Summer Nights (5 page)

So Matt parked the car, and as he set the brake he thought of the cars he would work on shortly, and the team and the things he would learn, and his heart soared. He got out smiling and circled the car to open the door for Emily. He took her hand in his, wishing she could be as thrilled about the job as he was. It blunted all his pleasure to deal with Emily’s anger. Her hand was—her hand—

“Emily!” Matt said. “Where—your ring—how come—where is it?”

She did not look his way. Her face was set in anger and she stared across the river. “It didn’t matter to me anymore.”

He could not believe what she had said. He held her hand up to the light, like a banker checking for counterfeit money. “It matters to me!” Matt said. “I still love you. Just because I’m taking a better job doesn’t mean I can’t still love you.”

She turned a second time, this time facing the road. Matt hated it when she wouldn’t look into his eyes. He took her arms and held her firmly, but he should have known better. “Pushing me around now?” said Emily through gritted teeth.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, stand any way you like. What did you do with my ring? Stick it in your jewelry box? Leave it on your desk? Emily, it’s not some dumb pair of cheap earrings from a carnival. I sold a whole car to buy that ring for you.”

“You should have found out about your job with the racing team before you wasted your money,” Emily snapped.

He didn’t know what to make of her. Why was it impossible to do two things at once? Why couldn’t he stay in love with her
and
join the pit crew? “Emily,” he said for the hundredth time, “so a few months go by and I’m not around. It doesn’t mean I’m going to date other girls, or not come back. It means I’m going to learn a fabulous trade and earn a lot of money and—” he broke it off just in time. He had almost said, “And have a lot of fun.” He knew the response to
that
statement. Emily would demand to know what kind of fun he expected
her
to have, stuck in Westerly without him.

But she could hardly come along. They would be on the move, so she wouldn’t be able to earn money to help. His salary wouldn’t keep them in motels. She had to stay and eventually he’d come home. It seemed to Matt this was straight and reasonable. He could not believe they were arguing about it yet again.

And he had been looking forward to this party so much. They all needed a final summer night: a good-bye not just for Anne, but for all of them. And he, too, needed an audience—people who would rejoice for him, who would clap him on the back, and in whose eyes he would see envy.

“I want you to wear the ring,” he said finally. He tried to kiss her but she moved toward the car. “Can we drive back to your house and get it, Em?”

“No.”

“Why not? Please wear it. For me.”

“No.”

“Why not?” He was yelling now. People in other cars looked their direction.

“Because I threw it away. It doesn’t exist anymore. It wasn’t worth anything to me. So there, Matthew O’Connor. You’re not the only person who can throw things away.”

Kip’s brothers ranged in age from six to sixteen. Their appetites were unbelievable. You no sooner filled the station wagon to the brim with food and unloaded it all over the kitchen, so that every shelf and cabinet was overflowing, then the boys had finished it and were complaining of hunger.

Both parents worked, and all five children had definite chores. Kip was the grocery shopper. George was head cook. She decided on hot dogs, cole slaw, baked potatoes, milk (the boys drank gallons each day), fried apples, and mint chocolate-chip ice cream. Nobody could complain about that. George disliked shredding cabbage, so, feeling kind, Kip bought a bag of pre-shredded.

She kept glancing over her shoulder. It was very strange, but she had a feeling that Molly had followed her here to the grocery. You knew you watched too much television when you began thinking things like that.

She had dropped Molly off first. Then she and Emily drove on to Em’s, with Emily oddly silent, gripping her towel like a life raft. “You okay, Em?” Kip had asked.

“Sure. Fine. Heat got to me.” Emily got out of Kip’s car and Kip drove quickly away to complete her family chores, get home, get changed, and reach the docks in time to organize the party for Con. She had promised to get everybody well hidden, so Anne would suspect nothing when she strolled along the river for a last view of Westerly.

Kip got in what looked like the quickest checkout line and which, of course, turned out to be the slowest. When she was finally through, she pushed her cart of brown paper bags out into the parking lots, her eyes flickering over the other cars, looking for Molly.

