Seventeenth Summer

by Maureen Daly

  “That shade could go down just a little lower and then I’ll try to sleep again. Make whatever you like for the children’s supper, will you?” and her voice trailed off. Quietly I fixed the window shade and smoothed the pillow under her head.

  Downstairs again I kept hoping that Kitty would play out at the creek until suppertime. There was so much to think about, I wanted the quietness now. All I had ever known about Oklahoma was vague stories I had heard about people striking oil down there and a few scenes of desert, spiky cactus, and milling cattle that I remembered from Western movies. None that seemed to fit in with Jack. Certainly cowboys didn’t want bakery goods! Jack belonged in drugstores, swimming behind Pete’s, or playing basketball in a school gym somewhere. I couldn’t imagine him anywhere else. It struck me then that he hadn’t said where in Oklahoma he was going to live, but I felt sure it would be way down near the southern border; probably almost into Texas. There was an old geography book in Kitty’s bedroom, I knew, but I didn’t want to look the state up; I didn’t want to know how many miles there were between Wisconsin and Oklahoma.

  Jack came over early that night and dried the supper dishes for me. After that we sat out on the front steps. I needed to talk to him alone, even if I didn’t know what I wanted to say. The night air was warm and filmy, hanging loose around us like thin, black chiffon. Beside the front steps the pine trees were fragrant with the same cool spicy smell that lingers over pine forests. Yet there was a quiet lonesomeness about that night, a poignant stillness that made my voice sound small and hushed, hardly like my own.

  “Jack, I forgot to ask you where you are going to live in Oklahoma.” He was sitting two steps below, resting on his elbows with his head back and his hair almost touching my hand.

  “We’re going right back to where we came from,” he explained without turning. “It’s a pretty big place called Shawnee—about third largest in the state next to Tulsa. I went all through grade school there.”

  I remembered then that earlier in the summer his cousin had mentioned a little girl in a white house who so used to live near Jack; a little girl Jack had liked. It was a white house with pine trees in front of it, his cousin had said. And probably it had green shutters and a broad back lawn, the kind of house a pretty girl would live in. I wondered vaguely, not really caring, if she were still there.

  It would be a different life without him: I could feel it already. Probably I would slip back and back into the old self-consciousness that made even walking into McKnight’s an agony. But it wouldn’t do to have him know what I was thinking. “What are you going to do down there?” I asked. After all, we still had almost a month left.

  “Well, I’ll still be with my dad, of course. My uncle has a bakery there and we’ll all work together. Dad thinks he can make a go of it.” And suddenly his tone was casually defensive. “I suppose you wish I were going to school some more, don’t you, Angie?”

  All summer long he had talked as if I were ashamed of his not going to college; as if he were ashamed of it himself. He went on now in the same half-apologetic voice, “I’d like to, Angie—you know that. But I’ve got to stick with my dad. I guess I’ll have to get educated my own way.”

  … Without Jack there would be no more Swede or Fitz and no more nights at Pete’s. All the summer days would slip by as they had in other years, not meaning anything.There would be no reason for sunshine or the tangy, fishy wind off the lake. It made my throat ache with lonesomeness even when he was sitting so close to me that I could smell the clean soapiness of him and could have touched his hair with my hand.

  He lit a cigarette and I could smell the blue smoke I couldn’t even see in the darkness.

  “Angie,” he said turning to me, “I think I’m growing out of the bakery business. I can’t tell my dad that—not yet—but it’s not what I want to do all my life. He gets sort of a happiness out of it but I am tired of it already. I’m tired of sweet sugar smells.” He pondered a moment, with his lips puckered in thought. “There’s something … disgusting about eating anyway.”

  Just as he couldn’t tell his dad, so I hadn’t been able to mention it to him, but I had never liked it, either—his being a baker. It didn’t seem right that a tall boy with such a fuzzy crew cut and smooth sun-burned skin should wear a big white baker’s hat and work with vanilla and powdered sugar all day.

  “Have you decided what you would like to do instead, Jack?”

