Summer of '69(122)
“No,” Kate says. “Bill Crimmins came and fetched her.”
Jessie pinches Kirby’s leg. “I told you so,” she whispers.
Her grandmother and Mr. Crimmins. The society matron and the caretaker.
People are people, Kirby thinks.
They are headed out to the end of the earth, Jessie thinks. When they are nearly at Madaket Beach, the best place to see the sunset, Kate tells David to turn left. They go down a winding sand-and-gravel road that’s bordered on both sides by scrub pine and Spanish olives. They cross a battered one-lane wooden bridge and then the land opens up. There are fields on either side of the road and a steel gray stripe on the horizon—the Atlantic Ocean.
Jessie is awestruck. This part of the island is natural and wild; it’s a far cry from the manicured streetscapes of town. She tries to memorize every detail so she can write about it to Tiger and to her new pen pal, Pick.
Jessie received a letter from Pick in early September, right after school started. He’s living in a sustainable community outside of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His mother did end up taking him to Woodstock, and the way he described it in his letter made Jessie glad she hadn’t gone. Pick and Lorraine drove to the concert in a VW bus with a couple from their community. The bus got a flat tire right before Eldred, New York, and Pick said it was easier to abandon the bus and hitch a ride than to track down another tire; the bus didn’t have a spare. Pick and Lorraine had to hitch rides in separate cars. The road was a logjam of vehicles headed to the Yasgur farm, and some cars were so crowded that people sat on the roofs and hoods. Pick worried he would never find his mother again.
Needle in a haystack, he wrote to Jessie. Four hundred thousand people, half of them women, and all of them looked and acted just like Lavender.
Pick hooked up with a couple who had brought their seven-year-old son, Denny, and in exchange for Pick keeping an eye on the little guy, they included Pick in their family unit and shared the food they’d brought.
The concert had good moments. Pick’s favorite band, Creedence, had played after midnight on Saturday night, but he fell fast asleep before Janis Joplin went on. He woke back up to hear Jefferson Airplane. I’d forgotten where I was, he wrote, then I heard Grace Slick’s voice. There were times when I was bored and tired and hungry but there were other times when I was part of this teeming, gyrating, smoking, singing mass of humanity. I felt proud to live in this country.
When Monday morning rolled around and Jimi Hendrix, the final performer, played a psychedelic version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Pick still hadn’t located his mother. He figured she would have wanted to stay and see Hendrix, but he decided if he didn’t find her, he would hitch a ride with someone heading back to Cape Cod and return to his grandfather on Nantucket.
But then this amazing thing happened. Denny saw a kid who had a balloon animal and he declared that he wanted one. Pick somehow, through asking one person and then another, found the man who was making the balloon animals. He was clearly strung out—he wore only a pair of red satin shorts and a red bow tie—and Pick was hesitant to approach him. It was Denny who charged forward toward the balloon man, and thank goodness, because Pick saw that the woman who was collecting the money for him—the animals were a dime apiece—was Lavender.
We got back to the community in time for me to start at a regular high school, Pick wrote. They had to put me back a grade, but nobody here knows me so it’s not too bad. I miss you, Jessie. Write back. Your friend, Pick.
Jessie won’t lie; she loved receiving the letter from Pick and she hurried to respond. She considered telling Pick that they were, in a way, related. They were both half siblings to Blair, Kirby, and Tiger. But that was a family secret and Jessie felt a certain power in guarding it. If she were to release that secret into the world, who knew what kinds of awful dramas would unfold?
So instead, Jessie wrote to Pick about the two astonishing things that had happened since she’d started seventh grade. The first was that she had been invited to Miss Flowers’s wedding to Mr. Barstow. The invitation was printed on fine stock, ivory with black lettering, in a script so fancy it was difficult to read. The envelope was addressed to Miss Jessica Levin, and it had impressed even Jessie’s parents. Kate had scrutinized the invitation as though it contained a secret message from the Russians. “Do you suppose she invited every student in the school? That would be only fair and yet, one would think, impossible.”
Jessie did some quiet trawling to see if this was the case. She asked Doris, “What are you doing on Saturday the twentieth?”
Doris had scowled. Over the summer she had developed a bad case of acne, probably from eating so many McDonald’s French fries. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sleeping in?”
Jessie decided she would attend the service at the Church of the Advent in Beacon Hill but not the reception at the Hampshire House; that way, Kate could drop Jessie off, have a quick visit with Nonny on Mt. Vernon Street, then come back and pick Jessie up.
Jessie was seated in the middle of the church on the bride’s side among a sea of unfamiliar faces; not only was she the only kid from school there, she was the only child, period, aside from one baby who cried until the organ music started and everyone stood up as Miss Flowers walked down the aisle.
Miss Flowers as a bride was the most beautiful woman Jessie had ever seen in real life. She had her dark hair swept back in a sleek chignon and she wore a satin column dress and a long sheer silk veil. The most extraordinary thing was that when she passed by Jessie’s row, she reached out to Jessie and gave her a soulful smile; her eyes brimmed with tears as she squeezed Jessie’s hand.