by Maureen Daly
Someday when Kitty is very much older I will explain to her and I know she won’t be angry with me. She won’t be angry at all.
The lake behind Pete’s lay flat and glassy in the sunlight. The lawn was green and lush near the water’s edge, but farther from the shore it was littered with cigarette stubs, small bits of bottle glass, and faded scraps of red and green firecracker paper left from the Fourth of July. Sometimes people have wiener roasts here and on one side there was a patch of burnt litter where someone had made a fire, and around it lay bits of charred wood and a blackened beer can and the grass was burnt short like curly black hair.
Jack had pulled the truck over into the shade and had gone into Pete’s while I put on my swimming suit. Finally I stepped carefully out onto the grass and slammed the truck door loudly to let him know I was ready. His steps crunched across the gravel as he came out and I was almost afraid to look at him. I wasn’t sure just what he would look like without his sweatshirt on. I put a big bath towel carefully around my own shoulders and went down to the water’s edge, waiting while he pulled the white sweatshirt off over his head and came up beside me. Then he gave a little run to the end of the short pier and took a shallow surface dive that brought him up laughing and shaking the water from his hair while his teeth shone white in the sunlight. His shoulders above the water were smooth and brown, shiny with the wet, and when he moved the muscles in his arms made a barely perceptible ripple. He swam out a short distance and then signaled for me to jump in.
Why is it there is always that self-conscious feeling about looking at a boy in swimming trunks? I think I was afraid that because I had only seen him in clean white shirts or sweatshirts or in his heavy basketball sweater that he might suddenly be thin and scrawny underneath and I would never have known it. Or his skin might be pale and soft like the underside of a frog and I might want to turn away and not look at him till he had pulled on his clothes again. Or maybe it was because my mother had always been careful about things like hanging the underclothes on the inside of the clotheslines, away from the street, and had always told us to pull our window shades down before going to bed at night.
The little wooden pier was slippery from the constant wash of the waves that slipped over the old boards, rotting openfaced in the sun. A long, green slime clung to the piles and moved slowly with the water. The lake was warm near the surface and chill near the bottom from the shifting, underwater springs that make Lake Winnebago treacherous. Jack was far out now and the water between us was smooth and limpid. Very near the shore where the trees hung low, a school of quick-tailed minnows glinted in the sun and were gone.
I began to walk out with the easy, languid grace one has in water, and beneath my feet the sand was hard and cold, ridged into regular little ripples. The far Oshkosh shore lay opposite, almost lost in the shimmer of sunshine and a low haze of smoke. When I reached swimming depth the water was warm and caressing on my shoulders and my arms looked very white and shapeless through the water. Jack and I swam side by side, leisurely, until we hit the first sand bar. When we stood up the water was only up to our waists and Jack looked at me with a surprised laugh, “Gee, Angie, you look pretty in the sunlight. Your eyes look like water!”
All around us the lake was flat and motionless, reflecting the sun and the puffs of clouds in the sky, without a movement or a ripple, as if the fish were down, down close to the sand and we were the only moving things in it. We seemed all alone in the smooth, unspoiled loveliness of the water. The sun was warm on our backs and Jack stood with water drops running from his hair and glistening on his face. I had a sudden impulse to reach out and run my finger lightly over the even, dark arch of his eyebrows as he stood looking at me. But there was an odd look in his eyes, an odd, warm look that made my lips tingle as his eyes met mine, and I knew it would be better not to touch him, not even to talk to him, just then.
Instead I turned away from him just a little, trailing my arm gently, slowly through the warm, green water till the ripples made slim, silver bracelets round my wrist.
Later we pulled ourselves onto the slimy little pier and then lay on the grass in the late sun where the trees began to stretch their large shadows lengthwise on the ground. The air was warm and a slight breeze just stirred the surface of the sun-glazed water. Jack looked up at the sky and sighed with contentment.
“Say, Angie—your sister still hear from that Martin fellow?” he queried.
“She sees him sometimes three times a week,” I answered, unconsciously coming to her defense. “Why?”
“No reason. Just wondered.”
“But why did you ask then?”
