Summer People

by Marge Piercy

  What was she throwing away as she tossed the crumbs on the outgoing tide? I must discard the fear of intimacy, as if to know me is to eat me. I must abandon a self-absorption so great I can be surprised when one of the closest people in my life suddenly turns on me, for the suddenness is only in my perception. I must close with Itzak or let him go. I must stop trying to hold on to everybody, all options open, all promises half made. I must try to look clearly and closely and honestly at Willie and at Itzak, what I want, what they want and need – to choose. I must not throw away old commitments for new, but I must not cling to what is comfortable because I fear what is more challenging. It is time for me to decide whether to have a child, and if not, to be clear about that too. It is the year and the season to stop blundering and choose.

  It was time to go to Dr Bridey, her gynecologist, for her annual checkup. Almost a year had passed and she was still waffling. Slowly she walked home past fields of goldenrod not yet nipped by frost. Itzak had forbidden calls, so they would not speak till he returned, when her decision had to be ready. In the marshes, blackbirds were gathering in great flocks, about to fly south. One flock took two minutes to pass over her, walking under the beating of wings like a thousand tiny hand drums. All alive were heeding their biological imperatives.

  She had been given her house back, for the work was finished and Jimmy had moved in with Willie. Her privacy was healing. She could work when and how she chose. She could traipse around in her underwear, hang her bras on the shower rod to dry, run downstairs rosy from her bath to put water on to boil. Yet she felt lonely. She was not sure if it was Itzak she missed, or just company.

  In her absence, Willie and Jimmy had roofed the building in the yard as a one-storey garage, shingled it and put on the side and garage doors. The truck still parked in the drive every night, however. The centre of the garage, as she peered in, was occupied by sawhorses and an electric saw. A row of garden implements, some buckets and an opened sack of bone meal had accumulated there. Willie and Jimmy had driven off at seven that morning in the truck and had not yet come back.

  This was the day she volunteered in the library from six to nine, so she ate a fast supper and rushed off. It was one more event that delayed her seeing Willie. She had left her car in Itzak’s driveway, taking a taxi from Logan, so she had not even needed her plane met. She had hoped to surprise a decision out of herself, but she felt muddled and conflicted. Willie was being patient, which she appreciated. It made her feel indebted. He was less insistent than Itzak, certainly a virtue. What advantage was there in seeking the harder relationship over the easier?

  Burt told her about Candida’s flight from her husband. Willie and George were her champions. A divorce was in process. Neither partner wanted to stay married and indeed, Burt said, it was quickly apparent in talking to Candida or to Alec that their feelings about each other amounted to intense dislike, with a wash of fear on Candida’s part and anger on Alec’s. They would go the no fault route if their lawyers could negotiate a property settlement. If they had to fight it out in court, legal battles could cost thousands and get nasty. Tyrone was hiding in New York and had not been down since Labor Day. The local consensus was that he had acted like a creep. A rumour was going around that he had been having an affair with Susan too, and that when Susan discovered him with Candida, she had killed herself.

  ‘That’s pure horseshit, Burt,’ Dinah said. ‘Susan adored Tyrone, but an affair? He had absolutely no reason to have an affair with her. He might have fifteen years ago, when they first met, but then she had little kiddies.’

  ‘It’s not my rumour, Dinah. But Mary Lou is convinced. She swears Susan was in love with Tyrone and that he promised to help her move to Manhattan to be near him, if she’d leave Willie.’

  ‘Does Willie know what people are saying?’

  ‘Willie’s too well-liked. Nobody would repeat it around him. But Jimmy must know. Construction workers gossip worse than a sewing circle.’

  That people should make up stories about Susan stung Dinah; but in a sense Susan had loved Tyrone: not the man, but the life she made him represent. ‘I’ll never believe it was suicide, but I can believe it was a fatigue of the will. A failure to want to fight through and survive.’

