Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  ‘This happens every year. It won’t go through the door.’

  She offered, ‘I’ll get rope from the truck.’

  They tied it round and round so that it could come inside, but then it was too tall to stand. They had to cut four inches off the trunk. Willie fetched the holder out of the tiny circular cellar, where it sat on a shelf near the furnace. Then they forced the tree upright by using the holder and only two guy wires to the nearest windows, where there were hooks left over from the last tree that couldn’t stand without help. Unlike bought trees, pitch pines never grew straight, so setting them up took skill.

  As happened every year, by the time Willie and Dinah finally had the tree fixed in position and stable, Susan was up. She brought her tea into the livingroom, instead of having it in bed, so that she could admire the tree. As she did every year, she said it was the biggest, the best, the bushiest tree they had ever brought home, and that it would be absolutely a knockout. They wouldn’t trim the tree tonight, because Tyrone was arriving and Susan felt they ought to greet Laurie and him, since she said Laurie was in a bad state. Tomorrow would be the great day.

  The next morning they had to run over to Tyrone’s to put things in order for him, and when they got back, Jimmy was home. It was going to be a grand holiday season, Willie thought. He loved the fuss and the visiting and the decorations. ‘You should have let us know you were coming,’ he said to Jimmy.

  ‘Yes!’ Susan echoed him. ‘I mailed all your presents two weeks ago! I sent yours and Lisa’s to Seattle. Where’s Lisa?’

  It turned out Jimmy and Lisa were separated. They’d had some silly fight. Maybe it was the restaurant failing. Willie was sure he’d hear all the details eventually if not from Jimmy, then certainly from Susan, who would not rest until she knew exactly what had happened between the couple. He figured his son would tell him what he wanted to, and that the rest was his own business. Willie always respected his children’s privacy; it was a matter of honour to him to trust Jimmy and Johnny and give them room.

  Willie was surprised when Jimmy reminded him that in previous years, the two of them had gone out to steal the tree together. Of course. Willie had forgotten that Jimmy had been his partner in the adventure before Dinah. Willie felt a little guilty for losing that memory of his son, but Jimmy did not seem overly sentimental about it. He seemed to remember it more as a joke. ‘Yeah,’ he said shaking his head at Dinah, ‘it was my old man introduced me to a life of crime. First trees. Then cars. Then it was the local bank. That’s how it all begins.’

  This was another of Willie’s favourite nights. Sometimes at this season he wished he could slow time down instead of speeding it up, the way he’d often wished as a kid. He wanted this evening to last and last. Jimmy looked fine, even if a little tired and ragged around the edges. Dinah’s presence helped there. Jimmy had always confided in Dinah – the kids had used her as a buffer in adolescence between themselves and Susan. Dinah would help both sides calm down. She would state Susan’s case to Johnny and Johnny’s to Susan. Dinah made each of them sound and thus somehow stuck with being reasonable. She would negotiate a compromise between positions that had suddenly become clear and arguable. Willie had watched the process with relief for years. Dinah would buffer Jimmy’s disaster too. Probably she already knew more than he would know for a week or more than Susan would be able to worm out of Jimmy even if she did nothing else all day tomorrow, which he passionately hoped would not happen to screw up his favourite season.

  He felt that Jimmy’s being home required no fancy explanations. Jimmy would move back in his room and for a while Susan and Willie would stop fighting about whether she ought to take over the kids’ rooms for a studio. She wanted a workroom. She complained incessantly about having to work in their bedroom. He thought she should take over Jimmy’s or Johnny’s room, or better yet, since those were small rooms under a slanted roof, he could knock out the wall between and make one decent-sized room. She was unwilling to eliminate either of the kid’s old rooms, saying that they wouldn’t feel welcome when they came home if their rooms were not kept for them. She would also argue that the rooms were inappropriate in light and size and shape for what she needed. She wanted a workshop added onto the house, or free standing like his studio. She was always comparing her having to work in the bedroom to his having a separate building for a studio.

