by Heather Abel
At last, she ushered them to the black-eyed Susans, where Jamal stood with a clipboard, checking everyone in. Nat made room for her on a towel under the shade tarp that Caleb constructed each summer. She and Saskia were dissecting Suze, her disappearance and reappearance, the waning or waxing of her beauty. Rebecca stared at the tarp’s undulating blue shadow. “You’re quiet,” Saskia said. “It’s the heat.”
“I’m fine.” How could she tell them that disillusionment was her true inheritance, the very opposite of the buoyant idealism she’d pretended was passed down like an heirloom? Before today, at least, the despair had been tempered by a golden aura of self-importance: nobody will come to the rally, but still we go; nobody will cover the rally, so we write about it; nobody will publish our point of view, so we’ll start a newspaper, which nobody will read but us. With his letter, Ira had shoved off self-importance, leaving only despair.
She stood dizzily, black planets floating across the scrim of her vision, and walked to the shore, where David sat, lifting a dead dragonfly from the water’s surface.
“I have to talk to you.”
David glanced up and then pointed at a snorkel drifting out of the eddy and into the current. “Watch this.”
“Can you hurry?”
He made her wait until the snorkel pushed out of the water attached to a nine-year-old boy, who released his mouthpiece, gasped, and said, “Dr. Livingston, I presume.”
“Hilarious, right? He’s been doing this since I got here.”
“I need to talk now.”
“Tilden,” David called. “I gotta go. Do your Dr. Livingston bit where Scott or someone can see you.”
The boy bowed. “Dr. Livingston, I presume.” He sank underwater.
When Caleb arrived at the river, he angled himself on his rock so he could see both water and shore, which is how he usually kept an eye on all the campers.
Today, even with an angled posture, Caleb didn’t see most of what went on. He saw that two little girls seesawed the inner tube, but he didn’t see a big-bellied girl swim up, saying, “I can get on, too.” He didn’t see the two tubing girls say to each other, “Do you smell something gross?”
He saw Mikala swim across the river to Scott’s lifeguard rock so Scott could rub sunscreen on her back, and he thought, Oh, they’re sleeping together, and found it interesting that he hadn’t noticed earlier. He saw that there were an unfortunate but predictable number of townies fishing upstream. But he didn’t see the two men in jeans and ARCO caps, lying on their stomachs under the tamarisk, hands around warming beers.
He saw that some campers were gathered in a coven, and in the middle were the three witches: Nicole, Shauna, Tanaya. He didn’t see that they were conducting interviews to compete for the role of David’s wife and that the interviewees had to answer six questions, three of which were embarrassing, and then were either told to stay or leave.
He didn’t see Rebecca and David walking together downstream.
He didn’t see that one of the girls on the inner tube bounced on the valve and it pierced her skin. He didn’t see the eleven-year-olds jabbing one another’s arms with fingernails. He didn’t see the boys slapping one another’s thighs with sandy towels. He didn’t see Kai watching Suze cross the sand toward Caleb. He didn’t see two older girls tell Nat that the men under the tamarisk were looking at them and making a screwing gesture, with one finger poking into circled fingers. He could only see that Llamalo was at the river and Suze had returned. She was walking toward him. “About time,” he called, raising his rescue tube. “Over here.”
“What should I do?” Rebecca paced back and forth under the calico shade of a cottonwood. She’d dragged David past the men in ARCO caps, into the seclusion of a copse of trees. “What am I supposed to do?” Snot from her nose, tears from eyes, calamity in her chest. “I’ve had this for weeks. I should be home with them. I should go right now.”
She was sure this was somehow her fault. All that sex, petting, penis. She’d let this happen.
Nearby, two strutting crows called to the broken glass on the sand. David turned this way and that to follow her movement. “No, no, no. Here is exactly where you should be. Look, if you can just calm down . . . Rebecca, if you calm down, we can talk this through.”
But she couldn’t ever calm down. Surely, he could understand that. He’d always been there, pulled on the same raft at the YWCA, given a dollar to share and sent to browse the bountiful tables of political pins at rallies.
