Clear Springs (25 page)

This rejection, on the heels of Larry’s rebuff, threw me into despair.

Meanwhile, at home, my mother wrote me about the garden and the weather and broken machinery. She wrote, “You told about reading about that guy that built a cabin at a pond. Well, he didn’t have to raise a family and so he had time to write down things he saw. He had an education, so he should have been able to get somewhere. And you wrote in your letter about the environment, but don’t forget you can’t solve the whole world’s problems.”

Mama coped. She dealt with what was handed her. Yet I didn’t realize that I was behaving just like her. In my own style, I was subservient, bowing to authority. Yankee culture sat on me like the rocks Mama set on the lid of a pickle crock to hold the pickles down in the brine.

Still, I paddled bravely along in an uncertain current. I talked to a psychologist in West Hartford a few times. He said, “Don’t you feel somewhat disoriented, being so far from home?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” I insisted. I believed I was meant to be in New England, in Carolyn and John’s sophisticated world. I couldn’t live in the South, where so much ignorance and prejudice persisted. I thought he was suggesting I should go back home.

But when I told him about Carolyn and John, his response worked like a brain corrective, like electroshock.

“They sound shallow,” he said. “Why would you let them treat you that way?”

That was a revelation. I felt as if he’d given me a happy pill.

I was afraid of drugs, but the psychedelic revolution—mainly through music—was transforming everything around me, fracturing objects and ideas like a light show at a concert. The bizarre juxtapositions, loss of context, and random acts of hallucinogenic vision seemed familiar—that was my life. Rock-and-roll musicians were leading the way. Once again, as it had when I was a teenager, music grabbed me and shook me up with a vision of truth. Perceptions were shifting, precisely what I needed. I had to unlearn “supposed to” and “should ought to”—all fatalistic agricultural imperatives. Instead of making hay while the sun was shining, I had to see the sunshine. I needed to see as a child again. It became important to stop and gaze at a toad-frog as if it were the first one on the planet. A flower petal restored childhood’s magic; the infinitely reverberating sound of a sitar had an undertone of shifting colors, with the smell of patchouli; the spidery veins of glazed ceramics mapped inner landscapes. One night in my apartment some friends and I hopefully baked some banana peels and smoked them, taking our instructions from Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow.”

The counterculture saved me. I wasn’t really capable of sustained despair anyway. The world was too interesting, and I hadn’t truly lost my naive enthusiasm. I had already done things my grandparents could not have imagined. I had bought a Volkswagen at the factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, and driven it throughout Europe; I had joined a peace march in New York; I had seen the Beatles at Shea Stadium (both times, 1965 and 1966). Now I was ready to let loose. I remembered Granddaddy’s advice: “Don’t be contrary.” But I always was. I plunged into the trappings of the revolution with the same industriousness I’d applied to puzzles and studies.

I painted my old gray Zenith radio bright orange. The next day the Rolling Stones were singing “Paint It Black,” so I painted it black. I made clothes from cotton Indian bedspreads. I wore beads, bell-bottoms, sandals, the works. I bought the regulation paraphernalia (paper flowers, Indian cowbells, buffalo-hide sandals) from Azuma on Eighth Street in the Village. In the summer of 1967, the sounds of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
followed me everywhere I went. In Toronto, where I visited friends from Binghamton, the sounds and symbols of peace were spilling over the streets of the Yorkville area.
The language of the period was seductive. Go with the flow; be here now; do your own thing; it’s your bag—concentric circles spreading from a pebble in a pond, washing away time and money and respectability and status. I didn’t need money, didn’t need television, didn’t need a washer and dryer. Who needed television when we had Bob Dylan? My Toronto friends and I pored over the collage of icons gathered at a mock funeral on the cover of the Beatles album. We cut out magazine pictures and pieced our own collages. If we paid too much attention to surface details, it was because they were shared symbols of our inner story. That summer I was thrilled to be liberated at last from pseudo-Chanel suits and high heels. In bluejeans, the garb of country people, I had come back to myself.

I hadn’t been home for an entire year. At the end of 1967, when I arrived for Christmas, I saw immediately how much my mother had aged. She was only forty-eight, but her face had begun to sag and her hair was turning gray. I noticed her tight, grim expression whenever Granny interfered in the kitchen. Mama dashed outside with her cigarettes at every opportunity. She didn’t want Granny to know she smoked, but the telltale aroma swished throughout the house.

