The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

  The theater department would be putting on Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, and Jules was given the part of Grandma. She played the role as an ancient but lively crone, talking in a voice that she didn’t know she had. Ethan had given her voice lessons, telling her how he came up with voices for Figland. “What you want to do,” he’d said, “is speak it exactly the way you hear it in your head.” She played a woman older than anyone she’d ever known; at the performance, two actors carried her onstage and set her down gently. Even before Jules started speaking, but just made vague cud-chewing facial movements, the audience began to laugh, and the laughter fed upon itself in the way it sometimes did, so that by the time she spoke her first line, a couple of people in the audience were snorting in laughter, and one excitable counselor almost seemed to be shrieking. Jules killed, everyone said when it was over. She absolutely killed.

  The laughter seduced her that time and every time afterward. It made her stronger, more serious, poker-faced, determined. Later, Jules would think that the rolling, appreciative laughter of the audience at Spirit-in-the-Woods had cured her of the sad year she’d just gotten through. But it wasn’t the only element that had cured her; the whole place had done that, as though it was one of those nineteenth-century European mineral spas.

  One night, the entire camp was instructed to gather on the lawn; no other information was given. “I bet the Wunderlichs are going to announce that there’s been an outbreak of syphilis,” someone said.

  “Or maybe it’s a tribute to Mama Cass,” someone else said. The singer Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas had died a few days earlier, supposedly having choked to death on a ham sandwich. The ham sandwich would turn out to be a rumor, but the death was real.

  “When is it going to start? The natives are restless,” said Jonah as they all waited.

  Ethan and Jules sat together on a blanket on the hill and waited. He leaned his head against her shoulder, wanting to see what she would do; at first, she did nothing. Then he moved his head down into her lap, settling himself in and looking up at the darkening sky and the jumpy Japanese lanterns strung on wires between trees. As if cued to do so, Jules began to stroke his head of curls, and each time she did, his eyes closed in happiness.

  Manny Wunderlich appeared before everyone and said, “Hello, hello! I know you’re all wondering what’s going on, and so without further ado I’d like to introduce our very special surprise guest.”

  “Look,” said Ash from down the row, and Jules craned between the people in front of her to see a woman in a sunset-colored poncho carrying a guitar by its neck, picking her way across the grass to take her place on a platform. It was Jonah’s famous folksinger mother, Susannah Bay! In person she was beautiful in the way of very few mothers, her hair long and black and straight—the opposite of Jules’s mother with her acorn-cap hairdo and Dacron pantsuits. The crowd cheered her.

  “Good evening, Spirit-in-the-Woods,” said the folksinger into a microphone when everyone was quiet. “Are you having a great summer?” A series of affirmative calls rose up. “Believe me, I know this is the best place on earth. I spent a couple of summers here too. Nothing is as close to heaven as this little patch of land.” Then she strummed hard on her guitar and began to sing. In person her voice was as strong as it sounded on her albums. She sang several songs that everyone knew, and some folk standards to which the audience was invited to sing along. Before her last song, she said, “I’ve brought an old friend with me tonight who happened to be in the neighborhood, and I’d like to invite him to join me now. Barry, would you come on up? Barry Claimes, everybody!”

  To applause, the terrier-bearded folksinger Barry Claimes, formerly of the sixties trio the Whistlers, and, as it happened, briefly Susannah Bay’s boyfriend back in the summer of ’66, came up beside her with a banjo strapped around him. “Hello, my lads and ladies!” he called out to the crowd. Though the Whistlers had all worn peaked caps and turtlenecks in concert and on their album covers, Barry had abandoned both when he struck out on his own in 1971. These days, he tucked his wavy brown hair behind his ears and wore soft, checkered shirts that made him look like a mild mountaineer. He waved modestly to the campers and then began to play his banjo while Susannah played her guitar. The two instruments came together and then backed off shyly, then came together again, finally forming the preamble to Susannah’s signature song. Quietly at first, then more forcefully, she began to sing:

  “I’ve been walkin’ through the valley, and I’ve been walkin’ through the weeds

  And I’ve been tryin’ to understand just why I could not meet your needs.

