Shenandoah Summer

by John Muncie

  “And second,” said Jackie, “we’ve been having a terrible problem with ants in the silo studio, so please, please, don’t take food there while you’re working. Let’s confine our snacking to the dairy barn kitchen.”

  This announcement received a burst of boos and then laughter. Snacking and napping were considered inalienable rights in Limespring’s studios.

  “And finally, next to me is the real reason I’m standing up here making a fool of myself,” said Jackie. “Those of you who are veterans, know her as Limespring’s brilliant and beautiful adjunct professor of drama. To those of you who are new here, she’s still Limespring’s brilliant and beautiful adjunct professor of drama. In any event, and without further ado, here’s Alyssa Brown.”

  This brought heartfelt applause, amplified by the Limespring veterans and led by Marius, who shouted out, “Hail, Penelope!”

  The blond adjunct professor stood up and responded to the outburst by curtseying as if she were meeting the Queen, then blowing the big man a stage kiss across their table.

  CHAPTER 4

  Alyssa looked across the familiar dining room with its log-beamed ceiling, pine-paneled walls, worn green linoleum floors, and round tables covered in bright oilcloth. So little had changed in the nine years she’d been doing the Follies at Limespring, including many of the faces. She’d started coming the same year Jackie took over as director, which was Abbi’s first year, too. Marius and Nattie had arrived the following summer.

  They’d become her second family, and a lifeline of sorts. When she’d volunteered to come up with “a skit or something” for Limespring’s annual solstice party, she had needed something to help blot out the pain. The Follies were born and it became a welcome distraction.

  In the years that followed, her Limespring friendships had reached well beyond the summers. She and Abbi e-mailed and telephoned regularly, and there was an open invitation to any of them who came through Washington to stay at her house.

  “Hello, everybody,” she said. “I don’t know about the ‘brilliant and beautiful’ part, but I am in fact Alyssa Brown, as many of you already know. And, also as many of you know, I live in D.C. during the school year, where I teach drama and direct productions at the Emerson School. Summers, however, I live here; just down the road in that little yellow house with the begging horses out front. Let me warn you—if you feed them, they will follow you around forever.

  “Anyway, for the past nine summers I’ve organized the play that caps off Limespring’s annual summer solstice party. We call it the ‘Limespring Follies.’ And you,” Alyssa said, sweeping her arm around the room, “are the stars.”

  She tilted her head, pausing just long enough for dramatic effect, but not enough for anyone to groan, and then added, “Don’t worry, it’s completely voluntary and it’s completely silly. In fact, calling it a ‘play’ is probably making Shakespeare spin in his grave right now.”

  “Trust me,” blurted Marius, “the Follies are to Shakespeare what a bar fight is to Gettysburg.”

  Marius’s remark got a laugh from the crowd and Alyssa, too. “And Marius should know,” she said. “He played Odysseus in last year’s production of the Odyssey. To give you newcomers an idea of how the Follies work, we reduced Homer’s entire epic—Cyclops, sirens, shipwrecks, angry gods, bloody revenge—into forty- seven ridiculous minutes. And I think everyone will agree that the highlight of the show was when the five evil suitors sang a chorus of ‘I’m a Believer’ with fake arrows through their heads.”

  This brought more applause and a refrain of “I’m a Believer” from one of the suitors, a balding composer from Michigan.

  “This year,” said Alyssa after the noise subsided, “we’re doing a similar disservice to the Arabian Nights in honor of Limespring’s own Abbi Bondi.” She pointed toward Abbi’s table.

  “As some of you may know, Abbi has a novel, a work in progress that’s based on The Thousand and One Nights, and she’s graciously taken time out from it to write the script for this year’s Follies. Thank you, Abbi.”

  More applause. Alyssa saw the man sitting next to Abbi whisper something in her ear. Abbi gave him a playful slap on the cheek; he returned a conspiratorial smile. New boyfriend? He didn’t seem her type. Abbi went for intense intellectuals with pale skin and complicated faces. They were usually tall and reedy and looked like vampires. This one had bulky shoulders, wide planes on his face, and a big, easy smile. He didn’t have dark circles under his eyes and he actually had a bit of a tan. The last time she’d talked to Abbi, she was seeing a novelist named William. This guy looked more rugby player than writer.

