Seventeenth Summer (8 page)

At first neither of us spoke but sat feeling the softness of the breeze and watching the fireflies winking in the grass, while from the clubhouse music floated out to us, muted by the almost tangible stillness of the night. Jack lit a cigarette and in the match glow I saw his face, so young and clean, and the sheer joy of just being with him made me shiver a little. He smoked in silence for a time and then, turning to me, said unexpectedly, almost as if he relished the words, “Everyone I introduced you to tonight liked you, Angie. A couple of the fellows are mad that they didn’t find you first.” I didn’t say anything but sat looking at the moon—by squinting my eyes I could make it shoot out into long yellow jags of light.

“Swede told me he saw you out looking at the boat the other day,” he went on. I still made no comment. He was puffing out the smoke from his cigarette thoughtfully, watching it in the air as it floated into nothingness. All around us the crickets were keeping up a steady cheep-cheep, so constant that after a while it was no sound at all, just a rhythm keeping time to the faster beating of my heart. Then without looking at me, without turning his head, Jack asked, “Why, Angie?” The night was so quiet that the words seemed to stand still in midair, echoing over and over softly till at last they faded away. Why? I could hear my
thoughts brushing past each other in my head, none of them coherent enough to be spoken. There were no words for an answer. I felt Jack’s hand on mine as it lay on the grass, his fingers warm and hesitant. He flipped his cigarette away and together we watched the stub glowing until it burned itself out in the grass.

Really I don’t know how it happened. If I could tell you I would. Maybe I shouldn’t even mention it, seeing it was only the third time I had been out with him. But I knew it was going to happen, and I wanted it to.

It was wonderfully strange knowing even before he moved, even before he put his arm around me, that he would. It gave me a new sense of power to think that from the very beginning of the evening—at least, from the first dance—I knew this would happen.

Then suddenly, and yet it wasn’t sudden at all, I remember myself with both hands pressed against the gabardine of his coat so hard that I could feel the roughness of the cloth. My head seemed to be throbbing wildly and still I was thinking very clearly and precisely. Behind him I could see the high stars and the golf course stretched out silver-green in the moonlight and the fireflies flickering in the grass like bits of neon lighting. I felt a new, breathless caution as if I were sitting in a bubble. And then, I, Angie Morrow, who had never done anything like this before, who until last Monday night had never even had a real date, could feel his cheek on mine,
as warm and soft as peach fuzz. And I knew if I moved my face just a little, just a very little….

In the movies they always shut their eyes but I didn’t. I didn’t think of anything like that, though I do remember a quick thought passing through my mind again about how much he smelled like Ivory soap when his face was so close to mine. In the loveliness of the next moment I think I grew up. I remember that behind him was the thin, yellow arc of moon, turned over on its back, and I remember feeling my hands slowly relax on the rough lapels of his coat. Sitting on the cool grass in my new sprigged dimity with the little blue and white bachelor’s buttons pinned in my hair, Jack kissed me and his lips were as smooth and baby-soft as a new raspberry.

The night was so still I hardly noticed the small breeze that brushed past us, as soft and silent as a pussy willow.

That’s the funny thing about Fond du Lac. It isn’t such a small town—we have at least eight churches, three theaters, and a YMCA—but everyone seems to know everything about everyone else. Early Saturday morning Mrs. Callahan called over from her back garden to my mother who was cutting flowers, “Did Angie have a nice time at the dance last night?” and then I saw her walking up her garden path and my mother walking down ours to talk it over.

At noon I heard Margaret on the phone saying, “Why, yes. She had very much fun. He’s rather young but nice, I think.
She’s been out with him a couple of times before.” Everyone seemed to know.

Probably if I’d walked into McKnight’s that afternoon girls I had never even met would look up and say to each other, “That’s the girl Jack Duluth has been taking out!” It’s funny what a boy can do. One day you’re nobody and the next day you’re the girl that some fellow goes with and the other fellows look at you harder and wonder what you’ve got and wish that they’d been the one to take you out first. And the girls say hello and want you to walk down to the drugstore to have Cokes with them because the boy who likes you might come along and he might have other boys with him. Going with a boy gives you a new identity—especially going with a fellow like Jack Duluth.

