My Summer With George

by Marilyn French

  She’s uncompromising in other ways too, and so is constantly unhappy either with her current lover or with her lack of a lover. One of them complained that Liz was so uncompromising, she could not drive on Long Island parkways because she was paralyzed by the sight of the word merge on a road sign. Over the past few years, I’ve listened to Liz’s laments about Lotte, who was lively but perhaps too lively and, besides, lived in Germany and was never available; and Emma, who was sweet but maybe too sweet, who wanted to be with her all the time and hung on her, which drove Liz crazy, given the size of her house. Before that, there was Nora, who was moody and unpredictable and kept Liz on edge; and Dorian, who was cold and aloof and had a hard time touching another person. But for the past six months, Liz had been complaining about loneliness, the silence of her little house when she goes home at night, the paucity of opportunities for cruising out here in the boonies, and the general unfairness of life.

  “What do you think about a poetry reading? Is that a good place to meet women?” she asked as she emptied the dishwasher. “God knows I can’t afford to join the yacht club.” She snorted. “Poetry readings are free.”

  “I don’t think you’d meet anybody you’d be interested in at a yacht club, Lizzie,” I said from my chaise, where I was sipping a midmorning coffee. I always reserved an hour for conversation with Liz on Thursday mornings. I knew it made all the difference to her feelings about her work, so I treated it as part of her salary. “Poetry readings sound good. The right kind of venue.”

  “The right kind of venue! Oh, Hermione! What a nice way to put it! Makes it sound so…respectable!” She wiped down the stove. “So how’s your love life?”

  She always asked this, although in all the years I’d known her, I had never had any answer for it except “What love life?” I figured she felt she had to ask me: it was quid pro quo; she was a feminist and wanted to be sure she didn’t dominate the conversation. But this time, I shocked her.

  “Terrible,” I moaned.

  Her head shot up. “Really! What! Woman or man?”

  “Man.”

  “Oh, well, what do you expect?”

  I forbore from pointing out that she had been less than successful with women.

  “Umm. I’m just having trouble reading his signals.”

  “Oh, one of those ambivalent creeps who give out double signals? Nora did that all the time! Drives you crazy! ‘Spend the weekend with me.’ So you cancel all your plans. Then she says she wants to be alone. Jeez, Greta, give me a break!” Liz started to mop the kitchen floor. “So what’s this guy do?”

  “Well, like that. Asked me to have lunch with him every day last week, but never stayed longer than an hour. Asked me—with great intensity—how I’d feel if he worked in New York, then not only drops the subject, but leaves town. Goes running in to examine my bedroom every time he visits my apartment, says he’d love to spend time with me, but never puts a finger on me, doesn’t even kiss me hello or goodbye. And he always has to run off.”

  Liz was leaning on the mop, staring at me sympathetically. “Umm. Weird. Sounds weird. Are you in love with him?”

  “Well…” I looked away. It was too embarrassing. Liz was so much younger than I; she was from a different generation.

  “Oh, poor Hermione. Poor thing.”

  “Sounds bad to you, does it?” I asked tentatively.

  “Umm. Yeah. Especially for a man. You know, they always want to get in your pants right away. But sounds to me as if you haven’t…”

  “No,” I said quietly.

  “So it’s weird.”

  “Maybe he can’t,” I said.

  “Yeah. How old is he?”

  “Fifties.”

  “Maybe he’s gay,” she offered.

  “You think everybody’s gay.”

  “That’s true. Still, you’d be better off if you’d get involved with a woman, Hermione.”

  “I probably would.” I started to rise. Our hour was nearly up. She was still leaning on the mop, gazing at me. I put my cup and saucer in the sink. “At least there’s work,” I said, with as much cheer as I could muster. “What’s wrong?” I asked, looking at her face.

  “I just can’t believe it keeps on like this. Does it keep on like this forever? Forgive me, Hermione, but how old are you? You must be close to my mom’s age. She has Jack, of course, for whatever he’s worth. But you’re still going through stuff like this?”

  I have to confess she was making me cross. “I don’t tell my age,” I snapped.

