by Meg Wolitzer
“Is it serious?” Ash asked on the phone after Jules had slept with Dennis. After all, Ash had known it was serious the moment she slept with Ethan, or possibly even before then.
“Yes,” said Jules, picturing Dennis Boyd’s dark face above her, the ceiling only inches beyond. “Careful,” she’d said to him, cupping his skull. “I don’t want you to crack your head.”
“No, I would be of no use to you with a cracked head,” he’d said, and she worried then that he was thinking that his head had already been cracked once, in a way, in college, and the fissure had repaired, and that Jules knew nothing about it, though of course she did know.
“He had a nervous breakdown, Ash, and he told me all about it, but he doesn’t know I already knew before he told me,” Jules suddenly said in a rush. “So what do you think: do I tell him I already knew, or is this a meaningless lie of omission, and I should forget about it?”
“You tell him,” said Ash without qualification. “You have to. He has to know what you know. You can’t start off with a secret.”
“You’re saying that?” said Jules, light but sharp.
A long silence ensued. “Yes,” Ash said finally.
Strange, Jules thought later, that she didn’t press Ash on this, or try to make her admit that it was hypocritical of her to take such a position. But stranger, maybe, that Ash seemed so comfortable taking that position. From time to time over the years Jules would wonder if Ash remembered this conversation, or whether she’d found a way to inure herself to contradictions and then forget them immediately. But on the phone Jules said nothing more about it, because this conversation wasn’t supposed to have been about Ash at all. It was supposed to have been about Jules and Dennis, and so she turned it back in that direction, realizing that she did agree with Ash’s advice: she had to tell Dennis what she knew about him.
“I sort of lied the other day,” she said to him the next time they saw each other. They had agreed to meet in Central Park, and were going to go to the zoo. “I already knew about your thing—your breakdown—when you brought it up,” she said right away as they paid and entered. “I shouldn’t have acted surprised the way I did. Isadora told everybody after you left.”
“She did? You’re kidding. Oh, this is bad,” he said. “It’s basically my fear about what happens when you leave a room. Everyone says the thing about you that you really can’t bear.” They walked down the path of the worn- looking zoo and through the curved entryway of the penguin house, and he said, “But I actually can bear it now. It doesn’t seem to matter so much to me anymore.”
“Really?”
Dennis nodded and shrugged. The person who had collapsed at Rutgers in the middle of his junior year was not exactly the same person who lay bare bodied in bed with her. That earlier person had recovered. This person could take care of another person and also let himself be taken care of when needed.
Dennis was very appealing to Jules in ways that would be hard to explain to Ash, but then she remembered the night she had first seen Ash and Ethan together; that night, she had dumbly thought What? What? Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.
“I knew I had a family history of gloom,” Dennis said as they entered the dank gray penguins’ sanctuary. Those muscular, determined little animals whipped through the cloudy water like speedboats, while schoolchildren stood in the fish stink watching, hands and noses and slack mouths against the glass wall. It felt illegal not to be in school anymore herself, to have freedom in the daytime to go with a man to the zoo, or to bed. Dennis and Jules hung back. He stood with his hands in his pockets, and said, “My grandma Louise, my dad’s mother, never left the house, and apparently her dad barely did, either. Whenever we went over there it was like being in a horrible dark room where nobody really talked. My grandmother never had any food for us. Only those cookies called Vienna Fingers.”
“I remember those cookies. We had them.”
“Yeah, but yours probably weren’t all broken, like hers were. We would sit with a plate of broken Vienna Fingers in front of us, and the name always creeped me out, as though they were human fingers. Jews’ fingers. My grandmother always had a low-level anti-Semitism going on. ‘The Jews this,’ ‘the Jews that.’ Don’t worry, though, you won’t have to meet her, she’s dead. When the sun went down, someone would turn on the tiniest table lamp. I couldn’t wait to leave. But I never connected any of that with myself. Or even with my dad, who’s really uncommunicative. I just thought he didn’t like me, but it wasn’t that. He’s basically an untreated depressive, that’s what the psychiatrist at the hospital said. But no one in my family admits to any of it. They’re ‘against’ therapy. It was embarrassing to them what happened to me. I think they basically believe college made me fall apart, and that I would’ve been fine if I’d stayed at home and worked at the store with my brothers.”
Jules lightly mentioned then that she knew of the Langton Hull Psychiatric Hospital from her summers at camp; she’d seen the sign downtown that pointed toward the road where the hospital was situated. He in turn said he knew of Spirit-in-the-Woods too, had seen the sign pointing toward it on the road outside Belknap. He said he had imagined what it would have been like if he had gone there instead of the hospital. Yes, it turned out that he too had eaten the huckleberry crumble, during a group outing into town with one of the nurses.
Dennis had been depressed but he wasn’t depressed any longer; the antidepressant he took was one of the so-called MAO inhibitors. “Like Chairman Mao,” he explained to her that night after the zoo, as they sat in her fold-out bed in her apartment, which was just a little better than his.
