I clung to his hand, feeling warmed and grateful, and a bit more hopeful in spite of everything. It made the rest of the hour’s drive almost enjoyable. Sherry watched the road and I watched the Columbia, flowing broad and deep and dark beside the highway, with the sun flashing on its surface and the steep sides of the gorge thrusting up on either side. Once a car passed, hands waved, and Sherry tooted and waved back, saying that was some of our bunch. The waving hands, at least, looked gay and friendly. Maybe Sherry was right, and college students were nothing to be scared of—all the boys like Vince and Charlie, the girls like Rose. But Rose wasn’t a college student—Helen was.
“Will there be anybody there like Helen?” I asked nervously.
“If there is, we’ll leave. What does that sign say? Kendrick? That’s our turnoff.”
We took a small bumpy road that climbed through woods and patches of deep forest and a few nearly perpendicular meadows that looked more suitable for goats than cows. Then quite abruptly we went through some wrought-iron gates, and the road leveled off as if it had reached the top of something. It had. We came around a last wooded curve, and there we were looking over the gorge, with several miles of the Columbia in sight below, and beyond it, across a lot of space, the state of Washington.
Sherry maneuvered the Volkswagen into the parking area, saying, “The view’s a lot better from down yonder.”
“Down yonder” was a big, low, rustic house set among tall trees, with a green lawn that ran right down to a final fringe of rhododendrons and the view. Beyond the house, picnic tables stood here and there among the firs. In a clearing, a fire built in a huge old iron pot sent up streamers of transparent smoke into the sunshine. There were knots of students everywhere, the largest group around the fire. I caught a glimpse of tennis courts behind the house.
“Now, listen, don’t go stiffening up like that,” Sherry said as we started across the lawn. “It’s a simple social occasion. Not a hanging.”
“I can’t help it, Sherry. I won’t start that awful smiling.”
“Scowl, then. Tell you what, I’ll converse casually with you, and you converse back, OK? It’ll relax you. You like to play tennis?”
“Don’t know how,” I muttered.
Sherry took my hand firmly. “No tennis? What did you do for exercise in that Swiss school you went to all those years?”
“Rode. Swam. Sailed. Skied.”
“Well, that sounds adequate. Ever ski around here? Up at Mount Hood, for example?”
I didn’t answer. Sherry had steered me on a supposedly absent-minded course that was taking us directly past a bench on which sat two blond crew cuts and a tanned girl in blue shorts. I felt a battery of eyes upon me—two pairs blue, one brown.
“Hi, Sherry,” said a crew cut genially, staring at me.
“Hi, Steve,” Sherry said. “Hi, Mary, Roger.” His hand tightened like a hand on the reins. We stopped. “Shan, this is Mary Warneke. Mary, Shan Lightley.”
“How do you do?” I said tonelessly.
“Hi, Shan,” Mary Warneke said with a bright smile and a measuring glance.
“Steve and Roger Miller, Shan.”
Two large forms arose from the bench. One seemed to keep on arising for an unconscionable length of time. Two pairs of blue eyes questioned me; two grins spread over two homely faces.
“How do you do?” I repeated. I had to tip my head back to meet one pair of blue eyes for an instant; then I concentrated on feet. My own, in Georgetta’s familiar and rather worn-out flats (sans ornaments). The Miller brothers’ enormous sneakers. Mary Warneke’s trim dark sandals on smooth tanned feet.
Sherry’s hand was still tight on the curb rein, his voice casual. “Mr. Fairly here yet?”
“Over by the fire. With Sue and that bunch—see? Red plaid shirt. They’ll hit you for dues as soon as you show up, I warn you.”
“Can’t hurt me. I’m broke,” Sherry said, raising a small responsive laugh—all male.
Mary Warneke’s bright, cool voice said, “Are you a transfer, Shan? Or will you be a freshman this fall?”
I said, “Neither one, actually,” tried to think of something to add, failed, and studied a nearby tree trunk.
“Shan’s new in Portland. She’s still window-shopping,” Sherry put in.
“Oh, that’s it,” one of the crew cuts said affably. “Canadian, aren’t you?”
