Seventeenth Summer (5 page)

Perhaps, I kept thinking, Jack will call me now, while he is home for lunch; but by one o’clock I had decided that probably he didn’t like to call when his mother and father were around—some boys are like that—and maybe he would stop off at McKnight’s on his way back to the bakery and call me from there. Or perhaps he would even come over for a few minutes—my mind made up a series of pleasant little excuses for him as the time went by.

But by the time two o’clock came and I had put away the lunch dishes, the house had grown quiet and the trees were beginning to turn their shadows eastward on the lawn; that excited feeling of waiting seemed to turn hard and make an aching throb in my throat. I had been so sure he would come.

Kitty was in the garage making bright, tinkering noises, trying to straighten out a dent in her bicycle fender with a claw hammer, and she said, “Sure, I’d like to walk to the lake with you,” when I asked her. “Wasn’t doing much anyhow.”

There were men working on the road that goes along the wide breakwater with the lighthouse on the end. One of them was leaning his chest on a pneumatic drill, pressing it hard into the gravel road and it made a loud rut-ta-tutting that echoed in the stillness of the afternoon, spitting up dirt and sprays of gravel as it dug. We stood to watch for a while. The rest of the men were working slowly, swinging their pickaxes in wide, in lazy arcs, or just leaning on the yellow, wooden trestles with the red danger flags fluttering, put there to turn the slow afternoon traffic away from the shallow gap in the road. Beyond them the lake was very blue. You could just barely see the strip of green and the thin fingers of smoke that was Oshkosh on the opposite shore.

Just behind me, inside the breakwater, was the Big Hole where the smaller sailing boats were tied. I knew if I looked I could see it. But I didn’t want to—not yet. There is that funny fascinating suspense in waiting, like wiggling a very loose tooth with your tongue. And besides it wouldn’t do to have Kitty know what I really came out for. She is a good scout but—well, I just didn’t want her to know, that’s all.

So we went over to watch the children swimming and splashing first, and then I pushed Kitty in a swing until she said
she was beginning to feel dizzy, and we walked all the way to the refreshment stand at the other end of the park for an icecream cone and a bag of popcorn. By the time we had walked back she had chocolate ice cream dribbled down the front of her shirt and her chin was shiny from the butter off my popcorn and both of us were ready to go home.

Just as I had planned we took the long way, back through the park, and we had to pass the Big Hole on our way.

The afternoon sun was sparkling and glinting on the tip of each small, quick wave so that the whole stretch of water in the harbor seemed to be giggling in the sunlight. There was a long row of small green and white sailboats tied to the shore, nodding up and down as the water licked the anchoring piles. They all had single, slim masts jabbing upward and gray canvas stretched neatly over their cockpits and, to me, they all looked exactly the same! I couldn’t even tell which one was Jack’s! I felt suddenly so relieved that I could have laughed out loud just standing there, looking at the boats dancing at the ends of their short ropes and the blue water shining in the sun. I don’t know just what I
had
expected to see—one boat standing off by itself, looking different from the rest or a sign on one of them saying, “This is the boat that Angie Morrow fell in love in!” or something equally as silly. But whatever it was, it wasn’t there at all!

Just then a horn honked close behind us and Kitty and I both
jumped in fright and turned to look. There was Swede. He pulled up alongside us and leaning out the car window, said, “Hi-yah, Angie. Want a ride home?”

It was annoying that he should come along just then. In the first place I hadn’t wanted him to see me staring at the boat, and besides I could just hear him saying later, “Hey, Jack, that Angie don’t look so good in the daytime! I saw her this afternoon out looking at the boat and she didn’t look so good as at night.”

I had on old slacks and I knew my nose was shiny, but Swede was smiling at me with his funny warm grin so there was nothing to do but say, “Hello, there. You scared me, honking that way. This is my sister Kitty, Swede.” They nodded to each other and she bent down in an embarrassed little-girl sort of way, pretending to take a stone out of her shoe and softly whistling a breathy tune with no particular melody.

“Been looking at the boat?” Swede asked. I nodded. “Nice little job, isn’t she? Did you have fun last night, Angie?”

