Читать книгу The Summer Demands - Deborah Shapiro - Страница 8

SPLINTER

Summer, green and still and slightly grainy. The way it is in foreign films from the 1970s and ’80s. A lulling, enveloping heat. I had things to do, I swear, written on lists, but those things seemed to get done only if they coincided with the slow, inevitable rhythm of the days. From the couch in the room with the bay window, I would watch those movies, watch young French women who never wore bras move around in philosophically provocative situations, and then I would get up and go outside, go down to the lake, or watch another movie. The days passed into each other without much distinction, dulling all anxiety but heightening a sensitivity. Like walking out of a dark theater into a bright afternoon, one world exchanged for another. Being stunned and not minding it, wanting to hold to an in-between.

I’d started to think of this place as a falling-down estate owned by a family that had shut it up, fled during a war, leaving us as caretakers. We’d done what we could, David and I, but the playing fields remained overgrown, the tennis, volleyball, and basketball courts all cracked and wild with weeds. The little cove by the lake was filmed with algae. The boathouse, the dining hall, the rec hall, the whitewashed bunks—they were still standing though in need of repair. Most of the bunks here, the original ones, were built in a clearing, in a horseshoe shape around a flagpole. But as the camp had grown, two structures were added at the edge of the woods. It was darker and cooler over there, even on a day in July, the sun bright and blazing before noon, an equatorial light.

I couldn’t have said what I was doing over in that part of the property. Taking a different way, maybe, down to the water. Those cabins had always had a secretive quality because they were set apart from the rest of the camp. And when I had been a young camper here, almost thirty years ago, these cabins were where the older girls, in all their mysterious glamour, stayed. If I was alone, I would walk hurriedly by. If there were two or three of us, we would linger, bravely, as if on a dare, waiting to be taken into their world.

The girls were gone now, of course, but something of them remained, some sort of pull, a lasting, palpable atmosphere. A presence. When I heard a sound—a dull thud that repeated, followed by a scraping—I stopped walking and kept listening. The noise was familiar somehow. I made my way around the side of the cabin where the ground rose a little and I could look inside through a screen.

I was sure I hadn’t left the shutters open on any of the cabin windows, though now they were propped up with a couple of two-by-fours. And I couldn’t remember if the clothesline between these two cabins, that I ducked under, had always been there. But the damp clothes on it—a T-shirt, a black no-wire bra, three pairs of underwear—those were definitely new.

A thud, again. The scraping. And through the screen, a young woman sitting on the dark wood floor, her back toward me. Shit, I heard her say—but it didn’t appear to be in response to my presence. She stood, moving into the light, holding her right hand in her left, staring at her palm. Long white neck, straight black sweep of hair across her forehead, lanky, a person of lines and edges. I saw then what she’d been doing: playing jacks.

I ran my nails down the screen, gently, a noise that caught her attention. She turned, making me out through the window. No smile, but her face was soft, unalarmed. It made me think she knew me, that she’d seen me before, wandering around, and perhaps had put together some idea of who I was. Which meant she would have been living on our property for a while.

She stepped closer, right up to the screen, looking down at me.

“I have a splinter,” she said. “From the floor.”

“I have tweezers,” I said. “Up at the house.”

She nodded, blinked her wide-set eyes, and I went quickly, on a mission, not questioning whether she’d be there when I got back.

We stood in the sun, outside the gloom of the bunk, and I took her hand to remove the sliver of wood, careful but competent, as if I did this kind of thing for a living. No trouble, anybody would do the same, but the casualness of my gestures already felt like a cover, disguising something I couldn’t yet name. She curled her fingers up—her nails painted a dark, galaxy blue—and I let go of her hand abruptly so she wouldn’t think I was holding on too long.

Her mouth remained slightly open after thanking me. Then, as if to find something else to do with it, she apologized—sorry—though she didn’t say what for. She folded her arms and I realized that mine were folded, too, though I wasn’t sure who’d mimicked whom.

“You’ve been living here?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“A couple of months.”

“A couple of months?”

“Yeah. You probably want me to go?”

I laughed, the question seemed both so innocent and knowing, coupled with a comic timing I wasn’t sure she was aware of. I also didn’t know what to say—laughter as placeholder or postponement—and out of habit or some deeply internalized patriarchal impulse, I told her I’d have to talk to my husband. She’d seen him? Around?

She’d seen him, she said. And he’d almost seen her, the other day, when she’d been by the rec hall, charging her phone in an exterior outlet.

It occurred to me, then, that she had whole systems in place. Systems for how to live here without us knowing. How much of us had she seen?

Had she spotted us, that first warm day of the season? From where we’d stood, up at the lodge, you couldn’t see to the end of the camp, the point at which the land turned into the lake. We’d never had this much space all to ourselves. This much oxygen. So, we ran. Down across the fields, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run like that, stumbling, out of breath. Just moving, moving. David liked to run, but he’d been limited until now to city routes. We ran along a wooded path and didn’t stop until we reached a patch of grass by the water. We took off only what we needed to and fucked against a tree before we lay on the ground, staring up at the sky—nobody around at all, we thought—and laughed about it, the tree, the fucking. The bark had scratched my back. I had a cramp in my side from running. Better in theory? David asked. Maybe, I answered. Sex in this spot hadn’t been a fantasy of mine. But the boathouse . . . We’d do that next, he said.

We didn’t, though. Neither of us had brought it up since.

“Are you hungry?” I asked her. It didn’t seem like a particularly random or loaded question, just the one that came to me. “Do you want to have lunch?”

“I would, but I have to go to work.”

One of us, at least, had a place to be. She had a shift, she said, in a coffee place a couple of miles away in one of the newer shopping centers. I knew the one: brick and glass; sterile, sparse landscaping. Her red collared shirt and her name tag were waiting for her there. She pointed toward the woods—she kept her bike locked to a tree by a path that I hadn’t known about. It led out to the road.

“Thanks again,” she said, holding up the hand I’d attended to.

“Sure.”

Just like that. I hadn’t gotten her name. She started to walk off, looked back for a long moment as if she might ask me something, something she’d almost forgotten. Her reserve wasn’t affectless, it was alert and ascertaining, and I could still feel it trained on me even as she turned toward the trees. I wanted to say Wait! and then I wanted to run—not after her and not away from her, but just to run, to go, to be in motion again. Instead, I stood there, listening to her moving over fallen brush as she made her way through the woods.