This is ridiculous, Kip thought. What would Molly follow me for?

She saw herself driving madly through unknown alleys, whipping down dark lanes, following narrow twisting streets, trying to throw Molly off.

Of course, Westerly was laid out on a grid without a single twist or alley, so it was an unlikely chase.

Kip was so annoyed with herself she refused to look in her rearview mirror the rest of the way home, lest she pretend it was Molly she saw behind her.

The party was Con’s mother’s idea. Con would never have thought of it himself, and once his mother mentioned it, Con wanted to ignore her. “I don’t want to give her a party,” Con protested. “I’m so mad at her, I’d rather—”

Well, he could hardly tell his own mother he would rather kill Anne than give her a party. He turned his back on his mother instead and stared out through a broken window into a side yard. They had been in this latest house only ten days, and remodeling had hardly begun. Anne had not been here yet. Now she never would. At the rate Con’s mother bought, fixed up, and sold at a profit the old Victorian houses that were scattered around the city of Westerly, the Winters would be living in yet another one by the time Anne returned from seeing the world.

If Anne returned.

If she could be bothered to telephone Con once she did.

“Now, now. You two have been dating steadily since you were in junior high,” Con’s mother said. She put aside the memory of the days when they dated others or the long, sad stretch when Anne was (as the four parents referred to it) Out Of Town.

“That’s right,” said Con huffily, “and Anne shouldn’t be dumping me like this. And if she is, she should at least ask me first before she goes and gets a job instead of coming with me to school.”

“I don’t know how I raised a son like you,” said his mother, laughing. “A girl doesn’t need your permission to arrange her adult life, any more than you need hers.”

Con sulked. He was good at this. Usually Anne rose to the occasion, trying to sweep away his bad humor as if her task in life was to keep Con happy. This was a pleasant contrast to Con’s mother, who felt that if her son wanted to be in a bad mood, that was his problem, not hers. Anne would rush forward, offering distraction, comfort, affection, and homemade brownies.

Con liked being with Anne. She was invariably the loveliest girl in any gathering, and boys and men admired Con for having Anne as much as they admired Anne for looking the way she did.

But it was the end of summer. Anne was about to possess the world and he would be an ordinary freshman on a campus with nearly twenty thousand other students. He would have to fight for a place like anybody else, and hunt for pretty girls, and struggle for grades. At State, he would be nobody.

The whole thing was an outrage. If Anne just did as she was told, and went with him, he could continue college just as if it were high school.

Con’s mother went right out and rented the
Duet.

Rather than exert himself, Con sweet-talked Kip into making every other arrangement. Old Beth Rose agreed to run the dumber errands.

Con had a sudden insight.

With Anne no longer shining by his side, he, Con, would be the boring one. Like Beth, good for the dumber errands.

His resentment at being left behind filled his chest. Some party it would be.

And he’d have to act all night as if he were enjoying it.

Matthew O’Connor remembered once in soccer when he was knocked down so hard that hitting the ground whacked all the air out of his lungs. It was a strange, collapsed, deathlike feeling. No air. No strength. He remembered how the coach’s face swam above him and the air seemed thick like cloth and would not enter his lungs and revive him. “Is he hurt?” everybody had shouted. “Nah,” shouted the coach back, “just has to catch a breath.”

Matt stared at Emily, and struggled once more to catch a breath. She was so mad at him she had actually thrown away his ring? Like the paper wrapping of a Big Mac?

Her features were small and old-fashioned. He always thought of her as a heroine in a silent movie. It did not surprise him when she stalked off, got back into the car, and slammed the door.

He loved her.

He did not know what to do. The whole situation was like a math equation that would not work to a solution. It should be so simple. Boy goes to job, girl waits.

Matt got into the car with her. He was actually afraid to touch her, for fear that along with throwing his ring away, she would throw him away.

He drove mechanically to the dock.

How were they supposed to get through a party now?

Kip rushed through her schedule. She and the boys unpacked the groceries. George accepted her menu, and especially the pre-shredded cabbage, with delight. She hopped into the shower to rinse the chlorine out of her hair. She blew it dry, put on her dress, slid her bare feet into her sandals, and left.