  Did you want me to be like she was?

  Is that all that was in your heart?

  A prayer that the wind would carry us . . .

  Carry us . . . apart . . .”

  After the performance, which was full of feeling and warmly received, everyone stood around and ladled up pink punch from a big metal bowl. Tiny fruit flies twittered on the surface of the punch, but mostly no one could see the rest of the bugs in the descending dark. The number of them ingested that summer was formidable: bugs in punch bowls, in salads, even scarfed down on the inhale in openmouthed sleep at night. Susannah Bay and Barry Claimes mingled with the campers. The two old friends and ex-lovers, moving among the crowd of teenagers, looked happy, flushed, natural—elder-statesman countercultural figures who were treated with appreciation.

  “Where’s Jonah?” someone asked. A girl said she’d heard he’d slipped out during his mother’s concert and gone to his teepee, complaining of nausea; several people said it was a shame he didn’t feel well on this night of all nights. Looking at Susannah, it was easy to see the origins of Jonah’s beauty, though it was more tentative and unassuming in its boy form.

  Jules felt excited and stiff standing not too far from Jonah’s mother. “I’ve never been near someone famous,” she whispered to Ethan, knowing that she sounded like a hick but not minding. She was relaxed around Ethan by now, and she was also relaxed around Ash. It still shocked Jules that the lovely, delicate, sophisticated girl in her teepee chose to spend so much time with her, but their friendship was indisputably easy, open, and real. At night Ash sat at the foot of Jules’s bed before they went to sleep; Jules cracked her up often but listened well to her too; Ash was observant and offered guidance about a range of subjects, though never bossily. They sometimes whispered for so long after lights-out that the other girls had to shush them.

  Now, after the concert, Ethan sipped his punch like it was brandy from a snifter, and when he was done he tossed his paper cup into a bin, and dropped his arm upon Jules’s shoulder. “The way Susannah sings ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ is so sad,” he murmured.

  “Yeah, it really is.”

  “It makes me think of the way people devote their lives to each other, and then one of them just leaves, or even dies.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said Jules, who had never understood those lyrics, in particular how a single wind could carry two people apart. “I know this sounds picky, but wouldn’t the wind carry them together?” she asked. “It’s one breeze. It just blows one way, not two.”

  “Huh. Let me think about it.” He thought briefly. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. But still, it’s very melancholy.”

  He was somber, watching her, seeing if the melancholy mood could make her respond to him again. When he kissed her moments later as they stood slightly away from everyone else, she didn’t stop him. He was ready, like a doctor who’s given his patient a little bit of an allergen in the hopes of triggering a reaction. He wrapped his arms around her, and Jules willed herself to want him as her boyfriend, for he was brilliant and funny and would always be kind to her and would always be ardent. But all she could feel was that he was her friend, her wonderful and gifted friend. She had tried so hard to respond to him, but she knew now that it probably wouldn’t ever happen. “I can’t keep trying,” she said all in a flood, unplanned. “It’s too har
d. It’s not what I want to do.”

  “You don’t know what you want,” said Ethan. “You’re confused, Jules. You’ve had a major loss this year. You’re still feeling it in stages—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and all that. Hey,” he added, “she’s got an umlaut too.”

  “This isn’t about my father, okay, Ethan?” Jules said, a little too loud, and a few people looked over at them in curiosity.

  “Okay,” Ethan said. “I hear what you’re saying.”

