Seventeenth Summer (30 page)

He started the motor, turning toward us as if we had questioned him. “She said to call her tomorrow and she’ll let me know. I guess everything will be all right … Gee, I don’t know what gets into girls sometimes!”

No month of my life has ever gone so fast. Those last days seemed to slip through my fingers like egg white and I almost wished the end would come, for the waiting was so hopeless and so tantalizing. I did the housework each day as usual, sewed name tags on my clothing for school in the afternoon and tried not to think what would happen when those September days finally came.

Thoughts of September were on Jack’s mind too. We had Cokes together in McKnight’s one afternoon while my mother was shopping and he told me that his father had already made arrangements to sell most of the bakery equipment to a baker in Waupun. “My uncle has all the equipment we’ll need in Oklahoma already.”

“I’m going to give some of my things to Swede, too, before I go. I’ve got things in my room I won’t want to pack and I won’t be needing my ice skates, either.”

It was a warm afternoon and quiet. The druggist was dusting
the shelves, removing the boxes and bottles, and rearranging them carefully, humming softly to himself. Neither Jack nor I spoke for a few moments but we were both thinking the same kind of thoughts. He had finished his Coke and was sitting sideways, one foot on the bench, smoking. Even the smoke was slow and lazy that afternoon, curling upward quietly.

Jack turned to me unexpectedly and, as if I had spoken first, said, “But, Angie, I couldn’t have seen you much when you were away at school anyway!”

He stopped then and grinned, realizing I hadn’t said a word. “Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

His voice was earnest now. “I just want you to know for sure, Angie, that I don’t
really
want to go to Oklahoma….”

“I know it, Jack. It’s just … well, I don’t know … something.” “Fate” was the word I had been thinking of.

“I can always come up to see you any time and you can come down to see me,” he lied pleasantly, laughing at me.

“And over weekends you come up as far as Kansas City and I’ll come down to meet you every Saturday night,” I answered.

“Yep,” he said and his face was serious again. “Honestly, though, Angie, I’ve got four-fifty already that I started to save toward coming down to Chicago to see you.”

I felt my heart beat faster. “Really, have you, Jack? Maybe you
could
come up sometime then!”

“Sure, I could!” and he made his voice bright and confident, so confident that I knew he didn’t mean it himself.

“What would your mother and dad say,” I asked, knowing in my heart that he was thinking exactly the same thing.

“What
could
they say, Angie? I’m pretty old now. I do mostly what I want.”

“But they would want to know why you wanted to come back. It’s so far. What could you ever tell them, Jack?”

“Maybe I could say I want to come back to see Swede and Fitz.” He didn’t laugh as he spoke and I didn’t feel like laughing, either. With the end only two weeks away it was no laughing matter.

Jack crushed his cigarette out with a thoughtful sigh. “Don’t worry, Angie. I may not make it right away but I’ll get up here again sometime.”

Kitty and I worked in the garden for a whole day with the sun hot on our backs, pulling up the rows of overgrown vegetables and piling them in a heap in one corner of the garden to dry. The radishes had blossomed with white flowers and gone to seed, the round red radishes grown into long, gnarled roots, coarse and reedy. The leaves were rough and scratchy. Even the onion stems were thick and bulbous, topped with purple flower clusters. In the late afternoon we were finished, hands scratched and legs muddy, and we cleaned ourselves while my mother set out tea for us on the back doorstep. While we sipped at our cups Kitty was lying on the lawn, chewing a bit of grass. “Too bad you have to go away, Angie,” she piped up, “’cause we are really going to have a fine fire when those things are dried.”

I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard her, but everything I did and saw and heard seemed to bring the days nearer to the end. Along the side of the house, the earlier hollyhocks had dropped their last blossoms and the seeds in the seed pods were like round, green overcoat buttons. The first asters were out, smoky-purple and heavy on the stems.

Lorraine came home from work early, even before I had set the table for supper. “We didn’t have much to do this afternoon, so they let us out ahead of time,” she explained. “The summer business has slowed up so we aren’t very busy anymore.”

“I’m glad you came home,” Mom said. “It seems as if I’ve hardly seen you this summer at all—with one thing and another.”