  Alyssa continued to explain the project, listing the roles that needed to be filled—she offered to play Scheherazade if no one else wanted to—and the props that had to be made. Central to this summer’s Follies was a giant genie bottle. She asked for volunteers to see her after dinner, then sat down to dessert.

  It was banana pudding. Her favorite. Jackie had ordered it specially for her; she did it every year. She spooned up a big mouthful and moaned. “Okay, Jackie, this is the last time,” she said. “I’m putting it in my contract, no more banana pudding when I’m here. I’m already deep into my fat clothes.”

  Across the table, Marius raised his wineglass. “I propose a toast. That Alyssa eat banana pudding the rest of her life and that all women should have curves like her.”

  There was a chorus of “hear, hear” and a hearty “amen” from Jackie, a perpetual dieter. Alyssa smiled and dug in. The last time she’d really cared enough about her weight to do something—the Atkins diet—was right before her audition for a Little Shop of Horrors at the Orpheum Theatre in 1982. She didn’t get the part, but she lost seven pounds in ten days and her appetite for bacon.

  Sure, she’d like to be fifteen pounds lighter, but she’d like to be fifteen years younger, too. The likelihood of either was about the same.

  The conversations swirled around her and, parched for the sound of adults after the long school year, Alyssa drank them up. Jackie and Marius began planning a group canoe trip on the nearby Shenandoah River, then got off on a tangent about the Hudson River school of painters; a novelist and a collagist were talking about the rise of reality TV; Nattie wanted to discuss the West Side Story revival on Broadway. Nothing about grades, or dress codes, or the latest atrocity the new headmistress had committed. No teenage gossip about who’s breaking up and who’s “doing it.” Another reason to love summer vacation.

  Alyssa was happily starting to expound on Sondheim’s lyrics when she glanced over at the adjacent table and saw Abbi huddled with the man she’d slapped on the cheek. Well, she thought, maybe a little Limespring gossip would be okay.

  “Who’s the jock with Abbi?” she asked Nattie. “Her latest? What happened to the guy who wrote novels about an elevator operator?”

  “Oh, William’s still in the picture,” said Nattie. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually get married someday. No, this guy’s just a friend. At least now he is. I think they had something going years ago.”

  “Writer?” Alyssa said, taking the last spoonful of pudding.

  Nattie looked over at Abbi and Tug. “Nope. Sculptor. Kind of. Urban art collages. You know, piles of toilet seats, empty window frames—that sort of stuff. He’s pretty well-known in New York. The art magazines call him ‘the Junkman.’ He’s kinda cute, in a jock sort of way. I bet he’s terrific in the sack.”

  Alyssa laughed. “That’s beyond my field of expertise. I always went for the brainy ones.”

  Nattie gave her a curious look. “Well . . .” she said and paused, “there’s something to be said for smarts.” Then she tipped back on her chair to get another look at Tug. “Wish I were ten years younger.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Later that night, Alyssa leaned on the porch railing and looked out over the fields of Finally Farm. A three-quarters moon had turned them a silvery gray, and the opalescent light refracted through the slatted leaves of the big
mimosa, dappling her like an Appaloosa’s rump.

  She was wearing just a T-shirt and even that was too much. The crimped cotton pressed damply into her underarms; a bead of sweat rolled down the channel of her back. It was too early in the summer to be this hot. When a timid breeze edged down the hollow, she turned and let it try to cool down her damp skin.

  Mr. Ed, she’d said to him. Mr. Ed! The memory giggled up from the farcical lobe of her brain and she almost laughed out loud. He’d been pretty gracious about the insult, she had to give him that.

  It had happened after dinner. Nearly half the Limeys came to her table to volunteer for the Follies and it turned out that Abbi’s friend—what kind of a name was Tug?—had experience building sets for an experimental performance troupe in Brooklyn. “I’ll build or design or act, whatever you need,” he’d said.

  She liked his enthusiasm. The Follies always went better when there was at least one dynamo fellow involved.

