by Meg Wolitzer
“God, Ethan,” Jules said to him. “It’s amazing. It’s totally original.”
He turned to her, his expression bright and uncomplicated. This was an important moment for him, but she didn’t even understand why. Incredibly, her opinion seemed to matter to him. “You really think it’s good?” Ethan asked. “I mean, not just technically good, because a lot of people have that; you should see what Old Mo Templeton can do. He was sort of an honorary member of Disney’s Nine Old Men. He was basically the Tenth Old Man.”
“This is probably really stupid of me,” said Jules, “but I don’t know what that means.”
“Oh, no one around here knows. There were nine animators who worked with Walt Disney on the classics—movies like Snow White. Mo came in late, but he was apparently in the room a lot too. Every summer since I’ve been coming here, he’s taught me everything, and I mean everything.”
“It shows,” said Jules. “I love it.”
“I did all the voices too,” Ethan said.
“I can tell. It could be in a movie theater or on TV. The whole thing is wonderful.”
“I’m so glad,” Ethan said. He just stood before her smiling, and she smiled too. “What do you know,” he said in a softer, husky voice. “You love it. Jules Jacobson loves it.” Just as she was enjoying hearing the strange name said aloud, and realizing that already it had become a far more comfortable name for her than dumb old Julie Jacobson, Ethan did the most astonishing thing: he thrust his big head toward hers, bringing his bulky body forward too, pressing himself upon her as if to line up all their parts. His mouth attached itself to hers; she’d already been aware that he smelled of pot, but up against her he smelled worse—mushroomy, feverish, overripe.
She yanked her head back, and said, “Wait, what?” He had probably reasoned that they were at the same level—he was popular here but still a little bit gross; she was unknown and frizzy-headed and plain, but had captured everyone’s attention and approval. They could join together, they could unite. People would accept them as a couple; it made both logical and aesthetic sense. Though she’d gotten her head free, his body was still pressed against her, and that was when she felt the lump of him—“a lump of coal,” she could say to the other girls in her teepee, eliciting laughs. “It’s like, what’s that poem in school—‘My Last Duchess’?” she would tell them, because at least this would demonstrate some knowledge of something. “This was ‘My First Penis.’” Jules backed up several inches from Ethan so that no part of her was in contact with any part of him. “I’m really sorry,” she said. Her face was hot; certainly it must have been turning red in various places.
“Oh, forget it,” Ethan said in a hoarse voice, and then she saw his expression simply change, as if he’d made a decision to switch over into the self-protective mode of irony. “You have nothing to feel sorry about. I think I’ll find a way to live. A way not to commit suicide because you didn’t want to make out with me, Jules.” She didn’t say anything, but just looked downward at her feet in their yellow clogs on the dusty shed floor. For a second she thought he was going to turn away furiously and leave her here, and she would have to head back through the trees alone. Jules saw herself stumbling over exposed tree roots, and eventually Gudrun Sigurdsdottir’s sturdy flashlight would be used to find her in the woods, where she would be sitting against a tree, shaking. But then Ethan said, “I don’t want to be a dick about this. I mean, people have been rejected by other people since the dawn of time.”
“I’ve never rejected anyone before in my life,” Jules said fiercely. “Although,” she added, “I’ve never accepted anyone before either. What I mean is, it’s never come up.”
“Oh,” he said. He stayed by her side as they trudged back up the hill together. When they reached the top, Ethan turned to her, and she expected to be met with something sarcastic, but instead he said, “Maybe the reason you don’t want to do this with me isn’t even because of me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You say you haven’t rejected or accepted anyone before,” he said. “You are one hundred percent inexperienced. So maybe you’re just nervous. Your nervousness could be masking your real feelings.”
“You think so?” she asked, doubtful.
“Could be. It happens to girls sometimes,” he added, overstating his worldliness. “So I have a proposition for you.” Jules waited. “Reconsider,” Ethan said. “Spend more time with me and let’s see what happens.”
It was such a reasonable request. She could spend more time with Ethan Figman, experimenting with the idea of being part of a couple. Ethan was special, and she did like being singled out by him. He was a genius, and that counted for a great deal with her, she understood. “All right,” she finally told him.
“Thank you,” said Ethan. “To be continued,” he added cheerfully.
Only when he’d dropped her off at her own teepee did he leave her. Jules went inside and stood getting ready for bed, pulling off her T-shirt and unhooking her bra. Across the teepee Ash Wolf was already in bed, encased in her sleeping bag that was red flannel lined, with a repeating pattern of cowboys swinging lariats. Jules intuited that at one point it had probably belonged to her brother.
“So where were you?” Ash asked.
“Oh, Ethan Figman wanted to show me one of his films. And then we started talking, and it just got—it’s hard to explain.”
Ash said, “That sounds mysterious.”
“No, it was nothing,” said Jules. “I mean, it was something, but it was strange.”
“I know what they’re like,” Ash said.
“What what are like?”
“Those moments of strangeness. Life is full of them,” Ash said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. “I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they’re not what you thought. And that’s what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy.”
