The Summer Demands Read online

  I told him I had a lead on something. A lie. I knew we’d eventually need another income if we wanted to keep living as we were and continue to pay off our medical bills (how could there be more medical bills? still?) and the debt we’d taken on to finance our plan for reviving this place. But I didn’t want to think too hard about it right now, about my employability or how necessary, how urgent it might be for me to find work.

  I put my hands on the kitchen table, daring David to know something was up, but he didn’t notice, or he pretended not to notice, what I’d spent a good deal of the rest of that afternoon doing: admiring my crimson manicure. Stella was honest, and she’d said it was my color, so it was.

  “How was your day?” I asked him.

  Work was a series of disappointing client meetings, he told me, and I tried to be interested and consoling, because he’d found a job when we couldn’t make a go of the resort, because he worked hard, because I loved him, because he was starting to resent me, because I was pleased with my nails.

  When we finished our dinner of pasta and tomato sauce from a jar, I washed the dishes with a sense of purpose. I’d started living according to a certain arithmetic: If I did enough dishes, David couldn’t resent me as much. I took a glass vase out of a cupboard, rinsed it, too, and placed it on the counter, thinking that the next day, I would fill it with flowers. I would set a table. I would open a cookbook and make us a proper meal.

  David sat on the living room couch in semidarkness, looking at his phone.

  “David, David, David,” I said.

  He held on to his phone longer than he should have, out of habit, but before this could depress me, I took it from him, standing over him. He looked up, called back to a place that, out of habit, we hadn’t been for far too long. Then he took my hand, pulling me toward him.

  “I like your nails.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You found it,” he said, reaching up to touch the gold disc resting below my collar bone.

  I climbed on top of him. There was nothing covering the bay window in that room. It faced a backyard that turned into brush. I kept looking at the glass as if I might see someone outside, but all I got was my own reflection.

  Stella was golden in the sun. We lay on towels in the sand and she glittered, smooth and tan, after we’d been swimming in the lake. I had on a form-fitting, long-sleeve shirt, made of bathing-suit material, and though it protected me from getting burned, from ultraviolet damage, I wondered what the point was. My skin didn’t look like Stella’s did, like it sought out a two-piece in a kind of mandated-by-nature symbiosis. It might have, when I was younger, but I hadn’t known then to appreciate it. Or I knew—the world was always telling you—but I couldn’t comprehend it, I didn’t feel it. And maybe I had never been like Stella. I had thought she must put something in her short, straight black-brown hair, a balm or a spray, to make it fall so sharply around her face, with the sweep of bangs angled to the outer corner of her eye. But it naturally dried that way. Falling just so.

  In this effortlessness, she reminded me of the older girls at camp who had fascinated me when I was eight, nine, ten. Those girls were visions. Part mothers, part sisters, heroines, idols. They were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Some were thin, some muscular, some chubby. Their features had come into fullness and it seemed like they could never be dulled and they were all equally beautiful. But I can see that’s only true in retrospect. At the time, we younger girls absorbed—as if by osmosis, nobody ever said a word—the workings of an intricate caste system. We understood there was a hierarchy even if we couldn’t have said what it was or how, exactly, you came to occupy your place. At the top, the girls could be quiet or loud, careful or bold, academic achievers or average-grade getters, from wealthy Westchester or one of the less affluent towns outside Boston, attending camp with the assistance of a scholarship fund Esther and Joe had established. There were no specific criteria you could point to. But we all knew where each of the older girls stood. They had their favorites, too. Younger girls to whom they were especially kind or attentive, the shining girls in whom they saw themselves, and occasionally the girls they thought were less fortunate, whom they could pity with their charitable hearts.

  At the end of each season a themed banquet was held. Under the Sea, On Safari. The bunk of older girls who put it together each year would dress accordingly. The rest of us would wear our best outfits and, for about a half an hour before the dinner started, the girls who’d come to camp with disposable or compact cameras took pictures of each other. An exercise in exclusion, in documenting who was part of your group and who didn’t make it into the frame.

