Seventeenth Summer (19 page)

One afternoon Margie and I walked down to McKnight’s to meet him. It was wonderful sitting there. Fitz stopped in and other fellows and girls came in, together and alone, and called “Hi!” or came over to talk with Jack and Fitz while Margie talked steadily and smiled broad smiles at everyone. She smiled so broadly that I noticed she had got lipstick on her teeth and I thought to tell her about it—but Fitz wasn’t looking at her anyway. Occasionally a woman who had been shopping would come in with a little boy or girl and they both would have a quick ice-cream cone or a pineapple soda, and the child would eat slowly, staring at the older fellows and girls making so much noise, while the ice cream dribbled down his chin. Older people and very
young didn’t seem to belong here. No one belonged here but the “crowd,” those who were “in.” Until I met Jack I hadn’t belonged here, either. I remembered once, in early spring having come in with Kitty and having had a small Coke with her, sitting at the fountain, while from the back booths came the sound of laughing and talking. But no one had talked to me. I wasn’t one of the crowd then. I remember I had told Kitty to hurry up and made her leave before the Coke was half finished. I couldn’t stand being so out of things. But it was different now.

Fitz was working in a fruit store for the summer and said that he had to get right back, for he had just sneaked out for a few minutes and he didn’t want them to miss him. After a while Jack said that he really should get back to the bakery too, for his father didn’t know he had gone, either. But I knew he wouldn’t leave. After Fitz had gone out the door Jack still sat with Margie and me, fingering his bent straws and waiting, as if he wanted to say something.

“How’s this hot weather affecting business, Jack?” Margie asked in a professionally conversational tone. She always talks with an up-and-down movement, as if she were chewing gum. And she likes to be a special friend to all the boys, even if she is going steady.

“It isn’t so bad,” he answered. “People have to eat no matter what the weather does.” He looked at her and then at me and the three of us just sat saying nothing. “Doughnuts and things will always sell,” he added lamely.

Margie craned her neck to look over the booth to see if anyone she knew might be coming in the front door. There was no one.

“Angie,” Jack said, “unless you’ve got to get home right away, would you like to go for a little ride with me? I’ve got the truck and I don’t have to be back to the bakery for about twenty minutes or so….”

“Go right ahead,” Margie said to me indulgently. “I’ll just sit here and talk to the kids and wait till you get back. Some one of the fellows is bound to come in,” and she gave me one of her “I know how it is” smiles. I almost resented her thinking she knew all about Jack and me—even if she did.

He had the bakery truck parked just around the corner; the afternoon sun glinted on the windshield and the black leather seats were hot to touch. Jack got in beside me, started the motor, and swung the truck around in the opposite direction, away from the bakery, just in case he might run into his father. He drove out from the heat of the town to the coolness of the lake and pulled the truck up at the water’s edge. The breeze was moist and cool and the water was blue and rollicking, teased with sunlight. A sand dredge was laboring in the harbor, its engines making a steady grunt-grunt and the whistle on its bridge giving out short, periodic snorts, as if it were blowing through its nose. We laughed, both of us, hearing it.

Jack reached into the shelves in the back of the truck and picked out four sugar cookies with raisins for us to eat. We sat
munching them and laughing at the noises of the sand dredge and feeling the sun coming through the windshield, falling warm on our arms and legs. After a long time we went back to town.

Margie was still waiting in McKnight’s when I came back. She had ordered another Coke and was being dainty about lighting her cigarette when I came in. “Where did you leave Jack?” she asked.

“He let me off in front and went on back to work,” I explained, trying hard not to look straight at her. “His father won’t like it that he’s been gone so long as it is.”

She took a long, leisurely draw on her cigarette and we both watched the slow smoke curling. Then, leaning across the table, Margie said to me in a low, confidential voice, “You know, Angie, that shows when a boy really likes a girl—when he wants to kiss her in the daytime!”

The very next Sunday Jack’s aunt from Oklahoma passed through Chicago and his mother and father drove down to see her. But he stayed home. I wish now he had gone. He stayed to attend to the bakery and to see that the restaurants in town got their orders of hot rolls at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning. I would never have dared to mention it myself—in fact, I never even thought of it—but it was my mother who suggested that Jack come over for Sunday dinner.

