Seventeenth Summer (11 page)

“What’s the matter, don’t you like him?” I asked.

“Sure, I
like
him,” he hastened to explain, “but Tony’s just one of those guys….”

He sat with his hands locked around his knees and said, “Let’s just sit here a little while longer and then we’ll go in and round up Fitz and Margie—it’s getting late and I’ll have to be getting you home soon. I’d like to talk to you a little more and if we go in we have to talk to Tony and everyone and I won’t have a chance.”

Inside someone was winding up the victrola again and overhead
the moon inched its way from behind a cloud and showed in glimpses as the wind swayed the thick trees. It seemed so natural for me to be lying there listening to the waves and it wasn’t surprising at all to feel Jack’s hand in mine. I wondered contentedly if my mother was still sitting knitting the yellow sweater she was making me for college, and I wondered with a troubled feeling if Lorraine and Martin were having a good time. My thoughts bobbed in my head as if they were floating, as if they were airy, impersonal ideas resting lightly above my more solid and serious thoughts beneath.

I wonder, I thought, what I am really thinking. Last week I would have known definitely but now everything seemed vague and evasive. Every time I tried to think clearly about Jack and especially about Friday night there was a warm feeling in my heart and a very pleasant confused jumble in my head. Lying there on the car robe, I tried to imagine what I would have thought last week if someone had told me about a girl who had kissed a boy the third night she had been out with him. I tried to turn my thoughts so they looked inward; so I could really find out what was going on inside my head. Lying very still, my forehead wrinkled with concentration, I wondered.

“What,” I said to myself, “will I do if he should want to kiss me good night?”

Just then Jack leaned over and said with a laugh in his voice, “Angie, Angie, what are you doing? You look so funny that at first I thought you were looking cross-eyed!”

The door of the screened porch slammed and two people stepped out onto the lawn. Jack sat up and listened in the darkness. Their voices came toward us and then a low, deep laugh, and Jack turned to me, his words twisted with annoyance. “Well, we might as well go in the house now, Angie, here comes Becker. I don’t know who the girl is with him but I’d rather be where the bright lights are when that boy’s around.”

The next week passed quickly. Each morning I woke with an eager, expectant feeling as if I had just had a good dream. The days were filled with the mellow warmth of sunshine and the air was fresh with the smell of green leaves and damp earth that comes with early summer. Jack called every noon at a little after twelve and his calls punctuated the day like periods. It surprised me that my mother never seemed to mind that I talked with him so often, though we might just be sitting down to lunch when the phone rang. Once after he called I happened to look at myself in the mirror and was surprised at the bright, wide-awake look in my eyes.

Even my thoughts seemed changed. When I woke in the morning and looked in the bathroom mirror as I was washing my face the thought might strike me, “What would Jack think if he could see me now with lathery soap all over my face?” or when I was puttering in the garden I might wonder, “Does Jack ever notice the queer, cool smell that comes from nasturtium leaves?” When I did leisurely things like ironing or peeling
potatoes for dinner I found my mind making up little stories about Jack and me, pretending that he had walked into McKnight’s while Jane Rady was there and that he looked at her and then came over to sit with me, or pretending that he had come to visit me for a dance at college and all the other Freshmen were so nice to me after that, thinking that I must have been a popular girl in my home town to have such a nicelooking boy come all the way down to see me.

One morning Kitty was out playing on the front sidewalk. She had taken her old box of half-used crayons left from school, laying them in a row in the sun until they melted to a pliable consistency, and then bending them into bright-colored rings or melting the ends with a match, sticking several together to make a bracelet. “Costume jewelry,” she called it. Every few minutes she came running into the house with excited plans of how she could make a fortune with just a few boxes of crayons by getting one of the local department stores to sell the crayon jewelry. Each summer Kitty is full of schemes to make money in a hurry. Once she had a lemonade stand that served soda crackers with each drink, and another time she had a route mapped out for the children in the neighborhood to sell the vegetables from our garden, door to door. None of the projects lasted more than two days.

