The Summer Demands Read online

“What?” I said. “Oh.” A small, embarrassed laugh. “No, actually. Not yet.”

  “Stella,” she said, showing me her hand, the one I’d held the day before, and then extending it.

  “Emily.” I shook her hand and then wondered, again, if I’d released it too soon or too late. “Are you off to work?”

  “I have a little time before then.”

  “Oh. Well, do you want to go for a walk or something?” It was strange, ostensibly having all the power here but feeling that I was the one taking a risk. A sense of relief, a stirring to life, when she said okay.

  We walked, out past the cluster of the rec hall, the old arts-and-crafts building, and a large storage shed of moldering athletic equipment. Into the full sun of the basketball court, the nets on the baskets having mostly disintegrated on the rusting rims. Into a shaded path that led to a bench by a stone wall. She seemed to know this place as well as I did.

  She’d grown up close to here, she told me, not too far from Plymouth. She should have had a Boston accent, misplaced r’s, drawn-out vowels; hints of it came through in a word or two, but mostly she sounded like she was from any place, no place.

  Plymouth, where the pilgrims eventually landed the Mayflower in 1620, where actors dressed up as seventeenth-century colonists at a reenactment village. You could visit them in their thatched-roof homes, and they would try to inhabit their time, telling you about blacksmithing or cutting hay, while also having a contemporary sensitivity and awareness of what that time would become. I had been there once on a school field trip. Stella had been there many times, she told me, and she’d even worked in the gift shop one summer.

  “People would always try to get the actors to break character,” she said. “You know, say something about modern life or drop their English accents. Not just kids, parents, too. Teacher chaperones, even. It always seemed like a weird thing to do. Weird and mean. Like everyone knows it’s an act, you’ve bought a ticket to see the act and be part of it and then you’re trying to get the actors to mess up, you’re trying to get someone to be bad at their job so you can go ‘aha!’ Or something. Like what kind of satisfaction do you get out of that?”

  “When you put it that way, it does seem mean and weird.”

  “Just let them do their job, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like, I do my job and I don’t give a shit but I do give a shit. I try to get people’s names right. And then you mess up and they take a picture of their name spelled wrong on the cup and post it online. My ex used to do that. Her name is Alice. How can you really get that wrong, right? One time she ordered a coffee someplace and they wrote ‘Salad’ on it and she was like, what the fuck and laughing. But what if your name is Salad or something? Maybe that’s what they heard and they just didn’t want to offend her.”

  When Stella let out a what-the-fuck laugh recalling her ex-girlfriend Alice’s what-the-fuck laugh, she smiled wide and radiant, and I found myself smiling, too. But then, at the thought of her ex, maybe, she pressed her lips shut, puffed her cheeks, and then blew out the breath. I stopped smiling, too.

  “I need a job,” I said, because she’d brought up the subject of work, and asking about Alice, even though she’d also brought that up, felt like prying somehow. And I didn’t want to appear at all flustered by the knowledge that she liked women. Because why, really, should I have been flustered? “I’m looking for a job.”

  “What kind of job? What do you do?”

  What did I do? I walked around here a lot. I’d tried to garden. I went for swims. I took a canoe out onto the lake. I took pictures of the neglected spaces, the empty dining hall, the long tables I’d once sat at now pushed against the wall, the industrial oven shut like a gigantic, ancient mouth, orange life jackets faded by the sun that found its way into the boathouse, massive cobwebs, secret messages scrawled in marker on rafters in the cabins. Names I knew and names I didn’t. Lost girlhood. There was so much long-gone girlhood around here. Scrawled hearts on the walls. Doggerel about boys. About body parts, burps, and farts. Palimpsests of so many summers past. It was going to be a project. There was an old enlarger up at the lodge and a ventilated space that had once been used as a darkroom when photography had been offered as a camp activity. I would buy new chemicals, develop these photographs, maybe write text to go with them. It could be a book?

