by Maureen Daly
The sunrise flush was fading on the wall and I shut my eyes, trying to sleep again. But the darkness was like the soft, hushed darkness had been with the canvas over my head in the boat and the wind outside ruffling the water. I caught my breath a little, knowing I was being silly and not being able to help it every time I thought of his hand and mine holding the match. Maybe if I got up quickly everything would be all right and I would forget. It could be, I thought, that I am still sleeping a little and holding a nice dream by the tail so it won’t get away. But I could hear Kitty breathing quietly beside me and I could see the long crack zigzagged on the ceiling and the early sun shining in the window and I knew that I was wide awake. And I knew that even getting up quickly wouldn’t help, that it was something that had nothing to do with waking or sleeping. Something that would be there all the time. And if I looked at myself in the mirror that morning I would see something different. My face would be the same but yet something had changed, and I would try not to look straight at my family all day in case they might see it too, and smile at each other and say, “Angle’s growing up.” And somehow I was afraid to have anyone know because I wasn’t sure myself. I couldn’t be sure at all until I saw Jack again.
About seven o’clock I heard my mother’s bed creak across the hall and I heard her open my door softly and look in. Quickly I shut my eyes and sighed as if I were asleep. I didn’t want to get up just yet. I wanted just a few minutes more to lie there and think. Just a few minutes more. She went into the bathroom then to get washed, and soon the morning noises began. There was the water running in the kitchen sink and the sound of five plates, four coffee cups, and one glass of milk being set on the table. The smell of freshly made coffee drifted upstairs and made me start thinking wide-awake, daytime thoughts. I could see in my mind just how it would be. My sister Lorraine would be sitting at one side of the table and my sister Margaret on the other. Lorraine would be rushing to get to work and Margaret would be in her house coat, all ready except to put her make-up on. My mother would pour the coffee and say, perhaps, that it was strong or weak or should have percolated longer or something. Then one of them would remember last night and say, “Oh, Angie. Did you have fun?” or maybe, “Do you think he’ll ask you out again?”
And I would put cream in my coffee and tell them all about the boat and how good Swede was at sailing it and how it had started to rain just when we got home. And they would ask a few more questions while I said yes or no or whatever the answer should be, but I would never mention the moon or the cool clean smell of the wind or that I had worn Jack’s sweater all evening or all the other small, warm thoughts that kept nudging at my memory even as I lay awake watching the sun grow brighter on the ceiling. I would eat my breakfast like any other morning, clear the table like any other morning and do the housework like any other morning; but somehow inside myself I would be waiting for the phone to ring or listening for a bakery truck to pull up at the curb in front of the house.
I got out of bed then without waking Kitty, dressed, and went downstairs. Just before I went into the kitchen I stopped and pinched my cheeks to make the muscles relax. Somehow my face felt stiff and unnatural. I had a queer feeling that when I sat down at the breakfast table I might not be able to eat at all. I might just look at everyone drinking their morning coffee and then suddenly blurt out foolishly, “I like a boy. And I never knew it would be like this!”
But that wasn’t quite what happened. Lorraine was standing by the kitchen stove in her house coat, curling her hair with the curling iron—she had just washed it the night before.
My mother was sitting now in a clean blue print dress at the table next to the window drinking her coffee, and her hair, where it is turning white on the sides, was brushed back high off her face. She used to get very bad headaches and would have to lie in a darkened bedroom with cool cloths soaked in vinegar on her forehead. The vinegar had bleached her hair snow-white at the temples. My mother is the only person I know who looks completely wide-awake and fresh when she wakes up in the morning.
“Your tomato juice is in the icebox,” she said to me. “I didn’t think you’d be down for a while.”
Outside, the garden earth was dark from last night’s rain and cobwebs, dew-sparkled, were stretched on the grass. Everything had a fresh, clean smell. “I think it’s almost cool enough to wear a sweater and skirt,” Lorraine said. “You know, after being used to collegiate clothes I just hate wearing summer dresses that wrinkle so easily.”