She wiped her face with the hem of her shirt. “The thing is, he’s right. Ira’s right. It makes me sick all the time. You go to a million rallies and make a million calls, and still your candidate isn’t elected, or if he is, he takes money from Exxon and plays golf with the health insurance lobbyists. There’s nothing we can actually do, right? Except buy a Christmas ornament made by a Nicaraguan women’s collective or Palestinian scarves or South African bracelets woven out of flip-flops. We can shop. Or we can stop shopping. We can announce we’ll never shop again, use the same paper bag for the rest of our lives and not give our kids birthday presents unless they’re handmade out of that same bag, and it won’t make a difference. Somewhere, right now, some guy is hauling away ten thousand plastic bags because they misspelled ‘Safeway.’ He’s dumping them into the ocean. So hooray for you and your one bag.”
“Oh wow.”
“Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh.”
“No, Zoom, I’m just laughing, because . . .” But he didn’t stop. “See, that’s what I always . . . Sorry. It’s just . . .” He walked toward her with his hand raised, like a boy taking an oath, one palm held out. He took hold of her wrist and pressed her palm against his. It was warm and suffocating. “I used to ask my dad if once there’s socialism and justice we’ll be happy all the time. He would say, ‘Don’t worry about that—we’ll never win.’ And so I started to wonder, what’s the—?”
“Did I ever tell you,” she said, too full of her own thoughts to let him speak, “about the day I left for college? How Ira and Georgia drove me to the Greyhound? They stopped at that donut place on Bundy, and then just sat there, watching me eat, nobody talking. Finally, Georgia said they needed me to understand that there would be, like, different factions among the left at Berkeley. Some would advocate violence, and even though those people might be the most attractive, the most passionate, I should avoid them. It was like I was Kathy Boudin about to join the Weathermen.”
“I can totally picture Georgia saying that.” He was bending his fingers against hers, and she pressed hers back, one by one. That’s all it was: a palm against a sweaty palm. And still it made it seem like there was nothing he wouldn’t understand.
“They were so serious about it. When I boarded the bus, I felt like I was embarking on some clandestine mission, off to lay down swords and shields . . . that sort of thing.” He snorted—of course he understood. “But there was nothing.”
“So you started your own group, right? Because with Rebecca, there’s never nothing. You come up with Unionionion and change everyone’s life forever.”
She blushed externally, glowed internally, said humbly, “I mean, I did start Students United for Justice, but there’s only seven of us.” She wanted to tell him everything, every meeting she’d gone to, every tall guy with glasses or dreads who’d lectured her about panopticons and the surveillance state; how she’d felt walking back to her dorm afterward as the eucalyptus leaves chattered and spores from the bottlebrush fell to the slate; and how she would lie in her bed full of the world’s longing. She wanted him to know it all, every moment of her life. “My point is . . .”
“You have a point?”
As if on mutual agreement, they slid their fingers between each other’s, like sliding legs between legs.
“Shut up.”
His smile was the smile that said he knew her best.
“My point is that I still went to the meetings. That’s the deal. We know futility—of course we do. We know it’
s useless, but we do it anyway.”
His free hand found the waistband of her jean shorts, slid up along the satin of her one-piece.
His armpit hair was dewy and delicate. She wanted to grab it and bury her face in it. He had a zit on his shoulder, but what did she care about standards of desire and beauty? She’d rub her fingers over it. As soon as Scott blew the whistle, they’d leave the river separately and meet at the barn. She’d shove him into the straw.
“The marches, the meetings, the newspaper—we do it all, because without it, there’s nothing. Without it, who am I? My dad runs this radical newspaper. That’s who I am. That’s me. That’s all I am. What do I tell them now?”
He drew his head back slightly, gave a skeptical look. “Tell them? Who cares! Just tell the truth.”
“And the truth is? What? None of it mattered? We tried and failed? I’m just like everyone else, except weirder?”
