Seventeenth Summer (4 page)

“It’s raining,” Jack said and held out his hand to see if he could feel the drops. “That will be good for the gardens.”

You can’t say to a boy “Have I been fun tonight?” or “Don’t you like me more than other girls—wouldn’t you like to go out with me again?” A girl just can’t say that sort of thing to a boy—especially when he’s talking about gardens. So I just stood there and all of a sudden the rain started coming down hard and the wind tossed the trees with quick gusts and blew my skirt around my legs.

“Good night, Angie,” he said. “You’d better get in the house quick. I’ve got to run for it. Get in quick so you don’t get wet.” He turned and cut across the front lawn with his sweater over his head.

And he hadn’t even said. I didn’t even know if he would call me again.

Softly I tiptoed upstairs. Far out over the lake, thunder rumbled like a slow freight. As I passed by my older sisters’ bedroom lightning lit the sky and in the yellow flash I could see the two of them sleeping quietly, their hair in metal curlers and cold cream shining on their faces.

And that was the first night.

I woke early the next morning—so early that the first flaming slashes of dawn were just beginning to be reflected pinkly on my bedroom wall. For a long time I lay in a warm, sleepy haze, looking at the alarm clock and knowing it was too early to get up and yet not wanting to go back to sleep again. It was so pleasant lying thinking comfortable, blurred thoughts about summer and about the night before.

My sister Kitty lay beside me sleeping soundly with her arms flung up over her head. She wears her hair in long pigtails and it was all fuzzy from tossing on the pillow. Once she turned over wearily, muttering something to herself, and then smiled contentedly in her sleep. Outside the window there were birds twittering excitedly about new plans for the day and inside I lay looking at the ceiling and thinking.

In the brightness of the morning last night didn’t seem quite real—as if it had been a movie which I had sat and watched but of which I had not really been a part. It could
hardly have been me who felt almost beautiful just because wind was fingering through my hair and the moon was thin like a piece of sheer yellow silk. I knew in a little while I would be getting up and putting on blue denim slacks and eating cereal at the table beside the kitchen window and dusting window sills and talking to my mother about garden flowers and what to have for dinner just as I had for so many summers. There would be no more of the exquisite uncertainty of last night, no queer, tingling awe at the newness of the feeling, and no strange, filling satisfaction out of just being alive. All that was last night because it
was
night and because it was the first boy I had really been out with. Not because it was a special boy—a boy different from other boys—but just because it was the first one. After a while, maybe after years when I had had so many dates that most of them were hazy, I would think of last night and remember it and that breathless loveliness, the same way and with the same amused pleasure that I think now about how I used to wait for the first look at the tree on Christmas morning or about the sweet pink froth of cotton candy at carnivals. Maybe, I thought to myself, if I were to see Jack this morning in the bright sunlight his eyebrows might be scraggly or his face might be pale and silly.

What if he tells every girl she looks pretty with her hair blowing around her face. And what if I didn’t look pretty at all and it was just because there was no one else around and nothing else to say. What if Swede had sat in the bow of the boat
laughing to himself because Jack was being smooth and I was being silly by listening. There is a crack over in one corner of the ceiling of my bedroom and I found myself unconsciously lining my thoughts up on either side—the good and the bad. The nice things to remember and the things that maybe in the sunlight wouldn’t be the same at all.

It might be that he would never call me again and I would spend the rest of the summer evenings going for rides with my mother and father and lying in bed trying to repiece that night in the boat and wondering where I could have failed. Maybe when I went away to college in the fall I would have to write all my themes for English class about water spraying over the side of boats and wet sails flapping in the wind and thin moons that were hardly there, because that would be all I could remember, all I could think of. Maybe all my life my heart would jump a little when I saw a short crew cut or a boy with a sweater knotted around his neck. Maybe every time I heard the name “Jack” I would hold my breath and be afraid to turn around to see who was there in case it might be he.

