April Love Story

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “No,” said my mother. “He is not bringing the blanket for the sandwiches.”

  “Marnie!” yelled Lucas. “Hurry up. Those blueberries are growing old.”

  “And so am I, so am I,” murmured my mother.

  “Oh, Mother, stop worrying. You’re the one who suggested it, anyhow. And no fair climbing the hill with binoculars.”

  “I’d never do a thing like that,” she said indignantly. She hugged me suddenly, and kissed me, as if she were sending me off to college or war. Lucas yelled again and I ran to get in the wagon.

  “For pete’s sake, Marnie,” said Lucas, “don’t ride in the wagon.”

  “There’s nowhere else to sit.”

  “My lap, my lap.”

  We bounced over the fields to the blueberry patch.

  The sun was hot. There was no wind. After a while Lucas said, “Mind steering, Marnie?”

  I steered. Lucas leaned back and stripped off his shirt. “Hot,” he explained. I leaned back against him again, and decided that this ride was even better than the chairlift. Less between us. And no icy wind.

  The blueberry bushes were right where Aunt Ellen had said they would be, and just as she had said, they were dripping with berries. And my father had put eighteen buckets in the wagon.

  “Eighteen?” said Lucas faintly.

  “Do they really expect us to fill eighteen buckets?” I said. “We won’t be able to do anything except insanely heave berries into buckets from now until dark.”

  “Oh, were you thinking of doing anything besides picking blueberries?” said Lucas.

  “I personally am not sufficiently fond of blueberries to spend an entire day of my life on them.”

  “Besides, a few blueberries go a long way. One handful for a whole mess of pancakes, and how often do we have pancakes?”

  “Right.”

  We spread the blanket on the grass and spread ourselves on the blanket. After quite a long while Lucas mentioned that the blueberries did not seem to be filling the buckets on their own.

  “Thoughtless of them,” I said.

  We lay on our backs and stared into the blue sky. “Our sky,” said Lucas. “Our hill, our trees, our world.”

  “Our kiss.”

  “Do we really need city life when we can have all this, Marnie?”

  “Yes!”

  We laughed and kissed again.

  “Nice,” said Lucas.

  “It would be nicer in the city.”

  “I’m sure a kiss is a kiss.”

  “Lucas, I’m feeling guilty.”

  “About what? Kisses? Marnie, you’re a bona fide farm girl now. You know very well we haven’t done anything to feel guilty about. Though if that’s what you want, I’ll be more than glad to—”

  “No, guilty about not picking blueberries. They’re all home, work, work, working and we’re here—”

  “Necking,” said Lucas. “Isn’t that a dumb word? I detest it.”

  “I think the neck is where you’re supposed to stop.”

  “Let’s not stop.”

  But we did stop, at the same moment, without speaking any more. It hurt to stop, like being wrenched by something invisible. Lucas worked the shady side of the bushes and I worked the sunny side. The blueberries annoyed me terribly. I had so many important things to think about—Lucas, for example—and there was always a goat or a parent or a blueberry between us.

  Why had we stopped? I wasn’t really sure. Pressure, almost, from parents who weren’t there, and a duty to work we’d developed in the last year and a half. Maybe a little fear, too. That neither of us was ready for more than kissing.

  The blueberries stopped plinking against the metal of my bucket, and landed softly on top of each other. I could have Lucas right now, I thought, and I chose blueberries. Weird.

  “Marnie?” said Lucas through the leaves and the deep blue rounds of the berries.

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  The words hung in the air, as if the sun’s heat were rising from them. Lucas walked around the bushes, set his pail down, and looked at me, the edges of a grin beginning on his lips. He had said it first, not me. “I love you, Lucas.”

  Of course we’d have had a more successful embrace if I hadn’t been holding my pail in front of me, but when it dropped the blueberries seemed of little importance.

  “Your lips are blue,” accused Lucas. “You’ve been eating more blueberries than you’ve picked.”

