Seventeenth Summer (14 page)

He kept watching me so intently that I found myself laughing in the wrong places and making small, uneasy remarks that didn’t mean anything. There was something about him that I didn’t understand. He kept looking at me with such a slow, lazy look in his eyes that even with the table between us it seemed as if there was no table at all. And you can’t talk to a boy when he’s not really listening.

It began to rain just as we left for home, sending little drops spitting against the car windows while ahead of us the highway stretched lonely and dark. We drove with the car radio turned low and Tony reached over and took my hand in his. We went
on in silence, he holding my hand lightly and me not knowing just what to do and feeling pretty silly, till he said in his same warm voice, “Are you cold, Angie?”

I was surprised. It wasn’t a cold night. “Why, no. No, thank you, Tony. I’m quite comfortable—and besides I’ve got my sweater right in the back seat.” He looked at me and then laughed hard, slapping his hand on my knee. He laughed so hard that I laughed too, and settled back on the car cushions, reassured. The music from the radio was soft and sweet and the windshield wipers were trucking merrily in the rain.

When we got home the storm had let up a little and Tony came right up to the door, standing on the top step with me.

“Would you like to do something Saturday night?” he asked.

My mind worked fast, feeling for the right, polite words. “I’d like to … I’d like to very much but—I’m busy this Saturday….”

He didn’t mind at all but just said, “All right, Angie. And thanks a lot for tonight. I liked being with you a lot. You know,” he laughed, “you’re a kind of
restful
girl to go out with.”

After he left I set the potted plants from the living room out on the front steps so they could catch the summer rain, while I turned over the odd thoughts in my mind to find out what Tony had meant. But I didn’t understand. Outside, the rain fell again in a quiet, steady patter and the air was fresh with the smell of damp earth and wet cement.

Of course I wasn’t really busy on Saturday night but I thought
surely
Jack would call by then.

Somehow when the telephone doesn’t ring it seems even more noisily present than if it is constantly jingling. As each day went by it became more evident that he didn’t mean to call. Every time I went into the dining room I could feel the phone on the corner table behind my back, almost as if it were someone staring at me. If it rang while I was upstairs I waited, breathless, to hear the mumbled conversation, praying that footsteps would come to the stair bannister to call up, “For you, Angie!” When I was washing my face in the bathroom I left the door open just a little so I could hear its ring over the noise of the water from the faucet, and when I was weeding in the garden between the vegetable rows my ears were strained with conscious alertness to catch any noise from the house. And as the end of the week drew near, each ring made that lump in my throat harder and heavier.

The days were filled with monotonous sameness. The mornings started out with bright, clean sunshine on the bedroom wall, the smell of fresh coffee, and my sister Lorraine at the breakfast table looking sleepy with curlers still in her hair. At first I tried to make myself feel glad that I was awake and that the morning was beautiful, and to keep the toast from sticking dry in my throat, and I tried to make myself care when my mother would say cheerily, “Well, Angie, today we’ll clean out the big spare closet,” or “Angeline, today would be a nice day to wash the front windows, don’t you think?”

Each morning was full of the pleasant drone of the serial stories on the radio and the usual little everyday tasks that dragged across my nerves in their routine dullness. When I dusted the living room there were furry night moths dead on the rug around the base of the floor lamp and the outside window began to be spotted with long-feelered Green Bay flies, those large, mosquitolike insects that sweep down like a plague for a few weeks of every summer. My mother enameled a kitchen chair white and set it on the back lawn to dry, and by night the paint was all stuck with their silly bodies.

The little boys next door found three dry peach stones one day and set them in a pan of water in the sun, waiting patiently to see them open, thinking they were clams. Kitty came in to tell me about it in her breathless, chattery way, but when I tried to talk to her the corners of my mouth felt heavy, and just moving my lips seemed too much trouble. I began to notice little things about her that I never noticed before—how her eyebrows turned up on the corners and the funny way she lisped when she got excited. I thought too how very nice it was to be young and not know about boys and things and still be happy about ice-cream cones and cutting paper dolls out of the Sears, Roebuck catalogues.

The days were beginning to get hot and the garden had that lush midsummer look when it seems that you can almost watch the plants grow. Early in the morning there were black and yellow spiders sunning themselves in strong webs stretched
between the tomato plants, and the tomatoes were hard, green balls with the small twist of dried yellow blossom still stuck to the smooth skin. Little bright-green grasshoppers skipped on the grass of the back lawn, and along the cracks in the cement sidewalk the ants were busy mounding up their black mudgrain houses.

One afternoon we walked to the movie and in the soft, cool darkness I sat trying to keep my mind on the screen and hearing Kitty beside me making noise with a bag of peanuts, while all the time my heart was beating with an aching throb and I kept remembering that the last time I had been here was the Sunday night with Jack. I could re-act in my memory the contented feeling of being so near to him and the warm, clean pressure of his fingers on mine.

And as each day changed into evening and Margaret came home from work full of talk about Art and the store, and the setting sun slid long shadows onto the lawn, a queer, tired feeling crept over me and through me until even my hands went limp. I didn’t even feel like a girl anymore. And all my thoughts turned into little prayers which I meant so much that it made me ache all over. “Just once,” I kept saying. “Let him call just once.”

Lorraine asked me to go for a walk with her one evening. Martin hadn’t called for several days and she had been sitting by the front window reading, leafing restlessly through the
pages of a magazine and glancing up quickly every time a car went past.

I knew why she wanted to go for a walk and I didn’t blame her. For the past few days I had wanted to do it myself. We closed the front door softly behind us and then walked down our street quiet and thick with summer shadows, till we came to Park Avenue. The night was here. Any small town is the same on a summer evening and slow cars went by one after another with their windows open, sending out quick snatches of music from the radio and twice we passed fellows and girls walking hand in hand, going toward the park.

