Seventeenth Summer (27 page)

Her words were hurrying out now, one after another and I could tell it was almost a relief to her to be talking. “I learned things from him that I never knew about before,” she went on. “Lots of things—I know what it means when people are really
happy, when they are really alive. You all feel sorry for me—you and Margaret and Art—but I don’t care. I saw him lots of times when none of you even knew I was out with him!” she added triumphantly. “I can’t even count how many times I’ve been with him, it’s been so many. You will never know all the things we talked about and all the things he said. I know everything about him. I know what he likes to drink and how he smokes a cigarette and what kind of clothes he likes a girl to wear and how he looks when he’s angry—you all thought I just dated him like any other boy. You didn’t know he
liked
me, did you?

“And no matter what ever happens,” she said defiantly, “no matter what ever, ever happens; no matter what anyone thinks and no matter whether I ever see again—I’m not sorry!”

She was no longer talking to me. She was only saying out loud the things that had been pounding in her head for days and days and the words came out now, cold and calm, as if she knew very well what each one meant but didn’t care anymore. Sitting there, I felt oddly that I had never even known the girl; that she wasn’t my sister at all. Not now.

The moments were long and tense as if both of us waiting for something, somewhere to answer, to make her take back what she had said. And suddenly her hands were limp on her knee and her voice was slow and heavy, “Angeline, I don’t know why I’m pretending when it isn’t true. This isn’t how I meant to grow up. I’ve heard of other girls … but that isn’t how I meant to be. I don’t want to pretend … but nothing will ever be the same anymore!”

She sighed with a little tired sound and I kept looking at the stars, not wanting to see her face just then. And when she spoke again her tone was as dull, as flat as milk of magnesia, “Oh well, Angie. I guess it doesn’t make much difference anyway.”

We stayed there a long, long time for there was a soothing kindness in the wind and in the restful silence of the night and it was I who moved to go into house first. Lorraine followed. My mother had been asleep for hours and the house was quiet with the breathing quiet of sleeping people.

My heart felt so hard it hurt inside me and as we tiptoed upstairs Lorraine touched my arm, whispering, “Angie, don’t tell anyone I mentioned him, will you? Everything will be all right. I guess the night just … got me.” She laughed to herself. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever mention him again.”

It seemed only moments until morning and I woke with the sound of my mother’s voice calling. The fever flush was still in her cheeks as I brought her a drink of ice water and her voice was still incredibly tired. It gave me an odd chill in the early aloneness of the morning. The hem of the sky was just faintly pink as I pulled her shades against the rising sun and, shutting the door softly, I went down into the half-light of the living room. Sleepy-eyed and curious, the dog came up from the basement, her tail wagging slowly in a contented stupor.

Once up I hated to go back to bed so I made fresh coffee in the kitchen, deciding to wait up until the others waked. Kinkee nosed companionably around my bare ankles and then, lying
down in the corner, went back to sleep. Except for the intermittent hiccup of the coffee pot percolating on the stove the house was quiet, breathlessly quiet. I opened the window wide to look out at the garden, fresh, green, and awake in the early morning with the clean smell of growing things. The air was like crystal and slowly the sun came up, sending streaks of apricot light across the blue of the sky. The cool air seemed to go straight down to the tips of my fingers as I breathed.

It is odd how one can feel like someone else early the morning—bigger, cleaner, so much more alive. The dew on the back lawn, caught with sunlight, the quick twittering of the sparrows in the hedges—all seemed to be happening especially for me. It was going to be another August day, mellowed with sun; another day for thinking and feeling everything. It was wonderful and even the thought of Oklahoma didn’t seem so gray in the freshness of the morning. We still had a month between us.

The strong smell of the coffee, the wind coming in from the lake, and the very fact that it was morning, filled me with a new exhilaration so that I dared to let myself play with a thought that I had shooed from my mind for the last two days. Such adult boldness is almost sinful, but ever since Jack told me in the truck behind Pete’s I had wondered. But no matter how hard I tried to imagine, my lips wouldn’t say it. Love is such a big word.