  “Your lips are normal. Didn’t you eat a single one?”

  “No.”

  “Allow me to feed you some of my number one, superior grade blueberries, then.”

  What with one thing and another when dusk came hours later, we each had but one pail of blueberries, and neither of those full.

  Chapter XV

  FOR TWO WEEKS BOTH of us were in heaven.

  Glimpses of each other, touches, laughs, words—they were like a symphony. Two people being in love is a lot more fun than one person being in love.

  And then school started.

  I walked alone down the lane to catch the bus and sit with Connie, while Lucas worked in the barn or the orchards. School was hard. For the first time in my life I wanted excellent grades because for the first time I realized that if I were to go to college, it would have to be on a scholarship. B minus would not do. I had to have A’s. And senior English, fourth year French, chemistry, and modern history were not an easy schedule. Between history and English I had weekly essays to write and a good deal of library research.

  When Lucas was splitting wood, I was investigating English poets since World War One.

  When Lucas was delivering the split wood at thirty-five dollars a load to townies, I was checking out volumes about the role of Palestine in modern turmoil.

  When Lucas was rebuilding fences that had sagged over the summer, I was reading Balzac in French and composing letters to a pen pal in Marseilles for an exchange program.

  When Lucas was unloading bushels of apples at the cider mill, getting splinters under his nails and tan on his bare shoulders, I was finding out what covalent and ionic bonds were.

  Lucas did not want me to talk to him about school. He ached for school. My senior year; and the first year of his life since he was four years old that he had no school to go to. It would cause some people to rejoice. It hurt Lucas enough that it tainted all our conversations.

  It wasn’t like other high school romances. One of us wasn’t in high school. Both of us had too much to do.

  I wove my second coverlet and for Christmas knit my father and Uncle Bob pullovers. For Lucas I knit a beautiful vest, using the smallest needles I possessed. “Dressy,” he said. “For wearing under a good suit.”

  “Keep it clean,” I told him. “The time may come.”

  Lucas’ solar greenhouse worked well. Nobody ever was as proud of anything as Lucas when he presented us with hand-pollinated tomatoes in mid-winter.

  “Something just occurred to me,” said Lucas.

  “What is that?”

  “We’re not slaves.”

  I giggled. “No collar,” I said, touching his throat. “No chains. I guess we’re not.”

  “Seriously, Marnie. I’m eighteen, almost nineteen, and I’m doing as much work as anybody.”

  “That just occurred to you? I always knew that.”

  “Well, the conclusion to be drawn from those facts just occurred to me.”

  “Which is?”

  “If I want to take the VW out one cold winter evening, and if I want to buy a movie ticket with my share of the split-wood income, and if I choose to ask you to go along with me, that is not only my privilege, it is my right. I do not, repeat not, require parental permission to do that.”

  It seemed incredible that we had never thought of it that way before. The adults told us we couldn’t waste gas or spend money, so we didn’t. But we were contributing—all too contributing—adult members of this household, and we did have a right to s
pend at least a little in whatever way we chose.

  “You do, repeat do, have my permission to ask,” I told Lucas.

  “Marnie, would you like to go to the movies with me tonight after supper?”

  “Why, Lucas, I’d love to. What an unusual idea. When can you pick me up?”

  “Thought I’d drop by around seven.”

  “Make it six thirty, please. Around seven I’m scheduled to do dishes and I’d rather be gone.”

  “Nothing worse than dishpan hands.” Lucas took my red hands in his calloused ones and we danced around the barn.

  “I thought you hated dancing,” I said.

  “I never had a worthwhile partner before.”

  “Then let’s go dancing.”

  “Where? Fantasy aside, the only dances I know of around here are those scheduled quarterly by the high school.”

  He was right. Darn! Why couldn’t we live in a city? Why did we have to be stuck out here?

  “Marnie, let’s not even bother talking about that. Let’s have a real date and talk about us.”

