Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  Her dreams were increasingly sexual. She touched herself to orgasm but it felt boring. Years ago she had had a vibrator. She wasted two hours looking for it. Humidity had destroyed the innards. She called her mother in Florida. A dinner party was in progress. The conversation was awkward, almost shy. How are you, I’m just fine, how are you? Is anything wrong? No, of course not. How’s the weather up there – cold, I bet.

  She took an extra four-mile hike late the next afternoon. She was thirty-eight and relationships had fallen, leaving her naked. If she had gotten pregnant in the winter, at least she would have something. She was thirty-eight and nobody loved her and she had nobody to love. Who was she, outside her work? There she was strong. There she had been commissioned to write for one of the four best flautists in the world. But in her self, she was rejected, with strength and energy burning lonely as a lighthouse on the rocks, whose light only serves to warn off Of what avail were the physical strength and energy that had – along with passion and willpower and luck – enabled her father to survive Auschwitz? She dug her garden to feed only herself.

  When she got back, she was aware at once someone was in the house, but this time she guessed it was Jimmy, as usual. Why had he gone upstairs? Her jeans and socks were damp from a bog of wild cranberries: She wanted to change into something warm and dry before supper. She had put a pot roast in the oven before she left the house. It was Friday. She had begun lighting Sabbath candles as she had during the last year of Mark’s life. Jimmy liked the ceremony, so he tended to arrive Fridays for supper.

  When she walked into her bedroom, Jimmy was there, in her bed. He was under the covers this time, and as he yawned and flexed his arms behind his head, she saw that he was either naked or partially so.

  ‘What’s this?’ She stopped where she was.

  ‘Take off your wet pants. I’ll warm you up.’

  ‘Jimmy, get out of my bed and go wait downstairs. I want to change.’

  ‘I need a change too. Come here.’ He held out his arms.

  He was beautiful, nothing short of it, and the response of her body was immediate. His hair was redder than Susan’s, his body hair like fox fur. He was in fine shape. She saw all that in a glance as she grabbed a wool skirt from her closet and a warm sweater from her dresser. ‘Jimmy, we don’t have that kind of relationship and we can’t. It would be incest.’ She retreated hastily to the bathroom. She would have liked to warm herself in a hot tub but she did not trust him to stay out. No, he was not her son, but he was the closest she had to one. She was shaken but solid beneath.

  When she came out he had put on his pants, but not yet his shirt, and was seated on the side of her bed grinning at her. ‘You aren’t my mother, Dinah. You aren’t old enough to be my mother. You’d have had me at fourteen.’

  ‘I’ve been involved with both your parents and I’m not about to have sex with you too. It’s just too involuted and messy.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s convenient. We both like it and we’re not getting any. It wouldn’t be messy at all. I don’t know anybody who shows more common sense day in and day out than you.’

  ‘Jimmy, your prick is always leading you into trouble you can’t handle. Can’t you find a girl around here? It ought to be easy.’

  ‘You and Willie and Susan all warned me off Laurie. She’s under my nose all the time. I’ve been a tin saint. I haven’t even kissed her. Yet.’

  ‘What about all the girls you went to high school with?’

  ‘Most of them have babies and they’re married or they might as well be. Besides, I like you better. I’ve always liked you better.’

  ‘Better than what? A nice fat sheep? Come on. You can stay up here if you want to, but I’m going to finish putting supper together.’

  He slid off her bed, reaching for his shirt. ‘All right, sorry if I shocked you. No hard feelings … Hey, remember when Willie and Susan decided I should call you Aunt Dinah?’

  ‘You wouldn’t do it.’ She felt giddy with relief as they went down the steep stairs. The moment had passed and he was not angry.

  ‘I’d met my aunt Elinor. I knew it was hypocrisy. You weren’t suddenly my aunt. I said to myself, when they fuck up, it’ll be my turn.’

  She laughed. ‘Never mind, it’s spring and even Tosca has been in false heat all week.’

  ‘You’ll come round,’ he said equably. ‘Supper smells great. I drew up plans for your new diningroom. Want to see them after we eat?’

