The Summer Demands Read online

  I could’ve tossed the note—I had her number now—but instead I took it upstairs and buried the blue paper in my nightstand drawer. And then I waited. I went online and read an article on how to build a professional network and counted this as a productive use of my time.

  I looked at old pictures of Esther and Joe. I’d come across a shoebox full of photos in the house and an album in the lodge—green imitation leather, a three-ring binder of yellowed adhesive pages covered in flimsy plastic. In the early ’70s: Some windy day. Esther in her trench coat, her dark, wavy hair pinned up under a thin scarf tied at her chin, her burgundy leather pocketbook. Joe in his belted trousers, his undershirt visible beneath his collar, his shirtsleeves rolled to reveal his still muscular, hairy arms. In the late ’40s: Esther in a dark floral silky dress, patent leather heels with cracks and creases in them, Joe in a suit and tie. The ’50s: In front of their house (our house) where saplings had just been planted.

  Esther and Joe never had children, though they’d tried. This fact had occurred to me before, vaguely, but I never felt the force of it, the force of that absence, until I experienced it myself. Until we’d entered into that world of biological chance, until pregnancy became something I sought rather than sought to avoid, I’d mostly thought childlessness was a choice. Or I hadn’t given it much thought either way. The final time I saw Esther was at a bar mitzvah shortly after I’d been through another failed IVF round—the last fertility treatment I believed I could endure (though it turned out I would endure one more). She’d asked about my life, the two of us at a table, David buttonholed into small talk elsewhere in the reception room, and I told her the truth. How could I not? We had been each other’s favorite in our family. And somewhat hunched-back now, wearing a black robelike dress, she reminded me of a large, friendly owl blinking through her thick glasses. Surely she had some wisdom to impart.

  “All the people we knew,” she said, “all they did was talk and talk and talk, but not about that. Or they would talk about it happening, like gossip, but they would never talk about it with you. The only person I could talk to was Joe, because it was his loss, too. But even then, there was a loss that was only mine, and I couldn’t keep losing.”

  “I can’t either,” I said. I took in the dance floor, where my cousin’s thirteen-year-old son and his friends had gathered, some of them obnoxious, some tentative, a few spontaneously giving themselves over to the music.

  Esther placed her bony, spotted hand on mine, gently patting it first, and then squeezing.

  About a year later, I learned she’d left the camp to me. For as long as I could remember, I’d seen Esther and Joe as an iconoclastic duo that had sneaked away from, but still had strong ties to, the neighborhood they came from. Their families. Their brothers and sisters. Esther had lost two older brothers in the Second World War and Joe had lost one, yet there were still so many of them. Esther had four other siblings and Joe had six. There were so many of them that none of them, not even my grandfather, my father’s father, were entirely real to me. Except for Esther and Joe, the youngest in their families, a half-generation younger than their oldest siblings. I knew most of them only as a small child, and the women were all one woman to me: folds of powdery skin, curled silver hair, Bakelite jewelry, enormous breasts that could smother you. The men: out-of-shape heavyweight boxers, cologne, ill-fitting suits, thinning straight hair or wild wiry locks. They were like illustrations in one of my picture books. I associated all of them with deli platters, Jordan almonds, those toothpicks with the crinkly cellophane flourish on top, Yiddish.

  We might have lived in their house and inhabited their camp but David and I were not Esther and Joe. We didn’t have an extended family of campers and staff. We had—I had—Stella.

  The paddles and lifejackets we got from the boathouse. The canoe was already down by the water. Stella sat in the front and I took the back. We made our way through weeds and a tangle of lily pads—the rhythm of the strokes returned to me easily and Stella knew it too.

  “When did you learn how to canoe?”

  I asked when, not how, because I didn’t want her to think I’d made certain assumptions about her—that her life, her circumstances, wouldn’t have contained boats.

  “It’s new. Alice taught me before she left. She learned at camp.”

