Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  Willie got to his feet, dusting off his jeans. He gave one last mournful glance at his sculpture. ‘Tyrone called to find out if his house is all right. There’s all sorts of nonsense on TV in New York about the Cape being cut in half, the sea pouring through, roofs caved in. She didn’t go during the storm, anyhow. When the snow stopped, she took the truck over.’

  ‘I don’t think even a four-wheel-drive vehicle can get through the drifts out there, but, Willie, it’s just a lull in the storm.’

  ‘You think so?’ He followed her to the door, stretching. ‘Maybe she’s in the kitchen.’

  ‘There’s no one in the house. I’m getting worried. When did she leave?’ She felt the futility of the question. Willie never wore a watch and all of his clocks were electric.

  Willie got into his gear and together they followed the tracks of the truck on foot along the buried road to Tyrone’s. ‘I can’t believe she did this,’ Dinah kept saying. ‘Going to check on the big house during a storm is just totally nutso!’

  ‘The snow’s starting again.’ Willie was beginning to worry. When anxiety took him, his features drew together in his face, giving him a pinched look. ‘I didn’t think there was any problem. The snow had stopped and I figured if the truck got stuck, she could always walk back. I’d dig it out later on. She seemed so excited about going.’

  A trip to the house instead of New York, perhaps. ‘You were just placating her by agreeing, because she’s been in a funk.’

  Willie shrugged. ‘Why didn’t she just go to New York without us?’

  ‘Maybe Laurie didn’t insist. Maybe Susan felt she’d be intruding.’

  Willie grunted. ‘Jimmy had better keep his pecker in his pants with Laurie. She’s high strung and barely treading water now.’

  ‘Our Jimmy is not noted for restraint. Nor have any of us set him an example of the chaste life.’

  ‘Snowing harder,’ Willie said unnecessarily.

  ‘Yeah.’ Wading through the snow took too much effort to talk more.

  ‘She was in a backbiting fit today. Kept snipping at me. I thought the fresh air might do her good.’

  Dinah was panting too hard to answer, plunging through the drifts. It was rough going and the snow was closing in on them. If it wasn’t for the ruts, she wondered if they could find the road. It felt as if night were coming already. Certainly it was getting darker. Still they saw the truck and the tree that had fallen on it long before they could get to it. ‘Oh god!’ Willie moaned. ‘Let her be all right.’

  When Dinah caught sight of the large pine, uprooted by the wind and fallen across the old Toyota, her heart clenched like a hand closing on spikes. Please, please, please. The tree had not landed across the cab but across the engine, although the windshield was lost in its boughs.

  ‘We’re going to have to cut her out,’ Willie said. ‘There are tools in the back if I can get at them. There has to be a saw. We need a saw.’ He bellowed, ‘Susan, we’re here, we’re going to get you out!’ No answer.

  Dinah shoved at the boughs. ‘She’s alive!’ At least now she could make out Susan mouthing at them frantically from inside the cab. Its front windshield was shattered and opaque. Susan was wedged behind the wheel. One door was smashed in but the other, on the driver’s side, was simply held shut by the tree. Dinah broke the branches off wildly, trying to thrust her way through the fallen mass to Susan. But it was one thing to break brittle dead branches, another to attack the living green wood. The branches would bend but would not break. She forced her way through and then she was stuck too among fallen boughs and had to wriggle back out.

  Willie had a saw and an axe, used when they occasionally poached hardwood. They both set to work. Sweat dripping down her back and between her breasts. After a few minutes she hung her parka on a partially severed limb and continued. It was getting darker and the snow was lashing her checks raw, clotting in her lashes. Her heart pounded in her throat as much from fear as from exertion. She was wringing wet.

  The tree seemed to fight them. Dying, it clutched the truck. Her imagination was as overheated as her body. Willie was far cooler and more effective in his attack. That slightly phlegmatic side of him was most valuable at a time like this as he switched between axe and saw with her, each taking turns. Gradually a path through the boughs opened up. She could see that Susan was bleeding. Dinah grew more frantic but also more focused. At last Willie grabbed the door handle and pulled it open. Susan fell out into his arms, crying. Her face was streaked with blood, her poncho spotted. Her hand hung crookedly. Between them they dragged her free of the tree. It was a dim twilight with snow swirling around them. If we can’t find our way back, we’ll all die here, Dinah realized. Sight was useless. She put her parka back on.