  It was true that I was looking for work, I explained. I told her about the job postings I scrolled through each day with descriptions that all read like advertising copy for an extreme sports drink. “Are you ready to kick ass and take names?” No. “We believe work is play. Have you got game?” I’m not sure. “Do you have a passion for juices?” I like juice, but no, I wouldn’t say passion. Still, I hit send on my résumé. Every click showed me my age. Thirty-nine. I wouldn’t have hired me if I were these people.

  “I’m not exactly sure what it is that I do,” I told her. “I inherited this camp and we came here thinking we would redo it, make it into a kind of resort, but that hasn’t really worked out.”

  “No?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You’re our guest, I suppose. Guest number one.”

  She and Alice had actually come here together, she said, in late May. But they’d broken up. Alice went back to Cambridge. She was going to be a senior at Harvard in September. Stella was going to be what she’d always been, a townie. Her word.

  Stella laughed again, from her chest and with her shoulders.

  “Who the fuck has a passion for juices?” she said.

  Stella had asked me what it was that I did. In what seemed more and more like another life, I had been a journalist. Or maybe “a writer of service journalism” was a better way to put it. I talked to people who wanted to talk, who had something to publicize, and punched that up into a story. But I wasn’t the best at coaxing information from someone who wasn’t already eager to share. When I’d started working at a newspaper, just out of college, I imagined I might do it for a few years and then apply to graduate school—a writing program, maybe a film program—but I never did. It turned out I liked my job, or I liked the way it kept me from interrogating my own ambition. For a while, anyway. If you don’t try—if you tell yourself you can’t try because certain circumstances prevent you—then you can’t fail. And there was still a gruff, ink-stained glamour to the profession at the time I got into it. The hard-boiled investigative reporter, Gene, who leaned back in his swivel chair and grumbled at whoever was on the other end of the line: “Look, you’re either a source or a target. What do you want to be?” He liked me because I liked him and I knew who Rosalind Russell was, I had seen His Girl Friday more than once. But I remember thinking, Is that all it takes? Knowing the right references to flatter the vanity of this middle-aged man? It went some distance, but it wasn’t all it took, of course. Gene accepted a buyout two years before my job was eliminated and then the paper essentially became a listings guide.

  I moved into public relations work, in New York and then in Chicago, and for a while I had enough hustle to disguise my lack of conviction, but eventually people—clients—could tell. One of them, who considered herself a friend, encouraged me to go with her to a gathering at a wine bar for “professional women.” It was the kind of event where you couldn’t make a joke about being an “amateur woman.” I went home and felt terrible about myself.

  But what kept me from feeling too terrible was that I had already shifted my focus elsewhere. David and I were trying to have a child. I would be a parent and—problem solved—that would be my primary identity. I knew better than to talk about it this way, for any number of political, cultural, and psychological reasons. I knew, from conversations with my friend Liz, a mother of two young girls, that it didn’t really work that way, even if you wanted it to. But, I secretly thought, I’m not Liz. Liz is not me. And I was right about that, at least. I wasn’t Liz. I wasn’t able, it seemed, to have one child, let alone two.

  We had sought out fertility specialists. We had sa
t in waiting rooms exchanging expectant looks of hope and vulnerability with the people waiting with us. I remember one stylish, fox-faced woman whose appearance suggested expertise and sophistication, that she knew how to move through the world, how to do everything successfully, everything, that is, but this. Her tight air of determination initially struck me as a caricature, until one day I realized I was setting my mouth in the same grim little line.

  But then. But then! All of the science, the shots, the waiting, the failing, the trying again. It worked. It actually worked. I felt it almost immediately, my body recalibrating itself, reshaping itself. My body forcing my guarded mind to accept that this was happening. I’d read—God, I’d read so much—that you wouldn’t need maternity clothes for a few months at least, but though I could fit into the pants I owned, they all felt too restrictive. It was as if, on a cellular level, I had been enlarged overnight. Like my blood had thickened. I wanted space and ease. I wanted soft, stretchy waistbands from the get-go. And I was exhausted all the time. No shit, said Liz, when I called her. Your body is making another body. And David and I marveled at how uncanny that was. What my body could do. My body could make another body! My body could even get my hopes up.