“That’s true,” Jules said. “That’s just what happened to me.” She looked with surprise at the pretty girl sitting on her bed; it seemed that this girl understood her, even though Jules had told her nothing. The whole evening was taking on various exquisite meanings.
A first kiss, Jules had thought, was supposed to magnetize you to the other person; the magnet and the metal were meant to fuse and melt on contact into a sizzling brew of silver and red. But this kiss had done nothing like that. Jules would have liked to tell Ash all about it now. She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it. Their friendship did begin that night; they talked in this oblique way about themselves, and then Ash began struggling to scratch a mosquito bite on her shoulder blade, but she could hardly reach it, and she asked Jules if she could put some calamine lotion on it for her. Ash yanked down the collar of her nightgown in back, and Jules dotted on some of the bright pink fluid, which had the most recognizable odor imaginable, appetizing and overbearing at the same time.
“Why do you think calamine lotion smells like that?” Jules asked. “Is it the real smell, or did some chemists just come up with this random smell for it in the laboratory, and now everyone thinks it’s what it actually has to smell like?”
“Huh,” said Ash. “No idea.”
“Maybe it’s like pineapple Lifesavers,” Jules said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, they don’t taste like actual pineapple at all. But we’ve gotten so used to it that we’ve come to think that that’s the real taste, you know? And actual pineapple has basically fallen by the wayside. Except maybe in Hawaii.” She paused and said, “I would give anything to try poi. Ever since I learned the word in fourth grade. You eat it with your hands.”
Ash just looked at her, and began to smile. “Those are kind of weird observations, Jules,” she said. “But in a good way. You’re funny,” she added in a thoughtful voice, yawning. “Everyone thought so tonight.” But it seemed as if funny was a distinct relief to Ash Wolf. Funny was the thing, other than calamine lotion, that she needed from Jules. Ash’s family and her world were high-test, and here was this funny girl who was amusing and soothing and touching, really, in her awkwardness and her willingness. Nearby, the other girls in the teepee were having their own involved conversation, but Jules barely heard anything they said. They were just background noise, and the central drama was here between herself and Ash Wolf. “You definitely make me crack up,” said Ash, “but promise you won’t make me crack up.” Jules didn’t know what she meant, and then she did: Ash had awkwardly tried to make a joke, a pun. “You know—don’t ever make me go insane,” Ash explained, and Jules politely smiled and promised she wouldn’t.
Distantly Jules thought of the girls she’d been friends with at home—their mildness, their loyalty. She saw all of them marching to their lockers at school, their corduroy jeans swishing, their hair fastened with barrettes or rubber bands or let loose in wild perms. All of them together, unnoticed, invisible. It was as though she was saying good-bye to those other girls now, here in the teepee with Ash Wolf sitting on her bed.
But the newly forming friendship was paused briefly by the presence of Cathy Kiplinger, who moved into the center of the teepee, taking off her own big, complicated bra and unharnessing her duo of woman-sized breasts, distracting Jules with the thought that these spheres inside this conical building were the equivalent of a square peg in a round hole. Jules wished Cathy weren’t here at all, and that Jane Zell wasn’t here either, or somber-faced Nancy Mangiari, who sometimes played the cello as if she were performing at the funeral of a child.
If it were just Jules and Ash, she would have told her everything. But the other girls were circling, and now Cathy Kiplinger, dressed only in a long pink T-shirt, was passing around a huckleberry crumble purchased at the bakery in town that afternoon, and a warped fork from the dining hall. Someone—could it have been silent Nancy? Or maybe Cathy?—said, “God, it tastes like sex!” and everyone laughed, including Jules, who wondered if sex, when it was really good, actually offered the pleasures of a huckleberry crumble—all goo and give.
The subject of Ethan Figman was now lost for the night. The crumble went around a few times, and everyone’s lips became tribally blue, and then the girls lay down in their separate beds and Jane Zell told them about her twin sister who had a shocking neurological disorder that sometimes caused her to slap herself in the face over and over.
“Oh my God,” said Jules. “How awful.”
“She’ll be sitting there, just totally calm,” said Jane, “and she suddenly starts to smack herself. Wherever we go, she makes a scene. People freak out when they see it. It’s horrible, but I’m used to it by now.”
“You get used to whatever you get,” Cathy said, and they all agreed. “Like, I’m a dancer,” Cathy continued, “but I have these enormous boobs. It’s like carrying around sacks of mail. But what am I supposed to do? I still want to be a dancer.”
“And you should try to do what you want,” Jules said. “We should all try to do whatever we want in life,” she added with sudden and unexpected conviction. “I mean, what is the point otherwise?”
“Nancy, why don’t you take out your cello and play us something,” Ash said. “Something with atmosphere. Mood music.”
