This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Published by Catapult
catapult.co
First Catapult printing: 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Shapiro
All rights reserved
“As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat,” copyright © 1974 by John Ashbery; from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
ISBN: 978-1-948226-30-1
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956398
Printed in the United States of America
10987654321
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.
JOHN ASHBERY,
“As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”
CONTENTS
SPLINTER
WEIRD ENERGY
THE STORM
HOUSECOATS
THE INTERVIEW
THE DINNER PARTY
PROBABILITIES
THREE WOMEN
RESPONSIBLE ADULTS
MADAME X
END OF THE SEASON
NECESSARY WAYS
HOURS, DAYS, AND YEARS
GOING UNDER
OPPORTUNITY
IN TIME
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SPLINTER
Summer, green and still and slightly grainy. The way it is in foreign films from the 1970s and ’80s. A lulling, enveloping heat. I had things to do, I swear, written on lists, but those things seemed to get done only if they coincided with the slow, inevitable rhythm of the days. From the couch in the room with the bay window, I would watch those movies, watch young French women who never wore bras move around in philosophically provocative situations, and then I would get up and go outside, go down to the lake, or watch another movie. The days passed into each other without much distinction, dulling all anxiety but heightening a sensitivity. Like walking out of a dark theater into a bright afternoon, one world exchanged for another. Being stunned and not minding it, wanting to hold to an in-between.
I’d started to think of this place as a falling-down estate owned by a family that had shut it up, fled during a war, leaving us as caretakers. We’d done what we could, David and I, but the playing fields remained overgrown, the tennis, volleyball, and basketball courts all cracked and wild with weeds. The little cove by the lake was filmed with algae. The boathouse, the dining hall, the rec hall, the whitewashed bunks—they were still standing though in need of repair. Most of the bunks here, the original ones, were built in a clearing, in a horseshoe shape around a flagpole. But as the camp had grown, two structures were added at the edge of the woods. It was darker and cooler over there, even on a day in July, the sun bright and blazing before noon, an equatorial light.
I couldn’t have said what I was doing over in that part of the property. Taking a different way, maybe, down to the water. Those cabins had always had a secretive quality because they were set apart from the rest of the camp. And when I had been a young camper here, almost thirty years ago, these cabins were where the older girls, in all their mysterious glamour, stayed. If I was alone, I would walk hurriedly by. If there were two or three of us, we would linger, bravely, as if on a dare, waiting to be taken into their world.
The girls were gone now, of course, but something of them remained, some sort of pull, a lasting, palpable atmosphere. A presence. When I heard a sound—a dull thud that repeated, followed by a scraping—I stopped walking and kept listening. The noise was familiar somehow. I made my way around the side of the cabin where the ground rose a little and I could look inside through a screen.
I was sure I hadn’t left the shutters open on any of the cabin windows, though now they were propped up with a couple of two-by-fours. And I couldn’t remember if the clothesline between these two cabins, that I ducked under, had always been there. But the damp clothes on it—a T-shirt, a black no-wire bra, three pairs of underwear—those were definitely new.
A thud, again. The scraping. And through the screen, a young woman sitting on the dark wood floor, her back toward me. Shit, I heard her say—but it didn’t appear to be in response to my presence. She stood, moving into the light, holding her right hand in her left, staring at her palm. Long white neck, straight black sweep of hair across her forehead, lanky, a person of lines and edges. I saw then what she’d been doing: playing jacks.
I ran my nails down the screen, gently, a noise that caught her attention. She turned, making me out through the window. No smile, but her face was soft, unalarmed. It made me think she knew me, that she’d seen me before, wandering around, and perhaps had put together some idea of who I was. Which meant she would have been living on our property for a while.
She stepped closer, right up to the screen, looking down at me.
“I have a splinter,” she said. “From the floor.”
“I have tweezers,” I said. “Up at the house.”
She nodded, blinked her wide-set eyes, and I went quickly, on a mission, not questioning whether she’d be there when I got back.
We stood in the sun, outside the gloom of the bunk, and I took her hand to remove the sliver of wood, careful but competent, as if I did this kind of thing for a living. No trouble, anybody would do the same, but the casualness of my gestures already felt like a cover, disguising something I couldn’t yet name. She curled her fingers up—her nails painted a dark, galaxy blue—and I let go of her hand abruptly so she wouldn’t think I was holding on too long.
Her mouth remained slightly open after thanking me. Then, as if to find something else to do with it, she apologized—sorry—though she didn’t say what for. She folded her arms and I realized that mine were folded, too, though I wasn’t sure who’d mimicked whom.
“You’ve been living here?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“How long?”
“A couple of months.”
“A couple of months?”
“Yeah. You probably want me to go?”