Here it came—the accent routine. Stiffly, I said, “No. I’m—” I’m what? I thought. Irish? Only by birth. American? Only by passport. British? European? Mongrel. “I’m—not,” I said, looking somewhere else.
There was a small silence, during which I could feel myself being dismissed as hopeless from three minds.
Mary Warneke’s voice, sounding warmer and easier, said, “Say, Sherry, that foreign exchange student arrived yesterday after all, and Bob’s bringing him. I’m supposed to tell everybody to be real nice to him, because he’ll be kind of—you know.”
“Oh, sure, I’ll make a point of it.”
“And if you want to play tennis, Woody Marshall has charge of the rackets. End of announcements.” She laughed, a pleasant, ringing laugh.
“I’m more interested in coffee than tennis at the moment,” Sherry said, to my overwhelming, intense, abject relief. “Guess we’ll go find some. See you later.”
“Sure. Glad to have met you, Shan,” one of the crew cuts said respectfully.
There were three other muttered, formal, glad-to-have-met-yous, one of them mine, and we strolled on across the lawn. I found I’d been holding my breath, as usual, and now I felt giddy and a little blind—but not too blind to see that there were at least ten people clustered around the coffee table under the trees ahead.
“Oh, please. Not yet,” I gasped.
“I never did show you the view, did I?” Sherry remarked in a voice loud enough to carry back to the three we’d just left. We swerved toward the rhododendrons, followed an unexpected little path through them, and arrived at a piece of cliff edge with a bench on it and an iron rail around it and the whole gorge in front. I stared miserably upriver, feeling as if I could never face Sherry again.
“It really is bad, isn’t it?” he said. “I always thought you must be exaggerating, but I see you weren’t.”
Well, that’s that, I thought. I knew it. I said, “We can go home now, can’t we? Or I could just jump off right here.”
“Now, calm down.”
“You said yourself it was bad—”
“I didn’t mean the way you acted. I meant the way you suffered. I even thought you looked kind of faint for a minute.”
“Oh, that’s only because I forget to breathe.”
“To breathe?”
“Yes, breathe! I do the same thing at the dentist’s, when he’s putting in Novocain. It’s just one of my stupid—Sherry, let’s not talk about it. Give up and take me to a bus or something. Then you can come back.”
After a minute Sherry said, “Shannon Kathleen, look at me.” With enormous reluctance I dragged my eyes away from the distant curve of the river and forced them to meet his for a bare instant, then frowned down at my hands.
“No, keep on looking at me,” Sherry insisted. “Don’t glare. Just plain look at me, as if I were an ordinary human being, and tell me why it’s so hard.”
“Because I’ve humiliated you before your friends, Sherry! You wanted to show me off, and I acted like a complete—complete—”
“Aaah, no you didn’t. You build these things up so. No, never mind the view right now . . . Things are always easier when you look at people, Greensleeves.” He held my eyes, smiling into them, and the clenched fist inside my chest began to loosen a bit. “You hardly glanced at Mary and the Miller twins. I bet you didn’t even notice those skyscrapers were twins.”
“No. I noticed one was more of a skyscraper than the other.”
&n
bsp; “That’s Steve. Nice guy.”
The one who’d asked—civilly enough—if I were Canadian. “They probably thought I was stuck-up. Insufferable. They probably thought—”
“They thought you were reserved, and slightly baffling, and had the most dramatic hair they ever laid eyes on. They don’t have any idea what you’re like yet. You’ve got the twins beginning to circle.”
“How can you possibly know all that?”
“I was looking,” Sherry said pointedly.
“I know I put Mary’s back up. I didn’t need to look.”
“Well, she’s engaged to Roger. She relaxed when she decided you weren’t going to eat him. She won’t let him circle far. But Steve’ll be back around. Of course, he’s going to find me more or less in his way.” Sherry grinned, and I felt the fist unclench a bit more. I glanced back at the view and decided I wouldn’t jump off into it just yet, after all. I’d have one more shot at this. Just one. “Come on,” Sherry added, pulling me to my feet. “This time, look at people. And for gosh sakes, remember to breathe.”
