Free Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly Page A

talking about, taken one day when she was nineteen and someone had just told her that she looked like Merle Oberon. She had posed with her eyebrows arched and her lips pursed a little, with a very ethereal, faraway look on her face. Martin looked at it a moment and then walked around the room, stopping to examine the things on the knickknack shelf. He picked up a carved wooden Indian head with a worn, brown face.
    “Real Indian stuff?” he asked. “Ever been way up North? Can pick this stuff up for nothing. Round the reservations it practically grows on trees. It’s nice to have around though if it’s a novelty to you.”
    It was disconcerting to have him pacing up and down as if I weren’t even there, so just to make conversation I said, “Do you like living in Fond du Lac? It’s a nice town when you get to know the people.”
    “I don’t live here, you know,” he told me with unnecessary emphasis. “And I don’t know anybody except a few fellows I’ve met around and that girl your sister knows. Maybe I’ll like it here and maybe I won’t. You can never tell if a town’s any good until you’ve been out in it on a Saturday night.” He sat down on the edge of the davenport, pulling his trousers up carefully at the knee before he crossed his legs. As if it were a sudden thought he took a fresh cigarette and then, changing his mind, pushed it back into the package. He kept looking at his hand, flexing the knuckles, turning them over and over, finally laying them palms up on his knees. His fingers were short and fat as a girl’s.
    Just then Lorraine came down, stopping a moment at the foot of the stairs with one foot a little ahead of the other the way models do. She had combed her hair high up on the sides, pinned in two sweeping rolls on top. I looked at Martin to see if he noticed how nice she looked, but he had just about the same expression on his face as when he was looking at the Indian carving. Lorraine put out her hand saying, “And you must be Martin Keefe. I’m so glad to know you.”
    When they left she turned back and called to me in the same careful, bright voice, “Good night, Angeline.”
    I could tell by the way she said it that Lorraine had decided to be the sophisticated type.
    The next morning was Sunday and Sunday is always almost the same at our house. After church in the morning we had a very late and very large bacon-and-egg breakfast and waited for Art, the boy Margaret is going to marry, to drive up from Milwaukee. He came just after breakfast, shaking hands with my father and kissing us all on the cheeks as he always does. He is a big, soft-voiced boy and his kiss always reminds me of a large, wet marshmallow. Margaret patted him happily on both cheeks saying, “Hello there, Arthur, you fat-faced one. You haven’t written to me since Thursday!”
    Kitty spent most of the morning on the living-room rug with the funny papers, while my father cleared all the sales circulars out from the back seat of his car onto the front lawn, swept the floor and the seat with a whisk broom, shined the windshield and polished the headlights, and then put all the circulars back in neat piles. My father is a traveling salesman and his car is as important as his house to him. Every Sunday after church he takes off his coat and tie and goes out to straighten it. It is all part of the contented, weekend ritual, and he puffed and blew as he worked, bustling with importance while he polished the windshield till his neck was red with exertion. Then he stood back with the chamois cloth in his hand to admire it. My mother sat by the living-room window watching and we alllaughed to ourselves, for we knew that by next weekend the car would be as dusty and untidy as ever.
    Lorraine and I made the beds together, and the house smelled of roast and cauliflower from the kitchen, and everything was so pleasant and Sundayish that I forgot to ask what she had done last night and whether or not she had had fun with