Seventeenth Summer

by Maureen Daly

  She didn’t mention where we were going but I knew where Martin roomed. Most of the houses on his street were already sound asleep but some still had low floor lamps shining through their eyes. “Let’s cross over to the other side, Angie,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t want him to see me if he should happen to be outside.”

  We walked softly on padded feet with the street lamps making heavy summer shadows from the old trees on the sidewalk. A quick cat jumped silently from the bushes and then, as suddenly, was nothing in the darkness. We went on until we were directly across the street from where Martin lived but the boardinghouse was quiet, its window shades pulled down like eyelids, and there was no green coupe pulled up at the curb. Lorraine said nothing at all but we both knew he wasn’t at home.

  The night was thick about us and the tree leaves whispered and small gnats made a moving fuzz around the streetlights. At the next corner we turned back automatically toward the avenue and out of the quietness of our thoughts, my sister said suddenly, “Angie, tell me—do you and Jack ever neck?”

  She startled me and I could feel my face flush warm in the darkness. Necking was one of those words that everyone knew about but never said. I was embarrassed into confusion—Lorraine and I never talked about things like that.

  “Do you mean have I—have I ever kissed him?” I asked and the words felt slow and awkward on my lips. And the night silence was pregnant with thoughts.

  “No, no,” she answered, her voice impatient. I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. “I mean—you know what I mean. Do you ever neck?”

  I didn’t really know, I told her, stumbling over the words. I wasn’t sure just what she meant … and something inside of me, panicky, kept hoping she wouldn’t say the word again.

  “Well, Angie, I’ve talked with girls at school, smooth girls, and they all … well, if you go out with a fellow a few times … it isn’t as if you have to be … You know how it is, Angie!”

  There was something in her voice that was asking me to answer but I didn’t know what it was that she wanted me to say. There was something in her voice that was saying so much more than the words themselves, an odd pleading that didn’t fit with the words at all.

  “Things are different now from the way they used to be,” she went on urgently. “People don’t think anything of it anymore … I mean, if it’s only one boy you’re going with and that sort of thing. It isn’t like it used to be when you had to be almost engaged … now everybody does it and nobody thinks … you know what I mean …”

  Her voice trailed off and she was looking at me hard in the darkness, waiting and I had to say something. I had to say something to get that worried, twisted sound out of her voice. I knew how she felt. She was thinking just as I was. There were little warm thoughts in her mind like soft fur, just as in mine: there were thoughts that made her lips tremble and set a quiet, steady, beating in her throat when the gentleness of the summer night touched her cheek and the air was fragrant with the smell of flowers hidden in the darkness. I knew how she felt.

  And suddenly I remembered how it was when we were still little girls and I wanted to reach out to touch her hand as we walked. “It’s all right,” I told her gently. “It’s all right, Lorraine. If you really like a boy—it’s all right to kiss him.”

  She went along in silence for a few moments, brushing close against the bushes, letting the cool, dark leaves touch her arm. “Angie, you don’t understand,” she said, wearily. “You don’t understand at all.” And there was no reproach in her voice. “You don’t even know what I mean!”

  I raked over that last evening with him carefully, looking for a sentence or even a word that could have made him angry, quickly skipping over the parts that were so lovely that it hurt to remember. And it wasn’t because I had gone out with Tony. That was silly, too. After all we weren’t going steady. Just because you’ve kissed a boy doesn’t mean you’re going steady. That’s silly, I told myself, but a little doubt dragged behind and stayed heavy in my mind.

  The night after I had been out with Lorraine, Kitty and I took the dog for a walk. It was late and Kitty came pattering downstairs in her nightgown when she heard me open the front door; and though I would rather have been alone, I let her come with me. The dog walked on silent paws, disappearing in the shadow of bushes and coming out again in the patches where the moonlight lay light on the ground; while Kitty walked beside me, her bare feet making a padding noise on the cement sidewalk.

  The night seemed to be deliberately hurting me with its lush loveliness. There was no need for the air to be so soft and fragrant just then nor for the crickets to keep up their steady chant that blended with my thoughts till it was no sound at all. Why, I thought, do night moths rise up like small white ghosts from the grass and why are the trees so full of whispers? Why do I keep remembering the smell of pipe smoke that you can’t even see, pungent in the night air, and that small, warm silence when someone is near you? Am I supposed to stand this? Am I supposed to go in the house and put the dog in the basement for the night and go into the living room and talk to my mother as if everything was the same as always? Am I supposed to keep my lips moving with small weekday words when my throat aches with longing and my mind keeps remembering that the night is breathless and the moon is looking through the trees, making silent shadows on the grass? It wasn’t fair that everything was so full of loveliness and remembering, so full of everything I wanted. I wasn’t old enough to have to stand all this.

  A slow thought eased itself into my mind and grew and grew until I knew it was the truth. I knew it as certainly as if I had read it printed in the paper. Just thinking made my heart hurt with a throbbing ache till I felt that it would ease it if I could just hold it for a moment, with its pulsing ache, in the warmth of my hands. I knew, and the palms of my hands tingled with desire just to touch him, and thinking of it made my breath feel dry in my throat. I knew then there was no use pretending or trying to cajole my mind into silence or clouding my memory with forced, fluffy thoughts. Sometime, sometime I had to see Jack again and I knew it.

