Jean and Johnny (6 page)

Then one Friday when Johnny and Homer had walked out of the building with Jean, Johnny turned to her and instead of saying good-bye, said,
“Are you doing anything tomorrow night?”

“Why…no,” admitted Jean.

“I thought I might drop around awhile if you are going to be home,” said Johnny.

“I—I would love to have you,” answered Jean, frantically trying to think what she could do with her family when a boy came to call. “I mean—I really would.”

“I'll see you around eight,” said Johnny.

“That will be nice,” answered Jean, expecting him to ask where she lived.

Johnny grinned. “So long,” he said. “I'll see you tomorrow night.” Apparently he already knew where she lived.

“So long,” said Homer.

Jean wasted a second's thought, as she did almost every day, in wondering what Johnny saw in an unimaginative boy like Homer. Then, elated, she hurried straight to Elaine's house. “Guess what!” she burst out when Elaine met her at the door.

“You have a date with Johnny!” guessed Elaine.

It was blissful to be able to answer yes.

“Come in and tell me everything. Absolutely everything!” said Elaine.

“There isn't an awful lot to tell,” admitted Jean,
and told Elaine what little there was to tell.

“Golly. He really asked you for a date. Now maybe there is hope for me.” Elaine did not try to conceal her admiration. “I was going to ask you over for supper tomorrow night, but now that you are busy, I think I'll ask Maxine instead.”

When Jean reached her own small house, she had no recollection of having walked there. She had been thinking about the house and how tiny it was and how awkward it would be trying to entertain Johnny with the whole family sitting in the living room. She walked into the bedroom, where Sue was sitting at their table studying several leaflets advertising dress patterns, the sort of leaflets given away at pattern counters in department stores.

Jean could not wait to break the news. “Sue, guess what. Johnny Chessler is coming over to see me tomorrow night!”

“Johnny
Chessler
?” exclaimed Sue.

“Yes.” Jean could not help feeling indignant at the way Sue spoke. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

“No. No, of course not,” Sue said slowly. “Was
he
the boy who danced with you that time?”

“Yes.” Jean's feelings were still slightly ruffled.

“Oh. I knew you were interested in the boy who danced with you and I knew you talked to Johnny once in a while, but…Well, it just never occurred to me that they were the same boy,” Sue explained. “Johnny is in my English class and…I just never thought about you and Johnny together, is all.”

Jean looked speculatively at her sister. Sue was such a quiet girl, it was not often easy to tell what she was thinking. Could it be, Jean wondered, that Sue liked Johnny herself? Poor Sue, it wasn't going to be easy to have her younger sister dating first, especially since Sue had already said she wanted to meet a nice boy. Well, that was life.

Sue studied a page of dresses designed in Paris. “I can't picture anyone I know wearing these,” she remarked, and then said, as if it had been Jean's date with Johnny that she had been thinking about all the time, “What are you going to do with him when he gets here?”

“I don't know exactly,” Jean confessed. Then she lowered her voice and asked, “What am I going to do about Mother and Dad? There's no place for them to go.” Tactfully she refrained from saying, “And you, too.”

“Don't worry about me,” said Sue, as if she had heard the unspoken words. “I can sew or study in
our room. But I don't know about Dad….”

Once more Jean went over the house in her mind. A living room not much larger than a nine-by-twelve rug, a dining room that was practically part of the living room, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that was just a kitchen and not a family room like those pictures in house and garden magazines, a breakfast nook that showed how old the house was, because houses were not built with breakfast nooks anymore. That was all. It would help if the breakfast nook was a breakfast room, but it was not. It was so awfully…nooky.

“Dad may be a problem,” agreed Jean, wishing that a rumpus room or a family room or any kind of extra space would suddenly attach itself to the house.

“Maybe we could move the television set into the breakfast nook and pretend we wanted to see something during supper,” suggested Sue. “If we didn't move it back, Dad might just happen to sit there and watch it.”

“That won't work,” said Jean, pleased that Sue was entering into her plans in spite of any feelings she might have about the date. “You know Dad won't allow television during meals.”

“I guess you're right,” said Sue. “But don't worry. We'll think of something.”

“We'll have to,” said Jean, “but I don't know what. I can't expect Mother and Daddy to go to bed at eight o'clock just because Johnny is coming over to see me.”

Sue pushed aside the fashion leaflets and smiled at her sister. “We'll manage Dad somehow,” she said. “He may be strict in some ways, but underneath it all he is just an old softy.”

“But you never can tell what he is going to be strict about,” Jean reminded her sister. “Look how he feels about babysitting.”