I laughed, the question seemed both so innocent and knowing, coupled with a comic timing I wasn’t sure she was aware of. I also didn’t know what to say—laughter as placeholder or postponement—and out of habit or some deeply internalized patriarchal impulse, I told her I’d have to talk to my husband. She’d seen him? Around?
She’d seen him, she said. And he’d almost seen her, the other day, when she’d been by the rec hall, charging her phone in an exterior outlet.
It occurred to me, then, that she had whole systems in place. Systems for how to live here without us knowing. How much of us had she seen?
Had she spotted us, that first warm day of the season? From where we’d stood, up at the lodge, you couldn’t see to the end of the camp, the point at which the land turned into the lake. We’d never had this much space all to ourselves. This much oxygen. So, we ran. Down across the fields, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run like that, stumbling, out of breath. Just moving, moving. David liked to run, but he’d been limited until now to city routes. We ran along a wooded path and didn’t stop until we reached a patch of grass by the water. W
e took off only what we needed to and fucked against a tree before we lay on the ground, staring up at the sky—nobody around at all, we thought—and laughed about it, the tree, the fucking. The bark had scratched my back. I had a cramp in my side from running. Better in theory? David asked. Maybe, I answered. Sex in this spot hadn’t been a fantasy of mine. But the boathouse . . . We’d do that next, he said.
We didn’t, though. Neither of us had brought it up since.
“Are you hungry?” I asked her. It didn’t seem like a particularly random or loaded question, just the one that came to me. “Do you want to have lunch?”
“I would, but I have to go to work.”
One of us, at least, had a place to be. She had a shift, she said, in a coffee place a couple of miles away in one of the newer shopping centers. I knew the one: brick and glass; sterile, sparse landscaping. Her red collared shirt and her name tag were waiting for her there. She pointed toward the woods—she kept her bike locked to a tree by a path that I hadn’t known about. It led out to the road.
“Thanks again,” she said, holding up the hand I’d attended to.
“Sure.”
Just like that. I hadn’t gotten her name. She started to walk off, looked back for a long moment as if she might ask me something, something she’d almost forgotten. Her reserve wasn’t affectless, it was alert and ascertaining, and I could still feel it trained on me even as she turned toward the trees. I wanted to say Wait! and then I wanted to run—not after her and not away from her, but just to run, to go, to be in motion again. Instead, I stood there, listening to her moving over fallen brush as she made her way through the woods.
WEIRD ENERGY
The car in the drive. David home from work. Some days I couldn’t wait for him to break my solitude. Days I could feel myself slipping into a horror story: David goes out into the world and maintains a sane relationship to it while I lose my mind and become this place. Today had been different, though. Someone else had broken my solitude.
When he came in through our front door, I called down to him, suggested we go out for dinner. I practically pushed him back into the car and we went to the one Thai restaurant nearby, along the main street of the village.
We lived in a south shore Massachusetts town, a few historic blocks with street lamps surrounded by houses, Victorians and clapboard Cape Cods, and then, a little farther out, small, cheaply fabricated split-levels and ranches that had replaced dilapidated frame houses sometime in the ’50s. American flags. Tracts with gas stations and retail strips, a few sizable stretches of woods that hadn’t yet been swallowed up into suburbs, and our camp. Two towns over you could find a yoga studio. We knew people from Boston who’d started families and bought homes outside the city, but they didn’t buy here.
I was going to tell David what happened that day, all through dinner I was going to tell him about the young woman whose name I hadn’t yet obtained. How I met her and then spent the afternoon going from room to room around our house, wondering what she would make of it. (Had she already been inside it, somehow?) The faded wallpaper, the smooth wood floors, the framed drawings on the mantle, the dark green tile in the bathroom, the stereo and the records. The candlesticks. The plants. She would have had nothing but contempt for our materialism, for all our comforts and calculations. But then I thought, no. She’d made a home, however makeshift, out of her surroundings in the bunk. I’d seen a crate she was using as a nightstand, next to one of the metal bed frames on which she’d laid out a sheet and a blanket. She seemed to have dusted off a wooden dresser, too, and a couple of folded shirts had sat on top. I was going to tell David all of this. But I didn’t. Even when he commented on my “weird energy.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I think I knew.
He looked at me from across the table, silently, curiously, and then glanced toward the room, as if a waiter were about to bring out a dessert with a candle in it. As if maybe I’d orchestrated a small surprise for him. For an instant I worried I’d forgotten his birthday, been too preoccupied that day to remember an occasion and that some disappointment would cross his face. But that wasn’t it. He turned back to me with a suggestive half-smile, still not sure what I was up to, though sensing it was something. David: on the taller side, square-shouldered, but not severe; the roundness of his nose and softness of his mouth had always struck me somehow as kind. As first impressions went, he came off as steady, collected. People liked him, and they tended to take him seriously. But if you met his gaze often enough, you’d see this seriousness called into question by a quick, engaging wit that flashed in his dark eyes.
