I can’t say I was staggered with delight at this solution to all my troubles, but it was a solution, and I knew it. By the time I’d changed the tablecloths for dinner, I was treading the old familiar mental paths of passports, airplane tickets, and hotels.
At seven o’clock Sherry stood up from his end of the counter, where he’d been keeping an unblinking eye on me, and told me to come along. “It’s not raining, I’m all through with exams, and if you tell me you’ve got a headache, I won’t believe you. Tonight we’re going to walk in the park whether you want to or not.”
“Oh, why sure, Sherry, I want to. What makes you think I don’t want to?” I said feebly.
“Every move you’ve made since Monday night,” Sherry answered. “I’ll wait five minutes exactly for you to change out of that uniform. Take any longer, and I’m coming in to get you, ready or not.”
Five minutes later, as we started for the park, he said, “Now, tell me what’s the matter.”
“Nothing, Sherry. Beyond being nervous about tomorrow.”
He turned a disbelieving eye on me. “You can’t be that nervous over just a picnic!”
“Yes I can, too. I’ll be more nervous than this before I’m done.”
Sherry’s face relaxed a bit. “Greensleeves, this is all in your mind. These people aren’t werewolves or anything; they’re a real nice bunch. I know them.”
“All forty?” The sheer number still made me shy like a filly.
“Sure, at least by sight. It’s a club. I told you, just a lot of people who like music and swapping records and getting together to listen to them, and squabbling about inane things like whether Bartok’s better in his way than Bikel is in his. The whole thing began with half a dozen music-happy paupers who didn’t even own a turntable—so they formed a club and asked somebody with a good record player to join.” Sherry grinned. “We’re respectable now—even got a couple of faculty members, one actually from the music department.”
“I don’t know anything about music. I don’t even like it. I mean I’m tone-deaf. I—”
“Well, relax, you won’t be asked to sing a solo. Actually, this thing tomorrow is purely social, very little music involved.”
I wasn’t reassured in the least. “How long will it last?”
“Well, all afternoon and part of the evening, anyway.”
“That long?”
“Greensleeves,” Sherry said patiently, reaching for my hand and patting it. “It’ll take us an hour or so just to get to this place. I’m going to borrow my roommate’s car—if you don’t mind sitting on the floorboards again.”
“What place is it?”
“Big hunk of mountainside about forty miles east, in the Columbia River Gorge. Overlooking it, that is. One of the trustees owns the property. It’s got a big rustic sort of cabin and a tennis court and picnic tables, and a creek with a waterfall, and lower down a pool where you can swim if you don’t freeze easily, and—well, it’s a swell place.”
“I haven’t a bathing suit. Not with me.”
“That’s all right—not many people swim. The creek’s pure ice water. Fine for chilling the watermelons.”
“I haven’t any picnicky clothes, either. Just an old skirt and blouse, or—”
“Wear your old skirt and blouse, then. And a warmish jacket.”
“I don’t have a—”
“Warm sweater, then,” Sherry said, raising his voice. “Will you stop thinking up excuses?”
“Let’s just stop talking about it,” I said gloomily.
“OK.” Sherry tucked my hand through his arm and smiled to himself. “You’re going to feel awfully silly about all this tomorrow.”
I didn’t answer. We found our bench near the statue and sat down, and I stared reproachfully at the cloudless sky. It was slowly turning bright apricot, with a star showing above the statue.
“Greensleeves,” Sherry began in that tell-me-what’s-wrong voice.
I said quickly—feeling the complete bandicoot—“Sherry, what courses will you take this fall?”
After a moment Sherry sighed and quit studying my profile and said, “Spinach, mostly,” and told me what courses he’d take that fall. Then he dug the new Fremont catalogue out of his jacket pocket and began thumbing through it, warming to his favorite topic as he described all the nice useless, flavorful non-spinach he wished he could take—things like Ethnomusicology and Case Studies in Dissent. Most were graduate level, I noticed. I wandered off on some lonesome mental side tracks of my own as the park grew dusky, and ended back where I’d been at dinnertime, trying to remember when my passport would expire.
“Getting dark earlier these days,” Sherry said. He’d been watching me, apparently for some time. I nodded. Summer was nearly over—and I didn’t want to talk about it. Sherry asked suddenly, “What does Shannon look like?”
“Look like? Sorry, but a lot like me, in general.”
“I don’t mean in general. I mean without all the eye-gunk and—” Sherry waved a hand vaguely.
“Sherry, you saw me that day. On the street.”
“Only for ten seconds.”
“Well, tomorrow you’ll have all day to memorize me—and without any of the eye-gunk and—” I waved my hand, too.
“And with your hair—down, or whatever the word is?”
“With my hair down.” In more ways than one, I thought.
Sherry drew a long, happy breath. “I can hardly wait.”
“Can you possibly mean there’s some trifling thing you don’t like about this hairdo?” I demanded.
He smiled, but the conversation did not progress into a lighter vein. He said, “I like everything about you, and I don’t care which one of you you are, and someday, sooner or later, I’m going to marry you.”
We were silent a moment.
“Greensleeves—” Sherry began.