  The blessings made a break after what had happened. She had a kiddush cup from her childhood, her best towel to cover the challeh. If she was a family of one, she at least felt more connected making a Sabbath. In her solitude she was finding a sense of herself as a Jew, but she was not sure what that meant in isolation. Judaism is not a religion of hermits, she told herself, but of community. To celebrate Pesach, she needed others.

  ‘When you say that Hebrew, are you really praying?’ Jimmy asked.

  She nodded. ‘But the English equivalent, that is, the equivalent out of my life, wouldn’t be a translation.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘I believe in holiness. I experience it whenever I really compose, whenever I play. I think music is holy. It comes through me as if it is.’ She felt as she spoke the resonant memory of that connective force. It was, before her, through her, after her. She was in it. Sometimes of it. It was a vast order, an alignment, a relationship of all beings. She lost her self in it. Her self came back to her afterward like clothes rumpled on the chair put on after lovemaking.

  Neither was talkative at supper, but that did not bother her. They were capable of companionable silences. She was running over her guest list. Saturday night was the first night of Pesach, and she had decided to have a seder. She had not done so since the year after Mark died. Always it had been a holiday she loved. Until her mother remarried, she had gone home for Pesach, no matter what was happening in her life. One seder chez the Dentist had foxed that. She was trying to pull together enough people to make it real, odd Jews who weren’t already taken. A successful seder would prove to her that she could survive by herself here.

  After she had sent Jimmy home, she sat staring at the plans he had drawn. It was true, she had no diningroom and her livingroom was largely occupied by her piano and writing table, her music apparatus, computer and synthesizers. Eating in the kitchen was grim, with company viewing the unwashed pots, the backlash of preparation; in the summer, it was unpleasantly hot. She had a little money now and Jimmy would build with her cheaper than she could ever to bring it off in future. The price was buying the materials and working with him. She did not take his pass seriously. It was in his nature to offer himself freely, as it had been her younger nature to leave no sexual stone unturned, no threshold uncrossed. He would begin when the boathouse was finished, starting it while he and Willie were working on the gallery. Tyrone would be subsidizing her diningroom. She felt like a novice skier perched on a long steep slope trying to decide whether to push off downhill. If she was going to have a child, she could not really expect to use Mark’s tiny dingy ex-study for a bedroom beyond babyhood. A secret promise. See, Nathan, I am making ready, I am preparing the way.

  The phone rang. This time she knew it was Itzak. He would be back in New York. Was he seriously worried about the piece? His voice was normal again, with its own rough bark quality. ‘I wanted to be back, but I have to say, being here is grim. Eight feet of unanswered mail. Dust balls. The dry cleaner lost a pair of good tails. A heavy metal band moved in next door. The walls throb in and out like a diaphragm. Everybody in the world is having a baby or just had a baby, and I feel superannuated.’

  ‘Maybe the heavy metal band will have babies and turn down their amps.’

  ‘I think they fuck with their guitars, which are probably sterile. So what are you doing for Passover?’

  ‘I actually thought I’d have a seder this year. With the three other Jews I know out here. What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothi
ng. My grandparents are dead. I always went to them. My parents are too deracinated to have a seder. Barbecues but no seders. I’m invited to my agent’s, but I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Come up here,’ she said before she thought twice. Then she thought twice and waited for him to decline. He just liked to kvetch. He must have a lover, a girlfriend.

  ‘Really? Saturday night. I could get out of New York early Saturday morning. I’m not scheduled till Tuesday. Can you put me up?’

  ‘It’s not fancy here. But I have a spare bed.’ In the room where Mark used to write, among the boxes of his mouldering papers.

  ‘Are you sure this is all right with you?’

  She wasn’t sure, but it would be highly impolite to say so. Why had she invited him? Because he obviously wanted to be invited. ‘It will be rather spare and impromptu … If you have a Haggadah you like, bring it. I’m cobbling this together after years of not doing it.’

  ‘What should I bring besides?’

