Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  Dinah walked slowly under the dogwood they had planted outside the livingroom where they could enjoy its white blossoms in May, its berries and maroon leaves in the fall. A spring of blossoming he had not lived to enjoy. Eyes on her, yes. It was Tosca sitting on the wide windowsill waiting for her, watching through the dark. Tosca had an exclusive passionate nature, a patronizing fondness for Figaro, a nodding tolerance of Susan and Willie, but she loved only Dinah, who had saved her as a starving kitten with two broken legs tossed from a speeding car into a culvert. Tosca slept on her pillow and Figaro at her feet.

  Once she and Mark had shared that bed, brought from their New York apartment and almost too large for the small Cape bedroom. Only when Mark was too weak to climb stairs had the livingroom become his sickroom. Willie and Susan had each slept in that bed a few times since and nobody else.

  She had never replaced Mark as husband, as the one, as the person in whom and for whom and with whom everything was done, not only because such a lover came once in a lifetime, for real love was much rarer than people liked to think. The remainder was friendship, sensuality, affection, domesticity. However, she had come to value that portion highly. She had the energy to put into her music in a far more single-minded and whole spirited way than she had with Mark. Once she had tasted fully her own power in work, she had come to value her solitude, an inner silence on which her imagination could scroll her music in patterns that felt right.

  Chapter Four

  SUSAN

  Susan thought that if Dinah had any sense of how to conduct her life, she would take advantage of the coming of the professor from Rutgers and unload Mark’s old papers on him. Then she could move her music operation upstairs, clear the livingroom and have a house that looked at least partially civilized. If Susan did not watch Willie and Dinah every day, they would convert both houses to utterly slobby combinations of workshops and pantries. There would have been herbs drying in the livingroom and seedlings started in every window, construction and canning projects sprawling over tables and benches.

  She could just imagine what her house would look like if Dinah ever went ahead with her mad scheme to hatch a baby. Who would end up raising that baby? Susan would. No thanks! Two were quite sufficient. She had adored having babies, she had loved Jimmy and Siobhan as infants and toddlers and young children, but somewhere around ten, the joy petered out if mothers would be honest about it. If it started again, she was still waiting.

  Susan was using the forenoon to colour her hair, while she was alone and undisturbed. Although by policy she was open about the fact that she dyed her hair, she gave it out that she did so because her hair was naturally the colour of dead mouse; whereas, as Willie knew, she had been a redhead, and she was covering grey. Now he might know that, but he didn’t think about it. She had established her propaganda and it worked. If she let her hair go, she would look ten years older. With men it never seemed to matter. Willie’s hair had gone white in his thirties. Tyrone had already been balding when she had first met him. Mark’s hair and beard had been streaked with grey.

  Mark had nonetheless been a potently attractive man. It was with Mark she had imagined having an affair that year they had lived next door. Even though she knew he was dying, it was of lung cancer and not catching and it was somehow a romantic Keatsian death, the way he brought it off. Even in extremis, he could not help flirting, making eye contact count, putting some spin on a handshake. Here was another artistic couple up from New York, moving to the Cape as they had a few years before: a little colony in the woods.

  Maybe she was powerfully attracted to bearded men, although Mark’s beard had been long and full, darker than his head hair, while Tyrone’s was a neat closely clipped overlay of the pale colour his hair must have been. Willie had once tried growing a beard at her suggestion, but it had made him look unkempt and vaguely menacing. She had begged him to shave it off. Yes, had Mark lived, she might have gotten together with him rather than with Dinah. Dinah had been hidden then. Susan had thought of Dinah as a housewife who played strange music on the piano and the flute, who walked bundled up like a curly-headed Eskimo in her parka that winter shuffling through the woods.

