The Summer Demands

by Deborah Shapiro

  Stella wasn’t there and David went into the bunk to look around. I didn’t know if he thought of it as an invasion, and if so, whether that was justified. David, I said, as if to stop him, but without much force, and then I only watched him look around the shadowy place, at the orange crate with a magazine on top of it, the drab green rucksack, a thin hotel towel hanging on a nail, the iron-frame bed Stella had left unmade.

  “We just let her live here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re, like, friends with her?”

  “Sort of. Yeah.”

  Weren’t we already planning to have all sorts of people staying here? Living, if only for a few days at a time, on our land? We were, essentially, going to host strangers. How far removed from that was this?

  They were going to pay us, said David. And he didn’t mean this to be greedy or transactional, but in the sense that it necessitated a contract, an understanding between parties, rules.

  What were the rules here?

  When winter was over, we’d discovered a bird’s nest in the eaves of Aunt Esther’s house. This after finding one dead baby bird, and then another a few days later, on the brown grass below. David had dug a small, careful hole in the ground. He’d taken a card, easing it under the shriveled creature, carrying it to its grave. Twice. He’d buried each bird in an observant but unceremonial way. We were too old or too expedient to mark the dirt, to recite a prayer or say something whimsical, wistful. And though it reminded me of what we’d hoped for and what we’d grieved, of course, I’d been harder hit at more seemingly random moments: seeing a commercial for debt relief; looking up at light through the glass ceiling panels in the modern wing of the Museum of Fine Arts; finding an old pair of bottle-green sunglasses in one of the kitchen drawers of the house. A clutching in my heart. But when David set about removing or relocating the nest, calling a rescue agency, I thought again: what a good father he would make. I wanted that for him. For us, but especially for him.

  I didn’t know if Aunt Esther’s intention, in leaving me the camp, was to provide us a fresh start. But that’s what David turned it into when he said, yes, let’s go. How he took care of me, took care of us, and how I wanted to be better—more generous—but how I still kept failing him, failing us.

  When David was growing up, his family moved around. He spent his very early years in Fort Worth, Texas, then suburban Maryland, and finally northern New Jersey, where his parents still lived. He had attachments to each of these places but none of them was home, exactly. It was like he’d taken extremely extended vacations there. He knew the lay of the land. He had friends. He had memories. Images. A playing field at twilight. A water park. White vinyl chairs in a breakfast nook at a neighbor’s house. A boxy forest-green Volvo with a mustard accent stripe. Maroon carpet on the stairs of a movie theater. The Tudor façade of an apartment house. Tickets on the seat-backs of a New Jersey Transit train. Penn Station.

  But because there was an unspoken temporariness to it all, he never really longed to escape where he was, nor did he particularly want to return. These were places he had been and there were other places he would go.

  Maybe that’s why he wanted to make permanent spaces for people, I had said, offering him my hack analysis when we were getting to know each other. We were in a park in Inwood, where Manhattan reminded me a little of the hilly parts of northern and eastern Paris, the neighborhoods we would wander together a year or two later. Or no, we were on a bench in Brighton Beach, eating pirozhki, by the waves of the Atlantic.

  He said that was a nice way to look at it. That he didn’t have too many illusions about the permanence of the reconfigured bathroom stalls he worked on.

  “Well, okay, I can see why you’d maybe feel a little . . . shitty about that kind of work,” I said.

  “Thanks, Dad,” he said, and then immediately apologized for calling me Dad. For linking me not with actual fathers, even, but a caricature so associated with puns and bad jokes as to be completely removed from any kind of sexual universe. The apology continued with some more Dad-distancing words I don’t remember, then ended with him blurting: “And I do want to have sex with you.”

  “You do. Want to have sex with me?”

  “I do.”

  “Right here?”

  “Is that what you’re into?”

  We were getting to know each other. We sat on that bench along the boardwalk as if we were rooted to the slats by a rush of intensity, wariness, and—I don’t know what else to call it—joy.

  The morning after I told David about Stella was Saturday. I woke up late, alone in our bed. David wasn’t in the house, but I didn’t get anxious. It wasn’t unusual. He always told me if he was going down to the lake or somewhere on the edge of camp, but he was probably outside, closer, doing yardwork. He’d made coffee. I poured myself a cup and took it out to the porch. A faint hum of insects. Green everywhere. No humidity or haze but a kind of depth to that green, like a painting done in thick strokes. I stood there barefoot in a loose tank top and underwear, half-dressed in a way I became conscious of only when I heard two voices, from across the road by the lodge. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but the tone was friendly and then there was laughter. David and Stella.

  The talking stopped and David came around the corner, muttering to himself, repeating part of whatever exchange they had just had, startled a little when he saw me.

  Hi, he said.

  You’ve met Stella? I asked.

  He’d gone over to her cabin, introduced himself, not sure what to expect really, but she seemed . . . fine? She’d noticed he was holding pruning shears (had he brought them as a prop? as protection?) and asked him if he wanted help. They’d done a little maintenance work together, trimming unwieldy hedges. She was great at it, he said. Like he would have hired her for a summer job and given her a glowing reference.

