Page 108 of Summer of '69
Magee felt like a newly crowned princess. She lay down across the big white bed and imagined sleeping there with Tiger, maybe even conceiving a child there. Both Tiger and Magee want a passel of kids—four or five.
The dinner menu for Thanksgiving:
Turkey with dressing made from day-old Portuguese bread, which Kate bought from a bakery downtown.
Mashed potatoes. Kate adds sour cream and tops them with snipped green onions. Magee must remember to tell her mother about this. Her mother’s cooking needs some updating.
Scalloped corn.
Carrots boiled in orange juice and topped with brown butter and cinnamon.
Brussels sprouts, roasted in the oven.
Cranberry sauce out of a can, just like at Magee’s house. The pies, pumpkin and apple, Kate bought at the bakery as well. They will be topped with Brigham’s ice cream—vanilla and butter brickle, Tiger’s favorite.
Kate brought linens from home, along with silver candlesticks and ivory tapers. Jessie makes a centerpiece out of gourds and apples. Kate turns the transistor radio to WBUR, which broadcasts classical music. All of this is a far cry from Thanksgiving at Magee’s house. Jean Johnson makes sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows and green-bean casserole with crispy onions and turkey with store-bought stuffing, and because no one likes pie, she serves a Sara Lee chocolate cake. Magee’s brothers always complain about the beans; they skim the marshmallows off the top of the sweet potatoes. The Johnsons eat at the kitchen table just like every other meal, and Magee’s father, Al Johnson, drinks his usual Budweiser from a can. Magee wouldn’t say she dreads Thanksgiving, but neither does it feel like aholidaythe way it does here. With three little boys in her house, Magee’s family Christmas is far more festive.
Kate asks Magee to set the table for ten and Magee worries that she will make a mistake. In her studies to become a dental hygienist, she has proved to be good at memorizing—incisors, cuspids, molars—and now she wishes she’d taken a book about table settings out of the library. Wine goblet, water goblet, fork, knife, spoon, dessert fork—all of those Magee can handle. (She actually isn’t sure which goblet is which, so she quietly asks Kirby, who says, “Water goblet is bigger. It goes here.” She places it to the side of the wine goblet. “It’s pathetic that I know that, but Nonny is a Brahmin.”) Magee is glad there aren’t fish forks or soupspoons or cordial glasses.
There is a moment of confusion, however, because Magee counts only nine people who are eating and yet Kate clearly told her to set the table for ten. Is there a guest Magee doesn’t know about? A family member she’s forgotten?
She asks Kate, who says, “We’re setting an honorary place for Tiger, so the chair next to yours will be empty. And look, I got this.” She shows Magee a small American flag on a stand, the same kind that rested on teachers’ desks when Magee was in grade school. “Tiger’s seat will be on the left side, second from the head.”
Magee has a lump in her throat as she sets the flag at the place Kate specified.
At five o’clock, Exalta Nichols—“Nonny,” as she’s known, Tiger’s grandmother—arrives with a man whom Kate calls Bill. Magee isn’t sure who Bill is; she knows Tiger’s grandfather has passed, and Tiger said that Exalta doesn’t have a new husband or a boyfriend, “unless you count Rod Laver.” But it’s quite clear that Exalta and Bill are a couple. He holds her arm as they enter and he helps her off with her coat and he offers to fetch her cocktail. Magee herself enjoyed a glass of champagne in the kitchen as she helped get everything ready; Kate had popped the cork off a bottle and poured glasses for Magee and Kirby and Blair.
We drank champagne as we prepared dinner,Magee imagines telling her mother.
The champagne has also eased Magee’s nerves about meeting Exalta. Once Exalta has been relieved of her coat and handed her cocktail—a gin and tonic served in a highball glass with an artful twist of lime—Magee is ushered forward to be presented to her.
My nonny,Tiger had said before he left,can be intimidating.
But the woman Magee meets is tiny in stature with a silver bobbed haircut held back from her face by a black velvet headband. She wears a soft red turtleneck sweater and pearl earrings. Her eyes widen as she takes stock of Magee.
“Aren’t youlovely?” Exalta says, reaching for Magee’s hand. “And you’re wearing Penn’s class ring. How divine that it fits.”
It doesn’t fit; Magee has wound tape around the back, but she won’t show Exalta that. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says.
Exalta turns to Bill. “Isn’t she just beautiful?”
What interests Magee at that point isn’t Bill’s response (he benignly agrees, although really, what else could he do?) but the glowing expression on Exalta’s face as she looks at Bill. Magee recognizes that she and Exalta are members of the same tribe. They are women in love.
They all sit down to eat. The turkey is golden brown, fragrant, and steaming in the center of the table, just like in a Norman Rockwell painting. David is at the head of the table with Exalta at the other end. Magee is in the middle, between Kirby and the empty chair, and on the other side of the empty chair is Jessie. This is Magee’s spot. She is becoming part of this story. Pennington Nichols met Exalta at a debutante ball in 1917, just after he returned from fighting in World War I. Fifty-two years later, Magee Johnson went for driving lessons because her mother decided it was worth the thirty-dollar fee to have Magee help her drive the boys around. Magee stepped out of the Walden Pond Driving Academy office and there, leaning against the car at the curb, was her instructor.
He’d stuck out his hand with a devilish grin. Devilish, he informed her later, because after twelve weeks of working as an instructor at this school, he had finally been assigned a pretty girl his age.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Tiger.”
She had noticed his eye right away—feline, wild, mesmerizing.
David rises to offer words of thanks and then lifts his glass. Magee raises her glass, filled with a delicious red wine. The only thing that could make this moment more perfect, she thinks, would be for Tiger to walk in right now, dressed in his combat fatigues, his expression weary but grateful.
However, things like that happen only in the movies and in novels.
But incredibly…
Just as all the adult members of the Levin-Foley and Whalen clans raise their glasses and say, “Cheers!,” and as baby Genevieve utters a happy cry from her wind-up swing, the front door of the house opens. They all turn. Magee’s heart hovers; it’s a hummingbird, wings beating so fast they can’t be seen.
