My Summer With George

by Marilyn French

  The upshot was, I didn’t learn anything about romance in college.

  As the summer of my sophomore year approached, my siblings spent considerable time on the telephone, discussing my future. I, happily immersed in physics and French and Renaissance literature, was unaware of this until Susan called me one evening and told me it had been decided that I would spend the summer with Jerry.

  I balked. I had not found Bridgeport even faintly interesting. Why couldn’t I stay with my sisters in Manhattan? Or get a job as a waitress in a summer resort? Susan said there was no room for me in the Manhattan apartment, I could certainly see that: it was one thing to bunk in for ten days, but three months would strain things. And sure I could get a job at a resort, but it was already May. You had to have a job like that sewed up by spring: had I done that? I had to confess I had passively done nothing, leaving worries about my future to others. I liked Delia, didn’t I? Susan argued. And Jerry wanted me to come. Jerry really loved me. Well, that silenced me. Because I loved Jerry too. So I packed my things and Jerry came and got me, and when he hugged me hello, I thought again how sweet he was. But he never talked, so spending time with him was difficult.

  Delia worked in an insurance company. She didn’t seem to mind my living with them. I suspected she was actually grateful for a little conversation, but she said she was grateful for my help with the cooking and the marketing and the dishes and the cleaning. Jerry left all the housework to her, just as if she didn’t have a job. I couldn’t believe this man was my sweet-natured brother, who had been so obliging to my mother. Not that he wasn’t sweet to Delia; he was. He just never lifted a finger to help in the house.

  Beyond that, he never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. He had bought a television set, and like Delia’s brothers and father, all he liked to do at night was sit in front of it. It’s true he was always tired: the poor guy went to work at four in the morning and didn’t get home until afternoon. He’d take a nap, then flop in his new reclining chair and eat his dinner from a tray table in front of that blasted box. Apparently, he didn’t love his work: his skin had turned gray, and he acted distracted. But he was mesmerized by television.

  Delia never complained about this, never got angry at him. I felt sorry for Delia, who was a truly good person. Of course, I also had a little contempt for her, because of my bad character. But I scrupulously followed their house rules. I never discussed Jerry with her beyond his preferences for dinner or sports shirts. I never brought up anything more serious about her than her weight or her hairdo or the new lamp she’d bought. I pretended to be a good person. I behaved as good people were supposed to in 1949.

  One afternoon, though, I slipped. It was a beautiful Sunday, and Delia, who never got out, begged Jerry to take her for a drive to Westport or some other lovely place—she couldn’t drive. He was sullen and grudging; he didn’t say no, but he didn’t move. He hadn’t shaved and he looked like a bum. Seeing Delia’s crushed expression, I exploded. After all, he was my brother.

  “Jesus, Jerry, what’s the matter with you? You look and act like a lazy bum!” I cried in exasperation. “You don’t want to do anything or go anyplace! You barely carry on a conversation! You’re a zombie! Delia works all week too, you know. She’d like to get out of the house on a Sunday!”

  Jerry looked up and fixed his brown eyes on me like bullets. “Oh, that’s easy for you to say, isn’t it!” he yelled.

  “What’s easy for me to say?”

  “You, you’ve always had everything! You don’t know what it is to be tired, to work and slave for other people and never even see them! You all got to stay home with Momma all those years, while I lived in a shitty rented room and supported you all! You all got to stay home and be together and have fun, while I was all alone! You got to go to college!”

  By this time, he was near tears, and Delia was edging toward him, sending me anxious looks. I didn’t know what to do: I was flabbergasted.

  “I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said finally. “I’m really sorry, Jer. But I have to tell you, we weren’t having so much fun.”

  His eyes flared, but then he dropped his gaze and a tear appeared on his cheek. Delia put her arm around him, but he pulled away. I couldn’t keep silent.

  “But if that’s how you felt, all the more reason to have some fun now that you’re not alone anymore, now that you have someone who loves you, someone who wants to enjoy herself with you. Instead, you hold on to your sadness as if you loved it, Jerry. You act as if you love your sadness more than you love Delia!”

