When We First Met Read online

  Every morning for a year and a half after Gail’s death, Jenny had awakened to see those pictures and every morning something heavy and thick filled her heart. For a long time after Gail died, Jenny had found it impossible to do anything nice for herself. She gave up girls’ track, she denied herself movies, TV, ice cream, and even long, hot showers. She knew it was penance for the fight she’d had with Gail. She knew the penance was meaningless, but for months she had been helpless to stop herself from doing, or not doing, those things. Gradually, her life had returned to normal. Rhoda had helped. On the bad days when Jenny couldn’t stave off the memory of her last fight with Gail, Rhoda would stay with her, walking sometimes for miles and hours, Rhoda talking, her arm linked with Jenny’s. It wasn’t that Rhoda said anything special, but that she was there. Once, Jenny tried to thank her. “For what?” Rhoda said. “For talking? I should thank you for listening.”

  “Enough to eat?” Jenny’s mother said now, sitting down across from her.

  “Plenty, Mom. It was good.”

  “How was work today? And school?”

  “Okay.” Jenny thought of the boy in the rainbow suspenders. That was private. She started telling her mother a funny story about a customer who had turned his thick shake upside down to show how solid it was. “‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘it’s like glue.’ And just as he said it, the whole shake fell out glop, all over the counter.”

  But her mother wasn’t really listening. She drummed her fingers on the table. “I sent her a red rose,” she said abruptly.

  “Who?”

  “That woman. Montana.”

  “The woman who—a red rose?”

  Amelia Pennoyer nodded. “I ordered a single red rose. I told them I wanted it delivered tomorrow.”

  “Mom, a red rose—that’s for love. Red roses are what Rhoda’s boyfriends sent her on Valentine’s Day.”

  “It’s for blood, Jenny. You know what tomorrow is. I want to remind her.”

  “Mom—” Jenny looked sadly at her mother. “Enough, Mom,” she said softly. “It’s been two years. You’ve got to—” She stopped, not wanting to say forget. She didn’t mean that exactly, but something like it. “You’ve got to let go, Mom.”

  Her mother had caught her hesitation. Strange how, despite their apartness, which Jenny sometimes felt so acutely, they often, as acutely, tuned in to each other’s thoughts. “I don’t want that woman to forget,” her mother said. “I want her to remember the way I do. Every day of her life.”

  Chapter 3

  “Well, fans,” the radio voice burbled enthusiastically, “This is Norman Greenberry here to tell you it’s a BEAUTIFUL Wednesday morning in our fair city. The forecast is for plenty of SUNSHINE on this EIGHTH day of MARCH and—”

  Glancing at her mother, Jenny snapped off the radio. “Thanks,” her father said as she sat down next to him.

  Amelia stood at the stove, flipping pancakes, her head bent. She wore an old gray-and-yellow housecoat with a loose hem. Nobody said anything about the date, but Jenny knew none of them was unaware. Well, maybe Ethel, but Frankie had looked as if he were ready to smash the radio just before she turned it off.

  The sun hadn’t been shining two years ago on March eighth.

  “Where’s Gail?” her mother says, coming in, a shopping bag in her arms. Her face is wet, full of color. “Why’d she go out? Did she wear her raincoat?”

  “She was baking something, needed cream.” Jenny bites her pencil. If x equals 56 …

  The phone rings. Her mother: “Oh, hello, Frank …” In their room, Ethel murmurs to herself. In the kitchen, her mother turns on the radio. Rain spatters the windows.

  Her mother comes back. “Jenny, when did you say Gail went out? I’ve been home nearly an hour.”

  “She probably met a boy.”

  “What market did she say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The doorbell. “Who can that be?” Her mother goes into the hall. Jenny flips pages in her history book. Do it tomorrow first period?

  “Jenny.”

  “Yeah?” Not looking up.

  “Jenny!”

  Going into the hall then, seeing her mother suddenly old, nose gone beaky, eyes sunk back into her head. A policeman standing there. “Jenny, there’s been an accident … Gail … stay with Ethel …”

  “Mom? Mom!”

  She’s gone.

  An accident?