David removed his hand from hers, folded his arms. “Come on, stop. You’re not weird. Just tell what you just said. How Ira’s wrong. It doesn’t even matter that he stopped the paper.”
“But it does matter. That’s not what I was saying at all.”
“It doesn’t. You get it—you just said it. What you couldn’t see before.” He was suddenly impassioned, impatient. “Listen, Rebecca, our parents are wrong. Their ideas are all wrong. For them, everything is anti, against. And this anger at everything, it means they’re basically paralyzed. Like Ira . . . But Caleb . . . See, Caleb’s figured out this way. About how to live here and not be stuck in unhappiness. It’s like a system. Where everything we do actually matters. And if we follow that way . . .”
“A system?” She shook her head, roiling with frustration. “I’m not talking about Caleb. I’m not talking about systems. Jesus Fucking Christ, David, I’m talking about Ira. Ira’s an important man, and he made a decision, which was, I think, brave. But it makes me sad. I’m sad. Do you see that?”
“But why? Fuck Ira. Your folks’ paper was never the answer. Never. Fuck him. So it’s over—who cares?” He looked triumphant. “You get it now. The answer is here. Now you see. We don’t need our parents—we have this.” He gestured wildly. “I mean, look at it.”
She glanced in the direction he pointed. Through foliage, she could make out campers and counselors enjoying the meager delights of a sweltering rivershore in naïve oblivion. She looked back at him, and his face seemed newly ugly, his features dull and insufficient like his mind. “You never listen, David. You never have. You just drift away from everything that actually matters. And whenever I try to talk to you about anything real, you can’t answer.”
“Because it’s stupid. It’s stupid to waste your life trying to change something you’ll never in a million years change. Even Ira realizes the futility. The stupidity.”
“It’s stupid to care about people who don’t have enough food? Water? That’s stupid? It’s stupid to care about inequality and injustice?”
“Ira’s been miserable. His whole life. I’ve never seen him unmiserable. But Caleb’s happy. Don’t you want to be happy?”
Of course not! she wanted to scream. But she wasn’t done with her list. “It’s stupid to care about the ongoing destruction of the Earth? Really, David? Or is it stupid to escape from it all and hide away in bourgeois delusion at a summer camp?”
“I thought you liked it here.”
“I like it. It’s great. But it’s not life. It’s a diversion. All of this.” She gestured toward him. “It’s been a great diversion.”
David began kicking at the sand. “Don’t be snide. It’s my life. My entire life. I’m moving here. I’ve been wanting to tell you that. When I turn eighteen.”
“Drop out of school?”
“Do you know what I’m leaving? I’m leaving nothing.” His face changed, softened. He reached for her hand. “Come on, Zoom. I thought maybe you’d come here with me. Maybe on vacation. Or spend a semester. Bring all your books, if you have to. Spend your days reading about how terrible the world is, but do it here. With me. Huh?”
She pulled her hand away. Her cataclysm had arrived. Her whole identity, her very self, blasted away. Nothing else could matter. Not him, not his plans. She wanted to hit him. Those shoulders, wrists, fleshless little bone bracelets, she wanted to break them. He was the only one who could grasp what was happening to her, and yet he didn’t. He didn’t understand her at all.
“Why would you think I’d ever do that?” Rebecca said, walking away.
At the water’s edge, Caleb sat on his rock, enjoying the miracle of Suze standing beside him. They’d spent their first moments alone sharing incredulity. Donnie! Among them again! Who could believe the insanity? The coincidence. The very day Suze returned!
“But you did great,” she said. “The way you took control. The way you managed him—respecting him, but without actually engaging in his rage. None of that typical male posturing. Which you could’ve done.”
“Well.” Caleb shrugged. He was trying to parse the compliment, which seemed to at once acknowledge and diminish his manliness. “It’s part of what we do here. Part of what Llamalo’s about. Respect, of course. Listening.”
“Jesus, Caleb. You still talk like that? Like you’re always giving a speech.”