  Now there was a suggestion I could warm to.

  After supper Lucas helped me clear the table and pour tea for everyone. But we didn’t sit down. Lucas brought our coats and helped me into mine. “Marnie and I are going to the movies. We’ll be back around eleven. See you.”

  “Lucas, it’s such a waste of gas,” said his mother. “And movie tickets are so expensive. There’s a concert next month that would be worth going to see, worth saving up for, though.”

  “It isn’t a waste of gas,” said Lucas quietly. “Marnie and I need to get out once in a while.”

  “Everything you need is here,” said his parents.

  But everything we needed wasn’t there. Nobody actually argued with us, but it was clear that our going out hurt them. Money aside, they truly felt that the farm should provide enough joy, that we shouldn’t have to range away, go to a town for our fun.

  We’d become very close, the six of us, working side by side, depending on each other for so much, from food to safety to warmth. It wasn’t easy to do things that would hurt four of us for the sake of two of us. On my own, I know I would have given in to what they wanted, and I think Lucas would have, too. Together, we knew we had to have some time for ourselves, some privacy, some space from the constant pressure of chores and farm.

  “I fantasize at night,” I said.

  Lucas was very interested in that.

  “No, no. About lipstick. Hot showers. Car exhaust fumes. Nightclubs. Offices. Crowds of people.”

  “They’re out there.”

  “Isn’t it odd, Lucas? For our parents out there is horrible. For us, out there is everything we want.”

  “Not quite everything,” said Lucas, taking me in his arms.

  “What would you do, Lucas, if you were out of here?”

  “Go to college. Learn everything I could. Spend four years thinking about what I’d do. How about you?”

  “I don’t know. One thing I can say definitely. When it comes to the future, I am always confused.”

  “Sometimes I think I actually would come back to the farm. Maybe I just want the decision to be mine and not my parents’.”

  “You’d come back here?”

  Lucas half nodded and half shrugged. “I enjoy it, Marnie. I’m good at it. Do you know I’m a better farmer than either of Mr. Shields’ sons, and they grew up on a farm. I have a knack for it. I love some of it.”

  I was amazed.

  “I like so much else, though, too,” he said. “I’d like to figure out a way to have the best of two worlds.”

  “Mother and Dad don’t think that’s possible. They say you have to choose.”

  “I think they’re wrong,” said Lucas, sighing. “But to prove it, I’d have to get away on my own for a few years, go back to school, have time to look around, try things, experiment.”

  Lucas’ wood business grew and grew. A surprising number of people horrified by oil prices had put small woodstoves in their living rooms and few had their own sources of wood. By the end of winter, anybody who had started out with his own wood had long since burned it.

  Since I was in school during the week, Lucas delivered Saturdays and Sundays, so I could go with him. We’d load a cord of wood into the wagon. Drive it to the buyer’s. Unload and re-stack it. Collect the money. I wore thick brown cotton gloves to protect my hands. Lucas rarely wore gloves. His hands were leathery enough.

  Once we went roller skating at an arena twenty-nine miles away. Neither of us had ever skated before. It had become a craze since we left the real world. We spent most of the time on our bottoms, but it wasn’t humiliating because we were together. In fact, I think we were the envy of the rest of the teenagers, who skated beautifully, because we were having so much fun.

  “Disco lights?” said my mother in genuine pain. “Rock music? When we need money for insulating this house? How could you?”

  “I need to be with Lucas,” I said. “Don’t you remember? We talked about it once. Being in love. All the nice small things.”

  “Yes, I remember,” she said more softly. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m not trying to ram things down your throat, really I’m not. It’s hard for me to see you as a young woman who wants different things, obviously, than I want for you.”

  “Lucas?” I said. “Don’t you want Lucas for me?”

  Yes, she did. But she wanted us with her, at the farm, not by ourselves, “out” somewhere that she felt was second best.

  Lucas opened a savings account and put in what he got from every third sale.

