Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  In summer Tyrone would anchor the raft two-thirds of the way down the pond. It was heaven to stretch out with the sun warm on her body, to lie there talking and drinking martinis that Tyrone brought out breathtakingly cold in a silver carafe, talking of the big busy real world. Tyrone would share gossip about people she had met once or twice but never forgotten, the people she had not yet met but had read about and had a chance, through him and through him only, of someday meeting. Warm sun, iced martinis, the water of the pond gently lapping. Such moments were perfection. The rest of her life fell off from them precipitously. It should not be that way. She could remember when her life had seemed as exciting as a good movie. Dinah had failed her. Dinah had settled into a bore.

  Sunday just before noon Tyrone called. ‘It’s the first springlike day. It must be seventy. I thought of you and I was filled with envy. I could see you up there among the trees, with the pond before you and the flowers all around your house. Do you know how lucky you are to live in one of the most beautiful and peaceful spots on the East Coast?’

  ‘Of course. Although I have to say in February I envy you. Besides, it isn’t seventy here. It’s chilly.’

  ‘That’s my secret fantasy. To live there. To let the city go and just live in peace with myself.’

  ‘You should come up oftener, Tyrone. It’s good for you. You always manage to relax. You haven’t been up since Christmas. I thought you might come for Easter.’

  ‘Easter … What a charming idea. Let me see, that …?’

  ‘A week from today.’

  ‘I’ll make every effort.’

  ‘Shall I plan a dinner? I’d be delighted.’

  ‘I’ll let you know in the next couple of days. I was supposed to be in Italy, but complications arose. In the meantime, it does me good to know you’re there with Laurie. She’s been sounding better, don’t you think?’

  Tyrone’s plans swerved about twice more but at last it was settled that he would fly to Nantucket on Friday with a business associate, in his plane. Sunday morning he would be flown over. Monday he would return to New York. He would not have Celeste with him, so the cooking was up to Willie and Susan. She was enormously excited. She had begun cleaning both houses. Now it was time to plan a menu. ‘Turkey or ham?’ She pondered. ‘Ham! Dinah wouldn’t let us have it for years and years.’

  ‘I really would savour a genuine country cured ham.’

  ‘I could get a ham at the supermarket – or better, I know a place that has excellent Dijon ham in Boston. Jimmy can go.’

  ‘I don’t want French ham,’ Willie said stubbornly. ‘I want a real country ham. I know how we could mail-order a Virginia ham overnight. I have the catalogue. I’m going to call that eight hundred number right now.’

  It was all coming together in her mind. They would cook at home, then bring dinner over to Tyrone’s and serve there. She loved the idea of presiding over the diningroom in Tyrone’s house. She would use his china and his silver and set a fabulous table and they would all sit down as one family to a real Easter celebration, the first in years and years. Dinah was weird about Easter. She would go along with Christmas, but she could not stand Easter. Flowers. Susan must get to the florist on Friday. What she would really love would be traditional white lilies. Laurie would not cause her trouble the way Siobhan would have; Laurie would be delighted to have her take over.

  As Susan oversaw Alice Dove’s cleaning of Tyrone’s house and as she polished the silver herself, she was reminded of her wedding. She had created it entirely. She had made her own gown and the gowns of her bridesmaids, although her own mother insisted on ordering hers, not trusting Susan to make one twice as attractive as the local bridal shop. Peach and mauve. How lovely she had been then. She had carried mock orange blossoms. To spite her parents she had insisted the marriage occur in North Carolina, Willie’s home, just as she insisted they marry Protestant, not a real marriage to her parents. His family were very gracious to her. It had been an outdoor wedding in their garden. They had a big house in bad repair with extensive grounds they had gradually sold off to developers.

  She could remember just the sense she had now of all her powers coming together, her vision of a perfect occasion, that beautiful civilized moment when all the arts and nuances of living joined in something fine, fleeting but memorable. She had floated across the grass enjoying her own beauty as something she was bringing to Willie – not in the nauseating sense her mother had intended, the very night before the wedding attempting to instruct her on sexual duty in an absurd Victorian vein. Only her own manners and her need for a flawless occasion kept her from correcting her mother’s idiot prudery. She wasn’t giving herself to Willie the next day as a virgin bride. She and Willie had been making love for a year and a half and she was pregnant, although she did not yet know it. Willie had not been her first lover, but her third. So much for her mother’s lecture on submitting to one’s husband, delivered even when her mother fretted that her daughter was about to live in sin, since they weren’t to be truly married in the Church.

