Summer Nights

  Those two had started dating in seventh grade. You had only to look at this year’s crop of seventh graders to know that it was a disgusting uncivilized age. Thirteen-year-old boys didn’t seem capable of anything other than rude, crude, and socially unacceptable noises. Yet Con and Anne had begun even then setting an example of romance few had been able to match then or later. (Of course, there was the little lapse of Anne’s pregnancy and then giving the baby up for adoption; few girls wanted to match that at age sixteen, and unmarried.)

  It’s good, Kip thought, that Anne is leaving. If she went on to State University with Con, Con would stay in charge and Anne would stay obedient. Anne will come back changed. She’ll have spent a year doing things Con can’t even imagine.

  Even I can’t imagine them, Kip thought, pushing her jealousy away, not letting herself think of foreign lands and fine hotels and fabulous star-studded gala parties.

  I wish it were my good-bye party tonight, Kip thought, diving under one more time. I wish somebody had decided to give me a goodbye party.

  She started crying underwater, a weird feeling, and when she surfaced her tears blended in with the pool water streaming out of her hair.

  She forced her thoughts to college.

  There would be, among other things, eighteen hundred boys in her class.

  Now how, Kip asked herself, can I possibly live with a collection of one thousand eight hundred boys and not find at least a dozen absolutely perfect ones? Answer: I can’t. So, in a matter of days, life is going to be boy-perfect.

  Chapter 4

  ANNE WALKED SLOWLY THROUGH her dark house and back out to Kip, Emily, and Molly. When you have been in the sun for hours, a house is as dim as a cave, musty as an attic.

  Not to see Beth for a year!

  It did not seem possible to Anne, either. None of them had ever been anywhere but Westerly. To go more than a weekend without seeing all your friends was beyond comprehension.

  The first doubt assailed Anne.

  What am I doing? she thought.

  She stared at the familiar backyard she would not walk in for another twelve months.

  I must stay calm. Less than twenty-four hours now. I’ll keep the girls here as long as I can. Then I’ll take a long time dressing for my last date with Con. I’ll stay with him till midnight. When I come home I’ll tell Mother and Daddy I’m too tired to talk. As soon as I’m up in the morning we have to leave for the airport. So they can’t attack me much more.

  And it’s important not to fight at the very end. I won’t want to leave to the sound of anger.

  She wondered how much hugging and kissing there would be from Con. It was possible their date would be worse than staying home. Con was coming for her at seven. If this went like their last few dates, they would be back home at seven-ten.

  Con actually thought Anne should have asked his permission before interviewing for this job. “I didn’t even know!” Con had cried. “Other people had to tell me you were trying to get the job.” He had stomped around, jamming his hands in and out of his jeans pockets. These days Con wore baggy pants, but when they started seeing each other in seventh grade, jeans were tight. Back then, Con couldn’t have squeezed a lavatory pass into his pockets.

  Anne, smiling at that memory, had said, “I’ll never have a chance like this again, Con. You wouldn’t want me to pass it up.”

  But he did. He thought the job would change her, turn her into a snob. It seemed the best strategy to joke about it. “You’re right, Con,” she said, laughing. “Probably I’ll forget everybody. Have a whole new set of friends and travel only by Concorde and never land in Westerly.” She tickled him lightly at the back of the neck where his hair grew down in a thick, dark wave.

  Con had grabbed her arm roughly. “How can you throw away what’s between us?” he demanded. “We’re supposed to have the best romance in this whole high school. Weren’t we voted Class Couple? We’ve lasted through thick and thin, Anne. You can’t go now.”

  She had lasted through thick and thin. Con had chosen to spend the hard parts with Molly. Anne had forgiven him, but forgetting was harder. She sometimes wondered if she were the only person who remembered the little baby girl they had given away, the little girl who called other people Mommy and Daddy, the little girl who would be old enough, pretty soon, actually to say those words out loud.

  Her parents could not bear the subject. Con pretended it had never happened. Her friends never referred to it. Anne thought of it every day.