  Her father calls from the hospital. “Gail’s in a coma. Stay home with Ethel. The best thing you can do for us right now.”

  She feeds Ethel, puts her to bed. No use trying to do homework. Sits in the living room, the TV on. Phone again. “Mom?”

  “It’s me, Frankie. Tell Mom I’m staying over at Burt’s.”

  On the TV, kids dancing, wriggling hips, hands shaking in the air. “Milk,” someone says. All laugh. An in-joke. “Come home, Frankie. Come home right away.”

  “I told you, I’m staying over—”

  “Frankie. Gail’s in the hospital.” She tells him what she knows. The policeman. An accident. Coma. Her voice is dry and tight. She hangs up. Why isn’t he here now? Why isn’t someone here with her? She’s all alone. All alone with her thoughts. She wants to cry, can’t, hits her fist repeatedly on the wall …

  Jenny finished her milk, put the glass in the sink, and kissed her mother’s cheek. “I’m going now. Take it easy, okay?” She and Frankie left the house together. “How was the concert last night?” she asked as they walked toward the bus stop.

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”

  “Oh, Mimi and I had sort of a fight—she keeps pushing me. When am I going to go back to school? She doesn’t believe me when I say never. Sometimes she sounds like Dad; he thinks because I’m a mailman I haven’t got any ambition.”

  Jenny patted his blue-gray uniformed sleeve consolingly. “And she didn’t even know you in your box factory days.”

  “Yeah, right. I’m going to sic you on Mimi. Make her realize what a prize I am now.”

  How odd to think there’d been a time when she was shy with her brother—he’d always been so sleepy-eyed, so distant. “Did you notice how quiet Mom was this morning?”

  “I did. When that moron said, ‘THE BEAUTIFUL EIGHTH OF MARCH’”—he mimicked Norman Greenberry’s chirpy enthusiasm—“I felt like punching him right in his radio.”

  “Frankie, Mom told me something sort of strange yesterday. She said she sent Mrs. Montana a red rose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mom sent her a red rose. To be delivered today.”

  “Why?”

  Jenny leaned out into the street, looking for the bus. “She said red was for blood. I told her, ‘Mom, red roses are for love.’”

  “I can see her point,” Frankie said, sounding almost admiring.

  “I can’t,” Jenny said. “Frankie, do you ever wonder why, about Gail? There’s no sense to what happened.”

  “Sure, I’ve thought about it. It was fate. I believe everything is linked. If I hadn’t needed a toothbrush, I wouldn’t have met Vic Ramsay in the drugstore last year, so I wouldn’t have gone to his sister’s party, and I wouldn’t have met Mimi. Links. Now what if I hadn’t taught Gail to ride a bike?”

  “Probably she would have learned anyway. But you didn’t teach her. You taught me. Vince taught Gail.”

  “I remember teaching her.” Frankie frowned as if Jenny were trying to take something away from him. “She learned fast, too.”

  “I learned fast,” Jenny said. Why did people insist on remembering things wrong about the dead? After her grandfather died, years ago, she’d heard her parents talking about him as if he’d been a blessed old saint. But, alive, he’d been a thorn in their sides, querulous and demanding.

  And Gail—her mother had made a shrine out of Gail’s part of the room. And what about the special box—sacred box—with all Gail’s report cards, a lock of hair, the letter from her cheerleader’
s sweater, and a cassette tape Gail had made the summer she’d gone to visit relatives in Maine.

  Her father generally didn’t talk about Gail, but when he did, a special smile would come over his face, as if he were seeing Gail in his mind, and she was so good, so wonderful—perfect, really.

  And she—wasn’t she capable of the selfsame deception? Only the other day, hadn’t she said to Rhoda about something or other, ‘Oh, Gail would have had the answer to that!’ Conjuring up an image—totally false—of a wise, warm, and loving older sister. But now, all at once, Jenny quite clearly understood what that phrase, Something came between them, really meant.

  It had to do with her and Gail. Something certainly had come between them—Gail’s death. They had never gotten along really well, and now they never would. They were frozen forever with Gail sixteen and Jenny fifteen, bickering and picking at each other. They would never understand each other now, never talk like sisters, never laugh together again, never again have another chance to be kind or loving to each other.