  Her mother had predicted to the day she died that Susan would return to the Church. Susan smiled grimly as she laid the silver gently back into its buffet drawers. It was solid silver, weighty in the hands unlike her own silver plate that she rarely bothered to polish for fear it would wear through the plating all the faster. The Church was a dark place she had escaped. Oh, the Protestants thought they had religion but what they had was something comfortable, tidy. Something that kept its place and bothered them little. A place to expose their new clothes and feel pious. There was no odour of sin and sanctity, no great weight of the centuries pressing down. The polite Protestant sects weren’t real religions, which was why she liked them. They offered as much religion as a truly civilized person needed. The Founding Fathers had been agnostics. Once she had visited Mount Vernon and had deemed it aesthetically pleasing; it was easy to imagine living a good life there. He had given up a lot for his nation, that man on the dollar bill. If she had a country life as social and as well set up as that one, she would not fantasize a pied-à-terre in New York.

  After Alice Dove left, Susan wandered through Tyrone’s house. She did not know where Laurie was, but she was out and Susan was left to enjoy. She had been in summer houses of Tyrone’s friends who had as much money as he did, where they had simply furnished the space with Bloomingdale’s plastic modular stuff or Crate and Barrel tables. Tyrone – actually his second wife, the one who had decorated, Janette – had chosen appropriate antiques and Chinese Orientals, pastels mostly.

  Tomorrow morning she would drive to a good florist and get lilies, yes, flowers for every downstairs room. Even the wood of this house was fine oak and maple, not cheap pine. She curled up in a window seat in Tyrone’s study, feeling a little presumptuous. His silent computer waited under its hood. The filing cabinets were veneered with walnut. The pond made scaly ripples on the cream ceiling. She imagined she could still smell the pipe he had used to smoke, before he decided it was unhealthy.

  When Willie and she had lived in New York, they had never met Tyrone. Willie tended to bring home to their SoHo loft shaggy penniless artists and loud politicos in those days, but she had encountered Tyrone soon after she and Willie had moved to the Cape year-round. Jimmy was six and Siobhan five and she was teaching them to swim. Where was Willie? Working in a gallery in Provincetown. She could imagine herself brown with the sun and dressed in some Indian nothing, soaked to the skin trying to get Siobhan to let go of her in the water.

  Tyrone had materialized out of the bushes. He was balding even then, perhaps a little heavier than he was now, dressed all in white like an image of vanished elegance. ‘What you need are water wings,’ he said. ‘I’ve taught my own daughter to swim, so she no longer needs hers. She’s six and she swims off the raft we’ve anchored. Perhaps your son would enjoy the use of it. You can walk over, take the dinghy at my dock and row out.’

  Yes, typically he had appeared urbane and helpful, br
inging her something she had not realized till then she needed. She felt like weeping. Was it for her younger self, carelessly and effortlessly lovely? For the importance and rootedness she had felt as the mother of two young children? They were gorgeous at that age. Adolescence had dealt nastily with both of them. Jimmy had only become handsome again while at college, and Siobhan was still peculiar looking, with her hair dyed patent leather black as if from spite and enough eye makeup to satisfy any clown. She had no idea if her daughter would look pretty if she were hosed down, because when Siobhan came home, rarely, rarely, she put on her cosmetic mask before she ate breakfast. It was her armour.

  When Susan heard Laurie on the deck, she barely had time to fly off the window seat and rush into the livingroom. Here was her real daughter. Laurie appreciated her far more than Siobhan ever had, confided in her more fully, enjoyed her company, came to her more willingly for solace. The daughter of my heart, she thought as she caressed Laurie’s small fine shoulder. ‘Tyrone’s going to notice right off how much better you’re looking. How did you get a tan? It’s been so chilly. I’ve barely ventured out.’

