Page 31 of Summer of '69
The guy driving is cute; he’s wearing a white polo shirt and sunglasses. The girl has her long dark hair braided down her back. Then Kirby realizes the girl is Patty.
“Hey, Kirby!” Patty says. “Meet Luke.”
Kirby grins. “Hey, Luke,” she says. “Glad to see somebody got this girl out of bed.” She climbs into the Jeep and even feels a small surge of excitement when Patty lifts her hands in the air.
“Katama, here we come!”
More Today Than Yesterday
Sunday, June 22, 1969
Dear Tiger,
I was hoping Dad would bring a letter from you when he came yesterday, but he said none had arrived, which put me in a bad mood and Mom in an even worse mood. She got drunk last night at the Skipper, and not the kind of drunk where she came home singing, but the kind where she came home crying. Nonny slept right through it because she started with her Hendrick’s and tonics at four o’clock instead of five, even though she was supposed to be minding me while Mom and Dad were out. She went up to bed at seven and put in earplugs. I made a peanut butter sandwich and watchedMy Three Sonsin the den.
I hate my tennis lessons.
Jessie crosses this last line out. She willnotcomplain about tennis lessons while her brother is loaded down with forty pounds of gear and slogging through hip-deep water in the rice paddies. Jessie does hate her tennis lessons but most of that hate is due to her experience with Garrison. Just walking into the Field and Oar makes Jessie queasy now. Exalta still refuses to let Jessie use the name Levin when she signs in or when she signs for something, like after her most recent lesson when she went to the snack bar to get a chocolate frappe and a grilled cheese.
“N-three!” Exalta had called out as Jessie headed to the snack bar. “Nichols!”
Jessie had been so furious with her grandmother that while the grill boy’s back was turned, she lifted a package of Twizzlers from the counter and slid it into her skirt pocket. Again, she’d waited for a hand to clamp on her shoulder announcing she’d been caught, but none came.
My tennis lessons started out badly but have gotten better since I asked for a new instructor. Her name is Suze, short for Susan; she was named for Susan B. Anthony, who, in case you weren’t paying attention in history class, fought for women’s right to vote. The cool thing is that Suze is a feminist just like Susan B. Anthony. She told me on the first day that she only accepts female tennis students because the world has enough male tennis stars as it is. She also told me she found out she was being paid less that the male tennis instructors at Field and Oar and she marched right up to Ollie Hayward, the head of tennis, and she threatened to quit if he didn’t give her equal pay. Ollie said yes—probably not on principle, she says, but because Suze is the best player of all the instructors.
Jessie stops there, though she could talk about Suze all day. Suze has short hair like a boy—bright red, due to her Irish heritage—and pale, pale skin. She has to play tennis in a white long-sleeved shirt so her skin doesn’t burn, and she paints her nose with zinc. When Jessie told Suze that Garrison Howe said she didn’t have enough arm strength for a one-handed backhand, Suze said, “Let me tell you something about Garrison Howe.”
Jessie held her breath. She waited for Suze to confide that Garrison had rubbed his tumescence against her as well.
“He’s a half-witted sewer rat,” Suze said.
“He is?” Jessie said.
“He is,” Suze said. “But name-calling is for the weak. Actions are for the strong. Got it?”
“Got it,” Jessie said.
I’ve had four lessons so far and I’m just starting to get the hang of it. I can hit a decent forehand and my backhand clears the net at least half the time. I also know how to score the game: love, fifteen, thirty, forty, game. Six games wins a set, but you have to win by two games. Two sets wins a match for women, three for men. (Suze feels it should be three sets for both sexes. Tennis is the most male-biased sport in the world, she says.) Next week, I’ll learn to serve. Suze says she’s had great luck teaching kids to serve; the junior champion here was once her student.
Other than that, nothing to report.
This isn’t precisely true. Jessie wants to tell Tiger what happened with Pick, but Tiger is her brother and Jessie isn’t sure how he would handle it. She has considered writing about it to Leslie or Doris, but it feels too new and too private to share.
When Kate and David came home from dinner at the Skipper, Kate started crying and woke Jessie up. She knew her mother missed Tiger, that she worried every second of every day that he would be shot and killed or, worse, captured and tortured. Her baby. Her only baby boy. Jessie lay in the dark listening to them talk in the kitchen, her eyes wide open as she, too, imagined the fates that might have befallen Tiger—without a letter, it was impossible to know if he was okay. David said all the right things, that Tiger was strong and fast, and, despite his disappointing grades, he was smart, he had a good understanding of the physical world, how to take things apart and put them back together. Most of all, he was mentally tough. David’s words put Jessie at ease but Kate still cried and David took her to their bedroom. Once the door was closed, all Jessie could hear were her mother’s muffled sobs.
Jessie realized she was starving—the peanut butter sandwich had been skimpy—and so she’d tiptoed downstairs for a snack.
She saw a flash of white moving outside the window and she froze for an instant, wondering if the house was haunted after all, if the ghost of Ebenezer Raymond or one of his children might be floating around, but when Jessie moved closer to the window, she saw Pick in his T-shirt and Levi’s, returning home from his shift at the North Shore Restaurant.
Without thinking twice, Jessie stepped out of the kitchen door onto the brick patio and whispered his name. “Pick!”
He swung around, saw her, and waved her over. Jessie tiptoed across the patio and down the flagstone walk to where Pick was untying a parcel secured to the back of his bike. It was a cardboard takeout box.
“Let’s go up to the deck,” he whispered.
They stepped lightly into Little Fair, passed the closed door of Mr. Crimmins’s room, and sneaked up the stairs. Jessie had forgotten that Little Fair had a deck that overlooked Plumb Lane; in the past, Kirby and Tiger had smoked their marijuana joints there so that Kate and Exalta wouldn’t detect the smell. The deck was small, just big enough for two people. Pick appeared with two green bottles and the cardboard box. At first Jessie thought the bottles were beer and she quickly calculated just how rebellious she wanted to be, but then she saw they were ginger ale. Still technically forbidden, but not nearly as bad.
Pick sat on the deck next to Jessie and opened the box. “They give me leftovers every night,” he said. “It’s Saturday, so we really scored big.”