  You would feel betrayed, wouldn’t you, by someone who got your hopes up only to dash them. You would think that at best, that someone was recklessly naive, and at worst, extremely cruel. At fourteen weeks in, our doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. I’d had what’s called a missed miscarriage. One of the few things I hadn’t read about, couldn’t bring myself to read about. And so, though I vaguely knew what a D&C was, I hadn’t comprehended that I would need a procedure to remove everything that had been growing inside of me, the body that my body, so recklessly naive, had been making. For three months, I had felt so powerful in a purely biological, unthinking way. And then, for no particular reason anyone could determine, my body became a tender, faulty thing and all I could do was think.

  I didn’t quite know how to make sense of time, after we lost the baby. I kept organizing my life, my hours and days, around something that no longer existed in time: This is when I would have started to feel it kicking, this is when I would have given birth. David told me he did the same, but I did it for longer. I did it for so much longer I felt I had to start keeping it a secret, because if anyone knew, they would—out of concern for my sanity—try to take that compulsion away from me, too.

  When our child would have been about three months old, my great-aunt Esther died of heart failure, of age essentially, and I learned she’d made me her beneficiary. She’d left me the whole camp, with no instructions or provisions on what to do with it. For more than fifty years, a couple hundred girls had come to Camp Alder every July and August, including me. But for the last fifteen years or so, it had sat empty. Uncle Joe had died, and Esther, in her final years, had moved to an assisted-living facility.

  We’d have to sell it. We lived, at the time, halfway across the country, and what would we do with an old camp? The question started to resolve itself only when I asked myself why we lived halfway across the country. Why still. We had gone to Chicago when David was offered a career-making opportunity. But we had no family there. And by then I had no real job. And David’s career-making opportunity had become a source of growing bitterness about the corporatized direction his organization, an architecture firm that was supposed to specialize in housing for low-income populations and the homeless, was heading in. He said he wished he worked with his hands again. He had spent summers in school doing construction.

  An idea took hold and I laid it out. We would move. To the camp. We would make it into a resort. Camp for adults, it was something of a trend at the time. I’d heard of ones in the Hudson Valley and Wisconsin. A place for companies that considered themselves forward-thinking to hold retreats, for the kind of weddings that became weeklong events. Why couldn’t we do this? Maybe, in the off-season, we could host a residency for artists. We would spruce it up just enough, add a few elevated touches: nice sheets, striped wool blankets, interesting but unobtrusive enameled fixtures. Stationery for guests to write letters home. The bunks would be cozy. The dining hall awash in elegant light. Half Adirondacks lodge, half turn-of-the-twentieth-century Austrian sanatorium. And the food. The food! We would have a marvelous chef. Some friend of a friend who was superb but underappreciated. We would grow our own ingredients. I would learn about greens and root vegetables. I would buy overalls and wear them.

  “That sounds like a fantasy,” said David. “An Internet-fueled fantasy. And kind of cynical.”

  “And?”

  I admitted I no longer knew what cynicism was and if there was a point when it doubled back on itself and became belief. But I was convinced we wouldn’t be building an exclusive enclave, we’d be building a welcoming microcosm. I put it this way to David, to dovetail with his principled view of the world. If it all went well, perhaps we could even apply for grants, establish some sort of partnership where we provided housing and helped people—homeless families, refugees—get back on their feet.

  “That’s not really how it works,” he said. But there was something encouraging in his smile, a pleasure in seeing a spark in me he’d thought was gone.

  “Look who’s cynical now.”