  She was not sure exactly what that had to do with her new job, but somehow it had been part of the final decision to take it.

  Last May the local paper had carried an interview with a very elderly actress named Ivory Glynn, the only famous person ever born in the little city of Westerly. Fifty years before, a film called Ivory Rose had climaxed her fabulous career, and after Ivory Rose, Miss Glynn retired from Hollywood, while generation after generation of film goers remained her fans. Now, film festivals from Cannes to Buenos Aires to Los Angeles were going to feature the fiftieth anniversary of Ivory Rose and Miss Glynn, now age seventy-four, had emerged from seclusion and come to Westerly to find a companion to go with her around the world.

  Con just laughed when he read the article. “Can you imagine traveling with that old biddy?” he scoffed. “Probably have to spend your time hunting down wheelchairs and flannel sheets and hot-water bottles.”

  That night Anne and Con were at Dory’s, a large family-style restaurant on the river. It was one of the few places in Westerly where teenagers could hang out. You could buy one soda and dance half the night, or sit outside on benches, or just mill around, looking for people you knew.

  “Now, listen to me, Anne,” Con said that night. “I didn’t like our dorm assignments at State, so I drove up there yesterday and had them changed. Took some talking, but I wrapped that woman in the student residence office around my finger and I got what I wanted.”

  Anne was not listening. London. Rome. Planes taking off, silver streaks in a blue sky. What a wonderful woman Ivory Glynn must be. Having stayed out of public sight all these years, brave enough to walk back onstage.

  “Now, what did you go and sign up for Music Literature for, Anne?” Con demanded. “You know what that is? Crap like Beethoven and Mozart and you have to sit in the music building all week listening to tapes. Drop that course, Anne, you won’t like it. It’ll take up too much of your time.”

  They leaned over the splintery railing and looked down into the Westerly River. Anne fed her potato chips to a flotilla of ducks. Those ducks have more purpose in life than I do, Anne thought. I’m not even paddling. I’m letting Con paddle for me.

  Con informed her what tomorrow’s plans would be.

  Anne Stephens fed the ducks. She thought she would rather make her own plans for tomorrow. Perhaps she would rather make her own plans for all her tomorrows.

  In the morning she arranged an interview with Ivory Glynn.

  Miss Glynn was fragile, her skin very white, with deep wrinkles like crushed aluminum foil gently pulled back apart. Her hair was equally white and did not curl, but stuck up like escaped pillow stuffing. She was beautifully dressed, but she sat awkwardly against many pillows. A watch with a jeweled wristband dangled on a thin, blue-veined wrist.

  “My dear,” Ivory Glynn said to Anne, “you are quite amazingly lovely. You remind me of myself. But as you have never traveled, I cannot begin to know how you might handle an emergency, and a girl of eighteen lacks the judgment I will need in a companion.”

  Anne flushed with embarrassment. How small-town it would be to mention her four years of high school French and three years of Spanish. Impossible to announce that after a lifetime of parental or boyfriend control, she was ready now to make decisions. Nor could she list those romantic cities like a travel brochure and say she hoped for a free ride from Miss Glynn.

  The actress cleared her throat. Anne got up and poured her water from the carafe on the table. Miss Glynn
offered Anne a Coke. “And perhaps you would tell me, as you sip it, why you would even want to go with me?” said Miss Glynn. “You are about to leave for college and the company of several thousand other teenagers away from home for the first time. Think of dorm life, campus life, freedom, and new friends!”

  Anne smiled at her. “I know. I do think of it. I love to go into a roomful of strangers and know that soon they will have turned into friends.”

  Miss Glynn set her glass down. “Now that,” she said, “is an extraordinary claim. Most people—I include myself—hate a roomful of strangers. Most people are afraid they will never break the barriers and have new friends.”

  “Oh, no.” Anne shook her golden hair. “I’m not the smartest at school. I don’t have a flair for anything academic. But I can make friends. I could get off the plane with you, among all the world’s strangers, and I would make friends. I might have to ask for help with taxis or menus, but I’d be all right because I’d make friends who’d help me.” She blushed again. “I guess I can also waste people’s time,” she admitted. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Miss Glynn.”