“Let’s hurry,” said Lorraine.

There is something almost disgraceful about two girls, especially sisters, even going out for a walk alone when other girls have dates, so we turned off the avenue as soon as we could onto a side street, a street with heavy trees and lampposts only twice in the block.

I wish now I could have said something to Lorraine. Something quick and bright with happiness in it. If I could have said the right things that night, her whole summer, her whole life might have been different. But there was a certain wordless pride that kept us both from talking. I couldn’t admit, even though I knew it was true, that Martin had only been taking her out because he was new in town and didn’t know any other girls. I had to pretend that I didn’t know that every day after work she walked to the drugstore looking for him and that
once I had heard her call his boardinghouse and then hang up gently when a strange voice answered. I had to pretend that I thought she wasn’t going out with him just because she didn’t care to and that it was
she
who was turning
him
down. I had to pretend all that, and go along in silence as if we were just out for an ordinary walk because we were sisters and because when we were younger we played tag together and never argued over paper dolls or tattletaled about each other and it was the same now.

She didn’t mention where we were going but I knew where Martin roomed. Most of the houses on his street were already sound asleep but some still had low floor lamps shining through their eyes. “Let’s cross over to the other side, Angie,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t want him to see me if he should happen to be outside.”

We walked softly on padded feet with the street lamps making heavy summer shadows from the old trees on the sidewalk. A quick cat jumped silently from the bushes and then, as suddenly, was nothing in the darkness. We went on until we were directly across the street from where Martin lived but the boardinghouse was quiet, its window shades pulled down like eyelids, and there was no green coupe pulled up at the curb. Lorraine said nothing at all but we both knew he wasn’t at home.

The night was thick about us and the tree leaves whispered and small gnats made a moving fuzz around the streetlights. At
the next corner we turned back automatically toward the avenue and out of the quietness of our thoughts, my sister said suddenly, “Angie, tell me—do you and Jack ever
neck?
”

She startled me and I could feel my face flush warm in the darkness. Necking was one of those words that everyone knew about but never said. I was embarrassed into confusion—Lorraine and I never talked about things like that.

“Do you mean have I—have I ever
kissed
him?” I asked and the words felt slow and awkward on my lips. And the night silence was pregnant with thoughts.

“No, no,” she answered, her voice impatient. I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. “I mean—you know what I mean. Do you ever
neck?
”

I didn’t really know, I told her, stumbling over the words. I wasn’t sure just what she meant … and something inside of me, panicky, kept hoping she wouldn’t say the word again.

“Well, Angie, I’ve talked with girls at school, smooth girls, and they all … well, if you go out with a fellow a few times … it isn’t as if you have to be … You know how it is, Angie!”

There was something in her voice that was asking me to answer but I didn’t know what it was that she wanted me to say. There was something in her voice that was saying so much more than the words themselves, an odd pleading that didn’t fit with the words at all.

“Things are different now from the way they used to be,” she went on urgently. “People don’t think anything of it anymore …
I mean, if it’s only one boy you’re going with and that sort of thing. It isn’t like it used to be when you had to be almost engaged … now
everybody
does it and nobody thinks … you know what I mean …”

Her voice trailed off and she was looking at me hard in the darkness, waiting and I had to say something. I had to say something to get that worried, twisted sound out of her voice. I knew how she felt. She was thinking just as I was. There were little warm thoughts in her mind like soft fur, just as in mine: there were thoughts that made her lips tremble and set a quiet, steady, beating in her throat when the gentleness of the summer night touched her cheek and the air was fragrant with the smell of flowers hidden in the darkness. I knew how she felt.

And suddenly I remembered how it was when we were still little girls and I wanted to reach out to touch her hand as we walked. “It’s all right,” I told her gently. “It’s all right, Lorraine. If you really like a boy—it’s all right to kiss him.”

She went along in silence for a few moments, brushing close against the bushes, letting the cool, dark leaves touch her arm. “Angie, you don’t understand,” she said, wearily. “You don’t understand at all.” And there was no reproach in her voice. “You don’t even know what I mean!”

I raked over that last evening with him carefully, looking for a sentence or even a word that could have made him angry,
quickly skipping over the parts that were so lovely that it hurt to remember. And it wasn’t because I had gone out with Tony. That was silly, too. After all we weren’t going steady. Just because you’ve kissed a boy doesn’t mean you’re going steady. That’s silly, I told myself, but a little doubt dragged behind and stayed heavy in my mind.

The night after I had been out with Lorraine, Kitty and I took the dog for a walk. It was late and Kitty came pattering downstairs in her nightgown when she heard me open the front door; and though I would rather have been alone, I let her come with me. The dog walked on silent paws, disappearing in the shadow of bushes and coming out again in the patches where the moonlight lay light on the ground; while Kitty walked beside me, her bare feet making a padding noise on the cement sidewalk.

The night seemed to be deliberately hurting me with its lush loveliness. There was no need for the air to be so soft and fragrant just then nor for the crickets to keep up their steady chant that blended with my thoughts till it was no sound at all. Why, I thought, do night moths rise up like small white ghosts from the grass and why are the trees so full of whispers? Why do I keep remembering the smell of pipe smoke that you can’t even see, pungent in the night air, and that small, warm silence when someone is near you? Am I supposed to stand this? Am I supposed to go in the house and put the dog in the basement for the night and go into the living room and talk to
my mother as if everything was the same as always? Am I supposed to keep my lips moving with small weekday words when my throat aches with longing and my mind keeps remembering that the night is breathless and the moon is looking through the trees, making silent shadows on the grass? It wasn’t fair that everything was so full of loveliness and remembering, so full of everything I wanted. I wasn’t old enough to have to stand all this.