“No reason, Angie. Really. I just happened to think of it.”
“Does he still come into the bakery for rolls in the morning?”
“Sometimes he does. Sometimes he eats at Walgreen’s drugstore when the weather is so hot.”
“He’s nice, I think,” I ventured slowly. I always had a feeling that Jack knew something about Martin that he didn’t want to mention.
“Yeah, he’s a good guy,” he answered laconically and rolled over on his back, covering his eyes against the sun.
“Jack,” I persisted, not wanting to let the matter drop. “Do you think he is too old for Lorraine?”
“No, no,” he said, reassuringly. “He dates lots, lots younger ones sometimes.”
“What do you mean?”
Jack sat up suddenly and ran his hand over his hair in irritation. “Gee, Angie, don’t keep asking me questions about a guy I don’t even know. All I see him is when he buys rolls or maybe I might meet him out some night. How do I know what he does or who he dates or anything … ?” He pulled a long grass stem and sat chewing the end, looking out over the lake, pretending to squint at something on the opposite shore. I knew he didn’t want to talk about it anymore so I didn’t probe him further.
Pete’s is very quiet in the afternoon. There was only the occasional sound of a delivery truck with beer or Coca-Cola as it swung off the highway onto the gravel parking lot. The sun was sinking low in the west, making hot glass of the water, and a dragonfly as large as a humming bird, with shiny gauze wings, darted toward us and then zigzagged back toward the sun. Here and there on the lawn late dandelions were yellow and bits of broken glass caught the light. I put the towel around my shoulders and lay in almost sensuous warmth with the sky bright and the grass rough on my bare arms. There was a long silence with thoughts going on in it.
Jack sat flicking bits of stick toward the water and without looking at me he said, “You know, Angie, I’ve known you over a month and a half now…”
I lay still, not saying anything, pretending to be watching the sun that was turning to pink in the water.
“That’s the longest I’ve ever gone with any girl … at one time.” Something below the lake moved, making wide, silent rings on the smooth surface. The silence of the afternoon seemed suddenly loud with the rustle of the trees and the soft, sucking sound that even calm water makes against the shore. Something in me was suddenly alive. It was something new, something I had felt only in the last few days. It was warm, strange, and beating, and I wasn’t even sure what the feeling meant. And somehow I was afraid to know. My lips felt hot and my checks were tense with waiting. Without lifting my eyes to look at him I knew his hand was close to mine on the grass and I could sense his groping for the right words to say.
“We’d better go, Jack,” I said quietly. “Please. We’d better go right away.” And I tried to keep my thoughts out of my words as I said it.
I had been so happy myself for the past few weeks that I hadn’t had time to notice. But that night I realized Lorraine had changed. I wasn’t sure just how, but she was different. While she waited for Martin we sat in our bedroom talking. It was close and hot and the night air was like warm velvet. The fluffy curtains at the window puffed out slowly and rhythmically with the breeze as if they, too, were panting in the heat. Lorraine’s hair was pinned up in a tight roll arou
nd her head and she carried a small powder puffin a hankie so she could powder her shiny nose without being noticed. Martin was late and she was restless.
She began cleaning out her purse, the things on the bed. We aren’t supposed to smoke in our house, but I knew she did for there were tobacco crumbs on everything. “You know,” she said and her voice was tight with agitation, “I almost wish school would start right away. You and I are going to have so much fun, Angie. I’ll see that you get started with the right crowd of freshmen from the beginning and we’ll really have fun together this year.”
“I’d like to get away from all this,” she went on.
“From what?” I asked. “From what? Don’t you like summer?”
“Oh, no, it isn’t that …it’s just …well, everything.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I told her. “I think this has been one of the most wonderful summers we’ve ever had,” and my heart beat faster as I said it.
“It’s the sameness of it,” she explained. “It’s the same every morning,” and she then went on in a mock sing-song, “You get up and it’s hot, you get dressed and it’s hot, you go to work and it’s hot … I’m so sick of potato salad and cold meat and silly old ice cream and flies coming in the hole in the backdoor screen and having to wash out my slips every night that I could just die! I don’t know—” She broke off with a little laugh.