“So what would a Mao inhibitor be?” she asked. “The threat of capitalism?” Dennis smiled politely, but he seemed serious, distracted. He had brought over dinner for them, some things he’d cooked, “nothing fancy,” he warned her, not understanding yet that the gesture itself was winning. He explained to her, as he laid out the meal on a towel across her bed, that each food was an item he’d either seen her eat before or that she’d mentioned that she liked. “At Isadora’s dinner party, you were one of the ones who said they liked cilantro,” he said. “I remembered that. I had to go to two places to find it. The guy at the Korean place tried to sell me parsley, but I stood my ground.” Dennis and Jules ate carrot and celery sticks with a cilantro yogurt dipping sauce he’d made, and then the still-warm spaghetti he’d brought over in a plastic container. “Do you ever cook?” he asked her.
“No,” Jules said, embarrassed. “I don’t really do anything like that. I haven’t even paid my health insurance premiums.”
“I don’t see the connection, but okay,” he said. “That’s fine. I like to cook.” The unsaid thing was that it was fine if he ended up doing the cooking in their couple. They were going to be a couple, they really were. Then he said, “About food, there are some issues. Me and my MAO inhibitor—well, there are a lot of things I can’t eat.”
“Really?” she said, curious. “Like what?”
He told her the list of contraindications, which included smoked, pickled, or preserved meats; aged cheeses; liver; pâté; Chinese pea pods; soy sauce; anchovies; avocados. And also, he said, some beers and wines, as well as cocaine. “I definitely can’t ever have cocaine,” Dennis warned. “So please don’t give it to me.”
“Too bad,” said Jules, “because though as I said I generally don’t cook, tomorrow I was going to make you a three-year-old Gouda and cocaine sandwich. And force it up your nose,” she added. Actually, looking at the sweetly eclectic little meal he’d brought, she was so touched that she wanted to buy a cookbook and cook for him sometime. Try out her oven, see if the pilot light was lit. Her desire to do this was a little embarrassing to her, as if it were a housewife throwback; she couldn’t explain how this had come about, but they had entered love and mutual care
taking, which unexpectedly involved feeding and food.
“Ah, what a shame,” said Dennis. “I would’ve really liked that sandwich.”
“Out of curiosity, seriously, what would happen if you ate one of those foods?” she asked. “You’d get depressed again?”
“No,” he said. “Much worse than that. My blood pressure could skyrocket. They gave me a whole pamphlet about it. Foods with tyramine in them are potentially deadly to me.”
“I never even heard of tyramine,” Jules said.
“It’s a compound in a lot of foods. And seriously,” he said, “I could die.”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Please don’t do that.”
“Okay. For you I won’t.”
To fall in love with a man who was emotionally precarious meant not only helping pay attention to what he ate but also knowing that there was a potential for him to fall disastrously. He was really well now, he had assured her, fixed at a reasonable mood state by the mysterious MAO inhibitor that made alterations to his brain, that got in there like the gloved fingers of a surgeon and moved various parts around. He was really well, he repeated. In fact, he felt pretty great. And he was hers, if she wanted him.
FIVE
After that first summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods, returning home was a calamity. Lois and Ellen Jacobson seemed exceedingly slow to Jules; did they possess no curiosity about anything? They were both passive for long stretches of time, and then suddenly they became opinionated about the most boring subjects imaginable: hem length this season according to Glamour magazine. Whether the new Charles Bronson movie was too violent for teenagers. Lois: “Yes.” Ellen: “No.” And, most disturbing, they didn’t even recognize the pain that being forced to live with them was now causing Jules. The summer had turned her superior and quietly angry, though she hadn’t known this about herself until her mother and sister appeared on the last day of camp in their Dodge Dart, which looked greener and boxier than ever. From the window of her teepee she saw the car make its way along the narrow, bumpy road. Jules had felt like an interloper when she’d first been invited to join Ash and the others in Boys’ Teepee 3, but here were the real interlopers, driving toward her and having the nerve to stop on the road behind Girls’ Teepee 2 and try to claim her for their tribe.
“Do I have to go with them?” Jules said to Ash. “It isn’t fair.”
“Yes, you have to. I have to go with mine too, whenever they show up. They’re always late. My mother likes to go antiquing.”
“It’s fine for you to go back to your family,” said Jules. “You belong there. And you’ve got Goodman to live with, and all the other people from here living near you, and you’ve got the whole city, in fact. I mean, it isn’t comparable, Ash. I am in Siberia. I’m going to slash my wrists and leave a bloody trail along my suburban street, which happens to be called Cindy Drive. Can you believe it? Cindy? What street do you live on again?”
“Central Park West. But look, we’ll see each other all the time,” Ash said. “This summer isn’t going to just go away like it never happened.”
Ash put her arms around her, and from her peripheral vision Jules saw Cathy Kiplinger turn away in mild annoyance. Jules didn’t blame her; girls hugged on a dime, taking any opportunity when emotion gathered in their throats. Like babies or kittens, girls wanted to be held. But maybe Cathy Kiplinger was annoyed because she was jealous. Everyone wanted to be held by Ash, not even to evoke a sensual feeling but just to have been singled out. Cathy was sexy, but Ash was beloved.