  “How much have you saved so far?” I said.

  “Ah, Marnie, don’t even ask. All that sweat and hauling, and I’ve got a lousy four hundred twenty dollars. Enough money to get me somewhere, but not enough to do anything for me once I get there.”

  “You could get a job.”

  “Sure, I could. But I’ve got a job right now. I want school. Tell me how I’m going to pay for college. Buy books. Pay fees. Tuition. Room and board. Find time to study and go to labs while I’m holding down this job with the skills I don’t have.”

  I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t know.

  Chapter XVI

  THE SECOND WINTER DREW slowly to a close. Spring came, swiftly this year, reaching its beautiful peek and vanishing into, summer before April was over.

  I got to go to a prom with Lucas after all, my own. Nobody ever looked so handsome in a tuxedo as Lucas did. Our parents didn’t mention the cost of renting one. Mother made me a beautiful dress, close-fitting, with a dipping neckline I had thought she would take out of the pattern. I felt like a princess.

  “I’d feel like a prince myself,” said Lucas, “except my nose reminds me the last thing I hauled in this bus was manure.”

  “Keep sniffing your gardenia. It’ll keep your mind off that sort of thing.”

  But we had not realized what people would talk about on prom night. Each other, of course, and the years at high school, and who was with whom, and how everybody looked.

  But mostly, what we were going to do next. Secretarial school, army, working in a parent’s store, plumber’s apprentice—and college. Everybody in my crowd was going to college. “What are you going to do, Marnie?” they said.

  “Farming,” I said.

  “Farming,” said Lucas.

  Nobody was interested in that. We’d always done that. They wanted to talk about college. About going places and doing things and learning things. About which school had better engineering classes and which was best for elementary education.

  The prom was Saturday night.

  When Lucas and I met at breakfast Sunday morning, the house was empty. Our parents must be out working somewhere, I thought, and I suggested a picnic breakfast to Lucas.

  We fixed a thermos of coffee (a recent splurge of Uncle Bob’s) and a jar of homemade—what else?—applesauce, some of my sweet rolls and napkins. Out the window we spotted our parents.

&
nbsp; “They’re deciding whether to put in more herbs this year, I bet,” said Lucas. “Mother was thinking she might be able to sell herb vinegar or something.”

  Quietly and carefully we walked out the front door so they wouldn’t see us. Not that we were off to do anything wrong, but people who are up and moving in our house get chores to do, and we both felt the need to talk instead.

  The geese honked the way they do for me, but nobody yelled after us, and we went over the meadows, up the hill to our favorite picnic spot under a sourwood tree.

  We had just sat down and opened the thermos when five goats joined us. Lucas swore. I had forgotten to shut the gate behind us. I didn’t blame him for being furious. There is nothing harder to catch than a playful goat. You can sit still and hope he’ll get curious about you, but that rarely works five goats in a row.

  One goat had its collar on, so I grabbed her and Lucas manhandled another, using his belt for a collar. We got those two down to the barnyard, shoved them in, rounded up some escaping hens, and caught the cow halfway across the pasture that would have led her into the flowerbed. Then we ran up the hill again, this time with ropes, to get the other three goats.

  “I think,” said Lucas, puffing, “that those goats want out just as much as we do.”

  “Some old film buff should be here,” I said, leaping unsuccessfully after an agile young nannie.

  “Why?” panted Lucas.

  We both slipped, catching each other instead of the goat between us which would have been fine, except we really did have to catch the silly goats. “We must look like something out of Laurel and Hardy, that’s why.”

  It took us half an hour to get the last goat and haul him down to the barnyard and close the gate on him. “Lucas!” yelled his father. “Work to do!”

  We hesitated. There was work to do, a lot of it, and we’d wasted so much time because of my carelessness. “I’ve got something to fetch up on the hill,” yelled Lucas back. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  We trudged back up the hill. “Climbing up gets less romantic each time,” said Lucas.

  “I noticed.”