  ‘Good New York Passover macaroons. And if you want other than sweet wine, if you go in for the dry kosher wines, bring a couple of bottles.’

  ‘No, I prefer the real old-fashioned sweet stuff. It’s part of it.’

  ‘Good … If you don’t change your mind about coming, let me know which plane to meet.’ Surely he would reconsider and call it off.

  She mentioned to no one that Itzak was coming, until Saturday when it became clear he was on his way. She decided she could tell Jimmy, who had invited himself. He remembered the only seder she had made with Willie and Susan. It had not been a success. Willie and Susan had been appalled by the religious references and the story of Exodus. They had refused to drink the sweet sacramental wine and found the Haggadah reading interminable. They had acted throughout as if it were just too primitive and weird. She had put her desires aside; every year since, Pesach had passed while she glanced at it as into an open grave of guilt.

  Burt was coming, along with his lover Leroy, who wasn’t Jewish but had been to seders before. Then there was the feisty widow Zee Gildner, whose husband had been an organizer with the steel-workers. In desperation for more Jews she had invited the Hills, a couple from Newton who owned a house on Bracken Pond. They always came up for the holidays, so she had called them in Newton – she owed them although they didn’t know it for cutting a Christmas tree on their land. They had a daughter Courtney who was ten and could ask the four questions.

  Jenny Hill called to say that Courtney had her girlfriend Molly with her. Dinah asked herself what she had wrought, bringing Itzak together with Jimmy, a gay couple, a bland suburban family with one own and one borrowed child, and the widow Gildner. Itzak would decide he couldn’t be bothered playing her Cat in the Moon for flute and chamber orchestra. Why had she invited him? Because he seemed to want to be invited. That was no excuse, only a pretext for disaster. She should never had tried to have a seder out here on a sandbar and once launched on that folly, inviting Itzak was a whole higher stage of lunacy.

  Then Jimmy stopped by. ‘Hey, Laurie would like to come. She’s really interested. She’s never been to a seder.’

  ‘Jimmy, this isn’t a folk custom put on to amuse the tourists.’

  ‘Come on, Dinah, who drove fifteen miles for all the stuff you forgot? I want her to come. She’s lonely. Tyrone’s only bopping in for Sunday, as it turns out. Don’t hurt her feelings.’

  ‘I want this to come off right. I need it to work this time.’

  ‘Besides, she has good card tables and we can set one of them up. That’ll solve the seating problem. We can put it up at the end of your table or just through the archway in the livingroom.’

  ‘All right. Invite her.’

  ‘I did.’Jimmy started to saunter off. That was when she told him about Itzak. She hoped the name would mean nothing to him, but Jimmy was more interested in music than his parents. ‘Holy shit, Dinah. Mother’s going to hit the ceiling. She’ll swear you’re doing this just to spite her.’

  ‘Why? I’m sure she’s never heard him play.’

  ‘Ah, but she’s heard of him. That’s enough. You know Mother loves the famous and the also-rans … So I have a heavy duty rival. From the pictures on his albums, he’s a curly headed sweetheart.’

  ‘Stuff it, Jimmy. I sleep only with my cats. Bring over that table this afternoon, okay?’

  How is this seder going to be different from all other seders? Answer: it could be, kineahora, a complete nightmare.

  Chapter Twenty

  DINAH

  Dinah started cooking in the morning. It was a raw chilly day, so for a while she had hoped that the airport might be fogged in; no such luck. She fetched Itzak, who looked lost. She was sure he was asking himself why he had come. He seemed smaller than she remembered him, huddled in a trench coat beside her in the old Volvo. She had cleaned the spare room cursorily. Mark’s papers filled the closet to its ceiling and overflowed against one wall of the room. After a late and hasty lunch, she established Itzak there with a pot of tea and he promptly fell asleep, probably from boredom.

  She found herself thinking again of her father. This had been his favourite holiday. For him Pesach bore connotations of the liberation of Auschwitz, the exodus from Europe. Although he was never at home in the States, he had no longer belonged anyplace; all that gave him a sense of home had been burned. Nonetheless he was enormously glad for American citizenship. If he would never feel safe, he appreciated feeling less in danger.

