I closed my eyes, counted out time, and then I was off. Not quite stumbling but not sure-footed either. That forward, loping motion of almost letting yourself fall before you put your foot down, over and over. It was a clear night, the warmth of the day just beginning to surrender to a chill in the air. I didn’t have a plan but I thought it would be so sweet to find David, as if there were an invisible cord between us and he could reel me toward him. And David was close by, I imagined, in a clever spot that didn’t require too much effort for him to get to. An elegant solution, as usual. Liz would go far and not stop until she was out of breath. Felix, I didn’t know about but I suspected him to be somewhere in the middle of our circumscribed area. And Stella? It was Stella I found.
A working security flood lamp on the side of the infirmary cast a cone of light into the darkness, bright enough to see a few fluttering moths, wide enough so that I could see Stella at the edge of its circumference, on the wooden steps of the building. Sitting with her elbows resting on her knees, her hands supporting her chin—a bored pose, but not necessarily a dissatisfied one. A minor rustling from somewhere underneath the bunk-like structure and the crack of a branch in the nearby pines seemed to cause her little concern.
“I tried to go in but it’s locked,” she said, as I approached and stood facing her. “You got me.”
“You know, for someone who lived here undetected for weeks, you’re surprisingly bad at hiding.”
“I made it easy for you.” She blinked but kept looking right at me. And then she shrugged and smiled. I still didn’t know how to take her tone. The way she seemed to have of making statements that were, on one level, completely literal and straightforward, but which also suggested another level. A beguiling one. I kept standing there because I wasn’t exactly sure what we were supposed to do now—should I walk her back to headquarters like a prize horse?
What I did was thank her, for defending me at the dinner table.
“Is that what I was doing?”
“It’s always been so easy with them, Liz and Felix. I thought it would be tonight. I’m sorry.”
Stella didn’t say anything but I could hear her, or else it was my own inner voice: You thought it would be easy?
“I don’t know,” I said, answering myself, out loud.
“Don’t know what?” Stella asked.
“Why I do some of the things I do.”
She looked at me like a skeptical child. Or a tired psychotherapist.
“Thanks for inviting me to the . . .”—she searched for the word—“party.”
“Of course.”
And I realized only just then that I had orchestrated this whole evening not at all for Stella but around her. I wanted her to meet Liz and Felix not because I thought they’d all get along so well, but because I wanted to show Stella off and then see what that would do to Liz. Not the same, not at all the same as Liz presenting her children, her life, to me. But I’m not sure the motivation was entirely different. And I also hadn’t known that I’d wanted to see what Liz’s presence would do to Stella.
I sat down beside her on the steps as if I needed some stability to comprehend this more fully but I didn’t dwell on the thought. Instead, I thought back to my friend Berrie, when we were counselors here and would sit out on bunk steps just like this in our sweatshirts, talking in low voices because our campers were supposed to be sleeping. In my memory, Berrie had always been frank and free and unembarrassed. But now I remembered it differently, how when she would tell me about times with John the kitchen guy, going off into the woods with him, she was completely open with me, but she would also drop her already quiet tone to a theatrical whisper whenever she said things like “blow job” or “dick” or “finger.” The vocal equivalent of blushing.
I started talking, as if Stella had read my thoughts, as if no connective words were needed. “I have this sense,” I said, “that younger people, and it makes me feel so old to even say that, but that as a generation now, they have no hang-ups about sex. They’re just fine with everything, I mean as long as it’s consensual. Which is great, you know? But how is it even really possible? Like, I have hang-ups—hesitation, self-consciousness, shame—about interactions I have with people in grocery stores. Did that ‘excuse me’ come out right? Was I too chatty or not chatty enough with the cashier? It’s not crippling or anything, I go buy food when I need to, but it’s there, even in a situation that’s so low-stakes. God, how do you not have that with people you’re having sex with? How are you all so comfortable in your skin?”
“You’re making a sweeping generalization.” Some amusement in her voice. But also some uncertainty. She looked down at her knees.
“You’re not answering my question.”
I looked down at her knees. They were just knees. A safe focal point.
“What younger people are you talking about? I mean, aside from me, what younger people do you know?” She lifted her gaze, shifted slightly closer to me.
“I don’t know. People I see online or whatever.”
“Well. I don’t know what to say. You feel bad about having hang-ups?”
“I think I just wish I were more fearless about things.” I was talking, at this point, to fill up space, to postpone what felt like an inevitability.
“It’s not like it’s all one thing or all one way. If I’m going to represent young people everywhere, online and off, I’d have to say, yeah, there are people who are comfortable in their own skin, fine with everything. But those people aren’t the ones telling you how comfortable in their own skin they are. The people who do that, who make an effort to show you how fine they are with everything, are usually the most uncomfortable, with the most to prove. And it’s not so much about age. Or so it seems to me.”
“You’re very smart,” I said, slurring the “very” a little but tightening up the “smart.” A drunk exaggeration of being drunk. And she accepted the compliment, though I didn’t know whether she took it seriously.