  At that, he put his hands over his face and began to sob loudly. Delia was now sending me violent looks and waving her hand, urging me out of the room. I left, but I peered behind me. I saw her crouch down next to him, stroking his back and murmuring, and after a while he put an arm out and embraced her. Then I went outside.

  I spread a towel on the back lawn and lay down with Blake’s Songs of Experience, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking about Jerry and love and sadness. I remembered how Jerry acted around Mother, and how she looked at him differently from the way she looked at us girls. Jerry was always lighted up inside when he was near Mother, and she had a special tenderness for him. With us, she was hard, almost tough, as if she was preparing us for…war, really. For hardship. Delia looked at Jerry with the same kind of tenderness Momma showed; I wondered if that was what brought them together. But he didn’t seem to return it. Not anymore, at least: he used to. I remembered how he’d looked at Delia during the wedding, with soft, flaming eyes. What had happened?

  I closed my eyes, raising my face to the sun. Suddenly, I heard Delia whispering.

  “Elsa! Elsa!”

  She was standing over me.

  “So sorry! Were you asleep? I’m sorry to wake you, but I didn’t want to go out without telling you.”

  I sat up.

  “Jerry and I are going for a drive,” she said, smiling broadly. “Thanks!” she mouthed, not even saying it out loud. She bent quickly and kissed my forehead, then ran toward the house, turning back once to smile at me with mischievous complicity. Jerry had backed the car out of the garage; he had shaved. Delia hopped into the passenger seat, and they both waved goodbye. I sat there smiling, really pleased with myself I think that was the first time I had the sense that I had done something good for someone else. But I did it by being bad, by breaking the rules. So much for goodness.

  Jerry’s apartment was on a bus route, which was convenient for me. I took the bus to town to find work, and in a couple of days I found a job waitressing in a popular restaurant right on the bus line. I worked 4:00 p.m. to midnight, five days a week, thirty-five cents an hour plus tips. On a good night, I could earn five to six dollars, which Jerry said was the best money a girl could make short of going on the streets.

  “Jerry!” Delia protested, blushing. My brother had certainly changed.

  The restaurant, Mario’s, served what in those days passed for Italian food in most of the United States: heaping plates of thick, soft spaghetti drowned in a sugary red sauce, with iceberg-lettuce salads piled high with Russian dressing (mayonnaise and chili sauce) or an “Italian” dressing Mario bought in huge bottles that contained not an iota of olive oil but lots of sugar. The waiters and waitresses got a spaghetti dinner as part of their pay, but the food took my appetite away. I lost a lot of weight that summer.

  I started work in June, right after my eighteenth birthday. Jerry had brought a decorated cake home from the bakery, and Delia served it after a special dinner of my favorite foods—rib lamb chops, mashed potatoes, peas and carrots. She also bought me a beautiful new slip, pink satin with lace on the bodice. My practical sisters sent me five dollars in a card. Since all of this was considerably more than I was used to, I was content. I look back at my simple old self with affection. Nowadays, my birthdays are usually celebrated grandly, with parties for two hundred thrown by the Altshulers or small elegant dinner parties at the Four Seasons or Chanterelle hosted
by my publisher Heartbreak House, or intimate dinners at charming out-of-the way places organized by Molly. Charles, my second husband, used to take me to Martinique or Venice for my birthday, and Andrew, my third husband, used to give me diamonds—well, of course, he took them all back. But in 1949, I was thrilled to get a slip—an item of clothing women do not even wear today. Or if they do, they wear it as a dress.

