Summer of '69(41)

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.”

Jessie warmed at his use of the pronoun we, and also, her stomach rumbled. “I’m starving,” she admitted. “My grandmother passed out before she could make me any dinner.”

“Bill told me your grandmother likes her gin,” Pick said.

“She does,” Jessie said, though she hardly thought it was a good idea for Mr. Crimmins to share this detail with Pick. But Jessie supposed that the family secrets would all be revealed, now that the Crimminses were living among them. Jessie eyed the cardboard box. “What did you get?”

Pick unfolded the flaps. “Meat loaf,” he said. “And cod cakes. There’s plenty, so help yourself.”

Jessie loathed cod cakes and would eat meat loaf only under duress, but she was hungry and she was so happy to be sitting alone with Pick that the food tasted more delicious than any she could remember. They both ate with their fingers and a couple of times their hands met when they reached into the box. Then Pick offered Jessie the last bite of meat loaf, which she declined, but he said, “Come on,” and popped it into Jessie’s mouth, and his fingers touched her lips in a way that made her feel faint.

She drank some of her ginger ale—it was cold and spicy—and wondered if she should leave, but Pick cleared away the box, then turned around so that his back was to the railing and he was facing Jessie. He stretched out his dungareed legs, one of which was grazing Jessie’s bare knee. He might not have noticed it, but Jessie was 100 percent nerve endings, all of them alert and yearning. It was funny the way being touched by Garrison had been offensive and gross but the slightest contact with Pick made her feel like she had eaten magic beans.