Dr. Keller was an old man in his sixties, he prescribed the pills without a fuss, but he also gave me a little lecture about not using them as a license for promiscuity. I told him I was engaged to be married, and he said that was nice to hear and he wished me luck. I told him my period had started on the sixth, and he said I should take the first pill on the eleventh, and then keep taking them till all twenty-eight pills were gone. Then I could expect my next period a few days after that, and counting the day I got my period, I should allow five days and then begin taking the pill again the very next day. It sounds very simple.
Thursday, August 14
I didn’t realize Andy could be such a jealous person.
I was waiting for him outside the bank today, he must’ve been about ten minutes late, he explained that he’d got caught in traffic. But I was talking to Mr. Armstrong, who’s head of the bookkeeping department, a very nice person who’s old enough to be my father, I really mean it. Well, he’s at least thirty, anyway, and he’s married and has a small daughter. Anyway, we were just standing there talking, passing the time, when Andy pulled up in his car. I said good-bye to Mr. Armstrong, I don’t even know his first name, and I got in the car, and the first thing Andy wanted to know was who was that I was talking to. I told him it was a man who worked in the bank, Mr. Armstrong from the bookkeeping department. So Andy wanted to know what we were talking about. I told him I’d been waiting there on the sidewalk, and when Mr. Armstrong came out he saw me standing there and we started chatting, that was all. So Andy still wanted to know what we were talking about. I said, Why, are you jealous? And he said he would kill me if ever I started up with another man.
I think he meant it.
Saturday, August 16
Today Andy told me his plan.
Everybody was out of the house this afternoon, they all went to the beach — Uncle Frank, and Aunt Lillian, and Patricia. I told them I had shopping to do, that I needed some new clothes for the fall, and Andy lied and said he had a date. So we got to stay home alone. We made love in Andy’s bed for the first time. I really feel great now that I’m taking the pill. Andy says it’s turned me into a wild animal, whatever that means. Maybe he’s right. I just don’t worry about a thing now.
His plan sounds stupid to me.
His plan is not to go to college in the fall. After he’s been accepted and everything. Instead, he says he wants to work full-time at the steak joint, as a waiter no less. He says he can make plenty of money waiting tables, and he says with both our salaries, we could live very well. In short, he wants to marry me as soon as possible, forget about college, take our own apartment, etc. I told him that’s all his mother has to hear. First that he wants to marry his own cousin, and next that he’s dropping out of college to do it. Andy says he doesn’t give a damn about his mother, but I told him I’d have to give this a lot of thought. He said, Why? What’s there to think about? We love each other, don’t we? I said I loved him dearly, but dropping out of college before he even started was really kind of stupid. And besides, I was only seventeen, I wouldn’t be eighteen till March, which made me underage. His mother was my guardian and she’d never sign for me to get married. He said the hell with her, we’d elope. I said, Andy, let me think about it, okay? Then we made love again before they got home.
I really do feel like a wild animal when we make love.
Monday, August 18
Mr. Armstrong stopped me on the way out to lunch today, and asked me if that was my boyfriend who picked me up all the time. I said, No, it was my cousin. That’s really the truth, but of course the other is the truth, too. Andy is my boyfriend. Mr. Armstrong asked me where I was going, and I said out to lunch, and he said, Of course, how stupid of me. Where else would you be going at 12:30? He asked if he could walk with me, and I said, Sure, Mr. Armstrong, why not, and he said I should please call him Jack, which is his name. He said he’d taken a lot of ribbing about being named Jack Armstrong, but I didn’t know what he meant, and he explained that there used to be a radio show, oh, back in the thirties he guessed it was, and the hero of it was Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. He said that was before my time. I said that was probably before his time, too, wasn’t it, and he said, Oh, yes, I don’t remember it personally, my parents told me about it. He said he was twenty-six years old, which really came as a surprise to me, because honestly he looks much older. Anyway, he dropped me outside the R&R, and I went in for a sandwich, and didn’t see him the rest of the afternoon. He really does look a lot older than twenty-six.
I didn’t mention any of this to Andy because I don’t want him to take a fit about nothing.
Sunday, August 24
In church this morning, I prayed to God that Andy would change his mind about going on to college in the fall. Registration is September 8, which is just a little more than two weeks away. Please, dear God, I ask you again. Let him change his mind. We love each other a lot, but telling Aunt Lillian about us now would be the wrong thing to do, I feel. Besides, I think he’s rushing things. It’s not as if I was pregnant, which I’m not.
Monday, August 25
Jack came over to my desk this morning and asked if I would like to have lunch with him. The first thing I thought was that Andy would get very angry if he ever heard about it, and then I figured there’d be nothing really wrong with it, except of course Jack is married. So I said, Well, thanks a lot, Jack, I really appreciate your asking, but you’re a married man and all, I happen to know you’re married and have a four-year-old daughter. (It was Heidi who’d told me this.) So Jack said, What difference does that make, all I’m asking is whether you’d like to have lunch with me. I’m not taking you to Singapore for a six-month tour of the Orient. Well, I thought that was pretty comical, and also pretty honest, so I said, Sure, why not, let’s have lunch together.
He’s a very fascinating person.
He’s not what you’d call good-looking, but he has a very interesting face with a lot of character in it. His hair is brown, I guess, but so dark it could almost be black. And his eyes are blue, and I suppose he’s just about six feet tall, give or take a few inches.
He told me that his father used to be a coal miner in a place in Pennsylvania, I forget the actual name of the town, but the people there call it Scooptown. And he said he himself had never worked in the mines, that he’d been fortunate enough to get a football scholarship to college, and to get out of Scooptown when he was just eighteen. He met his wife while he was an undergraduate out in Michigan, and then she’d worked for a while to put him through school while he was going for his master’s. He started at the bank only four years ago, just a little before his daughter was born, but he expected he’d be promoted to assistant manager before long.
He also told me that he absolutely did not want me to get the wrong idea about us having lunch together. He wasn’t on the make, in fact he’d tell his wife all about it, that was how innocent the whole thing was. Besides, he knew I was only seventeen, he certainly wasn’t about to rob the cradle. Though I was very pretty, he had to admit that. In fact, if his wife asked him tonight, he guessed he’d have to say I was beautiful. He made me blush, I mean it. I mean, I’m not beautiful. I’m just not. But it was nice of him to say so.