Page 18 of Endless Summer: Stories
“And she wants you.”
“I guess so,” Clen said. “But I told her, I mean, I wasclearthat I’m taken. I belong to you, Dabney Kimball.”
And yet he had planned on leaving her for seven to ten hours while he went to a formal alumni dinner-dance thing with Jocelyn and her influential parents. Dabney caught a glimpse of herself in Clen’s dorm room, lying on his bed, sniffing his pillowcase for his scent. She would have readFranny and Zooeyfor the umpteenth time and tried again to figure out why Franny never made it to the football game with Lane Coutell, why she never took a bite of her chicken sandwich but felt okay enough to smoke seventeen cigarettes in a forty-page story. She would have waited, thinking how dedicated Clen was to the newspaper, while in reality Clen was eating bloody prime rib and stroking Jocelyn’s long hair and trying to sound impressive for Jocelyn’s father. Dabney felt sorry for the girl who would have waited alone in Clen’s dorm room, but that girl was not her—because she was leaving.
Jealousy, cheat, trust,like-likes, crimson and blue, Harvard, Yale, Spizzwinks, Whiffenpoofs, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalists, Handsome Dan, nearly fifty Yale graduates killed in World War II. People had problems, Dabney thought. Her father had fought in Vietnam, and he came back different. Dabney’s mother couldn’t handle it.She didn’t leave because of you, honey. She left because of me.Dabney’s father had told her that once when they were duck hunting.
But she did leave me,Dabney thought. Her own daughter, her only child.
There was a game taking place on the football field, and there were, Dabney supposed, other games being played here in the Yale Bowl.
She turned away from Clen. He said, “Wait a minute, where are you going?”
Back to Jason’s car,she thought, even though Mallory didn’t want her.To find Clark from Owl. To find a pay phone.She would call Solange and go back to Cambridge. Or she would call Dr. Donegal and go back to Nantucket. Where was she going? Anywhere but here.
She started walking and people rushed past her, so many people, they swallowed her up, making her invisible. If Clen didn’t move right this minute, she knew, he would never find her.
It’s like setting foot on another planet, where no one is familiar and I do not know the rules.
Yes,Dabney thought. That was it. That was it exactly.