We were silent for a moment and outside I could hear the faint sound of cars going by on Park Avenue and the early evening noise of the summer crickets. “If you and Martin aren’t doing anything special tonight, why don’t you come to the show with Jack and me?” I ventured. “It will be cooler there and it’s nice to have somewhere definite to go.”
“No, I think we’d rather not,” and her superior tone was back again. “Martin and I never plan what we are going to do. Besides, if you are with someone interesting you don’t have to go any place. That’s what I mean is wrong with people in this town. They always have to go somewhere and never think how it is to just sit and talk about worthwhile things. It isn’t like in cities where … well, you know what I mean …” and she let the sentence trail off, not bothering to finish it.
She sat thinking hard, mulling over her thoughts. “Do you know,” she said unexpectedly, “I think Martin really likes me….”
“Did he tell you?” I asked cautiously. I wasn’t sure if that was too private a question or not.
“No,” she answered laconically.
“How do you know then?”
“I just know. There are ways … I can just tell.” But somehow her voice sounded tired as she said it.
The last two weeks of July melted away like brown sugar into nothing but warm, crowded memories. I let the inevitable imminence of college ride on the top of my thought, never really admitting to myself that it was there. Fitz and Margie and Jack and I went swimming together twice on the hottest days and one night when there was a moon—full and lush with that overripe look—we went sailing with Swede. And one afternoon Jack brought over a quart of ice cream and we all sat eating it on the back lawn. Jane Rady called Jack and asked him to go to a wiener roast with her that night, but he told her that he had a date with me. Margie told me about it later and I couldn’t help feeling contentedly smug inside.
I tried to keep myself from seeing that summer was slipping by though everything about me sang with it—the full, warm swell of the July breezes and the full-blown poppies that turned heavy-headed and scattered their petals to the ground. In the garden the corn was ripe and the leaves were satin-shiny in the sunlight, and when I broke open the ears, the rows of even kernels showed through like teeth, in a sudden yellow grin. The tomatoes lay open to the sun, ripe and tight in their skins and crickets burrowed into them from the ground side, nibbling ragged holes in the firm red fruit. The squash vine that trailed between the corn put out a yellow trumpet of a blossom and little green, warted cucumbers lay on the hot earth. There was no more small pink and white clover scattered on the lawn and no damp, hidden corners, close to the house, with fresh, new shoots coming through. The air was heavy and sultry and the earth rich and full with growing. Summer was in its heyday.
Late one afternoon Jack and I went out for a ride along the old creek road. On the bridge over the stream he parked the truck and we got out to lean over the rail and look at the water. The long, hot days had shrunk the creek into a narrow trickle, leaving the green water reeds high and dry in a muck of red clay. As we stood there a farmer with a team of horses clop-clopped over the bridge with a straggling load of alfalfa with tiny purple flowers, and he stared at us in silence as he passed. Long after he had gone, a low, yellow dust from the wagon wheels hung over the road.
“I guess he thinks we’re crazy,” Jack said.
“Uhuh. I guess he does.”
In from the fields came the silken hush of the wind in the tall weeds and the air was honey-sweet with clover. Along the creek, small willows shuddered and showed the white side of their leaves to the breeze and an occasional fat frog plopped into the water, dislodging patches of green-brown scum that lazied along with the current to catch against water reeds farther down the stream. Jack kicked a sprinkle of gravel over the bridge with the toe of his shoe and it splashed with a tinkling sound like small bells. The sun was warm on our heads and shoulders.
“It’s getting on so that summer’s almost over,” he said, musing. “And it seems just like yesterday that school let out.”
“It isn’t nearly over,” I told him. “It isn’t much more than half gone.”
“Sure it is,” he insisted. “About four more weeks and you’ll be going away to school. After July is gone, summer is gone.”
“Four weeks is a long time, though, Jack, and maybe you can come down to see me at school once in a while—and then I’ll always come home for holidays and things….” I tried to make my voice sound reassuring.
“Sure, I know it,” he said. “But it’s just that it won’t be summer anymore and it won’t be quite the same.”
