Title : It’s OK If You
Don’t Love Me
Genre : Fiction – Romantic
Author : Norma Klein
Publisher : The Dial Press, New York
Year : 1977
Length
of page : 202 pages
Character
:
1.
Jody :
The main character, a girl who loves sport especially tennis.
2.
Lyle :
Jody’s friend, loves tennis too, chivalrous, wise.
3.
Whitney :
Jody’s ex-boyfriend.
4.
Elizabeth :
Jody’s mother.
5.
Eric :
Jody’s brother.
6.
Philip :
Jody’s stepfather.
7.
Elliott :
a friend of Jody’s mother.
Summarizing:
Lyle
and Jody are playing tennis in the court.
They are talking during the play.
Jody really likes Lyle’s smile.
Maybe she shouldn’t say that to mean he’s nice. Jody likes Lyle because Lyle is not New
Yorker. He didn’t grow up in New York
City. He is tall and sort of gangling,
with greenish eye, he always choosing his words very carefully, unlike Jody who
is just kind of blurt things out.
Lyle
comes from Ohio. He just moved to New
York a few months ago. Jody met him t
Sloan-Kettering, the laboratory where they both worked over the summer. He’s going into his last year of High School,
like Jody, and they have a program for senior who are interested in
science. It was terrific job, Jody even
got paid, though she’d have done it for free just for the experience. Lyle worked at a lab down the hall from the
one she was in, and they really didn’t get to know each other that well, but
once at lunch, which everyone ate at that cafeteria down stairs, he said
something about not knowing how to get a tennis permit, and they got to talking
about it. Jody went with him one day to
the Arsenal, where he got one. Today’s
the first day they’ve played. Their jobs
ended a week ago, and school starts pretty soon. He’s going to Bronx Science. Jody goes to a private school called Talbot
that she’s gone to since she was in third grade.
***
One
day after they have played tennis, they talk each other in some garden beside
the river. Jody tells about her family
and Lyle does too. He leans back and
looks across the river. And he begins to
tell about him to Jody. He talks about
his family that his parents died six months ago. They were in a car crash. That’s why he is there. He is living with his sister. She’s married. He wants to go to Yale. He will apply there, Princeton or
Haverford. He has to get a
scholarship. After a few minutes he said
that his sister’s apartment is sort of small and they just had a baby, so it
isn’t so ideal in term of space. He
could’ve stayed in Ohio and lived with the family of his best friend, Kent, but
Renee wanted him to come to stay with them because her husband got a job there. His family left some money to Lyle, but not a
lot. That’s why Lyle really wants get
that scholarship. His father taught
biology at a small college. The salaries weren’t too high and his mother gave
flute lessons.
Jody
tries to imagine what that would be like.
Having no family left except Eric, her brother. Her family is a little different, but still
she could see it would be sort of horrible.
Jody’s family were in San Francisco for a while when she was little,
only it didn’t work out that well. Her
mother was just twenty four or so. She
said she was much too young when she got married. So one day she just split and took off for
California, not even knowing anyone or anything. She guesses that was kind oh the point. To go somewhere she didn’t know anyone.
Jody
starts to tell about her father. Her
father stayed behind in Scarsdale. He
was setting up his practice there, he’s a Dentist. Her father and her mother had broken up. So, she still lives in Scarsdale with his
wife and their kids. And she tells about
Elliott. He is her mother’s friend who
lives with them. He was married, only
now, he’s not divorced exactly, but he’s separated. His wife doesn’t want to give him a
divorce. After that, she tells about
Philip too. Philip is her stepfather.
Her mother married Philip. He lives
right near there. He teaches physics at
Columbia.
Jody
thinks that whenever she tells about the saga of her life, she can tell they’re
feeling sorry for her. Partly they’re
thinking: Poor thing, her parents split when she was such a tender age, a mere
babe, as it were. But in fact, she was
repressing it, but to tell the truth, she can’t even remember much about her
whole time in California. She was only
three when they went there. Eric was one
and a half and five when they came back.
Even of her mind is that it was then her mother started working at this
literary agency before she set up her own with her friend Harietta. Before she always used to be at home during
the day and after that she almost never was.
When
her mother and Philip broke up, she did take it pretty hard. She was eight when they got married and
thirteen when they split, and even though her mother says those five years were
the hardest of her life, for Jody they were kind of nice. Jody really liked Philip a lot. She was still at the age then when she hoped
he mother would stop working and have more babies. Her mother said that her main problem is that
up till now she always married the men she fell in love with. Now she realizes “you can love someone but
maybe not be suited to live with them”.
It’s not that she regrets the other marriages.
After
it, Lyle wants to get back. Renee likes
him back at six. So he offered Jody to
walk home, but Jody told him she’d just take the bus down river side. Otherwise he would have had to go way out of
his way, since his sister lives in the Bronx.
Jody doesn’t know anyone who lives in the Bronx. In fact she has hardly
ever been there. To her it seems almost
like another state.