“If his mother is going to be away I’m sure he won’t want to prepare anything for himself,” she said.

So I called him on Saturday evening while he was still at the
bakery. My heart was pounding as I talked to him. Even if I did know him well, it seemed such a forward step to ask a boy to have dinner with your family! I could hear the sound of people moving about and the ring of the cash register behind his voice as we talked.

“Jack, my mother would like to know if you would like to come over for dinner tomorrow, seeing your mother and dad won’t be home….”

“You’ll have to talk louder, Angie,” he said. “We’ve pretty busy here and I can’t hear you.”

“I said,” I repeated, articulating carefully, “would you like to come over for dinner tomorrow?”

“Gee, Angie, that’s swell. That’s really swell!” and his voice dropped low. “What time?”

“What are you whispering for?” I could tell he was talking with his mouth close to the phone.

“I just don’t want my dad to hear,” he said.

“Why?” I made my voice sound very surprised and a little insulted, though I knew very well what he meant. I had thought of it myself before I called.

“It’s all right, of course,” he assured me, hastily. “It’s just that I don’t know if my dad would like it so well … me, having dinner with girls, I mean. You know how it is….”

“Of course,” I said abruptly. “We’ll expect you about noon, Jack,” and I hung up. It wasn’t nice of me. It wasn’t nice of me at all, for I knew just what my father would think if I had been asked
to have dinner at
Jack’s
house. But I knew that Jack would worry all night. He would want to call back and ask me if I was angry with him, but the bakery would be rushed with last-minute Saturday night customers and he wouldn’t have time. After the bakery had closed it would be too late and he would be afraid my mother would be annoyed with him for calling at such an hour. So he wouldn’t know until tomorrow if I were angry with him or not and would spend all the rest of the evening thinking about it, while he waited on customers, and making up ways of explaining to me why he couldn’t tell his father. Of course, I knew why and I wasn’t angry at all. Only sometimes, even if you like a boy so much, it is almost fun to know he is worrying about you.

Sunday morning in the summer is almost too good, almost sensuously pleasant. All the windows were wide open and the sun lay in bright patches on the living-room rug and the hollyhocks grew straight and high around the back door and everywhere there was a feeling of warmth and oneness—as if there was no difference between inside the house and outside. Everywhere it was summer. My father spent the morning in the garden, straightening out vegetable rows with a hoe and piling up a heap of pulled weeds in an empty bushel basket, stopping now and then to wipe the sweat from his forehead. In the kitchen my mother tied on a frilled Sunday apron and began cutting the string beans for dinner. She kept looking out the window at my father, humming as she worked.

Even if the day was hot we were having roast pork and mashed potatoes for dinner because, as my mother said, “If your father has to eat out all week he deserves a good dinner at the weekend.”

Upstairs Margaret and Lorraine were making the bed together and Kitty was reading the funny papers on the back lawn. Everyone knew that Jack was coming. They had known ever since my mother had suggested asking him, but somehow I shied away from talking about it. It didn’t seem quite safe to talk about him anymore. I knew they didn’t quite understand about Jack and me and I had a vague, uneasy feeling that if they did they wouldn’t like it at all. My mind was always on the alert for the first word of disapproval. After all, what would my mother say if she knew that I, who had just been out of high school six weeks, was feeling the way I was? Families just don’t understand about such things.

Kitty came into the kitchen to help peel the apples for the applesauce and then gathered up the long curls of peelings and went out to eat them on the lawn, sitting in the sun. Kinkee came over, wagging her tail and wiggling her nose in anticipation. Kitty held out a curl of apple skin and the dog sniffed it gently and then let it drop to the ground untouched.