  Stella didn’t turn around, so I couldn’t see if there was any irony in her expression. If she had some knowingness about my conversational calculations, all the assumptions I made and tried to get out of in my questions.

  In the middle of the lake was a small wooded island. Or more like a mound of land thick with trees. Alder trees, for which the lake was once named, though it was actually a pond, according to an old surveyor’s map that hung on an office wall up at the lodge. Everyone at camp, though, had always simply called it “the lake.” We circled the island and decided not to get out—ticks, and we weren’t wearing pants and long sleeves—but we stopped paddling and just floated and Stella told me she had explored the island one day. That if you walked to the middle, there was a clearing, which was spooky because you never saw anybody maintaining it. It was like a crop circle or something.

  “Do you believe in that sort of thing?” I asked her. And I wondered about the clearing—the phenomenon of an absence that just keeps existing, that nature hadn’t covered over and restored.

  “What, like aliens?”

  “The supernatural.”

  “I’m not sure. I like astrology, though.”

  “Well, yeah. Your name. It means—”

  “Star, yeah. I know.” We shared an awkward laugh. Her mother had told her when she was small, I imagined, looking up at the night sky or telling her a story before bed. She’d been told by anyone since then who had tried to hold her attention. She didn’t need me to tell her.

  “My mother was—is—a huge David Bowie fan. Ziggy Stardust. All that. That’s why she named me Stella. Or that’s what she’s always said.”

  She turned to face me, smiling, and she didn’t ask me what my sign was. She told me. She knew. Or she guessed and she was right. Then she turned back around and we continued floating in the canoe. Silent, aimless, absorbing the sun. A green-and-purple dragonfly landed on my knee and I stared at it, expansively curious, as if I were communing with it, as if its iridescence were going to tell me a secret, as if I were drugged.

  We paddled back, eventually, pulled the canoe up onto land and left it there. Stella removed her life jacket and went into the water for a swim, out to the aluminum dock, and I sat in sand that was soft as velour, realizing that I still had my own life jacket belted around me. I finally took it off and leaned back on it. The brightness of the day, filtered through the leaves of a scraggly tree, glowed orange-red through my closed eyelids.

  I thought of a hot night when neither of us were sleeping and David and I came down here with flashlights and swam in the dark, warm water.

  I thought of Esther and Joe, one September, maybe. After Labor Day, when the season was over but it was still warm, the air still soft but with a hint of something sharper and metallic on the way. The two of them by this lake they’d loved for so long. It wasn’t chlorinated, Olympic-sized, it didn’t appeal to a new generation of parents or their children.

  “We could have built a pool,” Esther says.

  “We have a goddamn lake.” Joe’s voice cracks as it rises. A lake! What the fuck is wrong with people?

  To live was to make so many compromises. One had to draw the line somewhere. This was their principled refusal. No pool. And so, the last Alder campers had come and gone more than fifteen years ago. Esther and Joe had considered selling to a developer. Up by the lodge, across the street, there was a housing tract. Homes built in the early ’90s that now looked neither new nor old. The people who lived there were what used to pass for upper middle class, better off than many of the people in this town, who inhabited deteriorating houses that had belonged to their grandparents, or boxy, cheaply fabricated homes. I
pictured Stella growing up in one of those small, square houses with thin walls, a few towns over. Where her mother told her the meaning of her name.

  That night I dreamed about the lake, only there were old stone steps that led down to it, the same kind of worn steps that might lead up to an ancient temple. And the lake in the dream was merely an antechamber to a larger body of clear water. I researched the meaning of this, and got so many conflicting interpretations that I decided to hold to the residual feeling that had led me to look it up in the first place: good fortune.

  There were two women I knew from New York. We were friends, friendly, though not actively so. They looked alike in the way that white, well-educated, well-dressed women in creative fields can look alike. They were not exactly shy, but they were shrewdly reticent and their shrewd reticence was sometimes mistaken for quietness, softness, by people, men, who weren’t as shrewd and smart as they were. About the same age, my age, they both wrote for a middlebrow magazine some people considered highbrow or a highbrow magazine some people considered middlebrow. Depended on the people. I confused these women once in a dream, or one turned into the other, and they’d since become the same person to me. I had to think for a moment when I wanted to distinguish them in my mind. That article about how the fate of an obscure fishery could tell us a lot about climate change. Was that Anna? No, Carrie. Right?