“Sherry—” I luckily happened to say at the same moment, and he let me go first. “Sherry, I want you to promise me something. I want your solemn word you’ll fatten up that fund and go to Oxford or somewhere on it. Whatever happens.”
“What do you mean, whatever happens?”
“Whatever happens tomorrow.”
“I’m not going to promise any such thing. We’ll see what happens tomorrow—then we’ll talk about promises afterward.”
“We might not be seeing much of each other afterward,” I said desperately.
“Why not?”
I muttered, “Well, you said you were going right home Monday.”
“I’m coming right back, too, don’t forget. And a week in Bell Landing isn’t going to cool me off a bit, if that’s what you had in mind.”
It wasn’t what I had in mind.
“Why are you so interested in packing me off to Oxford, anyway?”
“I think you ought to do what you set out to do. What you—talk about doing. Not just talk.”
After a minute Sherry said, “I’m not sure I follow that, but isn’t it irrelevant? I’ve changed my interests.”
“No you haven’t. You can’t help wanting to browse in those nice graduate courses any more than you can help having curly hair! It’s the shape your inner man has been taking for twenty-one years, or however old you are. It’s your—your burning interest.”
“Well, I’ve got a new one, and it’s more important.”
“No, just conflicting. Just in your way. It is, Sherry. You know if I weren’t available, weren’t anywhere around—”
Swiftly, he caught my chin, turning my face so he could subject it to a slow, grim scrutiny. “Don’t get any ideas,” he said.
“I’m not. I mean I was only trying to—”
His hand dropped. “Greensleeves, what are you driving at? Can’t you just up and tell me?”
“No,” I said wearily. “What time is
it? I can’t see my watch.”
“I can’t either, so it’s finally dark enough to kiss you. I thought it never would be.”
He reached for me, and I jumped up as if the bench had ejected me, saying something breathless about its certainly being time to go.
Sherry sat very still a moment, then slowly rose and stood beside me. “Greensleeves, don’t you want me to kiss you?” he said quietly.
“Not—just now,” I answered with much difficulty.
“Not all this past week, either. Not since Monday night. You were perfectly willing then. Have I done something?”
“No, Sherry! Truly not.” I met his eyes, silently pleading for understanding of something I wasn’t going to explain—an unreasonable plea if I ever heard of one. “Sherry, wait till tomorrow’s over. Then you won’t even want to.”
“How can you be so ridiculous,” he murmured, more or less to himself, but he smiled, if a bit unhappily. “I hope that’s all it is,” he added.
I did, too, but didn’t say so. My emotions seemed to have got as incredibly complicated as only my emotions can get. Sherry took my hand, and we started slowly across the park. “OK, Greensleeves,” he said gently. “We’ll wait till tomorrow’s over, if you must have things all proved and cut and dried. You’ll see. After tomorrow everything’s going to be just fine.”
But I had a strong feeling his interests might change again. By now I almost hoped they would—that he’d lose all interest in me within the next twenty-four hours. At least it would spare me trying to resolve my paradox or peel any further into that treacherous onion. It would also render quite irrelevant the matter of whether or not to tell him about Dave.
2
Somebody had been living right—though not I—because Sunday, August 18, turned out to be the most beautiful day for a picnic anybody could have ordered custom-made. Things glittered and shone, and birds behaved like coloratura sopranos, and sounds reverberated from far off, as if the world were new and larger. The air was like a length of silk, the temperature precisely seventy.
I got up to all this glory, feeling as if I were going to the guillotine, and washed my hair.
By the time Sherry came for me about one-thirty, I’d piled it under the scarf the way I’d worn it to Uncle Frosty’s office that day that seemed a hundred years ago, and added earrings and blue eyelids. It was well I did, because we encountered Wynola and Dr. Edmonds and Dave before we folded ourselves into the Volkswagen.
“How do you feel?” Sherry shouted sympathetically as we percolated noisily across town. “Still nervous?”
“No, I’m perfectly calm,” I said. Numb might have been a better word—it was that flat fatalism you feel when they actually wheel you into the operating room, and you know you can’t do a thing about it now.
We stopped at a petrol station before crossing the river, and Sherry, murmuring, “Well, so long, Georgetta,” had the Volkswagen’s tank filled while I went into the rest room to perform my transformation. After I’d finished, I stood a moment before the looking glass, knowing Sherry expected to see some stranger. Well, that’s who I saw—a stranger. For better or worse, I couldn’t tell. All the emphasis was different—or lack of emphasis. I’d got so used to blue eyelids and bangs and side curls that the effect without them seemed unfinished, as if I hadn’t tried hard enough—and my hair swinging loose about my shoulders felt queer, besides elongating my face into a now unfamiliar shape. I wasn’t at home with Shan any more. Thoughtfully, I hung my cardigan around my shoulders and went out to join Sherry, whose eyes riveted on me. He helped me into the car and stood leaning on the open door, frankly staring.
“Let’s go, before I lose my nerve,” I muttered.