Jean waited until suppertime to break the news to her mother and father. When everyone had been served she said as matter-of-factly as she could manage, “A boy named Johnny Chessler is coming over to see me tomorrow night.”

“Why, how nice, dear,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Chessler? I don't recall hearing the name. What is he like?”

“Well…” Jean hesitated, wondering how to describe a boy like Johnny to her mother and father. She did not know how to explain that Johnny was handsome and charming and all the things a girl would like a boy to be. “He—he is nice looking, with curly hair, and he wears the most beautiful woolen shirts, the kind that have to
be dry-cleaned, and he is—oh, I don't know….”

“You are telling us what he looks like,” said Mr. Jarrett, “but what I want to know is, is he good enough for my daughter.”

“Oh, Daddy,” said Jean with a nervous laugh. Her father was teasing, she knew, but she understood him well enough to know that beneath his banter was a serious note.

“And what
I
want to know,” said Sue, “is how she is going to entertain a boy. We can't all sit around the living room and stare at him.”

Jean mentally thanked her sister for bringing up this touchy problem.

“No young whippersnapper is going to drive me out of my house,” said Mr. Jarrett.

The sisters exchanged a glance that said they understood their father was not entirely joking. “Now, Dad,” said Sue, “don't start playing the heavy father.”

“We'll manage somehow,” said Mrs. Jarrett reassuringly. “Of course the girls will be entertaining boys and we will have to figure out a way for them to do it.”

“I'll stay in my room and study,” volunteered Sue. “I have to do it sometime this weekend and it might as well be then. That will remove me from the scene.”

“Your father and I will want to meet him,” said Mrs. Jarrett.

“Of course,” agreed Jean. “He would think it was peculiar if I didn't have any family around at all.”

Mrs. Jarrett sighed. “I do wish we could buy a larger house. Or at least build onto this one. Perhaps I should enter that contest I saw announced the other day.”

“What is the prize this time?” asked Mr. Jarrett. “Not a live kangaroo like you thought you might win for naming that airline.”

“I thought it was rather ridiculous at the time,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “The winner receives his weight in gold. Or rather the equivalent in money for writing the last line of a limerick about a new kind of home permanent.”

Mrs. Jarrett's family shouted with laughter. “You don't have to enter a contest,” said Mr. Jarrett. “You are worth your weight in gold already.”

“Have some more potatoes, Mother,” urged Jean. “Just in case you win.”

“Every little ounce would help,” said Sue. “How about some more dressing on your coleslaw?”

“Just don't forget—I won the television set,” Mrs. Jarrett reminded her family.

“But nobody has said what I am going to do with
Johnny,” Jean said, bringing the conversation back to the original problem.

“Just who is the fellow, anyway?” asked Mr. Jarrett.

“A boy at school.” Jean resigned herself to answering questions of this sort from her father.

“If he wants to call on Jean, I am sure he is a very nice boy,” said Mrs. Jarrett soothingly.

“Do you know him?” Mr. Jarrett asked Sue.

“Yes,” answered Sue. “He's in my English class.” This seemed to mollify Mr. Jarrett. At least he did not ask further questions about Johnny.

“But
nobody
has said what I am going to do with him.” Jean cast an anxious glance at Sue, who could be counted on to understand and help out.

“We could all have a lively game of old maid or lotto,” said Mr. Jarrett.

“Daddy!” Jean could not help sounding stricken. What a dreadful idea, suggesting that Johnny play old maid or lotto with her family. He would never want to come again.

Mr. Jarrett patted Jean's hand. “Don't worry, daughter. I was only joking. Of course you may entertain your young man.” It sounded so quaint and old-fashioned, his saying “your young man.”

“The breakfast nook,” said Mrs. Jarrett as Jean
and Sue rose to clear the table. “It is the only place for us. We'll move the television set in here before Johnny comes and after we meet him, we can come back here, and your father can watch his television programs while I work on a contest.”

Jean and Sue exchanged a smile in the kitchen. “Whew!” mouthed Jean silently.

“What are we having for dessert, Mother?” asked Sue.

“Vanilla pudding,” answered Mrs. Jarrett. “There is a jar of strawberry preserves open. You might put a dab on top of each serving to give it a little color.”

“Let's call it blancmange,” suggested Sue. “It sounds so much more glamorous. When I used to read in
Little Women
about the March girls' taking blancmange to Laurie when he was sick, I thought it must be a great delicacy.”

“Why, so did I!” exclaimed Jean. “I felt terribly disillusioned to find out it was plain old vanilla cornstarch pudding.”

“I suppose this boy is going to eat us out of house and home,” commented Mr. Jarrett, as the family began to eat the vanilla pudding, or blancmange.

