“I don’t know. I turned my phone off so I wouldn’t have to hear anything from Alice.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine. You could tell them you had a family emergency.”
She shook her head again, it didn’t matter. She didn’t even reach for her phone.
“What do you want to do?” I asked her. “We can do anything you want.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and what she was really saying was this: I want to not want anything. Can you help me with that?
We were out of wine, I had downed our last bottle the night of Alice in the kitchen. So I pulled into the lot of a liquor store, a package store as they called it here. Stella got out of the car with me and we went inside, up and down aisles of worn linoleum and metal shelving lined with alcohol. I think my father must have come to a place just like this one, which couldn’t have changed much over thirty, forty years, to buy the liquor we brought to the woman in the housecoat, pink carpet underfoot, one Christmas so long ago. I still didn’t really know too much about liquor, or wine for that matter, but Stella had already put two bottles of Irish whiskey in a plastic shopping basket and she walked the aisle like she wasn’t done. The man behind the counter—sunken-cheeked, a baked-on tan like he worked outdoors when he wasn’t working here, early thirties maybe, scruffy, wolfish—eyed the two of us from under his baseball cap, separately then together, and he saw a half-dressed young woman whose haircut wasn’t meant for him and a not-young woman in black clothes that weren’t meant for him, and though none of this was meant for him, he also saw the aunt-niece thing we were up to, and unlike Samira and Jenna, he didn’t care. He was into it. Maybe too into it. He’d come along with us if we invited him, maybe even if we didn’t. His interest made me want to pay for our bottles and get the fuck out of there, while it also made me think it wouldn’t be as easy as that. But then.
“Hey,” Stella said to him at the register. She didn’t know him personally, but she knew him as a type. “So, listen, this morning I found my girlfriend, who fucking goes to Harvard”—she laughed when she said Harvard—“with some bro-fuck named Brian”—that same laugh—“and then I basically killed my friend here’s chance at getting a job and I’m probably gonna be fired from my job now. So do you think this’ll be enough to get us properly shit-faced tonight?”
“Yeah, this’ll do,” he said. “And fuck that Harvard skank.”
They gave each other smiling nods, a tribal sign. Stella had spoken to him with the local accent I thought she didn’t have. But of course she had it. Or could bring it back just like that. I had thought, when we met, that she sounded like she could be from anywhere. But nobody is from no place. Nobody real.
Sunk into the couch in the living room, Stella and I watched episode after episode of a reality show where the reality was that no one ever experienced emotional growth. Middle-aged women in tight, expensive jeans bickered, they gossiped, they got on private jets, they dermatologically enhanced themselves, they went to charity events, all while having the same conversation over and over again using different words and wearing different pairs of tight, expensive jeans. It was mesmerizing. And I wasn’t even that drunk, though Stella was. One of the bottles of Jameson was more than half empty. We each had a corner of the couch, our feet skirting each other’s in the center.
Stella hit pause, freeze-framing on a palm tree.
“I’m still wearing what I wore to bed last night,” she said.
“It happens.”
“What if I just wear this forever? If you don’t take off your clothes, ever, do they eventually, like, merge with your skin?”
She lifted up her shirt from the neckline and looked down through it. Then, more intently, she sat straighter and leaned toward me. She lifted the hem of my shirtdress, grazing my thigh, and looked in. I pulled the collar of my shirtdress up to my eyes, like a black tent, a tunnel of dark, soft light, and I met her frank, unblinking gaze at the other end. But in doing so, I’d turned it into a game a child might play. She let her end drop and the light fell away. I wasn’t supposed to have looked at her under my shirtdress. I was supposed to close my eyes, let my head lean against the armrest, let her hands move along my legs, let them push my dress up over my hips, let her mouth go wherever it wanted. She didn’t want to see me, my face, she had only wanted to see Not Alice and I could have been Not Alice if I hadn’t looked at her. But I made us see each other.