She had a job for the summer at the Elite Canvas Company, just sitting all day folding and addressing circulars which were sent all over the country to advertise awnings, golf bags, and canvas laundry bags. Every summer the Elite took on about twenty extra girls. My father is a good friend of one of the men in the office—they had played some early golf together the weekend before and he had arranged it.
At first no one mentioned the night before. “We’ll put the winter things in the attic this morning,” I remember my mother’s saying to me. “Just let Kitty sleep and you get the stepladder from the garage and I’ll hand the things up to you.” Ours is the old-fashioned kind of attic that you get into through a trap door in a bedroom ceiling. “We can get all Lorraine’s school clothes put away so the closets won’t be crowded all summer,” she added.
My sister Margaret came down just then, all ready for work. You would like my sister. She is tall, thin, moves very quickly, and is engaged to a boy from Milwaukee who looks and acts just like a giant baby panda. Leaning over she kissed Mom, or rather brushed her with her cheek so she wouldn’t rub off her lipstick. “No tomato juice this morning,” she said and drank her coffee standing up by the stove—Margaret is always in a rush.
There was the usual breakfast talk: “Did you hear the rain last night?” “What would you children like me to get for supper?” (Mom always calls us children), and “We should have a big day at the store today.” Little everyday things that could be said on any morning and I waited, just drinking my coffee and eating my toast, knowing that at any moment someone would remember. I could almost feel the words just hanging in midair. My mother reached over to snap off a loose thread hanging from the hem of Margaret’s dress. I remember that so well because that was just before Margaret turned to me, remembering, “—Oh, Angie, how was last night?”
“Fun,” I answered. Then I told them about the rain and how good Swede was at sailing and Jack used to date Jane Rady and how I remember her talking about him when she used to sit next to me in history class and about how many people had been out riding because it was such a nice night and all the cars with bright headlights that had been lined up along Lighthouse Point. Maybe, I thought, I’m talking too much; maybe I’m talking too fast. My voice seemed not to be coming from me at all, and I was surprised to hear it so calm and casual when inside my head the thoughts were all warm and shaky.
“I used to know Jack’s cousin,” Lorraine said. Her hair was curled in rows of shiny sausage-curls, and she was holding the curling iron as far away from her head as possible so she wouldn’t burn her cheek, talking with a funny grimace as if any movement might bring the iron too close. “He was a drip though. He used to wear real baggy pants and always got to school late and had to be sent to the office for tardy slips.”
I tried to think of something to counteract that slur. It wouldn’t do to have the family think that Jack had dull connections before they even knew him—it’s important that the family like a boy—but nothing came to my mind quickly enough.
In the green clumps of marguerite daisies along the garden path, round knobby heads stuck up with the green sheaths half open, showing the white silk petals underneath. Mom pushed back the kitchen curtains to look at them, commenting absently that next spring we would plant only a few rows of vegetables and have the rest of the garden all in flowers. Lorraine looked at Margaret and she looked at me and we all smiled, because every summer, for as long as we could remember, my mother had said that.
T
hen Margaret glanced at her wrist watch and gave a little gasp, though she had known all the time that it was late, gulped down the rest of her coffee, and rushed out, leaving the front door half open, calling back, “Be sure to have something good for supper because I’m going to be real hungry!” Lorraine went upstairs to get dressed and Mom finished her coffee and a last piece of toast before clearing the breakfast things away.
Though I don’t know just what I expected, I was vaguely disappointed that this was just like any other morning. The sun was bright on the kitchen floor, the coffee was steaming as always, and my mother looked just as calm and shiny clean as she always did. Maybe, I thought, I was wrong about last night and maybe everything is just the same. Maybe it wasn’t—well, what I thought it was.
But all morning, puttering with the housework, I was really waiting for Jack to stop round on his bakery route, and my mind was far from finger marks on the white woodwork and dustcloths that smelled of oily furniture polish. But by eleven o’clock he had not come. And by eleven o’clock, with the beds all made and the housework done, I knew this was not an ordinary day; I knew definitely that everything was not the same.