A bit of bleached wood floated slowly beneath us, bobbing gently, and we watched it till it passed under the bridge and was gone. The coffee-brown water was shot through with sunlight. Jack turned to look me full in the face, squinting a little against the sun. “Gee, Angie,” he said in a puzzled voice, “I don’t know what it’s going to be like around here when you’re gone!”
My father had some business in Minaqua in far northern Wisconsin and my mother, Kitty, and I drove with him and spent the weekend. We drove for miles over long, cool highways lined with silent pine woods, strange and dark. All Saturday my mother and I shopped. We bought a playsuit for Kitty with Swiss embroidery and some bright, striped chintz for drapes and a bedspread for my room at college. “Something cheery is good when you’re away from home,” my mother said.
That night I tried to write Jack a note on hotel stationery but tore it up because the pen scratched and I couldn’t think of anything to say anyway. I bought a colored postcard in the lobby with a picture of a tall, stratifed rock with an Indian standing on it and wrote, “Dear Jack—You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is up here.The pines are wonderful. Be good and I’ll see you soon.” The next morning I was sorry I had sent it. It didn’t say what I meant. But you can’t put on a postcard how much you miss a boy.
I never expected to meet Lorraine and Martin there that night. Except for the few moments at the Fourth-of-July parade I had never seen them out together. Jack and I went down to the Rathskeller by ourselves and met Fitz and Margie there. The Rathskeller is a night club; a dark, down-a-flight-of-stairs sort of place where it is necessary to keep the lights on even in the daytime. There are imitation windows set with leaded-colored glass and arranged with a glow of light behind them to give a touch of reality, but they are really set in the wall below street level. The walls are paneled in heavy wood and the tables and chairs are thick and brown so that the whole room seems to be in a yellowbrown haze all the time. It gave me a dark,
excited feeling just to he there.
It was a hot, muggy night and even the breeze was warm, but in here the floors and walls gave off a dusky coolness. The four of us sat at a small table in the corner and I let Margie take the chair on the outside—I felt uneasy to be seen in a place like this. There had been bars in Pete’s and Chet’s but this place was different. It had such a dark, nighttime look. A waiter in a short, white coat and a pencil stuck behind his ear came to take our order and they all asked for beer except me. Even Margie asked for beer and when it came she poured it herself, tapping the glass with the bottle to keep the white foam from topping the edge of the glass. Then Fitz filled his glass, raised it, and touched Jack’s. Then he touched Margie’s and they all said in a chorus that sounded to me like “Roast it!” and took the first swallow. I just sipped my Coke and pretended to know what they were doing. I meant to ask Jack about it later.
Over in one corner was an ornate jukebox with lights inside that made its decorated front shine like murky, colored water flowing upward in a steady stream, twisting and turning until the colors seemed to be braided together. It was a gaudy thing, like a woman with too much rouge on, and the glow it made in the corner of the room was almost warm and tangible enough to touch and the bright, twisting colors added a strange color to the music that came out of the box. There was something oddly sensuous about it. Even when I was talking to Jack I could see it out of the corner of my eye, the slow, blurred turnings of the lights, quietly insistent.
Fitz and Margie left the table to dance and we watched them. There were others dancing, people who were older than we were. Most of the fellows had slick, wet-looking hair that still showed the comb marks—the kind of boy who wears a navy-blue suit with a narrow stripe for Sundays and for best occasions even in the heat of summertime. I remember noticing two girls sitting at one of the tables. They wore thin blue satin blouses that caught the colored shine of the light of the jukebox, making them seem to move beneath the shiny material even when they were sitting perfectly still. I seemed to remember vaguely having seen them somewhere before. When they danced they stood first very close to their partners and then far away, moving with short, jerky steps and flat, expressionless faces. They never talked when they danced. Fitz danced with his chin on Margie’s head and held her hand down far, near her hip. She closed her eyes and they didn’t talk when they danced either, but that was different. Jack and I watched them till the glow of the jukebox and the warm dusk of the room mingled together and swam before my eyes in a low-light murkiness as exciting as wine.