“I know it,” she answered. “The first part went so fast and this last part is just dragging. At first everything seemed so busy and now it doesn’t seem as if it should be summer anymore at all.” I was busy at the open kitchen window and heard their voices on the back lawn.

Lorraine spoke again and her tone was cautious. “This afternoon I was thinking, Mom, that if all of you don’t mind … I’d like to go back to Chicago!”

My mother said something I couldn’t hear but Lorraine objected, “But she won’t have to come. Freshmen don’t have to be there till the tenth of the month, but I just
want
to go back early. There are some girl friends I would like to visit—a couple of them asked me to stay with them if I ever got to the city. And besides,” she added hastily, “I’ve got a lot of important reading to
get finished before I take my English comprehensive exam this year and I would like to get a head start—before the regular homework gets too heavy.”

At supper my mother told us that Lorraine had decided to go back. “Of course, I think you’re crazy, but if you want to, go ahead,” Margaret shrugged.

“Your father won’t like it, either,” my mother objected, “but I suppose it’s all right.”

“I’ll get a lot of reading done and having worked all summer, this will be like a vacation before starting school again,” Lorraine explained. “I’ll just take a few things and you can send the rest with Angie when she comes.”

“It really seems a little foolish to me…” My mother was still hesitant but it was decided. Lorraine would leave on Sunday.

That night in bed she nudged me, saying softly, “Asleep, Angie?”

“No. I’m wide awake,” I whispered. “What do you want?”

She was lying staring up at the ceiling, her arms behind her head, and she had been silent for so long I had thought she was asleep. “Guess what, Angie—I saw Martin today.”

I felt myself instinctively grow cautious and eased my voice into casualness. “Did you really? What did he say, Lorraine?” As far as I knew she hadn’t seen him since the Sunday night he had failed to call, and except for the night on the front steps she hadn’t mentioned him once.

“He didn’t say anything,” she answered. “I just saw him driving by in the car.” She waited a moment.

“He looked so nice, Angie. He went by quite fast so I just got a quick look but he had on that brown tweed suit of his that I always liked and his hat pushed way back on his head. He looked just like he used to look….”

“Did he see you, Lorraine?”

“Well,” and her voice was careful, picking the words thoughtfully, “I was just standing on the corner waiting to cross Park Avenue and he came up a side street and then turned down the Avenue … It was during lunch hour and I think he was hurrying uptown to eat. Angeline, he didn’t see me….”

Her voice was very quiet now and very empty, tired with lonesomeness. “He didn’t see me,” she repeated. “I’m almost sure.”

She caught a late afternoon train for Chicago on Sunday. We all went out for a ride right after dinner—so she could say “good-bye” to things for the summer. We took the lake highway out to Pete’s and I noticed that already the swamp grass along the road was turning yellow and the glossy leaves of the willow trees were a fading yellow-green. There were birds everywhere, flying low in the bushes and bending the tall grasses with their weight. Lorraine looked out the car window as we drove, not saying anything.

We passed fields of wheat, ripe and heavy-headed, honeycolored in the sunshine, and already long yellow feathers of early goldenrod grew in the ditches. There was a lush heat over everything; a slow, simmering heat that made you warm from
the inside out. “We’ll go for a turn around the park road. Would you like that, Lorraine?” my father asked and she nodded. I secretly hoped we might see Swede and Jack down by the boats as we passed, but the boat was empty, bobbing quietly by the dock.

Farther out on the lake sails tipped the skyline, matching the white of the clouds. We pulled up along the bank of the lagoon to give Lorraine a last summer look at the park and the water. It was peacefully quiet and water lilies like white wax floated on broad green pads, rocking on the slow current. “I never knew a summer could go so fast,” she mused. Near the edge of the lagoon floated a dead white fish, its sides shining like mother-of-pearl, almost beautiful in the sunlight. I heard Lorraine sigh a little.

“Dad, I think it’s almost traintime now. Let’s just drive down Main Street once more before you take me to the station,” she said.

The shops were all closed and the street was calm with Sunday afternoon quiet, but there were a few ears lining the curbs and Lorraine kept looking from side to side, very casually. We went from one end of the street to the other and then my father turned toward the station saying cheerfully, “Well, Lorraine, there’s your last look at Fond du Lac for a while anyway.”