We had had scrambled eggs and toast and tea for lunch, just the three of us, my mother and little sister and I, sitting at the end of the kitchen table. “Just a pick-up snack,” Mom had said. “Whatever you can find in the icebox.” At twelve o’clock I began to get a queer restless feeling, as if I wanted to sit drumming my fingers on the table top, and I could hear the big clock in the dining room very plainly as it ticked.
Perhaps, I kept thinking, Jack will call me now, while he is home for lunch; but by one o’clock I had decided that probably he didn’t like to call when his mother and father were around—some boys are like that—and maybe he would stop off at McKnight’s on his way back to the bakery and call me from there. Or perhaps he would even come over for a few minutes—my mind made up a series of pleasant little excuses for him as the time went by.
But by the time two o’clock came and I had put away the lunch dishes, the house had grown quiet and the trees were beginning to turn their shadows eastward on the lawn; that excited feeling of waiting seemed to turn hard and make an aching throb in my throat. I had been so sure he would come.
Kitty was in the garage making bright, tinkering noises, trying to straighten out a dent in her bicycle fender with a claw hammer, and she said, “Sure, I’d like to walk to the lake with you,” when I asked her. “Wasn’t doing much anyhow.”
There were men working on the road that goes along the wide breakwater with the lighthouse on the end. One of them was leaning his chest on a pneumatic drill, pressing it hard into the gravel road and it made a loud rut-ta-tutting that echoed in the stillness of the afternoon, spitting up dirt and sprays of gravel as it dug. We stood to watch for a while. The rest of the men were working slowly, swinging their pickaxes in wide, in lazy arcs, or just leaning on the yellow, wooden trestles with the red danger flags fluttering, put there to turn the slow afternoon traffic away from the shallow gap in the road. Beyond them the lake was very blue. You could just barely see the strip of green and the thin fingers of smoke that was Oshkosh on the opposite shore.
Just behind me, inside the breakwater, was the Big Hole where the smaller sailing boats were tied. I knew if I looked I could see it. But I didn’t want to—not yet. There is that funny fascinating suspense in waiting, like wiggling a very loose tooth with your tongue. And besides it wouldn’t do to have Kitty know what I really came out for. She is a good scout but—well, I just didn’t want her to know, that’s all.
So we went over to watch the children swimming and splashing first, and then I pushed Kitty in a swing until she said she was beginning to feel dizzy, and we walked all the way to the refreshment stand at the other end of the park for an icecream cone and a bag of popcorn. By the time we had walked back she had chocolate ice cream dribbled down the front of her shirt and her chin was shiny from the butter off my popcorn and both of us were ready to go home.
Just as I had planned we took the long way, back through the park, and we had to pass the Big Hole on our way.
The afternoon sun was sparkling and glinting on the tip of each small, quick wave so that the whole stretch of water in the harbor seemed to be giggling in the sunlight. There was a long row of small green and white sailboats tied to the shore, nodding up and down as the water licked the anchoring piles. They all had single, slim masts jabbing upward and gray canvas stretched neatly over their cockpits and, to me, they all looked exactly the same! I couldn’t even tell which one was Jack’s! I felt suddenly so relieved that I could have laughed out loud just standing there, looking at the boats dancing at the ends of their short ropes and the blue water shining in the sun. I don’t know just what I had expected to see—one boat standing off by itself, looking different from the rest or a sign on one of them saying, “This is the boat that Angie Morrow fell in love in!” or something equally as silly. But whatever it was, it wasn’t there at all!
Just then a horn honked close behind us and Kitty and I both jumped in fright and turned to look. There was Swede. He pulled up alongside us and leaning out the car window, said, “Hi-yah, Angie. Want a ride home?”
It was annoying that he should come along just then. In the first place I hadn’t wanted him to see me staring at the boat, and besides I could just hear him saying later, “Hey, Jack, that Angie don’t look so good in the daytime! I saw her this afternoon out looking at the boat and she didn’t look so good as at night.”
