So he went to the coffee shop to work and saw Stella there. The two of them without me. So what? My head didn’t start spinning but I felt the immediate urge to shut myself up alone in a room upstairs so that it could do just that.
“Well, I’ll let you keep working,” I said, and before I knew it, I was in the glossy green-tiled bathroom upstairs, sitting on the edge of the white tub, my chin digging into my palms, elbows into knees.
Did Stella tell him about our kiss? A kiss, nothing to lose your head over. But still. Is this what I deserved for thinking I could get away with it, with kissing her and suffering no consequences? Or did she not even have to tell David because he already knew? Like the two of them were in on this? But in on what? Was something happening between the two of them? Something I had missed, mistook for good-natured fellow-feeling? In Husbands the wives are nothing, that is, they have almost no screen time, other than a few images, by a pool, with children, one sequence of domestic violence. When I thought of David and Stella that way, with a shared, deep but platonic understanding, why did I assume that left any room for me? But . . . but what if I was wrong about that, too, and Stella was working both of us? But why, what for? I couldn’t ascribe a motivation to her, though the suspicion was suddenly there. As was a vulnerability—I’d left myself open to being taken advantage of, and I’d pulled David into it, and what had I done?
I wasn’t sure that I became any wiser as I got older. Increasingly, there was that creeping sense of not catching on. Of being aware there was something to catch on to and missing it. Or thinking something was a parody, that it must be, only to eventually realize it was not. That there was no longer any face value at which to take things.
“Em?” David was in the upstairs hallway. I stopped the spiraling, pulled myself together.
“Yeah?”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine, yeah. I’ll be right out.”
We stood in the narrow, dusky hall and I put my hands on his shoulders and looked in his eyes—because we knew each other’s body. It was a coffee cup with his name on it in her handwriting. It was a drunk kiss on the infirmary steps. That’s it. That’s all.
He reminded me how bright and shiny I had been that morning, and I told him how long ago that seemed.
“How’s your work?”
“Good. I’m in good shape. It was good to have the day.”
Good, good, good.
“Did you see Stella at the coffee place?”
“Yeah, she says hi. She thanked me, us, for dinner.”
“Really? I was worried dinner was too much, with Liz and everything.”
“Yeah. You know, one of the things I love about Liz is that it always seems like she’s got some kind of agenda. And it’s great if you’re into her agenda, it gives things purpose, something to be engaged in and working toward. She kind of demands that you be into it, though. And you and I always go along. But I think Stella’s attitude was more along the lines of fuck no.”
He said fuck no and it punctured all pretense, anything too mannered (Liz) or melodramatic (my overwrought bathroom thought-spasm). It opened a window in that hothouse and, for a moment, fresh air rushed in and I experienced that rush as an actual physical sensation. A lighter heart, lungs filled with oxygen.
THREE WOMEN
Monday arrived and with it the expectancy that I might hear something about the job, a message from Samira or Jenna confirming a follow-up meeting. More soon. I had put all my eggs into this basket—the only basket I had. But nothing was coming through and I couldn’t sit there all day hitting refresh. I had no distractions preventing me from seeing Stella and accounting for my actions on Saturday night. Was I supposed to apologize? I thought I was supposed to, but that was before David’s name in her handwriting on a coffee cup kicked up my swirling suspicions and doubts. But I wondered if those suspicions and doubts were merely an excuse, a way for me to mitigate whatever I’d done, with her, to her, to David, to all of us. It was all a jumble now but I was certain that when I saw her, things would be reordered, clarified somehow.
I didn’t exactly know her schedule, but Monday mornings she was often around. I would go to her bunk and not overthink it. No rehearsing. No looking in the mirror before I left the house.