“That is just in the funny papers. At least I think
it is,” said Jean, “but I suppose I should give him something to eat. I hadn't thought of that.”

Jean thought it over. She had a vague notion that when a boy came to see a girl, the girl usually took him into the kitchen to raid the refrigerator. The Jarrett refrigerator, unfortunately, did not merit raiding. Vanilla pudding and cold meat loaf were hardly the sort of things a girl could offer a boy. And the milk…It was stored in half-gallon cartons that Mrs. Jarrett bought at the market, because she saved two and a half cents a quart, just as she bought butter in one-pound pieces because it cost five cents less than a pound of butter divided into quarters. Jean did wish they could have milk delivered in bottles from a dairy. It seemed to her that quartered butter and milk in bottles always looked so elegant in a refrigerator.

“I think you should fix something ahead of time,” said Sue, who also must have been taking mental inventory of the Jarrett refrigerator. “Something you can whisk onto the table. That is what I would do if he were coming to see me.”

“What table?” asked Jean. “Mother and Dad will be in the breakfast nook. Eating with a boy in the dining room is too formal.”

“Serve it from a tray on the coffee table,” said Sue.

“I think that is a very practical suggestion. Now don't worry, Jean. I am sure it will all work out.” Mrs. Jarrett patted her daughter's hand.

Jean looked around the table at her mother, smiling at her so reassuringly; at her ruddy-complexioned father, who was so tenderhearted underneath his sternness; at Sue, who had helped her, even though it must hurt to have her younger sister have the first date. Jean was completely happy. She not only had a date with Johnny, she also had the most wonderful, understanding family in the whole world.

Mrs. Jarrett, in galoshes and her wet-weather coat, stood by the drainboard enjoying a last-minute sip of coffee before she left for her day of selling yardage at Fabrics, Etc. “It is such miserable weather I doubt if we will be very busy today,” she remarked, “even though we are having a good sale on seersucker mill ends. There are some very good buys—pieces that would make up into sturdy pajamas for children.”

Sue, who was stacking the breakfast dishes, looked out the kitchen window into the gray morning. “Poor Daddy, delivering mail in this awful weather.”

“‘Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat—'” began
Jean, as she carried her plate from the breakfast nook into the kitchen.

“‘—nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,'” finished Sue and her mother in unison. Mrs. Jarrett plucked a couple of dead blossoms from the brightly blooming African violet on the windowsill.

“I'll have a pot of hot coffee waiting for him when he gets home this afternoon,” volunteered Jean.

“That's my good girl.” Mrs. Jarrett smiled at her younger daughter. “Have you thought what you are going to serve in the way of refreshments this evening?”

Jean was happy to have the conversation turned to the evening that lay before her. “I had thought of that dessert made of chocolate cookies with whipped cream between, because it is supposed to stand awhile before it is served, and I could make it after lunch,” she said, as Sue began to wash the breakfast dishes. “Or is that too expensive?”

“I think we can manage.” Mrs. Jarrett opened a cupboard, took down a canister, and pulled out some of the housekeeping money, which she handed to Jean. “This should be enough. You
might even buy a small jar of maraschino cherries, too.”

“Thank you, Mother,” said Jean. “I'll make enough so we can have some for supper, too.” It did not seem right to use so much of the housekeeping money for herself and Johnny.

“And, Jean,” Mrs. Jarrett continued, “be sure to plan some way to entertain him. You might get that old Chinese checker set out of the garage and set it up on the coffee table.”

“Oh, Mother,” protested Jean. “Nobody plays Chinese checkers anymore. That went out with bustles.”

“Not quite,” said Mrs. Jarrett. “Johnny doesn't have to play if he doesn't want to, but it might make things easier if you had something on hand in case you need it.” Mrs. Jarrett set her empty coffee cup on the drainboard for Sue to wash. “I hope Johnny has a good time this evening. I am so glad boys are beginning to come to the house.”

Jean felt that her mother's use of the plural was a little optimistic.

“What are you going to do today, Sue?” asked Mrs. Jarrett.

“Straighten our room and then go downtown to the main library to gather material for my term
paper,” answered Sue. “‘Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished?'”

“I didn't know high-school students were still abolishing capital punishment,” remarked Mrs. Jarrett, as she opened the back door. “Well, good-bye, girls. I'll try to catch the five thirty-three bus so we can have an early supper.”

“Good-bye, Mother,” answered Jean. “I hope you sell lots of remnants.”