  So, you don’t want to call the police or anything, I said.

  I had gotten good at reading David over the years, come to know his body, and the expression on his face seemed to say: No, you can keep her. It also betrayed embarrassment. Maybe at the way he’d reacted the day before when I’d told him about Stella? Maybe at the way he’d stepped into my place with Stella just now? Both, possibly. He set the shears on a worn wicker chair, moved up behind me, and put his hand through the arm opening of my top. He put his other hand down my underwear. I spilled the coffee. Not out here. I pushed him inside the house, pulled him toward me, slipping on the rug in the hall, down to the floor.

  We knew each other’s body so well and still—or maybe therefore—they gave us away. His head between my legs was all that mattered, and then, coming back to myself, to him, I exchanged the favor, but it wasn’t a favor and it wasn’t an exchange this time, not an even one. I didn’t exactly surrender something, he didn’t exactly take anything from me, but something was transferred from me to him so that, after, I felt at a loss. I’d had something, some source of desire, that was mine alone, and now I had shared it with him, and I wasn’t sure if sharing it with him was an act of generosity or one of betrayal.

  The next time I saw Stella I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  THE STORM

  One summer when I was a camper at Alder, they had evacuated us to the regional high school in advance of a hurricane. Like all the other children at the camp, I was instructed to take my sleeping bag, my pillow, and a change of clothes. Though the building must have had windows, in my memory we didn’t see daylight for two days. It was strange being in a school we’d never attend, devoid of people we’d never know. Trophy displays and long rows of lockers, painted cinder-block walls. We hadn’t spoken to our parents before we left. We packed up and followed orders. Two days, it seemed, spent in a gigantic bunker or a spacecraft.

  The latest weather forecasts David and I had heard this week hadn’t warned of anything as potentially destructive as that long-ago storm. We didn’t need to evacuate. But we were cautioned about high win
ds, downed branches, power outages, flooding. We bought groceries and tested the generator. David decided not to go to work.

  It was our duty, wasn’t it, to check on Stella? To invite her, but really insist, that she come up to the house, for her own safety, because this was going to be more than a soaking summer rain.

  When the trees began to shiver and the temperature dipped, I pulled on a jacket and went to her cabin. The impersonal urgency of the situation—dangerous weather beyond our control—tempered my hesitancy. Hesitancy that she would think I had an ulterior motive, hesitancy that I did. But I was able to look her in the eye again and she seemed happy to see me, grateful that I’d offered her the option. She’d been thinking of asking if she could stay with us for the worst of it. She had on a hip-length, striped mohair sweater, and through it I could see a T-shirt from a high school sports team. Sometimes I thought I wanted her clothes, and other times I realized I would have to be her in order to wear them.

  She slipped her phone into the pocket of her jeans, got her backpack together quickly, and, on our way to the house, she kept her hands tucked into the long cuffs of her sweater. I felt a little like I was walking her to her first day at a new school. And then, too, like she was walking me to mine. A kind of excitement and trepidation that seemed out of proportion to the action of heading up the front stairs of the house, opening the door for her, but then, what would have been in proportion? I didn’t know.

  I had, that first afternoon that we met, removed her splinter, come home, and instinctively, almost unthinkingly, gone through the rooms of this house wondering how she would see them. How, by extension, she would see me. She was everywhere, in every room, when I’d imagined it. Now that she was really here, though, standing in the hall, her hands stuck safe in her sweater cuffs, she was still alert, still ascertaining, but she didn’t stride in, did not make herself perfectly comfortable. She was waiting for me to set the tone and I had frozen, for a moment, before a kind of practiced hospitality kicked in. Oh, come on in! Here, let’s put your bag down. I regretted that I hadn’t asked her in before this, or at least not beyond the front porch. I hadn’t wanted to seem too forward. Which is really just to say, I think, that I hadn’t wanted to be rejected by her.

  In the living room, where the windows were still open, the curtains billowed in before getting sucked back against the screens. Stella looked around, down at the patterns of the rugs, up at all the books on the shelves and in piles against a wall, interested but a little helpless, like she was looking at a façade of hieroglyphics. I didn’t want to point to any particular book, introduce it to her as a favorite in some way that would probably come off as condescending. I didn’t understand why this was so difficult, here, now, when it had been so easy with her, by the lake, in her bunk.

  Because of David in the house? But it was David who saved us. Hey. Coming in casually. Hey, Stella. Trimming weeds together had bonded them, had it? Made them comrades in yardwork, given them a basis to be relaxed around each other. Hey, David. She turned from the books. Thanks for taking me in. He motioned: It’s nothing. What are you even talking about? Of course.

  We settled in. We lit candles on the table as it darkened outside. Made grilled cheese on good bread and tomato soup with basil leaves. Opened a bottle of red wine. We didn’t lose electricity but we played board games and worked jigsaw puzzles as if we had.

  At one point, David and Stella were in the kitchen, baking brownies, while I lay on the couch and listened as they talked loudly about ex-girlfriends.

  “Alice, God, she sounds like a type,” said David. As was his girlfriend in college, Lauren. “Strong opinions, not much doubt or humility.”