I focused on the line of the dark green treetops, where they met the sky, which was so blue and cloudless. Some small part of me wanted to be shot off into it and not come back. To disappear into that endless blue curtain. It was dizzying, so I looked ahead, toward the bunk. But before I reached it, before anyone had seen me approaching, the cabin door opened and out walked a woman, shaking out her long, curly hair, and then turning, stretching her body to the sun. She was naked. Her hair fell down her back. She had large but high breasts, ample hips, fleshy yet firm thighs, like a Renaissance painting of a classical goddess. It was Alice. I recognized her from the pictures on Stella’s phone. She looked like she owned the place. And for a moment, she did.
Stella appeared then, behind her, on the front steps, in a T-shirt and Aunt Esther’s silk robe, hanging open, over it. Alice pulled on the hem of the T-shirt, like why do you have this thing on? I couldn’t make out what they were saying but there was laughter before Stella went back inside.
I realized I’d witnessed this while ducking into shrubbery. This felt emblematic of a larger issue, representative of my character. It was pure slapstick. I couldn’t take myself seriously enough. How could you take yourself seriously enough when you were hiding behind a bush? It reminded me of the conversation I’d had with Stella about how Alice didn’t give a fuck. You have to take yourself seriously, on a certain level, in order to not give a fuck. To not give a fuck about being “nice,” wanting to be liked. But “liked” was a complicated concept, especially for women. There were women who didn’t give a fuck about being “nice,” but they certainly cared about being esteemed and envied. They cared about their status, in the way a celebrity must, and so, as celebrities did, they created a persona. What they didn’t give a fuck about was how canny and calculating anyone might think they were in their desire for admiration, in creating roles for themselves to fill, images to represent those roles. It was not so far removed, I thought, while crouched behind this huckleberry bush, from the way Lucille LeSueur became Joan Crawford or Norma Jeane Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe, except they weren’t products of the sexist Hollywood studio system. It was more subtle, much lower-key, more self-determining, potentially more subversive, but the difference was in degree, not in kind. Being a woman, in public, in the world, is a kind of Warholian project. The no-fucks women make it look easy, but it’s one of the hardest things—to create a persona and then to live in it. How much of a fuck you actually have to give in order to not give a fuck! It’s the trickiest game, and instead of trying and losing, I had never really played, I had never taken myself seriously enough to play. I heard “yeah, get in line, join the club” and I got in line. And when I got out of line, it was to come here, to a kind of seclusion, where I didn’t have to be a woman in the world. But being here was ultimately only a kind of hiding.
It was enough. I was tired of it. I emerged from the hedge and stood there in the open field. If they saw me, they saw me. If they were too busy with each other, with their beautiful bodies, that would be fine, too. Alice didn’t own this place; I did. And just then I didn’t give a fuck.
Well, I gave enough of a fuck to have brushed the leaves off myself and maneuvered around the hedge so it wasn’t obvious I’d been crouched within it. As if I’d come from another direction. But then I stood there in the open field and Alice spotted me. She held one hand to her eyes like a visor and raised the other in a kind of motionless wave before she let it fall into her messy hair. I didn’t wave back, I slowly walked toward her, and she, barefoot, stepped down a little more eagerly onto the area of dirt and stones and patchy grass just below the cabin stairs, to meet me. Her blond-brown hair was long enough and thick enough to cover and reveal her breasts as she moved
.
“Emily, right?” Her voice a little scratchy but mostly sonorous, mostly lovely.
I nodded.
“Alice?” I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t know who she was.
We didn’t shake hands and I think the reason was that she was naked. And though I was the one fully dressed and she had no clothes on, her nakedness humiliated me. It was meant to, at any rate. I’m pretty sure that’s what she intended it to do—but of course she would never have admitted to that. What she would’ve said is that she was just naked, natural beneath the sun on a luminous day, and whatever shame or curiosity or envy that stirred in me was only a symptom of my repression. If I gave a fuck, I would’ve been humiliated.
“Stella told you about me, I guess,” she said.
I could hear the shower running inside the bunk and I assumed Stella was in it.
“A little, yeah.”
We were the same height. Alice fixed me with her gray-green eyes, almond-shaped and upturned. Her long face gave her a regal air but her blunt nose counteracted it, as did her manner. Casual, disheveled.
