Seventeenth Summer

by Maureen Daly

  We had all sat down at the table, my mother and father at the heads and Jack across from me. My mother had passed him the butter and the cut-glass dish of applesauce with her usual cool care and talked with him while my father was carving the roast. Art and Lorraine added little comments here and there. Martin had called Lorraine right after church to ask her to go out with him that night and she was in a soft-mouthed, benevolent mood. I thought then that everything was going to be all right.

  Jack was just saying to my mother, “This aunt of mine that’s stopping in Chicago is the one who used to live next to us in Oklahoma.” My father should have seen that Jack was busy talking. But he didn’t. He had just finished carving the roast and wanted to make room for the serving plates so he passed him the salad, thrusting it right into his hands, and Jack was so startled that he knocked against his water glass, steadying it just in time with his free hand while the salad bowl wavered in the other. He was across the table from me and no one else offered to help. It was agonizing to watch. The salad bowl was large and the table crowded so he balanced it on one hand, trying to serve himself with the double servers with the other and keep up the conversation at the same time. Art kept talking, too, attempting to cover up his awkwardness and pretending not to notice. My own fingers were anxious for Jack’s as they fumbled.

  And after that everything that happened was Lorraine’s fault. She knew Jack had only graduated from high school. She knew that I had never said he was a smart boy. She knew it and yet she kept talking to him as if he were one of the boys she had known at college. Lorraine is like that sometimes. If I had been sitting at the table at the beginning I might have stopped it but I was in the kitchen just then.

  Kitty had been quietly toying with her glass and one longstemmed cosmos that leaned out from the rest until she knocked pollen from it into her milk and I left the table to go to the kitchen for a fresh glass. Someone had mentioned that the flies weren’t bad at all for this time of the summer. It was just a casual remark but when I came back with Kitty’s milk Lorraine had begun. She was saying, in her schoolteacher voice, “Perhaps it’s like in that book. About us being like flies that the gods crush—only this time they got the flies.” She laughed pleasantly but no one knew quite what she was talking about.

  Jack was buttering his roll, not even listening, but she turned to him abruptly, “You’ve read that book, of course, haven’t you, Jack?”

  “What book?” He was startled.

  “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” she explained kindly. “ByThornton Wilder … you know, the same man who won the Pulitzer Prize with Our Town … ?”

  Jack gave her a half-smile of acknowledgment but his face remained blank. Lorraine should have stopped there, right there. Art broke in heartily to ask if anyone would like to go for a good swim later in the afternoon but Lorraine went on with enthusiasm. “I hear,” she said, looking first at my mother and then sweeping her eyes around the table back to Jack, “that William Saroyan writes his short stories in only three hours! Imagine!”

  “It seems to me that worthwhile things should take more time than that,” my mother commented mildly.

  “Of course,” Lorraine went on with pointed condescension, “that depends on whether you’re a genius or not. Have you read his My Name is Aram, Jack … ?” and her voice trailed off into a question.

  Leave him alone, my mind snapped at her. Leave him alone, why don’t you? You wouldn’t have read it, either, if you hadn’t been to college and if you weren’t as old as you are! He’s only young. You can’t expect him to know everything about everything….

  Jack looked at her in embarrassment and his lips were awkward with his words. “I don’t read much,” he confessed and my heart slipped down a little. “I don’t read at all as much as I’d like to,” he went on, “but, gee, with school and everything …” He looked at her in apology and then at me, adding feebly, “I played a lot of basketball and things …”

  Lorraine gave him a bright, understanding smile and let him go back to his eating. It wasn’t that Lorraine is a mean girl. She didn’t talk like that just to make Jack seem like a dull boy, she just wanted to make herself seem smarter. But he didn’t know that and from that moment on everything went wrong. Each forkful of food seemed to be a separate problem to him. I saw him look at each piece of roast pork, lift it a little from his plate as if he were wondering whether or not he could make it, and then raise it quickly to his mouth with a jerky, forward movement of his body. He was so scared that someone would start to talk to him again that he ate too fast and kept his eyes glued to his plate in apprehension. Once my mother asked if he would care to help himself to more buttered peas and he stopped eating suddenly and looked at her with a startled “Ma’am?”

