Seventeenth Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

be like this!”
    But that wasn’t quite what happened. Lorraine was standing by the kitchen stove in her house coat, curling her hair with the curling iron—she had just washed it the night before.
    My mother was sitting now in a clean blue print dress at the table next to the window drinking her coffee, and her hair, where it is turning white on the sides, was brushed back high off her face. She used to get very bad headaches and would have to lie in a darkened bedroom with cool cloths soaked in vinegar on her forehead. The vinegar had bleached her hair snow-white at the temples. My mother is the only person I know who looks completely wide-awake and fresh when she wakes up in the morning.
    “Your tomato juice is in the icebox,” she said to me. “I didn’t think you’d be down for a while.”
    Outside, the garden earth was dark from last night’s rain and cobwebs, dew-sparkled, were stretched on the grass. Everything had a fresh, clean smell. “I think it’s almost cool enough to wear a sweater and skirt,” Lorraine said. “You know, after being used to collegiate clothes I just hate wearing summer dresses that wrinkle so easily.”
    She had a job for the summer at the Elite Canvas Company, just sitting all day folding and addressing circulars which were sent all over the country to advertise awnings, golf bags, andcanvas laundry bags. Every summer the Elite took on about twenty extra girls. My father is a good friend of one of the men in the office—they had played some early golf together the weekend before and he had arranged it.
    At first no one mentioned the night before. “We’ll put the winter things in the attic this morning,” I remember my mother’s saying to me. “Just let Kitty sleep and you get the stepladder from the garage and I’ll hand the things up to you.” Ours is the old-fashioned kind of attic that you get into through a trap door in a bedroom ceiling. “We can get all Lorraine’s school clothes put away so the closets won’t be crowded all summer,” she added.
    My sister Margaret came down just then, all ready for work. You would like my sister. She is tall, thin, moves very quickly, and is engaged to a boy from Milwaukee who looks and acts just like a giant baby panda. Leaning over she kissed Mom, or rather brushed her with her cheek so she wouldn’t rub off her lipstick. “No tomato juice this morning,” she said and drank her coffee standing up by the stove—Margaret is always in a rush.
    There was the usual breakfast talk: “Did you hear the rain last night?” “What would you children like me to get for supper?” (Mom always calls us children), and “We should have a big day at the store today.” Little everyday things that could be said on any morning and I waited, just drinking my coffee and eating my toast, knowing that at any moment someone wouldremember. I could almost feel the words just hanging in midair. My mother reached over to snap off a loose thread hanging from the hem of Margaret’s dress. I remember that so well because that was just before Margaret turned to me, remembering, “—Oh, Angie, how was last night?”
    “Fun,” I answered. Then I told them about the rain and how good Swede was at sailing and Jack used to date Jane Rady and how I remember her talking about him when she used to sit next to me in history class and about how many people had been out riding because it was such a nice night and all the cars with bright headlights that had been lined up along Lighthouse Point. Maybe, I thought, I’m talking too much; maybe I’m talking too fast. My voice seemed not to be coming from me at all, and I was surprised to hear it so calm and casual when inside my head the thoughts were all warm and shaky.
    “I used to know Jack’s cousin,” Lorraine said. Her hair was curled in rows of shiny sausage-curls, and she was holding the curling iron as far away from her head as possible so she wouldn’t burn her cheek, talking with a funny