Summer of '69(3)
Everyone at school treated Jessie differently after Tiger was deployed. Pammy Pope invited Jessie to her family’s annual Memorial Day picnic—Jessie declined out of loyalty to Leslie and Doris, who hadn’t been included—and the guidance counselor Miss Flowers pulled Jessie out of class one Monday in early June to see how she was doing. The class was home economics, and Jessie’s leaving inspired enormous envy in all the other girls, who were battling with their sewing machines in an attempt to finish their navy corduroy vests before the end of the term. Miss Flowers brought Jessie to her office, closed the door, and made Jessie a cup of hot tea using an electric kettle. Jessie didn’t drink hot tea, although she liked coffee—Exalta permitted Jessie one cup of milky coffee at Sunday brunch, despite Kate’s protests that it would stunt Jessie’s growth—but Jessie enjoyed the escape to the cozy confines of Miss Flowers’s office. Miss Flowers had a wooden box filled with exotic teas—chamomile, chicory, jasmine—and Jessie chose a flavor as if her life depended on picking the right one. She decided on hibiscus. The tea was a pale orange color even after the tea bag had steeped for several minutes. Jessie added three cubes of sugar, fearing the tea would have no taste otherwise. And she was right; it tasted like orange sugar water.
“So,” Miss Flowers said. “I understand your brother is overseas. Have you heard from him yet?”
“Two letters,” Jessie said. One of the letters had been addressed to the entire family and included details of basic training, which Tiger said was “not at all as hard as you read about; for me it was a piece of cake.” The other letter had been for Jessie alone. She wasn’t sure if Blair and Kirby had gotten their own letters, but Jessie kind of doubted it. Blair, Kirby, and Tiger were all full biological siblings—they were the children of Kate and her first husband, Lieutenant Wilder Foley, who had served along the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea and then come home and accidentally shot himself in the head with his Beretta—but Tiger was closest to his half sister, Jessie. Actually, they weren’t allowed to use the terms half sister, half brother, and stepfather—Kate flat-out forbade it—but whether or not anyone chose to acknowledge it, the family had a fault line. They were two families stitched together. But the relationship between Tiger and Jessie felt real and whole and good, and what he had said in the letter proved that. The first line, Dear Messie, made tears stand in Jessie’s eyes.
“Letters are the only thing that make it easier,” Miss Flowers said, and at that point, her eyes had been brimming as well. Miss Flowers’s fiancé, Rex Rothman, had been killed in the Tet Offensive the year before. Miss Flowers had taken a full week off from school and Jessie saw a photograph of her in the Boston Globe standing next to a casket draped with the American flag. But when the new school year started in September, a romance seemed to blossom between Miss Flowers and Eric Barstow, the gym teacher. Mr. Barstow was as muscle-bound as Jack LaLanne. The boys both hated and respected Mr. Barstow, and Jessie and the other girls at school had been wary of him—until he started dating Miss Flowers, when he suddenly became a romantic hero. That spring, they spotted him bringing Miss Flowers a delicate bouquet of lilies of the valley wrapped in a wet paper towel, and after school each day, he carried her books and files out to the parking lot. Jessie had seen them together by Miss Flowers’s Volkswagen Bug, which was painted the color of a Florida orange, Mr. Barstow leaning an elbow on the roof while they talked. She once saw them kissing as the school bus drove away.
Some people—Leslie, for example—are unhappy that Miss Flowers saw fit to replace her dead fiancé within a year. But Jessie understands how losing someone tragically leaves a vacuum, and as they learned in science class, nature abhors a vacuum. Jessie knows that after Wilder died, her mother had hired a lawyer to fight the insurance company’s claim that his death was a suicide; the lawyer argued that Wilder had been cleaning the Beretta in his garage workshop and it had discharged accidentally. This distinction was important not only for life insurance purposes but also for the peace of mind of Kate’s three young children—Blair had been eight, Kirby five, and Tiger only three.
The lawyer Kate hired—who was successful in convincing the court that the death was accidental—was none other than David Levin. Six months after the case was settled, Kate and David started dating. They got married, despite Exalta’s vehement objections, and a few short months after the courthouse wedding, Kate became pregnant with Jessie.
Jessie hadn’t wanted to talk to Miss Flowers about Tiger and Vietnam, so to change the subject, she said, “This tea is delicious.”
Miss Flowers nodded vaguely and dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief she kept tucked into the belt of her dress to offer her students (she was, after all, a guidance counselor for adolescents, and their hormones and feelings ran amok on an hourly basis). She said, “I just want you to know that if you have any dark thoughts during the school day, you can come to talk to me here.”
Jessie had glanced down into her cup. She knew she would never be able to take Miss Flowers up on this offer. How could Jessie talk about her dark thoughts regarding her brother—who was, as far as she knew, still alive—when Miss Flowers had actually lost Rex Rothman, her fiancé?
Jessie was tormented each night by thoughts of Tiger getting killed by mortar shells or grenades or being captured and marched a hundred miles through the jungle without any food or water, but she stayed away from Miss Flowers’s office. She managed to avoid seeing the guidance counselor alone until the last day of school, when Miss Flowers stopped Jessie on her way out the door and said in her ear, “When I see you in September, your brother will be home safe, and I’ll be engaged to Mr. Barstow.”