Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  In eleven days she would meet Sean as her houseguest. She had to have her hair cut at once. Was there anyone here who could do it? Should she go into Boston? Perhaps it would be safer to get it done in New York, if Rafael wasn’t on vacation. It was hard to sit here chattering with so much to do.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  SUSAN

  Susan felt remote from her recent life, removed enough to see it whole and tiny in the distance, spread out behind her as she turned for a final survey. She could even afford to remember how much fun it had been in the early years with Dinah. Dinah had been crazy about her, a wonderful lover who adored her body just as it was, passionate through thick and thin. Susan smiled, approving that she was able to joke. She was going through her cupboards and closets, ruthlessly discarding for the local thrift shop clothes that were out of style, shabby, tiresome, too country. That blue Indian shift belonged to her first year with Dinah, when she had actually been persuaded to play in a group with her, beating on a tambourine and prancing around the little stage of the local tavern.

  Even supper had turned from chore into event. Willie and Dinah egged each other on in foraging, seeing what they could turn up in the woods, shell fishing, what they could barter for. Willie had wakened up too, from a marriage that had grown stale. Having another woman involved with Willie made him exciting to Susan, proving there was something to him. It justified her attachment. No doubt adding Dinah to the marriage had postponed its demise, but to what end? Susan should have left years before and returned to New York. She would never wear this corduroy jumper there. Out with it!

  Willie and she had left at a time half the couples they knew were moving out, some to the West Coast, to Vermont or Maine, to Boston, to upstate New York. Rents had surged, and as the drug scene shifted from soft drugs to the hard expensive habits, the street scene grew nastier and more violent. People were beginning to talk about health and fitness, clean air, fresh food. When their building changed owners and services were cut to force the rent-controlled tenants out, they joined the exodus from Manhattan without hesitation. They moved to the Cape where they had shared a house during August with another couple. It was a place they knew, they thought. In that era, prices had not taken off. They bought the two houses side by side – the old house to provide income as a rental unit – for a total of sixty thousand. Both had been in dreadful shape. Besides racoons, no one had been living in the old house, which lacked central heating and required a new well. For the last thirty years, the new house had belonged to a mad old lady who kept chickens inside. To get rid of the smell, Willie had to rip up the kitchen floor.

  Odours clung to the old wood anyhow. Sometimes sitting at her vanity she thought she could still smell the bottle of Opium that had been broken in a fight with Dinah two years before. The day was unseasonably cool, making it easy to work upstairs. The sky had clouded over. The air, palpably dank, smelled of the sea. Here was a prom dress she had made Siobhan in high school, which Siobhan had never worn, refusing to go to her own prom, spending the night getting puking drunk with a girlfriend. Would Siobhan have grown up less weird in the city? Frankly she doubted it. Out with the children’s castoffs. She felt distant, let down by both her children.

  She thought of Willie and herself as a couple picked up like paper on the wind of the zeitgeist and dumped where its energy faded. Here they had washed up and here they had stayed. Similarly, just after the height of the women’s movement, she had become involved with Dinah when half the women she knew had already tried out affairs with other women. Only she had taken ten years to figure out she had made a mistake. Out with the long black dress with the patchwork top in which she had gone out with her two companions for hundreds of gossipy suppers. She had enjoyed the scandal for a long time, childishly no doubt. Out with that absurd purple pantsuit she had thought very au courant some forgettable winter.

  Out with all her long underwear. Nobody wore long underwear in New York. Buildings were extravagantly heated, so women wore the ghost of lace, wisps of satin and silk. She had to break through to Tyrone. He was acting frightened of her. She wondered what ghastly exaggeration he had heard about her argument with Siobhan and Willie. He must have been shocked by what would sound like a complete loss of control. She had to allay his nervousness, set him at ease with her, for she needed his help to move to New York. It had been a silly mistake to have brought it up quickly, bluntly. She should have let him suggest it himself, for it followed logically from her situation, and had she allowed him to take the lead, surely he must have stumbled upon it as a solution. Her mistake had been presenting him with her plans as projects, as demands. Men hated that sort of approach. They liked to feel in control. That was less true of Willie than most, and perhaps her technique had grown rusty. With Willie it was better to ask for what you wanted, as loudly as possible, in order to get his attention. She could remember when she had thought his equanimity a virtue, for her own father had a temper she and her mother tiptoed around. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ Susan’s mother was always warning her. If she could enlist Tyrone’s help, she could make her move.