  I found waitressing very difficult. The hardest part was being nice to insulting, contemptuous customers, but at first, I was also overwhelmed by having to remember and carry massive orders of baked stuffed clams and fried zucchini and eight or ten different pastas for a family group. The chef frightened me with his bad temper and violence: once, when I returned a dish a customer had complained about, he threatened me with his cleaver. The waiters frightened me too. They acted as if I was supposed to behave in some way that I didn’t. I didn’t know what they expected (looking back, I suspect I was supposed to defer to them because they were male), but I certainly felt their fury with me for not obliging. They made nasty comments about my character even as they surveyed my body in what seemed to me an extremely rude way. The other waitresses, much tougher than I, told me to ignore them, and sometimes one of them would yell at the guys to lay off After a few weeks, I could yell that myself.

  In time, I made friends with the other waitresses, one of whom, Meg, had a driver’s license and a brother with a car. On an occasional Monday (when the restaurant was closed) she’d borrow it and drive a bunch of us to the beach.

  But my best friend on the job was Bert Shiefendorfer. He was a waiter, but he wasn’t like the others. A student at Bridgeport University, he went to school by day, waited tables at night. He was majoring in physical education and was on the college track team; he wanted to be a track coach. Bert was scrawny, very white and freckled, with reddish-blond hair and blue eyes.

  In the early days, when I was inexperienced, Bert helped me carry the heaviest trays, and he’d shut the other waiters up when they started in on me. But the nicest thing he did was walk me to the bus stop after work and wait with me until my bus arrived. The restaurant closed when our shift ended, and the street was dark and deserted. Downtown Bridgeport was barren at night, dangerous even in those relatively innocent days. Bert wasn’t attractive, but he was very kind.

  One Saturday night, as Bert and I waited at the bus stop in our usual silence—conversation was not easy for us—Bert blurted out abruptly, “Say, you wanna go to the show on Monday?”

  I was puzzled. “What show?”

  “The show,” he insisted, looking at me as if I were demented. When I continued to stare dumbly at him, he added, “The movie show.”

  “Oh! The movies!” I hesitated. I didn’t want to reject him. I didn’t want him to get angry with me and stop helping me at work or waiting with me at the bus stop. On the other hand, on Monday nights—Monday was a day off—I always went to a movie with Delia. She looked forward to it, the only time all week she got out for fun. But I knew Delia would feel that any invitation from a boy superseded anything girls did together—anything at all. I quickly slipped Delia into second place, figuring I could go to a movie with her on my night off and stay in Bert’s good graces. So I said yes.

  Delia felt precisely as I’d thought she would. Bert and I had an okay time. He was sweet, if a little slow. Soon it was a regular thing, the Monday-night movie with Bert. The only problem was finding two decent movies in the Bridgeport area in one week.

  I felt comfortable with Bert in a way I never did with the boys at college. He came from the same class I did: his father ran a gas station, his mother worked at Woolworth’s. He didn’t try to impress me. He just sat and smiled at me with his sweet open face, and sometimes he held my hand. I figured he was fine for a summer flirtation. I could make a wry anecdote of it when I went back to school—my summer with Bert. No one at Mount Holyoke would guess that the egghead snob I appeared to be would date a boy whose English wasn’t up to par, who was just plain dumb. So things went along peacefully through July and into early August.

  But then, one Tuesday, in the middle of August as we waited for the bus, he said, “You got tomorrow off, doncha?”

  I nodded.

  “Me too,” he said. “Wanna go to the beach? I can loan a car off my pop.”

  “Sure,” I said, glad for any chance to tan. “But I have to be back by six.” Tomorrow was my movie night with Delia.

  “No problem,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at ten. Where exactly do you live?”

  I was happy the next morning, piling into his old wreck of a car with my beach bag, everything in it smelling of suntan lotion—a smell that still raises my spirits. We drove not to the public beach where I went with the other waitresses, but to a private beach in Greenwich. A friend of Bert’s worked as a guard in the parking lot, and he let us in. No one could tell we didn’t belong there, since we were white, Bert said, adding in a knowing tone that it would have been different if we were jigs. I asked him what that word meant, and he acted as though I was being snotty or snobbish or something. He explained it finally, as if he were talking to someone mentally defective, and was outraged when I said I didn’t like the word and wished he wouldn’t use it: it was disrespectful. He looked at me as if I had asked him to undress in public. Things were not going well with us, but the truth was, I didn’t care.

