Summer of Sin Ch. 01

((Submitting this to see if there is any interest - if there is, I will post more. This story is long, and will take some time to get to the naughty stuff!))

It was the summer of 1959, and Nancy was feeling blessed.

For starters, she had just graduated high school - with top marks, no less. Maybe not valedictorian level, sure. But all A's, and what's more, she had been accepted to a top girls' college all the way in New York. It wasn't in the city - her mother would never allow that - but it was still far from home, and from everything she had researched it seemed to be very prodigious.

On top of that, her grandparents had just given her a more than modest gift of money, as a graduation present. While many of her friends from school would be working at the soda shop or the diner that summer, she was now well off enough to spend her last few months at home lounging around, making social calls, and avoiding work altogether. Which is exactly what she had planned. It felt a little guilty, but for the first few weeks she reveled in waking up late, dressing down, and spending her afternoons doing little more than puttering around the garden and reading mystery novels in the backyard. Her mother was not keen on such idle behavior, but given how well she had done in school, she grudgingly accepted it as a sort of earned vacation.

Nancy and her parents lived in a quiet, leafy suburb. It was a brand new development, and although every house looked the same, she loved it there. She lived nearby all of her friends, and had been close enough to school that she could walk. Her church was nearby, too, as well as the recreational center where she attended her weekly book club. In the evenings, she and the other girls would go to the park, eat ice cream, and watch the boys' baseball games. She did dream of visiting New York City someday, but until then, her neighborhood was basically her little paradise.

After a few weeks of lazing around, however, she began to realize what she was missing by not working. Everyone was getting older, and with college approaching, all of her old school friends were either breaking off into early adulthood or forming cliques around their jobs. Nancy's afternoons, which she spent alone, began to grow boring, if not a little lonely. And soon she even stopped being invited to the baseball games, and stopped getting calls on the kitchen phone. In mid-July, she realized that she hadn't seen a friend in almost a week.

She tried going out, and forcing her way into social events, but the other girls treated her standoffishly. She realized, with some shock, that some of them were even hanging out with boys. She could barely believe it - did their parents know? She could barely stand to see her old friends, some of which she knew for a fact had pledged themselves until marriage, kissing and holding hands with creepy guys from high school. Some were even worse. At the diner one day, she spied Lucy McEnnis and a boy in his car, and he was touching her chest. It was almost too much to bear.

Oh well, she thought. It was only two months until college, and then things would get back to normal. And if not, well... at least she could start fresh. Until then, she would keep to herself, work on the garden, and try to improve her reading.

She loved working in the garden, and loved the excuse to wear her slim blue jeans, and her fun short sleeved shirt. She loved tying her auburn hair into a messy bun and rolling up her sleeves to get some sun on her arms. It was fun to dress differently, and to take a break from the swing skirts and long wool shirts that had were the unofficial uniform of most suburban girls. Part of her interest in seeing the city was rooted in the kind of fashion photos she saw in LIFE magazine and others, of women in New York who wore the kind of clothing that movie stars did. It wasn't exactly Madison Avenue, but when she was by herself at home in her pants and nearly form-fitting shirt, Nancy felt like she was getting away with something.

She knew why her parents frowned upon it. Although she didn't go with boys, she knew how they looked at her. She was, as her mother would say, awfully "developed," so she was encouraged to cover up. It wouldn't exactly be acceptable for any of them - or any of Mom's gossipy friends for that matter - to get a wrong impression by seeing her dress "like a boy". But as long as she was careful, and did so when her Dad was at work and her Mom was away socializing, it wasn't so bad. It was just for her - and it wasn't like she was necking in the backseat, like other girls seemed to be doing.

So on those long summer afternoons, she wore her "secret" clothes, and toiled away in the dirt for hours, working on her flowers, and polishing the little statues that her mother collected, and laying in the grass and letting the sun wash over her. The only person who may have seen her was the man next door, but he seemed to have secrets of his own. Nancy's parents said that he was some kind of businessman, and while he did go about in a smart suit, he always seemed to come home in the middle of the day, if he came home at all. He looked normal enough, maybe thirty-five or forty years old, with neat hair and handsome but not-too-handsome features, but whenever he wandered back to his house at one in the afternoon, he would stroll down the path between his and Nancy's house and give her a knowing smile, as if he knew that they were both revealing something that no one else knew.

It made her feel a little funny. As far as she could tell, she was like everyone else, just a plain, freckled eighteen year-old just barely becoming too big for her childhood home. That's how it went with everyone, right? But when he gave her that little smile, it made her feel... adult. Or something like that. But he never spoke, and it made her think that there was something about him that was unique in that characterless suburban landscape, whether it was a paradise or not.

She began to wonder about the man, even going so far as to ask about him at the dinner table. Her mother brushed the topic away, which only made Nancy more curious. So she began to keep a close eye out for him, both in the afternoons when he would arrive home (in which case she would do her best to smile politely, as if to convince him to say something) and at night, when she might catch a glimpse of him through an open window.

It didn't strike her as odd - it was curiosity, that was all. But over the course of a week or so she began to spend more time in her bedroom, gazing through the blinds of the window that overlooked his house. It was a strange pastime, sure, but as she went longer and longer without seeing her old friends, she became more fixated on the idea of this strange person next door. Before long, she was creating narratives in her head. Was she reading too many mystery novels, or was this man some kind of government agent? It would make sense - the strange working hours, the polite silence. It would make sense, too, that a secret agent would lay low in a plain-jane neighborhood like theirs, to avoid suspicion. Every now and then, she would get a tantalizing look at him through the window, either eating dinner, drinking casually, or watching television. But none of it satisfied her.

Then one night, at the end of July, she was in her billowy pink negligee, reading in bed with the windows open. A strange smell came wafting in, and she was surprised to see the man next door, outside on his patio, laying back in a lounge chair. He was smoking something - it was not a cigarette, and the smell wasn't tobacco. He had a portable record player by his side, and if she focused her hearing just right, she could catch the faintest sound of jazz music playing. Jazz music! She had heard it a few times before, but only in snippets. The man was something else, something else entirely. But what could it be?

She got as close to the window as possible. The neighbor's yard was just a few dozen feet away. As carefully and quietly as she could, she slid the window open further, to try and identify that smell, and to try and hear some more of the music playing. She even sat on the broad windowsill to get as close as possible. She held her breath - but she forgot to turn her light off. And when she slipped and rattled the blinds, the man next door turned his head in surprise and got a full glimpse of Nancy, staring at him through the open window.