  The day was suddenly unbearably hot and the knife in my fingers was cold and slippery. When I moved, the cloth of my thin dress stuck to the back of my chair and I had to keep my eyes busy with the salt and pepper shakers and the empty cut-glass apple-sauce dish to avoid meeting Jack’s across the table. It seemed even worse because my mother had tried to make everything as nice as she could. In front of my whole family he had to act like that!

  How were they to know that out at Pete’s he was different? How were they to know that he had been president of his class at school for two years in a row, or that he had come in second in the state in the basketball free-throw contest? How did they know that he could dance to any kind of music at all, fast or slow, and that any girl in town would be glad to wear his basketball sweater even for one night? All they would remember was that he hadn’t even been able to serve himself with double salad servers and that he filled his mouth too full when he ate. In our house where we had never been allowed to eat untidily, even when we sat in high chairs! It all seemed so suddenly and sickeningly clear—I could just see his father in shirt sleeves, folding food onto his knife and never using napkins except when there was company. And probably they brought the coffee pot right in and set it on the table. My whole mind was filled with a growing disdain and loathing. His family probably didn’t even own a butter knife! No girl has to stand all that. Never. If a boy gets red in the face, sputters salad dressing on the tablecloth, and hasn’t even read a single book to talk about when you ask him over for dinner, you don’t have to be nice to him—even if he has kissed you and said things to you that no one has ever said before!

  Even now it is hard to talk about what happened next. It was too awful. It was the kind of thing you read about but can’t believe could ever happen to you. It sent the tears nipping at my eyes and made a tight ache in my throat till I almost thought I would have to leave the table. You see, we were having ice cream for dessert. Everyone was eating nicely and quietly and Lorraine, just at the moment it happened, was being dainty about selecting a cookie from the plate. I have heard old men making noise eating soup and other things but that’s different, and I don’t care because they are old and they perhaps have something wrong with their teeth. But eating such a simple thing as ice cream and with my family sitting there and everything, Jack clicked his spoon against his teeth! He looked up in surprise, as if he was wondering who could have done it, and then went on eating hastily. Lorraine cleared her throat and gave a little ho-hum sound to herself. And then it happened again! Quite by mistake but a definite, neat click, like knocking two water tumblers together. No one said anything—my family are too polite to say anything with their mouths but I knew what they were saying in their heads.

  I saw my mother raise her eyebrows just a little. Just a little, as if a quick thought had passed through her mind and my heart shrank up into a tight ball of loathing till I felt that my whole insides would rattle around like a hard, brown peanut in a shell. In my mouth was a bitter taste as if I had been sucking a penny and I couldn’t even raise my eyes to look at anyone. Twice! Twice in a house where no one ever forgets to say “Pardon me,” or gets indigestion, or neglects to have a clean handkerchief! The utter shame of it sucked the whole hot, bright
afternoon dry of happiness and I felt myself slowly begin to hate Jack.

  And later on it was the same. My mother suggested pleasantly that we leave the dishes till the cool of the evening and that Jack take our car and drive Kitty and her to the movies. My father had to work on his business reports for the week and the others had plans of their own.

  Sitting beside him, I never said a word. There was nothing to say. We dropped my mother and Kitty at the theater and then Jack turned the car north on Main Street toward the park. Any other afternoon it would have been different. Ordinarily we would both have thought of Pete’s where Swede and some of the fellows were bound to be playing poker in the dark coolness of a back booth, or we would have thought of having a Coke in McKnight’s with its air-conditioned brightness, or even of looking for Margie and Fitz who were bound to be parked out along a country road somewhere. But today was different. I wasn’t thinking that kind of thoughts anymore. I sat very still beside Jack but my mind squirmed with repulsion and my lips curled with distaste as I thought of it. Any boy who couldn’t even eat ice cream without making noise! Along the street people were walking leisurely, men in their shirt sleeves with the cuffs turned back and girls in summer dresses. A strong tar smell rose from the sun-baked streets and little glints of light shot out from the chromium radiator cap on the car. But I didn’t care anymore about anything …just sat with my eyes straight ahead.