The sunrise flush was fading on the wall and I shut my eyes, trying to sleep again. But the darkness was like the soft, hushed darkness had been with the canvas over my head in the boat and the wind outside ruffling the water. I caught my breath a little, knowing I was being silly and not being able to help it every time I thought of his hand and mine holding the match. Maybe if I got up quickly everything would be all right and I would forget. It
could be, I thought, that I am still sleeping a little and holding a nice dream by the tail so it won’t get away. But I could hear Kitty breathing quietly beside me and I could see the long crack zigzagged on the ceiling and the early sun shining in the window and I knew that I was wide awake. And I knew that even getting up quickly wouldn’t help, that it was something that had nothing to do with waking or sleeping. Something that would be there all the time. And if I looked at myself in the mirror that morning I would see something different. My face would be the same but yet something had changed, and I would try not to look straight at my family all day in case they might see it too, and smile at each other and say, “Angle’s growing up.” And somehow I was afraid to have anyone know because I wasn’t sure myself. I couldn’t be sure at all until I saw Jack again.

About seven o’clock I heard my mother’s bed creak across the hall and I heard her open my door softly and look in. Quickly I shut my eyes and sighed as if I were asleep. I didn’t want to get up just yet. I wanted just a few minutes more to lie there and think. Just a few minutes more. She went into the bathroom then to get washed, and soon the morning noises began. There was the water running in the kitchen sink and the sound of five plates, four coffee cups, and one glass of milk being set on the table. The smell of freshly made coffee drifted upstairs and made me start thinking wide-awake, daytime thoughts. I could see in my mind just how it would be. My sister Lorraine would be sitting at one side of the table and my
sister Margaret on the other. Lorraine would be rushing to get to work and Margaret would be in her house coat, all ready except to put her make-up on. My mother would pour the coffee and say, perhaps, that it was strong or weak or should have percolated longer or something. Then one of them would remember last night and say, “Oh, Angie. Did you have fun?” or maybe, “Do you think he’ll ask you out again?”

And I would put cream in my coffee and tell them all about the boat and how good Swede was at sailing it and how it had started to rain just when we got home. And they would ask a few more questions while I said yes or no or whatever the answer should be, but I would never mention the moon or the cool clean smell of the wind or that I had worn Jack’s sweater all evening or all the other small, warm thoughts that kept nudging at my memory even as I lay awake watching the sun grow brighter on the ceiling. I would eat my breakfast like any other morning, clear the table like any other morning and do the housework like any other morning; but somehow inside myself I would be waiting for the phone to ring or listening for a bakery truck to pull up at the curb in front of the house.

I got out of bed then without waking Kitty, dressed, and went downstairs. Just before I went into the kitchen I stopped and pinched my cheeks to make the muscles relax. Somehow my face felt stiff and unnatural. I had a queer feeling that when I sat down at the breakfast table I might not be able to eat at all. I might just look at everyone drinking their morning coffee and
then suddenly blurt out foolishly, “I like a boy. And I never knew it would be like this!”

But that wasn’t quite what happened. Lorraine was standing by the kitchen stove in her house coat, curling her hair with the curling iron—she had just washed it the night before.

My mother was sitting now in a clean blue print dress at the table next to the window drinking her coffee, and her hair, where it is turning white on the sides, was brushed back high off her face. She used to get very bad headaches and would have to lie in a darkened bedroom with cool cloths soaked in vinegar on her forehead. The vinegar had bleached her hair snow-white at the temples. My mother is the only person I know who looks completely wide-awake and fresh when she wakes up in the morning.

“Your tomato juice is in the icebox,” she said to me. “I didn’t think you’d be down for a while.”

Outside, the garden earth was dark from last night’s rain and cobwebs, dew-sparkled, were stretched on the grass. Everything had a fresh, clean smell. “I think it’s almost cool enough to wear a sweater and skirt,” Lorraine said. “You know, after being used to collegiate clothes I just hate wearing summer dresses that wrinkle so easily.”

She had a job for the summer at the Elite Canvas Company, just sitting all day folding and addressing circulars which were sent all over the country to advertise awnings, golf bags, and
canvas laundry bags. Every summer the Elite took on about twenty extra girls. My father is a good friend of one of the men in the office—they had played some early golf together the weekend before and he had arranged it.

