Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  ‘You go,’ Willie said, aware of his own generosity.

  Jimmy went at once, before his father could change his mind. Willie smiled and looked up Lisa’s number in the address book Susan had kept in the table under the phone.

  She answered on the sixth ring, sounding a little harried. It took her a moment to place him or to figure out at any rate whether to go on talking, but she did. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Jimmy didn’t think we should trouble you with it – he said you couldn’t possibly come out to the funeral anyhow – but I did want you to know that Susan’s dead.’

  ‘Dead? That’s awful. Jimmy was so close to her. Was she sick?’

  ‘She drowned in the pond swimming after dark,’ Willie said. ‘It was a big shock for all of us. He did take it hard.’

  Lisa was silent for a while. ‘What’s he doing these days?’

  ‘Working construction. He’s earning a decent living, although the work is hard, of course. But he’s good at it. He has a good eye and a good hand.’

  Someone spoke. A woman’s voice. The roommate? Lisa covered the mouthpiece and said something back. When Lisa came on again, he asked, ‘How’s my grandson? You wouldn’t consider sending me a photo, would you?’

  ‘I didn’t know you wanted to see him. Of course I’ll send you photos. We took some really cute ones just two weeks ago, when we went to the Locks for a picnic.’

  ‘Your roommate and you?’

  ‘She has a little baby boy. No father.’

  ‘But your child does have a father and a grandfather,’ Willie said mildly. ‘Jimmy has never gotten over breaking up with you.’

  ‘He ruined everything, Willie,’ Lisa said, and he could imagine her shaking her head, screwing her face up the way she did. ‘I hope he’s sorry. I hope he’s really sorry.’

  ‘He is. He isn’t even seeing anybody here. He’s been concentrating on getting established as a builder.’

  ‘I’ve been putting off getting the divorce straightened out. He’s not going to start trouble over custody, is he?’

  ‘I know he’s been talking about wanting to see his son, but he said he thought he’d given you enough trouble.’

  ‘I’m really sorry about Susan. She was such a lovely woman. She enjoyed things so much, like going out to dinner with us … She was special. She gave me a dress last time she was here, one she made herself … I am sorry about it. Maybe I’ll write Jimmy. Of course I couldn’t have come out. Besides, I’m barely surviving. Jimmy has been sending the money on time, but it isn’t enough. Ask him if he can’t send another twenty-five a week. Chris is too young for day care –’

  Ah, Chris. That was the baby’s name. He wrote it in the book beside Lisa’s phone number. Then he wouldn’t forget again.

  ‘… and my roommate can’t baby-sit both kids except weekends, so I can only work Saturday and Sunday unless I get a job that pays enough for a woman full time, but I don’t think it’s so good for them anyhow, for children that young when their mother’s at work all the time …’

  When he got off the phone, he felt he had done his bit saving Jimmy. Feeling as dependent as he did on his son for getting through each day, he felt he owed him a little help, obvious or clandestine, whatever might do the most good. He did not think that Lisa was adamant any longer. Time and trouble and taking care of a four-month-old baby had softened her toward Jimmy somewhat, perhaps enough to be worked on. He did not think there was any danger Jimmy would go back to Seattle, but Lisa might be brought here. Maybe he would take care of the baby. He had enjoyed his own, after all. He had liked being a father. He still did like it. It would probably suit him, in the long run, better than it suited Jimmy. Willie was wanting that little grandson. Maybe Lisa would come, get a job, she and Jimmy would be busy and he would raise the little boy, whom he saw as something like Jimmy had been as a toddler, ruddy and plump.

  That would give him something at the centre of his life. It would be lively here again. He would call Lisa a couple of more times before he started working on Jimmy. Jimmy and he himself needed saving, badly, and maybe Lisa and Chris could rescue them. Something had to. He could not just drag on feeling hopeless.

