by Maureen Daly
The air was full of the warm smell of buttered popcorn, the hot asphalt of the street stretched basking in the sun, and the pungent, exciting smell of firecrackers. Floats went by with slow grace, like huge elephants, fluttering with crepe paper and hung with flags, and Kitty studied each one with open-mouthed amazement and then turned to me in bewilderment asking, “Angie! Where’s the man that drives them?” and promptly lost herself in the excitement of the string of small ponies that came next.
Each summer holiday a traveling concession comes to our town, stakes off a wide circle on the green of the park lawn, rings it in with rope, and tethers its patient little ponies in a line, waiting for the children to come with their dimes to pay for three slow exciting turns around the ring. In the morning the ponies were part of the parade, walking in a prim straight line, their hoofbeats neat and dainty on the hot pavement, and jaunty red and blue pompons stuck behind their ears. They always reminded me of genteel old ladies who, for some reason, had to work for a living but never quite forgot that they had known better things. “Angie, make Daddy take me to the park afterward,” Kitty pleaded. “I want to ride the black one with the little face,” and her voice went soft and her lips were all pouted up with love just looking at the demure ladylike pony.
“If he can’t take you, I will,” Jack promised and it made my cheeks tingle to hear him say it. I couldn’t have been more proud if he had promised to buy her the whole horse.
A girl drum major with a high, pouter-pigeon figure did a fancy goosestep past us, the thin satin of her skirt clinging to her legs. Someone shrilled a sharp whistle through his teeth. A titter went through the crowd and the man next to me guffawed loudly to himself, then looked around him quickly, trying to pretend he had just been clearing his throat. I looked away so I wouldn’t have to meet Jack’s eyes and he was squinting very hard at something down the street in the opposite direction. Then the rest of the parade went by.
Almost every business in town contributes something to our parades and a long line of milk trucks, freshly washed and spruced with their wheels twisted patriotically with red, white, and blue paper, drove by; and after them came a string of ice wagons with slow, plodding horses that kept their heads down and their dull eyes on the pavement, while their ribbon-braided tails flicked patiently at the files. Little boys with smoking punk in their hands rode in and out of the parade, tossing firecrackers at the horses’ feet.
It was getting on toward noon and the heat rose from the pavement and the clear blue sky was as dazzling as the sun. Women in sheer print dresses stood along the curb, fanning themselves with handkerchiefs or folded newspapers, the powder white in the fat creases of their faces. Across the street from us a little boy stood in bare feet, shifting from one leg to the other to keep them off the hot cement, his eyes still intent on the parade. Men took off their ties and rolled up their shirt sleeves, while the sweat ran down their faces and their shirts stuck to their backs and Kitty put her hands to her hair, feeling the heat. Everyone stood around, talking and pointing and calling to one another across the street, with their clothes limp and their faces hot and shining but no one even thought of going home.
Part of the local American Legion marched past with little flags stuck in their hatbands, swinging striped canes and hailing their friends along the curb. Jack’s father went by and waved to us. I knew it was the first time he had ever seen me and I felt self-conscious, wishing suddenly that I had worn a better dress. One of the Legionnaires walked past on wobbly knees, swinging a yellow feather bird on a stick that made a high, shrill twee-twee noise when it went through the air. Kitty squealed with delight.
The parade wound up with a few stragglers and little boys on bicycles twisted with ribbons of crepe paper, and the crowd surged out from the curbs, pushing toward their cars. Bits of red and green paper from the firecrackers littered the sidewalks and the hot air was tinged with the smell of gunpowder. Everyone was smiling broadly with the holiday excitement that takes over on the Fourth of July and with the round, exciting thoughts of a whole long warm day of shining cars, smooth highways, laziness, and full picnic baskets. Jack took Kitty’s hand and together we pushed with the crowd toward the side street where my mother and father were parked.
It may have been the sunny brightness of the day or it might have been the exhilaration of the band music, but suddenly I was almost giddily glad just to have Jack beside me and I felt that I should walk with my head very high and my shoulders straight. It was the sort of a day when just being able to look at people seems wonderful.
