by Maureen Daly
I realized then with a half-proud, half-ashamed feeling, that Jack was a better boy than I was a girl.
Tony Becker called me the next morning just after I had cleared away the breakfast dishes. “Hi, there,” he said over the phone. “Guess who’s talking.” I knew it wasn’t Jack’s voice and I didn’t think Martin Keefe would call in the morning even if he did call at all. It might have been Swede but he was too good a friend of Jack’s to call me.
“I just drove over from Oshkosh to deliver some stuff for my dad,” he went on. “This is Tony talking.” Even though he had liked me a little I hadn’t expected him to call. It seemed too much luck to have two boys wanting to date me when just a few weeks ago there hadn’t been any. He asked me if I would like to do something with him on Wednesday night and I told him I certainly would. When he hung up I went out into the garden and could hardly keep the elation out of my voice as I said to my mother, “Tony Becker just called me.”
Later in the morning I phoned Margie and we talked about little things till I ventured casually, “Oh, by the way, Tony Becker asked for a date Wednesday night.” I thought she sounded queer when she asked me if I were going, but attributed it to jealousy—even if a girl is going steady I guess she doesn’t like other girls to be too popular.
At noon I made sandwiches and tea and we had lunch on the back lawn, my mother, Kitty, and I.The sky was dazzling blue, and white cabbage butterflies flitted here and there over the garden in an endless dance. We sipped our tea slowly, enjoying the brightness of the day, while Kitty plucked handfuls of the short grass and showered them down on Kinkee who was sleeping beside her. The grass tickled the dog’s black nose till she sneezed and then walked away in abused dejection. I kept waiting for the phone to ring till the one o’clock whistle blew at the factories on the edge of town. That was the first day in over two weeks that Jack hadn’t called at noon.
That evening Margaret and I put on slacks and played baseball in the side lot with Kitty till the sun went down, and after that we went inside and played three-handed bridge with Lorraine while my mother sat with her reading glasses on, letting down the hem of one of Kitty’s last summer’s dresses.
Later, when I opened my window before going to bed, last night’s moon was out again, just showing through the trees on our lawn. I tried to go to sleep very quickly. It seemed better not to think about Jack that night.
Lorraine told us when she came home from work the next day that she had a date with Martin that night. She met him having a Coke in the drugstore, she explained all smiling. He was just as nice as anything, asked how she’d been, and then suggested that they do something that night. “Honestly,” she said to Margaret with enthusiasm, “you should have Art find out subtly where he gets his things … Martin has the most superb taste in clothes!”
She went upstairs and put her hair in curlers and came to the supper table with apologies and a film of cold cream on her face. No one mentioned Jack’s not having called. My mother had had a letter from my father who was working on a prospect down in southern Illinois and he had hopes of closing a big deal in the morning. Kitty had spent the afternoon catching bumblebees in a canning jar and was rushing through her supper so she could let them loose again before they suffocated. All day long one half of my mind had been thinking about Tony Becker and tomorrow evening, and the other half was cautiously waiting for Jack to call. He might be in Green Bay visiting his cousin again, of course. Either I would get a postcard tomorrow or he would be certain to call.
That night I tried to stay awake until Lorraine came home to ask if she had had a good time. It struck me that I had been so busy thinking about Jack for the past few weeks that I hadn’t taken the time to be nice to Lorraine or to talk with her the way we used to. I lay for a long time remembering how it used to be when we were all little girls and there was nothing to do on Saturday night but take baths and play pillow games in bed. I wondered if Lorraine thought about things like that anymore.
The old clock on the courthouse tower in the center of town rings out every hour, and late at night, when the town is still, the chimes echo out even to the edge of town. Lying in bed, I heard the clock strike midnight and then one o’clock. Outside the night was quiet and only an occasional car went down the street. Even the wind in the trees was hushed. Before long I lost hold of my thoughts and they slipped into dreams. I didn’t hear Lorraine come in after all. I don’t even think I heard two o’clock ring.
