Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  He was hammering on one of the embedded spokes, trying to flatten or bend it, she could not tell. He did not turn or answer.

  She wasn’t going to give up. Susan was still speaking to him; in fact they seemed to be getting on fine. He had to help Dinah. He had to make her understand why Susan had withdrawn, and, furthermore, he had to make Susan see her. ‘Why is she doing this now, Willie? I have to know. People don’t just stop loving each other on a whim.’

  ‘I think she wants you to apologize,’ Willie said slowly. He got up and sat in a director’s chair, pouring himself a cup of coffee from a bright red thermos Dinah had given him.

  ‘For what? Helping to save her life? Not kissing Tyrone’s ass?’

  ‘She thinks you want to control who we see. That you’re trying to run our lives.’ Willie was avoiding her gaze, staring into his coffee as if it were full of little swimmers running races.

  ‘But that’s ridiculous!’

  Willie stared into his cup.

  ‘I don’t like Tyrone. But I go along to his house, I cook when we have him over with his current wife. I put in an appearance at his parties.’

  ‘Tyrone is an old friend. We’ve known him for eighteen years, Dinah. You have to understand that when you attack Tyrone, Susan feels attacked too. They’ve been close forever.’

  ‘Let’s not rewrite history. It’s only since his last marriage broke up that we have Tyrone in our hair all the time. His most recent wife didn’t like the Cape, and in fact they spent two summers in Scotland. Am I the only one who remembers life three years ago?’

  ‘That was just for a couple of years. I didn’t like her much. Glenda,’ he said as if pleased to remember her name.

  ‘She wasn’t too memorable,’ Dinah said sourly. ‘But she did have the advantage that she kept Tyrone off Cape.’

  ‘See, you can’t control your hostility toward him, even talking to me.’

  ‘Why should I? Who can I be honest with, if not with you?’

  ‘You’re giving way to jealousy. You have to try to control it.’

  ‘Willie, he’s a rich jerk. If I’m jealous, it’s only because Susan makes such a fuss over him.’ She was dismayed to realize she had now got into an argument with Willie about Tyrone. That was not at all what she had intended.

  Willie had finished his coffee and was hunched in his chair glaring sullenly in the direction of his sculpture; now she was put in the position of being a distraction, an interruption. She had always been as careful not to intrude on Willie’s work as she had been to keep Susan from intruding on hers. Yet if she left now, everything was worse. What choice did she have? She must abandon the field today and try again tomorrow. ‘Would you like to go truck shopping tomorrow? I’ve been marking ads in the papers.’

  ‘Jimmy found an eighty-three Ford. It doesn’t have four-wheel drive, which may kill us in the winter, but the price is right. The bed’s rusty but the body’s in good shape. It’s only got fifty-two thou on it.’

  As she crossed the yard, she felt awkward, runty, cast out. So she didn’t like Tyrone; Susan found the Moonsnails unendurable socially. Like Mark before her, Susan found Dinah’s playing in a rock band déclassé. Dinah couldn’t take that seriously from Susan. She didn’t take the band seriously either. After all, she had once been part of a real band. But she had needed a gig to support her without draining the vital juices of her creativity, and the Oystereem had been precisely that. Susan was shocked whenever she walked in and Dinah was playing a hiphop record, and if Dinah tried to explain why she found the percussion exciting, Susan would think she was trying to excuse bad taste. Susan only liked rock music popular before she left New York.

  Maybe she’d given herself licence to be too loud about her dislike for Tyrone. But never, never had she taken Susan’s attachment to him seriously enough to soft-pedal her opinions. Susan was her lover, not a casual friend she had to be polite to over tea. How had it happened? She was still reeling. When she caught sight of herself in a mirror, she stared, as if to read what had gone wrong. Her face looked like her face, only rumpled and drawn. She saw instead Susan’s face, that apple blossom look she wore when happy, the way her face grew hot and ruddy when she was close to coming.