But it turned out to be an all-wrong sort of day when Kitty was bound to skin her knee, fat houseflies came buzzing in the hole in the backdoor screen and no one could find the lemon squeezer anywhere. After the parade Lorraine had said, “If we’re not back by four, just go without me—I don’t know just what Martie’s plans are.”
And at four-thirty my mother, fresh from her afternoon nap, had lifted the picnic basket from the kitchen table and gone out to the car saying with finality and a “humph” in her voice, “We’re not waiting around here all night for anyone.”
Art muttered to Margaret under his breath, “What a fellow like him can find to do to pass the time in broad daylight …”
So we had gone on without Lorraine.
Even the air coming in the car window was warm as we drove, and the hot, white highway before us shimmered like running water. My mother and father sat in the front seat and the rest of us were crowded in the back seat with the picnic baskets. I tried to sit carefully, so my bare legs didn’t have to touch Kitty’s small, hot brown ones, and we drove for miles that tailed on miles along the highways and dusty country roads looking for old familiar picnic grounds; and soon the car was filled with the nauseating smell of hard-boiled eggs from the potato salad, so that I had to close my eyes to keep from feeling uneasily giddy.
Each picnic ground we passed was lined with cars and milling with men in loose-knit golf shirts and with little, loud-lunged children in sunsuits so scanty that their thin, narrow ribs showed. “Perhaps if we just drive out in the country just a bit farther we can find a nice place with running water which no one knows about,” my mother suggested. She was the only one in the car who wasn’t warm and her voice was calm and cool.
Cars rushed by with short, whizzing noises and even out in the country the highways were crowded. Every available woods had a car or two pulled up to the ditch and people had even spread their tablecloths outside the fences where the grass was dusty near the roadside. Art, who loves picnics, kept urging that we find a place secluded and well in off the road—“a place with shade but no people,” he said.
Beside me Kitty was restless, squirming because the rough upholstery scratched her bare legs. Farther out from the city the fields of corn stood motionless in the still air, the leaves shiny as silk in the sunlight, and the trees were clumped green on the hill-sides like huge bunches of parsley. Wild cornflowers grew scattered on their thin, sprawled stems making a low, blue haze along the roadside. Once a flock of blackbirds rose noisy from a field as we passed, very black against the bright sky, and the whole country was stewing in a slow, heavy heat.
My father drove with one hand on the wheel and the other arm out the window, as if he were dragging it through cool water. We passed car after car and woods after woods till the sun slid westward in the sky and a long, lop-sided shadow of the car trailed after us on the highway. The heat filled the air with a steady, pulsing warmth that fanned our faces and made our eyelids heavy until even my mother looked hot and tired. “I think,” she said, “that there is no better place for a picnic on a day like this than our own back garden,” and it was so warm that no one even bothered to answer.
Once more we slowed up at a group of trees a little way from a farmhouse, but a long, lean dog ran toward us, yapping, and an irate farmer in a damp blue shirt looked curiously from around the barn, so my father, without a word, accelerated the motor and turned toward town.
&n
bsp; Back at home Margaret and I spread the lunch out on the back lawn while Kitty amused herself mournfully by pulling the yellow butterflies with torn shreds of wings off the radiator of the car and laying them out side by side on hollyhock leaves.
It was almost five-thirty by then and my mother sat down on a garden chair and balanced her paper picnic plate on her knee. The sun was still as warm as noon, but shadows were beginning to stretch their lengths on the ground and the leaves of the trees were restless with small breezes. “Wouldn’t you think,” she said, “that Lorraine would have the niceness to call and say that she wasn’t coming home for supper either? I don’t know why it is that no one can make plans here anymore.”
Art was lying on a car robe with his full paper plate on the grass and a Coke bottle propped up beside it. It was at times like this that I was glad he was going to be part of our family. He would do anything at all to prevent friction or unpleasantness and he said now in his odd, warm voice that always reminded me of soft suede, “Oh, I don’t know, Mom. You know how it is when you’re out. You just forget what time it is.” Margaret passed him a sandwich just then and brushed her hand with the long bright nails against his, very gently.