  “I don’t just know, Angie. But I like to do ‘hard’ things. Sometimes I think I would even like to be a farmer. I still have some relatives out in Rosendale who farm—it’s good, clean work. Last summer I spent about two weeks with them and I loved it. I talked to the fellows about jobs to see what they wanted to be and that, but Swede doesn’t care much what he does and Fitz thinks he’d like to work in a men’s store—he cares a lot about neckties and things.”

  He puffed at his cigarette. “I wouldn’t like that because I like to do things that make me feel big. I like to row a boat; I like to lift heavy boxes down at the bakery—things that make you feel as if you have muscles.” His voice grew louder as he talked about it. “I don’t know if you know what I mean, Angie.”

  “I do, I do,” I exclaimed, surprised to realize I knew exactly what he meant. “I know what you mean, Jack—it’s like shaking rugs out of an upstairs window on a spring day. You can feel things—the air is cool and it’s good to have a grip on something. The feeling comes to you through your hands, you can feel it on your cheek—you can almost see what you feel, it is so wonderful. Is that what you mean, Jack?”

  “That’s just it, Angie! You’ve got it,” he said in excitement. “I never knew that anyone else felt like that. I’d like to do work that made me feel all the time the way I feel when I’m in swimming—as if my legs are long and hard. I feel the way they look in the water.” He was talking fast and holding my hand so tightly that my knuckles hurt. He realized what he was doing then and both of us laughed.

  “Gee, Angie, it’s a relief to talk to a girl who knows what a fellow’s talking about.”

  He stuck his legs out in front of him, stretching and leaning back, looking up at the sky. The night was so pricked bright with stars, like a page from an astronomy book, it hardly looked real. His voice went on in a dream sing-song. “What I’d really like to be is a transport pilot, Angie. I’d like to take a ship up at night when it was as black as this and you wouldn’t even be able to see me. The tail light and the wing lights would look like stars and no one would know there had even been a plane up there at all till they noticed there were three stars gone.”

  He was leaning back so that my hand touched the warm of his neck and his crew cut felt fuzzy against my bare knees like the fur of a teddy bear. “Way, way up,” he whispered to himself, “so the moon would shine on the wings.”

  After a little while Lorraine came out. She had spent all evening in the bathroom combing and re-combing her hair, parting it first on one side and then the other, critically. Now it was twisted up in tight curlers and knotted in a big red kerchief. Her face looked very small and pinched with no soft hair fluffed around it.

  “Hear you’ve going to Oklahoma, Jack,” she commented sharply, as she sat down on the steps beside us. “You’ve lucky. Wish I were getting away from this town myself.”

  “He won’t be going away for a month though,” I told her. “He won’t leave until I leave for school,” and I felt suddenly reassured for having said it. If I could actually talk about it I mustn’t care so much myself!

  Jack didn’t stay long after that—he and I couldn’t really talk with Lorraine there—but after he had gone we stayed out on the steps, thinking in silence. It was a night for thinking. I sat with my hand around my knees trying to urge myself into a belief that everything I had heard that day was true. Lorraine was picking apart a sprig of fir tree with her sharp fingernails.

  I don’t know how long we stayed there, without saying a word, and I didn’t even hear her speak until sh
e repeated loudly, “Angie, did you or didn’t you?”

  “Did I or didn’t I what, Lorraine?”

  “I said,” she repeated with slow sarcasm, “none of you ever liked Martin very well from the beginning, did you?”

  His absence had been brooding silently over the whole house ever since the Sunday of his birthday when he had broken the date with Lorraine and I knew the tension would have to crack sometime. He was the kind of boy that a whole family remembers and, often, wholly unrelated things would make me think suddenly of his hands and the odd habit he had of slowly flexing and unflexing his fingers as he looked at them and the perpetual soft sarcasm around his mouth. But Lorraine was waiting for me to answer.

  “We liked him—of course, we did, Lorraine. Mom asked him to come with us on the Fourth of July picnic, didn’t she? And we always were nice to him when he came….”