  Someday, he said. In the meantime, take one of their rooms or let me knock the wall down. It’s not a structural wall. The conversation repeated itself every month like Susan’s periods. Now he couldn’t offer that solution, but Jimmy had worked as a carpenter summers while he was going to Dartmouth. Maybe he could put on an addition for her. If Jimmy was really staying, maybe he’d suggest it. Give his son something to keep him occupied.

  Now he put all that out of his mind, for this was the night they trimmed the tree. He loved the private times they took with each other, and he loved the rituals they shared, the meals, the holidays. People thought them peculiar but it was at once two separate intimacies he had, two wives, and something more: the three of them together had a strength and a richness he had never found in a couple. It was simply more fun with three lively adults talking and playing. They were polite. Sometimes they had to negotiate who was to be where. Susan would say to him, I’m going over to Dinah’s tonight. Other things had been worked out so long ago they no longer needed stating. Susan did not like to stay in the house alone. If he made love with Dinah in the evening, which was not common anyhow, he came home promptly so that he could sleep in the bed with Susan and she would not fret. Dinah did not like anyone hanging around in the morning, so it all worked out. It took attention to their separate and mutual needs, a nice balance of love and respect. He thought of himself as unusually warm and affectionate. There weren’t too many men who could keep two women satisfied and happy. This season celebrated that lucky state.

  The tree trimmings too were special. Susan had found dozens of delicately coloured glass baubles at yard sales, in antique and junk shops, in flea markets. Sometimes she drove to Boston the day after Christmas to buy beautiful and expensive ornaments at half or three quarters off. She did not mind standing in line for forty minutes in Lord & Taylor’s for the perfect pagoda ornament for the treetop or a spectacular feathered peacock or golden leopard.

  Over the years she had collected fabulous beasts, so that the tree was a needled bestiary, a Noah’s ark of fantasy, of green burros and glass unicorns, of spotted ducks and fine gold spiderwebs. She also liked little dolls, firemen and wooden soldiers and ballerinas. Among all these were the remains of their early married trees when they had been poor in the city. In those days they had waited till Christmas Eve to pick up a tree free when the local merchants closed. He remembered trees strung with Susan’s jewellery for ornaments, her necklaces and earrings. When costume jewellery broke or she lost an earring, she still would recycle her jewellery on the tree.

  There too were the shell ornaments they had made their first years on the Cape, Johnny frowning with concentration as she drilled little holes in scallop and conch and moon snail shells for the hanger to slip through. It was a whole family history packed into scraps of tissue paper in boxes. Each emerging piece shook memories out of him, glittering in the coloured lights.

  He loaded the phonograph spindle with Christmas music and the four of them hung the ornaments, one at a time, ritually, drinking hot buttered rum he always made then. Dinah brought the cats over to enjoy the tree. Bogey liked Figaro. The two of them sniffed each other over as if they hadn’t met for a month instead of in the yard that afternoon. Then they curled up together in front of the fire. The little multicoloured lights shone like chips of bright jelly. Tosca followed every ornament with her eyes. They put only the nonbreakable ones on the lower branches, because every year at a certain point she crept up and began to bat at them. She particularly liked to make the metal bells tinkle.

  Willie felt crammed up to his throat with pleasure. This was a time
he felt like a rich man. If Johnny were only home, he would have felt himself absolutely sealed in love. There were both his women going back and forth and hanging the pretty gaudy little things, there was his son with hair even redder than Susan’s, standing on a chair putting doves and cardinals on the ends of the high branches. When they finished at last and sank, all pleasantly, cosily drunk by now, in the various chairs to stare at their creation while the fire hissed into coals, he thought it a perfect icon of family happiness. His family. Gaudy, unlikely, fanciful but quite, quite real and satisfying. He was the most satisfied man he knew. This was a small town and everybody from the butcher to the postmistress knew their situation, but the Cape also had a history of toleration for eccentrics, economic, social, political and sexual oddballs. They were an old and respected public scandal. He thought he hardly knew a man who didn’t secretly or openly envy him.