Even though it was late, Nancy got her cello from the storage area and sat on the edge of her bed, her bare legs opened wide, intently playing the first movement of a cello suite by Benjamin Britten. As Nancy played, Cathy stood on someone’s camp trunk, her head perilously near the slant of the ceiling, and she began to perform a slow, free-form routine like a go-go dancer in a cage. “This is what guys like,” Cathy said confidently. “They want to see you move. They want your boobs to swing a little, as if you could hit them in the head with them and knock them unconscious. They want you to behave like you have power, but also like you know they’d win the battle if it ever came down to it. They are so predictable; all you have to do is move your hips in a kind of swivel, and get a kind of jiggle rhythm going, and they’re completely under the influence. It’s like they’re cartoon characters with eyeballs popping out of their heads on springs. Like something Ethan would draw.” Beneath the pink T-shirt her body moved in snake segments, and once in a while the shirt would ride up so that the vaguest hint of pubic darkness was revealed.
“We are the modern music and porn teepee!” Nancy cried with glee. “A full-service teepee, to meet every male’s artistic and perverted needs!”
All the girls felt fired up, overstimulated. The stark music and the laughter, drifting from the teepee and scribbling among the trees, headed toward the boys, a message in the darkness before lockdown. Jules thought of how she was nothing like Ethan Figman. But she was nothing like Ash Wolf either. She existed somewhere on the axis between Ethan and Ash, slightly disgusting, slightly desirable—not yet claimed by one side or the other. It was right not to have agreed to go over to Ethan’s side just because he had wanted her to. As he’d said, she had nothing to feel sorry about.
• • •
Over the following few weeks of the eight-week season, Jules and Ethan spent a great deal of time alone together. When she wasn’t with Ash, she was with him. Once, sitting with him by the swimming pool at dusk, with a couple of bats soaring around the chimney of the Wunderlichs’ big gray house across the road, she told him about her father’s death. “Wow, he was only forty-two?” Ethan said, shaking his head. “Jesus, Jules, that’s so young. And it’s just so sad that you’ll never see him again. He was your dad. He probably used to sing you all these little songs, am I right?”
“No,” said Jules. She let her fingers drape through the cold water. But then suddenly she remembered that her father had sung her one song, once. “Yes,” she said, surprised. “One. It was a folk song.”
“Which one?”
She began to sing in an unsteady voice:
“Just a little rain falling all around,
The grass lifts its head to the heavenly sound,
Just a little rain, just a little rain,
What have they done to the rain?”
She stopped abruptly. “Go on,” Ethan said, and so, embarrassed, Jules continued:
“Just a little boy standing in the rain,
The gentle rain that falls for years.
And the grass is gone,
The boy disappears,
And rain keeps falling like helpless tears,
And what have they done to the rain?”
When she was finished, Ethan just kept looking at her. “That killed me,” he said. “Your voice, the lyrics, the whole thing. You know what that song’s about, right?”
“Acid rain, I think?” she said.
He shook his head. “Nuclear testing.”
“Do you know everything?”
He shrugged, pleased. “See,” he told her, “I heard that back when it was written, when Kennedy was president, the government had been doing all this aboveground nuclear testing, which put strontium ninety into the air. And the rain washed it down into the ground, and it got into the grass, where all the cows ate it and then gave milk, which children drank. Little radioactive children. So this was a protest song. Your dad was political? A lefty?” he said. “That’s very cool. My dad is a bitter slug ever since my mom left. You know the fighting that Wally Figman’s parents do in my cartoons? The shrieking and wailing? I think you can guess where I get my ideas.”
“My father wasn’t political,” said Jules. “And he definitely wasn’t a lefty, at least not in a big way. I mean, he was a Democrat, but he certainly wasn’t radical,” she said, with a laugh at the absurdity of this idea. But she clipped off her own laugh as she thought of how she hadn’t known her father all tha
t well. He had been Warren Jacobson, a quiet man, a ten-year employee of Clelland Aerospace. He’d once told his daughters, without their having asked, “My job does not define me.” But Jules hadn’t asked him what did define him. She had almost never asked him anything about himself. He was thin, fair-haired, burdened, and now he was dead at forty-two. So she began to get stirred up thinking of how she would never know him very well. And then she and Ethan were crying together, which led to inevitable kissing, which wasn’t nearly as bad this time, because they both tasted identically of mucus, and it didn’t matter to Jules that she didn’t feel excited. Instead, she felt mostly desperate thinking about her father being dead. Ethan intuited that this was the exact kind of foreplay Jules Jacobson required.
They went along like this, and she came to expect that they would sometimes go off together and have such moments. In this and other ways, Jules’s life was changing rapidly here, advancing like a flip-book. She’d been no one, and now she was right in the middle of this group of friends, admired for her previously unknown sly humor. Jules was a source of interest to all of them, and she was Ash’s great friend and Ethan’s object of worship. Also, since she’d been here, she’d instantly become an actress, trying out for plays and getting parts. She hadn’t even wanted to audition at first. “I’m not nearly as good as you,” she’d said to Ash, but Ash had advised, “You know the way you are when you’re with all of us? How great it is? Just be that way onstage. Come out of yourself. You have nothing to lose, Jules. I mean, if not now, when?”