The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

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СКАЧАТЬ had always struck me somehow as kind. As first impressions went, he came off as steady, collected. People liked him, and they tended to take him seriously. But if you met his gaze often enough, you’d see this seriousness called into question by a quick, engaging wit that flashed in his dark eyes.

      “I just can’t remember the last time you ordered one of those iced coffees,” he said.

      And neither could I—sweet, with condensed milk. A gratuitous, gluttonous drink from my youth. At some point in my life I’d replaced it with water, an occasional glass of wine. We could take each other’s measure in beverages, David and I, we had that kind of collective, institutional memory between us. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I still didn’t mention the young woman.

      The warmth of the dark. Moonlight. David was already upstairs when I locked all the doors and the windows on the first floor. Something I’d rarely thought to do the whole time we’d been here. I went to bed in only a T-shirt and took it off in the middle of the night, cool and naked beneath the sheet. David slept. Moths opened against the screens of our bedroom windows. I lay there, waiting, waiting, waiting, and I was not sure for what.

      Our house had been called the Director’s House. White with black shutters, an old farmhouse, though I don’t know if there was ever a farm. It was where my great-aunt Esther and her husband, Joe, had lived for years while they ran the camp. Esther and Joe had been city kids: triple-decker houses and apartment buildings, lunch counters, shoe shops, bakeries with rye bread and challah, kosher butchers, shul. The Mystic River, smokestacks, crowds, streetcars, and Revere Beach. They’d grown up in Chelsea, a large, tightly knit community of working- and lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Second- and third-generation children moved out and up to the Boston suburbs but Esther and Joe and their families hadn’t yet prospered enough to leave.

      One summer, through the efforts of a charitable Jewish organization, Joe and Esther had the chance to go away to camp. This was part of a program whose unstated mission was to foster comfort in nature and self-defense skills. It was 1945. At fifteen, Esther and Joe had never been away from home, never really been more than a few miles from their neighborhood, from their many brothers and sisters, from the clatter of city life. They knew dirt but they’d never held soil in their hands. When Esther and Joe—resolutely urban, nurtured by density, neurosis, and the Great Depression—discovered the woods, they never wanted to leave.

      Across an asphalt road, the one real road in the camp, sat the Lodge, a ramshackle one-story building constructed in the same style as the Director’s House, painted white with a layer of black trim curling and flaking to reveal a faded pine green. When we’d first arrived, David and I, pulling off a winding rural road and into a half-circular drive, I saw the lodge at the center of the curve and I practically leaped out of the truck we’d loaded up with our possessions, ushering myself in through a partially unhinged screen door, into a world of linoleum floors, dust on heavy wooden desks in a room used for administrative purposes, then hurricane lamps and two sofas—one floral, one patchy gold velour—in a room that had been designated as the Lounge. I was entering a photograph of my own past, my family’s past. Yellowed posters bearing the faces of imprisoned Soviet dissidents were still tacked along one wall. In the ’80s, when I had come here as a girl, we had sung songs about them, singing for their release. I didn’t know what had become of them since. But David did. That one, he said, finally emigrated to America and became a neocon lobbyist. That one died after being exiled to Siberia.

      How do you know that? I asked.

      How do you not? he said.

      I thought the girl might have cleared out in the night. That the bunk would be bare, as if she’d never been there at all and I’d imagined the whole thing.

      I knocked softly on the door, accommodating, polite. She had trespassed on our private property, but I didn’t seem to mind. Even though all I really knew of her was that she played jacks, supposedly worked as a barista, had a cell phone and bike, hair like a dramatic brushstroke, and a quiet but sure way of setting up her space. That she was a cause, perhaps, of the strange, subtle coiling feeling taking place inside me. That she was alert, ascertaining. I knocked and she answered. She came out onto the wood-plank steps in the bright morning wearing peach-colored sunglasses with mirrored lenses, so all I saw for a moment was my own reflection, trying to look like I wasn’t trying too hard, my shoulder-length brown hair piled on my head, threadbare T-shirt, cutoffs that were loose, unraveling. Then she came into focus. She was a little taller than me, and thinner, so that a kind of buff-colored canvas karate pant looked good on her, as did the standard red polo shirt she had to put on for work. She wore it oversized, revealing the length of her collarbone. Her hair was damp. She must have figured out how to turn the water on for the plumbing in the bunk. Resourceful girl.

      “I know, I should go,” she said, pushing the sunglasses up into her wet hair, a gesture that struck me as disarming; those mirrored lenses were like a shield. And mostly because she wasn’t putting me in the position of being the uptight, incurious person telling her to leave, I wanted her to stay.

      “Well, you don’t have to. I mean, not right away.” I leaned on the unsteady railing of the stoop. I didn’t want to keep shifting but that’s what I did, while she rested against the door frame of the bunk, at ease, like she would take whatever I said in stride. Like she was used to taking everything in stride, or at least pretending to.

      “Did you talk to your husband?”

      “What?” I said. “Oh.” A small, embarrassed laugh. “No, actually. Not yet.”

      “Stella,” she said, showing me her hand, the one I’d held the day before, and then extending it.

      “Emily.” I shook her hand and then wondered, again, if I’d released it too soon or too late. “Are you off to work?”

      “I have a little time before then.”

      “Oh. Well, do you want to go for a walk or something?” It was strange, ostensibly having all the power here but feeling that I was the one taking a risk. A sense of relief, a stirring to life, when she said okay.

      We walked, out past the cluster of the rec hall, the old arts-and-crafts building, and a large storage shed of moldering athletic equipment. Into the full sun of the basketball court, the nets on the baskets having mostly disintegrated on the rusting rims. Into a shaded path that led to a bench by a stone wall. She seemed to know this place as well as I did.

      She’d grown up close to here, she told me, not too far from Plymouth. She should have had a Boston accent, misplaced r’s, drawn-out vowels; hints of it came through in a word or two, but mostly she sounded like she was from any place, no place.

      Plymouth, where the pilgrims eventually landed the Mayflower in 1620, where actors dressed up as seventeenth-century colonists at a reenactment village. You could visit them in their thatched-roof homes, and they would try to inhabit their time, telling you about blacksmithing or cutting hay, while also having a contemporary sensitivity and awareness of what that time would become. I had been there once on a school field trip. Stella had been there many times, she told me, and she’d even worked in the gift shop one summer.

      “People would always try to get the actors to break character,” she said. “You know, say something about modern life or drop their English accents. Not just kids, parents, too. Teacher chaperones, even. It always seemed like a weird thing to do. Weird and mean. Like everyone knows it’s an act, you’ve bought a ticket to see the act and be part of it and then you’re trying to get the actors to mess up, you’re trying to get someone to be bad at their job so you can go ‘aha!’ Or something. Like what kind of satisfaction do you get out of that?”

      “When СКАЧАТЬ