That final morning of the 1974 camp season, Jules had flipped through Ash’s copy of the Spirit-in-the-Woods spiral-bound yearbook that they’d each been given a day earlier. Like Jules’s yearbook, Ash’s was filled with intensely scrawled, sentimental comments from other campers. But while the comments in Jules’s book were mostly along the lines of, “Jules, you were hilarious in that Albee play. And you turned out to be a HILARIOUS person in real life, which I would never have guessed! I hope you go on to do great things. Let’s stay in touch!—Your friend and teepee mate, Jane Zell,” Ash’s were different. Several handsome boys admitted in Ash’s yearbook that they had been quietly and desperately in love with Ash all summer. Though Ethan Figman knew very well that while he longed to be Jules Jacobson’s boyfriend, he could accept just being her close friend. But several boys, unable to say anything to Ash directly, finally said it in her yearbook. The sentiment went along certain lines:
Dear Ash,
I know that you and I have barely spoken. You probably won’t remember this, but once when I was practicing my bassoon in the meadow, you walked by and called to me, “That sounds great, Jeff!” And I swear to God, it was as if my role in life was to be in that meadow in order for you to walk by. I know that we orchestra types aren’t fast and witty like you theater types. Though here is a pretty good bassoon joke:
How are bassoons similar to lawsuits?
Everyone cheers when the case is closed.
Well, that’s it. Before I leave this place I want you to know that I was totally in love with you all summer, even if it was only from across a meadow.
Fondly,
Jeff Kemp (Jeff with the bassoon, not the other Jeff, the douche who plays trumpet)
Jeff Kemp would go back to his life and his school orchestra and his metal folding chairs on a concert stage, and endure the whole year without the love of Ash Wolf, and she would come to symbolize all that he loved about girls. Girls as advanced, superior beings. Girls as delicate as squab, but also so thoughtful and kind that you had to have one around you. Even Jules experienced a little of that with Ash. “I promise you,” Ash said on that last day of camp, August 24, 1974, “I won’t let you slip away.”
It wasn’t only Ash, her closest friend, who Jules needed; it was all of them, and the feeling she had when she was with them. But the actual sensation of being at camp was already being pried up and loosened. It had been a strange and remarkable summer for her, but the whole country would remember it too: a sitting president had resigned, and then vacated the White House while everyone watched. He’d waved to them as though he was departing after his own special summer. She couldn’t stand leaving here now, and she felt herself begin to cry. In the distance, other cars arrived. Above all the voices, Jules could hear Ethan’s; once again, just like on the day of arrival, he was at the center of everyone, helping other campers and parents, using his thick body to lift trunks and duffels and push them into the open backs of waiting cars. Jules wasn’t the only one in tears. The shoulder of Ethan’s Felix the Cat T-shirt stayed wet the entire day.
“I don’t want to leave; I don’t even want to go out there,” Jules told Ash, but at that moment her mother and sister came inside the teepee; they hadn’t knocked but had just boldly entered like a police raid, trailed by the counselor Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, who said, “Look who is here!” Gudrun’s eyes were frankly sad.
Jules let herself be embraced by her mother, who seemed genuinely emotional and pleased to see her, though perhaps some of that was just spillover from the long, hard year of her husband’s illness and death. Lois Jacobson had no idea that she was taking home a different person from the perm-haired, tentative, grieving goofball she’d dropped off here at the end of June.
“Make sure you have your toiletries,” Lois said, and Jules was appalled by the word and pretended not to have heard her.
“I think Jules has everything,” said Ash. “We all cleaned out the cubbies.”
“Jules?” said Ellen, looking at her sister. “Why is she calling you that?”
“Everyone calls me that.”
“No they don’t. No one does. God, you’re totally bitten up,” Ellen said, taking Jules’s arm and turning it over for examination. “How did you stand it?”
“I didn’t even notice,” said Jules, who had noticed but hadn’t minded. The mosquitoes had come in and out through an accidentally swastika-shaped hole in her screen while she slept.
Now Jules and her mo
ther and sister began to carry her belongings out to the car, but Ethan appeared before them suddenly and grabbed one end of her trunk. “I’m Ethan Figman. I’m your daughter’s animation go-to guy, Mrs. Jacobson,” he babbled absurdly.
“Is that so?” said Lois Jacobson.
“Indeed it is. Any pressing animation question that Jules has had over the summer, I’ve answered it. Like, for instance, she might ask me, ‘Wasn’t Steamboat Willie the first cartoon with sound, Ethan?’ And I’d say, ‘No, Jules, but it was one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound. Also, it was the first time the world ever got a glimpse of Mickey Mouse.’ Anyway, my point is that I’ve been there for her. You raised a great girl.”
“Shut up,” Jules whispered to him as they stood at the car. “You’re just talking out of your ass, Ethan. Why are you doing this? You sound like a deranged person.”
“What do you want me to say?” he whispered back. “‘I kissed your daughter repeatedly and tried to feel her up a little, Mrs. Jacobson, except she didn’t like it, even though she’s crazy about me too? So we tried and tried but it got us nowhere?’”