We drove back to Oshkosh on Wednesday evening. It is a twenty-mile drive from Fond du Lac on a wide curve of highway that runs along the lake, almost touching the shore. My mother hadn’t liked Tony very well—I could tell that. He had been polite and friendly but there was something in the way he had talked to her—as if he had known her a long time, instead of being a little shy the way boys are supposed to be. It was almost seven-thirty when we left and the sun was going down, with stretches of cloud like graying cotton against the faint rose of the sky. A cool, moist wind blew in from the lake. Farther on, the highway goes through a stretch of sodden marshland, thick with slim, green rushes and stagnant with green-scummed pools. Here and there were the dark mounds of beaver hills, half hidden in the tall grass.
From the very beginning I liked Tony. There was something different about him. He drove faster and didn’t look straight ahead with his eyes on the road the way Jack did, but kept turning to look at me. In fact, he looked at me so much that I began to feel that I must be very nice to look at. He asked me what I’d been doing with my summer and what college I was going to in the fall and the sort of things that make easy conversation. One stretch of highway runs directly along the lake shore and the water there was restless and choppy. There is a small island a short distance out with two heavy-headed trees on it. “Sometimes in stormy weather,” said Tony, pointing it out, “the waves wash right over that island so that the trees look as if they are growing out of the water. I tried to land on it from a motorboat one afternoon but you can’t do it. It’s too rocky and the island’s nothing but a piece of high marshland anyway.”
He smoked one cigarette after another and I had to open my window to clear out the smoke, and the night air was cool and smelled of rain. We passed a long straight row of ash trees, bending gently with the wind and restless as before a storm. There is something fascinatingly secure about riding in a car at that time of evening. Along the road the barns and silos were changing into dark silhouettes against the sky and fields were losing their fences in the dusk. The road to Oshkosh is dotted with taverns that thrust their bright neon beer signs out into the night. In a yard before one of them, an old white farmhouse converted into a roadhouse, early customers had already parked their cars, like a row of dark beetles. We passed an old billboard that sagged drunkenly on tired legs, its supports sunk into the marshy ground. The whole countryside seemed caught in the silence that comes over everything just as the sun goes down. First lights were just beginning to wink on in the farmhouses and trees stirred uneasily, apprehensive of the coming night. The wind had twisted the dark clouds into weird shapes and in the whole gray-green pall of half-darkness I felt as if I would like to sit closer to Tony, safe inside the car with the bright headlights before us, pushing aside the dusk.
Just on the outskirts of Oshkosh was a line of new white frame houses with warm lights in their shiny windows, the young evergreens beside the doors still squat and green and the lawn still grassless and fresh with red clay. Tony slowed up as we went by and said, “Look at that, Angie. Look at that, will you? All those people sitting reading the evening paper in their nice, clean white boxes. Looks nice, doesn’t it? Just like playing house.” It was good to hear a boy talk that way and Tony had talked like that all the way from Fond du Lac.
He liked things. It was he who had pointed out to me that the corn in the fields was higher than usual for this time of year; he had showed me a tavern where he usually stopped on Friday night for crisp, hot little fish fried in deep fat; and he had told me wi
th pleasure to listen how clear the music came through on the car radio since he had had the aerial adjusted. He seemed to be glad about everything. Each cigarette he smoked seemed to taste good and he watched the smoke, blue in the air. There was something about his mouth that seemed different from other boys. When I looked at him I felt so conscious of it. His lips were full and red and when he talked the words sounded slow and warm, as if he enjoyed saying them. I had noticed, too, that when he came up our front sidewalk, though he came fast enough, he seemed to be doing it slowly, to the fullest, and when he looked at me I felt that my face must be warm and smooth. I didn’t get the same breathless feeling of expectation I felt when I was with Jack but rather a lazy, luxurious consciousness of being alive.