The place seemed fuller of activity and voices. Several newly arrived groups were walking down from the parking area, there were people on the long porch of the house, and several dripping-wet hardy souls in swimsuits were streaking out of the lower woods toward the fire, amid a lot of exaggerated tooth-chattering. The coffeepot was doing a thriving business. Sherry walked right into the thick of the crowd around it, taking me along. “Hi, Sue. Got any of that for us?” he said.
“Sherrreee! I thought you were never coming! Now you can pay your dues and be on the Mustard-Slathering Committee and make Tim Stiles behave himself. He keeps telling me I must run away with him tomorrow, I must, I must—he can’t live without me, and I drive him mad.”
“Well, you drive me mad, too, sort of,” Sherry said with a grin, while my tentatively budding new notion of myself as a mysteriously fascinating though tongue-tied creature withered up and died on the spot. Nothing mysterious about this girl’s charm; she was the prettiest thing I ever laid eyes on, blond and wide-eyed, with a laugh like a bell and blue-white teeth. She seemed to know Sherry very well indeed.
I said, “How do you do,” without hearing her last name and might have cut and run that minute if I hadn’t immediately had to say “how do you do” to a lot of other people, including Mr. Fairly, who had a thin, dark moustache and was something called a faculty adviser. I couldn’t keep track of anybody’s name after this, but I must have been looking at people because there was a kaleidoscopic procession of faces flashing past my eyes—all smiling when they turned toward Sherry or each other, all arrested in curious or polite or startled or noncommittal expressions when they turned to me.
Well, back to Mary-High, I thought. Nothing’s changed, nobody’s different, I haven’t learned a thing all summer, Shannon’s still Shannon, and there goes your popularity contest, college level.
Sherry reached out casually, pried one of my hands loose from my coffee cup, and led me toward the fire, saying “Breathe!” out of the corner of his mouth. I let the air out of my lungs, dragged some more in, and after a moment took a shaky swallow of coffee, scalding my tongue in the process. Things began to look less kaleidoscopic, and I relaxed infinitesimally. One thing was different, after all—I hadn’t had Sherry beside me at Mary-High.
“Ordeal by introduction,” he observed sympathetically. “I know that was a little rough, but I had to check you in with Mr. Fairly. We’ll just take them as they come after this, one or two at a time.”
Three of the dripping-wet tooth-chatterers were still clustered around the fire, and though my every instinct voted nay, we joined them.
“Hi, Sherry,” said two of them, male and female. The other girl just watched Sherry and waited, smiling. In the midst of introducing me to Ginny Somebody and Bill Somebody else, Sherry seemed to focus on her for the first time, and stared.
“Well, I’ll be darned,” he said with one of his nicest grins, and took the hand she extended, laughing. “And this,” he said to me, “is little Betty Patros, of all people.”
“The Nuisance,” Betty Patros said, dimpling roguishly. I suddenly felt lonesome. Ginny said, “You mean you know each other?” and they explained in chorus that they’d been next-door neighbors all through grade school.
“Ginny, I poisoned Sherry’s life for years before it finally got through to me that big boys don’t like babies tagging along everywhere they go. How’s Bell Landing, Sherry?”
“Oh, it’s transformed. New addition on the high school, and the feed store’s repainted. Listen, what are you doing here? I thought it was Medford you moved to. Are you old enough for college?”
“I will be by fall. I’m staying with Ginny all year, poor her. She’s my cousin.”
“Small world,” Bill observed, grinning amiably at me. “I didn’t happen to live next door to you at any time, did I?”
The invitation was wide open for me to dimple roguishly in my turn and try my hand at the type of banter that seemed to be the lingua franca in these parts. That beautiful Sue was a past master at it, Betty Patros was a confident beginner, Bill and even Sherry seemed idly proficient. Ginny, having barely opened her mouth so far, was an unknown quantity, but could doubtless hold her own if she tried. I suddenly decided I couldn’t and that the fact might as well be established right away. I merely smiled at Bill—or tried to—and shook my head.
“I was afraid of that,” Bill murmured. “Where do you live? Portland?”
