DRACULA’S DAUGHTER

Mark was a hippie. He had hippie hair and hippie clothes. He had Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Jefferson Airplane, Cream. He smoked a lot of pot, had read Steppenwolf and The Doors of Perception and The Hobbit. He had a hippie girlfriend named Wendy who didn’t shave her legs or even her armpits, hair being natural. So was sex. “Let’s have sex, Mark,” she would say, and he would say, “Let’s,” and they would. That was how natural.

Wendy lived in Stevenson North and Mark in South. He had a roommate named Steve, who was a nice guy but very straight, who talked about possibly pledging next semester. Wendy had a roommate named Maggie, who Mark still hadn’t met. Wendy said she was kind of strange, but wouldn’t say more than that.

There was a peace rally one Sunday afternoon at the lagoon. It was late October, a nice day out, windy but warm, the leaves on the trees flickering red and yellow. Mark and Wendy were going to the rally, of course—being for peace, being hippies.

He came to Wendy’s room in his Buffalo Bill jacket, half the fringes missing, which he liked about it: showed he didn’t care about appearances. Same with his Indian headband, half the beads gone. He was also wearing moccasins, but not to go with the headband, although of course Indians were the original hippies. On the left sleeve of the jacket he had a black armband, and when people asked him what it was for he told them, “For all the Vietnamese children we’ve burned and murdered.”

Wendy was wearing her big, floppy straw hat. She looked cute in it, like a cute little hippie chick, his cute little hippie chick.

“Do I look all right in this?” she asked him. “Not too stylish?”

“You look like a cute little hippie chick.”

“I don’t want to look cute, Mark.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

She told him to wait, she had to go pee. The bathroom was down the hall. Then they would leave. So he was waiting, studying the Salvador Dalí poster she had on the wall, the one with the melting clocks. Mark had never dropped acid. He was a little afraid it might be like this.

Then Maggie walked in.

He almost laughed.

He thought maybe she was on her way to a Halloween party, or back from one. It was nearly Halloween and he thought maybe this was her costume: Dracula’s daughter, in a long black dress all the way to the floor, just a few inches longer than her shiny black hair. But her hair was real, you could tell, and her skin was so pale and her lips so full and shiny red and her arms so long and slender, and her eyebrows very low.

“Hello, Mark,” she said, in a voice that came from deep in her throat, her long, white throat.

He had to swallow first before he could speak. “Hi,” he said.

He wanted to sit down, his legs felt so weak, but then Wendy came back. She told Maggie they were on their way to the rally and asked if she had any plans for the afternoon.

Maggie said, “No.” Then she looked at Mark, from under those eyebrows. “I’ll be right here,” she said, “all afternoon.”

“Does she always dress like that?” he asked Wendy, on their way.

When they got there, several hundred people were all sitting in the grass facing a platform set up in front of the west end of the lagoon, with a speaker system. Mark’s political science teacher, Dr. Abernathy, was up there in a folding chair with several others, waiting to speak. At the microphone now was a student with a bleached-out denim jacket and acoustic guitar doing a song he wrote about the war, about the carnage, about Johnson’s lies, about the military-industrial complex, a very long song that he sang in a Bob Dylan voice.

Sitting there next to Wendy, their legs folded under them, Mark was trying to pay attention to the song. But he kept picturing that look Maggie gave him beneath her eyebrows, that deep, sly, knowing look: I’ll be here, Mark. That was what she meant. I’ll be waiting for you.

He didn’t care about the carnage or Johnson’s lies or the military industrial complex, or even about Wendy.

I’ll be here, Mark.

He got up, telling Wendy he had a cramp from sitting like that and wanted to walk it off, and went limping away before she could join him. He made his way in and out among all those solemn, earnest people sitting in the grass, whiffs of pot here and there, returning a lot of peace signs before he finally reached the sidewalk and took off running.

He knocked, softly.

“Come in, Mark.”

Afterward he wandered around the campus in a trance.

He ended up back at the rally, standing on the outskirts under a tree. Dr. Abernathy was at the microphone now, gesturing a lot, shouting against the strong wind. Wendy was sitting where he’d left her. She would lean forward and listen to Dr. Abernathy for a minute, then lean back and look around—for him, no doubt—then return to Dr. Abernathy.

In her hippie hat.

He wandered off toward the other side of the lagoon, no one over there. He could still hear Dr. Abernathy, going on now about napalmed Vietnamese children, the ones Mark was wearing his black armband for.

He slid it down off the sleeve of his Buffalo Bill jacket and flipped it away, then decided to get rid of the jacket as well and dropped it in the grass as he walked along. Same with the tie-dyed T-shirt underneath it, pulling it off over his head, the beaded headband coming with it. Next he kicked off his moccasins, left foot, right foot, pulled off his socks, then went ahead and unbuckled, unzipped, and slid his denim bell-bottoms down, along with his underpants, and stepped out of them. Still not satisfied, he got a good grip on his hair with both hands and pulled his entire suit of skin off over his head—guts and muscles sliding from his bones into a warm heap.

This was more like it.

He walked on, the wind making eerie music in his ribs.