You’ll say it again
And again
“You get nothing.”
Sometimes I’d hear it on the radio, early mornings when I dressed for school. It never made the charts.
One afternoon, when Alex and I were in Venus Records, buying the new Seal album, I got him to listen to it. I told him that Huguette had inspired it.
“You get nothing…I remember her saying that to me,” he said.
“That night we went to Roundelay, yes.”
“She was just kidding. Cog Wheeler makes her sound calculating, but she wasn’t, was she?”
“No. He was.”
“You ended up really liking her, didn’t you?”
I said Yes, I’d ended up really liking her.
That fall, Nick asked me once what was with me? He said Brittany had told him she’d seen me down on the beach with the French girl—if that was gay, what was straight?
“And I saw the way you were with her that night of your birthday,” he added.
I said, “You should see me with Alex.”
“Do I have to?” He laughed.
For a while Franklin still looked my mother up when he came into New York. She said she’d never managed to melt that icy exterior; it was like dating Mr. Spock, the gentle but unfeeling Vulcan from Star Trek.
The last we heard of Nevada, he was back in seclusion. Franklin reported that things were normal again at Roundelay. Once, Cali’s sister, Mrs. Rochan, had visited, but Huguette had stayed with Mr. Rochan in New York.
Afternoons after school and weekends I had a job waiting tables in a small sandwich shop on upper Fifth Avenue. It was a favorite hangout for older teenage girls. They’d come in carrying shopping bags from Saks and Bloomingdale’s, and order rice-milk cappuccinos. Even though I knew that Huguette was in Pennsylvania, I wondered if she came home some weekends. And what would happen if she wandered in one day? What would we say to each other? How would it feel to see her again?
Winter came early that year, with snow already at Thanksgiving.
Alex was busy investigating opportunities in summer theater. Wherever I’d be, I’d have to have a full-time job, because it would be my last summer before college.
Mom was thinking about going into business in June with a woman who had a catering service up on the Hudson, in Piermont, New York.
One night she showed me photographs of the house she’d rent, overlooking the Tappan Zee Bridge.
“Right near Alex’s parents’ place,” I groaned.
“Oh, they’re used to you two by now.”
“Maybe I’m not used to them.”
But I was. Both Alex and I were handling “the slings and arrows” a lot easier.
My mother said, “Rockland County isn’t the Hamptons, but I’ve had the Hamptons. I think of last summer as The Summer of My Wooden Soldier.”
I grinned, remembering the novel called The Summer of My German Soldier. She’d helped me with the book report I’d done when I was in sixth grade.
I still carried the key chain in my pocket, with “Paint Over It” engraved on the gold circle. I still remembered one line from the song: Pick a darker color, too, So nothing of the old comes through.
I didn’t tell my mother my own feelings about that summer. But I knew that it was a time I’d never forget.
I knew that I’d always think of it as the summer that I loved a girl.
A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
My real name is Marijane Meaker.
When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.
My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.
I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.
I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)
Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York, Dinky was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.
Gentlehands, a novel as successful as Dinky but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s
