The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

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      “Yeah.”

      “It’s like, I do my job and I don’t give a shit but I do give a shit. I try to get people’s names right. And then you mess up and they take a picture of their name spelled wrong on the cup and post it online. My ex used to do that. Her name is Alice. How can you really get that wrong, right? One time she ordered a coffee someplace and they wrote ‘Salad’ on it and she was like, what the fuck and laughing. But what if your name is Salad or something? Maybe that’s what they heard and they just didn’t want to offend her.”

      When Stella let out a what-the-fuck laugh recalling her ex-girlfriend Alice’s what-the-fuck laugh, she smiled wide and radiant, and I found myself smiling, too. But then, at the thought of her ex, maybe, she pressed her lips shut, puffed her cheeks, and then blew out the breath. I stopped smiling, too.

      “I need a job,” I said, because she’d brought up the subject of work, and asking about Alice, even though she’d also brought that up, felt like prying somehow. And I didn’t want to appear at all flustered by the knowledge that she liked women. Because why, really, should I have been flustered? “I’m looking for a job.”

      “What kind of job? What do you do?”

      What did I do? I walked around here a lot. I’d tried to garden. I went for swims. I took a canoe out onto the lake. I took pictures of the neglected spaces, the empty dining hall, the long tables I’d once sat at now pushed against the wall, the industrial oven shut like a gigantic, ancient mouth, orange life jackets faded by the sun that found its way into the boathouse, massive cobwebs, secret messages scrawled in marker on rafters in the cabins. Names I knew and names I didn’t. Lost girlhood. There was so much long-gone girlhood around here. Scrawled hearts on the walls. Doggerel about boys. About body parts, burps, and farts. Palimpsests of so many summers past. It was going to be a project. There was an old enlarger up at the lodge and a ventilated space that had once been used as a darkroom when photography had been offered as a camp activity. I would buy new chemicals, develop these photographs, maybe write text to go with them. It could be a book?

      It was true that I was looking for work, I explained. I told her about the job postings I scrolled through each day with descriptions that all read like advertising copy for an extreme sports drink. “Are you ready to kick ass and take names?” No. “We believe work is play. Have you got game?” I’m not sure. “Do you have a passion for juices?” I like juice, but no, I wouldn’t say passion. Still, I hit send on my résumé. Every click showed me my age. Thirty-nine. I wouldn’t have hired me if I were these people.

      “I’m not exactly sure what it is that I do,” I told her. “I inherited this camp and we came here thinking we would redo it, make it into a kind of resort, but that hasn’t really worked out.”

      “No?”

      “Well, I don’t know. You’re our guest, I suppose. Guest number one.”

      She and Alice had actually come here together, she said, in late May. But they’d broken up. Alice went back to Cambridge. She was going to be a senior at Harvard in September. Stella was going to be what she’d always been, a townie. Her word.

      Stella laughed again, from her chest and with her shoulders.

      “Who the fuck has a passion for juices?” she said.

      Stella had asked me what it was that I did. In what seemed more and more like another life, I had been a journalist. Or maybe “a writer of service journalism” was a better way to put it. I talked to people who wanted to talk, who had something to publicize, and punched that up into a story. But I wasn’t the best at coaxing information from someone who wasn’t already eager to share. When I’d started working at a newspaper, just out of college, I imagined I might do it for a few years and then apply to graduate school—a writing program, maybe a film program—but I never did. It turned out I liked my job, or I liked the way it kept me from interrogating my own ambition. For a while, anyway. If you don’t try—if you tell yourself you can’t try because certain circumstances prevent you—then you can’t fail. And there was still a gruff, ink-stained glamour to the profession at the time I got into it. The hard-boiled investigative reporter, Gene, who leaned back in his swivel chair and grumbled at whoever was on the other end of the line: “Look, you’re either a source or a target. What do you want to be?” He liked me because I liked him and I knew who Rosalind Russell was, I had seen His Girl Friday more than once. But I remember thinking, Is that all it takes? Knowing the right references to flatter the vanity of this middle-aged man? It went some distance, but it wasn’t all it took, of course. Gene accepted a buyout two years before my job was eliminated and then the paper essentially became a listings guide.

      I moved into public relations work, in New York and then in Chicago, and for a while I had enough hustle to disguise my lack of conviction, but eventually people—clients—could tell. One of them, who considered herself a friend, encouraged me to go with her to a gathering at a wine bar for “professional women.” It was the kind of event where you couldn’t make a joke about being an “amateur woman.” I went home and felt terrible about myself.

      But what kept me from feeling too terrible was that I had already shifted my focus elsewhere. David and I were trying to have a child. I would be a parent and—problem solved—that would be my primary identity. I knew better than to talk about it this way, for any number of political, cultural, and psychological reasons. I knew, from conversations with my friend Liz, a mother of two young girls, that it didn’t really work that way, even if you wanted it to. But, I secretly thought, I’m not Liz. Liz is not me. And I was right about that, at least. I wasn’t Liz. I wasn’t able, it seemed, to have one child, let alone two.

      We had sought out fertility specialists. We had sat in waiting rooms exchanging expectant looks of hope and vulnerability with the people waiting with us. I remember one stylish, fox-faced woman whose appearance suggested expertise and sophistication, that she knew how to move through the world, how to do everything successfully, everything, that is, but this. Her tight air of determination initially struck me as a caricature, until one day I realized I was setting my mouth in the same grim little line.

      But then. But then! All of the science, the shots, the waiting, the failing, the trying again. It worked. It actually worked. I felt it almost immediately, my body recalibrating itself, reshaping itself. My body forcing my guarded mind to accept that this was happening. I’d read—God, I’d read so much—that you wouldn’t need maternity clothes for a few months at least, but though I could fit into the pants I owned, they all felt too restrictive. It was as if, on a cellular level, I had been enlarged overnight. Like my blood had thickened. I wanted space and ease. I wanted soft, stretchy waistbands from the get-go. And I was exhausted all the time. No shit, said Liz, when I called her. Your body is making another body. And David and I marveled at how uncanny that was. What my body could do. My body could make another body! My body could even get my hopes up.

      You would feel betrayed, wouldn’t you, by someone who got your hopes up only to dash them. You would think that at best, that someone was recklessly naive, and at worst, extremely cruel. At fourteen weeks in, our doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. I’d had what’s called a missed miscarriage. One of the few things I hadn’t read about, couldn’t bring myself to read about. And so, though I vaguely knew what a D&C was, I hadn’t comprehended that I would need a procedure to remove everything that had been growing inside of me, the body that my body, so recklessly naive, had been making. For three months, I had felt so powerful in a purely biological, unthinking way. And then, for no particular reason anyone could determine, my body became a tender, faulty thing and all I could do was think.

      I didn’t quite know how to make sense of time, after СКАЧАТЬ