  “We’d better go in,” Kitty whispered in a small voice as if she, too, had caught the strange spell of the night, and she took my hand. Yes, I thought, we had better go in, and as I opened the front door a night moth flew in, drawn by the light, and fluttered against the lamp shade.

  Later, lying in bed, I thought and thought so long that every thought in my head turned into a prayer, and the longing seemed to suck all other ideas from my head until the whole bed, the whole darkness of the room was keeping time to the words that beat and beat in my head. Through the window the night breezes came soft with the smell and warmth of summer and my prayers went on and on, ends linked to beginnings in an endless chain, till my thoughts were a steady chant of “Let him call, let him call!” and outside, the moon, almost full, hung heavy and gold just above the trees.

  And I kept seeing it, so round and close, even after I shut my eyes.

  And the next morning I found out. My mother and Kitty drove to Sheboygan with my father—it was unusual for him to be home in the middle of the week and it made the day a sort of holiday. I waited till I heard the car back out of the driveway and the sound of it fade away down the street. Even though I knew I was alone I made myself walk down the stairs casually, slowly, as if it didn’t matter at all. I stopped in the living room to dial the radio to a music program and took a last, cautiously casual look in the kitchen to make sure everyone was really gone before I picked up the phone. I even looked in the icebox and made myself pretend I was concerned over what I would make for lunch. The dog Kinkee raised her nose from her paws as she lay under the kitchen table and it gave me a guilty feeling even to have her hear but, after all, there was nothing wrong with calling!

  Margie’s voice on the other end of the wire was high and a little surprised. I could imagine her thin, red lips as she talked. “Well, gee, Angie, it certainly is a long time since I heard from you!”

  “Why
, yes. It is,” I said, my mind feeling for the easy, noncommittal words.

  “What you been doing?” she went on, and I told her nothing at all except the usual lazy things one does in a summer and what had she been doing?

  “Oh—Fitz and I have been going out to Pete’s like always and then a bunch of us had a wiener roast the other night …” Her voice trailed off a little.

  Go on. Go on. Did you see him? Was Jack there? Tell me. Tell me. Don’t make me ask. Don’t make me ask, my mind said, but the words from my mouth came with slow unconcern, “That must have been fun, Margie. That must have been loads of fun with the weather so nice and everything.”

  The next words I seemed to see rather than hear, as if they came out, black and stark before my eyes on ticker tape. “I suppose,” she said simply, “I suppose you know that Jack has been dating Jane Rady again?” She knew I hadn’t known; she knew, but how else could it be said?

  For over a week, she told me. Ever since that time I had gone out with Tony. Almost every night since then. To the wiener roast and to Pete’s and to shows by themselves. Jane Rady had told all the girls she was going with Jack again. Jane Rady had told everyone. After all, it had been well over a week.

  I was glad Margie kept talking for I wasn’t sure of my own voice then. Those minutes on the phone were so long I couldn’t even remember ever having talked before.

  “Honestly, Angie,” she went on in a very confidential, sister-to-sister tone, “I can’t see why you had to go out with a boy like Tony when you were dating someone as swell as Jack Duluth.”

  “Why? But why, Margie? I had fun with Tony. It was nice. What do you mean ‘a boy like Tony’? He’s a friend of Jack’s. Jack introduced me to him. Don’t the fellows like him or what?”

  “Boys like him,” she explained with elaborate patience, “and girls like him too—but, well, they don’t go out with him … unless they’re that kind.”

  I had been staring at the rug pattern on the dining-room floor till it rose and blurred before my eyes. I was so surprised that what Margie was saying seemed faraway and unreal, like something that wasn’t meant for me to hear at all. And after she had said it I wanted her to hang up and let me think my own thoughts.

  “That’s why everyone was so surprised, and especially Jack, because no one thought you were the kind to go out with a fast boy like that, Angie!”

  For the rest of the day the word resounded in my head. But he hadn’t been when he was with me, so how was I to know that Tony was a fast boy!

  My mother brought home some newly shelled peas they had bought up at a vinery on the highway coming from Sheboygan. I picked out the small, round thistleheads that are always mixed with vinery peas and put the peas on to cook.

  “We passed Jack in the bakery truck headed for the lake just as we turned into the street,” my mother said conversationally, tying on a clean apron. “He must have been going out to look at his boat.”

  Since morning my thoughts were so numbed that now I could look at her and nod in answer without my face showing anything.

  Late the next afternoon all the ominous, heavy gloom I felt inside of me seemed to come out in the weather. I had been in the kitchen most of the day ironing Kitty’s dresses and the clothes had the clean, fresh smell of having blown in the sun, but the steam came up hot from the ironing board and the air was damp and muggy. My hair was sticking in fuzzy curls on my neck, and from the radio in the living room I could hear the inarticulate drone of the baseball game. It was the sort of day that made you wish you could go to bed right away and not have to wake up till tomorrow.