  ‘Do I have a tan?’ Laurie ran to peer in the mirror over the buffet. ‘I do! You’re right. Thank you, Susan,’ she burbled, as if Susan were the sun. ‘It must be from walking with Dinah and Jimmy. They’re always dragging me off to the dunes or along the marshes.’

  ‘We could take walks together,’ she said, before she could stop herself.

  Laurie did not notice her jealousy. ‘At least it’s clean now, but I hate the smell of disinfectant. I need that tall cut glass vase.’

  ‘Right there in the cupboard. I’ll get flowers tomorrow.’

  ‘I picked daffodils. Smell how fragrant they are. I never knew they had a scent. Dinah cut some from her garden and then she took me to an old house site on a hill near the Bay. They grow wild there, under the trees.’

  There were many old house sites on the Cape, but she was sure she knew that one, where once they had made love with the daffodils blooming. Then, when Dinah had truly loved her and not criticized her all the time. It could not have been April. She remembered it as warm, serene. She did not want to remember anymore. Quickly she took her leave.

  Saturday she had just finished putting together a cake for the next day, a chocolate gâteau with walnut layering, and was looking out at the pond when she noticed a dinghy with a motor on it heading across. Tyrone already? She had taken nearly three hours to put the cake together, but she wanted to do it right. She was too excited to work on the designs she owed Max at Young Ideas, the new one based on the purplish stems of beach plums not yet leafed out, the apricot buds unfurling. She just wanted to enjoy the holiday. Could Tyrone have arrived? She flung her apron off and ran to fix her hair. When she peered out the window of her bedroom through the binoculars she kept there, she saw that it was not Tyrone but a man and a woman. For a moment she thought the woman was Janette, his second wife, but of course she was too young to be Janette as Janette was now, nine years after Tyrone had divorced her.

  They were heading right for her dock. She resumed her toilette, sure that they had something to do with Tyrone, perhaps guests he had forgotten to mention, friends of his from New York looking for him. In any event she must change and be appropriately garbed to receive them.

  But when she had changed to her casual but smart bottle-green smock, she saw Dinah greeting them, with some young man she did not recognize standing in the door of her house. Surely they were not coming to see her? No, she was pointing at the boat and shaking her head and now she was returning to her house. They were a couple almost matched in height and slenderness, both in slacks and sporty anoraks. The man was in his middle thirties, the woman, a few years younger. She was almost more handsome than pretty, extremely fair, white-blonde hair cut short and sleek that showed off her high sharp cheekbones, her long neck.

  ‘We’re terribly sorry about the motor, we didn’t know,’ the man said in awkward greeting.

  ‘What about the motor?’ She was entirely confused.

  ‘That they’re illegal on the ponds. So the young woman there was telling us,’ he went on.

  ‘Never mind!’ Susan said. She could have killed Dinah on the spot. ‘I’m Susan Dewitt.’

  ‘Oh, we found you.’ The man looked relieved. ‘Tyrone Burdock told us to look you up. We’ve bought the house across from you and we’ve just finished renovating it. I’m Alec and this is Candida. The MacIvors.’

  ‘My husband is Dr MacIvor,’ Candida said, speaking for the first time. ‘He’s at Deaconess. In Boston.’

  ‘Would you come in for a drink? Or coffee? I’ll get my husband.’ It was easy introducing herself. For a decade it had been cumbersome. You see, this is my husband, but there is also Dinah. You want to invite us to dinner and that’s awfully kind of you, but there are three of us and we come as a set. She had rejoined society and could meet people as an equal, not as a pariah who had to explain for half an hour in the face of the most banal invitation.

  Candida and Alec seemed properly impressed with Tyrone. She enjoyed letting them know how close they were, that he was coming for an Easter she was hostessing. They talked about how wonderful the pond was. Candida loved to swim. She also adored playing tennis. They were going to have a court put in. Did Susan play?

  ‘Oh, I used to. I’d love to play again.’ She must take lessons at the court on the highway and bone up rapidly. Tyrone was a superb player and between his first and second marriages, they had played every Saturday morning all summer. If there was a court on the pond, he might resume.