Lorraine and I were talking about it the night after the dance. Jack works late Saturday nights so I hadn’t even hoped to see him. Kitty goes to bed by seven-thirty and Lorraine and I were alone. “It’s different when you go away to school,” she had said to me. “You seem to have a broader outlook. Most of the girls in town here have nothing to think about but fellows—they just get out of high school, work in the dime store or something for a year or two, and then get married. They don’t have anything else to think about!”

She was sitting in her flowered seersucker house coat with her hair twisted in curlers. It was only half dark outside and we were in the living room with the lights off, listening to the radio and enjoying the stillness of the house. I wasn’t really listening
to her—warm, slow thoughts of last night kept brushing through my mind and sending tingles up my spine. “You know,” Lorraine went on, “there are girls who graduated with me from high school who have babies two or three years old already and I’m not even through college!”

I didn’t quite get the connection but didn’t want to say so. By not listening hard I thought maybe I had missed the first part. “Like my date last night,” she continued.

“What about him?” I asked.

“Well, lots of girls in this town would be crazy to go out with him.” I looked at her to see if she was really serious—Lorraine doesn’t usually talk that way. “But,” she went on, “I don’t even care if I see him again or not. He’s a good dancer and everything but I’ve just got other things to do. Of course,” she added with condescension, “it was nice of Art to bring him up, but it wasn’t as if I had to have a date—it’s such a short time since I was in Chicago and I know boys down there….”

We sat saying nothing for a while, me thinking about Jack and she thinking about I don’t know what. Occasionally a car went down the street past the house, its headlights making a sweep of light before it. The dog, Kinkee, came into the living room and stretched out on the rug, settling her nose on her paws with a contented sigh. Lorraine reached over and twisted the radio dial to dance music. “You know,” she said suddenly with unexpected emphasis, “there is nothing I dislike so much as girls who are boy crazy!”

A little later the telephone rang and she answered. At first I couldn’t tell what she was talking about, catching only snatches of the conversation: “How tall did you say?” “Where will we go?” and “Who else will be along?” and then she came back into the living room very excited and already twisting the curlers out of her hair. It was a blind date, she told me, and her words were jumbled with excitement—a friend of a friend of one of the girls she knew. He was a little older; he graduated from the university about six years ago; he was a fraternity man but she couldn’t remember which one; he was now in town working with an insurance company and he wasn’t too tall but tall enough!

“He wouldn’t have been looking for a date this late on a Saturday night but he’s new in town and doesn’t know many girls yet,” she explained carefully. “We’re not going anywhere special—just dance somewhere or something.” She snapped off the radio and said, “Come on with me, Angie, and help me decide what to wear—I want to look nice.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, watching her. After she powdered her face she stood in front of the mirror with her eyes opened very wide as if she was amazed at something and put vaseline on her eyelashes. Her lipstick she put on with a brush—a small, pointed one like the kind that came in the tin boxes of paints we used in grade school. She talked to me with hairpins in her mouth as she fixed her hair. It had been dampened when she put the curlers in and now the curls weren’t quite dry so she combed
them out into a fluff, curled it all around her finger, and then combed it out into a fluff again.

“You know,” she said through hairpins, “if he went to the university he is probably a smooth boy—probably drinks Scotch and things. I wish I knew what kind of girls he likes. I don’t know if I should pretend I’m the real intelligent type or pretend I’m sophisticated and have been around. It’s different,” she added, “with a town boy who knows all about you. Like with you and Jack—he knows that you’ve never gone with another fellow anyway.”

I’d never thought of “pretending” with a boy. I’d thought either you had been around or you hadn’t, either you were the intelligent type or you weren’t. Lorraine talked as if she were dressing up a paper doll.

I had meant to tell her about Jack right away. When something as important as that happens to a girl she ought to tell someone. But the words were hard to pick. Every statement I figured out seemed to require a “so what?” answer. What if I did like Jack, she might say. What did I expect to do—dislike him?

