Seventeenth Summer (25 page)

Now he started the motor again and pulled the truck to the very edge of the gravel lot as far from Pete’s as we could get, very close to the water. The sky hung low, dark, and forbidding, and the lake was gray-green, choppy with waves, angry in the wind and lashed by the gray rain. Lake and sky were storming at each other in almost visible argument.

Jack shifted toward me and sat for a moment, absently picking at the cracked leather of the car seat. His face was thoughtful. His hands were as brown as his face and there was a white ring on one
finger where he had changed his class ring from the left hand to the right. He was as ill at ease as I was and kept moistening his lips as if he were trying to work up the courage to say something.

I looked back at the wooden shelves in the truck behind us. They were still lined with several boxes of doughnuts and a gooey lemon meringue left from the day’s sales and the air was sickeningly sweet, smelling like melted marshmallows.The front seat of the truck was suddenly very small and close.

“Jack,” I said, “it’s awfully hot in here!” The still, hesitant tension of waiting made me giddy with excitement.

He rolled down the car window on his side. “There. That better?” With the window open the storm seemed even nearer. Cool, wet air blew across my face and the tall old trees on the lawn bent low, twisting and moaning, wrenching at their trunks and writhing in a strange sympathy with the tormented water. Gray waves rolled crashing toward the shore and thrashed against the wooden pier, slapping like bare hands against the flat rocks. High sprays of foam tossed into the air and the wind was heavy with the damp, suggestive smell offish. It gave me a strange, wild feeling, restless and lonesome. From the gray-green tumult of the water and the weird twistings of the trees we might have been miles and miles away from everything. Long, sharp lightning tore at the clouds and angry thunder snarled after it, loud above the noise of the lake. I had almost forgotten about Jack for a moment.

“Angie, look at me, will you?”

I turned toward him, my heart pounding in my throat. And as
always when I looked straight into his eyes my clear, practical thoughts began to slip away from me as if they were buttered.

“I wanted to come out here where there was no one else so I could talk to you, Angie. Something’s happened that I want to tell you.”

The thoughts in my head were beating with my heart and I found myself watching his lips for the next words rather than waiting to hear them. Outside the wilder waves were leaping the rock barrier of the shore, puddling the grass beyond, and occasionally far-flung foam dashed itself against the windshield of the car. Jack’s hand on mine was warm and insistent but his voice was strangely stiff and scared. I had never seen him like this before.

“I don’t know quite how to tell you this, Angie. I wasn’t going to tell you at all—at least for a while. But last night I talked it over with Swede and we talked and talked and he said what else was there to do?”

He paused again, not knowing how to go on. Taking another cigarette from the package in the pocket of his shirt, he lit it and flipped the match out the window. The damp breeze ran clean, soft fingers through my hair and laid its cool touch on my neck.

Jack took my hand again and began in a hurried, determined voice, “See, Angie, I don’t mean that I’m a fast boy or anything but—I’ve been around a little. Not like Swede and Fitz maybe—I mean, well. I’ve dated a lot of girls though … and I’ve kissed a lot of them.” He wasn’t looking at me now.

“I know that, Jack,” I answered quietly.

“I even went steady with Jane Rady for about two weeks last year. And I let her wear my class ring for a while …”

I didn’t know what he was going to say; or what he wanted to say. It might mean that after today I was just going to be one of the other girls with him, but somehow I couldn’t believe that. Early in June I might have believed it. Even last week I could have imagined what it would be like not to see Jack anymore, but not now. Not after everything.

The inside of the car was suddenly very small and secret with the storm outside thrashing around us and the rain pelting on the car roof. The whole wildness of it was pounding inside of me and there was a throbbing ache in the palms of my hands. The suspense in Jack’s words, the warm slowness of his voice, made my throat dry with anxiety.

At last the words broke from him so quickly that he sounded almost as if he were going to cry. His forehead was puckered up with earnestness. “Gee, Angie, honey,” he said, “I don’t know what goes on in your head or what you feel, but I like you so much I think about you all the time! Nothing like this ever happened to me before. All the time—at work, when I’m with the fellows, and when I’m alone at night—all the time I think about you and wonder what you’re doing and what you’re thinking. When I first went out with you I just liked you a little bit but now it’s getting worse and worse. I like you so much that I don’t know what to do about it!”

The car was so quiet that the drumming of the rain on the roof
was deafening. Everything else was breathlessly still. I wanted to reach over to touch the smooth, pulsing brownness of Jack’s wrist as it rested on the steering wheel and to feel the warmth of his cheek, but my hands stayed open and empty in my lap.

His voice was strangely low and calm now. “I’ve thought about this for a long time and I know what I’m saying … I’m in love with you, Angie!”

Words tingled at my lips and I felt my hands trembling but there was nothing I could say. I didn’t even know what I was thinking. Love is such a big word. And no one had ever said it to me before.

After a long time Jack started the car, the wheels crunched on the wet gravel, and we turned back toward town. Along the highway, lights showed blurred through the rain and the storm sky was dark with the darkness of night. Turning down my own street I saw that the light was on in our dining room and that my family was sitting around the table at supper.

It wasn’t until I was inside the front door and Jack had pulled away from the curb that I remembered we hadn’t stopped to get lemons for the iced tea.

IN A MOVIE IT MIGHT
have ended there. In fact, I almost thought it would for I didn’t know myself what could come next. I was so bewildered and mixed up in my head about the whole thing that my first thought was to call Jack on the phone in the morning, just to hear his voice and to make sure that I hadn’t been dreaming.