Later that day I brought the stepladder from the garage into the house to get the two big trunks for school out of the attic.
Carefully I eased them, one at a time, out of the trap door in the roof, while Kitty stood below holding the ladder and chattering directions up at me. Both locks had to be fixed and I cleaned the trunks out carefully before sending them away with the repairman. In one was an old blue gym suit and a pair of gray rubber tennis shoes that made the inside of the trunk smell like old balloons. In the other were some papers of Lorraine’s from school—an incomplete chemistry notebook, a sheaf of English themes, and a dance program with a browned gardenia stuck between the covers. The gym suit I threw into the clothes hamper and put the tennis shoes into the garbage can, but the other things I saved for Lorraine.

When she came home that afternoon I asked her what should be done with them.

“What did you find, Angie?”

“Just some old papers, a dance program, and a withered gardenia that looked as if it might have been a souvenir,” I explained. She looked them over curiously, leafing through the papers, and then picked up the dance program. “This is from the spring dance of my sophomore year. So is the flower,” she mused, and then suddenly gathered them all together in a crumpled heap.

“Just burn them, Angie,” she said. “I’m not going to save anything anymore.”

By evening my mother was feeling well enough to sit on the back lawn in a garden chair, still weak and thin-voiced but her
cheeks had cooled. I asked her if she would mind my going out for a little while that night and she answered, “Of course not, dear. You go. Lorraine and Margaret will be here with me, and besides I think I will only sit up for a little while anyway.” It worried me to hear her, for I knew she was patient and soft-voiced like that only when she was very tired. She is more gentle then because she hates to bother anyone by being ill. There is almost a sadness about her.

Jack had asked me to go for a ride that evening and he and Swede came over together to pick me up. He came down the back sidewalk, his face flushed with embarrassment, Swede trailing behind. “I certainly hope you’ve feeling better, Mrs. Morrow,” he faltered. “Angie told me you were in bed yesterday and I thought maybe you would like this.” He had been balancing a pie very carefully between two cardboard pie plates and he held it out to her.

“I asked my mother,” he explained, “and she said that even if you weren’t feeling well this would be all right to eat because it’s lemon and there’s only simple things in the filling.”

My mother was surprised into silence but Margaret, sitting beside her, spoke up quickly saying, “Why, Jack, you honey! If that isn’t nice. I just hope there’s enough for a piece for all of us.”

He smiled sheepishly and Lorraine took the pie from his clumsy hands, bringing it into the house. I heard her open the icebox door to slip it in.

“Really, Jack I can’t tell you when I’ve been so pleasantly
surprised.” My mother’s voice quavered a little. I couldn’t tell if she were going to laugh or cry—sometimes she cries at the most surprising things. “Are you sure you and your friend wouldn’t like to have a piece with us now!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I didn’t introduce you, did I? Mom, this is Swede Vincent, and Swede, these are my sisters, Lorraine and Margaret, and the little one, Kitty, is out playing along the block somewhere.”

They exchanged hellos, Swede jerking his head forward to each in turn, and then there was an awkward silence. “Swede is the one who sails the boat so well,” I ventured.

“Of course, I remember,” and my mother took it up smoothly. “You graduated in June with Jack, didn’t you?”

Swede answered with a few embarrassed nods and a few mumbled words, smiling as if his face were starched. No one would ever believe he had been one of the most popular boys in the senior class last year. He looked so uncomfortable that I suggested almost at once that we leave and he sighed audibly, bowing to my mother with a hasty, “Very glad to have met you, ma’am” as he backed down the sidewalk. Jack nudged me and laughed.

Safe in the car, with the motor running, he soon got his confidence back. “Which of those sisters was which now, Angie?” he asked.

I explained that the one who had taken the pie from Jack was Lorraine and that the other one was Margaret. “That’s the one I meant,” he exclaimed with relish. “The one with the long hair and
the low voice. That’s what I call cute,” and he licked his lips in mock appreciation. “Boy, that’s something!” And his old swagger was back now.

Jack nudged me again quietly and winked.

Swede had a date with Dollie that evening and we had to cross the railroad tracks and drive beyond the river to get to her street. The house was gray and shabby and across the front ran a low wooden porch that sagged down in a mud lawn, pounded hard and flat as if children played on it often. There was a little red wagon across the sidewalk.

