Mona was going to a dance. A real dance at school: a Boy was taking her. No Melendy child had ever done such a thing before.
Randy sat on the foot of her sister’s bed watching her get ready.
“I don’t see what you want to go for,” she said, “and with that old Chris Cottrell, too.”
“He’s all right,” replied Mona from her new adult altitude, and then descended from it to say anxiously, “Oh dear, I hope I don’t step on his feet. Do you think I will?”
“You won’t be able to miss them, they’re as big as a couple of cellos,” said Randy crossly.
“I’m kind of scared,” confided Mona. But when she slipped the dress over her head, the new dress that she and Cuffy had made, the annoyingly distant composure returned to her face.
The dress was pretty. It had a long, full skirt, really long, right down to the floor; and it was made out of thin pink cotton stuff, nineteen cents a yard at the Carthage Dry Goods and Confectionery.
“Jeepers, you look old,” commented Rush, looking in at the door, “about eighteen or nineteen at least.”
“Do I really, Rush?” Mona was delighted.
“Yep. But I don’t see why you want to.”
“I’m tired of looking callow. Listen, kids, shall I wear these roses on top of my head, or sort of on the side by the parting?”
“Oh, wear them between your teeth like Carmen,” said Rush, wheeling away from the door. “I think you’re getting kind of silly, Mona.”
Mona didn’t care. Her eyes were shining, her cheeks pink, as they always were when she was excited. The roses in her hair were very becoming. Randy sighed, and watched her gloomily.
“Gee whiz, you’re getting so grown up. Pretty soon you won’t be any fun at all.”
“Don’t be silly. There’s the doorbell!” Mona gave her a kiss without thinking about her, snatched up her summer coat and hurried down to the living room where Chris and her father were talking to Cuffy.
After they had gone Randy went slowly up the stairs to the Office. She felt awful. Rush was at the piano practicing the first of the Brahms-Handel Variations. “When I’m about twenty-one I ought to be able to do ’em pretty well if I start now and work hard,” he’d said.
Randy sat first in one chair and then in another. She tiptoed into Clarinda’s room and back again, took a book out of the bookcase and replaced it; stared at one of the newspaper pictures on the wall; tiptoed up to the cupola, looked out at the moonlit world without seeing it, and then tiptoed down again. Finally she sat down in a creaky wicker chair and sighed deeply.
“Say, what’s the matter with you anyway?” asked Rush, turning from his music. “You’ve been circulating around here like a draft.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Randy said mournfully. “I guess it’s that I hate having any of us grow up.”
“But we’re not grown up,” Rush observed briskly. “None of us. Not even Mona.”
“She almost is. Dances, radio acting, and all that. She even puts powder on her nose sometimes.”
Rush flipped the pages of his music. “What do you care? I’m still here.”
“You won’t be long. Pretty soon you’ll start going to dances yourself. With girls and things.”
“For Pete’s sake, Ran. You know how I hate all that stuff.”
“You will, though,” persisted Randy, a soothsayer disliking her wisdom. “Pretty soon you’ll always be slicking down your hair, and talking hours and hours on the telephone, and cleaning your fingernails without being told.”
“Oh, shut up. I will not.”
“Yes, you will. And you’ll be careful of your clothes, and always play lovey-dovey music on the piano—”
But that was too much. With a yelp of rage Rush leaped from the piano bench and chased Randy, shrieking and laughing, all the way downstairs and out of doors before he caught her.
“I take it back, I take it back,” squeaked Randy in a cowardly way; and Rush released her.
Oliver was standing in the doorway wearing pajamas with blue Dumbos all over them.
“What was the running and the noise about?”
“Rush and I had an argument, that’s all,” said Randy, hugging him in spite of his protests. “Oliver darling, I’m so glad you’re only seven!”
When Mona came home at half past ten she found Randy waiting up for her. Or rather she found Randy asleep in her bed, with the lights on, and a note pinned to the sheet under her chin which said, “Wake me up and talk.”
“Wake up, wake up,” called Mona in a whisper, shaking her sister’s shoulder; and Randy grumbled, protested, and finally pulled herself together and sat up.
Mona was wearing her dressing gown. The pink dress lay in a crumpled wreath on the floor, and she was pulling off her slippers impatiently.
“Ooh, my feet, my feet.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“Oh, yes, wonderful. Everybody danced with me, even Mr. Coughing. I didn’t step on anybody’s toes either, but lots of people stepped on mine.”
“Are you glad you went?”
“Yes, it was an Experience. But I think I’ll enjoy it more when I’m older. You know, sophisticated, with a permanent wave and all.”