  “I’m really sorry. Really!” She slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “It’s just that…all these years, no matter what happened, even when someone really broke my heart, I had this idea, this dream—I was positive that someday I’d meet the woman of my dreams and we’d live happily ever after. It never occurred to me that this stuff could keep going on, right into your sixties, your seventies—my god! It’s a nightmare! I don’t think I can stand it!” Bursting into tears, she dropped the mop, which clattered to the floor. She snatched some tissues from a box on the counter and ran out to the dock.

  That night, after dinner, I sat on my screened porch in the darkness, staring out at the water, visible only in streaks of reflected moonlight. When the moon vanished, I decided to sleep on the porch, and fetched linens to make up the daybed. It was sweltering in my bedroom, even with all the windows raised, but on the porch, I needed a blanket. I lay snuggled in and warm, breathing the wonderful clean night air, feeling safe and comfortable enough to return to memories of my early years.

  I sat unmoving while Jerry and Delia embraced me tearfully. Though I welcomed the embrace and the apparent forgiveness, I was uncomfortable with what I felt were slightly false grounds and with the way Jerry swung into action. His firm chin and lips, his beetled brow, the rigid set of his head on his neck as he nodded it up and down, told me that no interference from me was desired. He was a man with a mission. The only thing I had that he wanted was Bert’s telephone number. With a strange certainty, I knew that it gave him pleasure to be so outraged, that in fighting for me, he was drawing on emotions that had nothing to do with me at all. I sat, swollen-faced and drained, watching what seemed to me like an overacted performance, the making of an Alp out of a little mound of dirt. I felt like a small soiled thing, about to be laundered; a corpse, grateful that other people were buying the coffin and arranging my body in it, planning the rites needed to move me into my future, such as it was. But I said nothing. It was also true that once Jerry took over, I relaxed; I felt cared for, protected. That night I slept until morning for the first time in weeks.

  Saturday, after the three of us had finished breakfast, we went into the living room, where we sat in silence until ten o’clock. On the dot of ten, Jerry, looking at his watch, stood portentously, walked into the tiny entry hall of the apartment, and picked up the phone. Delia and I rose and followed him, hovering in the archway. Jerry took an extremely casual posture, leaning against the wall with his legs crossed at the ankles like Fred Astaire. But the knuckles of his hand holding the receiver were white.

  “Mrs. Shiefendorfer? The mother of Bert Shiefendorfer? Yes. My name is Jerry Schutz. I’m Elsa's older brother. Elsa Schutz, yes. Well, I would think that name would be familiar to you. Is that so. Well, we have a matter to discuss, and I’d like to come over and see you and your husband. Bert should probably be present.”

  A long silence on Jerry’s end.

  “You know, Mrs. Shiefendorfer, it would be better if we could handle this matter in a calm and friendly way. You have to think ahead, Mrs. Shiefendorfer. A grandmother shouldn’t alienate the mother of her grandchild and her family. I feel sure that Bert must have discussed this with you, Mrs. Shiefendorfer. You know I manage a million-dollar corporation, Mrs. Shiefendorfer. Yes, the Homey Honey Bread Company.”

  Actually he was the assistant manager.

  “So I have some resources, Mrs. Shiefendorfer. But I would hate to have to hire a lawyer and go to
court and expose your son in the newspapers, especially since the boy got my sister drunk, fed her beer, which she’d never had before in her entire life, a college girl, an innocent girl who never even had a boy friend…

  “Right. Right. Sure thing. I can be there in an hour. You wanna give me directions?”

  Jerry scrawled on a pad, hung up, and turned to face us with a big smile. He held up his hand, making a circle with his thumb and middle finger. “Success! She’s scared to death,” he announced. “Her precious boy’s future’s threatened. There’s not gonna be a problem,” he assured us.

  Delia hugged me and kissed Jerry. I smiled at him, but it was a tense smile. I couldn’t tell him that I hated what he was doing, that I couldn’t stand it, that I didn’t want any of it, that I just wanted to be dead. I said I didn’t feel well and went back to my room and lay down and tried to will myself to die, just the way I had when I was little and Mother scolded me.