  I had a goal, a new possibility, a different way to keep track of time. I populated spreadsheets. I determined the proposition was risky but possible. I convinced David. We let our lease run out, sold off some of our furniture, packed up the rest in a truck, and set off for New England in the winter, leaving one cold climate for another. We’d counted on red tape in getting the proper permits and licensing and loans. We anticipated the surfacing of unseen structural problems. We had thought that time plus money plus will could result in achievement, but it turned out we didn’t have the right amount of each variable to resolve the equation.

  The clouds threatened rain all morning, and when it came, sheets of it hitting the shutters, Stella and I were in her bunk, flashlights and an old lamp I’d found for her in the lodge glowing against the gloom. I’d turned on the bunk’s electric supply for her. We were playing jacks, the set she’d found on a shelf. She’d had to look up the object of the game on her phone. She needed to remind me, too, but though I’d forgotten the rules, the weight of the tarnished, pointed metal pieces was so familiar in my palms. The glinting green rubber ball hadn’t deteriorated at all. We scoured the floor for rough spots—there would be no splinters today.

  Her nails were still that galactic blue, though it had come off a little. Time to repaint, she said. So that’s what we did when we’d had enough of jacks. She had two bottles of polish, the blue and a dark, glossy red. Crimson, she said, choosing for me. She expertly used only a minimum of polish remover on a cotton ball and then brushed on a fresh coat of the navy lacquer. I struggled to look as skilled as Stella. It took me forever to do one hand, the color going all over my fingers because I’d had no practice. I rarely did this.

  “Here,” she said, taking my other hand, in a competent, caring, practiced manner, like I’d first taken hers, when removing that splinter, and she placed it on the floor in front of her. But there was also a tenderness in her touch. And—I don’t think I was imagining it—an electricity. Something transformative, too: In no time, my fingers seemed to belong to a woman with dark brows and cutting cheekbones, holding an apple to her open mouth, in a silk dress and the highest heels, in front of a camera lens somewhere in Paris in the 1980s.

  “That’s totally your color,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “I mean, it’s the only other color I have. But yeah.”

  She looked from my hands to my face and then my neck as if she were answering a question she’d asked herself.

  “I think I have something that belongs to you,” she said, and she got up, opened the top drawer of her dresser, and turned around, holding out a gold necklace, a chain with a small disc imprinted with an “E.” It shone out of the low light. David had given it
to me as a birthday present years back and I’d lost it a month or so before. By the water, I’d thought, though I couldn’t be sure.

  “Yes, that’s mine.” I was relieved to see it again, but that relief didn’t squash a wrenching in my gut and a tightening I could feel across my face.

  “I found it down by the lake. I figured it could have been anybody’s though probably yours. But at the time, I didn’t know how to return it to you without either letting you know I was here or totally creeping you out. Like, I mean, if I’d left it visibly on your porch or something, you’d be like, what the fuck, who put that there, right?”

  “Right. Yeah.”

  “Here,” she said, and because my nails were still drying, she moved behind me to put it around my neck, brushing my hair to the side. She didn’t linger when she hooked the clasp, she efficiently performed a task, like a hairstylist or a doctor or any other professional who might have cause to touch the back of your neck. But I’d never before replayed to myself—as I did on my way back to the house, when the rain let up a little—the motions, the positioning, the feel of any hairstylist or doctor who’d ever touched the nape of my neck.

  “It’s so pretty on you,” she’d said, stepping around to look at me. And I’d lowered my gaze to the disc hanging around my neck, so I didn’t have to look at her looking at me.

  Back at the house, I didn’t even get out of my raincoat, I went straight up to my room, taking the stairs in twos, to examine the tray where I kept a few bracelets, and with my glossy nails—polish made them feel different, more object-like—I opened a velvet-lined box. I didn’t own much expensive jewelry but what I had, a couple of pendants, an emerald ring from Aunt Esther, was all still there, exactly where I remembered it being. Stella was honest, I reassured myself. If there was dishonesty here, it was my own, I thought, out of breath, standing there with water dripping off my raincoat.

  Later, David asked about my day. Any job prospects?