Seventeenth Summer (17 page)

Lorraine pushed back her chair and went upstairs through the living room, being careful not to look at my father.

I was very glad then that Jack and I had only made plans to go to the parade.

All the town turns out for that Fourth-of-July parade, lining the Main Street from the lakeside park right out to the fairgrounds in a colorful, jabbering crowd. Kitty stood beside Jack and me, jumping with excitement and making cautious little ventures into the street, peering squint-eyed toward the park against the morning sun, and then running back to report on the parade’s progress. Big bass drums vibrated deeply in the distance with a steady, rhythmic throb, and traffic policemen, their silver badges shiny in the sunlight, cruised importantly up and down the street with small flags fluttering from the handlebars of their motorcycles, waving the crowds back closer to the curb.The red, white, and blue bunting on the lampposts was lazy in warm breeze, and shop windows were ribboned with crepe paper and draped in flags.

Lorraine had come to the parade with Martin after all and stood just across the street from us looking very pretty at a distance. Martin looked warm and kept shifting his coat from arm to arm and brushing his hair back from his forehead with his free hand. He hadn’t wanted to come. Earlier in the morning I had heard Lorraine say to him on the phone, “But, Martin, you just can’t live in Fond du Lac if you don’t go to the parade!” Her voice had that bright, brittle sound that always reminded me of Christmas tree ornaments.

I was glad Jack was the kind of boy who looked best in the bright sunlight. His skin was very tan, and the hot, damp weather
made his short hair crinkly-curled, and his shirts always seemed clean when other fellows’ were warm and wrinkled. Or maybe it was just because I liked him so well that he looked so nice to me.

From across the street Lorraine yoo-hooed and waved, pointing us out to Martin. He nodded and smiled at us with his cigarette still in his mouth. “Cheerful guy,” Jack said to me.

When the mayor’s car at the head of the parade came into sight, Kitty was so excited that she tugged Jack’s hand instead of mine and then, realizing her mistake, stood very close to me, giggling with embarrassment. The mayor was followed by the firemen’s band, and the heavy dum-dum of the drum was so loud that my whole chest seemed to swell and be beating time with it. After the drums came the firemen with their arms held high, tootling on their fifes, while between their shoulders their heavy blue shirts were stained dark with perspiration.

The air was full of the warm smell of buttered popcorn, the hot asphalt of the street stretched basking in the sun, and the pungent, exciting smell of firecrackers. Floats went by with slow grace, like huge elephants, fluttering with crepe paper and hung with flags, and Kitty studied each one with open-mouthed amazement and then turned to me in bewilderment asking, “Angie! Where’s the man that drives them?” and promptly lost herself in the excitement of the string of small ponies that came next.

Each summer holiday a traveling concession comes to our town, stakes off a wide circle on the green of the park lawn, rings it in with rope, and tethers its patient little ponies in a line,
waiting for the children to come with their dimes to pay for three slow exciting turns around the ring. In the morning the ponies were part of the parade, walking in a prim straight line, their hoofbeats neat and dainty on the hot pavement, and jaunty red and blue pompons stuck behind their ears. They always reminded me of genteel old ladies who, for some reason, had to work for a living but never quite forgot that they had known better things. “Angie, make Daddy take me to the park afterward,” Kitty pleaded. “I want to ride the black one with the little face,” and her voice went soft and her lips were all pouted up with love just looking at the demure ladylike pony.

“If he can’t take you, I will,” Jack promised and it made my cheeks tingle to hear him say it. I couldn’t have been more proud if he had promised to buy her the whole horse.

A girl drum major with a high, pouter-pigeon figure did a fancy goosestep past us, the thin satin of her skirt clinging to her legs. Someone shrilled a sharp whistle through his teeth. A titter went through the crowd and the man next to me guffawed loudly to himself, then looked around him quickly, trying to pretend he had just been clearing his throat. I looked away so I wouldn’t have to meet Jack’s eyes and he was squinting very hard at something down the street in the opposite direction. Then the rest of the parade went by.

Almost every business in town contributes something to our parades and a long line of milk trucks, freshly washed and spruced with their wheels twisted patriotically with red, white,
and blue paper, drove by; and after them came a string of ice wagons with slow, plodding horses that kept their heads down and their dull eyes on the pavement, while their ribbon-braided tails flicked patiently at the files. Little boys with smoking punk in their hands rode in and out of the parade, tossing firecrackers at the horses’ feet.

It was getting on toward noon and the heat rose from the pavement and the clear blue sky was as dazzling as the sun. Women in sheer print dresses stood along the curb, fanning themselves with handkerchiefs or folded newspapers, the powder white in the fat creases of their faces. Across the street from us a little boy stood in bare feet, shifting from one leg to the other to keep them off the hot cement, his eyes still intent on the parade. Men took off their ties and rolled up their shirt sleeves, while the sweat ran down their faces and their shirts stuck to their backs and Kitty put her hands to her hair, feeling the heat. Everyone stood around, talking and pointing and calling to one another across the street, with their clothes limp and their faces hot and shining but no one even thought of going home.

Part of the local American Legion marched past with little flags stuck in their hatbands, swinging striped canes and hailing their friends along the curb. Jack’s father went by and waved to us. I knew it was the first time he had ever seen me and I felt self-conscious, wishing suddenly that I had worn a better dress. One of the Legionnaires walked past on wobbly knees, swinging a yellow feather bird on a stick that made a high, shrill twee-twee
noise when it went through the air. Kitty squealed with delight.

The parade wound up with a few stragglers and little boys on bicycles twisted with ribbons of crepe paper, and the crowd surged out from the curbs, pushing toward their cars. Bits of red and green paper from the firecrackers littered the sidewalks and the hot air was tinged with the smell of gunpowder. Everyone was smiling broadly with the holiday excitement that takes over on the Fourth of July and with the round, exciting thoughts of a whole long warm day of shining cars, smooth highways, laziness, and full picnic baskets. Jack took Kitty’s hand and together we pushed with the crowd toward the side street where my mother and father were parked.