  Everything reminded her of her loss, the rupture of her life. She no longer did her laundry in Susan’s washer and dryer. It was multiplying. Soon she would have to drive to a Laundromat. She had not used one in so many years, she was vaguely aware the closest was a couple of towns away. All the nearer ones had been shut down for polluting the water table. Under the Cape was a finite aquifer, with salt water bearing in from all sides. Water and land were precious and fragile here. She let her dirty clothes pile up, waiting for Susan to take her back, but now she was running out of underwear. She hated to acknowledge that she was truly thrown out by asking the location of the current Laundromat, but she had no choice. Her last fairly clean pair of socks was on her feet for the second day.

  When she finally got back four hours later with her folded laundry, she became aware the moment she walked in that someone was in her house. The kitchen light was on and the rocker moved nearer the table. Susan at long last? Like most Cape people she never locked her door in the winter. Susan had finally come to her senses and returned to her. ‘Susan?’ she called. She felt as if she had grown a foot taller.

  Someone was upstairs but did not respond as Dinah climbed the narrow steep staircase. Her bedroom was lit by a gable facing the pond, but the last sun had drained from the east. The room was dark except for her stained glass lamp, made by the Moonsnails’ drummer in a crafts phase. It was not Willie and it certainly was not Susan propped in bed with the corduroy bed rest behind him.

  ‘Jimmy.’ She was so disappointed it was difficult to keep that from her voice, but her fantasies weren’t his fault.

  ‘I had a row with Mother about you this afternoon, so I decided to drop in while I’m p.n.g.’ He was sitting with a cat against each thigh. Animals liked Jimmy. Cats, dogs, horses – all moved toward him.

  Persona non grata, she supplied, taking the window seat in the gable. She pulled the thick velvet curtains shut, as the wind was tweaking the old wood. The glass behind her radiated a chill. ‘Why did you fight about me?’

  ‘Because I’m not prepared to write you off.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Sure sounds like it. What went on between the two of you while I was in New York?’

  She started to tell him in laborious detail her version of the storm, but he interrupted her. ‘I can’t remember if I ever met Tom – Laurie’s husband. I was out on the Coast when they married. What was he like?’

  Dinah squinted into a dark corner of her room. ‘I only met him a couple of times here. He was tall with an arrogant manner.’ She didn’t want to admit how little attention she had bothered to pay him. She was keenly aware of her shortcomings. Her failure to pay attention to most jerks she met socially was seeming more of a vice than a convenience. She felt to herself like a person who has been knocking around cheerfully and has broken everything in sight without noticing. ‘Are you interested in Laurie?’

  ‘I feel sorry for her,’ Jimmy said. ‘But not in any paternalistic way.’ He crooked his hands behind his head, cuddling up to her corduroy pillow. ‘She hasn’t fucked up her life any worse than I’ve done to mine. I have a fellow feeling for her of two people who’ve got a long way to climb before they can see any light.’

  ‘Me too,’ Dinah said sourly. She could not find the tone she frequently adopted with Jimmy, of fondly overlooking his peccadilloes. ‘How could Susan cut me off this way? How could she just stop caring and slam the door?’

  He grinned. ‘That’s what I’ve been asking about Lisa. And you didn’t even make Susan pregnant.’

  ‘I guess I’m miserable.’ Dinah felt as if she had finally named the weight in her, this vast soggy thing she had been carrying around like a load of wet laundry in her head. She felt immediately guilty. All her life she had said to h
erself that unhappiness was self-indulgence. Perhaps she was always secretly comparing herself to what her father had gone through so that she felt nothing that happened to her was really bad. She felt a sanction laid on her to be cheerful in minor adversity, with the unsaid proviso that any unhappiness of hers was by definition minor.

  ‘Join the club of the merely human.’ Jimmy was obviously enjoying her weakened state.

  ‘How haven’t I been human?’

  ‘You’ve felt for years you’d found your own solution. You had it made.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Once again Dinah tasted that sharp mustardy disbelief. How could she have suddenly lost what she had treasured? She could see Susan sitting where Jimmy was, so vividly both faces hung super-imposed. ‘I had what I wanted. I still want it!’

