Fifteen (4 page)

“Yes, I think we should,” agreed Jane. She rose from the sofa, an act that brought Stan to his feet. She went to the hall closet and pulled her short white coat from the hanger. Another uncomfortable moment came when Stan took the coat from her to help her into it, and her arm missed the left sleeve twice before she groped her way into it. She was sure Stan would think she was not used to having a boy help her on with her coat. And how right he would be!

“Mrs. Purdy, is it all right if I have Jane home by ten thirty?” Stan asked.

Jane could tell her mother was pleased to have Stan ask this question. She herself would have preferred Stan to think she was old enough to come in whenever she wanted to; but on the other hand, if she wanted more dates with him, it was a good idea to please her parents. And it was pleasant to feel protected as long as it was Stan and not her parents who was doing the protecting.

“Yes, I think ten thirty is late enough for her to be out,” said Mrs. Purdy. She smiled encouragingly at Stan, while Jane did some rapid mental arithmetic. About two and a half hours for a single feature, cartoon, and newsreel; fifty-five minutes at Nibley's; and five minutes to walk home.

“I'll have her back by then,” Stan promised.

“Have a good time, kids,” said Mr. Purdy.

Kids! Pop
would
have to call them kids. Oh, well, thought Jane, what difference did it make? She was starting out on a date with Stan, and he was every bit as nice as she had thought he would be.

“I hope you don't mind walking,” said Stan when they were outside. “Dad won't let me have the car very often.”

“It's a lovely evening to walk,” answered Jane. So his father did let him have the car sometimes! “Have you lived in Woodmont long?”

“A little over a month,” said Stan. “We lived in the city, but my folks decided to move over here to get out of the fog. Dad commutes to the city now.”

“We have fog here too,” said Jane, to keep the conversation going. She noticed that Stan walked on the outside of the sidewalk.

“Yes, but not like the fog in the city. It really dripped, out where we lived.”

Jane wanted to find out as much as she could about Stan in the five blocks to the movie. “Where do you live in Woodmont?” she asked.

“On Poppy Lane,” he said. “It's sure nice over there. We have an acacia tree in the front yard and a big fig tree in back.”

Poppy Lane. About a mile from the Purdys'; on the other side of the shopping district, but in the same kind of neighborhood. If the Crandalls had a fig tree in the backyard, their house must be fairly old, like the Purdys', and that meant they were neither very rich nor very poor. Just average. Jane smiled to herself. Things were working out better than she had dared hope.

By the time they reached the Woodmont Theater, Jane had learned that Stan, besides his younger sister, had one who was two years older than he was and that he would enter his junior
year at Woodmont High in September. In the meantime, he had this job working for the Doggie Diner, because his cousin owned the business and because he liked dogs and planned to be a veterinarian when he finished college. He does have a purpose, Jane told herself triumphantly. Conversation was not so difficult, after all, and the five blocks were much too short. Stan was soon pushing his money through the hole in the glass window of the Woodmont Theater ticket booth.

Afterward Jane realized she had been too busy turning over in her mind all that she had learned about Stan to remember much about the movie they saw together. It began with a schoolmarm getting out of a stagecoach while a lone horseman rode into town, and it ended with a kiss against a technicolor sky, and in between there was a fight in a saloon, shooting on the street, the sound of horses' hooves in the night, and something about a mortgage. What Jane did remember clearly were the admiring glances of several Woodmont High girls who had seen them take seats just before the lights were lowered, and Stan's shoulder above hers, and the way their elbows kept bumping accidentally until she folded her hands in her lap. She did not want Stan to think she was the kind of girl
who expected to have her hand held just because she was sitting in the dark with a boy.

After the movie Stan said, “How about stopping at Nibley's? We still have time.”