  Dinah had not mentioned the question of having a baby again, not directly, but Susan could always read her, and she knew Dinah had not forgotten or given up. If Dinah dared just get pregnant and then present her with a fait accompli, she would go through the roof. She must make that clear. She had tried to speak to Willie, but he insisted Dinah had never said anything to him about a baby. If Dinah wanted a baby, she should have had one with Mark at the normal time. By now the kid would be in middle school. Every time Susan thought of Dinah playing with that maddeningly unfair option, she could feel her insides stewing like a pot of hot glue, bubbling, viscous, with a dangerous stench. What a thing to pull on Susan suddenly, what a rotten hat trick.

  Susan had paid her dues to womanhood. She had raised two healthy bright kids, with a lot of help from Willie, certainly. He had been a great father. No matter how bored or discontented she got, she never overlooked how much he had given of himself to the children. Further, Susan had helped Laurie through her adolescence. Laurie was a third child to her, closer than her own daugher Siobhan. She knew more about Laurie than Tyrone did, for instance that Laurie had been unhappy with Tom – a fact that seemed to come as a surprise to Tyrone. Last night Laurie had called to beg her not to invite anybody else this holiday season, not even people she had known for years. ‘I’m ashamed. I can’t stand to have anyone look at me.’

  Now it was ten in Seattle. Again she dialled Jimmy’s number, but again a mechanical voice said the number had been disconnected. Again she tried Information, but nothing was listed. Where was he? Had he left Seattle without telling her? Her last letter had not come back, but she had not heard a word from him in two months. He was in some kind of trouble, she was sure of that. The restaurant had been going so well. What was wrong?

  Throwing down the blow dryer, she paced, clutching herself. And Siobhan! It was impossible to pry out of her what was going on. She would not even tell Susan if she loved Aldo, the gawky weird playwright she was living with. Now if Siobhan’s live-in boyfriend had died of an overdose, Susan would not have been the least bit surprised. Tom had seemed steady.

  She finished drying her hair at her bedroom window facing the pond. It was an unexpected blessing that Tyrone was coming for the holidays. She always tried to get to New York a couple of times a winter, but it was still a long dreary time until the summer people started opening their houses. Tyrone had a beach house in Aruba where he was more inclined to go in December than the Cape – a house he had offered them many times, but Willie always said they couldn’t afford to fly down there in winter. The pond life was gayer and more civilized in summer. Tyrone would stroll the shore with her, or they would take tea or cocktails together and talk intensely and on a plane she seldom reached with anyone else. With him she was lifted to a beautiful high place, like the view from the terrace of a penthouse where a fine dinner party was just breaking up.

  She tried to imagine what she could give him. Willie and Dinah would cart over some of their homemade cordials and preserves, but she knew how silly that was, when Tyrone could buy the best liqueurs and conserves of Europe. Sometimes she had in her treasure hoard, her drawers, her shelves, her closet, a little antique or bizarre or imported folkloric thing, objects to which no price could be attached and thus priceless as presents. She must come up with something like that for Tyrone. Laurie was easy, for Susan would simply knock off work on her designs a day or two early and make some skirt or chemise for her. Tyrone was a more difficult matter; she must put intelligence and creativity into his gift. Then she would wrap. She liked to make her own paper out of reproductions of paintings or drawings, photographs from magazines. Her boxes were each works of art. It took her days, but it made the giving of such presents as they could afford special.

  Her hair was dry and looked perfect. She shook it o
ut on her shoulders. It never needed setting, so long as she washed it every other day. She still had a full thick head of hair. Her gaze fell on her hand mirror. Siobhan had bought a dime-store mirror and turned it into a papier-mâché creation, two elongated skinny elephants embracing on tiptoe, while their trunks formed the outside of the mirror. Marvellous thing. Siobhan had been only twelve when she made it and the breach between them still healed frequently. Susan sank onto the bench before her vanity, staring. She was seeing past her face into that sweet intense time when it was always summer and she had presided over the centre of a universe of family and friends, her precious children, her husband, her flirtations, other couples they exchanged dinners and child care with, all swirling about the sun she felt within her.