  ‘Can you walk?’ Willie was bellowing over the wind.

  ‘I can’t feel my feet! They’re frozen!’

  ‘We’ll get you home,’ Dinah promised, taking half Susan’s weight around her shoulders and staggering onward with the load.

  ‘They’ll amputate my feet,’ Susan moaned. ‘My feet are dead.’

  Between them they supported her and went stumbling through the drifts. Susan was sobbing and seemed only half conscious. Obviously she had banged her head. Dinah was still terrified. It seemed to her they made no progress through the snow and the gathering dark. Fortunately the snow was not yet as heavy as it had been during the night, although the wind was gathering force. Her own face felt frozen. Her sinuses ached. Her feet were numb in her boots and her fingers had died. Her eyes teared constantly. Every few steps she stumbled and several times went down, getting wetter.

  They went on and on and on. ‘Are we lost?’ Dinah asked repeatedly, and evenly Willie answered, ‘We’re following the truck prints backwards.’

  They were actually at the house and Willie was kicking open the door before she realized they had come out of the woods, because no lights were on. They staggered with Susan limp and moaning between them into the dark cold livingroom where the fire had long ago gone out, and there they collapsed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SUSAN

  Susan considered her accident one of those ultimately trying situations in which everyone’s best and worst characteristics stood out in plain relief. Willie was truly useful but also his withdrawn self. He could not bear to acknowledge she had been in real danger and thus busied himself with incidentals and arrangements.

  But Dinah was impossible, her most irritable and imperious. You’d think Susan had had an accident especially to give Dinah a bad day.

  ‘How could you be such a fool! Going out in the worst storm in five years in order to reassure Tyrone? Have you gone completely bonkers?’

  Susan was in bed. The power had come back on suddenly as it always did, with the water gushing from the hiccuping taps, every light in the place blazing in the middle of the night, the radio blasting out, the digital clocks Willie loved all blinking maddeningly 12:00 12:00 12:00 and the phone ringing two minutes later, Burt asking, ‘Did you get your power?’

  At least it was warm. She had been treated for frostbite and her skull had been x-rayed – no fractures except for her wrist. She had been barely conscious, but Dinah had summoned the rescue squad, led in by a snowplough, and Susan had been taken off in an ambulance. Now she was home again tucked into her proper bed with the cushions piled up, five stitches in her forehead that wouldn’t show under her hair if she combed it right, her left wrist in a cast, her feet bandaged and what must Dinah do but scold her as if she were an erring cat who had taken a chickadee. Dinah’s occasional sternness had wrung tears from her often enough; but no more. She had used to think Dinah’s temper was the other side of her passion. ‘What are the chances of a tree falling on anyone?’ Susan asked rather amiably, she thought. She was determined to set an example of fortitude and good temper. ‘One cannot conduct one’s life trying to avoid absurd accidents, such as lightning striking and church towers falling on one’s head.’

  ‘Only an
idiot stands under a big tree in the middle of the field in an electric storm, and only an idiot goes out in a blizzard. If someone’s life depended on it, if you were on the rescue squad, I’d understand.’

  ‘Weren’t they sweet? I didn’t know Wendy was a paramedic.’ She thought Dinah looked fetching this afternoon, wearing a finely knit black sweater. Susan hadn’t tried making love yet. She wondered how it would go with her wrist in a cast. It would be easier with Dinah than with Willie. Should she suggest giving it a try? She smiled. She was about to give Dinah an unexpected present. She felt relaxed, generous, sensual in spite of her bruises and pains. Everyone had been warm and caring to her.

  ‘She’s the best they have,’ Dinah said parenthetically in her normal voice before resuming her rant. ‘But to go out in the worst blizzard in five years just to make sure some millionaire’s cottage hasn’t lost a shingle?’

