Summer of '69(97)

“I’m coming to you now,” Jessie says. The sun is blasting the orange clay court. Jessie is so hot, it feels like she’s standing on the surface of the sun. She needs water and shade. But then she imagines the other girl or girls, some maybe only eleven years old or even as young as ten, maybe a girl who will be twelve or thirteen next summer if Garrison comes back, and so she keeps talking. “He touched Helen Dunscombe too. She was crying in the locker room about it. He touched her breast while he was showing her how to serve. Helen told her mother and her mother said that’s just the way men are.”

“What?” Suze shouts. She stands up to her full height and starts bouncing her palm off the face of her racket. “Well, I mean, she’s not wrong. Men are like that. But we don’t have to put up with it. Jessie, do you hear me? We do not have to put up with it.”

“What are we going to do?” Jessie says. She suddenly regrets her decision to confide in Suze and she realizes she should never have mentioned Helen Dunscombe by name. “Are you going to tell Ollie Hayward?” Jessie envisions being marched into Ollie’s office or maybe even the office of Mr. Bosley, the general manager of the Field and Oar, or—horrors of all horrors—to the board of governors, old men like Mrs. Winter’s husband. Jessie will have to speak the embarrassing truth and her name will be sullied and Helen Dunscombe’s name will be sullied—and possibly Helen will turn around and deny it ever happened and then Jessie will be left exposed and alone. Any which way, it will be worse for Jessie than it will be for Garrison Howe. “Please. My grandmother, my family…they can’t know about this.”

Suze’s face is shaded by her visor; all Jessie can see clearly in the blinding sun is the white stripe of zinc on Suze’s nose. But Jessie can tell Suze is deep in thought.

“I’m not going to tell Ollie,” Suze says. “He won’t care and even if he does care, he won’t punish Garrison properly. But I will punish Garrison properly. I will see to it that Garrison resigns.”

Jessie lets her breath go. Suze understands. Suze is her role model. “How are you going to do that?” Jessie asks.

“I’m going to enlist the help of Jeffrey Pryor, who has pledged his undying devotion to yours truly.” Suze smirks. “He’ll do whatever I ask him to.”

Jessie is fascinated but not at all surprised. Suze is a person who inspires devotion. “Are you going to ask him to beat Garrison up?”

“Better,” Suze says. “Jeffrey works two jobs here. He’s the grill boy at the snack bar”—meaning, Jessie thinks guiltily, that he’s the one she stole the Twizzlers from—“and he’s in charge of the men’s locker room!” Suze raises her hands above her head in victory.

Jessie is confused. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, let me enlighten you,” Suze says. “I’ll ask Jeffrey to put BenGay in Garrison’s jockstrap, itching powder in his socks, and laxatives in his Cokes!” Suze grins. “Trust me, Garrison will be gone within a week.”

Jessie imagines Garrison hurrying off the court toward the bathroom mid-lesson, fearing he might have a very embarrassing accident in front of everyone. She wants to hug Suze. She can’t wait to tell Helen Dunscombe!

“All right, get back to the baseline,” Suze says. “You owe me one more volley.”





All Along the Watchtower



As soon as Kirby gets to work on Friday, Mrs. Bennie informs her that Senator Kennedy and his cousin Joe Gargan have checked into their rooms but are out for the evening.

It’s Kirby’s understanding that the senator is hosting a party out on Chappaquiddick for the Boiler Room Girls—the elite group of women who worked on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Patty’s sister Sara was one of the Boiler Room Girls and she has come to the Vineyard to attend the party. That afternoon, when she swung by the Narragansett Avenue house to say hello, she extended an invitation to both Patty and Kirby. Sara O’Callahan was nothing like bland Tommy; clearly the females in the family received the superior genes. Sara had dark hair and milky skin like Patty, though Sara’s hair was cut in a pixie just like Mia Farrow’s, which made her blue eyes seem impossibly big and round. She was slender and fashionable in a red A-line dress and hammered-gold earrings. Sara brought along her friend Mary Jo, another one of the Boiler Room Girls who had worked as Bobby Kennedy’s secretary. Mary Jo wore a navy-blue linen sheath and pearls. Kirby looked on both Sara and Mary Jo with awe. They were only five or six years older than her but they seemed worldly and sophisticated; Kirby wanted to be just like them.

She would become just like them, she decided. Since ending her relationship with Darren the week before, Kirby had been flailing. Who was she? What did she want from life? She needed to shrug off her heartbreak and disillusionment and start to forge a real identity. She would return to the person she was on the morning of the first protest march, when she pulled on her tie-dyed peace sign T-shirt and zipped up her fringed suede boots. That woman was passionate and self-possessed, carefree and confident. Kirby had been feeling like her love affair with Scottie and then her relationship with Darren diminished her, but now she understood she had that backward. Those two relationships, even in their failure, had given Kirby something—strength, she supposed, and resolve.