Summer Nights (3 page)

Anne smiled at her. “I know. I do think of it. I love to go into a roomful of strangers and know that soon they will have turned into friends.”

Miss Glynn set her glass down. “Now that,” she said, “is an extraordinary claim. Most people—I include myself—hate a roomful of strangers. Most people are afraid they will
never
break the barriers and have new friends.”

“Oh, no.” Anne shook her golden hair. “I’m not the smartest at school. I don’t have a flair for anything academic. But I can make friends. I could get off the plane with you, among all the world’s strangers, and I would make friends. I might have to ask for help with taxis or menus, but I’d be all right because I’d make friends who’d help me.” She blushed again. “I guess I can also waste people’s time,” she admitted. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Miss Glynn.”

The old lady got to her feet. It did not appear to be an easy task. Anne helped her up and steadied her. “Old age,” remarked Miss Glynn, “is lamentable.”

They shook hands, Anne being careful not to apply pressure to the arthritic fingers.

And one week later, having interviewed people who wanted to meet other stars, people who wanted glamour to rub off on them, and people who hoped for money and fame themselves, Miss Glynn offered Anne the job, because Anne could make friends anywhere.

Anne sat back down by the pool, smiling at everybody. The hard part, she thought, is
keeping
friends!

I cannot have any arguments with anybody. It’s not enough that I will be making friends overseas; I want to come back to friends here!

E
MILY EDMUNDSON THOUGHT OF
herself as a person with two definite stages, much as a tadpole will later be a frog. There was the pre-Matt Emily and then came the Matt-Emily.

Pre-Matt Emily was a nervous little girl with so little personality her teachers could never remember her name. Pre-Matt Emily had no close girlfriends even—just a cluster of other uninteresting girls with whom she generally had lunch.

But Matt met her out of town and had not been told she was boring. Matt was such an exciting, crazy, unthinking jock of a kid, he just swept her up into his personality, and they became a pair. Matt was always running, always talking, always full of plans and projects. He was a car freak. He’d been restoring and making money on old cars since he was barely fourteen. He had more energy than any other person Emily knew.

People loved to be around Matt. The moment Emily began dating him, she was grafted onto the social lives of people like Anne and Con, and Beth Rose and Gary, or Kip and whoever she was dating at the minute.

Her life in the last two years, her Matt-life, had been perfection.

Now, Matthew O’Connor had a peculiarity. In this one way he was different from any boy in the high school. A thousand other boys and not one of them ached to get married. To listen to them, you’d figure marriage as a social custom had vanished. Not for Matt. He actually looked forward to having a wife and family, his own house and his own business. He even said this out loud …to other boys.

On New Year’s Eve, at the dance where so many exciting things happened to all the rest, the most exciting and terrifying thing imaginable happened to Emily. Matt gave her a diamond ring and asked her to marry him.

She was stunned, afraid. She hardly knew how to put the ring on. Or if she should.

We’ll get married, Matt said, laughing in wild joy, we’ll live happily ever after.

It took him months to convince her it was best, and then she fell into his daydream, and they planned together. Her doubts were gone; Matt was right, hadn’t he always been right?

Then came the phone call.

“Em, Em, guess what! You’ll never believe what! But guess anyway. No, don’t, because you won’t. Just listen to me, are you listening to me?” Matt always talked like that. Emily laughed to hear him. No doubt the big excitement was because he got the new windshield into the Triumph on the first try.

“Jordan Saylor’s racing team,” Matt shouted. “You know Saylor, right? Saylor Oil? The biggest sponsor of car races in America? Saylor? You know it? Right?”

“I know it now,” Emily agreed.

“Right, right. Emily, this car I restored, a guy on Saylor’s pit team bought it. Pit team, Emily! Those are the guys that fix the racing cars right there on the track, changing tires in seconds, putting out fires, fixing gear shafts.
Saylor’s,
Em!”

“That’s pretty exciting,” Emily said, who thought it was pretty boring.

“And they offered me a job.”

She would always remember that, how the sentence lay there, sending off little facts like atoms bombing her helpless heart. There were no racetracks, no pit teams, no Saylor’s within five hundred miles of Westerly. And race teams did not stay at one little track. They traveled with the cars. They were, quite literally, a road crew.