We stopped at a place called Chet’s just on the edge of town. Instead of going around to the other side of the car to open my door, Tony just leaned across from the driver’s seat and turned the handle. It struck me then what a big boy he was. Inside, Chet’s is divided into two parts, just like Pete’s—one half for the bar and the other half for the orthophonic, the dance floor, and a circle of little black-topped tables and chromium-and-leather chairs. As we walked in several people turned to say hello to Tony and the bartender hailed him from the other room. This wasn’t a tavern or a roadhouse or anything like that—in fact, it was the sort of place that every town has for the younger people to go—but I couldn’t quite reconcile myself to being with people who drank beer and to going to “bar places.”
The whole evening went quickly. Tony was fun, though he was the first boy I had ever been with who drank whiskey and soda and I kept unconsciously watching him, expecting him to act as men in the movies do when they drink too much. We sat at a table by ourselves but several of his friends came over. The fellows seemed older and looked at me as if they were surprised about something, and the girls Tony talked to were the kind with very dark lipstick, short skirts, and low voices.
We danced together, Tony and I, and the music was slow and easy, and there was something in the way Tony moved that reminded me of how he had looked walking up our front sidewalk. I can’t explain to you the feeling it gave me. There was something slow and conscious about the way he moved his legs—as if he were thinking about them.
Of course I was wondering about Jack. Little thoughts nudged at my brain all evening but I tried to fluff them away. It was just the music from the jukebox and the familiar things like cigarette smoke and Cokes that made me remember him. After all, three days without a phone call is nothing, and I busied myself talking with Tony to keep other thoughts out of my mind.
He kept watching me so intently that I found myself laughing in the wrong places and making small, uneasy remarks that didn’t mean anything. There was something about him that I didn’t understand. He kept looking at me with such a slow, lazy look in his eyes that even with the table between us it seemed as if there was no table at all. And you can’t talk to a boy when he’s not really listening.
It began to rain just as we left for home, sending little drops spitting against the car windows while ahead of us the highway stretched lonely and dark. We drove with the car radio turned low and Tony reached over and took my hand in his. We went on in silence, he holding my hand lightly and me not knowing just what to do and feeling pretty silly, till he said in his same warm voice, “Are you cold, Angie?”
I was surprised. It wasn’t a cold night. “Why, no. No, thank you, Tony. I’m quite comfortable—and besides I’ve got my sweater right in the back seat.” He looked at me and then laughed hard, slapping his hand on my knee. He laughed so hard that I laughed too, and settled back on the car cushions, reassured. The music from the radio was soft and sweet and the windshield wipers were trucking merrily in the rain.
When we got home the storm had let up a little and Tony came right up to the door, standing on the top step with me.
“Would you like to do something Saturday night?” he asked.
My mind worked fast, feeling for the right, polite words. “I’d like to … I’d like to very much but—I’m busy this Saturday….”
He didn’t mind at all but just said, “All right, Angie. And thanks a lot for tonight. I liked being with you a lot. You know,” he laughed, “you’re a kind of restful girl to go out with.”
After he left I set the potted plants from the living room out on the front steps so they could catch the summer rain, while I turned over the odd thoughts in my mind to find out what Tony had meant. But I didn’t understand. Outside, the rain fell again in a quiet, steady patter and the air was fresh with the smell of damp earth and wet cement.
Of course I wasn’t really busy on Saturday night but I thought surely Jack would call by then.
Somehow when the telephone doesn’t ring it seems even more noisily present than if it is constantly jingling. As each day went by it became more evident that he didn’t mean to call. Every time I went into the dining room I could feel the phone on the corner table behind my back, almost as if it were someone staring at me. If it rang while I was upstairs I waited, breathless, to hear the mumbled conversation, praying that footsteps would come to the stair bannister to call up, “For you, Angie!” When I was washing my face in the bathroom I left the door open just a little so I could hear its ring over the noise of the water from the faucet, and when I was weeding in the garden between the vegetable rows my ears were strained with conscious alertness to catch any noise from the house. And as the end of the week drew near, each ring made that lump in my throat harder and heavier.
The days were filled with monotonous sameness. The mornings started out with bright, clean sunshine on the bedroom wall, the smell of fresh coffee, and my sister Lorraine at the breakfast table looking sleepy with curlers still in her hair. At first I tried to make myself feel glad that I was awake and that the morning was beautiful, and to keep the toast from sticking dry in my throat, and I tried to make myself care when my mother would say cheerily, “Well, Angie, today we’ll clean out the big spare closet,” or “Angeline, today would be a nice day to wash the front windows, don’t you think?”
