Summer of '69(109)

Jessie’s mouth falls open. Behind Exalta and Bill Crimmins, Neil Armstrong walks on the surface of the moon.

Man is walking on the moon!

Exalta isn’t pushing Mr. Crimmins away. She is kissing him back. They are kissing and Jessie realizes that Exalta, too, is real. She’s a real person who has feelings for Mr. Crimmins.

Exalta breaks away. “Come upstairs with me,” she says.

Jessie quietly, oh, so quietly, scurries back down the hall to the kitchen.



Sunlight floods Jessie’s room the next morning and she awakens, blinking at the ceiling. Then, she starts to laugh. It’s funny, isn’t it? Funny peculiar but also, for some reason, funny ha-ha. Exalta is old! Mr. Crimmins is older! And yet, there they were. Jessie wonders how long their romance has been going on. Was it just a spontaneous moment inspired by the wonder of space travel? Or has it been happening all summer? Or…is Jessie going to discover that Exalta and Mr. Crimmins have been conducting a love affair for years and years, ever since Penn Nichols died, or even before that?

Jessie hops out of bed, pads past Mr. Crimmins’s closed bedroom door, walks across the yard, and goes into the kitchen, where she finds her father reading the newspaper. Splashed across the front is the headline “Man Walks on Moon,” and there’s a grainy black-and-white photo of Armstrong and Aldrin planting the flag.

“We missed the moon landing,” David says. “Too much wine at dinner. I’m sorry, Jessie. I wanted to wake you up so we could watch it.”

“That’s okay,” Jessie says. She can’t look her father in the eye or she’ll give him a crazy-person grin. She pokes her head into the fridge looking for juice.

“Your mother went to the hospital to bring Blair and the babies home, so what do you say you and I get out of the house for a while to give them some space? We can go play tennis. You can show me what you’ve learned.”

Tennis on a Sunday; it’s worse than church. But Jessie needs to talk to her father alone, and this might give her the opportunity. “Okay,” she says.



After breakfast, Jessie and her father put on their whites, grab their rackets, and walk to the club. Jessie has butterflies in her stomach that increase in number the closer they get to the club. She’s obviously nervous about disclosing her mother’s secret, but more immediately, she’s nervous about her father signing in at the club desk. What if they don’t let him in because he’s Jewish? She nearly suggests they walk a quarter mile to play on the public courts at the Jetties but she doesn’t want to alert her father to a possible problem or make him think he’s not good enough for the Field and Oar Club.

When they approach the desk, Jessie’s heart is hammering in her chest. It’s not even Lizz at the desk; it’s some fill-in person who won’t recognize Jessie and know she’s a member.

David smiles. “Good morning,” he says to the fill-in girl, who has messy hair and dark circles under her eyes and looks like she was roused from bed five minutes earlier. “I’m David Levin, son-in-law of Exalta Nichols. My daughter and I are going to go hit.”

The girl-who-just-woke-up—BRENDA, her name tag says—doesn’t even blink. “Sign in,” she says groggily.

Jessie watches her father sign: Nichols N-3.

He turns to Jessie. “Ready to play?”

“How come you didn’t sign Levin?” she asks as they walk toward the courts.

“Because it’s your grandmother’s membership.”

“Yeah, but Levin is your name,” she says. And my name! “Did you not sign it because you don’t want anyone to know you’re Jewish?”

David throws his head back and laughs. He wraps an arm around Jessie and pulls her in close. “Trust me, everyone here already knows I’m Jewish. But you know what else they know?”

“What?” Jessie says.

They are right in front of court 11, which is closest to the water. It’s the only court Jessie has played on all summer but she has been so racked with anxiety about her lessons that she has never once noticed how pretty her surroundings are. Today the sky is brilliant blue, and an American flag ripples in the breeze. The harbor is dotted with boats. The view from here is breathtaking but also exclusive because it’s not for everybody.

David says, “They know I’m smart and that I have an important job and they know I’m a really, really good tennis player. They also know how much I love your mother and your sisters and your brother and you. And to most people here, Jessie, the good people, that’s all that matters. Okay?”

Tears are standing in Jessie’s eyes but she hopes they’re hidden by the bill of her visor. She nods and leads her father onto the court.

They hit the ball around, Jessie accepting her father’s compliments—“Your backhand is so strong and accurate! Your serving form is darn near perfect!”—but after an hour, the sun is high and hot, and both Jessie and David have had enough.

“How about we go to the Sweet Shoppe?” David says. “Get that ice cream I promised you.”

Even though it’s July 20, this is Jessie’s first trip all summer to the Sweet Shoppe. It smells the way all good ice cream parlors should, like toasted marshmallows, melted chocolate, and the malt-and-vanilla scent of just-baked waffle cones. Jessie orders a double scoop of malachite chip in a silver bowl and David gets black raspberry in a cone and they sit at one of the tiny circular marble tables in uncomfortable wrought-iron chairs.