  The old lady got to her feet. It did not appear to be an easy task. Anne helped her up and steadied her. “Old age,” remarked Miss Glynn, “is lamentable.”

  They shook hands, Anne being careful not to apply pressure to the arthritic fingers.

  And one week later, having interviewed people who wanted to meet other stars, people who wanted glamour to rub off on them, and people who hoped for money and fame themselves, Miss Glynn offered Anne the job, because Anne could make friends anywhere.

  Anne sat back down by the pool, smiling at everybody. The hard part, she thought, is keeping friends!

  I cannot have any arguments with anybody. It’s not enough that I will be making friends overseas; I want to come back to friends here!

  Chapter 5

  EMILY EDMUNDSON THOUGHT OF herself as a person with two definite stages, much as a tadpole will later be a frog. There was the pre-Matt Emily and then came the Matt-Emily.

  Pre-Matt Emily was a nervous little girl with so little personality her teachers could never remember her name. Pre-Matt Emily had no close girlfriends even—just a cluster of other uninteresting girls with whom she generally had lunch.

  But Matt met her out of town and had not been told she was boring. Matt was such an exciting, crazy, unthinking jock of a kid, he just swept her up into his personality, and they became a pair. Matt was always running, always talking, always full of plans and projects. He was a car freak. He’d been restoring and making money on old cars since he was barely fourteen. He had more energy than any other person Emily knew.

  People loved to be around Matt. The moment Emily began dating him, she was grafted onto the social lives of people like Anne and Con, and Beth Rose and Gary, or Kip and whoever she was dating at the minute.

  Her life in the last two years, her Matt-life, had been perfection.

  Now, Matthew O’Connor had a peculiarity. In this one way he was different from any boy in the high school. A thousand other boys and not one of them ached to get married. To listen to them, you’d figure marriage as a social custom had vanished. Not for Matt. He actually looked forward to having a wife and family, his own house and his own business. He even said this out loud …to other boys.

  On New Year’s Eve, at the dance where so many exciting things happened to all the rest, the most exciting and terrifying thing imaginable happened to Emily. Matt gave her a diamond ring and asked her to marry him.

  She was stunned, afraid. She hardly knew how to put the ring on. Or if she should.

  We’ll get married, Matt said, laughing in wild joy, we’ll live happily ever after.

  It took him months to convince her it was best, and then she fell into his daydream, and they planned together. Her doubts were gone; Matt was right, hadn’t he always been right?

  Then came the phone call.

  “Em, Em, guess what! You’ll never believe what! But guess anyway. No, don’t, because you won’t. Just listen to me, are you listening to me?” Matt always talked like that. Emily laughed to hear him. No doubt the big excitement was because he got the new windshield into the Triumph on the first try.

  “Jordan Saylor’s racing team,” Matt shouted. “You know Saylor, right? Saylor Oil? The biggest sponsor of car races in America? Saylor? You know it? Right?”

  “I know it now,” Emily agreed.

  “Right, right. Emily, this car I restored, a guy on Saylor’s pit team bought it. Pit team, Emily! Those are the guys that fix the racing cars right there on the track, changing tires in seconds, putting out fires, fixing gear shafts. Saylor’s, Em!”

  “That’s pretty exciting,” Emily said, who thought it was pretty boring.

  “And they offered me a job.”

  She would always remember that, how the sentence lay there, sending off little facts like atoms bombing her helpless heart. There were no racetracks, no pit teams, no Saylor’s within five hundred miles of Westerly. And race teams did not stay at one little track. They traveled with the cars. They were, quite literally, a road crew.

  “A job?” Emily repeated.

  It was a fabulous job, Matt told her. A perfect, unbelievable opportunity, one he could never pass up. So instead of opening his own garage to restore cars—well, he’d be going off as soon as possible to join the pit crew. They needed him today, actually, but he explained he couldn’t leave quite that soon, and they understood, how about ten days?