  Chapter Fifty

  WILLIE

  The next morning Willie awoke to rain scratching on the roof, the rattling of sashes. The wind had come up strong during the night. He did not like to open his eyes, as there were Susan’s things all in their places, and no Susan. The bed no longer gave up her scent – the sheets had been changed and changed again – but on the dresser her perfumes and powders stood, the top of her jewellery box open on the jumble of earrings. He was more camping in the room than living in it, most of his clothing still across the hall in the room Jimmy had moved back into. They lacked the energy to straighten themselves out. Order was losing to piles of unwashed clothes and casual dirt. He thought as he walked reluctantly down into his grey day, that the house was beginning to show that two men lived there and no woman. If only Dinah would hurry back. If only Dinah would move in and centre his life. Why keep two houses open all winter?

  As he stood just outside the door examining the harried clouds, letting Bogey do his business without a walk this morning, he could hear the surf pounding beyond the pond and over the dunes. An east wind was bringing rain and a sudden chill. The summer people had been fooled. They would start leaving by noon. The raft was gone and the pond stretched clear to the far shore, etched into short rough waves capped with froth. The gulls were passing low overhead on crooked wings, shrieking. He smelled salt and his skin stung slightly. This was the sort of morning he would have returned upstairs to Susan, wakened her with a pot of tea and they might have made love. Then she would go back to sleep and he would work.

  He was not the sort of man who failed to appreciate what he had until he lost it. He had appreciated Susan strongly. Susan had felt he failed her by not having the kind of success she had hoped for, by not making as much money as she would have liked. Still he had not failed her in being loving, in being attentive, of that he was sure. He remembered his resolution to move Lisa and Chris, his unknown grandson, here to the pond, and while the idea seemed less powerful than the day before, it still had enough substance to give him a sense of momentum and hope.

  Most mornings in the week he and Jimmy had taken to driving into town to breakfast at the Sandspit, where all the guys in the building trades ate. It was good networking, as Jimmy put it, because if you needed a mason or an electrician or an extra hand, you could find the man you wanted right over his cranberry muffin. It was where you heard about lots that might be available, subdivisions that might open up, who hadn’t paid their bills. You could hear everything else worth knowing about everybody in town. Jimmy liked it for the contacts in the trade, but Willie did it for the company, so he wouldn’t start the day lonely and blue.

  However, on a Sunday, it was a different scene, family and couples and visitors. It would fill him with self-pity. He was puttering around the kitchen putting utensils away and wiping the counters when Candida arrived in a bathrobe, with blood all over her face from a laid-open lip. It shook Willie to look at her. That bastard had to have hit her with all his might to cut her like that. She was crying so hard she could not speak at first. He set her down in a chair and this time he called Jimmy’s good buddy George, the officer who had recovered Susan’s body, and asked him if he could come by to take a look at what Candida’s husband had done to her.

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!’ she said. ‘He’ll be furious. He locked me out of the house.’

  ‘It’s time for this to stop,’ Willie said. He felt purposeful. If his own life was over, he could still fix other people’s, young people’s lives. ‘You need help. They’re used to domestic violence. It’s not like ten years ago, when they’d tell you to go home and be a good wife. Even at town meeting, we talk about battering. Now I’m not going to clean you up until George gets here. He’s on his way.’ He did not tell her that George remembere
d her all right, as the blonde who wore the string bikini and even her pubic hair was blonde. George would burn rubber getting here.

  ‘It was so stupid! We started fighting about what to do about a leak in the roof – and it just exploded until he kept hitting me. I ran outside to get away from him and he locked the door and shouted from the upstairs window that I could stay out until I got down on my knees and begged him. He kept calling me names. I was sure everyone for miles could hear!’

  ‘I didn’t hear a thing,’ Willie said soothingly.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do! I was cold and wet and bleeding, and I just ran here.’

  He felt strong, competently dealing with Candida who was weeping and soaking wet. He wrapped a blanket around her and brought her hot tomato soup. George took her story and said it would be a good idea if she came into the station house to swear out a formal complaint. As Candida had been locked out in a robe and torn nightgown, Willie took her upstairs and found something of Susan’s for her to wear. It was also clear she’d need stitches in her lip. He felt nervous as he waited for her to come downstairs in Susan’s blue corduroy dress, but she did not look anything like Susan in it. She had belted it and unbuttoned the top three buttons, so it looked like a different dress.