  Jerry was right. When confronted, Bert collapsed and cried, admitting his guilt—the beer, the sex. Then the Shiefendorfers too collapsed, grudgingly accepting that he was responsible, although they spoke my name with sour mouths. But they didn’t criticize me to Jerry: they were afraid of him. He was an executive, a man who knew about lawyers and newspapers. (They never guessed that the “manager” of a bakery actually walks around in shirtsleeves, nagging slow workers, arranging for rat extermination, ordering machinery repairs—or making them himself—and overseeing deliveries of things like sugar and flour.) They agreed that Bert would have to quit school and get a job that paid more than waiting table. His two years of college and being on the track team could maybe help him get on the cops, Bert’s father suggested. Bert’s father was in with the cops; they hung out at his gas station, and he played poker with a sergeant on the Bridgeport force. And the idea seemed to appeal to Bert, Jerry reported.

  Jerry became my liaison with the Shiefendorfers. He and they planned our future: neither Bert nor I was consulted. I was too stunned to care; no doubt Bert was too. I suspected that except for Jerry, who was enjoying his centrality, his sense of power, everybody was as numb as I was. The thing was a shock, a sudden dramatic end to everybody’s plans and hopes, like being told you have a terminal disease.

  Bert didn’t call or ask to see me. I didn’t really care. Most of the time I lay on the daybed in Delia’s sewing room and stared at the ceiling. I knew it was my own fault, my own doing, but still I blamed my sisters. Why didn’t they warn me? Why didn’t Susan or Merry or Tina—or Delia or my mother—why didn’t they sit me down and have a long talk and say, This one thing you must not do or you will ruin your life forever, you will lose everything you have, which was little enough as it was! Why had nobody impressed this on me? Yet I had to admit I knew it anyway, knew it somehow without being told. Every girl knew it: it was universal knowledge. Still, at least ten girls in my, high school class had been pregnant at graduation. But they didn’t have as much to lose, I thought: who else had a full scholarship to college? To a wonderful college? You’d think a person smart enough to win such a scholarship would be smart enough not to wreck her life, and for what? What Bert and I had done on the beach hadn’t even felt good. Well, it felt nice at first, the kissing and the touching, but then, when he put his thing on me, on my leg with just a little tiny bit of it in me, that had not felt good; it felt like nothing at all, and it got me all wet and sticky. For that I had ruined my life?

  The hardest thing I had to do was write the Millington High School teachers. I kept picturing them sitting together in the coffee room reading my letter, shaking their heads, their hopes in me smashed. “These girls,” they’d sigh, and lay the letter aside, their disappointment palpable in the room. It took years before I could think about that without feeling a pang, sharp as a heart attack.

  It was almost as hard to quit school formally: I wrote the dean that I was getting married. Everyone knew what that meant; I was glad I could do it by mail, so no one would see my face. But I had to go back for my things. Jerry drove me up on a weekend, when, I hoped, few people would be around. I didn’t want to meet anyone I knew, to have them look at me, to have to explain anything. I dreaded bursting into tears, humiliating myself utterly. Amazingly, I didn’t bump into anyone, not even Irmgard, who must have been away for the weekend. I packed my clothes, my precious books, my portable typewriter, and sneaked out of there feeling déclassé, a little shopgirl who’d slipped in like a stowaway but was found out before she had done any real damage.

  Jerry and I barely spoke on the drive to South Hadley. He kept the radio on to pop music until we reached the hills and got only static. Then we drove in silence until Jerry cleared his throat, and I knew, I knew exactly what he was about to say.

  “You think at all about what I said to you, kid?”

  “Umm, well, I don’t know, Jer.”

  “It don’t have to be this way, you know.”

  I couldn’t think how to tell him what I felt, that I was appalled my own brother would urge me to do something illegal, something I could go to jail for, if I didn’t die of it first! I knew there were people who’d had abortions, but it was a terrible thing, it was against the law; no decent girl, no respectable girl, would even think about it! I knew Jerry loved me and wanted the best for me, but I couldn’t understand how he could imagine that I would do such a terrible thing…

  My eyes overflowed. “I just can’t, Jer,” I wept.