  “Sometimes, I think if Gail was still alive, things would be totally different,” Frankie was saying. “I don’t mean the obvious things. I mean—take me and Dad, for instance. He doesn’t get down on me the way he used to.”

  “I know.” Jenny shifted her books. “Things are definitely better, but that’s because you graduated high school and got a job.”

  “That helped, but I’m sure the real reason he doesn’t chew me up anymore is because he’s basically mellowed out since Gail got totaled.”

  “Totaled—what a horrible thing to say.”

  “What do you want me to say? Crashed? Smashed? Wasted?”

  “She was killed,” Jenny said evenly.

  The gray-and-red bus was approaching. “Are we having a fight?” Frankie asked. “Mimi last night? You this morning?”

  “I’m not fighting,” Jenny said. “I’m a pacifist.”

  To Nell Montana:

  Today is March eighth. I hope you have slept as few nights in the past two years as I have. But I doubt it. Has what you did affected you in any way?

  You drank and you drove and you killed an innocent sixteen-year-old girl. Have you given it one thought since then? Do you look at yourself in the morning and know you are looking at a murderer?

  Do you know my daughter suffered for days before she died? That wasn’t a cat in the street you killed! That was my child. Today is two years, and I still can’t rest.

  My daughter is in her grave. You should be in jail! Yet you are free. Free to shop, free to go to the movies, free to enjoy yourself. Why hasn’t society done unto you as you did unto my daughter?

  Sweet dreams, Mrs. Killer.

  Grieving Mother

  Chapter 4

  Seven times that week Jenny saw the curly-haired boy in school. Once, as she was going into the guidance office, he came around the corner at the far end of the hall. “Hello,” she breathed. Impossible for him to hear her, but his head turned as sharply as if she’d shouted his name.

  Another time, passing the band room, she knew, without any reason to know, that he would be there. The door was open, she looked in, and yes, there he was, working over the big snare drum, head down, drumsticks flying, hands flashing. He was gone, in another world, seeming so totally absorbed she surely might have stopped and stared at him forever without his knowing. Yet in the same moment she passed, he looked up. A smile started, but nothing was said. Still, it was as if the entire day had been meant for that brief exchange.

  And on still another day, as people poured out of school in a loud, laughing, and noisy mass, she saw him ahead of her. Turn around, she thought. Turn around. I’m here. And he did. He turned, he saw her. She told herself to speak. Hi. Hello! Who are you? What’s your name? But, again, neither one said a word.

  Which one of them would speak first? It began to seem like a contest. They passed in the halls, looked at each other, smiled, waited, neither spoke, and they kept going.

  At night, in bed, pushing the pillow under her head, listening to the sloosh sloosh of passing cars and watching the headlights flash across the ceiling, Jenny tried to imagine their first real meeting, their first words. Someone had to break the ice. How long could they go on just looking at each other? How did it begin with other people? In books and on TV, what did people say when they wanted to meet?

  She thought of a movie she’d seen recently. The boy and girl sang in the same chorus, he standing behind her. “Halleluja, Halleluja,” they sang. Later, the girl, passing the boy in the hall, said, “You have a lot of energy in your singing.” The boy was shy, so he got awkward and stammered, “I do? I do?” His friends punched him and laughed, and the girl, very pretty and appearing really confident, said, “Yes. My name is—” The boy’s friends punched him some more, so he’d realize he should tell her his name, too. And then the girl said, “You have a smashing voice.” Something like that. And they were off and away.

  Well, so she had complimented him, built up his ego, drawn him out of his shell. Was that what Jenny should do? Firmly take the initiative? Was the golden-haired boy in the blue shirt the shy sort? She could say something like, “I feel a lot of energy coming from you.” Or, “You should always wear blue shirts.” She couldn’t comment on his singing voice, to say nothing of his speaking voice. And he didn’t have a gang of friends waiting around, waiting to punch him and make sure he got her message. Which, down to its bare essentials, was, I’m interested. Are you?