Was she already annoyed with him? And somehow this is what turned him on. All the girls since had been reverent, cowed, young. Suze had never conceded anything out of obligation. There’d been a friction between them that he’d loved. Only with her could he be completely honest. He leaned closer. “Alright then, I’ll tell you. I was scared shitless, Suze. I thought he might have a gun. Donnie’s always been unstable. The grudge he’s held against me? The way he slept with you to get at me? Don’t give that look—you know that’s why he did it. Flooding the ditch? And he didn’t exactly grow into a more reasonable adult. Those letters. You didn’t even hear the worst of them. He believes that I’m an eco-Nazi, which is an industry term—”
“I know what an eco-Nazi is.”
“An eco-Nazi is the way extractive industries slander environmentalists. He thinks I shut down Exxon’s shale project in order to get his land.”
“Okay, but you do see why he might want to come up with a narrative like that?”
“No, Suze, let me explain. You’re missing the point. This isn’t Donnie’s idea. Not at all. It’s all received knowledge. Total conspiracy theory fed to him by . . .” She was looking away, waving at someone under the shade tarp. He raised his voice. “The thing you don’t understand is they’ll say anything to get poor people riled up.”
She turned back to him. “Okay, but—”
But he wasn’t finished. “They encouraged him to come here and scare me. Unfortunately for him, I mean, as you saw, he’s completely inarticulate, not an orator. And why should he be? That’s not exactly what you learn as a miner. Different skill set.”
“Well, apparently you do learn to soothe a baby. That was a surprise. Who’s the mom?”
But he was done talking about Donnie, and he bugled his hands around his mouth in authoritative display. “Hey, Mikala, tell Josh to jump farther out next time.” Back to Suze: “So you want to hear about the changes around here?”
“Well, sure, but . . .” She glanced around as if he might be speaking of the new sandbar cut by springtime snowmelt, the spread of tamarisk on the shore. “But in the grand scheme of things, it’s the same.”
And even though he agreed completely, in a theoretical way, there was so much he needed her to know. The lawn, of course. Suze’s Meadow. How they’d tried seeding it with Kentucky bluegrass and, when that didn’t take, switched to a hybrid bluegrass. Then, the platforms. When and where he’d built each of the new ones.
As he spoke, she nodded along, encouraging as always, murmuring “oh” and “uh-huh,” her expressive face recognizing the amount of work he’d done, although she couldn’t know how much of it was performed while imagining her as witness. He told her about moving the photog
raphy shack, building the blacksmith area, why he’d decided upon a new type of fence around the Gathering, the number of kids who did a solo up on Escadom this year, the number of returning campers this year versus last.
Each piece of news suggested something else he wanted her to know. Only when he began telling about the changes to the shower routine did she look bored, eyes darting from his.
“You’ll find the yurt’s the same, though,” he said suggestively, daringly.
But she began turning her head slowly from beach to river and back again, shielding her eyes with her hand. “So who’s the lucky girl this year?” Finally, she pointed at Kai standing in the water. “The beauty with the boobs. She’s the one. Right?”
Before he could answer, Tanaya and Nicole approached the rock. They were both bikinied and covering their stomachs with an arm.
“We need to talk to Suze,” Tanaya said.
“Over there,” added Nicole, pointing. “It’s about Fiddler.”
Suze hit Caleb’s thigh. “Fiddler on the Roof? At Final Friday? That’s different. What’s that about?”
He explained that the show was important to the girls fitting in here, shedding their former skin. Suze nodded, smiled, and then said to Nicole, “Sure, honey, let’s talk.”
As she slipped back into her sandals and walked away, his thigh burned where she’d touched it. She was jealous! He would need to reassure her that Kai was no competition. Hope passed through adolescence, the years of lockers and ticking classroom clocks, the years of masturbation, longing, longing, longing. Hope reached young adulthood, twenty-four, the age Caleb had been when he’d met Suze, the age Ira had been when he’d registered voters in Mississippi, hope’s earnest prime.