“I’ve got to look at you a minute. You know, this is real strange. I feel as if I were only just now seeing you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Sherry reached out tentatively and took a handful of my hair, lifting it, then letting it slither gradually through his fingers. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” he murmured. It had certainly grown too long. I tried to push it around to the back of my neck and hold the bounce down, but Sherry took my hand away and kept hold of it. “And your eyebrows—”
“Mother’s eyebrows,” I said crossly. It was beginning—the same old flicks on the same old raw spots.
Sherry said, “They’re your eyebrows—whether she’s got some like them or not. You know, I begin to see why those Mary-High girls found you hard to take. You’re so much yourself. You’d make them all look like dittos of each other. That’d put any girl’s back up. And the boys’d be scared of you.” He looked amused suddenly, closed the door, and came around to get in beside me. “I’m kind of scared of you myself,” he added as he started the motor.
“Why?” I asked incredulously.
“I don’t know yet. Oh, I don’t mean scared, exactly. What do I mean, anyhow?” He gave me a considering glance. “It’s astonishing. You’re not even pretty.”
I took a deep breath of self-control and said, “You’re making me feel lots better.”
Sherry grinned, but went on analyzing. “Now if I were a Mary-High boy . . . well, I know. It’s just a ‘Now there comes somebody’ sort of feeling—that’s what I mean by scared. A boy doesn’t just walk right up to somebodies. He needs to circle around them a little first and work a few things out.”
“I can’t follow this,” I said irritably.
“I mean you’re an unknown quantity. Can’t you see that? The girls would close ranks, and the boys would go all over cautious. High-school boys are a pretty scary bunch. Real rabbity at heart.”
“Rabbity? Those bugle-voiced lords of creation in football sweaters?”
“The louder, the scareder. Don’t contradict me about high-school boys. I’ve been one.”
“Well, they weren’t scared of me. They just ignored me. I don’t think the boys even noticed me, actually.”
Sherry threw me a glance of mingled amusement and impatience. “They may have ignored you, Shannon Kathleen Lightley, but I can tell you right now they noticed you. And don’t contradict me about that, either.” He turned onto the Steel Bridge and added thoughtfully, “Of course, they’d have noticed Georgetta, too. But for some reason, the effect shoots up about 500 percent the minute you unfurl that hair.”
I clasped my hands tight and tried to concentrate on the beautiful Willamette River we were crossing, which was impossible because bridge railings are always placed at the precise eye level of people in cars, besides which I didn’t have my mind on it.
“What’s wrong now?” Sherry asked.
“Well, you’re making me feel conspicuous! How am I ever going to get through today if I can’t sort of blend into the crowd?”
“The day you blend into a crowd, I want to see the rest of the crowd,” Sherry said with a grin. “Your reactions are cockeyed, Greensleeves. Most girls’ll go to any lengths short of wearing a ring in their nose just to stand out in a crowd. You can’t help doing it—but what’s wrong with that?”
“Everything! It’ll make the girls close ranks and the boys go cautious! You said so yourself. And if people are thrown off right away just by my looks—”
“I didn’t say this bunch would act like that. I said a high-school bunch probably would.”
“College freshmen are just high-school seniors one year older.”
“Unless they’ve worked for a couple of years in between, or been in the army a couple—my roommate was in for three—or got married and had kids and then decided they’d better get an education. Or came from Saudi Arabia or Kenya or Tokyo in the first place and haven’t any clearer idea of an American high-school senior than you seem to have of an American college.”
“Oh,” I said, blinking.
Sherry eased the Volkswagen onto the freeway east and settled back. “Greensleeves, you don’t seem to know much a
bout colleges, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re kind of ignorant.”
“Well, I know it. But—”
“They’re not anything like high schools. High schools are homogeneous, especially the small-town ones. If you don’t blend with the crowd—and run with the pack—and try to look and talk and dress and think just like everybody else, you’re sunk. The great unloved. You’re either In or Out, and no climbing around between pigeonholes, either. Have I hit off Mary’s Creek High pretty well?”
“To perfection,” I said bitterly.
“Bell Landing, too.” Sherry mused a moment. “It’s a kind of feudal system, with the May Queen and the football captain on top, and the people like me on the bottom.”
I turned slowly to look at him. “People like you?”
“Certainly.” Sherry smiled at the windscreen—or maybe at my tone. “I never found a pigeonhole in high school any more than you did.”
“And you have found one in college?”
“There aren’t any. That’s the difference. People come from all over, and they can’t bring along their little feudal systems—or anyway make them stick—because everyone else has one, too, and besides, the May Queen got married and the football captain is running a filling station, and there’s nobody to regroup around. Before they can locate some new grooves, they’re all cramming for midterms, and they just never get back around to it. So there won’t be any entrance examination for you today, because there aren’t any rules.”
I thought this over and very cautiously let myself feel a small ray of hope. “You mean the girls won’t get their backs up, and the boys won’t circle, and—”
“Well, I didn’t say that. But it’ll be on an individual, not a group, basis. Once you get acquainted with a few people—”
“How will I do that? You’ll introduce me?”
“You bet I will.” Sherry smiled, reached for my hand, and squeezed it hard. “Introduce you! I’m going to wave you like a flag.”