  ‘People change,’ Jimmy said sententiously. ‘Can we have supper soon? I’m hungry. The level of cuisine isn’t so high these days with Willie cooking every night.’ Jimmy called Susan Mother, but since he had reached what he considered adulthood, around sixteen, he often called Willie by name.

  Dinah decided she would cook for him; she had been eating out of cans, an occasional omelette, expecting that the situation would be resolved and she would dine with what had been for a decade her family. It would be healthy and soothing to sit down to a genuine meal.

  She realized as she was putting supper together, that she had become accustomed to the range of gadgets in the new house. However much she teased Willie, she was used to tossing the onions in the Cuisinart rather than chopping them by hand. She was used to having a salad dryer. She had trouble lighting her elderly oven with a match. She had not bought a new pan in fifteen years. Hers were chipped and battered. Domesticity was going to be bumpy for a while.

  ‘You’re not sleeping with Laurie, then?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’d have scared her out of her skin if I’d made a move. Besides, I have an old flame in New York. Nothing serious, but enough left to satisfy me when I go down there.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Dinah said fervently, ‘because if you think Susan’s mad at me, that’s nothing to what they’ll do to you if you get mixed up with Laurie.’

  Jimmy shrugged. ‘I’ll play out that hand if it comes to me, but I’m not looking for it. She’s a scared little girl … You going to make some music for me tonight?’

  Of all of her family on the pond, Jimmy was the one most interested in her music. He had a better ear than anyone else in the family, and he genuinely enjoyed listening to her. That had been true even when he was a kid. It was a bond between them. What she did was far more real to Jimmy than it was to either of his parents. Twice when works of hers were being performed on the West Coast, he had turned up – with Lisa once and once with their bookkeeper. It had been a delight to see him, to share her minor triumphs with her own family.

  A mid-February storm shifted to freezing rain as it wound down, crusting the snow with a glaze of ice. Driving was bad and walking was impossible. Dinah was feeling lonely, especially as the light petered out. She missed long talkative evenings by the fire in the new house. At noon she stuck her head in Willie’s studio and asked him if she could come by at three, if he thought he’d be finished. He said when he was knocking off, he would signal her.

  That didn’t happen until four, after she had stopped work an hour before and sat watching his studio across the deeply rutted drive and yard between the houses. She had taken a bath, slipped on her most seductive silky sweater, brushed her hair five times, tweaked her eyebrows and applied bronzy lipstick. Then she added a pair of big metal earrings Willie had made for her years ago, when he had a notion to launch a line of handmade jewellery in local galleries. She was holding tight to Willie. As long as they were still involved, she had her foot in the door, she belonged somewhere.

  Just because Susan was temporarily angry with her, why should that ruin her relationship with Willie? After all, she had an independent loving bond with each of them. Susan often withdrew into depression, so why should Susan’s alienation affect the pleasure she and Willie took in each other’s company? In some ways, as serious working artists, they had more in common with each other than either had with Susan.

  She came teetering across the glazed ruts in her high-heeled boots, her least sensible but most attractive pair. Halfway across she skidded and banged her knee, hard. Tears stood out in her eyes for a moment but she soldiered ahead. To complain would call undue attention to how much care she had taken with her appearance.

  Willie was sitting backward in a chair glaring at his piece. He had spent the afternoon hammering the spokes awry. Whatever effect he had been aiming for had not been attained. The piece looked more accidental than ever. The big skull igloo had been moved to the back, next to the oven where he softened plastic before bending or moulding it. It seemed to radiate powerful anguish, towering over this spiny lump.

  She sat down on his couch, seductively she hoped. It had been many years since she had wondered if she was attractive. ‘You don’t look happy,’ she said mildly, patting the couch. ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’

  ‘Sure.’ He sighed and sat down beside her, dropping his arm around her shoulders. ‘I’m trying something new but I haven’t got hold of it yet.’

  ‘But, Willie, don’t you think you’re overreacting to Susan’s criticism? She was mad at you because you didn’t want to see a show in New York enough to accompany her. She was just getting back at what she felt was disloyalty.’