On the
way home, Jody started thinking about Lyle’s being an orphan. She never met an orphan before. She doesn’t
think people are orphan as much as they used to be, or maybe it’s just you
doesn’t hear about it. Though she
supposes it’s different to be one starting at seventeen than starting when
you’re a baby. The thing with Lyle is
that you can tell he doesn’t say right out what he feels about things, but you
know he does feel them. It’s just sort
of buried way down somewhere. Jody would
have liked to ask more about his parents, what they were like and how he got
along with them, but when he started to talk about it, his voice got sort of
tight, like it was painful for him. The
funny part is she could tell him felt about her family the way she did about
his, as though her mother’s being divorced twice made her practically like an
orphan. But she supposes he doesn’t
realize that there in New York everyone’s parents they started out with. It just seems to be extremely rare. So she doesn’t think of their setup as being
that odd or unusual. And she’s glad her
mother is not marrying Elliott. Not
because she wouldn’t want her mother to get divorced again, but he’s just kind
of ponderous. He’s a psychology
professor, and he has all these really out mode ideas about women, which she’d
think would bother her mother.
***
On weekend,
Jody took the subway up to Lyle’s sister’s house. It was way far up, around two hundred and
something street. They live in one of
those small houses, the kind with about five six stories, and she had to walk
up because there wasn’t any elevator.
There were papers in the hall and the walls needed painting. Lyle was wearing white sweater and chinos and
his tennis sneakers. It was a cool day
for late August. He took me into the
kitchen and made grilled-cheese and bacon sandwiches. Lyle starts to tell about Kitty, Renee’s
baby. Her name is Katherine, but that’s
what they call her. Renee was a Math
teacher, but she gave it up when Kitty was born. Renee said she wanted to devote herself to
the baby till the baby’s three or four.
Lyle shows Jody the rest of the apartment and it is true, it’s really
small. There is what Jody guesses is the
master bedroom, but it’s not like the one her mother and Elliott share, where
there’s room for a desk and an extra chair and everything. This one just a double bed, which about took
up the whole room. There is a TV in one
corner on a bureau, and that’s all. The
baby’s room was even smaller, just a crib with a mobile hanging over the bureau
and some kind of changing-table thing.
They
go back into the living room and sit down on the couch. As Jody said, to her privacy is pretty
important so she really feels sorry for Lyle.
She would hate sleeping in a room without even a door. Renee had just told that she was pregnant
when Lyle’s parents were in the accident.
Lyle was the type who would find a way of making even a situation like
that seem not so bad. She’s not sure
she’d be that adaptable. Jody looks
around at the rest of the room. On the
piano were some photos. Those are Lyle’s
parents. Lyle looks like his
mother. She was not as tall, but had
that some expression, sort of serious and a little puzzled, as though she was
trying to fit everything together. His
father was tall and thin with a dark moustache, and he was laughing.
***
Every
year Jody goes to the U.S Open with Philip at Forest Hills for the quarter or
semifinal. This year Jody asked if she
could bring Lyle and Philip said sure.
First thing that Jody’s thinking about Philip is hi was practically the
ugliest person she’d ever seen. He
looked almost like a monster to her.
He’s about six feet like an albino and his hair is that sort of
whit-blond that people can only see on little kids. Philip lives by himself in this horribly
messy apartment near Columbia. During
the tennis matches Jody sat between Lyle and Philip. We watched for a couple of hours, men’s
singles, than men’s doubles, than the women’s singles. Philip says he likes watching women play more
than men, and usually Jody does too, only this day there was a long, very dull
match between Chrissy Evert and Virginia Wade.
It wasn’t very interesting. Jody
keeps looking at Lyle, wondering what he was thinking.
Afterward
Philip takes them back to his place for supper.
He made spaghetti, which is all he ever makes. The only difference is that sometimes he
makes meat sauce and something clam.
Jody’s seeing Lyle glancing around the living room and the bedroom. There were stacks of books and papers piled
knee-deep all over the place as usual, and there was a queer, musty smell. Philip always forget to open the windows.
***
Lyle
and Jody had been planning to go to a movie, but evidently his sister was
counting on him baby-sitting, so Jody said she’d go up and keeps him company. Renee was tall and slightly thin with brown
hair, darker than Lyle’s, pinned up in back.
She looked nervous and had one of those quick, soft voices where you had
to listen carefully to hear everything she said. Her husband was quite handsome, though not in
the way Jody likes. He was sort of
chunky with square features and thick black hair. His name is Wesley.
As
they are going out, Lyle and Jody watch TV in the bedroom for a while then they
go into the living room and start making out on the couch. Jody starts having a fantasy that they were a
teen-age couple that had to get our baby, Kitty. After we put Kitty back, they go back to the
living room.
Lyle
says that he’s just sure he’s love with Jody.