  Chapter Seven

  LAURIE

  Laurie drove her father to the Cape two days before Christmas. Tyrone had the gift, rare among men in her experience, of relaxing while she drove. It made her feel trusted, competent, piloting the big Mercedes all the way. He chatted with her, played tapes, made and took calls, read papers from his briefcase. He found driving fussy and boring. She drove fast and efficiently. They were at the house in the woods in six hours and ten minutes with Celeste, his new Haitian maid, sleeping in the back seat. All the way she felt as if she were running at the same time she was driving, running full tilt away from New York and everyone in her life.

  When they arrived, Willie and Susan were waiting. Laurie felt tired and cranky. She longed to throw herself at Susan and collapse, but Willie was there too. Finally Susan followed her upstairs. While Susan unpacked for her, for the first time in days, Laurie cried, letting it all out in gouts of words. Susan held her and kissed her hair and hugged her. Since her parents had divorced when she was ten, every summer when Laurie was with her father and the current wife, Susan stood in for her mother. It was to Susan she had carried her puzzlements, her protests and wounds. Her relief was enormous. She felt as if she had been standing on tiptoe for weeks holding up a ceiling and now she could let it fall. With Susan she need not pretend to control she did not have. She could sob out her outrage, her confusion, her grief. She could let go, because nobody in New York would know. Here in the winter, she was invisible, safe. When Susan finally left, Laurie lay tucked in her bed as countless times before. Exhausted, she slept.

  It wasn’t until the next morning she saw how nicely Willie and Susan had fixed up the house for them. All Ozzie Dove had ever done was turn on the water and the heat, but they had uncovered everything and put a basket of fruit on the marble coffee table. The house smelled of soup Willie had made and Susan had put milk, butter and eggs in the refrigerator. They could have a decent breakfast. Later she would take Celeste to town to shop. She put herself in order before she came down. She owed that to Daddy. He would not normally leave New York during the brilliant holiday season with all the parties and events and galas except for a week in the sun in their tiny villa in Aruba or for a ski trip to Switzerland. He was doing this for her, burying himself in the woods when nobody else was here and letting her have Christmas alone with him. She owed it to him to hold it together as well as she could until he had gone back to the city and taken Celeste with him.

  She dreaded going into town, but there would be almost no one she knew. She could not stand people’s eyes on her, pitying, wondering, burning her already scalded skin. She had lost her husband and lost face at the same time, and if she could not sort out humiliation from grief, that was because of the police and people harassing her. She wanted to be quiet. She wanted never to have to speak to anyone again, for at least a year.

  The day was something to be got through. Every day was that now. Living reminded her of a bad job, when she was always counting the hours to break and then to lunch and then to quitting time. She owed it to Daddy to try to be stoic, because she knew how much he was doing for her. He was taking heroic measures to save her, as if she were drowning as once in childhood that tenth summer. He was coming after her and bringing her to shore, as he had then. He had saved her life then and he was saving it now, but it was a slow saving. It hurt, as the water being forced from her lungs had hurt then. She was glad when lunch signalled the end of morning, glad when cocktail time closed the afternoon, relieved when supper was served and cleared and she blessed the time the day ended and she could go up to her room and shut the door on the world for eight hours.

  At her bedroom window she stared into the darkness. She could make out the crinkly presence of the pond under the stars. The stars seemed to exist only here. She never looked at the sky in the city. Yes, she thought, she could understand nunneries. Once upon a time, she would have withdrawn into one upon the violent death of her husband and taken gladly, gratefully, on her knees with joy a vow of silence. She had the impulse to pretend to develop laryngitis, for the holidays.