I had on old slacks and I knew my nose was shiny, but Swede was smiling at me with his funny warm grin so there was nothing to do but say, “Hello, there. You scared me, honking that way. This is my sister Kitty, Swede.” They nodded to each other and she bent down in an embarrassed little-girl sort of way, pretending to take a stone out of her shoe and softly whistling a breathy tune with no particular melody.
“Been looking at the boat?” Swede asked. I nodded. “Nice little job, isn’t she? Did you have fun last night, Angie?”
Now is my chance to find out, I thought. Swede is sure to know if anyone does! “Oh, I had a wonderful time,” I told him, and then added casually, very offhand, “Did Jack have fun?”
“Yeh, I guess he did.”
“Don’t you know?”
“No, he didn’t say nothing.”
“Did you see him today?”
“Sure.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“Nothing much. At least nothing—about you.”
So he hadn’t said anything! After last night and the way he’d looked and my wearing his sweater, and after what had happened while trying to light his pipe and everything—and he hadn’t said anything. I couldn’t believe it! Swede was sitting running his finger up and down, playing with the grooves in the steering wheel. I looked at him and I could feel a question forming on my lips, “But didn’t he even—” and I checked myself just in time, saying instead, “Thanks anyway for the ride, Swede, but I guess Kitty and I will walk home. It isn’t very far. Thanks anyway.”
“Okay,” he said. “Glad I met you, Kitty. See you later, Angie,” and the car pulled away.
The sun didn’t seem quite so bright on the water now. We passed two little boys coming home from swimming with their hair sleeked back and damp canvas knickers pulled on over their still-wet swimming suits. They had stopped at the public drinking fountain where the water comes out so cold that it hurts your teeth, and were squirting mouthfuls of water at each other, their cheeks puffed out like chipmunks’. One yelled hello to Kitty, sending the water out of his mouth in a spout. He was in her room at school, she explained with injured dignity.
Mom was sitting in a canvas lawn chair in the shade at the side of the house when we got home, reading the evening paper. It is an unwritten rule in our house never to ask for a piece of the paper until my mother has finished with it, so Kitty and I both sat down to wait. The short-clipped grass was cool and fresh and full of
little clover, the kind whose heads flip off like small pink and white balls before the lawn mower.
“I see where Grace Mary Wuerst is going to be married,” my mother said. I raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement and Kitty just sat chewing a clover stem. She turned a page and after a moment or two—“Remind me to tell Dad that there is a new hospital going up in Sheboygan. They are open for bids next Monday.” I raised the other eyebrow. My mother leafed through the last few pages quickly and then, without saying a word, pulled out an inside sheet and handed it to me and gave Kitty the page with the comic strips. We sat reading together and before long it began to get cooler and the shade from the house stretched out over the side lawn on which we were sitting, over the neighbors’ driveway and printed the crooked shadow of a chimney halfway up the side of the neighbors’ house. “You two had better go in and set the supper,” my mother said. “Margaret and Lorraine will be here soon and perhaps we might all like to walk up and see a movie tonight.”
I thought it over as I spread the cloth on the dining-room table. Of course, I couldn’t say I didn’t want to go, but if he should call when we were at the movie I’d never know! It might be that he hadn’t said anything to Swede because, like me, he wasn’t sure. And maybe Swede was just teasing me. Probably he and Jack had talked it all over and he just didn’t want to tell me, that was all. Outside, long shadows lay on the grass and I could hear robins in the trees on the front lawn singing that lilting question they always ask from tree to tree as the sun is going down.
In the kitchen Kitty had been opening two cans of pork and beans and she popped something quickly in her mouth and was wiping her fingers on her slacks with a guilty look when I came in for the silverware. I still couldn’t believe that he hadn’t even mentioned last night, hadn’t said anything at all.
No matter what you tell her, Kitty always eats the little piece of fat pork off the top of a can of pork and beans like that.
