Summer of '79: A Summer of '69 Story(2)
Jessie and Kirby sit in traffic on the Cross Bronx for what feels like days—Jessie drifts off for a second and she thinks maybe Kirby does as well—but then I-95 clears. Kirby puts the pedal to the metal and the LTD goes sailing right up alongside a tractor-trailer. Jessie yanks her elbow down once, twice, three times, and the trucker honks his horn, which gives Jessie a silly thrill. She feels like a character from Smokey and the Bandit.
“Flash him!” Kirby says.
Jessie considers it for a second, then remembers that her older sister is a terrible influence.
They have more fun on the drive up to Hyannis than they should under the circumstances. They devour the hotdogs—Kirby doctored them with just the right amount of mustard, relish, onions, and sauerkraut—and the radio gods are with them because they hear one great song after another.
“Lonesome Loser.” Beaten by the Queen of Hearts every time.
“One Way or Another.” I’m gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya.
“Knock on Wood.” It’s like thunder, lightning / The way I love you is frightening.
After they finish singing at the top of their lungs with Bonnie Tyler to “It’s a Heartache”—Nothing but a heartache—Kirby turns down the radio and says, “So what happened with you and Theo, anyway?”
Jessie doesn’t want to talk about Theo but she needs to come up with some kind of answer for her family.
Jessie met Theo her first week at NYU. She’d done her undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke, and so New York City—and men—were a dramatic change. Theo Feigenbaum had thick dark hair, green eyes, and remarkably long dark lashes. He sat next to Jessie in their lawyering seminar and asked her to borrow a pencil and a piece of loose-leaf, which Jessie gave him while wondering what kind of bozo showed up to the first day of class unprepared. But when he raised his hand to offer an example of jurisprudence, Jessie fell in love.
They dated the entire first year, then through the summer, then into autumn of their second year, when they basically cohabited. But the second year of law school was more difficult than the first, just like the second year of a relationship. The things that had been fun, even blissful—studying together in the park, getting pizza at St. Mark’s Place, splurging on a foreign film at the Angelika, or sneaking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it was easy enough to find discarded metal buttons on the steps and attach them to their collars)—lost their luster. And there was no time, anyway. Besides which, Theo grew increasingly jealous of how well Jessie was doing in class and how easily she had landed a summer associate’s job at Cadwalader. He started to turn mean and surly, he put Jessie down in public—at McSorley’s, for example, in front of their mutual friends—and argued with every single point she made in class.
Jessie would be embarrassed to admit to Kirby how she backed down, how she apologized, how her main objective became to placate Theo and defuse his growing anger, how she intentionally turned in a sloppy opinion so that he would get a better grade. Jessie watched herself make concession after concession even as she yearned to be strong and stand up for herself like a proper women’s libber. But she had wanted Theo to be happy. She had wanted him to love her. And so she yielded, she flattered him, she diminished herself to make him appear bigger.
And what had this gotten her? It had gotten her a kick to the gut, a fat smack to her pride. One night when Jessie had spent the last dollars of her monthly stipend on Reuben sandwiches from the Carnegie Deli, Theo stood her up. The sandwiches, which Jessie had transported back downtown on the subway as carefully as she would have her own newborn baby, grew cold and greasy. Jessie left them in the white paper bag and stormed down to McSorley’s, where she found Theo at a back table with a girl named Ingrid Wu, a first-year. They were all over each other.
“He cheated on me,” Jessie tells Kirby. “So I threw him out.”
Kirby is smoking again in a more relaxed way, with her elbow hanging out the window. “Good for you,” she says. “You deserve better.”
Jessie rummages through her macramé pocketbook for her sunglasses because suddenly, she feels like she might cry. She’d wanted to call Theo when Exalta died but she hadn’t because she was afraid it would sound like a plea for attention. A dead grandmother, how unoriginal. And yet, Exalta is dead, and it hurts. Jessie and Exalta hadn’t been close exactly, but there had been something—a mutual respect and admiration that was, in a way, more meaningful to Jessie than the more typical variety of grandmotherly love. Exalta was proud of Jessie’s accomplishments—her impeccable grades at Brookline High and Mount Holyoke, her high LSAT score, her admission to NYU law. Exalta could be stingy with praise, but she had, more than once, said that Jessie was a young woman with a good head on her shoulders who had a very bright future.
Along with her cutoffs and her crocheted tank, Jessie is wearing the gold knot and diamond necklace that Exalta gave her for her thirteenth birthday. Jessie lost the necklace the very first time she wore it, and she’d spent one fraught week of her thirteenth summer in a state of agitated panic. Mr. Crimmins found the necklace—thank God!—and Exalta kept it in her custody until Jessie turned sixteen. At that point, Jessie put it on—and she has never taken it off. It has been witness to every second of the past seven years. It’s a talisman and a reminder of Exalta’s belief in her. Good head on her shoulders. Very bright future.