Free A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer

Saigon to tell me he was okay. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart. I have a little news myself. You’re going to be a daddy!” There was a long silence, and then I heard a thud as he dropped the phone.
    By good luck, my best friend Susan, who’d been my bridesmaid (and who looked good in blue), got pregnant two weeks after I did, and Aurora, my best friend at Tech, was already two months pregnant, so we all went through it together. (I gained the most weight.) I had a host of other friends from home and my art and English classes who were all there for me as well, not to mention the church.
    My favorite class was creative writing with a teacher named B. C. Hall, or Clarence, as we called him. It was in his class that I learned to write. He sat cross-legged on the desk, as cool and hip as could be, hair just that little bit too long, giving us words of wisdom through clouds of cigarette smoke and squinted eyes, in a languorous drawl that held us spellbound. (Teachers were allowed to smoke in those days, I think. Or, more likely, he just said “screw the rules.”) On one of my stories, he wrote, “What’s an intelligent woman like you doing in a place like this?” I saved it and cherish it. We were friends until he died in 2005, and we wrote three screenplays together, two of which were optioned although not made. (Yet. I’m still an optimist.) It was in that class that I started writing stories that turned into my first novel,
Windchill Summer
, twenty-nine years later, a story about boys going to Vietnam and the toll it took on them and everyone close to them.
    In class, I sat between a couple of hippie guys named Matthew and Larry, who were always under surveillance for being the typical long-haired peace-symbol-wearing dopers. Matthew had the longest hair of anybody at school, a droopy blond George Custer mustache, and little round John Lennon glasses. He walked with an odd bounce up onto his toes with every step, which reminded me of Bugs Bunny. Matthew and Larry of course smoked pot, which was still exotic to most of the kids, and owned a head shop called the Family Hand, which had a black light room with psychedelic posters of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and others on the walls. In the middle was a giant waterbed, where you could lie and float and pass some groovy hours. They felt sorry for me, since my husband was in the hated war, and adopted me and brought me milk to drink in class so I’d be healthy. If I had a couple of hours to kill, they insisted I go over to the shop and take a nap on the cool undulating water bed. I liked it so much I later got myself one.
    I was hungry all the time and nervous with the strain of the war and the pregnancy. By the end, I had gained sixty-five pounds. Once when I was in a Taco Bell, a guy who had been in one of my classes the previous year came up and asked me if I had a sister. I said no, and he said, “Are you sure? This girl looks a lot like you, except she’s thin.” I wanted to smear his face with my enchilada. What a moron. But it sadly brought home the fact that I was fat. As school let out and the summer hit like an open oven door, I was huge and miserable. No air conditioners back then. At least not in our house. I was obsessed with the war, and I knew that every letter I got from Larry had been written two weeks earlier, or more, so I had no idea how he was doing or where he was. They weren’t allowed to say, exactly, but he named places such as the Pineapple Forest, Arizona Territory, and Da Nang. He was also near the Laotian border, and every night on the news when any of those places were mentioned, I squinted to see if he was one of the soldiers pictured.
    I enrolled in summer classes in English, as I had every summer, to get a second teaching major. Then the fall semester started. I was the size of a blimp and totally miserable, waiting for my baby to arrive, sliding by my due date with no sign of labor. I had a night class in Asian