Read Online Love Story by Erich Segal - Free Book Online

asked
her.
    ‘Did you ever think I might be
pregnant?’ she answered.
    This didn’t make it easier for me
to catch my breath.
    ‘Are you?’ I could finally say.
    ‘Hah! Scared you, didn’t I?’
    ‘Nah.’
    ‘Don’t bullshit me, Preppie.’
    ‘Yeah. For a second there, I
clutched.’
    I carried her the rest of the way.
    This is among the precious few
moments I can recall in which the verb ‘scrounge’ has no
relevance whatever.
    My illustrious name enabled us to
establish a charge account at a grocery store which would otherwise
have denied credit to students. And yet it worked to our disadvantage
at a place I would least have expected: the Shady Lane School, where
Jenny was to teach.
    ‘Of course, Shady Lane isn’t able
to match the public school salaries,’ Miss Anne Miller Whitman, the
principal, told my wife, adding something to the effect that Barretts
wouldn’t be concerned with ‘that aspect’ anyway. Jenny tried to
dispel her illusions, but all she could get in addition to the
already offered thirty-five hundred for the year was about two
minutes of ‘ho ho ho’s. Miss Whitman thought Jenny was being so
witty in her remarks about Barretts having to pay the rent just like
other people.
    When Jenny recounted all this to me,
I made a few imaginative suggestions about what Miss Whitman could do
with her - ho ho ho - thirty-five hundred. But then Jenny asked if I
would like to drop out of law school and support her while she took
the education credits needed to teach in a public school. I gave the
whole situation a big think for about two seconds and reached an
accurate and succinct conclusion: ‘Shit.’
    ‘That’s pretty eloquent,’ said
my wife.
    ‘What am I supposed to say, Jenny -
‘ho ho ho’?’
    ‘No. Just learn to like spaghetti.’
    I did. I learned to like spaghetti,
and Jenny learned every conceivable recipe to make pasta seem like
something else. What with our summer earnings, her salary, the income
anticipated from my planned night work in the post office during
Christmas rush, we were doing okay. I mean, there were a lot of
movies we didn’t see (and concerts she didn’t go to), but we were
making ends meet.
    ‘Of course, about all we were
meeting were ends. I mean, socially both our lives changed
drastically. We were still in Cambridge, and theoretically Jenny
could have stayed with all her music groups. But there wasn’t time.
She came home from Shady Lane exhausted, and there was dinner yet to
cook (eating out was beyond the realm of maximum feasibility).
Meanwhile my own friends were considerate enough to let us alone. I
mean, they didn’t invite us so we wouldn’t have to invite them,
if you know what I mean.
    We even skipped the football games.
    As a member of the Varsity Club, I
was entitled to seats in their terrific section on the fifty-yard
line. But it was six bucks a ticker, which is twelve bucks.
    ‘It’s not,’ argued Jenny, ‘it’s
six bucks. You can go without me. I don’t know a thing about
football except people shout ‘Hit ‘em again,’ which is what you
adore, which is why I want you to goddamn go!’
    ‘The case is closed,’ I would
reply, being after all the husband and head of household. ‘Besides,
I can use the time to study.’ Still, I would spend Saturday
afternoons with a transistor at my ear, listening to the roar of the
fans, who, though geographically but a mile away, were now in another
world.
    I used my Varsity Club privileges to
get Yale game seats for Robbie Wald, a Law School classmate. When
Robbie left our apartment, effusively grateful, Jenny asked if I
wouldn’t tell her again just who got to sit in the V. Club section,
and I once more explained that it was for those who, regardless of
age or size or social rank, had nobly served fair Harvard on the
playing fields.
    ‘On the water too?’ she asked.
    ‘Jocks are jocks,’ I answered,
‘dry or wet.’
    ‘Except you, Oliver,’ she said.
‘You’re frozen.’
    I let the