Blessings (5 page)

Now, for some reason, Jennie feels embarrassment and irritation. “Mom, I never asked.”

“Who said ‘asked’? Of course you didn’t. But a person can tell.”

“I don’t care. That doesn’t interest me.”

“Doesn’t interest her, she says!” Mom leans on her elbows and holds the teacup between both hands. Her eyes, glinting green-brown over the cup’s rim, are reflecting and amused. “What do you know? You’ve never been without money, thank God. Do you know what it is to wake up at night where you’re hiding in your bed, and you look at the clock and in a few hours you have to face the landlord and the butcher—they want their money and you haven’t got it? No, you don’t. So it doesn’t interest you. Tell me, what will you wear?” And without waiting for an answer, she says, “Listen, your father will make you a spring suit, a traveling suit.”

“Don’t bother Pop. He’s tired. I can find something.”

“One suit won’t hurt him. A few nights and he’ll finish it. What color do you want? I’ll tell you, it should be gray. Gray goes with everything. A nice suit so you’ll look like somebody when you get off the plane. He’s a nice boy, Peter. Why do they call him Shorty?”

“Because he’s six-feet-three.”

“He’s a nice boy.”

And Mom, wearing her familiar, warm little smile, pours another cup of tea.

It had begun even earlier than that, soon after the start of Jennie’s first year of college. Having skipped lunch to study for a test, she had stopped for a sandwich in the middle of the afternoon at a luncheonette off campus.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?”

She looked up at the tallest boy she had ever seen, with a head of the reddest hair she had ever seen.

“No, of course not.” In a new school and a new city, one needed to keep meeting people. And she moved her books aside on the table.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I watched you here every day at lunch last week.”

A fast talker. A wise guy? She answered, revealing neither surprise nor pleasure, “Why didn’t you, then?”

“You were with a crowd. There wasn’t any good way to begin.”

She waited. She wasn’t going to help him without knowing more about him. He had friendly eyes, but he’d begun too fast and had made her wary.

“I like the way you look. And your voice was something else I noticed. You don’t have a shrieking soprano.”

“I’m noticing your voice too.” His accent was full of soft vowels. “You from the South?”

“Atlanta. My name’s Peter Mendes.”

“Jennie Rakowsky. From Baltimore.”

He put out his hand. People didn’t do that on campus. Maybe it was a southern custom. Southerners were supposed to be more mannerly, more formal.

“I’d like to know you better, Jennie.”

She’d heard that before. Drinks and then bed, taken for granted, without having known each other more than a couple of hours. Well, he’d have a surprise in store for him if he was counting on that.

“Would you have dinner with me tonight? Do you like Italian food?”

“Everybody likes Italian food.”

“Okay, then. I know a great place. It’s not fancy, but it’s all home cooking. What time can I pick you up, and where?”

“I didn’t say I’d go. I said I liked Italian food.”

“Oh.”

She saw a flush almost as bright as his hair rise on his cheeks and was instantly sorry. He wasn’t a wise guy. He was straight and simple.

“Please.” She reached out to touch his hand. “I was only teasing. I’ll go with you, and thanks. I’m in the new dorm, and six would be fine if it’s all right with you.”

There was a tenderness about his mouth as it widened into a smile. In that instant she knew that she liked him, and all the way back to the library she hummed to herself.

What did they talk about over the ubiquitous checked tablecloth, the candle, and the tomato stains? On the college campuses of 1969, one didn’t hold a ten-minute conversation without reaching the subject of Vietnam. Jennie said she’d wanted so much to get to the convention in Chicago the year before, but she still had been in high school and her parents had been adamant. Peter’s experience was the same.

“It’s not that they don’t think it’s all horrible, what’s happening in Vietnam,” Jennie said. “But, well, they think kids shouldn’t go out in the streets. It doesn’t accomplish anything. They think Chicago was just a wild scene. You know how it is.”

Peter nodded. “Everything’s a mess. Sometimes I think the whole world’s going to rack and ruin. Sometimes I have so much angry energy, I think I’ll really be able to change things when I get out into the world.” Earnestly he drew his brows together, and as suddenly relaxed into a laugh. “The funny thing is, here I am ranting about fixing things in the future, and do you know what I’m going to study? Archaeology! Crazy, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not if that’s what you like. Why do you?”