The date came before she was ready so I opened the front door for him and asked him to come in and sit down. He wasn’t very tall and when he smiled only his lips moved, as if his eyes were thinking of something else. He introduced himself very politely, saying he was Martin Keefe and how was I tonight. He said it nicely enough, but the way he looked at me made me feel
like one of those pale, eyelashless girls used in advertisements to sell mascara. Lorraine didn’t come downstairs at once.

He took out a cigarette and tapped it on the back of his hand, lit it, and then sat there holding the burnt match end. We have no ash trays in our living room. None of us girls is supposed to smoke and my father gave it up years ago. I went into the kitchen and brought him a little crystal saucedish to use. “Thanks,” he said in a half-angry tone and then added abruptly, “What grade you in in school?” I explained that I had just graduated last week and he nodded in an approving sort of way without even listening and said, “Well. Do you like school?” I assured him I did though I had found senior chemistry a little hard and he answered vaguely, “Good. Everybody should like school. Is that a picture of your sister on the piano?”

It was Margaret’s picture he was talking about, taken one day when she was nineteen and someone had just told her that she looked like Merle Oberon. She had posed with her eyebrows arched and her lips pursed a little, with a very ethereal, faraway look on her face. Martin looked at it a moment and then walked around the room, stopping to examine the things on the knickknack shelf. He picked up a carved wooden Indian head with a worn, brown face.

“Real Indian stuff?” he asked. “Ever been way up North? Can pick this stuff up for nothing. Round the reservations it practically grows on trees. It’s nice to have around though if it’s a novelty to you.”

It was disconcerting to have him pacing up and down as if I weren’t even there, so just to make conversation I said, “Do you like living in Fond du Lac? It’s a nice town when you get to know the people.”

“I don’t live here, you know,” he told me with unnecessary emphasis. “And I don’t know anybody except a few fellows I’ve met around and that girl your sister knows. Maybe I’ll like it here and maybe I won’t. You can never tell if a town’s any good until you’ve been out in it on a Saturday night.” He sat down on the edge of the davenport, pulling his trousers up carefully at the knee before he crossed his legs. As if it were a sudden thought he took a fresh cigarette and then, changing his mind, pushed it back into the package. He kept looking at his hand, flexing the knuckles, turning them over and over, finally laying them palms up on his knees. His fingers were short and fat as a girl’s.

Just then Lorraine came down, stopping a moment at the foot of the stairs with one foot a little ahead of the other the way models do. She had combed her hair high up on the sides, pinned in two sweeping rolls on top. I looked at Martin to see if he noticed how nice she looked, but he had just about the same expression on his face as when he was looking at the Indian carving. Lorraine put out her hand saying, “And you must be Martin Keefe. I’m so glad to know you.”

When they left she turned back and called to me in the same careful, bright voice, “Good night, Angeline.”

I could tell by the way she said it that Lorraine had decided to be the sophisticated type.

The next morning was Sunday and Sunday is always almost the same at our house. After church in the morning we had a very late and very large bacon-and-egg breakfast and waited for Art, the boy Margaret is going to marry, to drive up from Milwaukee. He came just after breakfast, shaking hands with my father and kissing us all on the cheeks as he always does. He is a big, soft-voiced boy and his kiss always reminds me of a large, wet marshmallow. Margaret patted him happily on both cheeks saying, “Hello there, Arthur, you fat-faced one. You haven’t written to me since Thursday!”

Kitty spent most of the morning on the living-room rug with the funny papers, while my father cleared all the sales circulars out from the back seat of his car onto the front lawn, swept the floor and the seat with a whisk broom, shined the windshield and polished the headlights, and then put all the circulars back in neat piles. My father is a traveling salesman and his car is as important as his house to him. Every Sunday after church he takes off his coat and tie and goes out to straighten it. It is all part of the contented, weekend ritual, and he puffed and blew as he worked, bustling with importance while he polished the windshield till his neck was red with exertion. Then he stood back with the chamois cloth in his hand to admire it. My mother sat by the living-room window watching and we all
laughed to ourselves, for we knew that by next weekend the car would be as dusty and untidy as ever.