Kip loved bare feet. That was the most wonderful thing about summer. Freedom of the foot.

Briefly Kip wondered if Mike would be at the party. He had been her first real boyfriend, and they had drifted apart, never quite becoming ordinary friends again. She really regretted this, but it happened to everybody else, too. If only when you stopped seeing a boy, you could still be buddies. She really liked Mike. It would be nice to be able to chat with him as easily as with anybody else. Maybe it would happen tonight.

She drove to the parking lot by the river and got out of her car. “Hey, Kippie!” shouted some of the kids already there. “
Now
the party will start! Kip’s aboard!”

Kip laughed with delight and danced up the gangplank onto the
Duet.

B
ETH ROSE HAD A
favorite, unnamed daydream. She played it continually and never tired of it. It was a game in which the Perfect Boy would show up at last, just around the next corner. It was a daydream never fulfilled, and yet always hopeful. By the end of a typical day Beth would have dreamed up at least a dozen situations in which this Perfect Boy could show up, but never did.

When she drove away from Anne’s, she headed for the difficult intersection at Fifth and Maple. She would have to stop at the red light there, wait through two or three light changes as she crawled through the summer traffic. This would surely be the day when a convertible—a red one—driven by a terrific handsome teenage boy—would pull up next to her—perhaps with a second terrific handsome boy in the passenger seat. Beth Rose would toss her auburn curls and wink at them. The passenger would be so attracted to her, he’d vault out of the convertible, not even pausing to open the door, and race around her car as the traffic ground to a halt and horns honked. He’d leap into
her
passenger seat, and kiss her, and Beth Rose would have found true love.

However, she arrived at the traffic light at Fifth and Maple and next to her was a station wagon driven by a grim-looking mother whose toddlers were invisible inside their white crash seats. The passenger side was entirely full of brown paper bags and groceries.

Beth discarded that dream and planned that when she drove up her own street, the house two down from hers would finally have been sold, and the family moving in would have a perfect teenage boy. Oh, heck, make it good.
Three
perfect teenage boys. They’d all be in love with her. Probably fight over her.

However, the
FOR SALE
sign was still imbedded in the grass.

Beth went on into her own house, dark and cool, to shower and change for the party. Into a carryall she slipped white jeans, an XXL sweatshirt that said
HARD ROCK CAFE NEW YORK,
and her bathing suit. She slid into her dress. It was pale lemon-yellow, sprinkled with confetti dots of white that were almost invisible. The skirt was tulip-shaped with lettuce ruffles. The dress was sleeveless, cool and comfortable, and in the wind the skirt filled and swirled and made her feel wonderfully feminine.

Beth was slim but the heavy yellow belt made her look positively skinny. She loved that. Her mother didn’t. Her mother said she Looked Like Death, and When Was She Going To Eat More? and did Beth want to read this little pamphlet on Anorexia?

Mother, Beth would say, I am not too thin, I love food, I eat enough. They would eye each other suspiciously and drop the conversation.

Beth thought forlornly about Gary. She would probably never be over her crush on Gary. Carry it to her grave, no doubt. When she was an old crone of eighty-six she would be sick and delirious, still muttering the name Gary. By then she wouldn’t have had a date with him in seven decades.

Gary would be at the party tonight, of course; he was a good friend of Con’s and always appeared at any party.

She and Gary had dated on and off for a year. Gary was drifty. Half aware of the world, not of the world. For Gary, graduation had been the end of torture known as school. Gary was already at work in his father’s restaurant, his adult life in place, and Gary was evidently pleased.

Doesn’t he want anything different? Beth thought.

But Gary didn’t want anything at all, as far as Beth could tell. Days and nights circled round him, and he enjoyed himself and that was his world. Whereas Beth was filled with desperate yearnings and overpowering hopes. “Like what?” Gary used to ask her.

“Don’t you want adventure?” she would cry. “New places? Different thoughts? New everything, from clothing to telephone numbers? More worlds?”