  I considered writing quasi-professional emails—of the I’m still here variety—to Carrie and Anna. I could write one and send it to both of them.

  There was no confusing Stella. She was only herself.

  In the athletics shed, Stella and I had found two tennis rackets, strung and in decent shape, the handles not too stripped or eaten away, along with an air-sealed container of tennis balls. Neither of us played tennis, but what a jaunty thing to do. We’d go over to the old courts by the woods, where the sun was never too strong. We’d rig up the crumbling net. We’d have a few matches and then make spritzy drinks. Lying back in Adirondack chairs, admiring our nails.

  The only message I’d received that morning was a brief rejection for a position I’d applied to, thinking I might at least be called in for an interview. They’d filled the role internally, I was informed, but they would be happy to keep my materials on file. Best of luck!

  So I gathered the tennis equipment and brought it over to Stella’s cabin. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. No note. She’d switched her shift at work, maybe, and I wasn’t too concerned. We hadn’t made a definite plan. But I had built my day around this. More than my day.

  It was as if I were waking up. This was the way dreams ended, without conclusion. It was Friday, I realized. I’d taken out Stella’s splinter on Monday. Days so narcotic that time had slipped from its track. It hadn’t even been a week.

  When David got home that evening I asked him to go for a walk before dinner, down the road, past the semicircular, flattened spot in the woods that had once been used for archery, and the cabin where the kitchen guys lived in the summer, by the old infirmary. I’d been sick once for what seemed like days in that infirmary. Lying in bed, feverish, in a paneled room with sheer curtains and an old TV, wearing a soft, hot pink T-shirt that said ARUBA on it in white script. I’d never been to Aruba. I don’t know where that shirt came from. Aunt Esther was in the room, at one point, with a tray and a deck of well-used playing cards. Navy blue and white on the back, an intricate, scrolling Victorian design. She sat on the bed, placed the tray between us, and taught me how to play hearts. She showed me how to shuffle the pack, bending it into a falling arch. She felt my forehead and held my hand. In and out of sleep: the first time I woke she was still there, the second time I was alone. It didn’t occur to me to wonder where my parents were or what was happening to me. I was just there and it was just happening.

  I tried to get back to that state—the just being there, the just happening, come what may—as I told David that we had a young woman living in bunk 18 and that I’d gotten to know her a little over the last week. I apologized—I didn’t know why I hadn’t told him right away. And I didn’t, other than I hadn’t wanted to fully examine the half-thoughts that surrounded me like the weather. I hadn’t wanted to give those thoughts a name, a label that would contain them or that would make them mine, something I had to be responsible for.

  “A week?” That was all he said, at first, his voice catching. Then he bent down to the ground, grabbing the end of a large fallen log, and he heaved it out of the path where we were standing. He looked like he wanted twenty more logs to heave, one after the other, even though his hands were already red and marked from gripping the first. He pressed his hands into his hair, elbows in front of his face. There weren’t any more logs here and his anger, which rarely flared, had nowhere to go but toward me. “What the fuck, Emily.”

  Just happening wasn’t happening, not with my heart beating so fast.

  “I don’t understand how you just tell me this now like you don’t think it’s a big deal or that it’s disturbing, and that’s even more disturbing.”

  “I get that it’s a big deal.” And I did get it, but not enough to sound convincing.

  He pushed the fallen log farther away with his foot, pulled at a low branch; I suppose he still needed something for his hands to do. Despite his strength, David had a gentleness, an agility that made him boyish. He was like a boy, then, with the tree—more athletic than threatening. Still, there was a hole in the ground off to the side of the path, made by a small animal, and part of me wanted to twist away and shrink myself into it, scurry off and disappear. Another part of me, though, felt somewhat indignant. Was it really so terrible, what I’d done? Couldn’t I have done much worse?