Jack drove up in the bakery truck and was standing listening to her chatter that morning when I glanced out the window and saw him. I hurried up to my room and carefully
edged on lipstick with the tip of my finger before I went out to talk with him. That evening the two of us went out with his cousin from Oklahoma who was about twenty years old and drank more beer than any boy I have ever seen. He and Jack talked mostly about what they had done together before Jack had moved North—he and his family had lived in Oklahoma until five years ago and his cousin said something about the girl that lived in the white house with the pines in front whom Jack used to like. So Jack must have been going with girls, at least
liking
them, since he was thirteen! The cousin talked to me too, and said that any time I happened to pass through his state to be sure to look him up. I told him that since Wisconsin was almost walking distance from Oklahoma I would probably see him often and they both laughed and I felt almost pleased with myself.

Lorraine went out with Martin three nights in a row that week. I never knew when they made their plans for dates for he never called the house. She explained that she “ran into him” almost every day after work. He was rooming at a house not far from the Elite Canvas Company, and if she didn’t bump into him in front of his house she usually saw him having a Coke at the drugstore on the next block. Lorraine always said there was nothing she liked so much as a Coke after a day’s work and always stopped at the drugstore on her way home.

When I asked what they did when they went out, she explained that they didn’t go any of the places that the younger
crowd went like Pete’s and McKnight’s, but that Martin knew some nice places a little farther out of town—the kind of place he had been used to going to when he had been at the university. Each night she got in very late and I always woke with a start as the car pulled silently up to the curb with headlights switched off, so as not to rouse anyone. My room is at the front of the house and I would lie awake till I heard the car door close and Lorraine tiptoe upstairs and undress silently for bed. She always smelled of her own perfume and the heavy man-smell of cigarette smoke and went through the rituals of getting ready for bed in the dark, being careful not to waken my mother. That third night she sat in bed for a very long time with her hands around her knees, thinking. I said nothing, pretending I was asleep, and much later she got up again and I could hear the water trickling as she washed her face in the bathroom. The sky was already beginning to get light before she fell asleep that night.

Jack told me that Martin came into the bakery every morning at about seven-thirty for fresh rolls for his breakfast. He made morning coffee in his room at the rooming house but ate the other two meals out. “He gives you the impression that he’s a city fellow,” Jack had said. “He walks like he’s got on silk underwear or has a ten-dollar bill in his pocket or something.”

That week and the next were filled with such a new happiness that my whole mind sang with the sheer joy of it. One afternoon Kitty and I took our bicycles and rode out through
the Field until we reached the creek bank, and then along the water’s edge to the bridge on the gravel road, and I caught my breath at the loveliness of it. On the other bank a twisted cottonwood tree was shedding its white wool that caught in bushes as it fell, drifted with the creek or fluffed along the road, pushed by the breeze. Blue-bodied dragonflies hovered low over the stream, their gauze wings shimmering in the sun, and river plants laid their broad leaves flat on the surface of the water. Kitty leaned over the iron railing of the bridge trying to rouse frogs by dropping stones straight down into the water with the same full, plopping sound they make as they dive in. I leaned over the railing too, thinking of Jack with the warm, hushed feeling that came into my mind whenever I thought of him too hard. I felt the breeze brush my cheek like a soft hand and below me, under the water, I watched the seaweed ripple with the current like long, green hair.

We rode farther along the gravel road till we came to the stretch that is lined with slim, whispering willows. This is the place I had often heard girls talk about with giggles at school. Fellows like Swede or boys like Fitz who had steady girls always stopped at night to park on Willow Road. I felt almost sacrilegious riding along it on my bicycle in broad daylight. There were deep tire marks in the soft earth where cars had pulled in at the side of the road, and I had heard about how the police car used to ride up and down every hour at night with a powerful spotlight, scaring the parkers away. It gave me a
queer feeling, as if we shouldn’t talk too loudly even if there was no one there.

“Look,” Kitty cried. “Look. There’s a shoe in the ditch!” There was a high-heeled black pump half-stuck in the mud, the leather cracked and graying from the weather. What an odd place for a shoe, I thought, and all the way back I had a vague, guilty feeling, as if I should have known better than to go to a place like that—and as if I had let Kitty see something she shouldn’t.