  She must get her relationship with Tyrone back on course, smooth his fears away, reestablish the social connection, quickly before Labor Day took him back to the city. She had to work fast, for it was late August. She was amused how abruptly Tyrone had reacted to the news she was leaving Willie, by stopping work on the gallery. All along, he must have been throwing work Willie’s way out of kindness to her. Laurie did not seem disturbed. Laurie believed that Tyrone would keep his promise of a gallery; Susan thought that Laurie’s confidence was surely not misplaced.

  Willie too wasn’t as bothered as she would have expected. She said to him, ‘Now you can deal with that stupid mess in the yard and we can get the place cleaned up to show.’ His priorities were different, as he demonstrated, not by arguing with her, but by going ahead and doing just as he pleased, as he had all the years of their marriage. He was making a new cage of suppliants waving long gawky arms.

  Every afternoon instead of the studio, he was working on Dinah’s addition with Jimmy. She complained to Jimmy, who defended their actions. ‘Dad has to help me. I can’t take on another job till it’s done, and I need one. It’s just finish work. Let Dad alone to help me polish it off.’

  She argued, but neither wanted to help her sell the place. Willie imagined if he dragged his feet, she would forget everything and life would stagnate on. Willie started on her whenever he caught her in the kitchen: ‘Susan, let’s go pick rum cherries and make cordial.’ ‘The bluefish are biting in the harbour, think I should try my luck from Fergie’s boat?’ ‘It looks like the beach plums are ripening early this year. We oughtn’t to let the tourists get them all.’

  Enticing her with his homely little tasks, as if she were not sick to death of cobbling a life out of beach plum jam and smoked bluefish, how quaint, how cottagey, how dull. Let him play with Dinah, who had disappeared again. Willie was excited because some French dealer who had seen one of his pieces had invited him to submit slides for an exposition in Paris featuring work of social significance. That was Willie. Socially naive and stuck in 1973. It would cost three hundred dollars to ship a piece, and he wouldn’t make a cent. He kept bringing her these little pieces of news, these picayune tasks, as if he were Bogey catching chipmunks and bringing them partially chewed to lay at her feet. She saw herself taxiing off to openings, shopping in smart boutiques, breaking into designing, there in the hot heat of fashion.

  She was winnowing her possessions, finding little enough to save. She would end up with perhaps three suitcases of clothing worth carrying into her new life. Four times that amount would be dumped at the thrift shop to disperse among the matrons and teenagers of the village. If she still lived here, she would be amused next winter to see her old dresses in the grocery store and at the movies. Sometimes she still picked out items she had discarded five years before turning up at a party or an art fair. This was a backwater in which useful
or semiuseful items might bob for a decade round and round. She would be gone.

  In midafternoon Candida dropped by. ‘Alec is rather a bore when’s he around twenty-four hours a day. I had to get out, so I thought I’d steal away to have coffee with you. Your house always feels so cosy and friendly. I think you have the sweetest kitchen I’ve ever seen. It’s like something out of a painting.’ She waved toward the dried red peppers hanging from the beam. Actually they were two years old and dusty, since Dinah was the one who cooked hot dishes.

  Susan smiled and let it pass. Candida was a darling, but she did not live in New York and thus could not help Susan find an apartment or additional work. ‘Is Tyrone this deep in company? I haven’t seen him all week.’

  ‘No company this week. He went off to New York for three days. Now he’s back and caught up in some complicated investment. He’s putting a lot of cash into it at the outset, whatever it is. He says that’s one reason he had to give up on the gallery in town.’

  Everybody kept offering her explanations, as if she cared, as if she wouldn’t rather have Willie free to clear up the mess in the yard. ‘I must ask him what he’s doing.’ Actually she would never press Tyrone about business, as he preferred to talk about personal matters with her. But Susan did not like Candida to have the impression that she knew more about Tyrone than Susan did.