But now the outside of her right knee was touching the outside of my left, and then my face found hers, or hers found mine. I made it easy for you. We kissed, we were kissing. Later, when I was sober, I would wonder why, why any of it, but the moment was all sensation. Pressure and release, some stain of sweetness still on her lips from the tart Liz brought. My head had no room for thought, only a kind of movement that seemed involuntary. All of it was present-tense and not-in-time, or it was all time—Liz’s face when she’d looked up at me earlier at dinner, me sitting on steps like this with Berrie—until a very delicate balance shifted and structured the moment into a narrative: beginning, middle, end.
Stella pulled back, moved to her feet. She had her hand to her lips. She wouldn’t look at me.
“Stella—”
“I’m sorry,” she said. Meeting my eyes for the briefest moment, pushing her hands into her pockets.
I could feel myself becoming that person who wanted to acknowledge and analyze everything. A kind of defense mechanism, even in my intoxication—to intellectualize what was happening, as if that would make what was happening any better or easier. The person who, if this were a play, if it were performance art, would force us to confront ourselves right now, force an exegesis. The type of play where we’d even talk about why we were talking about it. Self-awareness as a hall of mirrors to run down or to smash. Either way, though, you were ultimately left in that hall, and I didn’t want to be in that hall. I wanted to be on those steps, I wanted her to return with me to that fluidity—the wine, the kiss, our bodies, time itself. I wanted impossible things.
My phone lit up with a message. From Liz. They’d all returned to the porch, they were wondering if we were okay.
“Shit,” I said.
“I think I’m going to head home, to the bunk. It feels late and I work early tomorrow. Will you just tell them all good night for me?”
“Sure, but—” But what? I couldn’t complete the thought. I only nodded, though she’d already turned away, di
sappearing into the dark, until all I could see was the white light from her phone and then not even that.
I replied monosyllabically to Liz—“Be there soon.” This, too, had become a scene with a beginning, middle, and end.
We didn’t play another round. We went inside, to golden lamplight in the living room, where Liz and Felix started talking about their kids. Their default, what they usually talked about in the company of other adults they knew, aside from us, and they let down whatever guard had been up in Stella’s presence. They sat in chairs, on either side of the fireplace, that faced each other, while David and I were together on the couch, listening, but it was like listening to exit music. We were all on our way out.
Up in our room, David told me my lips were stained, as if I’d been drinking red wine. But I’d only had white that evening.
It was that dessert, I said. Whatever was in it. Red as blood. Revivifying. No wonder that bakery had long lines.
We kissed, a shallow, routine, good night kiss in bed, but I held on to him, kissed him deeply now, continuously, and it was a continuation of that depth when he was inside me.
PROBABILITIES
I woke the next day, mid-morning, uncharacteristically full of determination and pluck. It was the weekend—I wasn’t going to hear anything more about the job with Samira today, so I could stay suspended in a state of hopefulness. Optimistic enough, even, to think that if it didn’t work out, there would be other options to come. I would make other options appear. I’d root around my bag of tricks and pull out a plan. What adults do.
“You don’t sound exactly like an adult,” said David. “You sound like a magician or a character in a musical who’s going to burst into song about rejoining the workforce.”
“Just you wait!”
“But I did mean what I said last night.”
“I know. But I feel like I need to start pulling my weight.”
“Why start now?”
His perfect timing. His straight face undone first by his eyes, which triggered the rest of his features to subtly give way. If this kind of conversation, this tone, was a dodge, a means of not taking things seriously, it was also the opposite of a dodge—it pinned us down, held us there, contained us. It allowed for the unspoken expression of something that couldn’t be more serious. Something you didn’t see—the deep-dug foundation—without which you couldn’t build upper levels that were open and light. Irony in its most generous, most capacious, most necessary form. What I didn’t say, but what coalesced in this conversation—what I realized for the first time—was that I had been out these past months on a sort of delayed nonmaternity leave. In a way, I had been pulling my weight, and his, if you thought of the weight as grief. David would never have pushed me to go back, but I could feel this time beginning to come to an end. Or transform, at least. That is, I could conceive of it as a time, finite.
Liz hadn’t been wrong about me the night before, with her stated concern for my mental health, but she had been coming from the wrong place.
Was it strange that I didn’t feel guilt or remorse or even much responsibility for kissing Stella? That I wasn’t sitting at the table, staring into my coffee cup, on edge? That instead I was enjoying my coffee, that this cup of coffee couldn’t have been better, as I sat there with David. The events of the evening before were still hanging around, albeit in a modified form, like water that had evaporated and condensed into a harmless cloud that was already moving along, off into the distance. Or so it seemed.
The only impending source of tension that Sunday morning was a deadline David had, a time-sensitive project that would require him to work that day, from home. And I understood how hard it was to work with someone else in the house, the silent riot your mind takes up against that person, a kind of chant: When are you going to leave? Why haven’t you left? Fucking go! He didn’t have to ask—I would head out, go down to the lake. I’d bring a book for the beach, pack a lunch, swim out to the floating dock, write cover letters in my head. I didn’t have to think about running into Stella and what I might do or say; she had told me that her shift started early today. She didn’t lie, she wasn’t a liar. Or else she was the best liar in the world.