  She was only forty-six and in good shape. She could even, she supposed, have another child herself if she were stupid enough to want to. She had had those years and nothing could bring back their joys. She had also endured the immense strain of managing to save money for both children to go to good schools, for although they had got the scholarships that made the whole project feasible, nonetheless their college years had been a savage burden. Willie was no spendthrift, but he thought little about money. It was she who had driven herself to earn at the peak of what she could manage, and now she wanted things easier. She had knocked herself out to get both kids quality educations, and to what point? Siobhan looked like a scarecrow and Jimmy ran a restaurant. Now she wanted for herself. More travel, more time in New York, little luxuries, more interesting friends, some glamour and romance in her life. A decade before she had solved a period of ennui by getting involved with Dinah. It had been a truly daring and outrageous response to boredom, and she had seldom been bored for years. They had made love until she was replete with exhausted languor. Dinah had seemed to her a mad genius of sex whose touch turned her flesh luminous. Sometimes then Dinah needed only to look at her, and her body would melt in response. The scandal merely added fire and spice. The envy of others had acted on her as an aphrodisiac.

  Now Dinah was happier piddling around in the sand growing beans and canning peaches than she was pursuing adventure and using what contacts she had in music to enrich their life with people one had at least heard of, who lived out in the real world – people who could tell stories about fascinating events and places. Now Dinah was talking of usurping the role Susan had played so well and long, and she would not have it. It was not fair. Even now, without a child, Dinah paid more attention to the cats than to her.

  She hurried to her sewing table. She would start on Laurie’s chemise, then find a trinket to surprise Tyrone. Their arrival was the one thing she could summon to bribe herself with, to push on through the grey day.

  Chapter Five

  DINAH

  Dinah had just played out a passage on the flute she had been struggling with for the past four days and found it finally and utterly delightful when the phone rang. It was her staff contact at the Mass Council telling her she had been awarded a New Works grant. She was very cool on the phone. Then she leapt up whooping. Tosca flattened her ears in dismay. It was some kind of mistake. She had received grants, but never such a big one. The typical commission for a composer would keep her in groceries for a month. How had they made such a gross error as to give her all that money? Usually the significant money was more in performing and in lecturing than in the payment for composing, and recording was something that cost her, rather than providing income. This did not involve her performing and she could live on it all summer if she budgeted carefully. Grants spawned grants, because all granting agencies wanted you to be certified by others first so that they wouldn’t be risking anything.

  Furthermore it was a commission and therefore would be performed, and by the outstanding flautist Itzak Raab with a chamber orchestra drawn from the BSO at Tanglewood. Raab had gone to Juilliard two years ahead of her. She remembered him in the cafeteria at the table where the best reeds sat, and she had attended the concerto contest where he had blown his opponents into dust. Her flute teacher had been his; twice she had run into him in Madam’s apartment. She remembered his intonation and his attack clearly, and vaguely his curly black hair. He had been one of those Juilliard students whom everyone said would make it in the cut-throat concert circuit; and he had, he had.

  She ran over to tell Susan and Willie, but their house was empty. Even Bogey was gone. The four-wheel-drive pickup truck encrusted with dust stood at the wide end of the drive next to her Volvo, so they had not gone shopping or to town. They must have gone to Tyrone’s to fuss some more. He was due tonight. She made herself coffee in their kitchen – which was more hers than Susan’s. They used the same coffee, espresso bought in the North End of Boston, ground fresh in a fancy electric grinder Willie had mail-ordered. She sighed and settled in to wait, hoping they would suddenly appear. If she did not tell someone her good news, it would vanish. Any moment the council would call back and say it was an error. This was not a little commission but a fat plum. It was even faintly conceivable that if Raab liked the piece, he might record it. He recorded often; his records seemed to sell well. He had recorded something by Steve Reich, she was sure. She did not remember if she had it. She’d look later. For now she waited in the kitchen.

