Seventeenth Summer (26 page)

The whole idea was so new, so unexpected, that I wouldn’t jar myself into comprehending. I had thought of college. I had thought of Jane Rady or of a new girl but never of something like this! “But why, Jack?” I asked in a small voice. “I thought your mother and father
liked
it here. All your friends are here.”

“But it’s just five years since we moved away, Angie. We have friends down there too, and my dad has two brothers and my mother has a sister there. It isn’t as if we were going down to strangers.”

“But why go at all?” I insisted. “You have your house here and everything. I don’t see why …” It was such a radical step, moving hundreds and hundreds of miles. Our family had never moved at all ever since I was born. People who live in our town stay there. It might be all right to go away for a vacation or to move a few blocks, but hundreds of miles!

Jack’s voice was very earnest as he explained, as if he wanted to convince me that it was necessary to move, that it wasn’t his idea, but I could tell he was just repeating what he had heard at home. “You see,” he said, frowning, “the bakery isn’t so good here. There is a lot of competition and we’re just a small place.
Down in Oklahoma my dad figures he can go in with his two brothers and really make a go of it. He’s been thinking about this for a long time. They didn’t want to while I was in school because that would break up things for me, but now I’m graduated there really is nothing to keep us here.” His last words limped out lamely.

The significance of what he had said seeped into my mind slowly, word by word, each bursting like a bubble into an inkling of realization as I stood staring at him. We had never talked about things beyond Pete’s or Chicago at the very farthest and now—Oklahoma! The idea was too big to fit into my head all at once.

He fumbled with the doorknob. “Well … I’ve got to get back,” he said. “I just brought some things home to my mother from downtown and I was supposed to take the truck right back to the bakery but I just thought I’d stop over. We aren’t going till next month though, Angie.”

He waited. I knew he expected me to say something; that I was sorry he was going, that I hoped something would happen to change the plans, anything at all. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t break down the shyness that always kept me from saying what I really thought and felt. It was, somehow, too embarrassing to be affectionate in the daytime and I couldn’t even make myself touch his hand.

His voice was hesitant. “I could have called you, Angie, but I wanted to see you anyway.”

“I’m really glad you came, Jack, but it’s just that I’m so surprised
I can’t talk for a minute.” Upstairs the bedsprings creaked as if my mother had waked and was tossing. Jack heard it too, and whispered, “I’d better go, but is it all right if I see you tonight?” I nodded stiffly and he laughed. “Angie, don’t look so scared! There are still trains and buses and besides I haven’t gone yet.” He shook me a little. “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

Upstairs my mother asked for a glass of ice water, and when I brought it I had to hold the glass with both hands to keep the ice from rattling. The bedroom was hotly stuffy and sour with the smell of vinegar, the bedclothes tossed and twisted. “I so hate to be a bother to you children, being ill this way,” she fretted half to herself. “But I do think I will feel better by tomorrow. It’s just the heat, I think.”

My lips trembled with soft words but we aren’t the kind of a family who loves each other out loud. “Wouldn’t you like to change rooms, Mom?” I suggested quietly. “The shade of the trees has been on Kitty’s room all afternoon and it’s so much cooler than this. I could put on clean sheets in a minute … ?”

“No,” she answered weakly. “Perhaps before supper, but I just don’t want to right now. I’m a little tired, Angie.” Her hands lay limp on the sheet and her head was heavy on the pillow, as if her neck was too weary to hold it up.

“Perhaps I can sleep again for a little while.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing I can get,” I urged, “nothing you would like to eat?”

“In a little while I’d like a cup of strong tea but not now …
Did I hear someone downstairs a few minutes ago?” she asked, her eyes still shut.

“Yes, that was Jack.”

“Did he want you to go out for a drive? Go if you like, Angie, I’ll be all right lying here.”

“He’s gone now,” I told her. “But that’s all right—he didn’t want anything—special.” There was no need to talk about it now. Later, when she was feeling better, and when I had had time to realize it myself there would be opportunity enough. Jack was going away and there would be weeks to talk about it.