Now is my chance to find out, I thought. Swede is sure to know if anyone does! “Oh, I had a wonderful time,” I told him, and then added casually, very offhand, “Did Jack have fun?”

“Yeh, I guess he did.”

“Don’t you
know?
”

“No, he didn’t say nothing.”

“Did you see him today?”

“Sure.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“Nothing much. At least nothing—about you.”

So he hadn’t said anything! After last night and the way he’d looked and my wearing his sweater, and after what had happened while trying to light his pipe and everything—and he hadn’t said anything. I couldn’t believe it! Swede was sitting running his finger up and down, playing with the grooves in the steering wheel. I looked at him and I could feel a question forming on my lips, “But didn’t he even—” and I checked myself just in time, saying instead, “Thanks anyway for the ride, Swede, but I guess Kitty and I will walk home. It isn’t very far. Thanks anyway.”

“Okay,” he said. “Glad I met you, Kitty. See you later, Angie,” and the car pulled away.

The sun didn’t seem quite so bright on the water now. We passed two little boys coming home from swimming with their hair sleeked back and damp canvas knickers pulled on over their still-wet swimming suits. They had stopped at the public drinking fountain where the water comes out so cold that it hurts your teeth, and were squirting mouthfuls of water at each other, their cheeks puffed out like chipmunks’. One yelled hello to Kitty, sending the water out of his mouth in a spout. He was in her room at school, she explained with injured dignity.

Mom was sitting in a canvas lawn chair in the shade at the side of the house when we got home, reading the evening paper. It is an unwritten rule in our house never to ask for a
piece of the paper until my mother has finished with it, so Kitty and I both sat down to wait. The short-clipped grass was cool and fresh and full of little clover, the kind whose heads flip off like small pink and white balls before the lawn mower.

“I see where Grace Mary Wuerst is going to be married,” my mother said. I raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement and Kitty just sat chewing a clover stem. She turned a page and after a moment or two—“Remind me to tell Dad that there is a new hospital going up in Sheboygan. They are open for bids next Monday.” I raised the other eyebrow. My mother leafed through the last few pages quickly and then, without saying a word, pulled out an inside sheet and handed it to me and gave Kitty the page with the comic strips. We sat reading together and before long it began to get cooler and the shade from the house stretched out over the side lawn on which we were sitting, over the neighbors’ driveway and printed the crooked shadow of a chimney halfway up the side of the neighbors’ house. “You two had better go in and set the supper,” my mother said. “Margaret and Lorraine will be here soon and perhaps we might all like to walk up and see a movie tonight.”

I thought it over as I spread the cloth on the dining-room table. Of course, I couldn’t say I didn’t
want
to go, but if he should call when we were at the movie I’d never know! It might be that he hadn’t said anything to Swede because, like me, he wasn’t sure. And maybe Swede was just teasing me. Probably he and Jack had talked it all over and he just didn’t
want to tell me, that was all. Outside, long shadows lay on the grass and I could hear robins in the trees on the front lawn singing that lilting question they always ask from tree to tree as the sun is going down.

In the kitchen Kitty had been opening two cans of pork and beans and she popped something quickly in her mouth and was wiping her fingers on her slacks with a guilty look when I came in for the silverware. I still couldn’t believe that he hadn’t even
mentioned
last night, hadn’t said anything at all.

No matter what you tell her, Kitty always eats the little piece of fat pork off the top of a can of pork and beans like that.

Even when you say prayers for it, a thing almost never happens the way this did. In five minutes more we would have been halfway down the block and I’d never have heard the phone ring at all. It was just as if it had been planned. Kitty and my other two sisters were already on the front steps with their hair all brushed and ready to go to the movie, and I had just run back upstairs for a clean handkerchief for my mother when the phone rang. It was Jack calling.

He knew it was late he said, and he would have called earlier, but his father hadn’t decided to let him use the car until a few minutes ago and would I like to go out for a while? Probably drive to Pete’s or something….

“Of course
not,
” my mother said firmly. “Tell him that you were just going to the movies with us. The idea of thinking that
you can go out any night in the week! Does he think you have nothing else to do?”

