David and Stella, I could hear from the hall, were those men in the movie again, the fulsome husbands, sitting in the back room of the kind of New York bar that no longer exists, windowless, all dark wood and desaturated colors, with strange old patrons dressed in synthetic fabrics and cheap knits, singing, badly, songs I didn’t know. The air between David and Stella wasn’t pressurized. There seemed to be no subtext when they talked. He asked her questions about her life and she answered: Her mother still worked as a nurse but in the western part of the state and had a boyfriend Stella wasn’t crazy about. She had one older sister who lived in the Pacific Northwest. Her dad had been out of the picture for a long time.
“Does your mom know you’re here?” my husband asked.
“No, actually. She probably thinks I’m still at my sublet room in the city.”
From the hallway arch, in the low light, they were a slow-shutter photograph: Stella with flecks of mascara in her eyelashes, her mouth turned up at the corners. David’s long fingers under his chin. I entered the room and I liked the three of us together. I liked that Stella wasn’t mine alone.
We stayed that way, talking, not talking, until the worst of the storm had passed, it seemed, but there was no question that Stella would spend the night here.
She followed me upstairs when I went to get her clean sheets for the extra bedroom and she accepted my offer of a T-shirt to wear as pajamas. The extra room was one we’d left as we’d found, with its wallpaper full of floral sprigs, a room that still belonged to Esther and Joe. But first I stepped into my room, the one I shared with David, and as I opened my dresser drawer, I could see out of the corner of my eye that Stella had followed me in from the doorway, training her gaze on my nightstand. So I looked there, too, at the pair of black sunglasses, a stack of books, an orange plastic pill bottle, elastic hair bands, a glass tumbler half-full of water. None of it was especially revealing, not even the antidepressants. She didn’t know I still had the note she wrote on blue scrap paper, kept safe in the drawer. But I did still have it, and now our eyes met for a moment and it was as if we’d accidentally touched hands then pulled quickly away and then I didn’t know where to look, what to say.
To break some tension, perhaps, she did a weird little dance with her arms, part mime, part tai chi.
“Gimme my shirt, lady,” she said.
“Sweet dreams,” I said.
Her self-possession fascinated me. Not because it was total and unfailing but because it faltered and then rebounded. There was a flexibility, an elasticity to it. I was never so self-possessed as Stella at twenty-two. I’m still not. So often in a situation my first question is: Am I doing something wrong? I care less and less what the answer is, but that’s still the first question.
The storm blew on through the night, gone by morning, leaving our house mostly fine, it seemed. Sun through the seam in the curtains when I woke up next to David, rolled into him, my head on the side of his chest. Half-asleep, he held my arm. I imagined Stella might be gone, might have left before dawn. Left the T-shirt I gave her folded on the guest bed.
She wasn’t in her room but I found her down in the kitchen, wearing, over the T-shirt, a silk robe, navy blue with peach blooms. There was something florid and decadent, something—I want to say moneyed—about her in that robe.
“This was in the closet. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No. It’s beautiful. It must have belonged to my aunt.” It was strange, that robe, of a piece with what I had thought was the singular, anomalous glamour of the upstairs bathroom, all glossy, dark green tiles, half the wall papered in white with a pattern of black abstract line drawings, an elegant faucet for the porcelain sink. Esther’s doing, no doubt, but was the bathroom intended as a start to an unfinished thought or was it always meant to be contained, of itself?
How had I never noticed the robe there? How was it not too musty, the fabric not too degraded to wear?
“Smells a little mothbally, but.”
“You should keep it. You should wear it all the time.”
I didn’t quite realize I’d said that last part out loud, but she laughed, so I did too.
“Thanks for letting me stay here.”
“Of course. Thanks for making coffee.”
“I’m good at it,” she said, so matter of fact I couldn’t detect any sarcasm or pride on her part.
I opened windows, a freshness filtering in from outside, but when David came down it wasn’t like the day and night before. All that chumminess, their ease and mine, had been replaced by a quiet fatigue, like the end of a long drive in a car. He seemed a little worn out. And a little wary. I didn’t remember what I’d dreamed about, but I wondered if David did somehow, if my dream was suffusing his waking hour, and if Stella figured into it.
Out on the porch, where we took our coffee, branches and debris had been blown about, landing in the small field in front of the house where you could just make out the old contours of a baseball diamond. It was Saturday, and David and I had the day ahead to ourselves, no plans except for cleaning up whatever mess the storm had caused. But Stella said she needed to get moving, if she was going to be on time for her shift.
She started to take off the robe and, though she had clothes on underneath, the gesture was unnerving. As if she were stripping for us.
“Oh no. You really should keep that,” I said.
And it was all I could do not to dash inside, find a blanket, and throw it over her, to end the scene, get her off the stage, out of the situation. Get us out of it. But which us? David was in the doorway, drinking his coffee, watching me fix the robe back on Stella, snugly tying the sash. Or perhaps he was only watching Stella accepting my adjustments. I couldn’t be sure which.
“I’ll walk back with you to the bunk,” I offered. “See if there’s any damage.”
“Sure. Okay.”