  George got her purse for her from the MacIvor house. He had words with Alec, who announced he was going back to Boston the next morning at six with or without Candida. George brought the purse with her keys and money and identification to Candida along with her raincoat, while she huddled in the truck beside Willie. Even with the two of them there, she seemed frightened that Alec would suddenly dash out of the house and hurt her.

  ‘Why don’t you leave him?’

  ‘I have to, don’t I? I’ve been putting things off. I was getting ready to this summer, I was thinking about it all the time, really I was.’ She had stopped crying but she held a bloody tissue to her cut lip. ‘I feel so embarrassed, everybody knowing how he treats me. I can’t go on. In the city it’s worse. There’s nobody I can turn to. We live in a high-rise on the Jamaicaway, and nobody talks to me. We never see anyone but other doctors and their wives.’

  Willie waited with her through the whole process. In the emergency room at the hospital in Hyannis, she told him all about her mother, who had wanted to be an artist, her father who was a broker and had abused her mother, her brother who had cocaine problems and her sister, who had four children already. She told him about the boarding schools she had gone to. He told her about his family in turn and his civil rights days. By the time she was finally called, she was starting to tell him how she had met Alec. The doctor put three fine stitches in her lip, assuring her no one would be able to see his work. Then Willie brought her back home, since she did not want to go to her own house. ‘Alec has to return to the city. I’ll just stay here, if you don’t mind, till I can go over tomorrow, when I know he’s gone. That’s why I had that kind policeman get me the keys.’

  Willie said, ‘You’re certainly safe here, I promise you. I’m not planning to go anyplace.’ It occurred to him he still had a key to her house, the duplicate he had made in May, but he did not tell her that.

  ‘You really wouldn’t mind if I stayed here tonight?’

  ‘Jimmy and I would enjoy the company,’ he said genially. ‘The two of us rattle around over here.’

  ‘Of course … I noticed you have all her things still there. Do you want them? Or would you like some help?’

  Right after Susan drowned, he had clung to the smell of the room, the traces of her. But he realized he was not comforted by that imitation presence any longer. Instead every gossamer scarf, every earring tossed in a little dish gave him pain. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t get rid of anything.’

  ‘I could do it for you,’ she said. She no longer seemed to him the brittle pretty girl he had met that summer. He felt her vulnerability. She was thinner, slighter than Susan. She had smaller breasts and longer legs. He thought of her as just as fragile as Susan had been. ‘I could clear out her clothes and take them to the thrift shop or put them on consignment. That room is like a shrine to her.’

  He nodded. ‘I left it as it was.’ He did not bother telling her that it was particularly that way because Susan had cleared him out of the room and made him stay across the hall. ‘But could you really deal with her things?’

  ‘You’ve done so much for me. Susan was my friend, and it would make me feel better if I could do something nice back for you.’

  ‘Then do it.’

  He put her in Johnny’s room, still as it had been when she went away to college with old David Bowie and Blondie posters and masks she had made in high school. She began working on the bedroom after supper. ‘Tomorrow I’ll borrow your truck and get some boxes in town,’ she said calmly. Like him, obviously she felt better having a focus outside herself. It was therapeutic for her to help him, obviously, as it was for him to take on her troubles. It was right, he thought, right on all levels.

  He decided to say as much, bluntly, out of curiosity about how she would respond. ‘I distract myself from my pain by helping you. You distract yourself from your pain by helping me. It’s silly, but it works.’

  ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ Candida said. ‘I think being open to each other and helping each other is what being human is all about.’

  She worked on the bedroom until ten, when she retired to Johnny’s room. He fell asleep quickly. The day had been busy. When he woke, he was surprised to find her already downstairs. ‘You get up early,’ he said. ‘Susan thought nine was barely civilized.’

  ‘I haven’t been sleeping well. But yes, I’m an early bird. The days here are so pretty in the morning.’ She put butter and jam on the table to go with the toast. ‘What do you have for breakfast, usually? Should I fry eggs? Or make an omelette?’

  ‘Two sunny-side up,’ Willie said. ‘The pepper’s in the grinder on the right.’