  After Alyssa had handed out assignments and rehearsal schedules, she’d taken the building crew—Abbi and Nattie, Tug, and three other first-timers—over to the old hay barn to survey the props from previous productions.

  “We take recycling to its most ridiculous extremes,” she’d said. “One year we used hubcaps for shields in Macbeth, or, as we called it, ‘Big Mac.’”

  She watched Tug charge through the stacks and could see why he was called the Junkman. He rummaged quickly through piles of castoffs, seeing possibilities in pieces of broken sets that even she hadn’t considered: half a stairway from No Exit, a rusted bedframe from Metamorphosis, the battered head of a papier-mâché snake from Cleopatra, and the back end of a rowboat from the Odyssey.

  Looking up from his stack of reclaimed junk, he’d flashed a smile and said, “All I need now is twelve-gauge wire and I’ll build you Arabia.”

  Alyssa knew that smile. She’d seen it a thousand times on the face of the charming smart-ass in the back of the class, the one who forced you to laugh in spite of yourself. It was a bad-boy grin that said, “We both know I’m clever and cute,” and made you complicit in its sly conspiracy.

  Alyssa smiled back at him. I know your type, Mr. Junkman, she thought. I bet you’ve got a girl in every gallery.

  They added a few more items to Tug’s stack, worked out a prop checklist, and then walked across the grassy courtyard to the studios. Nattie had seen some drop cloths there and thought they might work for backdrops.

  The studios were empty that evening, so the group could ignore the strict no-talking-no-humming-not-even-any-loud-breathing rule that was usually in force. Most of the studios opened onto a central common area called the Square. Scattered about it were three bulletin boards on rollers and four long tables. Nattie stopped by one of the tables and pointed to an assemblage of red plastic straws melted into what looked like a human brain.

  “This isn’t yours, is it, Tug?” she said.

  “Sorry, can’t claim it,” he said.

  “That’s a relief,” said Nattie. “What do you suppose it’s trying to be, anyway?”

  “I know, I know,” said one of the newcomers, an essayist from Wisconsin, waving his hand like a first-grader with the answer. “How about This Is Your Brain on Slurpees?”

  “More like Brain Drain,” Abbi said to the group’s guilty laughter.

  “Then maybe they should call these They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” Alyssa had wandered over to one of the bulletin boards and was examining a series of sketches. “I’ll bet the closest this person’s ever been to a horse is watching Mr. Ed.”

  Abbi burst out laughing. “Well, why don’t we ask him? Oh Tuuuug, been watching Mr. Ed reruns lately?”

  Alyssa looked from Tug to Abbi and back to Tug. Her face flashed red, but she kept her composure. “How about if I open my mouth wider for the other foot?” she said. “Sorry, I thought you were a sculptor.”

  Tug put his hand on Alyssa’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve had worse reviews than that—and a lot less accurate. You’re right, they’re pretty terrible. I’ve been sketching these damn horses for days and they still look like big dogs.”

  Nattie had walked over to look at the drawings. “What’s with the horses, Tug? I thought you did that assembled stuff.”

  “I did. I do, but I’ve been a little dissatisfied lately.”

  “A little dissatisfied?” said Abbi in a mocking voice.

  “Okay, okay, ‘a little dissatisfied’ might be an understatement. So I had a major breakdown and almost threw myself into the East River after I saw the da Vinci show at the Met last fall. I needed to get away from what I was doing. Away from New York, the galleries, the assemblages, everything. I needed to go back to the beginning—drawing.”

  He beamed that smile, this time straight at Alyssa. “I’m like a caveman and Limespring is my Lascaux.”

  It was straight flirtation, no chaser. She stared right back at him and said, “So you started with horses because there weren’t any mammoths around?”

  “Not exactly.” He hoisted himself onto a table and told them about his epiphany at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leaving out nothing except the part about his father.

  “Da Vinci was so much more than a master draftsman. He captured their souls, their essence, their, their . . . utter horsiness.”

  “Is that a technical art term you learned at Pratt?” said Abbi.

  The laughter that followed didn’t diminish Tug’s fervor. He continued talking about the drawings with the passion of an environmentalist defending the giant redwoods. Then he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Anyway, that’s what led me here—chasing the ghost of Leonardo da Vinci and massacring it. I’ve spent hours watching those damn horses, but I just can’t see them.”