It may have been the sunny brightness of the day or it might have been the exhilaration of the band music, but suddenly I was almost giddily glad just to have Jack beside me and I felt that I should walk with my head very high and my shoulders straight. It was the sort of a day when just being able to look at people seems wonderful.

But it turned out to be an all-wrong sort of day when Kitty was bound to skin her knee, fat houseflies came buzzing in the hole in the backdoor screen and no one could find the lemon squeezer anywhere. After the parade Lorraine had said, “If we’re not back by four, just go without me—I don’t know just what Martie’s plans are.”

And at four-thirty my mother, fresh from her afternoon nap,
had lifted the picnic basket from the kitchen table and gone out to the car saying with finality and a “humph” in her voice, “We’re not waiting around here all night for anyone.”

Art muttered to Margaret under his breath, “What a fellow like him can find to do to pass the time in broad daylight …”

So we had gone on without Lorraine.

Even the air coming in the car window was warm as we drove, and the hot, white highway before us shimmered like running water. My mother and father sat in the front seat and the rest of us were crowded in the back seat with the picnic baskets. I tried to sit carefully, so my bare legs didn’t have to touch Kitty’s small, hot brown ones, and we drove for miles that tailed on miles along the highways and dusty country roads looking for old familiar picnic grounds; and soon the car was filled with the nauseating smell of hard-boiled eggs from the potato salad, so that I had to close my eyes to keep from feeling uneasily giddy.

Each picnic ground we passed was lined with cars and milling with men in loose-knit golf shirts and with little, loud-lunged children in sunsuits so scanty that their thin, narrow ribs showed. “Perhaps if we just drive out in the country just a bit farther we can find a nice place with running water which no one knows about,” my mother suggested. She was the only one in the car who wasn’t warm and her voice was calm and cool.

Cars rushed by with short, whizzing noises and even out in the country the highways were crowded. Every available woods had a car or two pulled up to the ditch and people had even spread their
tablecloths outside the fences where the grass was dusty near the roadside. Art, who loves picnics, kept urging that we find a place secluded and well in off the road—“a place with shade but no people,” he said.

Beside me Kitty was restless, squirming because the rough upholstery scratched her bare legs. Farther out from the city the fields of corn stood motionless in the still air, the leaves shiny as silk in the sunlight, and the trees were clumped green on the hill-sides like huge bunches of parsley. Wild cornflowers grew scattered on their thin, sprawled stems making a low, blue haze along the roadside. Once a flock of blackbirds rose noisy from a field as we passed, very black against the bright sky, and the whole country was stewing in a slow, heavy heat.

My father drove with one hand on the wheel and the other arm out the window, as if he were dragging it through cool water. We passed car after car and woods after woods till the sun slid westward in the sky and a long, lop-sided shadow of the car trailed after us on the highway. The heat filled the air with a steady, pulsing warmth that fanned our faces and made our eyelids heavy until even my mother looked hot and tired. “I think,” she said, “that there is no better place for a picnic on a day like this than our own back garden,” and it was so warm that no one even bothered to answer.

Once more we slowed up at a group of trees a little way from a farmhouse, but a long, lean dog ran toward us, yapping, and an irate farmer in a damp blue shirt looked curiously from around
the barn, so my father, without a word, accelerated the motor and turned toward town.

Back at home Margaret and I spread the lunch out on the back lawn while Kitty amused herself mournfully by pulling the yellow butterflies with torn shreds of wings off the radiator of the car and laying them out side by side on hollyhock leaves.

It was almost five-thirty by then and my mother sat down on a garden chair and balanced her paper picnic plate on her knee. The sun was still as warm as noon, but shadows were beginning to stretch their lengths on the ground and the leaves of the trees were restless with small breezes. “Wouldn’t you think,” she said, “that Lorraine would have the niceness to
call
and say that she wasn’t coming home for supper either? I don’t know why it is that no one can make plans here anymore.”

Art was lying on a car robe with his full paper plate on the grass and a Coke bottle propped up beside it. It was at times like this that I was glad he was going to be part of our family. He would do anything at all to prevent friction or unpleasantness and he said now in his odd, warm voice that always reminded me of soft suede, “Oh, I don’t know, Mom. You know how it is when you’re out. You just forget what time it is.” Margaret passed him a sandwich just then and brushed her hand with the long bright nails against his, very gently.

My father had never said anything about Martin. In the beginning we were all so glad, and a little surprised, that Lorraine had someone to go out with that no one thought of criticizing. It isn’t
that she couldn’t get along with fellows if she wanted to, I guess, but because she has gone to college and everything she just doesn’t like “ordinary” boys. Until now my mother had never criticized Martin, either. “But you would think,” she said, “that a boy who has his meals in a restaurant three times a day would be glad to have a nice, home-made picnic!”

Sorrow over the dead butterflies had completely left Kitty by now and she piped up, “Ah, him! He’s so old he doesn’t like anything. He never wants to catch my baseball or play with Kinkee or anything. I’ll bet he doesn’t even like ice cream!” and the edges of her voice were curled with scorn.

After we had finished eating I gathered the leftover bits of sandwiches and the half-eaten curves of watermelon that looked like broad, empty grins onto a paper plate, and then we all sat on the lawn, relieved that the heat of the day was passing and the cool of the evening was creeping in low over the grass. Kitty brought out my mother’s knitting from the house, all wrapped in a clean towel, but she left it untouched while birds twittered in the garden hedge and a light wind stirred in the trees. Everything was so pleasant that my thoughts just floated, light and elusive, in my head.