Mona wiggled her bare toes luxuriously.
“Let’s go out, it’s a wonderful night, and I’m going to bathe my feet in the brook, they’re so hot and stepped-on. Let’s get Rush too. Oliver would only be walking in his sleep, so we won’t bother him.”
Rush awoke with the alacrity of one to whom sleep is a tedious waste of time. “Let’s go out via the kitchen,” he suggested.
Quietly, quietly they went down the stairs. For some reason they had all begun to laugh, and every now and then it was necessary to pause, holding back the wild laughter that struggled inside them, hugging their ribs, aching with it. It escaped only in short, stifled gusts, and hiccups. None of them could have told you what they were laughing at.
Recovered, but still gasping, they achieved the kitchen where there was so much moonlight streaming in through the screen door that they didn’t have to turn on the light to find the cookie jar and the root beer.
“Don’t let it slam,” cautioned Mona, arms full, holding the door open with her heel.
Beside the house the white peonies looked huge and pearly, shining out of their dark leaves. The air was full of their clean-clothes fragrance; and the honeysuckle was beginning; you knew it every time you took a breath.
Like ghosts the children walked across the lawn on their bare feet. The moon was full. Above the damp grass hung a veil of mist, luminous with moonlight and spangled with fireflies. There was no wind, and the sound of the brook was very distinct, tinkling, splashing, rushing softly. It made Mona think of an ancient fountain, shaped like a shell, covered with moss, and set in a secluded garden: something she half remembered, or imagined.
“How warm it is,” cried Randy, suddenly leaping and pirouetting across the dewy grass. “Oh, summer, summer, summer!”
A rank smell of fresh water and soaked maple keys came upward from the brook as they approached. It lay concealed, deep in inky shadow, with only an occasional glimmer of light wavering on its surface.
“Gosh!” said Rush appreciatively. “Imagine sleeping when you can be out in this!”
They walked carefully in the darkness, trying to avoid the places where they remembered rocks or poison ivy, and finally they came to the little pool above the falls. Rush put the root-beer bottles in the water to cool.
Mona felt that the moment called for a suitable quotation and thought of one after a brief scramble through her mind. She began it in a low hushed voice.
“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit—”
“And bathe our aching feet,” said Rush, quickly nipping her in the bud. “Listen, Mona, we know you know ten city blocks of quotations from Shakespeare.”
“All right,” said Mona good-naturedly, and they sat down side by side on a rock with their feet in the dark cool water. After a while when it was cold enough they drank the root beer and ate the cookies. Occasionally they slapped at mosquitoes, but without these tiny flaws the hour would have been too perfect.
Against the shadows fireflies wrote their meaningless hieroglyphics. Rush caught one and held it gently in his closed hand, watching the cold light come and go, come and go, between his fingers.
“This is better than the city,” he said.
“Better than the other valley, or the lighthouse even,” said Randy.
“Better than anywhere we ever lived,” said Mona.
From under the canopy of leaves they looked across the lawn to the big, square house, blue-white in the moonlight. Its windows were black, and so were the sharp shadows under its eaves, and the heavy fringes of the spruce trees which swept the roof. They thought it looked very beautiful.
At last Randy stood up with a little splash. “I’m going to bed and write a poem,” she said.
“I’ve got some music beginning in my head right now that may be good enough for Opus III,” Rush announced, and Mona said that she planned to go back to her room and recite all the Shakespeare she wanted, far from the sensitive ears of her brother.
But as it happened the poem never got beyond a single opening phrase: “Oh, summer night!” The music for Opus III was completed only in a dream; and as for the quotations from Shakespeare, that evening, at least, they never were recited at all.
Out of doors the night lived out its life serenely and splendidly. Toward morning a small wind began to blow, as though it came from far, far away; as though it were the first ripple of an advancing tide. With its coming the night commenced to dissolve, to weaken, and though one could see no daylight yet, a rooster miles away knew better, and began to crow.
And now the birds were waking up: at first only one, with a drowsy, broken chirp, and then another and another till the air was spattered with a thousand different notes.
At a quarter to seven Cuffy opened the kitchen door and out flew Isaac and John Doe, running madly, careening in circles, flinging themselves upon the grass with their eyes rolling, like prisoners who had been pent up for a lifetime. A smell of coffee mingled with the honeysuckle.
At half past seven Cuffy herself came out, breathing the morning air and bending over to see how the rose moss was coming along. Funny none of the children are awake yet, thought Cuffy, straightening and looking up at the quiet windows. Well, school is over, summer is just beginning, and they are children. Let them sleep a little longer. Let them sleep.