  Willie had an undying love of gadgets. Theirs was the original electronic cottage, for Willie used a Mindset computer, which he never wearied of telling people was in the MOMA, to play with stresses and run his graphics. She had an IBM, connected to her synthesizers that cost far more than the simple computer. In this small kitchen, she could see without turning her head a Cuisinart, an electric pasta maker, an electric ice-cream machine, a convection oven, a cappuccino and espresso maker big enough for a café, an ice maker, a programmable toaster smarter than most small children. She thought there was nobody from the bridge to the sea with their income level who used more electricity.

  It was not consumerism in Willie but a pure bubbling optimism that the new gadget would fulfil its promises, would deliver the labour saving or the improved product or the never-before-achieved-at-home concoction. He liked the idea that people were out there working to make new devices aimed at his happiness. He enjoyed believing in technology.

  They lived comfortably, but that was one of the advantages of the Cape; once you owned your land, you could live well on comparatively little. All of them got money in hunks and then nothing for months. Willie would sell some sculpture every summer. Once in a while he got a piece in a show during the winter, in Boston, in New York, sometimes farther afield, in St. Louis or Minneapolis or San Francisco. Sometimes that piece sold. Often it didn’t, for Willie liked to create humanoid figures trying to crawl out of coffins, reaching through barbed wire or slats, impaled, raising blocks. He worked a lot with large dangerous constructions of barbed wire and newsprint. Some of them involved tapes of unpleasant noises like screaming and gunfire.

  Susan was well requited for her designs. Making clothes just was a hobby. Her fabric designs were valuable, but she could get stuck on an idea whose execution frustrated her and miss deadline after deadline. Sometimes she was too depressed to work and hibernated in her bed for weeks.

  When Dinah was in a long dry period between good grants or good gigs, she played with the Moonsnails in the summer. Willie and she worked as carpenters, usually small jobs that regular contractors would not bother with. They were in demand because they did good and careful carpentry, but neither of them took a job unless driven to it. Now why was Willie taking time away from his South Africa piece to act as unpaid handyman for Tyrone Burdock? She finished her coffee and rinsed out the cup. Although Susan seldom cooked, she monitored the kitchen’s tidiness. Dinah kept running from window to window to look at the road and then the path, as if that could make at least one of them appear. Susan would be better; she would gush. Dinah had a great need to be gushed over, to prove her good fortune.

  The phone rang and she jumped to it. ‘Jimmy! But where are you?’

 
‘Right in front of the liquor store. Can somebody come and get me?’

  He’d taken the bus. So what had happened to his car? ‘I’ll come right away. Listen, could you go into Souza’s for skimmed milk and local eggs while you’re waiting, and bananas? Do your parents know you’re coming today?’

  ‘I didn’t know when I’d arrive. Uh, Dee, if I buy that stuff, I’ll have about fifty cents left.’

  ‘I’ll reimburse you, big spender. Be there in fifteen minutes.’ She whistled a theme from the rondo of Mozart’s Clarinet in A all the way to town. She was not displeased to have a little time with Jimmy first. Find out what was up. Get filled in. In her head the orchestra swelled. Flute was her usual instrument, but she played piccolo, of course, drums, guitar and piano on occasion. Flute was what she played in the Moonsnails – along with some tabla, conga drums, tambourine, occasional rhythm guitar. Not this summer. She wouldn’t have to play at the Inn six nights a week. The grant suddenly felt more real. Her fellow musicians would be let down, but they liked the gig better than she did, breathing smoke all evening, drowning out drunks, fending off idiots who fell into the speakers or demanded to sing with the band. It felt like only one step up from waiting tables.

  The guys in the band liked it because that was as much music as they ever played and because a fringe benefit was the ease of getting laid. The other fringe benefit was local celebrity far more negotiable in terms of stroking and immediate pleasure than real reputation. So her wind quintet was performed at Helsinki the same summer she worked six nights a week in the tavern. There was more satisfaction walking into the post office or Souza’s and having people tell her how great the band was than in a hostile review in a music journal arriving five months later, all of two paragraphs on her quintet.