  When I was ten, the banquet theme was Outer Space, and my friend Wendy and I got dressed early and went to the bunk of older girls who were putting the finishing touches on their costumes. They loved Wendy, with her freckles, her sweetness, and her athletic ability. They told her how cute she looked, while one of them braided her hair. I sat quietly on the bed next to her, wearing a pink shirt Wendy had let me borrow. It had a perforated mesh pocket, above which was stitched the name of a popular French label. I wore my own denim skirt, brand: unknown, provenance: discount store.

  An older girl who had dressed as an alien—in a plastic headband with springs stuck into glitter-coated Styrofoam spheres—noticed me and said, “Hey, sweetie.” A loaded term of endearment; I thrilled to it even as I intuited she didn’t know my name. “Is that top yours?”

  The question wasn’t a question. She knew, somehow, that it wasn’t mine and wanted me to know that. I smiled strangely and shook my head, wanting nothing more than to dash out of there and back to my bunk to change, but I had nothing to change into. “Well, you look nice,” she said. I had never before been complimented in a way that seemed designed to make me ashamed, with no real understanding of what I was being shamed for or what it was I sat there feeling ashamed of.

  I’d turned onto my stomach, resting my head on my folded arms, my hair falling over my face, and Stella, sitting on her towel now, lifted a piece of it, like a curtain—you there?—and I looked up at her through my hair, which was still as dark as it had always been, only stray grays here and there. I shifted so all I saw was Stella against the trees and sky.

  “Who cuts your hair?” I asked her.

  “Alice, most recently. She was really good at it. I’ve been doing it myself but it doesn’t turn out as well.”

  For a while I had wanted the story of how she and Alice met, and now Stella decided to tell me. She’d been living in Boston. Somerville, to be exact. Working at a music venue and a different coffee place. The music venue tended to attract college kids, and one night, at a show, Alice arrived and she kept looking at Stella and sometimes Stella would make eye contact in return.

  Alice had darkly made-up eyes. She wore a deep green slip dress and a fuzzy purple jacket when everyone else was in black jeans and T-shirts. Stella supposed Alice thought herself intimidating, and Stella wasn’t particularly interested in intimidation. But after the show, Alice came over and said she had to talk to her because the two of them were the only ones there with amazing hair. It meant something, didn’t she think? Stella wasn’t sure but she supposed it wasn’t nothing.

  Alice came from New York. Brooklyn Heights. In her junior year at Harvard, after taking a couple of semesters off. Studying comparative literature. Stella liked that these facts, as Alice presented them to her, weren’t accompanied by the kind of embarrassment that rich girls so often expressed when they spoke to her—as if her presence, her existence, shamed them. Alice didn’t pretend she was poor or that she was unaware of what wealth did for her. Alice was accustomed to having choices, and in this way, she chose Stella.

  It didn’t bother Stella at first. Alice’s glamour and bossiness weren’t alien to Stella. They were, in fact, like a more fully realized and externalized version of qualities Stella knew she, Stella, inwardly possessed. Or maybe, just maybe, Stella would occasionally think in the months to come, s
he was the more fully realized and externalized of the two and Alice was only playing that role.

  “I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” said Stella. “But do you know what I mean?”

  I propped myself up on my elbows and stared down at my towel, gold and moss green, from a set left in Esther and Joe’s linen closet. I think she may have meant that Alice’s glamour and bossiness was based on habit and insecurity, while her own ability to meet and to match that glamour and bossiness, when she so wished, derived from self-respect. And Stella had entranced Alice in this way, perhaps—through her aura of self-respect.

  “Alice thought I was interesting.”

  “You are interesting.”

  “No, but interesting like a specimen. Like something to study,” Stella said. “At first I thought that was our thing. Like we were our own kind of project. We weren’t just, like, a couple. We were creating something that gave us purpose. Only, she could keep going with it in her mind, keep spinning it out, like our attraction was a philosophical game or something for her, and I didn’t care enough about that game, not in the way she did.”