“Okay,” agreed Jane happily, and the two walked half a block down the street to Nibley's Confectionery and Soda Fountain. Once inside, Jane could not decide whether it would be better to sit in a booth in the back, where she would be sure to have Stan all to herself, or whether it would be better to sit toward the front, where she could show him off to the rest of the crowd. She nodded and spoke to a boy who had been in her history class, a girl from her gym class, and two more from her registration room, and hoped she was behaving as casually as if she were used to walking into Nibley's with a good-looking boy. The girls spoke to Jane, but they looked at Stan. Jane noticed wistfulness, envy, or just curiosity on their faces—depending, Jane decided, on whether they were with other girls, boys they didn't like much, or dates they really liked. It was, Jane felt, a very satisfactory experience.

Jane was surprised that Stan, who had lived in Woodmont only a month, knew so many people and could call them by name. They couldn't
all
have dogs that ate Doggie Diner horsemeat. Stan guided her into the only unoccupied booth, which was toward the front. Jane looked around her at the signs painted on the mirror behind the milk shake machines and remembered that only yesterday she had imagined herself sitting at the counter catching the eye of some strange boy in that mirror. Now she felt sorry for the girls who were sitting together at the counter sipping Cokes and watching the door to see who would come in next. The jukebox began to play
Love Me on Monday
, and Jane watched its colors turn and shift and thought how much they looked like fruits that boiled in the kettle when her mother made jam. The slow, rolling-boil stage, the cookbooks called it. Jane brushed this irrelevant thought out of her mind. She was wasting precious time that she could spend talking to Stan.

“What would you like?” Stan asked, as Mr. Nibley himself appeared to take their order.

“Well, hello there, Janey,” said Mr. Nibley jovially. “Aren't you out pretty late?”

Jane smiled weakly. Oh, Mr. Nibley, she thought desperately,
don't
. Don't let Stan know I don't come in here with boys after the movies all the time. That was the trouble with a town like Woodmont.
Everyone in the older part knew everything about everyone else. Mr. Nibley had known her since she had to be lifted onto a stool and he had to lean over to hand her an ice-cream cone. He probably thought she was about eleven years old now.

As Stan asked for a chocolate shake, Jane found she was too excited to eat. “A dish of vanilla ice cream,” she said at last. Tonight a chocolate Coke float seemed too childish to order.

“Why, Janey, what's the matter?” asked Mr. Nibley. “Don't you like chocolate Coke floats anymore?”

“I don't feel like one tonight,” Jane said aloud. In her thoughts she was saying, Mr. Nibley, did you
have
to go and tell Stan what I usually order? And please go away. I want to talk to him.

“Say, Janey, I just happened to think,” Mr. Nibley said. “Do you happen to know what kind of fertilizer your father is using on his begonias this year? I don't seem to get the same results he does.”

Fertilizer for begonias! “No, I don't, Mr. Nibley. I never noticed,” answered Jane. Go away, Mr. Nibley, she thought.
Go away
.

But when Mr. Nibley did leave, Jane found she did not know what to say. Talking to Stan when she faced him in the light was much more difficult
than talking while walking beside him in the dusk. She smiled across at Stan, who smiled back at her. Jane glanced down at the initials scratched in the paint on the table and raised her eyes again. How smooth and tan, almost golden, his skin looked. It was funny she had not noticed before that his eyelashes were thick and the crest of the dip in his hair was faded to a light brown. And on his right wrist—a strong-looking wrist—was a silver identification bracelet. Maybe someday…

“You were having quite a time with Sandra when I first saw you,” Stan remarked.

Jane laughed. “Perfectly awful. You saved my life. I don't know what I would have done if she had really dumped that ink all over the carpet.” This was better. Feeling more at ease, Jane told Stan about her experience with Sandra and the fly spray.

Stan was amused. “Mrs. Norton has just as much trouble with Sandra herself,” he said. “Do you babysit often?”

“Once or twice a week,” Jane explained. “My friend Julie and I have built up a sort of business.” She did not mind telling this to Stan, because he had a part-time job himself. There were some boys at Woodmont High who would look down on
a girl who babysat regularly.

Mr. Nibley set the vanilla ice cream down in front of Jane and, by not looking up, she managed to avoid conversation with him. She took a small bite of ice cream and looked across at Stan, who was peeling the wrapper off a pair of straws. He looked like a boy who was enjoying his date.

“Well, if it isn't Stan Crandall!” cried a girl's voice, and Jane, looking up, saw Marcy Stokes and Greg.