  ‘Too much psychologising, dear. Even a good swimmer can tire and mistake her energy level or the distance. Muscles get cold and they cramp. Then you get a faceful of water and start sputtering and coughing …’

  ‘I still think if we’d all been together, she’d still be alive.’

  ‘You’re brooding. Accepting death is hard when you just broke up with somebody. The pain of parting is there already and then comes worse pain.’ Burt spoke with the authority of someone who had lost half his friends to AIDS. At least once a month he had a funeral to attend.

  When she got home, Nita had called leaving a message for her to turn on Channel 2, public TV, at nine. It was half past. She assumed that Nita was performing, perhaps the BSO. Instead there was Itzak halfway through a lush full orchestral arrangement of the Bachianas 6. It was like walking into the middle of an animated conversation; she felt left out, deprived of what she had missed. But it was disorienting too to see him in a concert taped before they had ever met. Was this their future, her watching him on TV, noticing his name in the paper?

  The next day she dropped by the new house. Willie and Jimmy were off wherever they had been going every day. She left a note on the table inviting them both to supper. That was the coward’s way, but in Jimmy’s company, she should be able nonetheless to figure out what she ought to do about Willie: or what she wanted. Ought was one tangle she could not thread her way through, and want-to was a briar patch equally knotted and overgrown.

  When she was with Itzak, she wanted to be with him and only with him. She felt right. She fought it and quarrelled with it and fussed over it and analysed it, but the connection was powerful. On the other hand, new relationships had a compulsion to them – infatuation and novelty. She had shared a decade with Willie. That was an old and honourable commitment she should not lightly discard for something newer, more compelling sexually or emotionally or intellectually.

  With Susan dead, did she owe Willie her companionship? Might he not truly need her more than Itzak did? Itzak had his fame and his success. What did Willie have, besides the life she had helped him create?

  Willie and Jimmy appeared for supper. ‘I was wondering what had happened to you,’ Willie complained with a big grin. ‘I was getting worried.’

  She went through her explanation, finding herself watching him carefully for his reaction to her going to services. Why was she suddenly sensitive? Being with Itzak made her feel her Jewishness more strongly, which no doubt was part of his appeal. But she would hardly give a lot of weight to his Jewishness, although it was important to her, for it was not Willie’s fault he was a gentile. She remembered how sarcastic she had been to Burt about Joe, the Black fisherman who had gone out with Tyrone’s maid Celeste that summer, when he decided after six years with his white girlfriend that he couldn’t stay with her because she was white. ‘Did he just notice? I mean, one morning in bed, did he suddenly say, hey, that isn’t makeup?’ No, she could not in good faith suddenly decide that Willie’s not being Jewish was a large flaw.

  ‘Look at this.’ Willie pulled an envelope of photos out of his jacket pocket. ‘This is my grandson Chris.’

  The photos took Chris from turnip-shaped baldy to towheaded beaming infant. Willie wanted a fuss, needed it more than Jimmy did. Jimmy also looked at the photos, as if he were still curious about them. He stared, but then he handed them back to his father. Chris had not, Dinah noted, been introduced as Jimmy’s son so much as Willie’s grandson.

  Willie was telling an elaborate story about Chris and a neighbour’s poodle. Dinah asked, ‘So, you’re on speaking terms with Lisa?’ She addressed the question to both of them.

  ‘I call her every Sunday,’ Willie said proudly. ‘I hear about Chris’s week. Gosh,
he looks like you did at his age,’ he added to Jimmy.

  ‘Babies look more or less the same,’ Jimmy said mildly. ‘It was a little awkward when you put me on with Lisa. We’ve never been real fluent on the telephone.’

  ‘It’s a beginning,’ Willie said.

  Dinah looked from one to the other. Willie was playing some hand of his own. Jimmy looked to be just figuring that out. She couldn’t abandon them. She was related to Jimmy, a surrogate but highly real aunt or stepmother.