It was almost supper time when we turned for home. The sky was still blue and the sun bright but the birds had already begun the usual contented rites of evening, flying from hummock to hummock and then circling high into the air with bursts of song. A low breeze hushed through the long grass, and along the roadside wild dill raised its dull yellow flower clusters high on thick stems and weeds showed the silver-gray underside of their leaves, brushed forward by the summer wind. As we turned in our own sidewalk, we caught the smell of pork chops frying and strong, fresh coffee. My mother had already begun to make the supper.

Margie called a little later that evening and asked me to walk to McKnight’s with her for a Coke—Fitz and Jack were going out with the fellows so she knew I wouldn’t be busy, she said. We had got along well at the cottage party and driving back to town she had remarked coyly, “Angie, let’s you and me
get together some night when the fellows are taking out their
other
girls!”

Fitz made a muffled protest in the back seat, something that began, “Aw, Margie, you know that you’re the only—” and I didn’t hear the rest.

My mother doesn’t usually approve of my sisters and me going downtown alone at night. “There’s something so cheap about seeing girls just walking up and down as if they were looking for something,” she always said, but in our town all the girls do it. They get as dressed up as if they were going on a date and walk slowly up on one side of Main Street looking in the shop windows, picking out what they would like to buy if they had the money, and then down the other side, and everyone ends up at McKnight’s to have a Coke about nine o’clock.

I had never liked to do it because I didn’t know any of the fellows and I could sit in McKnight’s for an hour if I wanted and no one would come over to have a Coke with me. But it would be different being with Margie—she had dated so many of the fellows and everyone knew she was Fitz’s girl now.

There was the usual crowd standing in front of the drugstore when we went in. The younger fellows in our town have a system. To an adult or to someone from out of town it would mean nothing to see a group of young boys standing in front of McKnight’s or on the nearest street corner. But I knew what they were there for—Jane Rady had told me before I had even known Jack—and all the other girls
knew too. These are the “checkers.” They are the more popular crowd at high school and every evening about half-past seven they gather to stand talking together with elaborate unconcern, while in actuality they are sharply watching the cars going by to see what fellows and girls are out together; they watch to see who is having a Coke with whom and to report any violations on the part of the girls who are supposed to be going steady.

It is almost like a secret police system—no one escapes being checked on. At least no one who counts. The checkers also keep their eyes open for new prospects among the young sophomore girls who are growing up and show signs of datable promise. They only watch out for the very pretty or very popular girls, so it is the most serious catastrophe of all not even to be noticed by the checkers. They were the ones who had spotted Dollie—they can start or stop any of the younger girls in town just by passing the word around. Most of them didn’t even know my name until I began to date Jack.

When Margie and I passed them that night she smiled very wide and said brightly, “Hi, there, fellows,” and they all smiled back with approval but none of them seemed to notice me at all.

“Of course they know you,” Margie exclaimed, when I mentioned it to her later. “Any girl that goes with Jack Duluth is checkers material from then on. Just wait. First thing in the morning one of the boys will stop in the bakery and let Jack know that they happened to see you having a Coke with me last night.”

Margie was using a very instructive motherly tone of voice, as if she were teaching me my catechism. “I always tell Fitz exactly what I’m planning to do when I’m not with him,” she went on. “He so hates to have the boys tell him what I’ve been doing before he knows it himself. You see,” she added comfortably, “Fitz and I are very much in love.”

We both sipped our Cokes slowly for a while, watching others who came and went. Margie knew almost everyone and said, “Hi, there!” to each in the same bright voice. Once two girls came in with a slow, hesitant air. They were palish girls, about my age, with their hair very carefully set in neat waves and very little lipstick. One of them had on flat black oxfords—and everyone knows that no high school girl should wear anything but saddle shoes or collegiate moccasins! All the booths were filled but they walked down the aisle between them, peering over the high sides, looking for a place to sit down. No one said hello or offered to move or to make room so the girls turned, talking to themselves very busily and giggling a little, and walked out. But their faces had a stiff, hurt look. I knew just how they felt for until I had met Jack it was the same way with me—except that I wouldn’t be stupid enough to wear flat black oxfords. Any girl who does that almost deserves not to have fellows look at her.