real girlfriend. That thought reassured her.

  “He said he had a fight with his dad,” she said. “I guess he meant argument. I don’t know what about.”

  “It probably started with his hair and proceeded to how much money it’s costing to keep him in school and went on to why he didn’t enter a worthwhile field, like medicine or law. I think he makes Jimmy feel like shit.”

  “Then why is he in Chicago?” Ann decided the tea was ready, and she poured it into the small blue cups that belonged with the kimono teapot.

  “Do you have any milk?”

  “No. I’m out.”

  He shrugged and dipped his spoon into the sugar bowl.

  “Chip, tell me, what do you think is going to happen? I can’t tell. I was afraid he wanted to break up, but in his letters he says he cares about me and he loves me. Why isn’t he here?”

  “Jimmy’s very complex,” Chip said. He tested his tea. “He’s too sensitive.”

  “What happened to him on that trip?”

  “He got something in his head.” Chip bowed his head and shook it slowly. “I always think Jimmy’s younger than he is. He’s a kid. An idealist.”

  “He’s all balled up inside,” she said. “That’s what my mother would say. I guess that’s a yarn metaphor. She’d say his hair wouldn’t fit in a bushel basket.”

  Chip laughed. “What would she say about me if she met me?”

  “She’d say you’re a sight for sore eyes. If you just got out of bed, she’d say you looked ragged.”

  “That’s my natural look.”

  Chip’s crooked lower teeth and sweet grin were endearing, Ann thought.

  After he finished his tea and they had listened to some Joni Mitchell songs, Chip stood up to go. He said, “You call me if you need to talk, O.K.?”

  “Thanks, Chip. That’s very nice of you.”

  “You’re welcome.”


  “Do you want Jimmy’s TV? I’m not watching it.”

  “Nah, I have too much studying to do, and I get the news from the radio.”

  “It’s better not to look at the news.”

  “Do you do all your studying here?” Chip surveyed her dismal digs. Still no curtains.

  “Mostly.”

  “Don’t you ever take your book outside or to the library—some other place?”

  “Why?”

  “It would be good to have a change of scene,” he said.

  “All my notes and folders and notebooks and my typewriter? It’s too complicated.”

  “Especially the typewriter,” he said, nodding at her blue Smith Corona.

  “It weighs twenty-six pounds.”

  “It’s odd that you know that.”

  Chip’s bike was in the shop, so Ann drove him home. Seeing Jimmy’s little house again made her anxious. She could imagine moving into it with Jimmy when he returned. The front porch had a blooming vine she hadn’t noticed before, a bounty of pink flowers climbing up the column of the portico. A tuxedo cat dashed into the shrubbery when Chip closed the car door.

  PIXIE WAS AT the door as soon as Ann returned. “Was that Chip?”

  “Yes, I drove him home. He walked over here after his class.”

  “I guess we’re really through, then,” Pixie said, with a sad-clown frown. “Did he mention me?”

  “No, he came to check on me.”

  Ann cleared the table and offered Pixie some tea. Pixie declined and Ann rinsed out the teapot.

  Pixie edged toward the door. “I saw Jingles,” she said abruptly. “She’s filing an insurance claim. She says that dancer’s worth five thousand dollars. I would have said junk-shop rubbish.”

  “I have no idea what things like that are worth.” Ann dried the exterior of the teapot. She knew Pixie had paid $4.99 for the tea set. The sticker was on the bottom.

  “I grew up in an apartment full of knickknacks,” Pixie said. “Jingles said Sanjay brought her some curry. Humph! Curry.” Pixie twirled on her toes like a ballerina as she left.

  THE VIETNAM WAR seemed nearer, like an approaching drumbeat. Everyone against the war was showing it in the way they dressed, the way they talked. Ordinary people didn’t know what was happening, did they? The Dylan song resonated with new meaning. With the Doors blasting on her stereo, Ann stayed up late with one or another archaic tome on the reading list. Sometimes she suddenly asked herself why she was reading this or that text. Why? Jimmy was right to question the reading list. All summer she was in limbo, longing for his return. She wondered if his mother was washing his pink underpants, or if they had a maid.

  CHICAGO

  July 31, 1967

  Dear Ann,

  You must stop bewailing your dearth of sophistication. First, it’s not true. You are sophisticated in your own way, even if your dad didn’t have two cars and you weren’t in a sorority and didn’t live in town. You know more than I do about a lot of stuff. Furthermore, I sense that you’re beginning to stand up to Pixie. Good for you!