“A job?” Emily repeated.

It was a fabulous job, Matt told her. A perfect, unbelievable opportunity, one he could never pass up. So instead of opening his own garage to restore cars—well, he’d be going off as soon as possible to join the pit crew. They needed him today, actually, but he explained he couldn’t leave quite that soon, and they understood, how about ten days?

“Ten days?” Emily repeated.

“Actually, I’m already packed,” Matt said. “It’s just—you know—whenever you and I—when we can—you know—”

“Say good-bye,” Emily said.

“Right,” Matt said.

He had sold his most precious car to buy her ring. Emily had thought she mattered more than anything else in the world. Evidently not. The prospect of lying in the dirt of Indianapolis changing tires was better.

Emily did not complain. She had not been brought up to whine and moan. She even said he could have his ring back and sell it if he needed money for the trip.

“Emily!” Matt said, shocked. “Nothing has changed. You’re still my girl.”

“What do you mean, nothing has changed?” she screamed at him. “You’re leaving town. I’m going to be working at a florist’s. Alone at night. Alone on weekends. Alone for supper.
Alone every minute.
”

“But you always liked flower arranging before,” Matt protested.

“Don’t you understand anything? You’re leaving.”

“Yes, but I still love you.”

“But you’re not going to be here. You’ll be there.”

“Well, that’s where the racing team is.”

They went round and round. Matt found her very confusing. So he wouldn’t be here for months—so they couldn’t get married and live in their own apartment—so she’d be all alone with no friends and no social life and nothing to do and nobody to love her…so what was the big deal?

Every time Emily looked at her precious diamond ring she wanted to cry, or else did cry. Since New Year’s Eve she had taken such care of her hands. A hand with a diamond ring required more hand lotion, prettier nail polish. Now the ring was cold and bright and brittle. A mindless little rock, which would outlast Matt’s love for her. She hated the dumb little ring.

And her job, her lovely job, she hated that, too.

Emily had always been excited by fresh flowers. She loved to touch and smell them, arrange them, find the right ribbon for them. She loved how a person’s face lit up when you delivered flowers. Nobody could accept flowers and stay mad or depressed. Flowers could soften the world.

She had been working weekends at the florist’s for a year, making boutonnieres, wrist corsages, hospital bouquets, and wedding decorations. It had seemed so perfect in June, when they all graduated, and flung their caps in the air, and kissed their relatives. Matt would open a garage, she would arrange flowers, and at their wedding the following year, all their Westerly friends would come and rejoice for them.

Matt was desperate for her to be happy about his job with the racing team. “I’ll call you up a lot,” he would say.

“That’ll be fun.”

“I’ll write.” Matt had never even written a grocery list in his entire life.

“Great. A postcard of tires.” Emily sobbed continually. Where was the lovely life she had planned? All her friends would be out of town, at college, across an ocean. Even Beth Rose would commute to new classrooms, new places to hang out new people to have a soda with. Emily would get a postcard now and then. Sit home alone with her unpleasant father watching reruns on TV.

She hadn’t told any of the girls yet. What was she supposed to say to Anne, anyway? Oh, no, we won’t be getting married after all, Matt likes cars better, I’ll be here alone, don’t worry about me, just enjoy seeing the world.

As for the party tonight, Matt could hardly wait. He would tell all the guys. “They’ll be so jealous!” he said proudly to Emily. “They’ll offer me bribes to let them come too. They’ll say I’m the luckiest guy on earth.”

On New Year’s Eve, when she said she would marry him, he had called himself the luckiest guy on earth.

Emily lay on the hot slates pretending to sleep. She could not talk because her voice would crack and she’d cry. Tonight they all, even Anne, would find out that Matt was leaving her. For cars.

She slid the diamond off her finger and stared at it. Sun leaped through the prisms of the faceted jewel, sparkling with joy.

A fake, she thought. Diamonds don’t feel joy. Joy was in Matt when he gave it to me, but with Matt leaving, there is no joy anywhere.

You rotten ring, Emily thought, suddenly hating it. It was the symbol of her hurt and fury and loss. Her hand trembled, holding it, and the jewel winked back a thousand times, knowing it would last longer than love.