Jean set to work cleaning the living room and dining room, and soon discovered it was much more fun to clean house for a boy than for her family. She forgot about the weather and set about trying to make the living room attractive. She ran the vacuum cleaner and used an attachment to remove Dandy's hair from the chair he slept in when no one was looking. At ten o'clock she turned on the radio to hear the
Hi-times
broadcast and sat, toying with the vacuum-cleaner attachment, lulled into a daydream by the smooth flow of Johnny's voice. It was too bad the program wasted time playing records—she would much rather listen to a full fifteen minutes of Johnny.

The day grew so dark that Jean had to turn on the light to dust when
Hi-times
was over. She had not realized the shabbiness of the furniture until
now, when she tried to see her house through Johnny's eyes. She turned the cushions of the couch to find the least worn sides. She scrubbed the soiled spot on the back of her father's favorite chair with ammonia and water and then shoved the chair over a thin spot in the carpet. Her father should not object just this once, since he was going to spend most of the evening in the breakfast nook anyway. She dusted with unusual thoroughness, remembering to wipe off the windowsills and the rungs of the dining-room chairs. Dustcloth in hand, she paused to look critically around the room. It was comfortable, even if it was shabby, but it needed something to brighten it, something to divert the eye—Johnny's eye—from the walls in need of a fresh coat of paint. She wished she could think of a way to hide the crack in the plaster over the door into the hall.

Jean went to the bathroom at the rear of the house and looked out into the yard in hope of seeing a few flowers that she could cut. The day was even more forbidding than she had realized. The small lawn was sodden, and the few geraniums along the fence were beaten down as if they would never have the courage to rise again. Juncos had stripped the berries from the cotoneaster in the
corner of the yard, so there was no hope of creating an interesting arrangement from a few of its branches. Then Jean remembered her mother's African violet on the kitchen windowsill. Its fuzzy green leaves and purple blossoms would make a spot of life and color.

Jean carried the African violet into the living room, where she tried it in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece, on the coffee table, on a lamp table, and finally back on the mantelpiece, where it stayed because, reflected in the mirror, it was almost as good as having two plants.

“Oh, Johnny, oh, Johnny, dum de de dum,” Jean hummed, as she turned the plant so the most blossoms would show. Probably her mother was right about the Chinese checker set, even though Johnny might think it terribly old-fashioned of them to keep the game around. If she found conversation difficult—not that she would with a boy like Johnny, but
if
she did—she could casually make the first move, smile at Johnny, and say, “Your turn. Isn't it a quaint old game. My father simply adores it and insists we keep a set in the living room all the time.” Or something like that. The more Jean thought about it, the more certain she became that this was exactly what she would
have to do, except that she would have to omit the line about her father's adoring Chinese checkers. Conversation with her whole family within earshot might be difficult. She would like to spend the evening talking to Johnny, getting to know him better. She particularly wanted to find out why he had asked her to dance that evening in December, but this sort of conversation would be impossible, unless her father happened to watch a good noisy Western on television and they could talk under cover of gunfire from the breakfast nook.

Jean shoved Dandy, who appeared restless, out the back door into the storm and let him in again a few minutes later. Then as she dragged the dusty checker box out of a pile of cartons in the garage, she found another worry nagging at her. Because her father had to get up at five o'clock in the morning on workdays in order to eat breakfast and be at the post office by six, he was inclined to yawn, sometimes rather noisily, by nine thirty in the evening. Wouldn't it be dreadful if he started yawning from the breakfast nook while she and Johnny were talking? She was positive that Johnny's father, whom she pictured as a tweedy commuter with a briefcase, never yawned.

When Sue had not come back from the library by lunchtime, Jean prepared herself a peanut-butter sandwich, poured herself a glass of milk from a carton, and ate her chilly lunch standing beside the floor furnace with her skirt ballooned out by the hot air.

After lunch she put on her sneakers and raincoat to go to the market to buy the chocolate cookies, whipping cream, and maraschino cherries. The rain slanted against the street in sheets and she had to leap the gutters, which boiled with muddy water rushing down from the hills. She thought sympathetically of her father, his mail pouch protected by the cape on his black raincoat, who had been walking in this weather all morning. For herself she did not care. She felt exhilarated by the bad weather and even found a childish pleasure in getting her sneakers wet. What difference did it make? By evening it would all be over, and when Johnny arrived the stars would be out and sparkling through the atmosphere that was now being so thoroughly washed. It almost seemed as if the whole world was being washed clean for Johnny. In the market she smiled radiantly, for no reason at all, at the boy who packed her groceries in a bag, and was surprised when he smiled back.
Smiling at a boy was not so difficult after all.

