"Summer's End"
Song by: John Prine
I was supposed to meet her after every lottery. That was our pact in the summer of 1969. I stood her up. I don’t know if she ever forgave me.
I spent my long summer days painting fences, mowing lawns, rolling joints in my attic, and tossing her in the pool. She spent her days pouring baby oil on her legs, babysitting the triplets that lived next to the park, and climbing the ladder to my attic to take two hits off the smoldering roach I held out the window for her.
Back then she was the only girl I knew who would drink the better half of the beer we’d buy. She was a sturdy Wisconsin girl made of Norwegian stock. I was a skinny Wisconsin boy made of steadied nerves and quiet laughter.
She became a force in my life in the spring of 1969, only months before we made our pact. I wasn’t going to college and it seemed like the hometown I had once known slipped away to real life. Then there was one night when she went from just a girl I had known in passing to the girl that made everything feel as if it would all be okay.
It was well after midnight and I had driven my car to her street parked, just trying to get away from my house. I didn’t know it was her street when I chose it, I just liked the way the trees lined the the road.
I needed to take in as much air as I could so I sat on the trunk of my car and tried to inhale. Mid gasp I saw her walking down the street. She had just gotten off her shift at Laurence’s Diner and was carrying a paper cup filled with a chocolate milkshake when she found me.
She handed me the paper cup and pulled herself up next to me. I took a sip, then she took a sip. We spent an hour like that. I could only make out her eyes in the shadowy light of the streetlamp at the end of the block, but everything about her seemed right because she respected the silence I had created. There were three or four sips left at the bottom of the cup when I last handed it to her. She finished the rest, got up, and kissed my already-burning cheek. Her lips were sticky.
Green Lake, Wisconsin seemed like a place that would never be touched by the news we heard Walter Cronkite deliver every night. So, after that first night with her sticky lips, we talked about anything other than what was happening miles away.
There were rumors around town that there were millions of dollars at the bottom of the lake, and we went there at least once a week to look for it. We would take our little earnings and buy Miller Lite at the liquor store, then head down to the water. She was 17 and I was 19, and we pretended like we didn’t have a future. It was my job to buy the six-packs we could barely afford, and it was her job to tune the radio in just right when we got to our secret spot.
We devised plans of how we’d sneak our way to the fortune at the bottom. We told each other we’d use it to buy a cabin in Washington. We were obsessed with Washington. Neither of us had ever left the midwest back then.
The world always seemed to catch up to us though. On a particularly dreary night in late May we sat at the diner together. She declared that after every draft lottery, we’d sit on her porch in celebration or in sadness. It was our pact, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Shortly after foreshadowing silence filled our booth after her declaration, she took the salt and pepper shakers and poured a little mound on my plate. Then she took a fry, swirled it in the black and white granules and ate it. She whispered, “salt and pepper dip.” I showed my kids how to do the same years later.
Our pact wasn’t a good idea. Around the country people saw dates pop up and took in the fact that someone they knew could now be considered both dead and alive. Late in the summer of 1969, I was declared both dead and alive.
I drove to her house after seeing my birthdate pop up on the screen. But, I didn’t get out of the car. I watched her come outside and sit on the porch cross-legged in overalls and despair. I couldn’t get out of the car. So, I looked at her through the window. I think at she saw me, but if she did, she didn’t come to the car.
In the fall of 1969 I boarded a plane. I traveled to the place she and I had pretended didn’t exist. While I was away, I imagined her taking sips of a chocolate milkshake on the back of a car. I hoped she took a sip and thought of me alive, a sip and thought of me dead, but always took the last sip thinking I was still alive.
In the winter of 1972 I came home, and on December 23rd, I tried to hold up the rest of our pact. I stopped at Laurence’s and got a chocolate milkshake, drove my father’s car to her block, and parked in that same spot as the night she kissed my cheek for the first time. I sat on the trunk and waited to find a light on in her house. It was cold, but only my face felt the brittle Wisconsin wind. I took tiny sips of the milkshake hoping she’d appear soon.
When I started to see the bottom of the paper cup, a light flicked on in her house. Light came from the third window on the second floor. That window was once her room. She was 20 then and I didn’t know if that room still had ruffles on its curtains and scratched records, or if it had been repainted and the sheets on the bed were stiff with lack of use. The light in the window was broken by a figure that looked at me. I looked at it. I took a sip and thought it was her, took a sip and thought it was a stranger, then took the last sip and believed it was her.