  Galloping into the lantern light at that moment came Goodman Wolf, along with a pouting ceramicist from Girls’ Teepee 4 who always had clay under her fingernails. They stopped on the edge of the circle and the girl tipped her head up toward his, and Goodman leaned down and then they kissed, their faces both dramatically lit. Jules watched as Goodman’s mouth pulled away with what she could swear, even from a distance, was a smear of the girl’s colorless lip gloss on his lips, like butter, like a prize. Jules imagined exchanging Ethan’s face and body parts with those of Goodman. She even imagined debasing herself with Goodman in some crude, Figland-type way. She pictured cartoon drops of sweat flying out from their joined and suddenly naked selves. Thinking about this, she was suffused with a blast of sensation like the light from Ethan’s projector. Feelings could come over you in a sudden wild sweep; this was something she was learning at Spirit-in-the-Woods. She could never be Ethan Figman’s girlfriend, and she was right to have told him she would no longer try. It would have been exciting to be Goodman Wolf’s girlfriend, of course, but that wasn’t going to happen either, ever. There would be no pairing off this summer, no passionate subsets formed, and though in some ways this was sad, in other ways it was such a relief, for now they could return to the boys’ teepee, the six of them, and take their places in that perfect, unbroken, lifelong circle. The whole teepee would quake, as though their kind of irony, and their kind of conversation and friendship, was so strong it could actually make a small wooden building chug and sway in preparation for liftoff.

  TWO

  Talent, that slippery thing, had been the frequent subject of dinner conversation between Edie and Manny Wunderlich for over half a century. They never tired of it, and if someone studied word frequency in the dialogue of this now elderly couple, they might note that talent kept appearing; though really, Manny Wunderlich thought as he sat in the underheated dining room of the big gray house off-season, occasionally when they said it, they meant “success.”

  “She became a great talent,” his wife was saying as she served him a spoonful of potato, banging the spoon against his plate to release it, though it apparently did not want to be released. When they first met in Greenwich Village at a party in 1946, she was a modern dancer, and she leapt around her bedroom on Perry Street wearing just a bedsheet, with ivy twined in her hair. In bed, the callused bottoms of her feet were sharp against his legs. Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny’s great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn’t rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded. Edie proved to be a dreadful cook, and throughout their life together the food she prepared was often like poison. When they opened Spirit-in-the-Woods in 1952, they both knew that finding an excellent cook would be essential to the enterprise. If the food wasn’t good, then no one would want to come. Edie’s shy second cousin Ida Steinberg, a survivor of “that other kind of camp,” as someone had tastelessly said, was hired; and in the summertime the Wunderlichs ate like royalty, but in the off-season, when Ida only worked occasionally, for special events, they generally ate like two people in a gulag. Glutinous stews, potatoes in various iterations. The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers who had come through these stone gates and slept in these teepees.

  Lately, as the year 2009 came to a close, they could no longer remember all of them, or even most of them, but the coin-bright ones shone through the murk of the Wunderlichs’ memory.

  Manny had unconsciously begun grouping the campers over the decades into categories. All he needed was a name, and then the thought process and classification could begin. “Who became a great talent?” he asked.

  “Mona Vandersteen. You remember her. She came for three summers.”

  Mona Vandersteen? Dance, he suddenly thought. “Dance?” he said tentatively.

  His wife looked at him, frowning. Her hair was as white as his hair and his out-of-control eyebrows, and he could not believe that this thick, tough old pigeon was the same girl who’d loved him the way she had done back on Perry Street just after the Second World War. The girl who’d sat on a bed with a white iron headboard and parted her labia in front of him; he had never before seen such a sight, and his knees had almost given out. She had sat there, opening herself like little curtains and smiling at him as though this was the most natural behavior in the world. He’d just stared at her, and she’d said, “Well? Come on!” without any indication of shyness.

  Like a giant Manny had crossed the room in one big step, throwing himself upon her, his hands trying to part her further, to split her and yet own her at the same time—conflicting goals that somehow got worked out over the next hour in that bed. She grasped the rails of the headboard; she opened and closed her legs upon him. He thought she might kill him accidentally or on purpose. She was wild that day and for a long time afterward, but then eventually the wildness faded.