Jean enjoyed puttering around the kitchen preparing dessert for Johnny. She stacked the cookies carefully with layers of whipped cream between, frosted them with graceful swirls of more whipped cream, and topped each small tower with a red cherry. She made five servings, three for her mother and father and Sue to eat for supper, and two for herself and Johnny later in the evening. She would be too excited to eat dessert with her family anyway.

When the kitchen clock told her it was almost time for her father to come home, Jean got out the percolator, measured coffee and water into it, and set it over one of the burners on the gas stove. While she waited for the coffee to perk, she leaned on the windowsill of the breakfast nook and scanned the sky for even one light spot in the dark clouds. It was a soggy, soggy day and for the first time Jean began to wonder if it really would clear up before eight o'clock. The coffee began a few tentative eruptions into the glass percolator knob before it settled into a rapid perk. Come on, weather, thought Jean intently. Clear up, clear up, clear up for Johnny.

The kitchen was filled with the fragrance of hot
coffee, and Jean, who timed coffee by her sense of smell rather than by the clock, turned down the heat under the percolator. Her father should be home by now. Clear up, clear up for Johnny, she went on thinking. Through the window she saw Sue, her umbrella held low against the wind, hurrying up the driveway, and hastened to open the back door for her.

“M-m-m, hot coffee!” exclaimed Sue, handing her wet umbrella to Jean, who thrust it into the sink to drip. “I'm starved. I skipped lunch because everything cost so much downtown. Where's Daddy?”

“He hasn't come home yet,” answered Jean, thinking that the cold air had made Sue's face glow until she was actually pretty. “How would you like me to make you a delicious peanut-butter sandwich, specialty of the house?”

“Would you?” asked Sue gratefully, as she glanced at the kitchen clock. “He shouldn't be this late even if the weather is awful.”

“At least all the dogs that don't like mailmen will be inside on a day like this,” observed Jean, spreading peanut butter with a lavish hand. “Want some coffee with your sandwich?”

“Love it.” Sue removed her wet coat and hung it on a corner of the kitchen door so it would dry over the linoleum. Then she clasped both hands around the hot cup Jean handed her. “This feels good. My hands are practically numb, they are so cold.”

“Get the information for your paper?” Jean cut the sandwich diagonally and laid it on a plate.

“Enough to make a good start, even though the book I need most is out,” answered Sue, carrying the sandwich and coffee into the breakfast nook. “And, Jean, you will never guess who I ran into in the reference room!”

“The reference librarian?” guessed Jean, joining her sister at the breakfast table with a cup of milk flavored with coffee.

“Silly,” said Sue. “No. Kenneth Cory. I hadn't seen him for ages. Not since he moved out of the neighborhood.”

“You mean Old Repulsive?” The words escaped Jean's lips almost involuntarily. The expression that crossed Sue's face made her instantly regret that she had recalled the nickname the neighborhood children, with the cruelty natural to childhood, had once given this boy.

“Yes, Old Repulsive. Only he isn't anymore,” said
Sue. “I almost didn't know him at first. You know how he used to have buck teeth with bands on them? Well, his teeth are straight now. And his skin isn't all blotchy the way it was when he was in high school, either. And he wears a crew cut, so his hair doesn't stick out like porcupine quills the way it used to.”

“Where does he live now?” asked Jean, more from politeness than from interest.

“His family moved up into the hills,” answered Sue. “He's going to the university now. He's going to be an entomologist.”

“Is that the study of bugs or words?” asked Jean. “I never can remember.”

“Insects,” answered Sue.

This confirmed Jean's feelings about Old Repulsive. He was exactly the kind of boy she would expect to study insects.

“He talked to me quite a while,” said Sue, and added almost shyly, “I think he likes me.”

“Do you want him to?” Jean hid her dismay upon realizing that her sister was so eager to have a boy like her that she would snatch at this one.

“Yes,” said Sue thoughtfully, “I do.”

“I hope he does like you.” Jean kept the stiffness
she felt out of her voice. How fortunate she was to have a good-looking boy like Johnny like her. There was something pathetic about Sue's eagerness to make Kenneth sound attractive, as if perhaps she wanted to catch up with her younger sister.

The girls heard a car turn into the driveway. Jean, glad to have the disturbing conversation about Old Repulsive interrupted, got up to set the coffeepot back on the burner to reheat.

“What happened to you?” both girls asked their father as soon as he opened the back door.

Mr. Jarrett removed the black raincoat and handed it to Sue, who carried it into the bathroom to drip into the tub. “It was that little lady near the end of my route,” he said, stooping to pull off his rubbers and to pat Dandy, who had come running, his half a tail wagging, at the sound of his voice.