She wore the black high-top canvas sneakers she always did, and I wore the expensive rubber boots that covered my calves—what I bought, when we moved here, as “country attire.” But I was wrong to want them, they were an extravagance, an affectation, and I wanted to give them to Stella. Take the robe, take these boots, take it all. I’m not sure what I even meant by “all.” And I didn’t say any of this. We walked in silence until she told me how much she liked David. That usually when she spent much time with someone’s husband, or boyfriend more frequently, given her age, she didn’t get it. What was she doing with him? How did it work, when he was so . . . nowhere near her?
“You were prepared to think less of me?” My laugh rang out into the small meadow we mucked through. “For my choice in husband? Or for, what, even having a husband?”
Stella didn’t reply right away, but looked at me, a little taken aback, even slightly hurt, as though trying to gauge if I were upset with her.
“I just . . . I meant it as a good thing,” she said. “Like, something to aspire to. I can see it, that’s all.”
Before I could ask what it was that she could see, we’d reached the bunk. She ran inside for her red polo uniform and her bike, which she must have stowed for the storm. She squished it through the muddy grass a little, onto a solid path, and then she was gone, and I was perplexed. What had I wanted her to say? She’d liked David. It was a good thing. We were aspirational, even? Why should a comment like this have left me, standing there on the wet, open ground, with the sense of being safely categorized by Stella and put away. Of being considered done with. Of being on the outside and wanting back in.
To push the thought down, I surveyed the scene. The reason, after all, that I’d come this way. One of the shutters had come loose and hung off its hinges. Aside from that, everything seemed all right. There were probably plenty of other places, structures, things for me and David to assess on the property in the wake of the storm, but instead of going directly back to the house, I went to the lodge and headed to the room where all the old yearbooks were shelved. An archive of sorts, though looking through their pages wasn’t
so much going back in time as visiting a parallel world where the same systems were in place but their orchestration was different, where something you’d always known by one name was here known by another, you recognized the words but they had different meanings. I was there, in those pages, as a girl. Anne Frank in dark athletic shorts with light piping and a T-shirt that said ARUBA on it in white script. You know who else was there? I found her, the assistant nurse who worked those last couple of summers. Everybody in those black-and-white staff photos was identified in the accompanying captions, including Robin Dart, the squinting, smiling woman in a printed scrub top who looked exactly like a slightly older version of her daughter. Stella.
I didn’t know how long I’d been here. Long enough for David to come looking and discover me sitting among decades of spiral-bound yearbooks splayed out over the linoleum floor.
“Whoa,” he said. He looked almost impressed by the methodical disarray.
“Hi,” I said, a little embarrassed, but grateful to be found.
HOUSECOATS
Leaving Chicago, we’d taken a busy four-lane road into a suburb with low-slung warehouses and corporate buildings broken up by a couple of uncharming churches, and old developments of small dun-colored houses and apartments with synthetic siding made to resemble stone. I didn’t know what this had looked like in the fifties or early sixties, when it was built. New? Nice? Or was it always—forever—down at the heels?
David was at the wheel of our Honda and I was looking out, beginning to settle into a meditative gaze, when I saw, in one of these street-side apartments, a figure standing in a picture window, her hands pressed to the glass. I thought she was a girl at first, but she was an old woman, white, wearing a hot-pink house dress, platinum hair set in curlers, garish lipstick. She seemed like a hallucination—David clearly hadn’t seen her—and then she seemed to me more like a painting, or a photograph. No longer a person but an image hung on a wall or printed in an art book. I wanted to stare at her as much as I wanted to turn away. And it was only a glimpse I’d caught anyway as we drove on. But I couldn’t shake a feeling, an association. That she was encroaching on me even as she receded. I had only wanted to look at her for longer because I knew I was only looking. Those were the terms.
I remembered a woman like this from my childhood. These women used to exist outside of Boston, too, but I hadn’t seen anyone like them here for years and certainly not since we’d moved back. The kind of women who wore housecoats. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, traces of the ’50s and ’60s remained—not yet vintage, only dated. I suspected Robin Dart, no more than a dozen years older than me, knew the kind of women I meant, knew them better even than I did, and rescued herself from their fate through her love for David Bowie and a nursing degree. My memory is a fragment, a few frames from a film. I’m very young with my father in a house with pink walls, pink carpet, a thin white iron railing inside, a sort of banister that extends to become a barrier between two zones of carpet. Porcelain plates on part of the wall as decoration. We’d walked up concrete steps to ring the bell. We’re there to drop something off, a professional holiday gift, a bottle of liquor. It’s cheery. She’s older and her husband is there. He’s short and round and balding, in belted trousers and a too-snug plaid shirt. Maybe it’s the string of lights along the wall and in the window, foggy with condensation, the gift of liquor, but I have some sense that these people are not like us. We’re not like them. It’s very dim, it’s feeling along the wall in a dark space, but it’s there, this comprehension of difference. My father is giving them a gift for Christmas, a holiday we don’t celebrate. The difference is that they’re not Jewish and we are, and this may be the first time I come to be aware that “Jewish” is a whole universe of codes and signs I will learn to read.