  “Maybe you cared about something else more.”

  “A lot of the time I could already see myself as someone she would look back on years from now. So maybe I wasn’t totally in it either. We were going to come here together for the summer. I’d told her about this place.”

  “You were going to summer here.”

  Stella gave me a smile like I’d seen children give: guilty, amused, expecting to be rewarded for their mischief.

  “Yeah, we were going to be the kind of people who summer somewhere. As a joke, but we’d actually go, so, not a joke. But she got this fellowship and decided to stay at school.”

  Stella reached for her backpack, pulling out her phone to show me a photo of Alice. Her long, thick hair pulled back in an undone braid, like a nineteenth-century woman on the wall of the Musée d’Orsay. All entitled, voluptuous composure and insolence.

  I asked Stella if she and Alice were still in contact.

  “I don’t know. Not really. But she’s still in my phone, you know? People think I don’t give a fuck about things. Something about my face, I guess. Or maybe I don’t give a fuck about what they need me to give a fuck about. But my point is, I generally do give a fuck about things. And I think that was a problem for Alice. That I gave a fuck about things she didn’t. I’m sure she’s deleted me. I’m long gone from her world.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Well, you haven’t met Alice. But yeah, I get that maybe it’s easier, for me, to think that she can be so absolute about it being over.”

  “What did you give a fuck about that she didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. People? Feelings? I’m not even sure she liked me, as a human being. I think she liked me as a model for some kind of nonambition. And like I was a weird novelty to her in that way. If I had ambition it was a kind that didn’t correspond to what she’d been raised with, that didn’t even understand itself in those terms. I mean, just because I don’t go to Harvard doesn’t mean I don’t want to do anything with my life. I don’t want to be a barista forever. But it’s all right for now, you know?”

  I said that I understood that. How ambition was complicated. When you wanted something badly, you could become invested in the wanting. And then when that wanting didn’t result in the imagined outcome, or maybe even when it did, you were left in a situation where you had to give up the state of wanting you’d gotten so used to. Who were you, in a way, when the wanting was gone?

  I was thinking out loud, I suppose. Voicing some ongoing conversation I’d been having with myself.

  “You mean this camp, not being able to make it into a resort or whatever?” Stella asked.

  “No, I guess I’m thinking more about how we got to this place, how we even ended up here at Alder.”

  Stella had been digging her heels in the sand, creating shallow channels, moats. She stopped for a moment.

  “Did you think about trying to revive it as a camp for kids?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Why? Do you hate children?”

  She hadn’t expected me to laugh.

  “I mean—”

  “I don’t hate kids.”

  At twenty-two, she was closer to being a child, in years, than she was to being my age.

  “No, I get it,” Stella said. “I don’t want to have kids.”

  “Ever?”

  “Yeah. Why? Why would you do that to yourself and to another human being?”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “No.” Her consideration of the subject played out across her face—slightly raised brows, skewed, pensive mouth. “But sometimes. Yeah.”

  “Well, you never know, you might change your mind.”

  She nodded, conceding but unbelieving. As if the concepts of reversal and ambivalence were possible but abstract. Like she could only place herself in them the way she could place herself on an imagined ice floe in Antarctica.

  “Do you want to have kids?” she asked me.

  There was something so straightforward about Stella’s question—as if she had no idea how loaded such a question could be. Coming from her, it was a simple inquiry, which somehow made it possible for me to answer. I sat up, wrapping my arms around my knees, facing the water and the dock, with Stella in my peripheral vision.

  “We tried. I always wanted a child in a kind of abstract way, like someday it’d be nice to have a family. I never imagined it in great detail but I sort of just always saw it as happening one day, though I never had the biological urgency some women talk about. But there’s this point where everyone around you is having kids. And maybe it sounds shallow and wrong but that made me want it in this even stronger, more immediate way. Like I’d be left behind. I’d be missing out. So we started trying. And it wasn’t happening. And then I had a miscarriage. And.” And and and.