  ‘Alec and I are really getting in each other’s hair. We fight about the stupidest things, who didn’t put the milk back in the refrigerator and who left the wet towel on the coffee table. And who’s responsible that we spend so much and save so little. It just goes on and on!’

  ‘If you’re not happy with him, why don’t you leave him?’ Susan asked. Candida was sweet but wishy-washy. Unable to commit to action. ‘It’s your best years that you’re wasting, and no one will give them back to you.’

  ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’ Candida seemed struck by that remark. She nodded, nodded again. ‘Nobody will give them back. Oh my!’

  Susan felt crisply decisive. After Candida left, she hurried upstairs to resume her sorting. She was discarding hunks of her past, folding them cursorily and stowing them in shopping bags. One of her new habits was to stay out of the kitchen altogether while Willie cooked supper. He then ate, leaving her half the meal. She did not dine at six-thirty with Willie, but waited till after her seven o’clock swim and sat down to supper at the civilized hour of eight. I may still be in the country, Susan told her reflection, trying on a green tunic and discarding it, but I am no longer of the country. She must change her hair, lighten it, have it shortened. Get it done by someone versed in current styles. Betty Gore’s hair was always impeccable.

  By seven she had every shopping bag in the house jammed full and was bored with the game of throwaway. It was a mild evening, still damp but no colder than the day had been. She hesitated, wandering to the gable window. The woods, the shores were dark, but the pond was still dull silver. It wasn’t prime swimming weather. All the way down the pond in the twilight she saw someone on the deck outside the big house. Through her binoculars she watched Tyrone dive in. Good. She swam every evening. Lately she had noticed him paddling around in the evenings also, although he came only as far as the raft anchored near his end of the pond. She would go all the way to the raft tonight and join him. It would be a relaxed intimate setting. She would say not a word about her plans but draw him out, get him to discuss himself. Her skills with men were blunted after years with Willie. Her edges had worn dull, but she felt alert, primed. She would charm him back. She desperately needed his help.

  She changed into her suit and ran barefoot to the pond, sliding gently into the water and wading out, kicking off and settling into a steady pull. She had not managed to go as far as the raft all summer, but generally turned back when she grew level with a large oak on the right bank that marked the boundary of the MacIvors’ land, but she did not doubt her ability to reach the raft. After all, she could haul out and rest there. She did a side stroke, keeping her head up so that her hair would not get soaked. In previous years she knew she had swum as far as the raft, she remembered doing it.

  It was a long distance for her, but she pushed herself along steadily, fixing her mind on her goal. She would not mention Willie. She would not bring up New York. She would open with Laurie’s situation. Since Laurie had been almost a daughter to her, she had the right to worry aloud about her, perhaps discuss what he might be planning to acquire for a gallery now that he had given up on the old Victorian in town. She had something to add there. Mary Lou had told her about a piece of property on Commercial Street, suitable for a shop or a gallery and coming on the market in September. With that parcel, there would be no problem with permits. She would once again demonstrate her usefulness, and then they would move on from there. Her legs felt heavy, her arms ached. Could it be much further?

  She liked to swim quietly, gently, not splashing or beating the water unnecessarily. She never did the crawl, for it was a messy stroke. She liked the ladylike side stroke, with its feeling of gliding, kicking gently underwater as if she were a dancer. If it was not the fastest or the most efficient stroke, she thought it by far the least unpleasant. The pond spread around her, the water thick and cool as mercury, heavy tonight and resistant. It seemed to take forever to reach the point where she usually turned, and then she must swim on.

  Yet she was still enjoying the feeling of pressing on with her life, moving decisively through the problems, the decisions, the changes that resisted her as the water of the pond resisted, and yet she crept steadily, gracefully onward. She felt in full possession of herself. She could almost pity Tyrone, because she was going to get round him, but what she proposed to manipulate him toward was as good for him as for her. Her conscience was clear and cool. He had her pigeonholed, his country friend, Willie’s wife, but she was beginning a campaign to work her way out of that limiting category in his life. The special intimacy between them only required being reknit, extended, till it suffused both their lives in the city as well as here. She had to make clear that she had never expected the relationship between Laurie and Jimmy to last; that she maintained a crisp laissez-faire attitude toward that unlikely bonding. Tyrone could make her new life easy for her with a few words to subordinates, to business associates.