It made me think of something, flash on something, from a long time ago, that I both was and wasn’t intimately involved in. The beach by the lake. At night. Berrie and John, and me and Stuart. John, with his lips that always seemed slightly parted, as if you’d caught him perpetually unawares, as if he didn’t know why we girls looked at him the way we did, an innocence that offset his masculinity. Berrie with her gray eyes and husky, worldly voice, her eager smile. Stuart with his what? I didn’t know anymore, I remembered Stuart mostly as a harmless, nondescript presence, which was terrible, but true. Berrie and John were kissing, more than kissing, John on top of Berrie, lying on a towel in the sand. Stuart and I were doing the same thing, only it felt like an approximation or an imitation of what Berrie and John were doing and not the real thing. Stuart and I were a more fully clothed, upside-down mirror image of Berrie and John: I was on top of Stuart, and we were behind Berrie and John on the sand, facing in the opposite direction so that when I happened to look up—why I looked up I’m not sure—I saw John looking directly at me. We locked eyes for what couldn’t have been more than several seconds but the look didn’t seem to adhere to temporality at all, until he made a sound like his breath caught and he shuddered into Berrie.
We never mentioned it to each other and I never mentioned it to Berrie. I had liked him looking at me while he was kissing her, while he was fucking her, it turned out, and if she knew he’d looked at me and that I liked it, we wouldn’t have any more of those nights on the beach. We wouldn’t have any more nights where it was just the two of us, either, Berrie and me, the whispering nights in our sweatshirts on the bunk steps after she sang “Taps,” and the girls had gone to sleep.
What was it? A form of betrayal, despite the fact that John and I had never touched. Barely spoke. Never saw each other again after that summer. Berrie and I remained friends for a few years after we stopped going to camp and I never thought that, deep-down, I kept in touch with her because it was a way—a faithless, deceptive way—of holding on to what I felt when John and I locked eyes. Berrie and I drifted apart, eventually, without much ado or regret, and the intensity of that memory drifted, too. But still.
What if Berrie knew the whole time? What if even Stuart knew? What if they abided it because, however perversely, they got something out of it, too? Desire like shards of a mirror reflecting and refracting in endless combinations. And all of it inchoate, inarticulate, back then, at least.
Inarticulate still. If you spoke of it, it would disappear. You could get some diluted version of it, maybe, an agreement, an open understanding of needs and terms. All very adult and forthright, and everyone gets off and no one gets hurt. But what if the hurt, the thing no one wants to inflict and no one wants to feel and no one wants to talk about, is in some way, in some measure, necessary to all of it? David knew and Stella knew—not every detail, of course, though there must have been an awareness—and they’d abided it. I didn’t want to hurt David, or Stella, or even myself, but we live on two levels all the time, the articulate and the inarticulate, and being here in this place, at Alder, I’d been submerged in the inarticulate, it seemed to me now, like the unconscious mind was a lake I’d been swimming in day after day. Where cause and effect, action and consequence, didn’t work as they usually do. It wasn’t an excuse; it’s just the way it was.
I’d kept my head down in the blackness of my shirtdress, not seeing Stella’s reaction, her possible disappointment or shame or revulsion, only feeling her shift back into her corner of the couch, hearing the TV come on again, the women in tight, expensive jean
s picking up where they left off, the whiskey being poured into a glass.
I thought I heard the front door. David. If I hadn’t looked at Stella through the tunnel of my dress, what would he have walked in on? Maybe nothing. Maybe I would have stopped Stella, told her I couldn’t be Not Alice. Maybe she would have been frustrated but grateful later, sober. And if David had walked in on something, it would have been an ending, though I’m not sure I would have been able to explain that to him or if it would have mattered. There was enough to explain to him as it was. Early that morning, when we’d last seen each other, last checked in, Alice was out of the picture, our picture at any rate, Stella was becoming a kind of ghostly guest who made no demands, who left little impression beyond the tracks of her bike tires, and I was about to get a job—along with whatever money, security, status, and sense of self-worth that offered.