  The weather was bound to break and finally in the late afternoon a storm rode in from the lake on a low wind that smelled of fish and the dark, troubled water of Winnebago. Over to the north the sky grew heavy and sullen, a dark gray-green, the color of old bruises, and the wind snaked its way through the grass and pushed the bushes flat against the house. Outside, neighbor women came to their doors calling to the children to come in before the rain came, and in our living room my mother switched off the radio, grumbling with sudden static, and came into the kitchen.

  “Angeline,” she suggested, “let’s have a cup of tea and finish those macaroons in the cookie jar.” She set out the cups, but just as the steam began to whistle from the nose of the kettle she said, “Or perhaps it’s too near suppertime,” and put the cups and teapot away again.

  The smell of the lake was so strong the waves might well have been licking the back door step and the trees on the lawn tossed fitfully, as if they were worried beyond bearing. Kitty came in with her hair blown about saying, “Got to close the upstairs windows. It’s going to rain.” The sky was so dark that the air was gray-green and birds swooped low from the trees, uneasy about the coming storm. As I went to shut the kitchen window the wind blew the first rain against the pane in spiteful gusts, and out in the north, over the lake, lightning crooked a long, bright finger across the sky. It was a storm that would last the night.

  “What shall we have for supper?” my mother asked. “It’s the sort of night the children will be hungry.”

  “Pancakes and cocoa with marshmallows?” Kitty suggested hopefully. That is her stock menu for anything from picnics to birthday parties.

  “All right,” Mom agreed. “And, Angie, if you’ll melt up some butter with brown sugar it will save us having to go to the store for syrup in the rain.” Kitty hovered close to the stove with comments and suggestions till the syrup was done and I gave her the sweet, sticky pan to scrape.

  Later, at supper, she sat bobbing the marshmallow in her cocoa cup up and down, saying every few moments, “Isn’t this good, children? Isn’t this good?” She always calls my other sisters and me “children” because my mother does and usually I laugh but tonight I didn’t care.

  Lorraine’s hair was damp and uncurled from the rain and hung limp around her face. Every few minutes the lights in the chandelier dimmed as outside the lightning crackled, and we all held our conversation poised for a moment, waiting for the thunder to pass. The house had the warm, oppressive stillness in the air that comes from the tension of a storm and not having the windows open. For a moment I thought I couldn’t stand it—all the pleasant, protected smugness that kept making me pretend and pretend.They all sat around the table, enjoying the luxurious taste of syrup and melted butter, with their lips soft and smiling and their faces happy as if they were eating slices of contentment. I had a sudden stifled feeling, as if the house were too small and the cream-colored dining-room walls were crowding in close, so close that it made my very ribs ache.

  My mother filled Kitty’s cocoa cup again, smiling to herself. “Isn’t this a good night to be all home, cozy and inside?” she questioned, and her voice was quiet and warm with sheer satisfaction. Outside, the wind pelted the rain in sheets against the window and went keening through the trees, its sad wail trailing behind.

  We spent the whole miserable evening in the living room with the radio off because the air was static-filled with storm. Lorraine had pinned her wet hair into a scraggly knot at the back of her head like a neat washwoman and sat leafing through a pile of old magazines. My mother had picked apart a worn tweed suit of Margaret’s to make over for me for college, and I slipped it on, tacked together, over my slacks while she made rough calculations with pins. “There,” she said with satisfaction, “look, children. If that won’t look smart with a long yellow sweater!” I inched around slowly to give her the whole effect while she said with her head cocked, chewing a bit of thread, “But you must stand straighter, Angie,” and she gave me a motherly poke between the shoulder blades with her thimbled finger. “You’ve been slumping for over a week.”

  Margaret sat with a magazine and note paper on her knee writing to Art and smiling to herself, while the pen made a steady scratch-scratch in the quietness of the room.

  I took a book from the shelf and lay down on the rug to read. There is nothing like filling your mind with new thoughts to crowd the
old ones out, but somehow it didn’t work. It was like taking castor oil with orange juice. When you drink through the sweet juice floating on the top everything seems all right but you inevitably come to the thick, sickening castor oil, heavy at the bottom.

  Lorraine was chipping the nail polish off the nails of one hand with the other hand as she read, making a small, insistent noise as irritating as the screak of chalk on the blackboard. Martin had called just before the rain began for the first time this week. I had answered.

  “Hi, there, Angeline,” he had said.

  And I was so surprised to hear his voice I blurted out, “Hello, Martin! I’m so glad you called!” That was wrong. Martin always laughs at anyone who is glad about anything.

  “Yeah?” His voice twisted into a question and I could almost see his face with one eyebrow raised and a half-smile making his mouth sarcastically amused. “Your sister ’round?” he asked.

  “Why, no. No, she isn’t home from work yet,” I explained, “but she’ll be here in just a little while—”

  “All right,” he answered abruptly. “Thanks, Angie.”