Seventeenth Summer (16 page)

Paine’s is a very plain drugstore with a bare, shiny front window all neatly arranged with well-dusted boxes of tooth paste, a special milk of magnesia display, and a small barrel of horehound drops spilled artistically in one corner. It is the reliable sort of drugstore which does a large prescription business and even the few Cokes they serve have a slightly medicinal tang. I was sitting in a front booth all by myself. The sides of those booths are high and the table tops of cold speckled marble give the back of the drugstore a dusky gloom even in the daytime. I was sitting not thinking of anything, just being glad that the Saturday housework was done and noticing distastefully how white and puffy my hands looked from having scrubbed the kitchen linoleum. My mind was so tired of wondering and worrying that I just let thoughts wander in and out as they wanted to.

And all of a sudden there was Jack. When I think it over now we must have looked very silly to anyone watching—as if we
were in a play and both overacting. He came in the door, whistling to himself and was swinging onto a high stool before the soda fountain when he saw me. Something happened to me then—a funny tingling feeling started right at the top of my head and went down over me in a quick wave leaving me suddenly very cold and wide-awake. I remember putting my hand on the bottle of turpentine wrapped in green paper on the seat beside me, thinking vaguely that if he should come over to talk to me it would be nice to have to hold on to.

“Hello,” he said, gruffly, as though he were clearing his throat. “Didn’t see you at first.”

“Hello, Jack.” My face had a tight feeling as if I had washed it with too much soap.

I had always thought it was something like voting, that you weren’t really supposed to start feeling with your heart till you were at least twenty-one. And here I was looking at him so hard I could almost
feel
myself seeing the clean, wet look of his crew cut and the familiar coarse knit of his football sweater, while my heart was pounding till it made my voice sound quavery.

“How’ve you been, Angie?” he asked, sliding into the booth across from me.

“Fine,” I said quickly. “Fine, Jack. How have you been?” and I tried to look past him till I could be more sure of myself, till I could put my thoughts out of my eyes.

“I’ve just been down at the Y,” he told me. “Swede, too. We
had a swim and a shower. I always take an hour off on Saturday afternoon. We’re rushed down at the bakery on Saturday night.”

And then suddenly we were all out of conversation. There was a long, awkward silence with our thoughts very busy in it and I looked at him with a small smile anxious on my lips. I had the feeling that I wasn’t really I at all but another person sitting in the booth across the aisle, looking over and watching.

“What you been doing, Angie?” He urged his voice to sound interested and I caught the cue.

“Nothing. What have
you
been doing? I haven’t even seen Swede around lately.” It wasn’t the right thing to say. He knew I hadn’t seen Swede. It didn’t mean anything. Here I was with just a few minutes and I wasn’t saying anything; nothing that mattered. Jack’s hand was on the table and I felt my own close tight on the turpentine bottle; I wanted so much to touch it. Sometimes my hands seem to have minds of their own. I wanted so much to touch him that for a moment there didn’t even seem to be a table between us. He looked at me then, straight at me, and I felt my eyes go soft.

“I’ve got to go, Angie,” he said quickly. “I’ve got to get back right away because Saturday’s so busy at the bakery.” He said it but he never moved and it was as if he had never spoken at all.

Something had to be said and the words were suddenly on my lips, without any thoughts behind them, tingling to be said. “Jack, Margie told me what Fitz said you thought about that night with Tony.…”

But he wouldn’t look at me then. “Did she?” and his tone was dull and uninterested. “Yeah,” he added. I didn’t know how to go on. I couldn’t say that what he thought wasn’t true when I didn’t even know what he thought.

“I guess I was kinda surprised,” he said with a half-smile, never raising his eyes.

“Surprised at what?”

“To hear that you went out with Tony.”

“Why?”

“Why!” He looked at me in an exasperated way, running his hand through his hair, only his hair was clipped so short he really just smoothed over it. His voice was tight and quick as if he were angry.

“Gee, Angie, I take you out. Everything goes like it did. That night at the dance and then at the cottage and everything. And I start feeling … well, how I did … and then one morning Tony walks into the bakery and says he’s got a date with you!”

And there was nothing I could say.

“Just when I start thinking, well, maybe it’s all right, Fitz calls up and tells me that Margie just called him to tell him that you’d called her and said that you’ve got a date with Becker and you’re even
proud
of it!”

He looked at me in a puzzled, hurt sort of way and his voice was almost pleading. “Gee, Angie!”

“But, Jack,” I said, “Jack, how was I to know? I didn’t know a thing about it!” I sat twisting a curl of hair round and round
my finger because I was trying so hard to find the right words that I couldn’t even keep my hands still.

“Honestly, Jack, I didn’t know a thing about it until Margie told me.”

“Couldn’t you
tell?
”

“No, no, how could I tell?”

“Just by the way he looks at you. And you even danced with him at the Country Club dance!”

“But you were the one that arranged to exchange dances. I thought he was a friend of yours.”

“Sure, he’s a friend of mine. And he’s a good guy too, but he’s just that way. And any girl that I go with that would go out with Tony and—”

“And what?”

He looked up at me and his voice was quiet. “Didn’t you, Angie?”

“Well, Jack? Honestly!” It was my turn to sound exasperated, but inside my head words were bumping together so fast that I didn’t know what to say.

“How was I to know, Angie? I didn’t think so at first, but then I talked to Swede and we both know Becker, and well, when you called up Margie to tell her about it and everything … how was I to know, Angie?” For a moment neither of us moved or spoke; but when I am very, very old I hope I can look back and remember all the wonderful things that went on in that silence.

“I’ve got the truck outside,” he said huskily, nodding toward the door, “if I can take you home.”