She hated it.

Without thinking, she hurled it away, just as Matt was hurling her. It disappeared in the air and Emily covered her face with her towel, hating herself, and Matt, and the ring, and all happy people.

M
OLLY WAS SITTING UP
with her head ducked forward and her towel over her hair, as if she were drying it from swimming in the pool. She wasn’t. She was peering at the other girls from under the towel. The girls who had it all: Emily, Beth Rose, Kip, and Anne. The girls who had the future. While Molly had nothing.

She did not even have the right to be in Anne’s yard, Anne whom she had tried to defeat for years now. But Anne was weak, and had not stopped Molly from marching in, and the others were polite and also confused, and did not kick her out, either. So Molly was with them on their last day together, when she knew they wanted privacy most of all.

She liked the idea that they could not say their sweet little good-byes because she was there. She liked how they had to sashay off through the dark, cool house and out into the front yard, because Molly had ruined the backyard for them.

Anne not only let her in, she played Little Miss Hostess, offering her cookies and Coke. “Our last box of Girl Scout cookies,” she said. “Samoas. They’re my favorites.”

“How do you keep them so long?” Kip asked. “We order about a million boxes each year and they’re gone in a week. My four brothers just look at a box of Thin Mints and they’re gone.”

“We freeze them,” Anne said. “I hardly ever eat more than a cookie a week anyhow.”

They all laughed hysterically, they who could eat a box in one sitting. “That’s the diet idea I’ve been waiting for,” Kip said. “Defrost my desserts at the rate of one cookie a week.”

Molly said, “I can’t believe anybody buys Girl Scout cookies. The whole Girl Scout thing is so dumb. I mean, you were never Girl Scouts, were you?” She made it sound like a socially repulsive disease.

Kip, Emily, Anne, and Beth Rose exchanged looks in the superior way of friends annoyed by a stranger. Molly hated them.

“Actually,” Anne said, “I was a Brownie but never went on into Scouting.”

“I did,” Beth said. “I loved it. But I couldn’t seem to earn any badges and after a year or so I gave up.”

“That’s when you know you’re a loser,” Molly said. “When you can’t even earn a Girl Scout badge. They give them to you just for strolling through the woods.”

Anne went off to say good-bye to Beth Rose out front. Kip busied herself with a paperback. Emily slept.

Molly looked around the yard, hating it. Anne’s house was so perfect, and here among the trees was a little yellow dressing house, and a big yellow awning, and cute little yellow tables, and adorable little yellow soda-fountain chairs. They even had a stack of yellow towels for the guests who went swimming.

All sunshine, that was Anne’s life.

Molly dragged the towel back down over her face to hide the terrible expression of jealousy.

And Emily took off her diamond ring and threw it into the pool.

Molly continued rubbing her hair.

Impossible. Nobody would throw away their engagement ring. If they really hated the guy, they’d at least cash the ring in and have a fun time on the money. But what else tiny and glittery could she have tossed into the water?

Emily was too boring to do a wild and crazy thing like that. And surely if you decided to throw away a diamond, you’d do it when the boy was there, so he could see his hard-earned money vanish, and he could rage and be bitter and you could laugh in his face.

It shouldn’t be hard to find. A nice, clean, blue-tiled swimming pool. Provided it didn’t get pulled down the drains.

If you’re that mad at Matt, Molly thought, eyeing Emily from under her towel, you should have taken him down to the river’s edge. Had a knock-down-drag-out, screaming fight, ripped the ring off your finger, hurled it out into the muddy water, laughed while it vanished in the swirling current, and shouted, “So there! This is what I think of you, you creep!” Now
that,
Emily old girl, would have been a scene worthy of a diamond.

It couldn’t have been the ring. It was probably a prize from a Cracker Jack box or something. Molly flung herself backward onto her towel, cracking her head painfully against the slates. Neither Emily nor Kip asked if it hurt.

For Molly, high school graduation came as a complete surprise. It shouldn’t have. She had taken fourth year English, was on the yearbook committee, went to the Senior Prom.

But she was completely unready for it. How could high school be over? She felt she had hardly arrived. She had barely started going to parties, laughing in the cafeteria, flirting in the halls, learning other people’s locker combinations.