My father had never said anything about Martin. In the beginning we were all so glad, and a little surprised, that Lorraine had someone to go out with that no one thought of criticizing. It isn’t that she couldn’t get along with fellows if she wanted to, I guess, but because she has gone to college and everything she just doesn’t like “ordinary” boys. Until now my mother had never criticized Martin, either. “But you would think,” she said, “that a boy who has his meals in a restaurant three times a day would be glad to have a nice, home-made picnic!”
Sorrow over the dead butterflies had completely left Kitty by now and she piped up, “Ah, him! He’s so old he doesn’t like anything. He never wants to catch my baseball or play with Kinkee or anything. I’ll bet he doesn’t even like ice cream!” and the edges of her voice were curled with scorn.
After we had finished eating I gathered the leftover bits of sandwiches and the half-eaten curves of watermelon that looked like broad, empty grins onto a paper plate, and then we all sat on the lawn, relieved that the heat of the day was passing and the cool of the evening was creeping in low over the grass. Kitty brought out my mother’s knitting from the house, all wrapped in a clean towel, but she left it untouched while birds twittered in the garden hedge and a light wind stirred in the trees. Everything was so pleasant that my thoughts just floated, light and elusive, in my head.
When Jack came up the sidewalk the dog gave a short, gruff bark almost as if it were clearing its throat. I was sitting with my back turned and I hadn’t known he was coming but yet I knew it was Jack. Without even turning my head I knew it was he and I knew exactly how he looked. My mother smiled at him and asked him to sit down with us while she nodded to me to clear the picnic things away.
My hands felt awkward and unaccustomed as I shooed the flies from the uncovered watermelon rinds and gathered up the paper plates. I stood uncertain for a moment, wondering if I should bring the things into the kitchen or dump them vulgarly into the can at the end of the garden right then. Kinkee nosed politely around my bare legs, sniffing anxiously for scraps, so I decided to take the sandwich leavings into the kitchen and fill her bowl. Jack jumped to his feet to hold open the back door for me and I mumbled a “thank you” that somehow didn’t come out at all.
It all seemed too strange to me. Inside, scraping bits of sandwiches and potato salad into the dog’s dish, my hands shook and my cheeks had a hot prickly feeling. It didn’t seem right to go outside again and sit there on the cool grass, liking Jack so well, right in front of my family! This was the sort of thing that belonged at Pete’s or out near the boathouses, but not on my own back lawn with Kitty and Kinkee and everyone watching! It just didn’t seem right. The dog sat up on her hind legs, begging with petulant squeaks, till I set her bowl on the floor.
From the back lawn I could hear my father’s deep voice, Art’s soft one, and the boy-voice that was Jack’s, with polite pauses when I knew my mother was speaking. In the half-darkness of the kitchen I curled a few strands of hair around my fingers and held my hands tight to my face, just for a moment, to get my thoughts straight and to wait for that fast, excited beating to stop in my heart. Then I filled the dog’s empty bowl with water from the kitchen faucet, set it on the floor, and went outside.
My father was talking in a formal tone, a tone he saves and puts on like a necktie for just such special occasions as this.
“Of course,” he was saying, “it depends on what you want to do with your life. But for the girls here, I always feel that college is the best way to start.”
“You’re right, sir,” Jack answered. “I really think you’re right but with me it’s different. I’m the only one and my dad needs me ‘round the bakery. I figure maybe I can get some extra education through extension courses and just reading by myself—but my dad needs me ‘round right now.” Jack was sprawled on the grass, talking very fast and earnestly, his eyebrows knit together.
“But it seems to me the thing to do would be to try to get the education first,” my father explained and my mind quickly jumped to Jack’s defense. Maybe there was a mortgage or something. Maybe there was a whole family of poor first cousins that had to be supported. There were dozens of reasons why some people can’t afford to go to college. After all, my father shouldn’t talk that way to a boy he had met only twice before!
