Sunday morning, we managed breakfast with no problem. Wow, they'd left us a lot of food! That fridge was tiny, and I wouldn't trust anything left in its freezer to keep all that long, but it was packed. And there was cereal in the cupboard, besides the breakfast things Mia had told us about. We ate, and I washed the dishes. There was enough of the egg dish left that we put it back in the fridge. I thought it would last another day.
Our specific commitment, to Pastor Mac, to attend church on Sundays had ended the day before, with the wedding. But I was finding myself where Sam had been a year earlier, spiritually, though my doubts were a little different from hers. Ellen was with me, again for reasons of her own, and in fact I thought her hesitation wasn't so much doubt as fear. Come to think of it, in a different way that had been true of Sam as well.
So a few minutes before nine, we were knocking on the back door of the main house. Mia and Tom were ready to go, except that Mia was doing something in the kitchen so that dinner would be ready when we got back.
She teased me, gently, as I kept yawning. Pete and Tammy had told them that we were living together, but had also told them that we'd been abstaining from sex for the past six months. It was plain that they understood that we'd been as eager for that wedding night as any couple could ever have been. All the teasing, from all six of them, had been gentle and affectionate and, well, properâbut they all did it. A lot of it was just knowing smiles at certain points. We took it as it was intended.
We rode to church with Mia and Tom. A little to our surprise, Tammy and Pete came with Mary and Paul. Later, Tammy told us, "They understand that we're not believers, but we usually go when we're here. We grew up in that church, and everyone knows us. And of course, they're hoping that someday we'll hear something that will change our minds. It's no hardship for us, anyway. Except for jet lag, at this point, and I'm pretty sure we got more sleep than you did." And yes, well, knowing smiles.
The music was more old-fashioned than we were used to hearing in churches. Just an organ, and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gospel songs these people thought of as "the old hymns." Very much what my grandparents' church had used, when I was still a child. They had added contemporary material when I was in middle schoolâand more as time went on.
The sermon was good, but I wasn't in the bulls-eye this time, and neither was Ellen. The pastor preached ably on David's census of Israel and what came of it. If I had been at a different point spiritually, several things he brought out might have hammered at me, I think. As we left, I spoke with him for a minute or so about what he had said. "I will not take that which is thine for the Lord, nor offer burnt offerings without cost." If I ever did become a believer, I would have to wrestle with that one, I thought. The pastor really had done a good job with the passage. He preached to the heartâjust not mine, not right then anyway.
When we got homeâor back to base, if you preferâwe went off to change, then went back for dinner. Mia had said, "lunch," but it was definitely dinner. Pete and Tammy were there, and Paul and Mary too. We talked about many things. One thing of interest all around was summer jobs. We had known that Pete and Tammy had jobs, but not what they were. It turned out that Paul was a bank executive, and that for the previous two summers Pete and Tammy had worked for the bank. They were temps doing whatever needed doingâat low levels, anyway. They acted as tellers when needed, covering for people's lunch breaks but also for their vacations. They did a lot of filing. I gathered they helped the cleaning people sometimes, but most of what they did was clerical.
"Next year, we're definitely going to have to look for something career oriented, something permanent," Tammy said. "Hopefully it will pay better, too. But this has been great for us for two years running, and now a third year. It's been great for all of us. Dad gets people he trusts, and who by now know the other employees and all the routines. We get jobs, not all that well paying but not exactly minimum wage, either, and we get to live at home and eat off someone else's budget. The jobs will look good on resumes, too, and we won't have to say it was nepotism. It was the first time, but if we weren't pulling our weight, one summer would have been the end."
"And they've done a fine job," Paul put in. "Even the things we can't really let them handle, they help us by freeing up the people who can. They get a lot of government reporting figures together. Starting next year, I suspect we'll just hire another permanent, full-time person to replace them."
Of course, we had to discuss our own jobs. Several possibilities had turned up, without our having to look too hard. Dad had nudged some people in Washington, and we had seriously considered those. Ellen would have been working with a nonprofit. It would have been more like social work than the kind of individual counseling she really wanted, but it would have been good experience. I would have been collecting information and writing about what several bureaus had been accomplishing.
Uncle John had put us in contact with some people at the college where he had taught. For neither of us would these have been a great fit, but had we had nothing better we would have jumped at the openings.
We had each been offered a job at our university, from our own departments, and those were the jobs we were taking. Mine was helping a couple of history professors collect and organize their own research data, and it sounded like I might do some of the writing. I might even get a little credit. Ellen would be assisting with counseling. Some of it, again, was nearer social work than she wanted, but some looked to be exactly the experience she needed. For her, the pay was miserable and the hours were irregular. But we would be living in our own apartment, gaining contacts and experience. We too would need something better after we graduated, but this all really looked good to us.
In the course of a discussion of nothing in particular, Tammy suddenly said, "Oh!" in tones of surprise. Well, everyone stopped and looked at her, of course. She blushed, but she explained. "I suddenly thought of something. Ellen and Phil, for sure this doesn't mean I'm less grateful to you two! But something happened in high school that should have clued me in. Everyone else here knows about it, but here it is.
"A friend of mine, Mary, was in Drama Club." At this, obvious enlightenment dawned on everyone else's faces. "Well, junior year, she tried out for the lead role in a play. And she got it. Um, the female lead. The problem was that there was a male lead role, and the guy who got it was named Bill, and they'd never gotten along. I don't think it was anything like you and Sam. Mostly, they just ignored each other, but if one of them said or did something dumb, the other was sure to point it out, and keep on it for a while."
She paused. "Honestly, I think Mary was more to blame than he was. I think he'd have been happy just to ignore her and anything she said, but she needled him often enough that it kept him stirred up, too.
"So they had to play opposite each otherâbut it gets worse! There was a big romantic scene, in the course of which they were supposed to kiss. And the directorâthe student director and the teacher who sponsored the club, bothâhad worked it out that they were going to prolong the kiss for at least a couple of minutes. Well, the audience would mostly be high school kids, and they could be counted on to get into it and make comments, of course, and they thought that would help the audience relate.
"They both really wanted their chance to star, and neither was willing to turn down the partâeach of them thought the other one should, though. So anyway, the time came for the first run-through of that scene. And it was just terrible, naturally! Not just the kiss, but the whole scene, and even some earlier interaction.
"The director took them through it a few times, getting madder and madder. Finally, she told them, 'You two get together before the next rehearsal, and get yourselves together, or neither one of you will be in this production. We'll work on other scenes tomorrow, and that will give you the weekend, too, but I mean it! You be ready by Monday afternoon, or else!' And the faculty advisor backed her up completely. She said something like, 'You're supposed to be acting. That means doing a realistic job of doing things the characters do. How you feel about it as actors doesn't come into it. You don't deserve the leads if you can't do it better than you have been tonight.'
"So they spent nearly every free minute they had, for three days and more, together. They discussed the play. They discussed all the things they hated about each other. But they also spent time trying to kiss so it looked like they were enjoying it. They were mostly at Mary's house, and her folks had a rule, no boys in her bedroom, so they were in the living room, under her parents' noses. And I think her folks might have objected to all that kissing if they hadn't known how those two felt about each otherâand for that matter they could see that the kiss had to be practiced, or it would ruin the whole play. It really was that bad. I think Mary bit him on one of the early tries, Thursday night. Mary's parents went so far as to walk through the scene themselvesâyou know, 'Here's the way you need to kiss him.'" She grinned at Mary. "Not the way you expect your parents to behaveâeven though you know they must have, or you wouldn't be there!