My heart felt lumped inside me, warm with satisfaction. Everything seemed too wonderful. I had set the table in the dining room on one of the best white tablecloths and the bright sunshine streamed in the windows and glinted through the tall glasses onto the silverware, sending off sprays of light. In the center Lorraine had put a low bowl of pink cosmos from the garden with
their feathery, fernlike leaves. A small green bug dropped onto the tablecloth and began inching its way toward a plate. I lifted it carefully on the corner of the Sunday funny paper and shook it out the front door. Outside the whole world seemed yellow-green and sunny. Even the way the trees shook their leaves seemed different.

Later I went upstairs and put two little pink guest towels in the bathroom. It seemed impossible to think that Jack would even be seeing what our upstairs looked like! From the kitchen rose the pleasant Sunday smell of roast pork and fresh garden peas, and outside I could hear the sound of neighbors laughing together as they sat on their front porches, and just across the street a man stood in his shirt sleeves with a pail of water and a chamois, shining his car. Everything seemed suddenly too wonderful. The clean sunshine, the good dinner in the oven, and just a few minutes to wait until Jack would be here! It couldn’t be that good! It seemed as if I were drinking in the almost tangible pleasure of the morning like a rich, heavy malted milk that comes slow and thick through the straws.

My whole head sang with warm, summer-Sunday thoughts, till my hands tingled with the sheer joy of it. “O God,” I thought, “O God, O God—stop making me be so glad! I can’t stand being so happy!”

I was still sitting at my bedroom window when he came up the front sidewalk, and I waited there until I heard my mother open the front door for him and then the mumble of voices as my father came in from the garden to get cleaned for dinner. In the living room someone turned on the radio. I knew that Jack
would be sitting in the chair near the front door where he always sat and I waited till I knew my face was calm enough to face him without looking too happy. Then I went downstairs.

I don’t know just what went wrong at dinner. It wasn’t Jack’s fault. It wasn’t his table manners that were poor—it wasn’t that at all. He sat very straight just as he should; kept his left hand in his lap while he ate and broke his roll into four little pieces just like it says in etiquette books. So it wasn’t that.

We had all sat down at the table, my mother and father at the heads and Jack across from me. My mother had passed him the butter and the cut-glass dish of applesauce with her usual cool care and talked with him while my father was carving the roast. Art and Lorraine added little comments here and there. Martin had called Lorraine right after church to ask her to go out with him that night and she was in a soft-mouthed, benevolent mood. I thought then that everything was going to be all right.

Jack was just saying to my mother, “This aunt of mine that’s stopping in Chicago is the one who used to live next to us in Oklahoma.” My father should have seen that Jack was busy talking. But he didn’t. He had just finished carving the roast and wanted to make room for the serving plates so he passed him the salad, thrusting it right into his hands, and Jack was so startled that he knocked against his water glass, steadying it just in time with his free hand while the salad bowl wavered in the other. He was across the table from me and no one else offered to help. It
was agonizing to watch. The salad bowl was large and the table crowded so he balanced it on one hand, trying to serve himself with the double servers with the other and keep up the conversation at the same time. Art kept talking, too, attempting to cover up his awkwardness and pretending not to notice. My own fingers were anxious for Jack’s as they fumbled.

And after that everything that happened was Lorraine’s fault. She knew Jack had only graduated from high school. She knew that I had never said he was a smart boy. She knew it and yet she kept talking to him as if he were one of the boys she had known at college. Lorraine is like that sometimes. If I had been sitting at the table at the beginning I might have stopped it but I was in the kitchen just then.

Kitty had been quietly toying with her glass and one longstemmed cosmos that leaned out from the rest until she knocked pollen from it into her milk and I left the table to go to the kitchen for a fresh glass. Someone had mentioned that the flies weren’t bad at all for this time of the summer. It was just a casual remark but when I came back with Kitty’s milk Lorraine had begun. She was saying, in her schoolteacher voice, “Perhaps it’s like in that book. About us being like flies that the gods crush—only this time they got the flies.” She laughed pleasantly but no one knew quite what she was talking about.

Jack was buttering his roll, not even listening, but she turned to him abruptly, “You’ve read that book, of course, haven’t you, Jack?”

“What book?” He was startled.

“
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
” she explained kindly. “ByThornton Wilder … you know, the same man who won the Pulitzer Prize with
Our Town
… ?”