I said, “At the moment,” and drank some coffee.
Sherry and Betty Patros had been working out exactly when they’d last seen each other and had just turned back to the rest of us. “At the moment, what?” Sherry inquired.
“At the moment she lives in Portland,” Bill said, studying me. “That’s all I can get out of her.”
“Maybe that’s all she wants you to know,” Ginny remarked. She huddled into her beach towel, a friendly gray eye on me, and added, “Don’t tell him a thing. Betty, I’m freezing. Let’s go get dressed.”
“Well—but, Sherry, I’ll see you later, won’t I? So much to catch up on! Now don’t move. I’ll be back.”
She hurried off after Ginny toward the house, and after a moment during which we all watched her retreating figure—and a very good figure it was—Bill turned to Sherry and laughed.
“Far as I’m concerned, she’s still a nuisance to the big boys. You going to obey orders?”
“I think not,” Sherry said mildly.
“I hoped you’d say that. In fact, sort of vanish, will you? I’d like to keep her mind on me this afternoon—if I can.” He grinned at me and loped off toward the house.
“Still breathing?” Sherry asked me.
I said abruptly, “Sherry, I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
I waved my hands incoherently. “All this. Be like—these people. I don’t speak the language.”
“Who wants you to? Be like yourself.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” I said bitterly.
“No, you haven’t. Not one person we’ve talked to has the slightest idea what you’re really like. It doesn’t matter—take your time. Maybe none of these people have appealed to you.”
I remembered a friendly gray eye and said, “Ginny—seemed nice.”
“Well, she is. We’ll hunt her up later if you want to.”
“Actually, Bill was, too,” I admitted. I glanced at Sherry. “Queer, your running into that girl you used to live next door to.”
Sherry met my eye and smiled, and I suddenly quit minding about Betty Patros. He said, “Come on, let’s oblige Bill and vanish. Here, I’ll get rid of our cups.”
He moved away toward the coffee table with that lazy, lounging grace that was as much a part of him as his wiry hair. I waited nervously, feeling unprotected, then found my
self listening in astonishment to a conversation going on in the middle distance somewhere behind my left shoulder. When Sherry came back, I said, “Who’s the Viennese?”
“Who’s the what?”
“Listen!”
We both listened, I with a mixture of nostalgia and amusement. A diffident male voice was explaining all about having seen wonderful mountains from the air yesterday—explaining rapidly and eagerly in a soft, singsong, cadenced German. It announced his birthplace and background with every rolled r and hissing s, but so distorted regulation Hochdeutsch that only another working-class Viennese (or Franz, who has more than a touch of it himself) could have followed all he was saying. Unfortunately, he wasn’t talking to another working-class Viennese, but to several German-speaking students with strong American accents who, understandably, were finding even ich habe gesehen unrecognizable when pronounced “i’ hawp ksehn” and were busy interrupting him with “Bitte?” and asking each other, “Did you get all that?” and laughing helplessly at themselves.
I glanced over my shoulder and spotted the group at once because nobody could have missed the Viennese. He was carefully bareheaded, carefully sloppy in an open-necked shirt and slightly too-new American windbreaker, but in spirit he was still wearing one of those stiff blue suits and a tie, and obviously stood ready to click the heels of his new sneakers at any moment. He was neither as tall nor as good-looking as most of the Americans around him, but the girls were reacting like bees around a honeypot.
Sherry said, “I’ll bet it’s that exchange student we’re supposed to be nice to. Doesn’t look as if he needs it. How can you tell he’s Viennese?”
“The accent. His is really a thick one. It’s like spotting a Cockney . . . Why aren’t they speaking English? They’d get along better.”
They didn’t though. Having bogged down in the visitor’s language, they gave it up amid general laughter—rather anxious laughter on the Austrian’s part—and switched to American. That turned out about as similar to the Austrian’s book-learned English as his Viennese was to the Americans’ book-learned German. Now it was he who was muttering “Please?” every other minute and looking a bit wild-eyed at such phrases as, “I’m sure gonna hafta bone up,” and “Did-nigh tell y’ I was flunking German?”