  She had been so quietly thoughtful all evening that I was almost afraid to hear what she was going to say next.

  “You weren’t nice to him, Angie. You weren’t rude to him but you weren’t nice to him, either, none of you. But none of you ever understood him, that was all.” There was no resentment, no bitterness. It was just something she wanted to say and she was saying it.

  “You know, you didn’t like him because he was different from us. He cared about different things and thought that other things mattered. That’s why I liked him. He is a big-city boy all the way through.”

  Her words were hurrying out now, one after another and I could tell it was almost a relief to her to be talking. “I learned things from him that I never knew about before,” she went on. “Lots of things—I know what it means when people are really happy, when they are really alive. You all feel sorry for me—you and Margaret and Art—but I don’t care. I saw him lots of times when none of you even knew I was out with him!” she added triumphantly. “I can’t even count how many times I’ve been with him, it’s been so many. You will never know all the things we talked about and all the things he said. I know everything about him. I know what he likes to drink and how he smokes a cigarette and what kind of clothes he likes a girl to wear and how he looks when he’s angry—you all thought I just dated him like any other boy. You didn’t know he liked me, did you?

  “And no matter what ever happens,” she said defiantly, “no matter what ever, ever happens; no matter what anyone thinks and no matter whether I ever see again—I’m not sorry!”

  She was no longer talking to me. She was only saying out loud the things that had been pounding in her head for days and days and the words came out now, cold and calm, as if she knew very well what each one meant but didn’t care anymore. Sitting there, I felt oddly that I had never even known the girl; that she wasn’t my sister at all. Not now.

  The moments were long and tense as if both of us waiting for something, somewhere to answer, to make her take back what she had said. And suddenly her hands were limp on her knee and her voice was slow and heavy, “Angeline, I don’t know why I’m pretending when it isn’t true. This isn’t how I meant to grow up. I’ve heard of other girls … but that isn’t how I meant to be. I don’t want to pretend … but nothing will ever be the same anymore!”

  She sighed with a little tired sound and I kept looking at the stars, not wanting to see her face just then. And when she spoke again her tone was as dull, as flat as milk of magnesia, “Oh well, Angie. I guess it doesn’t make much difference anyway.”

  We stayed there a long, long time for there was a soothing kindness in the wind and in the restful silence of the night and it was I who moved to go into house first. Lorraine followed. My mother had been asleep for hours and the house was quiet with the breathing quiet of sleeping people.

  My heart felt so hard it hurt inside me and as we tiptoed upstairs Lorraine touched my arm, whispering, “Angie, don’t tell anyone I mentioned him, will you? Everything will be all right. I guess the night just … got me.” She laughed to herself. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever mention him again.”

  It seemed only moments until morning and I woke with the sound of my mother’s voice calling. The fever flush was still in her cheeks as I brought her a drink of ice water and her voice was still incredibly tired. It gave me an odd chill in the early aloneness of the morning. The hem of the sky was just faintly pink as I pulled her shades against the rising sun and, shutting the door softly, I went down into the half-light of the living room. Sleepy-eyed and curious, the dog came up from the basement, her tail wagging slowly in a contented stupor.

  Once up I hated to go back to bed so I made fresh coffee in the kitchen, deciding to wait up until the others waked. Kinkee nosed companionably around my bare ankles and then, lying down in the corner, went back to sleep. Except for the intermittent hiccup of the coffee pot percolating on the stove the house was quiet, breathlessly quiet. I opened the window wide to look out at the garden, fresh, green, and awake in the early morning with the clean smell of growing things. The air was like crystal and slowly the sun came up, sending streaks of apricot light across the blue of the sky. The cool air seemed to go straight down to the tips of my fingers as I breathed.

  It is odd how one can feel like someone else early the morning—bigger, cleaner, so much more alive. The dew on the back lawn, caught with sunlight, the quick twittering of the sparrows in the hedges—all seemed to be happening especially for me. It was going to be another August day, mellowed with sun; another day for thinking and feeling everything. It was wonderful and even the thought of Oklahoma didn’t seem so gray in the freshness of the morning. We still had a month between us.