  He reached over and patted my hand. “Okay, kid, okay. Don’t cry. Listen, it was only an idea. Forget it, I’m just an oaf. I been hangin’ out with the guys at the bakery too long, you know…”

  I took his hand and smiled at him. I did love my brother. I’d adored him when I was little; I used to follow him around the way a baby duck follows its mother, Momma used to say. At the thought of my mother, a fresh batch of tears poured out of me. Thank god she wasn’t alive to see this, to be shamed by me…

  “Come on, kid. It’ll be all right, wait and see. You’ll have the kid and you’ll love it and you’ll forget this stuff—in a couple of years it’ll be just as if you were madly in love with this guy. You know, love doesn’t last, anyway.” He stopped suddenly.

  This was an alarming new idea.

  “Don’t you love Delia anymore, Jerry?”

  Jerry had a tannish complexion, but he blushed right through his tan skin. Still, I didn’t stop. I had to know.

  “Don’t you, Jer?”

  “Sure, sure I do, of course! Just maybe in a different way than I did before, you know? You don’t know a lotta stuff about people when you marry them, you know?”

  “But Delia’s so sweet and good and nice,” I whined. I couldn’t bear hearing that two people I loved so much were less than happy, and I knew that if Jerry was unhappy, so must Delia be.

  “Yeah, yeah. She is. I know that. But you know, she’s so Catholic.”

  “I thought you converted. Aren’t you Catholic too?”

  “Sure, I had to; she wouldn’t have married me otherwise. But you know I don’t care about religion; we weren’t religious in our family.”

  “No. But why do you care if Delia is?”

  “Well, the Catholics have all these rules about birth control and stuff, and Delia doesn’t want to have a family until we’ve saved up enough to buy a house, and she won’t use birth control, so…there’s very few days in the month that are safe…” He hit the steering wheel with the palm of his left hand. “Listen to me, will you? Running off at the mouth. Just pay no attention, okay, kid? Delia’s a sweetheart. She is. Just sometimes we don’t agree. That’s inevitable, right? Happens to everybody.”

  I was still holding Jerry’s other hand, and I squeezed it. I wanted to tell him that whatever he did or felt, I loved him, but that I wanted him to stop talking. I wanted him to stop talking now! Once I realized they had one, I didn’t want to know their problem, Delia’s and his.

  But Jerry’s problem with Delia became mine before too long.

  We
were in Goodman’s, a local department store. Delia had insisted I buy a wedding dress. I said I didn’t want a wedding dress—we weren’t going to have a formal wedding. But she looked over my clothes and pronounced them unsuitable for any kind of wedding.

  “We won’t spend much,” she argued, “seein’ as how it won’t fit you in another month or two and probably not afterwards, either.”

  She found a beige rayon shirtwaist dress with a wide belt. “If you do lose weight later, this is a dress you can get some wear out of,” she urged, always practical. I didn’t care. I bought it, and a wide-brimmed beige felt hat, and low-heeled shoes to match. Delia was pleased and offered to treat me to coffee and cake in the store restaurant. I loved the store restaurant: the white tablecloths and the neat waitresses in black with little white lace-trimmed aprons and caps. I was happy to be there, and Delia was happy with my outfit. She saw me smiling and that made her even happier, and she rested her hand on mine and said, “I’m glad you have that navy suit you’re wearing. It looks great on you; it isn’t too tight yet. You ought to wear it when you meet Father O’Neill. I want you to look nice for him.”

  “Father O’Neill?”

  “Yes. I’ve made an appointment for you, for tomorrow evening. Jerry’ll drive you; I already asked him. You’ll have to take religious instruction with Father before he’ll marry you.” She was still smiling.

  “Why would I do that? I’m not Catholic.”

  “No, but Bert is. You’ll have to convert.”

  “How do you know he is?”

  “I had Jerry ask them. You have a right to know, after all.”

  I digested this for a while.

  “I’m not converting, Delia,” I said. I wasn’t smiling, and now she wasn’t, either.

  “You have to!”