Don still slept—and had nightmares—in the chilly foyer, and I shared LaNelle’s bed in the north room. LaNelle, who was by then in high school, was going steady with a boy Daddy disapproved of. I was afraid she would try to escape from that cramped household by leaping into an early marriage. She was worried too, but not about that. She told me she was afraid that if the war kept on, Don would have to go. Although he was only a child, Don would be of age in a few years. “The boys ahead of me are getting drafted right after graduation,” LaNelle said. “Unless they go to college.” She didn’t say whether she was worried that her boyfriend might be sent to Vietnam.

Daddy sat quietly in his easy chair as the reports from Vietnam were broadcast on the network news. He would not speak of his own fears. When some antiwar activists came on the screen, he said, “They ought to round up all them protesters and put ’em to work. Make ’em shuck corn.” He laughed. I did not want to argue with him about the war. Mama, hurried along by her own immediate duties, seemed to pay no attention to the war news.

Shortly after Christmas, Mama came home from a doctor’s appointment. She entered the kitchen. It was almost dark. She shoved
groceries onto the table and stood motionless. She didn’t remove her coat. I laid down my book and turned on the kitchen light. I could see the alarm in her face.

“He got the results of my test,” she said. “It’s cancer.”

Her news plunged through me like a heavy stone. I could not believe it. I could not lose my mother—that was absolute. When I was a child, I wasn’t afraid my parents would die, because it seemed impossible. Now I didn’t know how to tell her my feelings. I tried to say something reassuring, but my heart was pounding, and I thought she could hear it when we hugged.

“They say worry brings on cancer,” Mama told me glumly. She fumbled for her cigarettes in her pocketbook and slipped outside again into the coming dusk.

For the first time in his life, Daddy had to borrow some money. Mama had to have an expensive operation, a hysterectomy. She came through it well, except that her smoker’s cough jiggled her stitches painfully. After a week, with Mama still in the hospital, I had to return to school. Daddy drove me to the Greyhound bus station at midnight. We waited for the bus in his truck, with the heater on, and talked about how we could not go on without Mama. “I don’t know what I’d do,” he said.

LaNelle and Don, left in Granny’s care while Mama was recovering, were hungry. “We were just kids,” LaNelle told me recently. “We were used to cramming junk food, but Granny begrudged every bite. She tried to cook for us, and it would be a little dab of this and a little dab of that, and if we tried to eat leftovers, she’d say, ‘No, save that for supper.’ ”

After her surgery, Mama was supposed to rest for two months and not exert herself for a year, but the household was helpless without her. “Everybody stood around and gawked at me,” she said later. “That made me so mad!” Within a few days she was up, cooking chicken-and-dumplings and fried pies and improvising a peach double-knit pantsuit for a woman who exceeded the extra-large pattern.

Late that summer, I traveled home on the bus. It was a miserable thirty-six-hour journey. I took Dramamine so I could sleep. As the bus neared the Jackson Purchase, it stopped in Hopkinsville, and a dozen soldiers—just boys—boarded. They were in their working uniforms,
carrying duffels. I stared at them. I was used to seeing long hair, but these guys were like plucked chickens. They wore dusky green, their pants ballooning above their combat boots. I would not have been surprised to see M16 rifles, but they had none. I tried to concentrate on the book I was reading for my modern poetry class.

A boy threw his duffel bag overhead and sat down beside me. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I averted my eyes.

“You go to college?” His voice was deep Southern. I saw that his eyes were light blue.

“Yes.” I clutched my book.

“I thought you did ’cause that looks like poetry and don’t nobody read poetry unless they have to—that is, except me.”

“Oh, do you like poetry?” I asked, surprised.

“I like poems. I write a poem now and then, just to express myself, you know? Everybody laughs at me, but I just keep on. I like to do it. I don’t care what they say. Do you write poetry?”

“No. I’m not very good at that. I like to write, though.”

“Well, you could write me a letter, then. I bet you’re good at writing letters.”

He grabbed my book of poetry and saw the poet I was reading. He said, “T. S. Eliot—never heard of him.”

“Backwards, it’s ‘toilets’—almost, anyway.”