“She told me a little about you, too,” Alice said.
There wasn’t anything insinuating in her tone, I was surprised to find. She didn’t seem to be hinting at anything. But whatever I’d heard from Stella led me to believe Alice had a ravenous, greedy mind. Or at least one that was always on, always running.
“I think it’s really cool that you let her stay here,” she added.
“Well, we’ve got a lot of space.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s amazing. I just want to make, like, dandelion crowns and commune with the grass. Just roll all around in it. Or whatever.”
“Yeah.”
“So, were you coming to see Stella?”
“I was out walking, but yes, I thought I’d see if she was around.”
She motioned for the two of us to head inside the bunk and wait there for Stella to finish her shower. I’m not sure whether she simply didn’t see this as intrusive or if she knew exactly how intrusive it was.
“Stella! Stella! Stella!” she bellowed, opening the cabin door. “We have company.” The bathroom, with its peeling linoleum floor, was a straight shot down the center of the cabin from the front entrance. It was built with two working shower stalls and two toilets. I could see Stella’s arm reaching to pull a towel off a hook and then she stepped out, all wrapped up, tucked in, clean and snug.
“Hi, Emily,” she said, walking toward us. She didn’t quite have the look of a child getting caught out by a parent but there was a trace of wrongdoing in her expression. I’m not your mother, I wanted to say. Despite how old and uptight and parental Alice wants me to feel.
Stella understood me somehow. No, you’re not my mother, she communicated back. More like a witness to my conscience. And she tossed Alice a T-shirt, while she put Aunt Esther’s robe over her towel, and then, once covered, pulled the towel out from beneath her and hung it on a nail.
Alice took the T-shirt Stella gave her and showily pulled it overhead. She gathered up the bottom hem around her lower ribs, then looped that gathered fabric through the neck line and tugged it down to make a kind of cropped bra top. Eventually, she found a pair of underwear. I remembered walking home from school, down a leafy suburban street on a hot day, just before the end of eighth grade with my friend Nina. We’d done the same thing with our shirts, and a neighbor lady, a homemaker, not like our mothers, drove by and looked askance at us. “Puritan bitch!” Nina called out after her car. It seemed to me, at the time, like the most Massachusetts of insults.
There were old striped mattresses on two of the twin iron-framed beds in this bunk. Stella’s bed had sheets and the other now had a red sleeping bag unrolled on it. Alice lay back on it, staring up at the rafters, her arms folded behind her head, while I sat near Stella on her made-up bed and we both seemed to be trying not to look at Alice’s breasts, lolling in their makeshift bra.
It was a while before anyone said anything, but then Stella asked after David, how his work was going, that she’d seen him and they’d talked a little the day before when he came in to get coffee.
“Good,” I said. “His work is good. I think he’s got it under control now.”
“That’s good.”
Good, good, good.
“And have you heard anything about your interview?”
“No. Not yet.”
At this, Alice sat up, perked up, and asked me the name of the company, so I told her and right away she grabbed her phone and found its site. Scrolling, nodding at the clothes.
“Nice,” she said. “My mom would love this stuff. I’ll have to tell her about it.”
I tried to keep my expression neutral.
“But you want to work for them?” She sounded skeptical.
“I think I’d like to, yeah.”
Her mouth scrunched up with more skepticism along with a little condescension, maybe even pity, for my small, insular, and unimaginative life. She didn’t confine any of this to her mouth for long.
“There’s just so much wrong right now, in our country, in the world, and there’s so much to do, and it kind of breaks my heart that you”—pointing to Stella with her left hand—“spend your days making specialty coffee drinks for people and you”—pointing to me, right hand—“want to, what, sell clothes to people who like specialty coffees?”
Alice, do you not like clothes and specialty coffees? Do you not know what depression is? Has your body never failed you? Have you ever wanted something so much, and gotten so close you thought maybe it was really yours, and then it wasn’t? It wasn’t yours, it wasn’t anyone’s. It was gone.