Trees lined the wide, worn path down to the water, creating a high canopy of shade. A breeze cut through the day’s early humidity. Everything was old but everything was also renewed. I remembered the dream I had—the lake extending out into another lake. Good fortune.
As an adult, I never swam all that much or regularly before we came to Alder, but I had since become strong and smooth in the water. I could go and go and not tire. I swam out to a deep, cool spot and floated on my back so all I saw was blue sky and the green pines. Shouts from the other side, land dotted by houses, reached me every now and then. I knew the few families that lived across the lake by sight, to say hello to in town, but no more than that. To my knowledge, there wasn’t any enforced rule preventing them from swimming or boating close to camp, but none of them ever did. The middle of the lake, though, felt like international waters. As a young camper, I had been afraid of this depth, where the water was so dark it was almost black. I worried about snapping turtles and carnivorous fish that would bite off my foot. Those creatures didn’t live here, I was told, but it didn’t matter. How did anyone know for sure?
There are surprises and upsets and things you never saw coming. But what about the thing you did see coming, the highly unlikely thing that you weren’t supposed to spend time worrying about? Had I been attacked by a snapping turtle in this lake it would have been an extraordinary event but I couldn’t have said I didn’t expect it. Stella. What was Stella? What were the odds of me finding her here at Alder? Her presence, that day I first saw her in the bunk, hadn’t shocked me. I hadn’t seen her coming, but I had seen her absence, felt it so keenly that I wondered if I hadn’t imagined her into being what I needed.
Which was what? Newness, maybe. It wasn’t fair or correct to say there was nothing new between David and me, simply because we’d known each other a long time. It was always familiar, but not always comfortable. Because we’d known each other for a long time, we knew, somatically, when something was up. Our changing moods, our thoughts, our concerns—it all registered and came through in our bodies. With Stella, I could only guess. And with Stella, it was the newness that got me. I wanted her newness, but I also wanted my own newness back. We had lost potential—I had lost potential, lost some sense of possibility that I had taken for granted, some underlying, grounding idea of who I was and who I would be—and I didn’t know how to come to terms with that. How to gracefully accommodate that. I didn’t want to think of our existence, mine and David’s, as a long process of diminishment, but what else was it, really? And then Stella had appeared.
It embarrassed me, thinking of what I’d said to her on the steps the night before about sex and hang-ups. I wasn’t even sure what I’d meant, other than the fact that she made me feel uneasy in a way I’d stopped being conscious of. If I had ever been uneasy with David, in that charged, almost repressed way, time had taken care of it long ago. We got up off that bench at Brighton Beach. We got to know each other.
Something passed beneath me that I couldn’t see, rippling by my toes, sending a shudder through me, but I kept floating, in the sun and the dark water. Uncle Joe had wondered what the fuck was wrong with people who didn’t like a lake, and he would sit on the beach in a folding chair of woven plastic strips, appreciating the view, occasionally wading in. But it was Aunt Esther who couldn’t live without the water. As a ritual, she would go for a swim at dawn, before the camp was awake, often turning up at breakfast with her hair, grown long in the ’70s and kept long for years, in a wet braid. I remember her swimming out once, so far, beyond and behind the island. The lake empty except for the two of us. But when would this have happened? Just the two of us there? What I remember is this: me, on the dock, in a green bathing suit I can date to age eleven, reading-but-not-reading a book, the backs of my legs pressing,
ever more anxiously, into the corrugated metal, when I could no longer see her, the pressure letting up only when she came back into view. I had always thought, whenever I’d landed on this memory, that I was worried for her, but she was a good swimmer. I was worried for myself. Being left there alone. She climbed the ladder on the dock, revitalized, while I quietly ran my hands up and down the marks on my legs. She drew her towel about herself and then came over and wrapped her arms around me from behind, her wet cheek on mine, drops of water on the pages of my book.
I don’t know, thinking back, if there was anything conscious or intentional on Aunt Esther’s part in leaving me there alone. I never told her I was afraid, she never said she knew. But I wondered now, as I swam in and pulled myself up the ladder onto the dock, if she was testing my mettle. On the other hand, maybe she wasn’t thinking about me or my mettle at all as she went for her swim. Either way, it struck me as a kind of lesson.
I ate my lunch on a blanket, read part of one book and then part of another, and by the time I returned to the house, it was late afternoon. I didn’t have work I had to go back to the next day, but I still had that end-of-Sunday feeling that’s been with me since elementary school. A feeling not unlike the one I had as a child on the dock. A letting-go and a tightening grip, a gearing-up. A lonely feeling.
“Back here,” said David when I called to him. He was at the kitchen table, on his computer, papers spread out. And I noticed, too, a plastic, logoed cup of iced coffee, almost gone, from the place where Stella worked. David’s name along the side of it, in writing that looked a lot like that girlish, tall, looping hand of Stella’s.
“I needed a change of scene,” he said, answering a question I didn’t ask.
“Yeah, totally.” Making an effort to be nonchalant. Exactly the kind of effort, the slight betrayal of tone, that David would recognize. But he didn’t push me on it. And I wasn’t immediately sure what I was trying to be nonchalant about.
The Summer Demands Page 9