  ‘When a neighbour asks a favour, I try to oblige. Tyrone has done numerous favours for us.’ Her gaze came to rest on the Fleur de Fleurs he had given her for Christmas. Who else would give her French perfume? It was just the sort of luxury she needed and constantly missed. Perfume wasn’t really a luxury, but something her body required to feel dressed. On the bedside table were the lavender roses he had sent that afternoon, just opening. He knew how to be gracious, which was more than she could say for Dinah. She suspected that Dinah wanted her to be humble and grateful, as if Willie couldn’t have rescued her anyway and of course they came after her. It was like thanking somebody for flushing the toilet after themselves or for cutting the bread. Naturally they came after her and she was damned glad to see them, but did Dinah think Susan would not have done the same for her? If somebody went on at great length about their own virtues, it seemed superfluous to commend them.

  ‘Not so numerous as he asks in return. What kind of self-important ass asks you to go check his property at risk to your life?’

  ‘Tyrone is a sensitive caring man and a real friend! If I choose to return his favours with a favour he asks, you have absolutely no right to question my choice! It was a ridiculous accident, a tree leaping on me! Who expects to be attacked by trees? It’s as if I were walking down Fifth Avenue and a cornice fell on me.’ Susan caught sight of herself in the mirror that faced the bed. She looked battered but not impossible, raffish perhaps, waiflike. The bandage would come off soon and the stitches vanish. She saw herself in a large floppy hat. Dark bottle green. How could she hope to find such a treasure out here in the woods? She had never tried to make a hat. That would be amusing. Tyrone would admire it and she would tell him how the bandage had made her think of it.

  ‘Susan, how can you lie there smirking as if you’d done something clever! You almost committed idiot’s suicide. Your values have gone whacked. If Tyrone’s house had fallen down, what bloody difference would it make?’

  ‘You’d be glad! I’m surprised you haven’t burned it down yourself! You hate when anybody lively or intelligent arrives here. You’d like me locked up in the woods all twelve months of the year with no one to talk to but a dog and you and Willie! You’d like me growing moss on my side like some oak. I am not yet ready for a premature retirement to doddering old age.’

  ‘Susan, it wasn’t cute. The truck is smashed. You got badly banged up and you’re lucky to be alive. Can’t you admit it when you’ve fucked up?’

  ‘It isn’t your truck. And you’re simply jealous of Tyrone. You think nobody should have more than you have. You resent his style and you want me to pretend he doesn’t exist and that he isn’t one of my dearest friends.’

  ‘Susan, that’s silly. That’s the serf touching his cap in the field talking about his intimacy with the grand seigneur. Tyrone uses you. You’re more convenient, cleaner and smarter than Ozzie Dove. That’s all.’

  ‘Don’t try to separate me from my friends, Dinah Adler! You’re secretly a very possessive bitch. You simply don’t want me close to anyone else. You’re afraid you can’t compete!’

  ‘Susan, you have a pitiful crush on Tyrone, but his relationship to you only differs from his relationship to that Haitian maid in that he doesn’t pay you a salary, but you do it for nothing!’

  ‘Bitch! Liar!’ Susan grabbed the vase of roses and threw it at Dinah, who ducked but was splashed with water. The vase, Victorian marbelized glass, broke into a dozen shards. Susan began to cry furiously. ‘Get out of my room! Get out!’

  After Dinah had left, she dragged herself out of bed to rescue Tyrone’s poor flowers from the mess of spilled water and broken glass. She was not displeased when she cut herself, a minor gash on her finger that bled profusely so that when Willie came running in, he was upset with Dinah as well as with her. He finished cleaning up the mess, put the flowers in a new vase. Her finger stopped bleeding, although she sucked it when he was out of the room. She needed a bit of nice fussing over after Dinah’s nastiness.

  ‘What she calls love,’ Susan pronounced at seven when Willie brought her supper tray, ‘has become more and more the attempt to control both of us. To make us live just as she finds convenient, without regard to our desires, our tastes, our relationships with others – or with each other.’

  ‘You’re really mad at her.’ Willie was eating on the floor, stretched out on his elbow on the beautiful little country knotted carpet she had found at a yard sale, a lamb in a circle of daisies. Very few men his age could sprawl on the floor that way and look as natural as Jimmy would have.

  ‘You bet I am. You don’t see how manipulative and controlling she’s become, sweetheart. For instance, she won’t work with you on Tyrone’s renovations. Now we both know that you need that gallery. If she thought of anyone but herself, she’d pitch in.’

  ‘I looked at the house on Main Street last week. That space would be great for sculpture. The ceilings are high. With skylights in the roof, the upstairs gallery could be perfect.’