“Oh, let her go, Mom. With school just out it’s good to fool around.”

“Sure. It’s a wonderful night to go out and Pete’s is on the lake—let her go, Mom. The show isn’t very good anyway.”

“It won’t hurt, Mom. Let her go.”

My sisters were talking. I said nothing.

She mused a moment. “Well, all right. You may go this time but don’t let this boy”—she
knew
his name was Jack—“think that you can be running around all the time. You have better things to do. I thought this was the summer you were going to get so much reading done. But you may go this time.”

Halfway down the front sidewalk she turned and called, “Angie, you’d better put on your blue linen.You don’t look very dressed up for an evening.”

And I hurried upstairs to get ready, trying to calm the crowded, fluttery thoughts in my head. “I’ll see you in ten minutes then,” Jack had said.

You would like Pete’s, I know. There is no other place quite like it. When we were little we used to go for drives on warm summer evenings with my mother and father and stop there for ice-cream cones. Everyone did. And now that the children were grown up they still stopped—to dance now and have Cokes or beer instead of ice-cream cones. Mr. Mingle (everyone calls
him Pete) is past eighty and can just barely shuffle around, but he remembers everyone and can call each by his own name. The building, old and square, is built right on the lake shore about three miles out of town and the inside hasn’t been painted for years. Outside, the lawns and flower beds have all run into one and stretch to the water’s edge in a tangle of weeds. On one side is a gravel parking lot, for Pete’s is always jammed at night with the crowd from high school.

We went in the side door, Jack and I, and sat in one of the booths which are set back in latticework arches with little black painted tables, the tops rough with carved initials. The edges of the carving are worn smooth by hundreds of Coke bottles and glasses of beer and by hands that have held each other tight across those tables. Off in one corner is Pete’s old and irritable parrot perched on a wicker stand, scrawking at anyone who comes too near, continually rolling its yellow eyes in anger, and pecking at the pumpkin seeds in its food dish with an ugly beak that is chipped in layers like an old fingernail.

I felt a little scared. It was almost like making my debut or something. I had never been out to Pete’s on a date before, and in our town that is the crucial test. Everyone is there and everyone sees you. I knew of a girl once who went out to Pete’s with her cousin and no one else asked her to dance or paid any attention to her, and so she went away to college in the fall and never had dates at home for any of the dances at Christmas or Easter. If you don’t make the grade at Pete’s, you just don’t make it.

“What will you have, Angie?” Jack asked. He hadn’t said much to me on the way out—not much
about
me, I mean. Halfway to Pete’s he had asked if I heard anything funny in the motor of the car—like a faint knocking or something, so we drove almost two miles in silence, he with his head cocked to one side and a scowl on his face and I sitting very still trying to look as if I were listening hard. In the end, just as we got to Pete’s, he decided it had been his imagination after all. So you see, when he said, “What will you have, Angie?” that’s when my evening, the evening of my “coming out,” really began.

At Pete’s you choose from only four things—beer, root beer, Coke, and peanuts salted in the shell. No one ever wants anything else. I wanted a Coke and he wanted a glass of beer and we both wanted peanuts, so Jack went up to the bar to get them to save old Pete the trouble. The bar is in a smaller room in the front and the jukebox is there, too, and that’s where all the boys who haven’t dates sit and play cards and watch the other fellows and girls as they come in.

While he was gone I traced through the maze of initials on the table top, trying to make out someone’s I knew. Maybe, I thought, his is here somewhere. There was a heart with a J and another letter in it, but the second initial had been carved over so I couldn’t make it out. I thought of scratching my own A. M. in a small, smooth space—just so it would look as if I had been there before, as if someone had wanted to carve my initials like they did other girls’—but I couldn’t find anything to do it with.
If I took a hairpin out of my hair the curl on top would fall down and I would have to fix it all over again.

I took the little mirror out of my purse to look at myself—I didn’t often wear my hair with that big curl on top, and because they had all gone to the movies there was no one at home to consult before I left. It looked all right to me, but then Pete’s is so hazy-dark that everything looks different anyway.