  They were working on the same Victorian house, but for a different owner. She could sense each of them had something to say about that they were not going to say in front of the other, so she cut short her questioning until she might see each privately. How could so much have happened in her brief absence? Fall had quickened the pace of life.

  Once the summer people cleared out, her friends always seemed to be buzzing around at three times the rate of August. Many of the locals worked such long hours during the summer season, they had time for little else but sleep. Come September, they had shopping lists of things to do and people to see, a whole life to catch up on, money to spend. Susan had always gone into a mild depression in September, but Willie claimed to find life more invigorating when he didn’t have to stand in line for half an hour to buy a quart of milk and a newspaper, when he didn’t have to park a mile out of town and hike in to get his mail. If he wanted to experience a permanent traffic jam, he would have stayed in Manhattan, he said. People fell in love in fall, threw parties, changed careers, broke up, made the kind of decision that faced her.

  Jimmy excused himself at ten, but Willie stayed put. She realized that he could actually sleep the night with her. That was something they had regretted not being able to do over the years, but she was used to that separation. At first she had had trouble sleeping with Itzak, unaccustomed as she was to another body and will in her private space. Then she had grown to enjoy his presence, although she did not think she would ever again be someone who wanted to share her bed every night. Sex and sleep had been forever divorced for her.

  She had not decided whether she would resume making love with Willie. She had stopped sex as a temporary measure when she was waiting for him to tell Susan. Now Willie was assuming they were going upstairs together, and she could not figure out why they shouldn’t. It seemed natural, and refusing felt rude and premature. She had not figured out what to do, so why hurt him? He put his arm around her and drew her toward the stairway. It did not seem the moment to argue. We are the survivors of that shipwreck, she thought climbing the steps ahead of him in a melancholy daze. We must comfort each other.

  In her room they each undressed and got into bed before they began to caress each other. He felt bulky, immense after Itzak, coarser to the touch. She had trouble concentrating on the lovemaking. As she was kissing him, her mind was wandering over the situation. She felt ill at ease. He had been Susan’s long before he became hers, and she was used to him as partially or mostly Susan’s. She could not quite get Susan out of her mind. She was slow to excite. Her body felt sluggish, her mind, hyperactive. But Willie was patient. That was his nature, and she was grateful to him. He never liked to rush love-making, and he did not mind taking it gradually.

  By the time she was riding him, she had slipped into the act and she no longer thought about whether she was at ease or not because she no longer much thought. Instead her mind moved in rhythms, her heart drumming, the varied tempos of the fucking, the beat in his throat against her mouth, his pulse inside her. The rhythms moved in bursts of light across her clenched eyes and she felt carried forward as if on an immense wave of brasses. When she came, she lay a moment against his chest and then began again for him, shifting forward, going harder, faster for him, reaching down to grasp his balls.

  She felt at peace when they lay side by side, still partially entangled and sticky. She should get up and wash before she dribbled all over the sheets, but she hated to ruffle the warm calm in which they lay. It was familiar with him, it was good still. She was so weary of comparing the two men, dissimilar and incomparable, that she felt like never thinking about either relationship again. Willie was more tolerant of Itzak than Itzak of Willie, which also seemed to argue in Willie’s favour.

  I am not a woman but a debating society, a conference full of workshops and controversies unable to hammer out a single resolution, doomed to remain in session until some final consensus is reached and beginning to feel like disbanding entirely. She decided she was on the verge of giving them both up. She would collect more cats and eschew the company of men.

  At breakfast Willie was pondering too. He said suddenly, ‘It’s silly to keep both houses open all winter. We should live in mine – it’s bigger – and close this one up.’

  ‘Willie, I work on a piano or on my synthesizer. I’m not about to have all that apparatus moved. I have a dehumidifier installed behind the piano for wet weather. Moving Chester would put him hideously out of tune.’

  ‘Umm. I guess I could live here.’

  ‘Isn’t that a lot of work just to cut oil and electric bills? What about Jimmy?’

  ‘That’s why I thought of my house. It’s bigger. But Jimmy could use the room he was using.’