  That’s when Abbi had sprung her plan. She slipped an arm through Tug’s and nodded toward Alyssa. “The answer to your problem’s standing right there. You want to really see horses? Spend a few hours with Lissy. By the time you’re finished, you’ll be drawing them from the inside out. She knows more about them than anybody could possibly care. And this way, she’ll actually have an interested audience when she warps off into equine land.”

  Alyssa had to admit it was true. She’d watched many of her friends’ eyes glaze over when she started talking about horses. She loved everything about them. Their briny smell, the way her arms fit into the small dip between their chest and neck when she hugged them, the metronomic grinding of their teeth as they pulverized hay and grain into liquid. Some days she sat outside their stalls and listened as they ate.

  Tug tilted his head. “What do you think?”

  Alyssa smiled and said, “Sure.”

  And so it was set, Tug’s first horse lesson at Finally Farm. The next morning at nine.

  The breeze had died down. Alyssa flapped her T-shirt a few times, but that only moved a few beads of sweat down her body. She didn’t care. After nine months of occasional farm weekends, she was here for good. Or so it seemed from the vantage point of the first week of summer vacation.

  She closed her eyes and slowly inhaled. The farm’s June smell was as layered as a Middle Eastern spice market. The pungent fragrance of first-cut hay floated atop the insistent smell of manure and damp ground. There were grace notes of something sweet, maybe honeysuckle or maybe even the last spring hyacinth that hadn’t shed its frilly blossoms yet.

  She opened her eyes just in time to see the lights of Dr. Holland’s truck as it turned off Limespring Hollow Road into his driveway. In a few seconds the lights disappeared and she was left alone with the moon and the smells and the nightly chorus of cicadas, peepers peeping by the pond, the occasional nicker of horses, a cow grunting.

  She scratched the soles of her bare feet against the edge of a porch plank, then turned and walked into the dark bedroom. She pulled back the sheet and lay on her back; an overhead fan stirred the air and cooled her face. Already she could feel the change coming. The rest of the world was beginning to drain away. She closed her
eyes. I’m back, she thought.

  Then she laughed, out loud this time. “Mr. Ed.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The next morning, Alyssa was in the kitchen making coffee when the phone rang. For a second she thought it might be Roz calling from Chicago. Her daughter was interning there, at her uncle’s architectural firm.

  Though Roz had left less than a week ago, Alyssa already missed her and wanted to hear her voice. But she had promised that she wouldn’t keep calling as if Roz were still a kid. “I’m grown, Mom. Face it,” Roz had said.

  But Roz never called until after nine at night when it was free on her cell phone. And it was too early to be Darryl. He was in California. He’d been there nearly a week preparing for a project at a sister facility. He was coming home in a few days, but would go back for most of July and August. They’d discussed her going out with him. But they both knew she wouldn’t give up a summer at the farm.

  “Hi, it’s me, any cuties I should start losing weight for?” the voice on the other end of the phone said. It was Carol Richman, a friend and fellow teacher at Emerson. She always called the morning after Alyssa met the new crop of summer fellows. Carol was Emerson’s art teacher and designed the sets for Alyssa’s school productions. She wanted to know who the Limespring artists were, what they were working on, and if any of them were single, cute, and straight.

  In the four years Alyssa had known her, Carol had talked many times about applying for a fellowship. But she could never bring enough order into her life to complete the application.

  “Hey there, Carol,” Alyssa said. “There’s a couple new ones mixed in with the usual returnees. You know—Nattie, Abbi, Marius . . .” Carol had met them all before at Alyssa and Darryl’s annual July Fourth party.

  “As for the cuties, hmm, let’s see, there’s a painter from Florida who does tropical landscapes. But if I had to guess, I’d say he was gay. There’s also a sculptor who does assemblages but really wants to draw. I’m sure he’s straight. His name’s Tug, of all things. He’s been drawing—well, that’s a generous word for it—he’s been trying to draw my horses and wants to come here for ‘horse lessons.’ Funny, huh?”