Each morning was full of the pleasant drone of the serial stories on the radio and the usual little everyday tasks that dragged across my nerves in their routine dullness. When I dusted the living room there were furry night moths dead on the rug around the base of the floor lamp and the outside window began to be spotted with long-feelered Green Bay flies, those large, mosquitolike insects that sweep down like a plague for a few weeks of every summer. My mother enameled a kitchen chair white and set it on the back lawn to dry, and by night the paint was all stuck with their silly bodies.
The little boys next door found three dry peach stones one day and set them in a pan of water in the sun, waiting patiently to see them open, thinking they were clams. Kitty came in to tell me about it in her breathless, chattery way, but when I tried to talk to her the corners of my mouth felt heavy, and just moving my lips seemed too much trouble. I began to notice little things about her that I never noticed before—how her eyebrows turned up on the corners and the funny way she lisped when she got excited. I thought too how very nice it was to be young and not know about boys and things and still be happy about ice-cream cones and cutting paper dolls out of the Sears, Roebuck catalogues.
The days were beginning to get hot and the garden had that lush midsummer look when it seems that you can almost watch the plants grow. Early in the morning there were black and yellow spiders sunning themselves in strong webs stretched between the tomato plants, and the tomatoes were hard, green balls with the small twist of dried yellow blossom still stuck to the smooth skin. Little bright-green grasshoppers skipped on the grass of the back lawn, and along the cracks in the cement sidewalk the ants were busy mounding up their black mudgrain houses.
One afternoon we walked to the movie and in the soft, cool darkness I sat trying to keep my mind on the screen and hearing Kitty beside me making noise with a bag of peanuts, while all the time my heart was beating w
ith an aching throb and I kept remembering that the last time I had been here was the Sunday night with Jack. I could re-act in my memory the contented feeling of being so near to him and the warm, clean pressure of his fingers on mine.
And as each day changed into evening and Margaret came home from work full of talk about Art and the store, and the setting sun slid long shadows onto the lawn, a queer, tired feeling crept over me and through me until even my hands went limp. I didn’t even feel like a girl anymore. And all my thoughts turned into little prayers which I meant so much that it made me ache all over. “Just once,” I kept saying. “Let him call just once.”
Lorraine asked me to go for a walk with her one evening. Martin hadn’t called for several days and she had been sitting by the front window reading, leafing restlessly through the pages of a magazine and glancing up quickly every time a car went past.
I knew why she wanted to go for a walk and I didn’t blame her. For the past few days I had wanted to do it myself. We closed the front door softly behind us and then walked down our street quiet and thick with summer shadows, till we came to Park Avenue. The night was here. Any small town is the same on a summer evening and slow cars went by one after another with their windows open, sending out quick snatches of music from the radio and twice we passed fellows and girls walking hand in hand, going toward the park.
“Let’s hurry,” said Lorraine.
There is something almost disgraceful about two girls, especially sisters, even going out for a walk alone when other girls have dates, so we turned off the avenue as soon as we could onto a side street, a street with heavy trees and lampposts only twice in the block.
I wish now I could have said something to Lorraine. Something quick and bright with happiness in it. If I could have said the right things that night, her whole summer, her whole life might have been different. But there was a certain wordless pride that kept us both from talking. I couldn’t admit, even though I knew it was true, that Martin had only been taking her out because he was new in town and didn’t know any other girls. I had to pretend that I didn’t know that every day after work she walked to the drugstore looking for him and that once I had heard her call his boardinghouse and then hang up gently when a strange voice answered. I had to pretend that I thought she wasn’t going out with him just because she didn’t care to and that it was she who was turning him down. I had to pretend all that, and go along in silence as if we were just out for an ordinary walk because we were sisters and because when we were younger we played tag together and never argued over paper dolls or tattletaled about each other and it was the same now.