  ‘But I was delighted when Jimmy moved out. I work at home – I don’t go off to a studio the way you do.’

  ‘I understand.’ He was silent for a while, eating his cereal. Then he said, ‘I like living with a woman. I miss it. When Candida stayed with us right after Alec beat her the last time, Jimmy and I really appreciated having a woman in the house.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Candida to move in?’ Dinah suggested sarcastically. ‘She seems available.’

  ‘You think she’d like that?’ Willie asked.

  Dinah assumed he was joking back. ‘Ask her.’

  ‘She’s finally getting a settlement worked out. For a while it seemed they’d have to talk to the courts.’ He began telling her the tedious details of the struggle between Alec and Candida MacIvor. She tuned out, clearing the table. Time to get him moving. She wanted to sit down with the compositions she had begun in Scotland and see what her sketchy beginnings might lead toward. He was talkative. Finally she interrupted. ‘Willie, I need to get at my music. I don’t like to talk in the mornings, and normally neither do you. Aren’t you working?’

  ‘Not on my sculpture. I haven’t been able to since Susan died. Maybe I’ll be able to buckle down soon.’ He did, however, at last get his jacket and head for town.

  The next few evenings she ate at Willie’s. Then she did not see any of them while she and Zee went off for Yom Kippur services. When she broke her fast, Toby was a supper guest too. He and Jimmy seemed thick. ‘We’re going into business together,’ Jimmy said. ‘We’re going to develop Toby’s land.’

  Dinah said nothing. It was not what she would consider good news. She loved walking in the woods back there, and the last thing she longed for was a row of summer houses, a subdevelopment of four-hundred-thousand-dollar aquariums for psychiatrists and lawyers. On the other hand, land was the only thing the Captain had, since the IRS had taken his house and his boat, and no doubt he was sick of camping in an old clam shack on what used to be his family’s woodlot. He too wanted to make a buck and a living. It was the nature of development for summer people that after a while, if you were not serving them or selling to them, you were priced out.

  ‘Where will you get the money to start?’ Presumably they could finance the second house off the first and so on, but where would they get the cash for building the first on spec? Unless they had a buyer before they started or sold just the land. Nothing in that for Jimmy and not much for Toby.

  ‘We’re going to the bank Monday. And I know some guys who’ll come in as partners. They have cash.’

  Why did she assume they were about to launder some money? That evening she spent with Willie in his house, so that she could get away in the morning. He had not brought up the idea of closing one of the houses again. In
the morning she rose early, took a brisk walk with him around the pond and then went to work. It was Saturday. Willie decided to take the weekend off construction. He ambled toward his studio. ‘I’ll give it a try,’ he said. ‘Might as well shake up the mice.’

  ‘If you have mice, I’ll lend you Figaro,’ she said over her shoulder.’

  ‘I mean the ones in my head.’

  Dinah had a few in her own. It was not a good workday. Her life she liked to keep less interesting than her work, and right now her life was demanding too much attention. She was standing at the windows staring at the lightly ruffled water when Candida tripped by. She idly wondered if she should tell Candida where everybody was – Jimmy off with Toby walking over the land in question, Willie in his studio. Candida however reappeared from the house and flashed across the yard to the studio, gave a fast tap and passed inside. Dinah expected her to emerge swiftly, but Willie was obviously receiving – probably stuck – for Candida did not leave while Dinah was standing there.

  Dinah played through the sketches trying to improvise a richer texture. Instead her eyes kept coming to rest on the calendar. Itzak had spent Yom Kippur in London. He had had in mind attending services in his old synagogue, seeing his ex-wife and establishing some sort of peace, swallowed up and off limits in the world he had lived in before they had met, a dense world of old friends and old lovers and old commitments. Tomorrow he would be returning, expecting resolution where she knew only moods and thoughts shifting like the surface of the pond. Time was closing in on her. Not to decide was to decide. He would give up on her.