Maggie Sweet Read Free

sidelines talking to Mary Price and some other girls, when I heard, “Do you want to dance?”
    When I turned, our eyes locked and it was like we were the only two people in the gym. I don’t even know if I answered him, I just remember stepping into his arms as if I’d always known him, as if I’d been waiting for him my whole life. I wanted to say, “Do you know me? I know you, I’ve known you forever.”
    He was purely fascinating to my half-reckless, half-rule-abiding sixteen-year-old mind. He was my age, but seemed older: drove a souped-up ’48 Chevy too fast, wore a ducktail haircut, carried his Marlboros in the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt, and had no curfew. (I lovedto think of him as an outlaw.) And as if that wasn’t enough, he had the most beautiful face I’d ever seen, eyes as blue and velvety as pansies, and (wonder of wonders) he liked me too.
    But what really got me, what I’ll never forget, is that we could talk about everything for hours. And sometimes, Jerry, my sweet outlaw, read poetry to me.
    Of course, everyone else only saw Jerry’s outlaw side. The first time he drove me home from school with the radio blaring and the glass-pack muffler roaring, Mama Dean, who was drinking iced tea and watching Search for Tomorrow , must have come out of her chair like it had given her an electric shock. She went right to the porch light switch and flicked it off and on, my signal to get in the house pronto. When I ignored this signal, which was impossible to see on a bright October afternoon, she threw the old couch afghan around her shoulders and marched out to the driveway.
    “Maggie Sweet! What do you think you’re doing?” she said, her jaw stuck out and her eyes blazing.
    “We were just talking, Mama Dean,” I stammered.
    “Hmph,” she said. “That’s your tale and I’m a’ settin’ on mine.”
    After she hauled me red-faced and wailing into the house she went straight to the phone and called Mother at work. In a high, hysterical voice, she said, “Betty, get home. Some rampageous wolf in sheep’s clothing is fixin’ to carry off our baby.”
    And Mother came straight home and tried to talk some sense into my head.
    Nothing like this had ever happened before. Mother never took time off work for anything. That’s how torn up they were over me seeing Jerry.
    Until then I’d mostly done what they said, but I would have walked through fire to be with Jerry.
    Between Mother’s speeches of “Listen to me, I’m your mother,” and Mama Dean’s glinty-eyed tales about my philandering grandfather who had deserted her twenty-six years before, I met Jerry every chance I got.
    For almost two years it went on this way. Mother was sure that sooner or later her sensible genes would surface and I wouldn’t go back on my raising. But Mama Dean, ever mindful of my grandfather’s taint, followed me everywhere. Since we never owned a car, she was hard to miss. Sometimes during school I’d get that prickly feeling you get when someone is watching you. I’d glance out the window just in time to see a short, stocky woman in a flowered housedress, disappear into the red-tip bushes.
    Once, coming out of a movie ( Psycho , I think) Jerry swore he saw an old woman in pink fuzzy house shoes dart between parked cars.
    Finally one day I caught her. I was in Dixie Burger, having a Coke with some friends, when a gray head peeked through a window, not two inches from my face, then disappeared. I marched out of the shop and found Mama Dean crawling around on all fours pretending to dig in the dirt.
    “Mama Dean!” I shrieked.
    “Hey, Maggie Sweet,” she said, grinning like she’d been caught with her hand in the collection plate. “I think I lost my house key.”
    This time I said, “Hmph!,” and went straight home and bawled to Mother. “You’ve got to stop her. She’s ruining my life.”
    Mother said, “Oh, foot, Maggie Sweet!” But she did talk to Mama Dean, who said, “All right! All right!