  She decided to take them to Willie instead of fetching him, so that they could see his studio. Candida seemed puzzled. ‘I thought you were a carpenter? Or was that somebody else?’ she said to Willie, staring at the several large metal and plastic constructions occupying most of the room.

  Susan said quickly, ‘Oh, Willie’s overseeing the renovation of the boathouse and the design of a new gallery in town for Tyrone. As a favour. If you want a gallery well designed, who has better ideas than an artist?’

  She was delighted with them. What an improvement over the Captain and his drunken buddies and his chickens that crowed at four in the morning and his manure piles stinking. Of course a couple from Boston were not as useful or exciting as a couple from New York would be, but still, they would add to the social life of the pond. They would definitely enrich the coming summer.

  Chapter Nineteen

  DINAH

  The phone rang as Dinah was washing a muddy spring salad, violet leaves and the very first flowers, thinnings from her rows of spinach, turnip and mustard greens, bok choy and lettuce, pinched back sprouts of herb. It was Itzak. ‘I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. It must be late afternoon.’

  She could tell from the sound of his voice that he was calling via satellite, that echoey delay. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Oslo. Norway. It’s after my concert. All Mozart tonight. It’s still winter here. What’s it like there?’

  ‘It’s great. We haven’t had a snow cover since last February. I turned over my garden just before we met in March and started planting and putting out seedlings under milk cartons.’ She stopped, sensing she had told rather more than he had asked for. She knew a few more facts about him by now. She had made a few calls and asked friends, including Nita and Giselle. He was not gay but straight and had been married while abroad to an Israeli, with whom he had lived in London. The marriage had ended badly – that was all Nita knew. She considered him cute but very businesslike. He did not have a reputation for fooling around.

  ‘Sounds lovely. I’ve been on tour for three weeks and I’m worn out. I have a cold – can you tell?’

  ‘I thought it was just the connection.’

  ‘I feel flabby and cranky and lonely and very, very tired of being polite in various languages. How is our piece coming?’

  ‘The first two sections are complete now, I think. I think. Anyhow they’re ready to be given
a reading. The third section is stuck at the moment so I went on the fourth, the last, and that’s almost together.’

  ‘Good. So why is the third section stuck? What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘You sounded just like my father.’ It was the way he had passed over what was done and gone straight to what was left to do. Nathan had never been easy to please. The fathers of girlfriends gave them approval for wearing a new dress or batting their eyes. Fortunately her father saw through the flesh to the spirit. Her real education occurred not in school but with him. He was not satisfied easily, but then neither was Beethoven when she was playing him; Nathan had made her ear acute, self-critical, precise.

  ‘I was imitating my grandfather. I miss them. I just wanted to stay in touch. It’s late here. I should go to bed. Tomorrow I’m taking the train to Bergen. They say it’s a beautiful trip over the mountains. Maybe this morning after my concert, I’ll visit Grieg’s home. Why not? Wednesday I’ll be back in New York. Get our piece unstuck by then. I’ll give you a call.’

  She knew what was inhibiting her in the third section. The relentless rhythm building through it felt too sexual. It was the wrong season in her life and the right season of the year. Tosca remembered her old flings and rolled on her back, arching up her belly and teasing Figaro with soft mrrs and warbles. Figaro patrolled the garden and brought little furry creatures with their necks broken to adorn the doormat. The racoons were mating in the night bushes with whistles and snorts and hoarse cries of enraged passion.

  Robins hopped in her garden and towhees called from the woods. Flights of geese beat northward over the pond. Some night ducks rested in her trees, unlikely among the pinecones. Her peach was showing pink tips on the buds. The bright tender new shoots poked up through the thatch of dead beige grasses. She had stepped up her walking to burn off the energy rising in her spine like sap in the trees. That morning she saw a doe with her fawn drinking at the pond, between her house and the Captain’s. She imagined she was telling a child about Nathan. She imagined she was walking with her child in the woods, a girl with curly hair like her own. This town was a good place to raise a kid, unusually accepting of a woman alone with children. Lots of play groups. It wouldn’t be as hard here as in the city.