  Jimmy came down, his eyebrows rising. ‘Over lightly for me.’

  Monday morning. ‘Let’s see how far we can get on the garage today. If the Sampsons are serious, when do we start?’

  ‘They want six units, and of course they want it yesterday. Sure, let’s get shut of the garage, put the windows in and close it up. Like you, I’m sorry we ever began.’ Jimmy reached for the small TV that sat on the kitchen table, looked again at Candida and thought better of turning it on. He would never have done so when Susan was alive. Turning on the TV at meals was a habit the two of them had got into lately.

  ‘You won’t be sorry in the winter,’ Candida said. ‘As soon as the stores open, I’ll get some boxes. Willie, would you mind dreadfully walking by to see if Alec left for the city? I’m afraid to go over until I know he’s gone.’

  ‘I’ll take a walk with Bogey right after breakfast.’

  It was nice to have eggs. He didn’t bother usually, just opened a box of cereal. She didn’t make coffee as well as he did. He’d have to show her the way he liked it. It was soothing having a woman in the house. He felt less desolate. He didn’t mind at all offering her refuge. When Jimmy had gone to the bathroom he asked her, ‘What happened to Tyrone? He got you into this.’

  ‘He’s a bastard,’ she said tightly. ‘Got me into it and bailed out.’

  ‘He won’t help?’

  ‘He won’t even take my phone calls. I’m too much trouble to bother with.’

  ‘He stuck it to us on the gallery we were renovating for him.’

  They exchanged Tyrone stories until Willie decided he should take Bogey and check on Alec. The MacIvor house was locked up and the blue Mercedes with the MD plates was gone. When Willie came home, Candida was on the phone with some lawyer. Jimmy was ready to roll on the garage, so they went to work, pushing themselves and each other. She drove to town for boxes, as she had promised.

  When he knocked off and went upstairs to bathe and change, the room was a different place. She had put his clothes in the closet and arranged his toiletries on the dresser top. His sh
oes were on the shoe rack. She had left some vases and a bric-à-brac; other pieces she had removed. She had cut red chrysanthemums from Dinah’s garden for the bedside table. He wandered from bed to dresser in a grateful daze. He could never have touched Susan’s things, and he knew it. Candida had renewed the room for him and made it his.

  The house smelled of pork chops. She must have bought them in town. Susan told him pork was too fatty, and Dinah wouldn’t eat it. It smelled like home, like childhood. He was surprised that she could cook. She was not as good a cook as Dinah or as he himself was, but she did just fine. It was nice to have supper made for Jimmy and him. If he had realized she was going to do that, they could have worked an hour longer.

  He was eager to be done with the garage, for the whole thing was unnecessary now, depressing. Tomorrow they would reach a point where they could leave it alone, indefinitely. Jimmy had got an advance from the Sampsons and left orders at the lumberyard. Still, Candida was right. In the winter, they would be glad for a garage. It was time to start on the job in town. He was thankful that he was a carpenter as well as an artist, if he was still a sculptor at all. What an irony that the request from the big show in France came just when he had lost his ability to work. Maybe he would never be able to create again, now that Susan was gone. Or maybe, when Dinah came back home, he would find himself again.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  DINAH

  Dinah always did tashlich on Rosh Hashonah day. It was a ritual she had performed with her father, journeying to the Chicago River – the casting off of sins, which Nathan had explained as attitudes, bad habits, heavy baggage she wanted to unload. She put crumbs into the pockets of her old suede jacket that had been Mark’s. As the tide was turning outward, she crossed a covered sluice where a tidal river widened to enter the Bay. It was a place heavily used by fishers of all types, human and bird, great blue heron and kingfisher and gull racoon and fox and bluefish in a feeding frenzy. Beyond a fragile spit, the larger Bay stretched away, while the smaller Bay before her curved along in a half-moon shape, houses on one shore and the rest unspoiled, accessible only on foot or by small boat. The grass was still apple green in the marshes, tawny already on the hillsides. Enormous gulls croaked and mewed as they rose heavily or sat bobbing on the waves. On the marsh nearest the shellfish beds, a midden of oyster shells made a whitish mound.