“I just can’t remember the last time you ordered one of those iced coffees,” he said.
And neither could I—sweet, with condensed milk. A gratuitous, gluttonous drink from my youth. At some point in my life I’d replaced it with water, an occasional glass of wine. We could take each other’s measure in beverages, David and I, we had that kind of collective, institutional memory between us. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I still didn’t mention the young woman.
The warmth of the dark. Moonlight. David was already upstairs when I locked all the doors and the windows on the first floor. Something I’d rarely thought to do the whole time we’d been here. I went to bed in only a T-shirt and took it off in the middle of the night, cool and naked beneath the sheet. David slept. Moths opened against the screens of our bedroom windows. I lay there, waiting, waiting, waiting, and I was not sure for what.
Our house had been called the Director’s House. White with black shutters, an old farmhouse, though I don’t know if there was ever a farm. It was where my great-aunt Esther and her husband, Joe, had lived for years while they ran the camp. Esther and Joe had been city kids: triple-decker houses and apartment buildings, lunch counters, shoe shops, bakeries with rye bread and challah, kosher butchers, shul. The Mystic River, smokestacks, crowds, streetcars, and Revere Beach. They’d grown up in Chelsea, a large, tightly knit community of working- and lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Second- and third-generation children moved out and up to the Boston suburbs but Esther and Joe and their families hadn’t yet prospered enough to leave.
One summer, through the efforts of a charitable Jewish organization, Joe and Esther had the chance to go away to camp. This was part of a program whose unstated mission was to foster comfort in nature and self-defense skills. It was 1945. At fifteen, Esther and Joe had never been away from home, never really been more than a few miles from their neighborhood, from their many brothers and sisters, from the clatter of city life. They knew dirt but they’d never held soil in their hands. When Esther and Joe—resolutely urban, nurtured by density, neurosis, and the Great Depression—discovered the woods, they never wanted to leave.
Across an asphalt road, the one real road in the camp, sat the Lodge, a ramshackle one-story building constructed in the same style as the Director’s House, painted white with a layer of black trim curling and flaking to reveal a faded pine green. When we’d first arrived, David and I, pulling off a winding rural road and into a half-circular drive, I saw the lodge at the center of the curve and I practically leaped out of the truck we’d loaded up with our possessions, ushering myself in through a partially unhinged screen door, into a world of linoleum floors, dust on heavy wooden desks in a room used for administrative purposes, then hurricane lamps and two sofas—one floral, one patchy gold velour—in a room that had been designated as the Lounge. I was entering a photograph of my own past, my family’s past. Yellowed posters bearing the faces of imprisoned Soviet dissidents were still tacked along one wall. In the ’80s, when I had come here as a girl, we had sung songs about them, singing for their release. I didn’t know what had become of them since. But David did. That one, he said, finally emigrated to America and became a neocon lobbyist. That one died after being exiled to Siberia.
How do you know that? I asked.
How do you not? he said.
I thought the girl might
have cleared out in the night. That the bunk would be bare, as if she’d never been there at all and I’d imagined the whole thing.
I knocked softly on the door, accommodating, polite. She had trespassed on our private property, but I didn’t seem to mind. Even though all I really knew of her was that she played jacks, supposedly worked as a barista, had a cell phone and bike, hair like a dramatic brushstroke, and a quiet but sure way of setting up her space. That she was a cause, perhaps, of the strange, subtle coiling feeling taking place inside me. That she was alert, ascertaining. I knocked and she answered. She came out onto the wood-plank steps in the bright morning wearing peach-colored sunglasses with mirrored lenses, so all I saw for a moment was my own reflection, trying to look like I wasn’t trying too hard, my shoulder-length brown hair piled on my head, threadbare T-shirt, cutoffs that were loose, unraveling. Then she came into focus. She was a little taller than me, and thinner, so that a kind of buff-colored canvas karate pant looked good on her, as did the standard red polo shirt she had to put on for work. She wore it oversized, revealing the length of her collarbone. Her hair was damp. She must have figured out how to turn the water on for the plumbing in the bunk. Resourceful girl.
“I know, I should go,” she said, pushing the sunglasses up into her wet hair, a gesture that struck me as disarming; those mirrored lenses were like a shield. And mostly because she wasn’t putting me in the position of being the uptight, incurious person telling her to leave, I wanted her to stay.
“Well, you don’t have to. I mean, not right away.” I leaned on the unsteady railing of the stoop. I didn’t want to keep shifting but that’s what I did, while she rested against the door frame of the bunk, at ease, like she would take whatever I said in stride. Like she was used to taking everything in stride, or at least pretending to.
“Did you talk to your husband?”
The Summer Demands Page 1