We took the longest way, the way that goes through the park and along the edge of the lake where the small boats moored at the shore dip in rhythm with the waves and the blue water is spangled with sunlight. And down the long thin highway toward the country, passing cars with their windows glinting with sun, to the curved gravel road with scum-covered water in its ditches, growing with tall heavy-headed cattails and slim purple iris. Farther on the air is honeyed with the clean, sweet smell of clover and the willow trees shake their varnished leaves till they glitter in the sunlight.

Jack drove with both hands tight on the wheel and I sat close beside him till we came to the place where the Virginia creeper stretches heavy on the fences and the trees beside the road grow thick and gnarled, reaching up muscled arms, and the fields, all wild with mustard plants, are yellow as sunshine. Jack slowed the car while we held our breath and listened to the whole air singing with the sound of insects and wind in the grass and the warm steady hum that is summer. And along the ditches the weeds were gray with the dry dust that rose in a cloud from the gravel road as we stopped. Behind us lay the town, lost beyond the fences and ditches, and ahead the whole country lay stretching yellow-green in the sunlight.

And the thought in my mind was as warm and mellow as the sunlight. How odd, I thought. How wonderfully, wonderfully odd to be kissed in the middle of the afternoon.

IT WAS HOT. IT WAS HOT
with the steady beating heat that comes from a bare sky and a high sun, still and glaring, that covers the whole ground without a shadow. It was the kind of weather in which high school girls go about with their long silk hair pinned in knots on the top of their head like scrubwomen, and little children splash in tubs of shallow water in their back yards and older people drag mattresses out onto airing porches to wait for a breeze in the still, quiet heat of the evening.

We were all hot. All of us. The soil in the garden was parched and hard, crisscrossed with wide cracks, and big brown grasshoppers, their wings dusty, were heavy on the bean plants and bared the green stems with their nibblings. Kitty pinned her braids on top of her head so the little ends stuck up like horns and rolled her slacks above her knees while new brown-dot freckles popped out on her nose. All afternoon the dog lay panting under the basement stairs where the heat brought the moisture out of the cement in damp patches like sweat that ran in slow trickles down the stone walls.

“Tomorrow we’ll just pack a lunch, shut the house, and go away for the day,” my mother said at suppertime. It was so warm that her thin dress stuck to the back of her chair every time she moved. “In all this heat I don’t know as I could stand the noise and the firecrackers for a whole day,” she went on, fanning herself gently with a napkin.

Art was there too, having driven up from Milwaukee with my father earlier in the afternoon—neither of them wanted to get mixed up with the Fourth-of-July traffic. “If one of us goes we’ll all go,” my mother added. She was irritated with the heat and talked with her lips in a thin, strained line. Even Kitty had noticed it and was being carefully quiet and polite. “All this worry of accidents and death tolls in the paper takes all the fun out of holidays for me,” and she went on buttering her bread with thoughtful annoyance.

“Angie,” my mother said, turning to me, “after we finish supper I wish you would hard-boil some eggs and put them in the icebox for the potato salad tomorrow. I don’t want to have a single thing to do in the heat of the day.”

“And Kitty, run downstairs and bring up the picnic baskets from the canning cupboard and put the dishes in them tonight.” She was fanning herself with her napkin again. “Dad,” she said to my father, “I wish you would take me for a short ride in the car—this heat is almost too much for me tonight.”

Lorraine had been eating quietly but now she put down her fork and ventured, “You know, I don’t know as I’ll be able to go with you tomorrow—”

“Why not?” my father demanded sharply.

“I have a date with Martie,” she went on, explaining carefully, as if it were all very clear and logical, “and Martie suggested that it be sort of an all-day date.” (She had been calling him “Martie” for the last week.)

“Well,” answered my mother benevolently, “I don’t see as that makes much difference. Having no folks of his own in town to spend the holiday with, he might as well come along with us. He’ll probably find it a pleasant change, too, after so much restaurant food.”

Lorraine was silent for a moment, feeling for the words in her mind. “It would be nice, of course.” She was toying with her fork, her eyes on her plate, and I remember asking quickly for someone to pass me the bread, just to edge over that silence. “But if you don’t mind,” she said, “I’d rather he and I didn’t go on the picnic.”

My father looked at my mother and she raised her eyebrows back at him, but it was Art who spoke up. “Lorraine, if we get home early enough we can all go out somewhere in the evening, you and Marge and Martin and I.”

“We’ll have no one rushing home from one place to get to another or spoiling the day for the rest of us. We’ll all go or no one at all!” my father said severely and left the table, thinking the matter settled.

Usually I agree with Lorraine about everything, but this time I
did
think she could have been more tactful. She knew that we all knew how Martin treated her. After all, he had just called at the
last minute and her voice had been all eager over the phone when she said, “Yes, yes, I would like to go very much!” No matter how much she wanted to, even if she had to sit home alone all day when everyone else in Fond du Lac had dates, just once it would have been better to say she was busy.

“Call him up, Lorraine, and ask him if he wouldn’t like to go,” Margaret urged. “You don’t want to spend the whole day sitting around in stuffy old … well … places. On the Fourth of July everyone likes to do outdoor things!”

“Really,” my mother put in, “it used to be that we could arrange things here without having to worry about individual plans.”

Lorraine put down her fork and burst out suddenly, “Honestly, I just can’t see what all the fuss is about.” Her voice was high and small with a quaver in it. Ever since Lorraine was a little girl she has cried easily and now we all looked the other way and pretended not to notice that her eyes were tear-shiny and that her lip trembled. “If he doesn’t want to go,” she quavered, “he certainly doesn’t have to, does he? … Martin just isn’t the kind of boy who likes picnics!”

My mother rose and began to clear the plates into the kitchen. “I suppose,” she said stiffly to no one in particular, “I suppose you’ll be wanting your breakfast in bed next!”