  In the library one afternoon, Jenny was studying—supposed to be studying, but she was daydreaming. It was raining outside; the room was dim, feet shuffled, whispers broke the silence, and then she saw him coming through the turnstile, books under his arms, shirt sleeves rolled up. A sharp, blank sweetness covered her. Her eyes fell to her book. Thus, in the historical mode, she read. Thus, in the historical mode …

  Steps. A chair was scraped back. She wrote in her notebook, as if aware of nothing. Thus, she copied busily, in the hysterical mud— Her lips twitched. She dared a glance upward. He was sitting across from her, looking straight at her. The entire dim room seemed to light up. A glow entered … a stained-glass window letting in light …

  The pen hung in her hand, her eyes jumped, unseeing, across the page. Oh, what a fool I am, she thought. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She couldn’t understand how someone, a boy, a stranger, could make her feel so much, could turn her silent and yearning, could take away every ounce of her poise.

  He’s just a pretty face, she told herself sharply and sarcastically. Snap out of it, Jenny. Yet in the next moment she again raised her eyes. And again he was looking at her. And again neither spoke, but only stared at each other.

  Later, riding her bike to work, she went over the encounter in the library. “Why didn’t I say hello to him?” She bent low over the handlebars, the rain whipping her face. “Or, I could have said, ‘My name is Jenny. What’s yours?’” In the employees changing room of Hamburger Heaven, putting on her yellow suit, the jacket and wide-bottomed pants, she was still talking to herself. “I’m going to do it. The next time I see him—definitely.” She gave herself a confirming nod in the mirror, straightened the yellow cap, and hurried out to punch in.

  “Are you late?” Awful Albert said in his wheezy voice, catching her arm.

  “It’s not four o’clock yet, Albert.”

  Looking suspicious, the manager released her.

  “May I help you?” Jenny asked a customer, taking her place at the counter. Not yet supper hour, and already people were lined up three deep.

  Today’s special was the Mystery Dinner for kids under twelve. For ten cents over the usual price, their burger, shake, and fries came with a pullout party favor, a plastic puzzle, and an entry blank for a Kids’ Sweepstakes.

  As always, Jenny started her stint wanting to smile at everyone, to give everyone a little bit of personal attention. As always, the faces began to blur, as did the orders for fries, hamburgers, shake
s, Cokes, and pies. Girls and boys in yellow suits rushed around, jostling each other, calling out orders. They dipped the large strainers of frozen, cut potatoes into the vat of boiling fat, slapped frozen burgers onto the grill, swept the floor, and wiped the tables.

  Jenny liked the people she worked with. Matti and Phyllis were older, Marylee her age. Matti, who had Dolly Parton curls, and Phyllis with her long, kind face, liked to outdo each other boasting about weekend blasts. Marylee was quieter, worked hard, and could always be counted on to stand in for someone else in a pinch.

  “May I help you?” Jenny said for what seemed the thousandth time. She glanced at the clock. Half an hour more. The evening rush was letting up.

  “Soda, please.” A male voice. She looked up.

  “Large or small?” she said, automatically.

  “Small.” It was him. Only the counter between them. And his eyes were blue, lake blue; she had been right. She turned to the soda machine, put a paper cup under the nozzle, pulled down the handle, aware of him watching her. Every gesture seemed significant; the room blurred, only he stood out. She slid the soda across the counter.

  So they’d finally talked. Soda, please. Large or small? Not what she’d imagined! She wanted to laugh, bit her lip, smiling. You have a lot of energy. You have a gorgeous voice. What’s your name? My name is Jenny. “Thirty-five cents, please,” she said, efficiently punching numbers on the register.

  He handed her a quarter and a dime, dropped the coins into her open palm, and at the last moment their fingers touched. A shock went through her, something warm and vibrant. She leaned toward him, across the counter.

  Behind him, a man coughed impatiently. Jenny seemed to come awake, and the boy stepped aside. “Two burgers with everything,” the man said, looking up at the big printed orange boards. “Cup of coffee, apple pie.”

  “Two burgers with everything,” Jenny repeated into the mike. When she looked around, the boy was gone.