  I’d like to take you for a ride on the el, the elevated train that goes around the city. I love the city from that angle. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it. I want to show it to you sometime. I finished “Piers Plowman,” and it made me remember a time when I was in the hospital. I got very sick one winter. They thought I was going to die, apparently, but they didn’t tell me what was wrong with me. I overheard my dad say to Mom, “He won’t live to be fifteen if he doesn’t get over this.” I was about nine, so fifteen seemed positively ancient to me. I still don’t know what I had exactly, but I got over it and it never came up again. There was a man in the ward who had gangrene and they had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he lay there in a stupor, moaning now and then that he could feel his leg and that it was still in pain. What’s more, he could still smell the awful rotten odor of gangrene. I could smell it too! I told him so. I was in that room with him for a week. And the smell never went away. I’m still haunted by that man with gangrene. He was a farmer, from the cornfields down in Illinois, and he had caught his leg in some machinery. I will never forget how he lay there, with absolutely nothing to do. He didn’t like talking, and he wouldn’t read. He was a man who had never thought of reading a book. He was used to working, making things, fixing things, and his world was totally upended. I was there in my bed, a busy boy with my books and comics and games. I couldn’t even get him to play a game of chess with me. I was wide-awake and occupied with my childish pastimes, but they said I was sick. I think I had a cough, maybe pneumonia. I have thought about that man often, about what you would do if you couldn’t do what you were used to, or what you wanted to do. I blamed him and judged him for years. How could he be so narrow? But more recently—I think because of what you tell me about your dad—I’ve thought he must have had a lot in his head, a lot of wisdom that enabled him to lie there in bed and take what came, to accept it. He must have felt he had been stripped of his manhood. He must have felt a profound emptiness, his whole purpose gone. But he resisted with all his might. And I’ve come to admire him. He’d have to be very strong to be so stoic. I thought he should have been open to a game of chess, but now I see that he may very well have been embarrassed because he didn’t know chess.

  This is the kind of thing you dwell on when you go home for a while! You can’t go home again. I know.

  Love,

  Jimmy

  ANN, GRATEFUL FOR his encouragement, wrote Jimmy pages and pages of thoughts about her reading, while trying not to be too forward about her feelings for him. She didn’t want to pressure him. After Mama’s anguished letter, Ann renewed the biblical vow to honor parents. Jimmy’s contempt for his parents was unthinkable to her. She tried to encourage him to see their good points. But in his view, his parents were basically dishonest. The way his father laughed about his patients as though they were gullible guinea pigs, his mother’s fake hospitality, the hypocrisy of their suburban mores. They wore false-faces like pagan gods.

  CHICAGO

  August 6, 1967

  Dear Ann,

  I have to look at things straightforwardly, without playing games, and yet I know that I am always withholding, always courting mystery and hiding what I’m thinking. I know that. It is one reason I didn’t want to be with you for a while. It is so embarrassing to be this way, to recognize my deficiencies and to make you put up with them or even to deceive you with things I don’t say. I struggle with this and wish I could be as honest as I expect everyone else to be. Sound effect: big sigh. How did you ever get involved with me, Sugar Snooks? I’m nuts—you know I am. I look at the world and expect it to have some standards and consistency, and yet I know I fall short myself.

  Please bear with me. I will keep working at it. I appreciate what you say about the enormous privileges I’ve had, and maybe I’m not grateful, but is it really a privilege to be conditioned by these maniacs who worship the almighty dollar and think they’re better than other people? I know it’s indecent to complain about being well off, but I think money is the root of the problem. My dad is raking in the dough while gossiping behind his patients’ backs. That’s wrong. I know I should be more forgiving, as you suggest, and I’m giving some thought to that. . . . Here I am, reading Eldridge Cleaver’s prison diaries in Ramparts and wondering, will there ever be justice in this world? . . .

  Love,

  Jimmy

  ANN WAS QUESTIONING everything too—questioning authorities, rejecting expectations. She was still angry with Yvor Winters for ever making her feel small, angry with Frank the psychologist for questioning her love for Jimmy, angry with Pixie for being so critical. But she was afraid her rebellious streak was flimsy.

  When she went to pay rent to Jingles, who was surly and sullen, Ann thought about how difficult it would be to be a landlady. Jingles not only had been robbed but was being deceived. She didn’t know that Ann had repainted the pink walls or that Pixie had dumped pink rocks on
the bathroom tile. It seemed that there was a big-top show taking place and that Jingles the erstwhile acrobat was missing it. Ann got a whiff of incense inside Jingles’s house. It was the same fragrance that came from Pixie’s apartment.

  “Is that incense?” Ann asked. “It seems familiar.”

  “Sandalwood. I bought it in the Haight. I went there with Sanjay, your downstairs neighbor.” Jingles regarded her skeptically, as if realizing she had told too much.

  “I went there with Pixie last week,” Ann said. She had not seen Sanjay’s girlfriend, Paula, in many weeks.

  The Haight-Ashbury hubbub was appealing, yet daunting. Ann and Pixie had sauntered through head shops and Indian import stores. They bought cheap jewelry, sniffed the grass fumes in the air, surveyed the extravagant costumes. Psychedelic music drifted from doorways.

  Jingles, standing with arms akimbo, said, “I don’t know why those kids in the Haight want to be so dirty.”

  “Any word of your ballerina?” Ann asked.

  “I’ll never see it again.”

  She folded Ann’s check and saw her out the door. The plastic flowers in the hallway seemed dusty and grubby. The rear window had been repaired.

  AFTER TYPING SEVERAL term papers for sixty cents a page, Ann was able to buy two embroidered tunics from the India store next to the restaurant in Palo Alto where she had eaten with Jimmy and Chip the night of the acid trip. She bought a puzzle ring and an Indian bedspread, which she understood already to be clichés. She taped a poster from the Fillmore to her wall.