He stood in the archway between the hall and the living room, a little like a husband, a father, a man from an era of overcoats and cigarettes and unforgiving gender expectations, returning not simply from work but from a whole world so removed from the home he’d entered, from his family, domestic life. Stella had once been able to exist with him on this plane, the two of them like old friends, with some shared knowledge or history that made me feel remote—the image I’d had of them during the storm, when we’d taken Stella in. But I no longer knew what plane she was on, what plane any of us were on, really. It was the three of us in the room, as we’d been during the storm, but suddenly there were six of us, as if we’d doubled and our private, secret selves had emerged and were visible, occupying space. They were dressed just as we were. Our doubles looked at each other, acknowledged and took each other in, but they didn’t say anything. David and his double sat down in an armchair, reached for the glass of whiskey my double and I weren’t going to finish, and all six of us silently watched the women in tight, expensive jeans on the screen get on a yacht.
NECESSARY WAYS
“Maybe it’s for the best,” I said. “There are more meaningful ways to make a living. I could be doing something much more valuable with my time.”
“Valuable to whom?” David asked.
“I don’t know. Someone other than wealthy moms with nice taste and ethical shopping habits.”
David was hunched over his knees, sitting on the edge of the wing chair in our room, a tired coach, still trying, out of habit, to motivate the players who had disappointed him. I sat on the floor, knees up, my arms around my shins.
“I understand why you went with Stella to find Alice,” he said. “You thought she was in real trouble. I get that. But I don’t really understand why you’d bring Stella with you to your interview. From a professional perspective.”
“I wasn’t thinking professionally, I guess. If you’d seen her . . . Stella. I mean, you wouldn’t have left her alone in the car or wherever.”
He wouldn’t have, I was sure of it. Stella was downstairs on the couch. She’d fallen asleep sometime after the women disembarked from the yacht but before they convened later that day, in full evening regalia, at a philanthropic gala. David had placed a blanket over her, asked me to fill a glass of water and leave it on the coffee table for her. How caring, how thoughtful he was. How naturally it came to him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Yes, you do.”
I thought of how he’d defended me, at our dinner party, to Liz. How he’d been my champion, and how I’d let him down, how I’d forgotten to be his champion, forgotten he might even need one or need me to be one, these last weeks, months, longer. He rubbed his hand wearily into the left side of his face and I got to my feet, so that I was no longer looking up at him from the floor, he was looking up at me from the chair.
“Have you really been working late these past few nights?” I asked, not as an accusation but as a form of self-recrimination. I hadn’t been paying enough attention but I would make up for it. “I mean, when you’ve been late, have you been working?”
Yes, he nodded, not defensively, but sadly, almost gravely, with the understanding that it could have gone another way, if there had happened to be a Stella or an Alice, maybe, at his office. Or that he’d been working late because he did legitimately have work to do, but that the work also provided a good, convenient excuse to be elsewhere. Or that his working hard, for the both of us, coincided with a personal need of his that had little to do with the both of us. All of it, in that nod.
I was frightened by the thought that David would leave me. I didn’t want to consider it much beyond supposing that if it were to actually happen, I could do something, in theory, about it. Figure out some action to take and take it. What frightened me in a different but more uncanny way was thinking: What if we had happened to meet at the wrong time, as he put it, and hadn’t liked each other in the necessary way, and naively, stupidly, hadn’t recognized who we might become to each other, with each other, and carelessly walked away? We’d worked for what we’d become, and in working we’d had some control over things, but the origin of it was so frighteningly flimsy, so arbitrary as to be destabilizing.
What if we hadn’t learned how to read each other well and closely? A skill you may not always practice, but once picked up, like swimming or riding a bike, you don’t forget. It comes back to you, to your body. So that when I said, “We need to sell this place,” it wasn’t a random thought I happened to land on, but the vocalization of a decision, a directive we had arrived at by the fact that we could still read each other, the proof of a certain complicity between us.