  ‘Susan says you act with her the way men traditionally act with women. That you dismiss her criticism as emotional reactions,’ Willie said gravely.

  ‘Do you think that’s true?’ Dinah had the feeling once again things were slipping away from her, plunging downhill. She sidled closer to Willie. Her capacity for seduction had always been slight. She was so busy trying to move closer in a subtle manner she did not hear what Willie was saying until he had run down and was staring morosely at his amber mine, which now looked run over by a truck. She had the sense that Willie had been fulfilling an obligation; he was carrying to Dinah a load of complaint entrusted to him by Susan. Later Susan would ask him if he had told Dinah what she asked him to.

  ‘Willie, Susan has to talk to me face-to-face if she wants to complain. She can’t send messages through you. This has to be between Susan and me directly, and you can’t let yourself get caught in the middle.’

  ‘Oh, great. You’ve been asking me to squat in the middle. The moment you see me, you ask me what she’s saying, what she’s doing, when she’ll see you. You keep telling me I have to make her talk to you. Now you tell me to stay out of your quarrel.’

  ‘I’ve been selfish. I’m sorry,’ Dinah said in a soft apologetic voice she realized she had not heard from herself since Mark died. ‘I’ve been putting you in a bad place.’

  ‘It makes her furious. She thinks I’m taking your part.’

  Are you? Dinah wondered. She slid over and sat on his lap, putting her cheek against his. It felt awkward. For a decade she had been making love with this man at least three times a week, and now she felt illicit, embarrassed in approaching him.

  Willie responded slowly, as if reluctantly. Then he seemed to get into it. She did not worry much until they were both naked on the couch and she bent down to take him in her mouth. He was flaccid, the soft worm of his penis flowing away from her among his still golden pubic hair. The hair around Willie’s genitals and under his arms was still the pale yellow his hair must have been before it turned prematurely white.

  She took him in her mouth and tried to bring him to life, but after a few minutes, he stopped her with his hand on her head. She did not have to ask him why, because he was questioning himself. ‘I think it doesn’t feel right. It’s as if I’m seeing you behind her back.’

  ‘After ten years, suddenly it’s adultery?’

  ‘I know she doesn’t want me to be with you. She doesn’t have to say so. I can feel her resentment.’

  ‘But why?
Why does she have to take you from me too – after taking herself from me?’ Dinah’s eyes began to ooze tears slowly.

  ‘It just doesn’t feel right now. It’s like something secret.’

  She felt utterly defeated, pulling her clothes on as if her nakedness had become shameful. Willie’s virtues stymied her. He was simple in the best sense of that word, clear, true, solid, complete. He did not want to cheat on anybody. He didn’t want to lie or pretend. Their relationship had been perfectly open; now it was shut.

  Chapter Sixteen

  LAURIE

  Finally Willie and Jimmy had begun work on converting the boathouse to a little house for Laurie. The town was making Tyrone put in a septic tank for the new building, which she thought absurd but there was no getting around it. Fortunately February turned mild and the snow cover melted off. The ground was sandy where the new system was to be. One morning the bulldozer arrived to dig the hole. The health agent took another week to inspect the tank in situ, before the hole could be closed and the sand thrown back. Laurie felt enormous relief when the big machine scraped away down the sand road and she was left to herself – except for Willie and Jimmy, who were practically family.

  She didn’t need the boathouse till summer, so the speed of the work was hardly critical. She was living in the family house, using the bedroom that had been hers since childhood, through all the different apartments of her mother and Tyrone. She was frankly more eager for work to begin on converting the house Tyrone had bought in the centre of town into a gallery, but some weird local finagling was holding that up. The town boards kept making demands about parking and zoning that just seemed obstructionist. She let Willie handle it until one hearing when Tyrone was in Japan and she had to go. She really didn’t follow the arguments about drainage, runoff from asphalt versus gravel, about congestion and previous use – they all seemed deadly serious – but they were kind to her. Obviously her story was so notorious even the locals pitied her.