  “I’m sorry.” She brought her hand to my forearm, her blue fingertips resting on my wrist.

  And then I found myself apologizing. I barely knew her. I shouldn’t have been telling her all of this.

  “We might keep trying,” I said, brightly, like I’d made her sad and now I needed to cheer her up. “You know, with more fertility treatments and all that. Maybe adoption. We can’t really afford more trying, though. It just seems like . . . like a lot now.”

  I thought of my brother’s son, of visiting their house a couple of years earlier, without David for some reason, and my nephew was five and couldn’t sleep and he appeared, by the side of the guest room bed, carrying a pillow on which he’d arranged an assortment of stuffed animals. Two of his cherished “Lolos,” what he interchangeably called these bears with formless velour handkerchief bodies, a small plush owl, and a fox he’d considerately picked out for me. He asked if he could sleep in this bed with me and I said sure, thinking that my brother wouldn’t approve but that I couldn’t refuse him. He got under the covers and I reached over to touch his cheek and then his so-thin shoulder and, already more than half asleep, he took my arm into the fold and held it close to himself, as if it were another one of his animals. It wasn’t entirely unlike the tender way Stella had taken my hand in hers when she painted my nails, or the way her fingertips had rested on my wrist just now.

  “Alice would say something like, I don’t know, she’d say we make our own families. Or like, what even is family? She’d reduce it to something that’s not worth having. A social construct that’s dangerous and divisive.”

  “Why is she still in your phone?”

  “I don’t know.” She smiled, shrugged. “Why haven’t you told your husband I’m here?”

  In an office in the lodge, the old microphone of the PA system still sat out on a large wooden desk. When I’d gone to camp here, every night at lights-out, a counselor would sing “Taps” into it. All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.

  The one summer I worked there as a counselor, my closest friend was a girl my ag
e named Berrie Lerner. She had wildly curly hair and gray eyes and a boyfriend back home she was going to break up with because she couldn’t stop thinking about John, one of the boys around our age who worked on the kitchen staff, whom she had been with all July. I was with Stuart, another “kitchen guy,” as they were called, and the four of us would go down to the lake some nights and go swimming or just sit in the sand, or on the low concrete retaining wall, and fool around. Stuart and I quickly came to an unspoken understanding that we liked each other, liked each other’s body, but that neither of us fascinated the other. Berrie and John fascinated us. When the four of us were together, we were spectators and Berrie and John were the show.

  When it was Berrie’s turn to sing “Taps,” her voice, a steady contralto, would come through the PA system strong and clear but also soft. A voice to tuck you in and kiss your cheek. Berrie thought the last line went God is night. I could have corrected her when she came out and we sat on the steps with our flashlights, the heat of the day replaced by a coolness that required a sweatshirt. We’d be quiet for a while before we began to whisper about the girls or something that had happened that day or what we would do on our day off, how high school and our towns seemed so far away. Berrie would make a pronouncement about field hockey or blow jobs, in a you-know-how-it-is way, like a jaded forty-something divorcee, and then she would giggle or moan and—oh, shit—remember where we were and what time it was and lower her voice. God was nigh. God was night.

  Stella had left me a note on a piece of blue scrap paper, slipped through the mail slot in the front door of my house and onto the small kilim rug in the front hall, sometime after David headed out in the morning. She would be back this afternoon, said the note. We could go boating, maybe? She included her cell phone number and signed it: S. Her handwriting was girlish, looping, pleased with itself, more feminine and bubbly than I would have expected. It didn’t have the ageless quality of a certain kind of cursive that used to be taught—the penmanship of Aunt Esther, script that you could read pages and pages of. Irrationally, I used to think my own handwriting would evolve, as I got older, to resemble Aunt Esther’s hand. But it remained crabbed and illegible.