He grinned but seemed embarrassed, and I remembered that in the South “toilet” is a dirty word. I was self-conscious about my peace-and-love duds, which suddenly seemed as much a uniform as what he was wearing. My hair was long and straight, and bell-bottoms shrouded my ankles. Hadn’t Daddy worn bell-bottoms in his war?

“Did you get drafted?” I asked.

“Yeah. But I said I’ll go and get it over with.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll go in business with my brother, I reckon. He’s running a gas station back home—Jackson, Mississippi.”

“Where are y’all going?” I asked, indicating the group of soldiers.

“We’re shipping out tomorrow morning,” he said without emotion. “Vietnam.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was hard enough for me to grasp the magnitude of the war when I heard about it on the radio or saw pictures in magazines. But now, for me, the war came down to this—this breathing, actual boy, who liked to write poems. My main thought: he
could
die
. Was that his main thought too, or was he eager to go over there? He didn’t seem like a warrior. Why hadn’t he gone to school instead? Why were some boys in school and some in the war? I squirmed. It seemed worse to send a boy who liked poetry. But what did that mean? That he was too special to die?

The soldiers got off at Fort Campbell. As the boy next to me gathered his gear, I began to cry, but I forced back my tears and said goodbye to him—faintly. He was my only tangible link with the Vietnam War. I couldn’t bear his innocence. Indeed, I couldn’t bear to imagine my innocent little brother in just a few years in that same uniform going to that same place. I wished I’d gotten the soldier’s name. I should have said I’d write to him.

And then I was home for a week. Mama looked healthy and rosy, and she was working as hard as ever. One evening while she was cooking supper, Daddy and I sat watching police clubbing demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The war protesters were screaming, and reporters were hustling. Daddy cheered for the police, who were handcuffing the demonstrators, mostly students, and tossing them into paddy wagons. “There’s another one dragged off,” he said, as if he were keeping score.

“You don’t really mean that,” I said. “
I’m
a student. That could be me.” But I didn’t quarrel with him. I was frightened by what I was seeing on TV. The world seemed to be separating into two camps, and somehow I belonged to both. I didn’t want to believe my father was serious; he liked to be contrary.

“If those protesters had done that in Russia, they’d have been shot by sundown,” he said.

“I thought Americans didn’t approve of Soviet tactics,” I said.

He grinned.

“I caught you in a contradiction, didn’t I?” I said. He grinned, and I relaxed.

Mama said, “Y’all come on in here and eat before this grub gets cold.”

Granny had eaten early and had gone to bed. She still went to bed at dark and never watched TV. After supper, we crowded into the living room–bedroom to watch the convention, but Mama hunched down over her sewing machine. She was making a pleated dust ruffle for one of her customers.

When I returned to Connecticut, I thought about that soldier I had met, and from time to time I wondered what happened to him over there in the jungle. My mind turned, like Daddy’s tractor flipping clods in the fields in the spring. With the plow hitched behind the tractor, he broke the ground first, then disked it. Then he pulled a harrow over the ground to break up the clods and smooth the dirt. My thoughts swiveled. I began to write a novel. It was a story about the Beatles, in experimental, psychedelic, Donald Barthelme–inspired prose. A VW busload of hippies travel cross-country from California to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium. It was Jack Kerouac in reverse, through a mirror fractured by sound. Actually, it was sillier than that. But I was hopeful.

Finally, I met someone who felt so much as I did that we recognized each other as kindred spirits. He was a loner, too. I was a Southern girl trying to get over my culture; he was a Northern middle-class boy trying to get over his. He wore plaid flannel lumberjack shirts and jeans and plow shoes—like one of the Future Farmers of America at Cuba School. In the past, I would have been embarrassed to be seen with a guy dressed like that. But now I was changing.

I was conditioned to expect rejection. But Roger, the guy I fell in love with, didn’t berate me for being Southern, or being coy, or playing games, or having cockeyed ambitions. Roger wasn’t truly a Yankee. He had midwestern roots. Also, he was funny and could sing. “I could have been a Beatle,” he’d say playfully. He brought me tulips on our first date. He had picked them from the university president’s yard. We went to see
Finnegans Wake
. Roger drove an old light-blue Rambler with rust spots. One day he painted it a peculiar bright forest green, using an old paintbrush and a can of paint he happened to have on hand. The brush strokes gave the job an interesting oil-painting texture. Within the next few months, we spotted nine haphazardly painted vehicles in the area, all that same odd shade of green.