“Just honk!” Swede said. “Dollie don’t like me to come in after her.”

Jack honked the horn sharply twice and someone swung open the front door, bawling, “She’ll be right out!” and the door bounced back on its hinges. The top half was made of screening and the lower half was of brown cardboard, stuck in the wooden frame, and on one side of the porch was an old car seat, set up as a couch.

“Dollie’s the oldest,” Swede explained, half in apology. “There’s four kids younger.”

Just then an upstairs window screeched in its sash and Dollie stuck her head out and waved, “Be right with you, Swede,” and the window slammed down again. A few moments later she ran out, banging the door behind her.

“Hi, there, kids,” she said to Jack and me, and “Hello, you big
thing” to Swede, snuggling up to him playfully. Her face is so round and her mouth so baby-soft that next to Swede she looked like a doll.

“Is Pete’s all right with you?” Jack asked.

And from the back seat Swede shouted, “Don’t know where else!”

Long hot days and sudden rains had given Pete’s a stuffy, musty smell and shot new, crooked cracks through the plaster. There were still ribbons of red, white, and blue crepe paper twisted in the lattice around the booth, hangovers from the Fourth of July, and the jukebox was blaring out music that rocked to the ceiling. We took a back booth and Swede ordered a Coke for Dollie, lit her cigarette, and went out to the bar. “He always does that,” she giggled.

The old parrot in the corner was scrawking to itself, irritated with the heat, and the floor around the cage was littered with broken peanut shells, and the old bird swayed on the perch, breast feathers ruffled. It was cross and so dirty that we always took a booth as far away from the cage as possible.

Jack and I danced together once and then Swede came back from the bar, crowding Dollie into the corner of the booth as he sat down, nudging her with his elbow till she giggled at him to stop. “You old meanie,” she pouted. While we had been dancing she had printed her initials and Swede’s on the wall with lipstick and was coyly waiting for him to notice. She looked at me and giggled again.

But he finished his cigarette, flipped the butt at the parrot who scrawked and fluttered on the perch, rolling its yellow eyes in anger, and said, rising, “Let’s get out of this firetrap. This is the kind of night to be outside,” and he winked at Dollie. She drank down the rest of her Coke quickly and followed him, fluffing out her short hair with her fingers, signaling to us to come on. I guess she forgot all about the initials.

“We might as well go too, Angie,” Jack suggested. “We can take a ride and, if you like, we can come back here again later.”

In the car we turned the four windows down and the night wind came in, gentle and cool as water. Dollie sang as we drove in a soft, round voice as if her lips were pouted, and Swede joined her with a low boy-voice, improvising bass notes and joining in on the chorus. It was a beautiful summer night.

Jack turned off the main highway onto a dry country road that spat up gravel against the sides of the car and sent bits of stone stinging at the windshield. The road twisted before us, taffy-colored in the moonlight, and the moon shifted first from the right side and then to the left as we turned, laying shadows all around us. Dollie’s singing dropped off to a quiet hum and then, after a while, stopped altogether. We drove and drove and the landscape was weirdly melancholy in the moonlight, touched with a lonesomeness and mystery that eluded it in the daytime. The trees along the roadside showed a light side to the moon, but secretly shielded the quiet, black shadows that lurked behind them, while on either side the fields lay flat and open.
Something about the whole night made me want to whisper.

We were far out in the heart of the country now, lonesome with single barns and dark silos. Jack turned into a narrow, muddy lane, and bushes reaching out along the ditch brushed the car. The wheels caught in the deep, dry ruts and swerved to one side. “Jack,” I said, “let’s stop here.”

Without saying a word, without asking why, he pulled the car to one side and shut off the motor. Swede and Dollie were silent in the back seat. To the right was a broad field, spotted with dark bushes and rimmed with a line of dark trees. Behind them the moonlight was clear and mellow, sending long, lean shadows across the ground like thin fingers. “Jack, I’d like to go for a walk right now. Not far. Just out to where those bushes are,” and I pointed.

Swede sat up straight in the back seat and shouted, “You kids
crazy?
If I’d known you wanted to go walking we could have left you in town to walk round the park!”