“I understand what you mean, sir,” insisted Jack, talking carefully so it wouldn’t sound as if he were contradicting. “If I had a son I would want him to go to college. But you see, we had a pretty good bakery business down in Oklahoma, but my mother wanted to move back here to be near her folks and now we have to build it up all over again. And it isn’t so good—too many people in this town still bake their own bread and things.”
“Where is your mother from, Jack?” my mother asked, her voice pleasant.
“After they were married she and Dad lived in Oklahoma till just a couple years ago, but she is originally from out near Rosendale,” he said, turning toward her. “I have an aunt out there who says she knows you because you did some work together at a church bazaar once—her name is Alberts.”
So Jack had been talking about my family to his aunt! And he must have been talking about me too. Perhaps, to tease him, his father had said, “Jack’s got a new girl,” and his aunt had looked up in surprise, asked what her name was, where she lived, and what she looked like, or maybe she had heard him talking to me on the phone or maybe after the parade today his father had said to him casually, “Who was that girl I saw you with this morning, son?” To think of anyone calling him “son” made me shiver a little—it seemed such a daringly personal thought—and I looked up quickly to see if anyone had been watching me. But Jack was chewing a bit of grass, looking off toward the lake, and my mother had her eyes on her knitting.
We sat outside for a long time while the sky grew dark and small new stars popped out and a thin crescent of moon made a bright curve in the sky. We talked of everyday things and my father and mother addressed most of their remarks to Jack because he was company, and when he didn’t understand he would question them with a quizzical “Please?” instead of the “Pardon me?” that we always used, and even in the darkness I could imagine his eyebrows knitted together in thought. Art slapped at the mosquitoes that kept up a steady murmur around our heads, but after the heat of the day the coolness of the evening was so pleasant that no one wanted to go into the house.
I found my mind following the conversation with the same back-and-forth movement with which one’s eyes follow the ball in watching a ping-pong game. Each time anyone spoke to Jack I waited a little breathless to hear what answer he would toss back. At Pete’s and in McKnight’s I was sure of him but with my family I had been anxious. After all, it is quite a test for a boy to have to talk with six people at once.
> Later on, much later, when the sky was very dark and the stars were sprinkled across it, hard and bright, Kitty decided it was time to go through her Fourth-of-July ritual of lighting her box of sparklers. We all sat watching and making the right, appreciative comments, while she stood with each sparkler at arm’s length, shooting off a wraith of quick stars. As each one burned near the end she tossed it over her head so it fell in a bright arc to the ground, lying in the grass till the hot wire had glowed itself out. Kitty’s teeth chittered with excitement and ecstasy, and having Jack and Art as audience added to the thrill. She had taken off her shoes and short socks to enjoy the coolness of the grass, and my mother warned, “Be careful of those hot wires in the darkness with your bare feet, Kitty dear.” After the last sparkler had arched through the air and sputtered out in the grass, she gave a breathy little sigh and sat down beside me, all tired from the happiness of it. After the brightness of the sparklers the sky seemed even darker than before.
Somewhere off in the distance an ambulance siren sounded, faint at first with an eerie questioning, the sound swelling as it passed the corner of our street, going down Park Avenue and headed out toward the highway that runs along the lake. It sped on its way, leaving a long, thin wall of sound trailing behind it, while my mother stopped in her conversation, listening. All of us sat with our minds snapped in alertness, knowing what she was thinking. If we are all away from home and hear a fire siren, my mother is certain it is our house that is burning; if one of us is away and we hear an ambulance, she is sure it is one of us stretched out somewhere on the highway. We knew now she was thinking of Lorraine and we all began talking very fast and very animatedly to drown out the weird tail of sound that still lingered in the night. With sudden enthusiasm Jack burst out, “Mrs. Morrow, have you ever been sailboating?” and then petered out in a less eager account of the fun he and Swede had had that afternoon. It made my lips feel soft just hearing him then. How quickly, without even a word said, he had understood and become one of us!