“Oh, well,” she said.

I carried one bag and Kitty lugged the other with both hands, and we waited with Lorraine at the platform until the
train came and stood waving after her as it disappeared smaller, smaller down the track.

Going home we drove down Main Street again and though I looked on both sides of the street, noticing each car, I didn’t see Martin’s long green coupe that time either.

Fall was coming early that year. There was a queer sadness in the fact that summer should die so quickly, this of all years. Each day the freshness in the garden and the fields faded a little. The morning dews lay chill and frosty and in the evening long, quiet dusks came early, growing dark around the treetops while the birds lingered longer, with a strange melancholy in their songs.

Jack came over every morning, stopping off on his bakery route, and he called me every afternoon just after lunch. Once he remarked, laughing, “Angie, I never knew being in love took so much time!”

Every night we went out somewhere. Once when I was rushing through the supper dishes my mother came into the kitchen, the evening paper in her hand, saying, “Angeline, I hardly think it’s …” and she paused. “You shouldn’t really be seeing …”

“What did you say, Mom?” I asked, my heart pounding.

She looked at me a moment and smiled an odd, soft smile. “Oh, well …” she said quietly and went back into the living room.

For the last week she had been mending my clothes, tightening snap fasteners on my skirts and sewing buttons on my pajamas
for school. Newspapers were spread in one corner of her bedroom and she laid my clothes in neat, careful piles, ready to be packed. The drapes and spread were ready for my room and she was just knitting the last sleeve on a new pale-pink sweater.

“We’ll have no last-minute worries at all,” she remarked one afternoon and I realized suddenly that she meant what she said. She knew that Jack would be leaving just a few days after I had gone, but she wasn’t worrying about that at all. And I realized suddenly, too, that she didn’t know that that was the only thing on my mind through those last days. But how could she know? To me every moment passed with an awareness that it had slipped by and that time was coming to an end. But to her these last days really meant nothing.

When Jack and I were together neither of us talked about it much—it was a refusing to admit and a refusing to believe that September was only a few days away. But without saying a word, we began to do “last things” together. One night out at Pete’s the whole realization swept over me, coming so suddenly, startlingly, that it made my cheeks feel numb. All the same crowd was there that we had seen every night all summer. The air was still full of the damp cool smell of beer and the musty pleasantness of old wood, and the jukebox in the corner was still blaring out its nickel’s worth of music every few minutes. I seemed to see them all separately—the familiar town boys standing at the bar, laughing, and girls with long sweaters pulled over their summer dresses. For them everything was the same. Only one or two of
them would be going away. All the rest would be here night after night for nights on end, till outside the lake would be frozen over and the snow white on the ground and the tall bare trees creaking in the wind of winter. This time two weeks from now they would still be here. Two months from now they would still be here when I had counted out my last nights and rationed out my last minutes.

There were memories in everything. They seemed to hover in the corners and hang wispy in the music that came from the jukebox. They were floating like dust motes everywhere I looked. Swede danced with me once and he said softly, under the music, “Jack’s going to miss you, Angie. You’re a good kid—I’m sorry we didn’t get to know you sooner, that’s all,” and I had to keep my head against his shoulder so he couldn’t see my face just then.

Later Jack and I sat in a back booth by ourselves in silence, just being glad to be together, and we could hear the sharp voices of the boys in the front room playing cards and the muffle of feet dancing on the wooden floor, mingled with the music and the ring of beer glasses on the table—all the old, familiar sounds that were part of Pete’s. Sitting on its perch, the old parrot was sleeping quietly with its head lolling to one side and its tail feathers drooping.

Jack gave a little laugh, smiling at his own thoughts, and looking up at me, he said, “Remember that first night, Angie?”

I nodded and he laughed again, shaking his head. That’s all he said.

We decided to go sailboating one of those last nights and Swede went with us, but when we got to the lake it was dark and choppy, beating angrily against the boat as it rocked against the pier and sending high foam up over the gravel walk. The sky was dark and threatening and there was no moon. “I’d rather be a dead Chinaman than go out on a night like that,” Swede muttered, shuddering, so we all got back into the car and drove uptown instead.