“That shade could go down just a little lower and then I’ll try to sleep again. Make whatever you like for the children’s supper, will you?” and her voice trailed off. Quietly I fixed the window shade and smoothed the pillow under her head.

Downstairs again I kept hoping that Kitty would play out at the creek until suppertime. There was so much to think about, I wanted the quietness now. All I had ever known about Oklahoma was vague stories I had heard about people striking oil down there and a few scenes of desert, spiky cactus, and milling cattle that I remembered from Western movies. None that seemed to fit in with Jack. Certainly cowboys didn’t want bakery goods! Jack belonged in drugstores, swimming behind Pete’s, or playing basketball in a school gym somewhere. I couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. It struck me then that he hadn’t said
where
in Oklahoma he was going to live, but I felt sure it would be way down near the southern border; probably almost into Texas. There was an old
geography book in Kitty’s bedroom, I knew, but I didn’t want to look the state up; I didn’t want to know how many miles there were between Wisconsin and Oklahoma.

Jack came over early that night and dried the supper dishes for me. After that we sat out on the front steps. I needed to talk to him alone, even if I didn’t know what I wanted to say. The night air was warm and filmy, hanging loose around us like thin, black chiffon. Beside the front steps the pine trees were fragrant with the same cool spicy smell that lingers over pine forests. Yet there was a quiet lonesomeness about that night, a poignant stillness that made my voice sound small and hushed, hardly like my own.

“Jack, I forgot to ask you where you are going to live in Oklahoma.” He was sitting two steps below, resting on his elbows with his head back and his hair almost touching my hand.

“We’re going right back to where we came from,” he explained without turning. “It’s a pretty big place called Shawnee—about third largest in the state next to Tulsa. I went all through grade school there.”

I remembered then that earlier in the summer his cousin had mentioned a little girl in a white house who so used to live near Jack; a little girl Jack had liked. It was a white house with pine trees in front of it, his cousin had said. And probably it had green shutters and a broad back lawn, the kind of house a pretty girl would live in. I wondered vaguely, not really caring, if she were still there.

It would be a different life without him: I could feel it already. Probably I would slip back and back into the old self-consciousness that made even walking into McKnight’s an agony. But it wouldn’t do to have him know what I was thinking. “What are you going to do down there?” I asked. After all, we still had almost a month left.

“Well, I’ll still be with my dad, of course. My uncle has a bakery there and we’ll all work together. Dad thinks he can make a go of it.” And suddenly his tone was casually defensive. “I suppose you wish I were going to school some more, don’t you, Angie?”

All summer long he had talked as if I were ashamed of his not going to college; as if he were ashamed of it himself. He went on now in the same half-apologetic voice, “I’d like to, Angie—you know that. But I’ve got to stick with my dad. I guess I’ll have to get educated my own way.”

… Without Jack there would be no more Swede or Fitz and no more nights at Pete’s. All the summer days would slip by as they had in other years, not meaning anything.There would be no reason for sunshine or the tangy, fishy wind off the lake. It made my throat ache with lonesomeness even when he was sitting so close to me that I could smell the clean soapiness of him and could have touched his hair with my hand.

He lit a cigarette and I could smell the blue smoke I couldn’t even see in the darkness.

“Angie,” he said turning to me, “I think I’m growing out of the bakery business. I can’t tell my dad that—not yet—but it’s not
what I want to do all my life. He gets sort of a happiness out of it but I am tired of it already. I’m tired of sweet sugar smells.” He pondered a moment, with his lips puckered in thought. “There’s something … disgusting about eating anyway.”

Just as he couldn’t tell his dad, so I hadn’t been able to mention it to him, but I had never liked it, either—his being a baker. It didn’t seem right that a tall boy with such a fuzzy crew cut and smooth sun-burned skin should wear a big white baker’s hat and work with vanilla and powdered sugar all day.

“Have you decided what you would like to do instead, Jack?”

“I don’t just know, Angie. But I like to do ‘hard’ things. Sometimes I think I would even like to be a farmer. I still have some relatives out in Rosendale who farm—it’s good, clean work. Last summer I spent about two weeks with them and I loved it. I talked to the fellows about jobs to see what they wanted to be and that, but Swede doesn’t care much what he does and Fitz thinks he’d like to work in a men’s store—he cares a lot about neckties and things.”