  Music was his greatest pleasure, for it did not depend on words. At some point in his youth, he had learned English, but it was his sixth language. He knew Polish, Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew and German better. When he cursed, it was in Yiddish first. She remembered being fascinated as a child by the little differences between her father, her mother and herself. When her mother hurt herself, she cried out Ow! When her father hurt himself, he cried out, Oi! Ai-yi-yi-yi, her father would moan, when her mother would say, Oh, no, it’s not fair! They even sneezed differently. Her father’s sneeze was far more delicate than her mother’s, the sneeze of a small cat. When she was upset, Shirley held herself and drew into a knot. Nathan rocked.

  Shirley, doomed to be the second wife of two husbands, Dinah thought. I should talk. I was Mark’s third wife. She sought to imagine him, for in her recent loneliness, she had been trying to evoke the sense of lingering presence that a decade before she had fled. He was too distant. The savours of holiday cooking called up her childhood, not her marriage. They had gone to her mother’s once, once to his parents’, twice to friends. She had hosted a seder in New York before making a last one here for him and friends who knew he was dying. His parents had given them a seder plate from Israel, big and beautiful with an aquamarine glaze.

  Silently, secretly she had grieved as he was dying. She had not seen Mark’s parents since the funeral. In their eyes she had not really been a wife, a true daughter-in-law, because she had produced no grand-children. Once the funeral was over, the will read, they lost interest in her. They had never been possessive about his papers, for to them he had been a failure.

  At six-thirty the guests began arriving as she was arranging the ritual foods. Jimmy helped her set the tables. Laurie volunteered, but she looked so inept handling silverware that Dinah sent her off to the livingroom with Itzak to build a fire. That would keep them out of trouble.

  Then came Zee Gildner, enormous in a bright green velvet dress like a stage curtain wrapped around her, carrying yellow chrysanthemums she had obviously purchased from the florist. Dinah felt dismayed, because she knew that Zee lived on a schoolteacher’s pension and little else. She also came bearing a well-thumbed Haggadah. ‘This is what we always used, from when the children were little. It’s a good progressive one.’

  Jenny and Gary Hill arrived with two boxes of Passover matzoh, also Courtney and her girlfriend Molly, both whispering and giggling as they trailed in, and two copies of the Haggadah Jenny’s family had always used. ‘Peeyuh,’ Courtney said. ‘It smell
s like your house is on fire.’

  Dinah realized that clouds of smoke were floating from the livingroom. Pulling the fire extinguisher off the kitchen wall she raced in. The only fire was in the fireplace.

  Itzak and Laurie were coughing madly, flapping at the smoke. Jimmy slipped past them, reached in above the flames and pulled the chains that released the flue. Dinah opened the outer door. Figaro rushed into the yard. Jimmy was shaking his hand. She asked, ‘Did you burn yourself?’

  ‘I’m just rare, not well done. I’ll take some butter.’

  ‘Vitamin E is better. Come in the kitchen.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Itzak said, tears streaming from his eyes so that he looked sorry indeed. ‘I never had a fireplace.’

  ‘It’s my fault for not warning you … Oh, Itzak, did you bring the macaroons?’

  ‘Of course!’ He looked relieved to have an excuse to retreat from the smoke. ‘Upstairs in my suitcase.’

  ‘Is the house on fire?’ Courtney wanted to know. ‘Can we go home?’ She was a skinny girl who usually lived in a jogging suit but tonight had been hung with a plaid taffeta dress that made Dinah think of Christmas wrapping paper. Her friend wore a corduroy smock decorated with embroidery. The friend was pretty and made faces. Courtney would have sacrificed them all on a pyre, her parents included, for Molly’s best-friendship. Dinah remembered, oh she remembered.

  Itzak was picking his way down the steps – that short steep flight from the eighteenth century common in old houses here, almost more a ladder than a stairway – no happier than he had gone up. He was holding the white bakery box of macaroons but it was quite flat. ‘They’re a little smushed.’