“It started one summer in New Mexico when I saw the Indian reservations and read about the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones. They have a wonderful philosophy, all about their place in nature, about how things are joined, all things with one another—trees, animals, and people— and we have to live in harmony.”

Oh, she liked his face, his generous thoughts, his long, clean hands, his freckled neck and arms, and his clean white shirt! She liked the fact that his middle name was Algernon and that he could laugh about it.

“They say, ‘My mother the earth, my father the sky.’ Have you ever heard that?”

“No. It’s a beautiful idea,” she acknowledged, but what she was seeing was the head of thick russet hair, the eyes like opals: gray shot through with lavender light.

“So that’s what got me started. Now what about you?”

“I want to go to law school if I can afford to. I’m on a partial scholarship here, so I have to keep my grades up.”

Their talk bounded then from topic to topic. Music. Disco. Tennis. He was a seeded player. They had a tennis court in their yard, he said, so he’d always had lots of practice time. She had never known anyone who owned his own tennis court.

Had she ever ridden out to the Amish country? he asked. No, she hadn’t, although she’d read about them. So had he; he hadn’t spent much time in the North until now, and one of the places he’d wanted to see was the Amish country. Would she like to go there with him some Sunday? They could rent a car and take turns driving, if she liked to drive.

“I haven’t got a license. I’m only seventeen,” she told him.

“I’m eighteen. You’re young to be here.”

“I skipped a year in junior high.”

“I’m impressed.”

She flirted now, looking downward, then sideways, then upward, in a movement she had practiced before the mirror years ago. It revealed her thick black lashes and a curve of black curl across her temple. She thought of it as her piquant look.

“You needn’t be. I’m really not all that smart. I just work hard, for the reasons I told you.”

“You have amazing eyelashes,” he said.

“Really? I never noticed.”

“Well, they are. Gee, I’m glad I saw you this afternoon. I’d been thinking, this place is so big, maybe I wouldn’t ever see you again—or not for months, anyway.”

“I’m glad you did too.”

“I thought at first you didn’t like me.”

“I was only being careful.”

“So how about what I was saying, renting a car next Sunday?”

“I’d love to.”

They walked back across the campus, gone dark and almost vacant in the chill of early fall. Peter left her at the door.

“It’s been great, Jennie. Let’s start early Sunday and have the whole day. Good night.”

“Good night.”

He didn’t even make an attempt to kiss her. Ordinarily she would have felt this to be an insult, a rejection, even by someone whose kiss she didn’t want. Now she felt only that there was something serious in the quiet “Good night.” Odd, she thought, and hard to explain, even to herself.

They took their ride to Lancaster County, the first of many rides together. At an inn they ate seven sweets and seven sours, shoofly pie, and cider. They drove and walked past rich, rolling farms, fields of winter rye, and herds of dairy cattle in thick winter coats.

“No electricity, no machines,” Peter said. “They milk by hand.”

“You mean you can milk cows by machine?”

“Of course. That’s how it’s done these days.”

“How do you know so much about farms and animals?”

“Oh, we have a place in the country. I spend a lot of time there.”

“I thought you lived in the city.”

“We do, but we have this other place too.”

As fall turned to winter they began to see each other every day in their free time. They went to the zoo, the airport, and the waterfront. They sat on a bench in Rit-tenhouse Square and talked for hours. They took the train to New York and saw a French movie in Greenwich Village, where he bought her a silver bracelet.

“It’s too expensive,” she protested. “You spend too much, Peter.”

He laughed. “You know what? Let’s go back to the store.”

“What for?”

“To get the necklace that matches. Don’t look so shocked. It’s okay, I said.”

She looked up into his face while he fastened the silver chain around her neck. Happiness showed in his smile, in the fit of his fine lips, curved and upturned at the ends.