He puffed at his cigarette. “I wouldn’t like that because I like to do things that make me feel big. I like to row a boat; I like to lift heavy boxes down at the bakery—things that make you feel as if you have muscles.” His voice grew louder as he talked about it. “I don’t know if you know what I mean, Angie.”

“I do, I do,” I exclaimed, surprised to realize I knew exactly what he meant. “I know what you mean, Jack—it’s like shaking rugs out of an upstairs window on a spring day. You can
feel
things—the air is cool and it’s good to have a grip on something. The feeling comes to you through your hands, you can feel it on your cheek—you can almost
see
what you feel, it is so wonderful. Is that what you mean, Jack?”

“That’s just it, Angie! You’ve got it,” he said in excitement. “I never knew that anyone else felt like that. I’d like to do work that made me feel all the time the way I feel when I’m in swimming—as if my legs are long and hard. I
feel
the way they
look
in the water.” He was talking fast and holding my hand so tightly that my knuckles hurt. He realized what he was doing then and both of us laughed.

“Gee, Angie, it’s a relief to talk to a girl who knows what a fellow’s talking about.”

He stuck his legs out in front of him, stretching and leaning back, looking up at the sky. The night was so pricked bright with stars, like a page from an astronomy book, it hardly looked real. His voice went on in a dream sing-song. “What I’d really like to be is a transport pilot, Angie. I’d like to take a ship up at night when it was as black as this and you wouldn’t even be able to see me. The tail light and the wing lights would look like stars and no one would know there had even been a plane up there at all till they noticed there were three stars gone.”

He was leaning back so that my hand touched the warm of his neck and his crew cut felt fuzzy against my bare knees like the fur of a teddy bear. “Way, way up,” he whispered to himself, “so the moon would shine on the wings.”

After a little while Lorraine came out. She had spent all evening in the bathroom combing and re-combing her hair, parting it first on one side and then the other, critically. Now it was twisted up in tight curlers and knotted in a big red kerchief. Her face looked very small and pinched with no soft hair fluffed around it.

“Hear you’ve going to Oklahoma, Jack,” she commented sharply, as she sat down on the steps beside us. “You’ve lucky. Wish I were getting away from this town myself.”

“He won’t be going away for a month though,” I told her. “He won’t leave until I leave for school,” and I felt suddenly reassured for having said it. If I could actually talk about it I mustn’t care so much myself!

Jack didn’t stay long after that—he and I couldn’t really talk with Lorraine there—but after he had gone we stayed out on the steps, thinking in silence. It was a night for thinking. I sat with my hand around my knees trying to urge myself into a belief that everything I had heard that day was true. Lorraine was picking apart a sprig of fir tree with her sharp fingernails.

I don’t know how long we stayed there, without saying a word, and I didn’t even hear her speak until she repeated loudly, “Angie, did you or didn’t you?”

“Did I or didn’t I what, Lorraine?”

“I said,” she repeated with slow sarcasm, “none of you ever liked Martin very well from the beginning,
did you?
”

His absence had been brooding silently over the whole
house ever since the Sunday of his birthday when he had broken the date with Lorraine and I knew the tension would have to crack sometime. He was the kind of boy that a whole family remembers and, often, wholly unrelated things would make me think suddenly of his hands and the odd habit he had of slowly flexing and unflexing his fingers as he looked at them and the perpetual soft sarcasm around his mouth. But Lorraine was waiting for me to answer.

“We liked him—of course, we did, Lorraine. Mom asked him to come with us on the Fourth of July picnic, didn’t she? And we always were nice to him when he came….”

She had been so quietly thoughtful all evening that I was almost afraid to hear what she was going to say next.

“You weren’t nice to him, Angie. You weren’t rude to him but you weren’t nice to him, either, none of you. But none of you ever understood him, that was all.” There was no resentment, no bitterness. It was just something she wanted to say and she was saying it.

“You know, you didn’t like him because he was different from us. He cared about different things and thought that other things mattered. That’s why I liked him. He is a big-city boy all the way through.”