  My hand lay beside me on the plush of the car seat. I was conscious of its being there. I felt Jack turn his head to look at me. Then he looked down at my hand. One move would have done it. If I had turned my head or even moved my hand just a little his fingers would have been on mine and we would have held our hands tight while we drove out along the lake shore and then out toward Pete’s and everything would have been as wonderful as before. I knew that but somehow I just didn’t care. There was one, small breathless moment, as quick as a thought. But I didn’t move and Jack swung the car off Main Street and headed straight home with the afternoon sun glinting on the windshield and the warm air soothing in through the window. We drove straight home and Jack pulled the car into the driveway and opened my door for me. We walked to the front steps and, being very careful to avert my eyes, “Good-bye, Jack,” I said.

  He said good-bye and then stood looking at me. “Well,” he began again, pursing his lips, and then stopped. “Well …goodbye, I guess,” and I turned to go into the house.

  And he hadn’t even touched my hand!

  And it was foolish of me. I know that now, and I knew then that in the bottom of my mind I wasn’t angry, it was only in the very top. It is self-pampering, a sensuous luxury, to let yourself pretend to be angry, if only for a little while, with someone you really like. With summer so short and with college looming up large in September, I don’t know why I did it. It was foolish when each day went so fast and each night was only a quick, breathless moment with not nearly enough time for seeing and thinking and wishing.

  The next morning as I hung the clean clothes that smelled of soap and hot starch on the rope line, I thought it all over carefully. In the freshness of the new morning with the air warm and shimmering with summer and singing with the sound of the children playing and laundry trucks and my mother busy in the kitchen, I felt oddly ashamed. Jack must have been thinking funny thoughts that morning. He probably hadn’t even known what I was angry about!

  Margaret, who had the last two weeks of July for her vacation, had left the night before to spend it in Milwaukee with Art and his family. Even though she was engaged, my mother had disapproved at first with halfhearted, habitual disapproval. But she had gone and now the house was very quiet, especially at mealtime, but it gave Lorraine and me a chance to talk together. Lorraine always has to talk to someone and when Margaret is gone she talks to me. Of course, she doesn’t say quite the same things and skips a lot she would tell Margaret but we do talk some things over.

  I didn’t see Jack all day Monday, but on Tuesday he called to ask if I would go to the movies with him that night. All day I had a shy, expectant feeling—as if I were going to meet him for the first time all over again and I had to keep crowding the thought of kissing him out of my mind. It isn’t good to keep thinking about things like that. You get to look starry-eyed even in the daytime. It was swelteringly hot and we kept the living-room shades drawn all day and Kitty left the kitchen wet and sticky with her several watery attempts at lemonade. My mother was in the basement canning a bushel of early peaches and I went down casually to tell her it was Jack who had just called. She was sitting on one of Kitty’s little doll chairs, slipping the skins from the peaches dipped in boiling water, and the air was clammy with a sweet steam, and moisture ran oozing from the cement walls. Bits of the wet skins stuck to the floor where they had dropped and plastered against the side of the big aluminum canning kettle. There were shiny canning jars set in a row, collared with red rubber rings, waiting to be filled. I told my mother about Jack and she pushed her hair back wearily from her forehead and said noncommittally, “I’m glad he called, Angeline. Will you run upstairs and bring me down the sack of sugar from the third shelf in the kitchen?”

  Late in the afternoon Kitty went to the store for a pint of ice cream and the three of us ate it off saucers, sitting on the back lawn in the slanting shade of the house. Around us the afternoon was humming with the steady beat of the heat and the sonorous drone of the bees in the hollyhocks and the small, quick wasps with black and yellow bodies that zigzagged low over the short cloverheads. My mother sighed. “You know,” she said, “I almost wish this summer was over with heat and rush, and you and Lorraine were packed off to school. There is still so much to do to your clothes and getting curtains and a bedspread for your room … Here it is almost the last week of July …” And she left the thought in midair.