  But then he stopped moving. He sat down on the log and looked up at me. I returned his gaze because I had to, because I didn’t want to be a small, scared creature fleeing down a hole. And as he retreated, so did my indignation. He let up, I thought, because his worry outweighed his anger, and because I’d made him worry before. And even if my neurochemistry and my hormones were back in balance, something else was not. I crouched down to meet his level—okay?—and he nodded his whole upper body as I shifted to sit beside him.

  “I knew something was different, that something was going on with you, but I couldn’t figure out what it was,” he said. In the absence of antagonism, he reached for information. “What is she like, this squatter?”

  I laughed a little, out of some nervous release, finally, and then I fumbled around for adjectives and described her looks, her job, her bike, none of which seemed to impress him as they’d impressed me.

  “I mean, she seems nice,” I said.

  “She seems nice? She seems nice?” He tried it both ways and neither one satisfied him. “You’re the journalist—what do you know about her?”

  “You know that’s the kind of journalism I was never good at.”

  “The question-asking kind?”

  “I looked her up online. There’s not much. Some pictures of her in other people’s feeds, at the club where she worked. It all checks out with what she’s told me. I don’t know. If she wanted to kill us in our sleep she would have already done it, right?”

  “Maybe she wants something else. Something less violent but still, you know, not at all good.”

  We both knew that if I’d really feared she would kill us in our sleep, I would have told him about her immediately, called the authorities, no hesitation. That this was not about that, about my judgment being so questionable. This was about something less obvious, less easy to resolve.

  He took in whatever other details I could offer and I thought about an old fight of ours. I no longer remembered the context of it, only that I’d felt accused of something—of wanting too much. And he’d said it wasn’t that I wanted too much, it was that I wanted it all for myself. That I could be ungenerous, with him. It shamed me, at the time, because it was true. And I think he was upset with me, there in the woods, not simply because I’d behaved in an off-kilter
way that troubled him or because I’d let a stranger into our lives, but because I’d let a stranger into my life. I hadn’t shared it with him.

  “I want to meet her. Let’s go over there.” He straightened up, keen to move.

  “Well, she might not be there. She probably won’t be there. But if she is, I don’t want to, like, ambush her.”

  “But it’s our property.” On his feet. “And she’s been living here illegally.”

  I tried to think of a reasonable objection—beyond “So?”—but nothing came.

  “Let’s just go see if she’s even around.”

  I wouldn’t call David impulsive. He doesn’t act on whims. But he acts. He is decisive and his decisiveness can be fortifying. Kinetic. Energy moved and something changed. He drew up plans in his mind and executed them in the world, for a living. He made things happen for the both of us. Even moving to this camp was his achievement; I took us to a certain point in the process but he, finally, said yes, and got us here. If he’d said no, we’d have sold the property, we’d still be in Chicago. I certainly wouldn’t have left him and come here myself. I wondered, though, if we’d stayed in Chicago, would we still have been together? Would it have been easier to see and to focus on what we didn’t have, what we didn’t share? Or to think that all we shared was a loss? A generic, almost euphemistic word: loss. It papers over a gulf; and the paper holds, surprisingly, for much of the time, so that it makes reorganizing yourself around a disappearance look easy enough, an everyday occurrence, rather than the extraordinary undertaking it is. What did we even lose? Something unknown. We lost potential. But David had said yes, made this relocation happen, kept us together, so that the gulf wasn’t between us—it surrounded us, only the two of us—and it was possible, wasn’t it, to find new potential within it? And so, despite any inner objections I had there on the path in the woods, we headed over toward Stella’s cabin. And as we walked there, those objections began to give way to interest. Something in me wanted to go there with him, not simply to follow him out of a kind of fidelity, but to push it to some new place and see what that pushing would bring.