Wouldn't you know it, thought Jane. Marcy
would
have to come along now, when everything was going so smoothly. And at the same time her mind recorded the fact that Marcy already knew Stan. Leave it to Marcy.

“Oh, hello there, Jane,” exclaimed Marcy with a note of surprise in her voice that made Jane feel as if she were the last person in the world Marcy expected to see at Nibley's with a boy.

“Hi, Jane,” said Greg. “Mind if we join you? There aren't any empty booths.”

“Sure. Come on,” said Stan, sliding over in the booth. “Jane and I will be leaving before long anyway.”

Marcy slipped into the booth beside Jane, and Jane felt that everything about herself was all
wrong. Marcy's simple black cotton dress and the white cashmere sweater tossed over her shoulders made Jane, in her pastel dress and white coat, feel prim and all bundled up.

“Just coffee, Mr. Nibley,” said Marcy. This made Jane, who was nibbling at her vanilla ice cream, feel like a small girl who was being given a treat. She did not drink coffee. To her it was a bitter beverage that grown-ups—no, that wasn't the word—that older people drank.

Marcy flung back her sun-bleached hair with an impatient gesture and smiled lazily at Stan, as if Jane and Greg were not there. “We sure had fun at the beach that day, didn't we, Stan?” she asked.

“We sure did,” agreed Stan.

What beach? What day? Jane wondered miserably if Marcy's just-between-us-two smile meant that she had already had a date with Stan.

“Except we ran out of sandwiches,” was Greg's comment. “Next time you women had better remember you're packing a lunch for men, not boys.”

“Such as?” drawled Marcy.

So Greg had been there too, and at least one other girl. Jane was annoyed with herself for feeling so pleased that Marcy had not been alone with
Stan—at least not at the beach. But there might have been other times….

Greg smiled across the table at Jane. Encouraged, she smiled back, but he did not say anything that would help her enter the conversation. To hide her discomfort she took small bites of her ice cream. She could not help comparing Greg and Stan while Marcy chattered on. Greg was taller and better-looking than Stan, and there was something different about him too. Greg knows everybody likes him, she thought, and he expects them to. He's the student-body-president-in-his-senior-year type. Yes, that was it. And Stan—Stan was every bit as friendly, but somehow he was different. Quieter, maybe. Nobody would expect him to be student body president. He was just nice. The nicest boy she had ever met.

Jane waited for an opening in the conversation that would give her the opportunity to take part. None came. I might as well not be here, she thought unhappily, while Marcy went on about the sunburn everyone got that day at the beach and the fun they all had playing softball. And if she had been at the beach with the others, she would have been miserable trying to play softball with boys.

And then Jane began to question the success of her date. It seemed to her that she had done everything wrong and now it appeared that Stan was already part of Greg and Marcy's crowd, the crowd that belonged and that made her feel mousy and ill at ease. Sitting beside Greg, Stan seemed older and more sure of himself. He was not the student body president type, but he was the kind of boy who would get elected to things—room representative or even president of the Hi-Y. And she was only a girl who wrote “My Experiences as a Babysitter” for Manuscript and didn't get elected to anything.

Stan glanced at his watch. “Well, we'd better go, Jane,” he said, “if I'm going to get you home by ten thirty.”

“Oh, too bad,” said Marcy, her glance lingering on Stan as if his having to take Jane home spoiled her evening. “Bye now.”

Stan hurried Jane home so fast there was no chance to talk until they were standing in the dim circle cast by the Purdys' porch light. “Four seconds to spare,” said Stan, and smiled down at Jane.

Jane looked at him uncertainly. “I had a wonderful time,” she said hesitantly, and opened the door. Please, Stan, she thought, I like you so much. Say
I'll see you again. “Well…good night, Stan.”

“Good night, Jane,” he answered. “I'll be seeing you.”

Jane stepped inside the house and stood looking at Stan under the porch light. A halo of moths circled the bulb over his head. “Well, good night,” she repeated, careful to keep wistfulness and disappointment out of her voice. “I'll be seeing you” could mean anything. Or nothing.