Читать книгу The Summer Demands - Deborah Shapiro - Страница 9

WEIRD ENERGY

The car in the drive. David home from work. Some days I couldn’t wait for him to break my solitude. Days I could feel myself slipping into a horror story: David goes out into the world and maintains a sane relationship to it while I lose my mind and become this place. Today had been different, though. Someone else had broken my solitude.

When he came in through our front door, I called down to him, suggested we go out for dinner. I practically pushed him back into the car and we went to the one Thai restaurant nearby, along the main street of the village.

We lived in a south shore Massachusetts town, a few historic blocks with street lamps surrounded by houses, Victorians and clapboard Cape Cods, and then, a little farther out, small, cheaply fabricated split-levels and ranches that had replaced dilapidated frame houses sometime in the ’50s. American flags. Tracts with gas stations and retail strips, a few sizable stretches of woods that hadn’t yet been swallowed up into suburbs, and our camp. Two towns over you could find a yoga studio. We knew people from Boston who’d started families and bought homes outside the city, but they didn’t buy here.

I was going to tell David what happened that day, all through dinner I was going to tell him about the young woman whose name I hadn’t yet obtained. How I met her and then spent the afternoon going from room to room around our house, wondering what she would make of it. (Had she already been inside it, somehow?) The faded wallpaper, the smooth wood floors, the framed drawings on the mantle, the dark green tile in the bathroom, the stereo and the records. The candlesticks. The plants. She would have had nothing but contempt for our materialism, for all our comforts and calculations. But then I thought, no. She’d made a home, however makeshift, out of her surroundings in the bunk. I’d seen a crate she was using as a nightstand, next to one of the metal bed frames on which she’d laid out a sheet and a blanket. She seemed to have dusted off a wooden dresser, too, and a couple of folded shirts had sat on top. I was going to tell David all of this. But I didn’t. Even when he commented on my “weird energy.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, though I think I knew.

He looked at me from across the table, silently, curiously, and then glanced toward the room, as if a waiter were about to bring out a dessert with a candle in it. As if maybe I’d orchestrated a small surprise for him. For an instant I worried I’d forgotten his birthday, been too preoccupied that day to remember an occasion and that some disappointment would cross his face. But that wasn’t it. He turned back to me with a suggestive half-smile, still not sure what I was up to, though sensing it was something. David: on the taller side, square-shouldered, but not severe; the roundness of his nose and softness of his mouth had always struck me somehow as kind. As first impressions went, he came off as steady, collected. People liked him, and they tended to take him seriously. But if you met his gaze often enough, you’d see this seriousness called into question by a quick, engaging wit that flashed in his dark eyes.

“I just can’t remember the last time you ordered one of those iced coffees,” he said.

And neither could I—sweet, with condensed milk. A gratuitous, gluttonous drink from my youth. At some point in my life I’d replaced it with water, an occasional glass of wine. We could take each other’s measure in beverages, David and I, we had that kind of collective, institutional memory between us. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I still didn’t mention the young woman.

The warmth of the dark. Moonlight. David was already upstairs when I locked all the doors and the windows on the first floor. Something I’d rarely thought to do the whole time we’d been here. I went to bed in only a T-shirt and took it off in the middle of the night, cool and naked beneath the sheet. David slept. Moths opened against the screens of our bedroom windows. I lay there, waiting, waiting, waiting, and I was not sure for what.

Our house had been called the Director’s House. White with black shutters, an old farmhouse, though I don’t know if there was ever a farm. It was where my great-aunt Esther and her husband, Joe, had lived for years while they ran the camp. Esther and Joe had been city kids: triple-decker houses and apartment buildings, lunch counters, shoe shops, bakeries with rye bread and challah, kosher butchers, shul. The Mystic River, smokestacks, crowds, streetcars, and Revere Beach. They’d grown up in Chelsea, a large, tightly knit community of working- and lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Second- and third-generation children moved out and up to the Boston suburbs but Esther and Joe and their families hadn’t yet prospered enough to leave.

One summer, through the efforts of a charitable Jewish organization, Joe and Esther had the chance to go away to camp. This was part of a program whose unstated mission was to foster comfort in nature and self-defense skills. It was 1945. At fifteen, Esther and Joe had never been away from home, never really been more than a few miles from their neighborhood, from their many brothers and sisters, from the clatter of city life. They knew dirt but they’d never held soil in their hands. When Esther and Joe—resolutely urban, nurtured by density, neurosis, and the Great Depression—discovered the woods, they never wanted to leave.

Across an asphalt road, the one real road in the camp, sat the Lodge, a ramshackle one-story building constructed in the same style as the Director’s House, painted white with a layer of black trim curling and flaking to reveal a faded pine green. When we’d first arrived, David and I, pulling off a winding rural road and into a half-circular drive, I saw the lodge at the center of the curve and I practically leaped out of the truck we’d loaded up with our possessions, ushering myself in through a partially unhinged screen door, into a world of linoleum floors, dust on heavy wooden desks in a room used for administrative purposes, then hurricane lamps and two sofas—one floral, one patchy gold velour—in a room that had been designated as the Lounge. I was entering a photograph of my own past, my family’s past. Yellowed posters bearing the faces of imprisoned Soviet dissidents were still tacked along one wall. In the ’80s, when I had come here as a girl, we had sung songs about them, singing for their release. I didn’t know what had become of them since. But David did. That one, he said, finally emigrated to America and became a neocon lobbyist. That one died after being exiled to Siberia.

How do you know that? I asked.

How do you not? he said.

I thought the girl might have cleared out in the night. That the bunk would be bare, as if she’d never been there at all and I’d imagined the whole thing.

I knocked softly on the door, accommodating, polite. She had trespassed on our private property, but I didn’t seem to mind. Even though all I really knew of her was that she played jacks, supposedly worked as a barista, had a cell phone and bike, hair like a dramatic brushstroke, and a quiet but sure way of setting up her space. That she was a cause, perhaps, of the strange, subtle coiling feeling taking place inside me. That she was alert, ascertaining. I knocked and she answered. She came out onto the wood-plank steps in the bright morning wearing peach-colored sunglasses with mirrored lenses, so all I saw for a moment was my own reflection, trying to look like I wasn’t trying too hard, my shoulder-length brown hair piled on my head, threadbare T-shirt, cutoffs that were loose, unraveling. Then she came into focus. She was a little taller than me, and thinner, so that a kind of buff-colored canvas karate pant looked good on her, as did the standard red polo shirt she had to put on for work. She wore it oversized, revealing the length of her collarbone. Her hair was damp. She must have figured out how to turn the water on for the plumbing in the bunk. Resourceful girl.

“I know, I should go,” she said, pushing the sunglasses up into her wet hair, a gesture that struck me as disarming; those mirrored lenses were like a shield. And mostly because she wasn’t putting me in the position of being the uptight, incurious person telling her to leave, I wanted her to stay.

“Well, you don’t have to. I mean, not right away.” I leaned on the unsteady railing of the stoop. I didn’t want to keep shifting but that’s what I did, while she rested against the door frame of the bunk, at ease, like she would take whatever I said in stride. Like she was used to taking everything in stride, or at least pretending to.

“Did you talk to your husband?”

“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 sat 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?

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, she 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 age 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.

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?