  “She has so many opinions and she feels pretty strongly about all of them,” said Stella.

  “It’s kind of great, at first,” said David. “But exhausting, eventually.”

  “And then what?” asked Stella.

  Then, years later, David theorized, this type would befriend you on social media, expecting you to like all their many, strongly opinionated posts.

  “Was Alice cheap?” David asked, as if confirming that this quality was part of the profile.

  “Yeah, kind of. Like she expected me to get her free drinks and stuff when I was working, even though she could more than afford it.”

  “With Lauren, she never had her wallet, or she never had money on her, even though she had more money than I did. I ended up paying for everything. It was always little things, but it added up, not just in terms of money. It was selfishness, a lack of reciprocity, of generosity.”

  I’d heard enough about Lauren, mostly when David and I were getting to know each other, to feel that she maintained no hold on him. He didn’t secretly long for her. There was no one I secretly longed for anymore, either. There were people I thought about from time to time, but what I longed for had become free-floating, objectless. Until I met Stella, that is. And it’s not that she became the object of my desire. Not exactly. More like she reminded me that longing could sometimes, for an instant, here and there, be met.

  David and Stella joined me while the brownies were in the oven, David scooting himself in next to me on the couch so my head rested on his leg. Stella looked through our records and turned on the stereo. Not party music. Moody, lush, minor-key songs. And even though David and I were in a position to be watching her, as she hummed and read liner notes, it seemed to me that she and David, as they had been in the kitchen, were the pair. They reminded me of the men in Cassavetes’s Husbands. Their camaraderie. David and Stella had developed an attachment—or, at any rate, I wanted them to have an attachment, wanted to see them that way—like those married, middle-class, middle-aged male friends, with all their roiling feelings, who, in the wake of losing one of their own, get drunk in 1969 New York and then go off carousing to London. I was the suburban wife you briefly glimpse. If all this made me a little jealous, it was outweighed by relief. I sank deeper into the cushions of the couch.

  David asked her the question I never had: Why this place? How did she and Alice even know about the camp? And I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. She’d shown up and that was all that had mattered to me.

  Stella was happy to tell him. Her mother, a nurse, had worked in the infirmary over the course of two summers. It would have been long after I was a camper and just before Esther and Joe closed the place. From what Stella could tell, her mother liked the job, the staff, the girls she took care of. There’d been a day when Stella, for reasons she couldn’t remember or was never quite aware of—she would have been five or six—had come to work with her mother. She’d sat in a folding aluminum chair while a dozen or so girls lined up through the infirmary door to receive their morning medications. She’d watched TV, the same black-and-white set I’d probably watched when I was sick there. A counselor took her to the arts-and-crafts building where she’d made a mask out of glitter and glue. Later she’d gone down to the lake and put her toes in the water with an older girl who, she recalled, had looked like Anne Frank.

  “Is that terrible? Is that like saying all Jewish girls look the same to me? Like Anne Frank?”

  “I don’t know,” said David. “Emily used to kind of look like Anne Frank.”

  “I have her coloring,” I said. “It’s Jewish. Eastern European.” I was slightly offended by David’s observation but I wasn’t sure why.

  “You have her eyes,” said Stella. “I was obsessed with Anne Frank for a while.”

  “You were?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We learned about her for like one day in school but I kept going. I read everything. I wanted to visit Amsterdam to see the Anne Frank House. If anyone asked me where in the world I wanted to go, I would say Amsterdam for that reason. Not like I got that question a lot. But, you know. I don’t know why I was so interested in her. Maybe, in a weird way, because she reminded me of the girl who took me to the lake, and that was always one of those memories for me that was hazy but also really strongly stamped.”<
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  “There are yearbooks in the lodge, from each summer at Alder. We could look through them and you could probably find out who the girl was,” I said.

  David tried not to smile and Stella lowered her gaze. I got the joke a beat late. That all the girls in the yearbooks would look the same to her, like Anne Frank. And neither David nor Stella seemed to have the urge, as I instinctively did, to identify or know anything more about that particular girl.

  “Have you ever been to Amsterdam?” I asked.

  “I haven’t left the country. Well, Canada once.”

  I realized what it was about her that was unusual: For someone who hadn’t traveled very much or very far, she was one of the least provincial people I’d ever met. It wasn’t that she had no attachments. It was that her attachments didn’t seem to narrow her life, they seemed to make her want more life. If she wasn’t worldly, it was only because she hadn’t yet had the opportunity; she already had the outlook. This place, all the girls with Anne Frank eyes, had lodged itself in her, a place she didn’t belong to but which belonged to her.

  The context of the conversation she’d had early on with Alice about the camp was lost to Stella now—what remained were voices, sun through a window, squaring itself on Alice’s bed—but Alice had said they should go back and see what it was like now. Alice had left, Stella had stayed.

  The oven timer dinged and I went for the brownies, as the rain battered the windows, the side of the house, the roof. So much of it, as if a large lake had been turned upside down over us, repeatedly. Not a refreshing rain, a mud-making one. But we were safe in here. Still drinking our wine. I couldn’t tell what time of day it was. Clocks no longer mattered.