  Finally she made out the dim shape of the raft before her. It was bobbing. Perhaps the wind had come up. Little wavelets rippled out from it to slap her face. She grabbed the edge, resting. She was exhausted. Her heart stumbled painfully. She thought to call to him to pull her up, but did not at first see him. She feared he had already swum back to his deck. Damn! It would not make sense to rest here, then swim on to his dock. It would be just too weird to drag herself out of the pond exhausted and stagger into his livingroom in her wet bathing suit. She would have to abandon her plan until tomorrow. Then she saw his back. He was under the canopy that covered half the raft, protection against sun and wind. He was lying facedown on the air mattress making a sort of animal noise. For a moment she thought he was being sick. Grunting into the mattress. She called, ‘Tyrone?’ She pulled herself up with a great heave onto the raft and lay there panting. ‘Tyrone?’ she gasped between breaths.

  Even as she spoke and his head whipped around and another face appeared from under him, turning toward her, she realized he was on top of someone, a woman, he was fucking someone here. She froze. She could not move. The woman screamed and the two bodies broke apart flailing wildly while the raft dipped and sloshed on the water.

  ‘Oh my god,’ the woman said. Susan recognized Candida’s voice.

  He extricated himself and hopped up, covering himself with a towel. ‘It’s you again! You’re a pest, you know that?’

  ‘Tyrone! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!’ she said, wringing her hands.

  ‘Are you spying on me? You must be crazy!’

  Candida was trying to pull on her wet bathing suit, yanking on it. Susan heard something rip.

  ‘I didn’t know!’ Susan bega
n to cry. She was hideously embarrassed and all she could think to do was to slide off the raft at once into the water. She forgot to start swimming. Her hands lay limp at her sides. She fell into the water. She was so startled that she sank over her head and down, down, staring into darkness, her feet brushing weeds, before she realized she was in the water and was headed for the bottom. She kicked her way to the surface and came up again sputtering just beside the raft. ‘Tyrone,’ she said again, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  Alec was calling from shore, ‘Candida? Candida! Is that you? Are you all right? Candida!’

  Candida was still trying to pull on her bathing suit. It had ripped in front from her tugging.

  ‘Shit!’ Tyrone said. Susan heard a great splash that must be him diving off. As she swam aimlessly, frantically away, she could hear behind her much churning of the water. She assumed Candida was swimming toward her house and Tyrone toward his. No one came near her. She was exhausted and let herself rest for a moment, rocking idly. Then she stroked slowly back toward the far end. It was dark now. Tears filled her eyes, blinding her in the dimness. How could he be fucking Candida? He had recognized Susan and he had been furious. Nasty. He hated her. He called her a pest, and he would never forgive her. It was a mess, it was a mess, it was all a mess. Everything was spoiled. Everything was in ruins. The tears stopped up her nose till she had to gasp for breath through her mouth. It all felt disgusting.

  She was spent. Her arms and legs were pushing against the water. Even her blood felt cold. Her thighs were pulling her down. Her flesh had soaked up water and grown heavy. She was tired trying to make her life work right. Everybody was betraying her, everybody. She kept seeing Tyrone grinding away on Candida, his bare ass white and ridiculous and bony, pumping up and down mechanically. She could not stop hearing him making those ugly noises that sounded like vomiting, those grunting pig noises. Even Willie never sounded like that. There he was grinding away on a woman barely older than Laurie. Of course, he was always marrying fair haired women around thirty, one after another, like a dog with only one trick. He was banal, foolish. Having an affair with Candida right in the middle of her pond. He had ruined and vulgarized everything. There was nothing special between Tyrone and herself. Nothing special at all. He was about to marry another young wife and disappear into infatuation for several years, and she could rot here for all he would care. He would not help her out of her dead life.