Summer of '69(110)

“It’s time for you to pour your heart out,” David says. “I’m not here to judge. I’m just here to listen.”

Not here to judge. This is an unusual statement, Jessie thinks, which must be a sign that she can hand over her mother’s awful secret and David will respectfully accept it and take care of it.

She can’t say it.

She wonders if maybe she can ease into the news about her mother. There are many other places to start: Garrison’s unwanted liberties, Jessie’s spate of thefts, her losing Nonny’s necklace and the subsequent grounding, falling in love with Pick, her first kiss, her first heartbreak upon meeting Sabrina, the bra shopping that was interrupted by Blair’s water breaking on the floor at Buttner’s, her mother’s drinking problem, Jessie’s first period, her angst that Anne Frank did not survive the war, the scene with Lorraine Crimmins followed by Pick’s departure that is maybe forever, Tiger’s letter telling Jessie two of his friends, Frog and Puppy, had been killed and that he was being shipped on a secret mission, the discovery that Exalta and Mr. Crimmins were…girlfriend and boyfriend?

Jessie opens her mouth to speak but her tongue is frozen, both literally and figuratively. She feels like a stunted, thwarted failure. She is unable to share any of the things that happened to her this summer. She just can’t do it.

Instead, she digs into her malachite chip—it’s just a fancy name for mint chocolate chip—which has reached that seductively melted stage.

She feels the cool weight of her Tree of Life pendant against her breastbone. When her father noticed her wearing it, his eyes lit up. Maturity and responsibility, she thinks. And then, a radical idea seizes her.

When she was a child, she told her parents everything: I’m hungry, I’m tired, I need to use the bathroom, I skinned my knee, I like, I hate, I want, I need. What if growing up means keeping some things to herself? The experiences of this summer will become as much a part of her as her bones and muscle, her brains and heart. Ten or twenty years from now, when she looks back on the summer of 1969, she will think: That was the summer I became real. My own real person.

She draws her spoon along the delicious melty edge of her ice cream and says, “I haven’t been able to play my new record album even once.”

“The Joni Mitchell?” David says.

Jessie loves her father for remembering. And then another radical thought strikes: to her father, she is already a real person.

“Well, let’s remedy that as soon as we get home,” David says. He tilts his head and catches her eye. “So it’s fair to say this summer has turned out better than you thought?”

“Oh yes,” Jessie tells her father. “Much better.”





For What It’s Worth



Senator Kennedy is in trouble.

Not long after Patty tells Kirby the ghastly news about Mary Jo Kopechne, Mrs. Bennie calls Kirby into work. Although Kirby’s psyche is now frayed thanks to too much drama and not enough sleep, she has no choice but to go. She arrives back at the inn, still in her yellow daisy dress, and is immediately shuttled into the office with Mrs. Bennie and an Edgartown police officer named Sergeant Braga.

“Where’s Mr. Ames?” Kirby asks.

“He has already given the sergeant his statement,” Mrs. Bennie says. Kirby notes that her hair has been pinned back up in its usual bun, and any sense of fun or frivolity has been replaced with mournful gravitas. Kirby wishes she knew what Mr. Ames told the sergeant.

“We’re trying to corroborate the senator’s story,” Sergeant Braga says. “He allegedly left the party at the Lawrence cottage around eleven fifteen and offered to give Miss Kopechne a ride to the ferry so she could return to her lodgings in Edgartown. However, the senator got turned around in the dark and accidentally drove off the Dike Bridge, where the car flipped over and submerged. The senator says he repeatedly tried to dive down to free Miss Kopechne, who was in the passenger seat, but he was unsuccessful. After a brief rest, the senator walked back to the Lawrence cottage to alert his cousin Mr. Gargan and a friend about what had happened. They too dove down in an attempt to free Miss Kopechne but were unsuccessful.”

Kirby steadies her breathing. She can’t believe that Mary Jo Kopechne, Sara O’Callahan’s friend in the navy sheath and pearls, a person Kirby had met only the day before, was dead.

Dead.

The senator left the party with Mary Jo. This seems incriminating, doesn’t it? Or maybe it was innocent. Maybe he was, as he said, driving Mary Jo back to the ferry. If Kirby had attended the party, it could easily have been Kirby he was driving to the ferry. It could have been Kirby trapped in the car underwater.

“The senator says he entered the hotel at around a quarter past one. Does that sound right to you?”

One fifteen? That does not sound right. Luke came into the lobby at one thirty, Kirby recalls. The cab arrived around two, and Kirby returned to the hotel at ten minutes to three. Mr. Ames said the senator had shown up at two thirty. Right? Surely Mr. Ames has told the police this, but if it differs from the senator’s account, then Kirby’s recollection would be very important—except she hadn’t been there.

“I didn’t see the senator at all,” Kirby says.

“But he went up to his room,” Mrs. Bennie says. “You must have given him his key.”