  The only part that now remained of that slight, flexible girl was the cheese-grater texture of the heels of her feet. Her body had been stocky since the early 1960s, and it wasn’t childbirth that had done this; the Wunderlichs had been unable to conceive, and though there was pain in this fact, it had been blunted over time by all the teenagers who came through Spirit-in-the-Woods. Edie, back in late middle age, seemed to have been physically rebuilt in the image of a pyramid; no, she was built, Manny realized one day, like one of the teepees they could see out their window across the road—one of the teepees that had lasted all this time and never needed repair, never needed anything, because they were so primitive and basic and self-contained.

  “Mona Vandersteen was not a dancer,” Edie said now. “Think again.”

  Manny closed his eyes and thought. Various girls from camp obediently appeared before him like the Muses: dancers, actresses, musicians, weavers, glassblowers, printmakers. He pictured one particular girl with her arms thrust into a bucket of purple dye. Now he felt an old twitch and stir in his hiked-up trousers, though this was only phantom-limb arousal, since he was on hormones for prostate cancer and had budding breasts like a girl and hot flashes of the kind that his fairly stupid mother used to complain about as she fanned herself with a copy of Silver Screen magazine in their Brooklyn apartment. Manny was a physical disaster now, chemically castrated—his young doctor had actually, cheerfully used that word—and almost nothing got him going anymore. He thought of the name Mona Vandersteen, and a new image rushed to meet him.

  “Yes, she had wavy blond hair,” he said to his wife with false certainty. “Back in the 1950s, she was one of the earliest group of campers. Played flute and went on to join . . . the Boston Symphony Orchestra.”

  “It was the sixties,” Edie said, seeming a little annoyed. “And oboe.”

  “What?”

  “She played the oboe, not the flute. I remember this, because she had reed breath.”

  “What is reed breath?”

  “Didn’t you ever notice that the woodwind players who use reeds always have a certain kind of bad breath? You never noticed this, Manny? Really?”

  “No, Edie, I did not. I never noticed her breath, or anyone else’s,” he said piously. “I just remember that she was so talented.” Also he remembered that she’d had narrow hips and a big, pleasing ass, but this he did not add.

  “Yes,” Edie said, “she was very talented.” Together they ate their potatoes under a shimmer of brown sauce and individually thought of Mon
a Vandersteen, who had been so talented and who had gone on to greatness for a while. Though if she’d been in the Boston Symphony Orchestra all the way back in the 1960s, then who knew what she did now, or if what she did was lie in her grave.

  The Wunderlichs were older than everyone; they hovered like God and God’s wife, white-headed, still living in the house across the road from the camp. The collapsing economy was terrible for all summer camps—who had seven thousand dollars to spend now so their kids could throw pots? A couple of years earlier they had hired a young, energetic man to do planning and run the day-to-day operations, but the sessions remained pitifully undersubscribed. They didn’t know what they were going to do now, but they knew the situation wasn’t good and that eventually it would reach a crisis.

  Whatever happened, they would not sell the camp. They loved it too much for that; it was a little utopia, and the kids who came to it were self-selecting, always the same type—utopians themselves, in a way. The camp needed to remain intact, serving its valuable purpose of bringing art into the world, generation after generation.

  Each Christmas, former campers crammed the Wunderlichs’ mailbox with letters from their lives, and Edie or Manny walked slowly to the end of the driveway, opened the stiff door of the silver box, then brought the mail back inside the house, where Edie read the letters aloud to her husband. Sometimes she skipped lines or whole paragraphs when they grew too boring. Neither of them was particularly interested in the family lives of these former campers: where their children had been accepted to college; who had had a coronary bypass—oh boo hoo, everyone’s life was hard, and if you’d survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough. Sometimes Manny thought that the campers should have sent the Wunderlichs a pared-down, expurgated version of a Christmas letter, and all it would contain would be evidence of the great talent of that person. Slides, audio samples, manuscripts. Examples of what he or she had gone on to accomplish in the years and decades after leaving Spirit-in-the-Woods.