But I didn’t, for that morning my mother wasn’t well. She was still in bed when I woke, the pillow wrinkled and the top sheet rumpled from her tossing, so I went downstairs softly to make fresh coffee, bringing it up hot and steaming, but she couldn’t touch it. I knew then that she was really ill. I woke Maragaret and Lorraine and they got ready for work in careful quietness, opening and closing doors gently, their faces worried and their lips pursed in silence. Each tiptoed in cautiously to say good-bye before she left, easing the bedroom door shut behind her. The whole house was filled with soft, whispery stillness.

Kitty slept late while I straightened my mother’s bed, drawing
the window shades carefully to keep them from squeaking on the rollers and slipping a clean pillowcase on the pillow, cool and smooth beneath her head. It was alarming to have my mother ill. It was like having the clock stop. Her cheeks were flushed and she complained that her head was throbbing, like hammers beating at the back of her neck; so I brought a cloth wrung out in vinegar and an ice pack, setting it gently on her forehead. Then I waited a moment, helplessly. There seemed to be nothing more I could do. She looked so quiet lying there with her eyes shut and her hands palms upward on the sheet. Already the warm air of the room was sharp with vinegar.

“Mom,” I whispered, “anything else you would like?” but her lips didn’t move though her hand gestured wearily on the sheet. The door closed quietly behind me. I realized then with guilt that I had noticed her being tired often lately, in little, quiet ways….

Kitty had just waked and, sensing from the stillness of the house that something was wrong, she came tip-toeing out in her nightgown, her eyes round with questions and her braids fuzzy with sleeping. I explained in whispers that Mom didn’t feel well and that she should dress quietly and come downstairs quietly, without her shoes. And to be very careful about slamming doors. She nodded solemnly and padded back to her room on feather-soft feet, turning back to me with a cautious finger on her lips. Kitty can make a game out of anything.

Downstairs the sun lay in bright squares on the kitchen floor as I cleared away the earlier breakfast and set Kitty’s toast and
milk on a napkin on the end of the table. Even running the hot water into the dishpan made too much noise and I had to wash each piece of table silver separately, sliding each clean plate carefully onto the pile on the kitchen shelf. The vacuum cleaner raised such a quick banshee wail that I shut it off at once and just dusted the front room, plumping up cushions with soft fists and straightening the pictures on the wall. After that there was nothing to do.

Kitty had to be kept quiet and away from the house so I brought out her old straw sun hat and a basket and sent her to pull weeds at the far end of the garden. I watched her as she inched along the rows, bent over so her playsuit pulled short, showing her small, round legs brown in the sun. Once I went upstairs softly, opening the door just a little. My mother was lying quiet, with the ice bag slipped down over her eyes. She was breathing as if she were asleep, evenly, with an odd weariness.

By noontime Kitty had grown long-faced and mournful from playing by herself, so I packed a quick lunch of bread and butter and three small round tomatoes and sent her out to the creek to have a picnic. The tomatoes were still warm-skinned from lying in the garden sun and she took salt and pepper in a twist of wax paper to sprinkle on them, skipping off toward the Field with the dog behind her.

Shadows squatted short in the noon sun, so I set a tray very carefully with a clean linen napkin—crisp toast and canned chicken soup, steaming hot. I carried it upstairs hoping that by
now my mother would be feeling well enough to eat but she was still asleep and her breathing was tired and regular, so I tiptoed back to the kitchen with the tray. I had never known her to sleep so late into the day before.

The house was so still that every step I took seemed to make the floor creak and the clock in the dining room ticked loudly through the whole downstairs. It was as annoying and sharp as fingers snapping. During her lunch hour Margaret called to see how Mom was feeling and I hurried to the phone, picking up the receiver before it could ring twice.

I wasn’t used to having so much quiet time to myself and somehow I didn’t like it. With no one else’s thoughts about, it was necessary to think my own—and yesterday afternoon at Pete’s was too disturbing to mull over by myself. It only made me more restless, for each thought was like tickling my heart with a feather. Sitting in a chair by the living-room window, I tried to read; but the trees outside sent in mottled leaf shadows that moved restlessly on the square of sunlight on the rug and I couldn’t keep my mind on the print. My mind was drumming its fingers. The afternoon lagged by in a low haze of heat and quiet till I began to think lazy, ho-hum thoughts that made my eyelids heavy. Then I realized suddenly what was wrong with me—I was lonesome. Between twelve o’clock noon when Kitty had gone on her picnic and four o’clock while the house was still quiet and noiseless, I had used up all my own thoughts, all the comfortable ones, and now I was just lonesome. And I realized
too, what an empty place our house would be if my mother weren’t in it. Thinking of it, I felt uneasily as if I were going to cry. I almost wanted to go upstairs to turn the water faucet on loudly in the bathroom or rattle a window shade just to wake her up … A house is no use at all if there are no noises of living going on in it.

My mind was so turned inward with thinking that I didn’t hear the truck pull up at the curb; didn’t even know Jack was there till I heard his footsteps pounding up the front steps.

Hurrying to the front door with my finger on my lips I whispered at him, “Shhhh, Jack. Not such big feet! My mother doesn’t feel well!”

He whispered back a loud apology and stepped in, closing the door behind him. “Angie, I’ve got something to tell you!” His voice was different from yesterday, quick and eager, and there was a bright, excited look on his face. He stayed standing as he talked.

“We’re going back to Oklahoma!”

His words snapped my mind into alertness. “Jack … ! Why?”

He went on in a hoarse whisper, as loud as his natural voice, “We’re all going, my mother and Dad and me. I’ve known for a long time that we might, but I never mentioned it because I always thought the plans would fall through!”

My heart slipped down inside me. “When did you find out for sure?”

“Just at breakfast this morning—my mother and Dad
decided. You remember that time when that aunt of mine was in Chicago and they went down to see her? That time I had dinner at your house?” I remembered, I told him. “Well, they all talked it over that day and yesterday my father had a letter from her and this morning my mother and he decided that we would go back—definitely.”