“We were going to host refugees here,” I said. Almost like a machine, like an old black computer screen filling with green lines of commands and code, and this line was the last and for some reason it was audible.
“Like give them a temporary home?”
“That was the idea. An idea. But we haven’t been able to make it work. We can’t fix this place up in the way we were hoping. We ran out of resources. So here we are. And I’m crossing my fingers I have the opportunity to sell clothes to your mom.”
Stella laughed, Alice pouted.
“You’ll be in your last year at college, right?” I asked her. I didn’t give a fuck, so I could soften.
“That’s right.”
“And you’re studying comparative literature?”
“Stella fully briefed you. Yeah.”
“That was my major. That and film.”
“Oh, yeah?” She readjusted her breasts. “What did you focus on?”
“I studied French as my other language. And then I wrote a thesis on female education. Education as seduction. Seduction as education. Pedagogy and power. In Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Henry V, and Hal Hartley’s movie Trust.”
“Hal Hartley is a man, I’m assuming?”
“Yes.”
“Those are all by men.”
“I think that was part of my point. Then I wrote a whole section on Hélène Cixous and The Laugh of the Medusa.”
“Huh. Sounds very ’90s.”
“I suppose it was.”
“Well, I haven’t narrowed it down too much but right now I’m really interested in the intersection of labor, leisure, and love. Female labor, leisure, and love. In literature.”
“That’s a big intersection.”
“Yes, lots of directions to go in. But I’m already getting tired of how theoretical it all gets, the circularity of it—I mean the circularity of writing theoretically, analytically. All these essays. You think you get to some breakthrough, but nothing really breaks. It’s all in your head. Sometimes I just want to smash things.”
“You could go into demolition,” said Stella, just loud enough.
“Don’t start,” said Alice.
“What,” I interjected. I wanted Stella to start in on Alice. And she did. Changing her position next to me on the bed, tucking her legs under her and leani
ng forward toward Alice. Not aware that her robe opened a little as she moved.
“It’s just, Alice, you’re really interested in labor as a concept or a conceptual framework, but you’ve never had an actual job.”
Alice stayed where she was, gazing up at the rafters again.
“Stella, I’m sorry but your understanding of labor is so narrow.”
“And my understanding of love?”
“I don’t know. The way you think of love, it strikes me as sort of naive.” Alice finally looked directly at Stella. “Like you see it as removed from any larger political or social context or structures and you always want to reduce it to its most personal level.”
“Oh my god, Alice!” Stella laughed, so incredulous she was almost amused. “How can it not be personal?”
For a moment, I was no longer there. It was like watching a movie. One of the French films I’d been revisiting, where the characters go on vacation and have serious, somewhat philosophical conversations about love and desire. The light touch of the direction brings out the comedy of it all—but only for the viewer.
I was certain, just then, that Stella hadn’t mentioned our kiss to Alice. If she had, Alice would likely have thrown it back at her in that moment. Not to accuse her of any kind of betrayal but rather to call her out on how predictable, how pedestrian it was. How in keeping it was with her naively personal, bourgeois notions of love.
Alice rifled through a backpack, found a pair of blue denim cutoffs, and pulled them on. High-waisted, fraying around her upper thighs.
There must have been so many moments like this when I went to camp here. Half-dressed girls, young women, lazing around the bunk. The kind of images you’d see in a film likely directed by a man, the camera lingering on their bodies, and proceed with your critique of the objectifying male gaze. When I was living inside those scenes, a half-dressed girl at camp, I never much looked at the other girls, at Berrie, for example, with what I understood at that time to be desire. If I lingered on their bodies it was mostly out of curiosity, comparing my own form to theirs. If it ever was desire, it was never enough to act on much beyond some kissing and clumsy groping in college. But the way I found myself looking at Alice and Stella did have to do with desire. And I looked at them with an objectifying gaze. Only it wasn’t male. It wasn’t even female. It had more to do with age objectifying youth.
The Summer Demands Page 10