  ‘Just what you need. You’re getting in on the ground floor, helping Laurie set it up. Why couldn’t Dinah see that? Because she isn’t thinking about us. She’s thinking only about herself … She accused me of being in love with Tyrone! Can you imagine? One of our oldest friends.’ As she spoke she felt the same hot stab of pain she had felt when Dinah had first accused her. Her eyes burned with a silly desire to cry, from humiliation and the unfairness of it. Really, Dinah was a person she had thought of as knowing and loving her. She was beginning to realize Dinah had masses of unresolved anger floating loose in her – poisonous envy, possessiveness, jealousy – which had been allowed to grow so strong that now Dinah was unable to perceive Susan clearly. Of course she loved Tyrone, but it wasn’t romantic love. She had known him far longer than she had known Dinah, in fact; here was Dinah trying to push an older friend from her life. Dinah was behaving just like a possessive husband; but Dinah was not her husband. She had her own husband.

  ‘Why did she say that?’

  ‘Because she’s jealous of him, that’s it in a sentence. She loves to be the centre of attention, and when he’s around, she can’t be. Don’t you think she sometimes absorbs a lot of the attention we’d pay each other? That sometimes she just bumps in between us and we end up all the time worrying about what Dinah wants, what Dinah thinks, what Dinah needs … Don’t you sometimes feel you don’t get enough of my attention?’

  Willie was frowning at his emptied plate.

  ‘What’s wrong, sweetheart? Did what I say upset you?’

  ‘I was trying to remember how it was before Dinah. I don’t think it was so good for us.’

  ‘That was years ago, lovely. We’re much more mature now.’

  ‘I didn’t realize how angry you were with Dinah,’ he said slowly, looking at her with that air of resignation she knew so well.

  ‘She thinks she can dump her anger on me. Because I’m a softer, gentler person than she is, she can just use her loudness and her temper and her strength as a weapon and simply push me where she wants me. I don’t like being browbeaten, Willie, and I’m fed up
with her attempts. I’m serious.’ She could feel her love for him strongly tonight. Sometimes that old attraction got lost in the bustle of domestic activity, all the minutiae of problem-solving, of house-cleaning, shopping, laundry, cooking, bill-paying, saving and spending, and then Willie was no more sexually attractive than the canister vacuum cleaner or the coffee machine. Then she would suddenly perceive him, as now stretched out on the lamb rug like a domesticated lion, a tall good-looking sweet-natured man with whom she had had two children and with whom she had grown up, essentially. No wonder Dinah fantasized about having children with him.

  Susan could feel her desire for him seeping back like sweet red wine, like mulled wine spicy and hot and tipsy. Such a powerful and supple, such an adaptable relationship between them, it had survived not only her having an affair with a woman as compelling and tempestuous as Dinah, but his involvement with Dinah also. A bond, a marriage as strong as theirs, could survive equally well the end of that triangle, if Dinah did not restrain her temper and her overbearing need to control. ‘Willie … come lie beside me here. Let’s keep each other company.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  DINAH

  Dinah could no longer enter the new house. Susan would ostentatiously sweep from the room, locking herself in her bedroom until Dinah left. In order to see Willie, she went to his studio or waited for him to come to her. All of a sudden she saw Susan only in glimpses, and she saw Willie by appointment or by descending on him. They didn’t eat supper together; she no longer cooked alternate nights in the new house. She could not have imagined that their life together might so abruptly cease, stranding her without an easy opportunity to sue for peace with Susan. She kept expecting Susan to tire of pouting and welcome her with a hug. Nothing had happened that could justify such a radical break.

  ‘I’ve got into trouble all my life from being opinionated,’ she said to Willie’s back. Willie was trying to get on with a new piece, a great lump of amber plastic with aluminium spokes jutting out. He had put aside the huge bone house almost completed before the storm. Even though Dinah thought the new effort looked arbitrary and ill-conceived, reminiscent of cartoons of mines, her habit of freely criticizing had got her in so much trouble, she confined herself to encouraging noises when Willie asked how she liked it. ‘I used to get tossed out of social studies in high school for shooting off my mouth. Always I have some opinion burning holes in my tongue. But why does she stay mad at me?’