  Willie and Susan came over every day, but she didn’t see Dinah or Jimmy, who was supposed to be home, until Christmas Day. Then she had to help Celeste put a feast together, as if she had any competence in that line. Basically she fussed with the table. In the centre she put the really rather striking amaryllis Susan had brought Tyrone as a gift. Laurie spent an hour setting the table and moving objects around the room. Then she went upstairs, put on a dress, took it off, put on another dress, took that off. Finally she put on a loose black Italian wool tunic she felt safe in and black silk pants, because Tyrone insisted on her dressing. She understood his pressure to maintain face. He was so handsome still, she had to make a passable entrance as his daughter. He was both tall and big, an imposing man. Nobody could ignore him, ever. His hair had been blonde in her childhood but he had gone bald early. Her mother had told her that virile men balded young, the same remark each of his later wives had made in her presence, so that she assumed it was something Tyrone told them. He had a magnificent head and wore a close beard, as if to balance the weight. His eyes were bold and light blue. He moved like the good all-round athlete he was and never did he rise and knock over a chair, the way she did; never did he drop the napkin or upset his water glass. She wished for the ten thousandth time that she had inherited his grace along with his height.

  At least she hadn’t gained weight with all this trauma. At least that. Great. She lost her husband, she felt crazy and on the verge of total disintegration, she couldn’t face anyone she knew, she was so angry with Tom she could have killed him herself while she could not even yell at him or demand an explanation or say how hurt she was, but at least she wasn’t fat. They could put that on her grave. Her life was miserable, she was a total failure as a woman and an artist, but she kept her weight down.

  She heard the car arrive, a little surprised they had not walked as they usually did. She crossed the hall to look without turning on the light, to remain invisible. They were spilling out of Dinah’s elderly Volvo, their arms full of presents and wine. It had not occurred to Laurie to buy gifts for anyone except Tyrone, whose present she had ordered before Thanksgiving and given him at breakfast: a new neat little two-person sailboat that had won an award for its design and was supposed to be exceedingly manoeuvrable and able to snatch wind out of a calm. He had been pleased. His gift to her had been the architect’s plans and the promise of a contractor as soon as possible. And of course perfume and jewellery. He always gave her some piece of jewellery, this time sapphire studs.

  They were jamming the lower hall, getting out of their coats and mufflers, handing over a bottle of champagne and one of those yummy homemade liqueurs they produced, of beach plums or rum cherries. Jimmy, she noticed, was wearing only a light leather jacket instead of an overcoat. His appearance startled her because he had, like herself, grown up. Somehow she had expected him to be the same age as he had been the last summer they had hung out together. It was always startling when the year-round people changed while she was gone. It was like putting toys back
in a box and then coming and finding they had secretly gone on with some private game in your absence. However, Jimmy had gone to Dartmouth and had been working on the West Coast for the last three years. He belonged to the real world.

  Susan handed her a holly and white cedar wreath she must have made. Really, Susan was amazing with her hands. Just as it was occurring to Laurie she could get Susan to make her something comfortable and chic while she was parked here, Susan gave her a box that she opened to find a perfect midnight blue chemise trimmed in ivory silk. Susan was wearing one of her own dresses, of course, floor length with an uneven handkerchief hem of jacquard floral patterned aquamarine in a heavy silk that hung in thick draperylike folds glimmering. It had a cowl neck but in the back it was deeply cut. Susan still had a handsome back for a woman her age. She seemed to be flirting with Tyrone a lot. Laurie supposed he was more fun to flirt with when he was divorced than when he was getting married. Susan was just having fun. It didn’t mean anything. She told Susan how much she loved the chemise.

  Celeste had just laid out the hors d’oeuvres. Dinah and Willie immediately moved on them. ‘When we first started the Moonsnails,’ Dinah was saying to Jimmy, ‘I said we should call the band Free Hors d’Oeuvres. I figured a sign like that, Free Hors d’Oeuvres at the Inn, would really draw in the tourists.’

  But Jimmy was not listening. He was looking at Laurie. Not with pity, she noticed. Maybe nobody had told him her disgusting story yet. No, that would be too much to hope for. They couldn’t wait to talk about it, the biggest scandal of the year or the decade. He wanted to talk to her, but he didn’t have the same look in his eyes that made her avoid Willie, that combination of easy sympathy and hard curiosity.

  ‘Going to stay for a while?’ he asked.