  The knowledge that we were trespassing made us both nervous, and that made us giggly. Entering an enchanted paradise forbidden us in the normal course of life, we looked at each other and smiled in an oily, wary way. Our nervousness bound us together, and the bad patch passed.

  The beach was pebbly, like all the beaches on Long Island Sound, but it spread beyond us for miles and had hardly any people on it. The public beach was smaller than this, and it was always jammed; it was hard to find a spot to light where you wouldn’t be pelted by sand thrown up by the hundreds of kids running around, or hear the roar of portable radios, the screams of mothers, or comments on your body from passing males.

  Here, on this weekday, there was a small cluster of women—no more than a half dozen—with babies and small children, settled together on the sand near the snack bar. Some young men and women were playing volleyball farther down the beach, and a couple of isolated blankets lay scattered beyond them. We trudged past them, clambered over some rocks, and found a tiny island of dry sand, lapped by gentle water. We spread our blanket and settled down. Bert lavished suntan oil over my back and the backs of my legs. His hands were warm and gentle: very nice, that was. I did the same to him. That was nice too; I felt all tingly afterward. Then we lay down in the sun and just drank it in, barely talking.

  When we were burning up with heat, Bert said, “Hey, let’s do it,” and got up and reached his hand to me and pulled me up, and we dashed into the Sound and splashed in its coolness. Heavenly, just heavenly. Then we walked to the snack bar, and he bought us hot dogs and beers, and we walked back with them and ate and drank and lay in the sun some more and swam some more, and Bert went for more beers. I wasn’t sure I liked the taste of beer, but the hot sun made me so thirsty, I drank two bottles. I felt a little woozy; it must have been the sun. When we lay down again, his arm lay across me and his body was pressing against mine. Soon after that, it lay partly on top of me, and he was kissing me, and I was kissing him back. And we kept kissing, and then his hands started to move around my body. I wanted his hands to do what they were doing, I wanted to do that to him with my hands, and I did. After a while, he pulled a towel over his back and took off his bathing trunks and slid down the bottom of my two-piece suit and put his penis inside me. I wanted it there, I felt a desire for it, but I wanted something else too. Somehow the penis wasn’t enough, but I didn’t know what would be. I was excited but also let down when he gasped hard and rolled off me. I felt wet inside. He lay on his back and threw his arms out, exhausted. I waited for some ceremony more. None came.

  He slept for a while; I lay there confused. When he woke,
he looked at his watch, said, “I’d better get you home!” and jumped up, full of energy. I tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at me. We packed up our gear and trudged back to the car. He dropped me off at the house with a peck on the cheek. “See ya,” he said, then drove off.

  I did not know what to make of this. Of course, I didn’t tell Delia, who had already told me how important it was for a girl to be a virgin when she married. I sat through the movie that night in a daze, like a frozen person. Delia, dear as she was, didn’t even notice.

  I went in to work the next night with trepidation, wondering how Bert would act when we met. He was pleasant and helpful, exactly as always, except he never looked straight at me. This continued all week. I felt shattered. So when, Sunday, as we stood at the bus stop, he said, “Show tomorrow night?” I shook my head no.

  He stopped short. “You busy?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to go out with a person who doesn’t look at me.”

  “Whatdya mean? I look at you plenty.” But even then he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “You used to look at me,” I said. “Before…the beach. Then you stopped.”

  He studied the sidewalk, considering. But the bus arrived before he said anything, and I got on without saying good night. I spent Monday hanging around the house, wondering if he’d come by to discuss it, or at least call, but he didn’t. Tuesday was his day off that week, and Wednesday was mine, so I didn’t see him again until Thursday.

  He acted like a stranger. His sweetness had vanished into a distant regard. He used a thin, formal voice when he had to say anything to me. He didn’t walk me to the bus stop. Friday, I confronted him. I waited until he went into the storeroom behind the kitchen for some salad dressing, then followed him in.