Jody knows it, she says she doesn’t care if he loves her or not. Lyle feels so sorry. He thinks that they just have to know each
other better. He wants to have love-affair
with Jody, but he wants Jody to know the problem is about his parents. He just feels like this year is going to be
pretty tough for him. He’s just got to
get a scholarship and works hard and yet to start all over with teachers who
don’t know him and underneath, he supposes, he’s afraid of going to pieces. What he’s really afraid of is if they start
having an affair and it doesn’t go well.
It might be kind of throws him, and he just can’t afford that right
now. Jody knows it.
***
Jody’s
mother are going to have the operation in January, and then two weeks later she
and Elliott are going away for a week to some island in the Caribbean to
relax. At first, she wasn’t sure if it
would be okay to leave Eric and Jody home alone. In the past when she’s gone away, Jody and
Eric have stayed with her mother’s friend, Harietta, or her younger brother,
Howard. Jody’s mother and Elliott left
on their trip on Friday evening. On Saturday
Lyle and Jody are planning to go to a folk-music concert. Jody used to play guitar and even took
lessons for a couple of years at school.
She stopped the lesson, but she still plays sometimes, mostly alone in
her room. The concert was good. Afterward, they went out for pizza and
beer. They didn’t get back to the apartment
till almost two. Lyle looked around the
living room. Suddenly, Lyle asks to Jody
what if he loves her. Jody answers that
it will ok, she loves Lyle too. And they
get a relation that night.
Jody’s
mother always says that men can’t help having illusions about women and that
you’d go crazy trying to make them give them up. So if Lyle really and truly wants to think of
her as a “good” person, she supposes it doesn’t hurt to let him. It’s not that she thinks she’s a bad person,
even, it’s more that she would have thought, say, if she were describing
herself to someone who’d never met her, to list “goodness” as one of my major
attributes.
***
The
second week of April, Jody was sick for most of the week. She hadn’t been sick for that long in more
than two years. In the third day, when
she was debating if she should go in for a day of school, the letter came from
Cornell and Swarthmore. She got into
both of them! Cornell she had applied to
more as security, but she was pretty nervous about Swarthmore. Jody gets home late at Thursday, almost at
supper time. The second she opened the
door, her mother came bounding out of the kitchen, a huge smile on her face. She pulled this letter out from behind her
back. Jody could see from the stationery
it was the letter from Radcliffe. Her
mother was really happy that her daughter got letter from Radcliffe. But Jody wasn’t. She doesn’t like Radcliffe to be her next
college. Her mother stared at her and
asked what she was talking about. She
didn’t believe that Jody would prefer Swarthmore than Radcliffe.
Lyle
got into all the places he applies to, but Haverford id the only one that
offered him a more or less full scholarship, so he’s going there. He knew Jody was planning to go to
Swarthmore. At the end of the week, Jody
went to her mother and told her she’d thought it over and had decided that
she’d be happier at Swarthmore and her mother said “Ok”.
***
Someday,
on May 14th each year Jody’s school has an event called Alumni
Day. Not all the alumni come back. She had the feeling that Whitney, her
ex-boyfriend, might be one of the ones to come back. When she got to school that morning, she
wasn’t really surprised to see him standing in the front hall. Jody and Whitney were talking and make some
dating that night. Jody feels guilty
though, mainly in relation to Lyle.
The
following night, which was a Saturday, she’d agreed to go up to Lyle’s sister’s
apartment and baby-sit with him.
Frankly, that night, Lyle knows that Jody had ever slept with
Whitney. Lyle’s very angry and they
broke up.
***
Finally,
day by day they never talk each other.
One night, Jody can’t sleep. She
suddenly get this tremendous urge to talk to Lyle. Jody says that she’s really sorry for that
night with Whitney. She’s repenting for
her sins.
The
following day, no one was home. The
apartment was completely silent. Jody
started into her room, when she saw a note in Eric’s hand-writing. He’d tape it into the refrigerator. “Meet Lyle at the court”, it said. So, Jody decided to go to the court. When she got to the court, she could see Lyle
playing. He was playing doubles with
three other men. Jody walked over to the
side of the court and sat on the hall, looking down, watching him playing.
He
didn’t see Jody. He was too intent on
the game. She began feeling excited,
despite herself, and then mad that just a little call from him could have that
effect on her. It’s funny about
couples. It’s not that she thinks the only
relationship is the kind that last for all time. Maybe it’s sort of romantic, to want
that. But she wish she could be looking
back ten years from now so she could know if Lyle will be someone important,
someone who’s still there, or someone whom she’ll just remember because he was
the first. Not the first in one sense,
but the first in term of being all-out in love.
Comments:
Love
is magic. When people felt in love, the
word seems brighter and more beautiful.
Lyle and Jody are the couple who knows about love. Jody was eighteen when she felt in love with
Lyle. Maybe she had a sin with Whitney,
but she knows her last love is Lyle. If
Jody told to Lyle about Whitney with patient and guilty, Lyle would forgive
Jody and they’re still in their relationship.
But Lyle is a different person.
He didn’t grow up in New York where having sex without marrying is usual
thing there. So, he felt angry when he
knew that Jody was one of the New Yorker who did that thing.