At first no one mentioned the night before. “We’ll put the winter things in the attic this morning,” I remember my mother’s saying to me. “Just let Kitty sleep and you get the stepladder from the garage and I’ll hand the things up to you.” Ours is the old-fashioned kind of attic that you get into through a trap door in a bedroom ceiling. “We can get all Lorraine’s school clothes put away so the closets won’t be crowded all summer,” she added.

My sister Margaret came down just then, all ready for work. You would like my sister. She is tall, thin, moves very quickly, and is engaged to a boy from Milwaukee who looks and acts just like a giant baby panda. Leaning over she kissed Mom, or rather brushed her with her cheek so she wouldn’t rub off her lipstick. “No tomato juice this morning,” she said and drank her coffee standing up by the stove—Margaret is always in a rush.

There was the usual breakfast talk: “Did you hear the rain last night?” “What would you children like me to get for supper?” (Mom always calls us children), and “We should have a big day at the store today.” Little everyday things that could be said on any morning and I waited, just drinking my coffee and eating my toast, knowing that at any moment someone would
remember. I could almost feel the words just hanging in midair. My mother reached over to snap off a loose thread hanging from the hem of Margaret’s dress. I remember that so well because that was just before Margaret turned to me, remembering, “—Oh, Angie, how was last night?”

“Fun,” I answered. Then I told them about the rain and how good Swede was at sailing and Jack used to date Jane Rady and how I remember her talking about him when she used to sit next to me in history class and about how many people had been out riding because it was such a nice night and all the cars with bright headlights that had been lined up along Lighthouse Point. Maybe, I thought, I’m talking too much; maybe I’m talking too fast. My voice seemed not to be coming from me at all, and I was surprised to hear it so calm and casual when inside my head the thoughts were all warm and shaky.

“I used to know Jack’s cousin,” Lorraine said. Her hair was curled in rows of shiny sausage-curls, and she was holding the curling iron as far away from her head as possible so she wouldn’t burn her cheek, talking with a funny grimace as if any movement might bring the iron too close. “He was a drip though. He used to wear real baggy pants and always got to school late and had to be sent to the office for tardy slips.”

I tried to think of something to counteract that slur. It wouldn’t do to have the family think that Jack had dull connections before they even knew him—it’s important that the family like a boy—but nothing came to my mind quickly enough.

In the green clumps of marguerite daisies along the garden path, round knobby heads stuck up with the green sheaths half open, showing the white silk petals underneath. Mom pushed back the kitchen curtains to look at them, commenting absently that next spring we would plant only a few rows of vegetables and have the rest of the garden all in flowers. Lorraine looked at Margaret and she looked at me and we all smiled, because every summer, for as long as we could remember, my mother had said that.

Then Margaret glanced at her wrist watch and gave a little gasp, though she had known all the time that it was late, gulped down the rest of her coffee, and rushed out, leaving the front door half open, calling back, “Be sure to have something good for supper because I’m going to be real hungry!” Lorraine went upstairs to get dressed and Mom finished her coffee and a last piece of toast before clearing the breakfast things away.

Though I don’t know just what I expected, I was vaguely disappointed that this was just like any other morning. The sun was bright on the kitchen floor, the coffee was steaming as always, and my mother looked just as calm and shiny clean as she always did. Maybe, I thought, I was wrong about last night and maybe everything is just the same. Maybe it wasn’t—well, what I thought it was.

But all morning, puttering with the housework, I was really waiting for Jack to stop round on his bakery route, and my
mind was far from finger marks on the white woodwork and dustcloths that smelled of oily furniture polish. But by eleven o’clock he had not come. And by eleven o’clock, with the beds all made and the housework done, I knew this was not an ordinary day; I knew definitely that everything was not the same.

We had had scrambled eggs and toast and tea for lunch, just the three of us, my mother and little sister and I, sitting at the end of the kitchen table. “Just a pick-up snack,” Mom had said. “Whatever you can find in the icebox.” At twelve o’clock I began to get a queer restless feeling, as if I wanted to sit drumming my fingers on the table top, and I could hear the big clock in the dining room very plainly as it ticked.