I’ve asked my father about this moment and he has no memory of it, who these people were, why we might have been there.
THE INTERVIEW
The town we lived in was the kind of place that a certain demographic—old enough to know that a swath of popular culture no longer speaks to them, but not so old as to stop identifying as “youngish”; city-oriented and with some spare time and income to spend on restaurants, occasional travel, books and music, clothes—might go to get away for a few days. They might have stayed at our resort, had we been able to pull it off.
I was part of that demographic. Or thought I was. But I was also here all the time. This place wasn’t an escape for me. Let’s go to Boston, I’d say to David. A city I’d only known as a child, familiar but also foreign. The scale of it, the social tone.
We had a few friends there, David had colleagues he’d fallen in with easily enough, but I felt I almost had to learn a new language in order to understand people I came in contact with, for the interactions to come off. I was too friendly or not friendly enough.
New York I had always and immediately understood: direct but chatty. There was a warmheartedness to it, a pulse. You could find this in other cities but never in such a pure form. It was always diluted, by laidback disinterest, bored complacency, or the judgmental reserve insecurity creates. We’d go to Boston, to see a movie or go out to dinner, and it wasn’t a question of my clothes being too high end or too low, it was that, regardless, I’d be dressed in a way that looked like I put too much thought into how I dressed. I didn’t know what to wear or how to think about clothes anymore. If I really spun it out, I didn’t know how to think about thought anymore.
All of this became amplified when I got a call about a job interview, the prospect of which had started to seem so hypothetical as to be unreal. Like receiving an invitation to a royal ball. I knew I couldn’t just walk around camp all day forever. That sooner rather than later, if I didn’t start contributing, we would have to sell the property. I knew that, but it had reached the point where I was sending out résumés mostly so I could tell David I’d been sending out résumés, so he wouldn’t be upset with me. If I expected to feel anything about hearing back from a potential employer, I’d thought it would have been relief, at having good news for David. I hadn’t expected to feel excited, to feel possibility, for myself.
I brought Stella inside—you’re not done with me, not yet—led her upstairs, and opened my closet. Maybe because we had a goal in mind, a purpose that delivered us from ourselves, the exposure, the tension I had felt when she’d been in my room that night of the storm had slackened. Even as I stood there in my bra and underwear, putting on clothes and taking them off as she watched. Or maybe because of it. There was still a charge, but it had become bearable, manageable. I could direct it in a useful way.
Try this, she said. Okay, how about this? Oh, this! Yeah, that’s it. You look so fucking good! Pleased with herself, pleased with me.
She’d picked out a pair of cropped trousers and a slouchy silk top for an effect that was loose but not entirely without edge. We decided I should look like I had put just enough effort in to look effortless. I would be meeting with Samira, a woman who’d started an online retail venture of clothing and home goods that were ethically and sustainably produced but also met a certain fashion standard. Her small company was faring well enough to need another person to handle its communications needs. From what I could tell after looking her up, we were around the same age. Our eyes originated from the same part of the world, long, long ago; hers weren’t Anne Frank–like, exactly, but they were Semitic, deep-set with dark shadows. She’d grown up the child of diplomats—her father was from Spain, her mother was Lebanese—she was born in the United States and then they’d spent a stretch in Turkey and then a longer one in Canada. Before ending up in Boston, a move that I gathered had something to do with her academic husband, Samira had worked internationally as an editorial stylist.
All of which raised the critical question: Which shoes to wear? We tried it with flats (if Samira were short) and with heels (if she were tall). I couldn’t determine her height from photos.
“How does she sound?” Stella asked.
“I usually get a vibe off the way someone talks.”
I asked if I could take her with me to the interview. She could collect vibes in the lobby and transmit them to me. “Be my guru,” I said. “We’ll get this job together.”
She shook her head, not like I was being silly, but like her powers unfortunately didn’t work that way.
I didn’t necessarily believe in her powers, but I believed in her. Stella had told me she didn’t want to be a barista forever and I believed that she wouldn’t be. But I hadn’t asked what she did want and how she envisioned getting there. I wasn’t sure how to ask without sounding judgmental or oblivious. I had been raised with advantages she didn’t have, and still, look where I was. But then, I wasn’t Stella. Stella wasn’t me.
In my last year of college, at the university career center, I had searched an alumni database that provided me contact information for an editor at a downtown weekly in New York. I was nervous on the phone but he was enthusiastic, happy to talk and tell me about his work, putting me at ease. Ideally, he asked, what do you want to write? Ideally, I told him, I’d like to write about film. He didn’t burst out in derisive laughter. He just said, Yeah. Yeah: get in line, join the club. I got in line. That paper was gone now. And even films, it seemed, didn’t really exist as such anymore.
The day of the interview, I drove into the city without getting into an accident, located parking in a garage, took in my reflection in a storefront window, and nodded, pleased. I did all of this, like a fully functioning adult. It had occurred to me that I had stopped considering myself an adult, that it happened sometime after I was about to become a parent and then didn’t. That moving to Alder, which I had thought of as a little daring but was mostly level-headed, only compounded the regression.
The Summer Demands Page 6