  “Ten days?” Emily repeated.

  “Actually, I’m already packed,” Matt said. “It’s just—you know—whenever you and I—when we can—you know—”

  “Say good-bye,” Emily said.

  “Right,” Matt said.

  He had sold his most precious car to buy her ring. Emily had thought she mattered more than anything else in the world. Evidently not. The prospect of lying in the dirt of Indianapolis changing tires was better.

  Emily did not complain. She had not been brought up to whine and moan. She even said he could have his ring back and sell it if he needed money for the trip.

  “Emily!” Matt said, shocked. “Nothing has changed. You’re still my girl.”

  “What do you mean, nothing has changed?” she screamed at him. “You’re leaving town. I’m going to be working at a florist’s. Alone at night. Alone on weekends. Alone for supper. Alone every minute.”

  “But you always liked flower arranging before,” Matt protested.

  “Don’t you understand anything? You’re leaving.”

  “Yes, but I still love you.”

  “But you’re not going to be here. You’ll be there.”

  “Well, that’s where the racing team is.”

  They went round and round. Matt found her very confusing. So he wouldn’t be here for months—so they couldn’t get married and live in their own apartment—so she’d be all alone with no friends and no social life and nothing to do and nobody to love her…so what was the big deal?

  Every time Emily looked at her precious diamond ring she wanted to cry, or else did cry. Since New Year’s Eve she had taken such care of her hands. A hand with a diamond ring required more hand lotion, prettier nail polish. Now the ring was cold and bright and brittle. A mindless little rock, which would outlast Matt’s love for her. She hated the dumb little ring.

  And her job, her lovely job, she hated that, too.

  Emily had always been excited by fresh flowers. She loved to touch and smell them, arrange them, find the right ribbon for them. She loved how a person’s face lit up when you delivered flowers. Nobody could accept flowers and stay mad or depressed. Flowers could soften the world.

  She had been working weekends at the florist’s for a year, making boutonnieres, wrist corsages, hospital bouquets, and wedding decorations. It had seemed so perfect in June, when they all graduated, and flung their caps in the air, and kissed their relatives. Matt would open a garage, she would arrange flowers, and at their weddi
ng the following year, all their Westerly friends would come and rejoice for them.

  Matt was desperate for her to be happy about his job with the racing team. “I’ll call you up a lot,” he would say.

  “That’ll be fun.”

  “I’ll write.” Matt had never even written a grocery list in his entire life.

  “Great. A postcard of tires.” Emily sobbed continually. Where was the lovely life she had planned? All her friends would be out of town, at college, across an ocean. Even Beth Rose would commute to new classrooms, new places to hang out new people to have a soda with. Emily would get a postcard now and then. Sit home alone with her unpleasant father watching reruns on TV.

  She hadn’t told any of the girls yet. What was she supposed to say to Anne, anyway? Oh, no, we won’t be getting married after all, Matt likes cars better, I’ll be here alone, don’t worry about me, just enjoy seeing the world.

  As for the party tonight, Matt could hardly wait. He would tell all the guys. “They’ll be so jealous!” he said proudly to Emily. “They’ll offer me bribes to let them come too. They’ll say I’m the luckiest guy on earth.”

  On New Year’s Eve, when she said she would marry him, he had called himself the luckiest guy on earth.

  Emily lay on the hot slates pretending to sleep. She could not talk because her voice would crack and she’d cry. Tonight they all, even Anne, would find out that Matt was leaving her. For cars.

  She slid the diamond off her finger and stared at it. Sun leaped through the prisms of the faceted jewel, sparkling with joy.

  A fake, she thought. Diamonds don’t feel joy. Joy was in Matt when he gave it to me, but with Matt leaving, there is no joy anywhere.

  You rotten ring, Emily thought, suddenly hating it. It was the symbol of her hurt and fury and loss. Her hand trembled, holding it, and the jewel winked back a thousand times, knowing it would last longer than love.