  She is a little sad sometimes. I think it is because we are growing up—my sisters and I. Things that used to be so important aren’t the same anymore. We are all beginning to care about separate things now. My heart beat faster with a sense of caution. Perhaps my mother was going to mention Jack. I felt sure that any day someone would find out and begin to ask questions. I don’t know just what they would find out or how they would know what was going on in my head but they would guess somehow. They would ask—Were Jack and I going steady? Why did I see him so much? Wasn’t I a little young to be liking a boy? I didn’t want to have to answer things like that.

  The grass on the side lawn was parched brown with irregular scallops of green where the shade of the trees shadowed the ground. Kinkee lay stretched in the sun, watching the little mudcolored grasshoppers that skipped in the dry stubble. Out in the garden the flowers were heavy-headed and tired in the steady heat and even the sparrows in the hedge were quiet. “I think,” my mother went on quietly, “that I’ll just finish up the rest of those peaches tomorrow. I’m not up to canning them in this heat!”

  A sudden thought struck me. Wouldn’t it be odd if my mother got old! After so long. After so many summers of picnics and parades and long walks around the park in the peace of the afternoon, to be suddenly tired. It is only natural that when your children are big you must be older but somehow I had never thought of its happening to my mother. It made me feel queerly conscience-stricken and there was a strange stiffness around my lips. What a peculiar thing to think of in the bright sunshine of the afternoon!

  We went swimming later in the afternoon, Jack and I. He came just after four o’clock and pulled the truck up to the curb, honking the horn sharply twice. He couldn’t come in, he explained, for he was in his swimming trunks and a sweatshirt—just finished work and was going out to Pete’s for a swim and wanted to know if I would like to go with him.

  I hurried upstairs for my suit and a bath towel while he carried on a loud conversation with my mother who was sitting in the late afternoon shade of the side lawn. As I came out the front door, Kitty was sitting on the front steps, fresh from her bath with her braids pinned up and a clean blue play s
uit on. She was being very nonchalant about picking the leaves off a bit of twig broken from the bushes, careful not to look at Jack or me. She wants to go with us, I thought. She’s been so hot all day and she wants to go with us but doesn’t want to ask. Her whole attitude was tense with hoping and I knew it but shut my mind against the thought.

  “Please, God,” I said quickly to myself. “I haven’t seen Jack since Sunday and I have so much I want to say to him. Just this once let me be selfish. Kitty can go swimming tomorrow or any other time but not now. Not with us.”

  Jack and I pulled away from the curb and I waved back at them, but Kitty’s face was puckered with disappointment and I knew she was trying not to cry and my conscience turned over within me. As we turned onto the highway toward Pete’s, Jack said lightly, “Maybe your little sister might have liked to come along, huh, Angie?”

  Someday, I thought to myself, when she is very much older—say eighteen or so—I will explain to her and she won’t be angry with me at all.

  For the first few minutes I kept my eyes straight ahead, busying myself with the yellow and green summer scenery. Jack was whistling softly through his teeth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his legs, as tan and smooth as a girl’s, and I imagined suddenly how strong and clean he must have looked playing basketball in short khaki trunks. When he pushed down on the clutch, the ligaments moved under the smooth brown skin of his leg. All the antagonism and disgust of Sunday afternoon melted when we were alone together. Jack reached over to my side of the car to get a package of cigarettes from the glove compartment. His arm was very close to me and the consciousness of it made both our thoughts stand still for a moment. I laughed, a little self-conscious laugh, and turned my face toward him. He looked at me, too, just then, and I felt my eyes go soft, and his face was so close that I could have touched it with my cheek; and suddenly everything was just as it had been and I didn’t even remember what day it was—that just two days ago had been that Sunday.