She loved his cheerfulness. It was contagious, in the same way that Mom’s worrying was contagious. At home she felt an underlying anxiety, even when conversation was pleasant enough; she felt a vague fear that things— what things?—might at any minute crumble, that there were no supports. It felt good to be with a person who was happy. Happiness made you strong.

Toward the middle of their second month together Peter kissed her. Afterward she remembered her first thought: This kiss, unlike any other, means something. It was late one afternoon and raining, so that there were hardly any people out to see them. She was holding an umbrella when he took her in his arms; letting the umbrella drop, she reached around his neck, and they stood like that for a long time in the soft rain.

For another week or two there were more such fervent, innocent embraces, becoming each time more and more disturbing, as they pressed against each other with the heat of their bodies flaming through all the layers of heavy cloth. When he let her go, her nerves were alive. When she trudged upstairs to her room, she felt as if part of her had been torn away. Not enough, she thought. It’s not enough.

“It’s not good like this,” Peter said one day. “We have to do something about ourselves.” And as she did not answer, he said, “We need each other, Jennie. Really need. Do you understand?”

“I know. I understand.”

“Then will you leave it to me to plan everything?”

“I leave it all to you. I always will.”

“Oh, darling Jennie.”

All that week before the great change was to come, she could think of nothing else. She had always slept in pajamas, but now she went out and bought a pink nightgown trimmed with ruffled lace. Her moods fluctuated. Sometimes she felt the excitement catching in her throat; then she read poetry or turned the radio to splendid music, something that soared in triumph, like Beethoven’s Ninth. She felt like crying. Then she felt like laughing. As the weekend came closer, a thin strain of fear crept into her spirit, and she was afraid of the fear, afraid that it would be there to spoil the joy.

But he was very gentle, and she need not have been afraid. When the door to the motel room closed, he turned toward her with an expression so reassuring, so loving and protective, that all fear vanished. Tactfully he dimmed the strong glare of the overhead light, leaving only a lamp in the corner. With none of the haste or roughness that others had described, or about which Jennie had read, he took off her clothes.

“I’ll never hurt you,” he whispered. “Never in any way.”

And she knew it was true. He would never willfully hurt anyone. The beating heart under the hard male chest was soft. So she came to him willingly and gladly.

She never got to wear the fancy nightgown. In the morning they laughed about that. They took a last look around the drab room and laughed about that too. It had been warm and clean, and that was enough. They would be back.

How exquisite was the world! The way a sparrow left its tiny arrow-shaped prints on the snow. Pyramids of apples, sleek as red silk. The smile of a stranger holding a door for her to pass through. All were beautiful.

Yet sometimes—rarely, it is true—before falling asleep or while dreaming over a textbook, Jennie wondered whether these marvelous feelings could last through four more years. Four years! It was forever. And a little chill would shake her.

“Don’t leave me, Peter,” she said aloud into the darkness.

He told her gravely one day, “This is forever, you know.”

“We’re very young to know our own minds,” she answered, testing, waiting for his denial.

And it came: “Only a couple of generations ago people married at sixteen. They still do, in some places. We’ll just postpone it, that’s all. Get there a little later, when we graduate.”

“That’s true.”

Best not to think about it too hard. If you don’t think about a good thing, it will happen.

“I have to visit some people in Owings Mills next weekend,” Peter said one day. “That’s near you, isn’t it?”

“Not far. We never go there.”

“They’re old friends of my parents. Mr. Frank went to the U of P with my dad, and he’s been sick, had some sort of awful operation on his neck. They’ve invited me, and Dad wants me to go.”

“Well, as long as you’re not going to be here, I’ll go home this weekend. Mom’s been at me to come. Do you want to have dinner at my house before you go out to your friends?”

“Sure. I’ll take the train to Baltimore.”

“You’ll have to take a taxi to my house. On Saturday my father doesn’t drive.”

“That’s okay.”

She wanted to make sure that everything would be really nice. Sometimes, when Mom had been working in the store all day, things were a little hurried and careless. Today, however, because it was Saturday, Mom was setting the table in the dining room.

“Oh, darling, I’ve one little job for you. Take the silver from the drawer and give it a good wash, will you, while I finish the stuffed cabbage? I hope he likes it.”