  The strong smell of the coffee, the wind coming in from the lake, and the very fact that it was morning, filled me with a new exhilaration so that I dared to let myself play with a thought that I had shooed from my mind for the last two days. Such adult boldness is almost sinful, but ever since Jack told me in the truck behind Pete’s I had wondered. But no matter how hard I tried to imagine, my lips wouldn’t say it. Love is such a big word.

  Later that day I brought the stepladder from the garage into the house to get the two big trunks for school out of the attic. Carefully I eased them, one at a time, out of the trap door in the roof, while Kitty stood below holding the ladder and chattering directions up at me. Both locks had to be fixed and I cleaned the trunks out carefully before sending them away with the repairman. In one was an old blue gym suit and a pair of gray rubber tennis shoes that made the inside of the trunk smell like old balloons. In the other were some papers of Lorraine’s from school—an incomplete chemistry notebook, a sheaf of English themes, and a dance program with a browned gardenia stuck between the covers. The gym suit I threw into the clothes hamper and put the tennis shoes into the garbage can, but the other things I saved for Lorraine.

  When she came home that afternoon I asked her what should be done with them.

  “What did you find, Angie?”

  “Just some old papers, a dance program, and a withered gardenia that looked as if it might have been a souvenir,” I explained. She looked them over curiously, leafing through the papers, and then picked up the dance program. “This is from the spring dance of my sophomore year. So is the flower,” she mused, and then suddenly gathered them all together in a crumpled heap.

  “Just burn them, Angie,” she said. “I’m not going to save anything anymore.”

  By evening my mother was feeling well enough to sit on the back lawn in a garden chair, still weak and thin-voiced but her cheeks had cooled. I asked her if she would mind my going out for a little while that night and she answered, “Of course not, dear. You go. Lorraine and Margaret will be here with me, and besides I think I will only sit up for a little while anyway.” It worried me to hear her, for I knew she was patient and soft-voiced like that only when she was very tired. She is more gentle then because she hates to bother anyone by being ill. There is almost a sadness about her.

  Jack had asked me to go for a ride that evening and he and Swede came over together to pi
ck me up. He came down the back sidewalk, his face flushed with embarrassment, Swede trailing behind. “I certainly hope you’ve feeling better, Mrs. Morrow,” he faltered. “Angie told me you were in bed yesterday and I thought maybe you would like this.” He had been balancing a pie very carefully between two cardboard pie plates and he held it out to her.

  “I asked my mother,” he explained, “and she said that even if you weren’t feeling well this would be all right to eat because it’s lemon and there’s only simple things in the filling.”

  My mother was surprised into silence but Margaret, sitting beside her, spoke up quickly saying, “Why, Jack, you honey! If that isn’t nice. I just hope there’s enough for a piece for all of us.”

  He smiled sheepishly and Lorraine took the pie from his clumsy hands, bringing it into the house. I heard her open the icebox door to slip it in.

  “Really, Jack I can’t tell you when I’ve been so pleasantly surprised.” My mother’s voice quavered a little. I couldn’t tell if she were going to laugh or cry—sometimes she cries at the most surprising things. “Are you sure you and your friend wouldn’t like to have a piece with us now!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I didn’t introduce you, did I? Mom, this is Swede Vincent, and Swede, these are my sisters, Lorraine and Margaret, and the little one, Kitty, is out playing along the block somewhere.”

  They exchanged hellos, Swede jerking his head forward to each in turn, and then there was an awkward silence. “Swede is the one who sails the boat so well,” I ventured.

  “Of course, I remember,” and my mother took it up smoothly. “You graduated in June with Jack, didn’t you?”

  Swede answered with a few embarrassed nods and a few mumbled words, smiling as if his face were starched. No one would ever believe he had been one of the most popular boys in the senior class last year. He looked so uncomfortable that I suggested almost at once that we leave and he sighed audibly, bowing to my mother with a hasty, “Very glad to have met you, ma’am” as he backed down the sidewalk. Jack nudged me and laughed.