“And Stella?” he asked, because she’d become our responsibility. “Where does Stella go?”
I couldn’t read him closely enough, though, to know how literally he meant this. David solved problems—David with the dead baby birds, lifting them on cards, carrying them away for burial—but Stella wasn’t a problem to solve. She wasn’t a baby bird that fell out of the nest. Logistics get figured out one way or another. There would be a new place, somewhere, somehow, for her to physically reside. But where would she go? And where would the event of her, in our lives, go now?
“We’ll talk to her in the morning. It’s going to take a while anyway, to figure it out and put it all in motion.”
He yawned, an involuntary movement but willfully exaggerated, his eyes clenched shut, his jaw stretched as open as possible, exposing the dark silver fillings in two of his molars, deep into the cavity of his mouth, like a roaring elephant seal, but on mute. And then I yawned, too. It was contagious. How many thousands of times had one of us seen the other yawn and then responded in kind? An uncontrolled mimicry that has to do with empathy, or so I’ve read.
In the morning, a bright blue morning with a sharp coolness that signaled fall, the cotton blanket was neatly folded on the couch. The tumbler of water was washed and drying on the rack in the kitchen. And a note: Thank you. S.
David read a finality into it, that Stella had already gone for good. But I didn’t think she would have left like that and I wanted my impression to be the right one, some indication that I understood Stella, that we understood each other in a way that David didn’t fully comprehend. At the same time, I tried to hide any anxiousness from David. I didn’t want to be anxious about the possibility of her not being there. No running to her bunk—I waited, and when I did make my way over that afternoon, I stopped myself before reaching her. It was enough to see her clothes still out there in the sun, hanging on the line.
HOURS, DAYS, AND YEARS
It had been Aunt Esther’s proto-feminist desire to make Alder a camp for girls. And, from what I knew, what I saw or had been told, it had been Uncle Joe’s desire to please Aunt Esther. He was invested in Alder, involved in the running of it, was a presence at camp-wide events. At athletic games, he consistently wore around his neck a black-and-gold lanyard with a whistle. He had a beautiful voice and for years he would sing Irving Berlin’s “Always” at each end-of-summer banquet with the backing of a tape-recorded instrumental track, h
is eyes gleaming by the middle of it, because it wasn’t, as it could so easily sound, a song about unconditional, unquestioning love; it was about love that acknowledged conditions and questions, that committed itself to existing within those conditions and questions. Joe was as sentimental as he was grouchy. (What the fuck is wrong with people?) He loved this place, but he loved it because of Esther, and if she had ever been done with it, he would have been, too. It wasn’t that she dominated him and he submitted to her will. At least, it didn’t look like that to me. What it looked like was two people who believed in each other.
They had done something unusual together. Two people who were fairly conventional in the way they dressed and carried themselves, the way they presented to the world. But they had, in some measure, rejected what had been expected of them and then had had to redefine and readjust what they’d expected of themselves.
After we lost the baby, I had days that felt directed by a kind of grasping compulsion, a monomania: We will try again. We’ll keep trying. Whatever it takes. It was hearing myself say that—whatever it takes—that made me stop and wonder what did that even mean? It takes too much. It takes something you don’t have. At what point does persistence turn into delusion? Maybe what I was operating under was neither persistence nor delusion but a kind of fever that eventually broke, around the time Aunt Esther left me Alder. I couldn’t keep losing, I heard her say in my head.
When the fever broke, I’d asked David: How badly do you want a child?
Implicit in the question was another question, a sad, desperate one: Badly enough to leave me and go find someone else who can give you that life?
“I want,” he’d said, “I wanted . . . I want a child with you. I don’t even mean biologically. Maybe it’s adoption. Or foster parenting. Or maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, I want it to be with you.”
The Summer Demands Page 15