The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ right hand in her left, staring at her palm. Long white neck, straight black sweep of hair across her forehead, lanky, a person of lines and edges. I saw then what she’d been doing: playing jacks.

      I ran my nails down the screen, gently, a noise that caught her attention. She turned, making me out through the window. No smile, but her face was soft, unalarmed. It made me think she knew me, that she’d seen me before, wandering around, and perhaps had put together some idea of who I was. Which meant she would have been living on our property for a while.

      She stepped closer, right up to the screen, looking down at me.

      “I have a splinter,” she said. “From the floor.”

      “I have tweezers,” I said. “Up at the house.”

      She nodded, blinked her wide-set eyes, and I went quickly, on a mission, not questioning whether she’d be there when I got back.

      We stood in the sun, outside the gloom of the bunk, and I took her hand to remove the sliver of wood, careful but competent, as if I did this kind of thing for a living. No trouble, anybody would do the same, but the casualness of my gestures already felt like a cover, disguising something I couldn’t yet name. She curled her fingers up—her nails painted a dark, galaxy blue—and I let go of her hand abruptly so she wouldn’t think I was holding on too long.

      Her mouth remained slightly open after thanking me. Then, as if to find something else to do with it, she apologized—sorry—though she didn’t say what for. She folded her arms and I realized that mine were folded, too, though I wasn’t sure who’d mimicked whom.

      “You’ve been living here?” I asked.

      “Yeah.”

      “How long?”

      “A couple of months.”

      “A couple of months?”

      “Yeah. You probably want me to go?”

      I laughed, the question seemed both so innocent and knowing, coupled with a comic timing I wasn’t sure she was aware of. I also didn’t know what to say—laughter as placeholder or postponement—and out of habit or some deeply internalized patriarchal impulse, I told her I’d have to talk to my husband. She’d seen him? Around?

      She’d seen him, she said. And he’d almost seen her, the other day, when she’d been by the rec hall, charging her phone in an exterior outlet.

      It occurred to me, then, that she had whole systems in place. Systems for how to live here without us knowing. How much of us had she seen?

      Had she spotted us, that first warm day of the season? From where we’d stood, up at the lodge, you couldn’t see to the end of the camp, the point at which the land turned into the lake. We’d never had this much space all to ourselves. This much oxygen. So, we ran. Down across the fields, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run like that, stumbling, out of breath. Just moving, moving. David liked to run, but he’d been limited until now to city routes. We ran along a wooded path and didn’t stop until we reached a patch of grass by the water. We took off only what we needed to and fucked against a tree before we lay on the ground, staring up at the sky—nobody around at all, we thought—and laughed about it, the tree, the fucking. The bark had scratched my back. I had a cramp in my side from running. Better in theory? David asked. Maybe, I answered. Sex in this spot hadn’t been a fantasy of mine. But the boathouse . . . We’d do that next, he said.

      We didn’t, though. Neither of us had brought it up since.

      “Are you hungry?” I asked her. It didn’t seem like a particularly random or loaded question, just the one that came to me. “Do you want to have lunch?”

      “I would, but I have to go to work.”

      One of us, at least, had a place to be. She had a shift, she said, in a coffee place a couple of miles away in one of the newer shopping centers. I knew the one: brick and glass; sterile, sparse landscaping. Her red collared shirt and her name tag were waiting for her there. She pointed toward the woods—she kept her bike locked to a tree by a path that I hadn’t known about. It led out to the road.

      “Thanks again,” she said, holding up the hand I’d attended to.

      “Sure.”

      Just like that. I hadn’t gotten her name. She started to walk off, looked back for a long moment as if she might ask me something, something she’d almost forgotten. Her reserve wasn’t affectless, it was alert and ascertaining, and I could still feel it trained on me even as she turned toward the trees. I wanted to say Wait! and then I wanted to run—not after her and not away from her, but just to run, to go, to be in motion again. Instead, I stood there, listening to her moving over fallen brush as she made her way through the woods.

       WEIRD ENERGY

      The car in the drive. David home from work. Some days I couldn’t wait for him to break my solitude. Days I could feel myself slipping into a horror story: David goes out into the world and maintains a sane relationship to it while I lose my mind and become this place. Today had been different, though. Someone else had broken my solitude.

      When he came in through our front door, I called down to him, suggested we go out for dinner. I practically pushed him back into the car and we went to the one Thai restaurant nearby, along the main street of the village.

      We lived in a south shore Massachusetts town, a few historic blocks with street lamps surrounded by houses, Victorians and clapboard Cape Cods, and then, a little farther out, small, cheaply fabricated split-levels and ranches that had replaced dilapidated frame houses sometime in the ’50s. American flags. Tracts with gas stations and retail strips, a few sizable stretches of woods that hadn’t yet been swallowed up into suburbs, and our camp. Two towns over you could find a yoga studio. We knew people from Boston who’d started families and bought homes outside the city, but they didn’t buy here.

      I was going to tell David what happened that day, all through dinner I was going to tell him about the young woman whose name I hadn’t yet obtained. How I met her and then spent the afternoon going from room to room around our house, wondering what she would make of it. (Had she already been inside it, somehow?) The faded wallpaper, the smooth wood floors, the framed drawings on the mantle, the dark green tile in the bathroom, the stereo and the records. The candlesticks. The plants. She would have had nothing but contempt for our materialism, for all our comforts and calculations. But then I thought, no. She’d made a home, however makeshift, out of her surroundings in the bunk. I’d seen a crate she was using as a nightstand, next to one of the metal bed frames on which she’d laid out a sheet and a blanket. She seemed to have dusted off a wooden dresser, too, and a couple of folded shirts had sat on top. I was going to tell David all of this. But I didn’t. Even when he commented on my “weird energy.”

      “What do you mean?” I asked, though I think I knew.

      He looked at me from across the table, silently, curiously, and then glanced toward the room, as if a waiter were about to bring out a dessert with a candle in it. As if maybe I’d orchestrated a small surprise for him. For an instant I worried I’d forgotten his birthday, been too preoccupied that day to remember an occasion and that some disappointment would cross his face. But that wasn’t it. He turned back to me with a suggestive half-smile, still not sure what I was up to, though СКАЧАТЬ