The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

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СКАЧАТЬ when I would have given birth. David told me he did the same, but I did it for longer. I did it for so much longer I felt I had to start keeping it a secret, because if anyone knew, they would—out of concern for my sanity—try to take that compulsion away from me, too.

      When our child would have been about three months old, my great-aunt Esther died of heart failure, of age essentially, and I learned she’d made me her beneficiary. She’d left me the whole camp, with no instructions or provisions on what to do with it. For more than fifty years, a couple hundred girls had come to Camp Alder every July and August, including me. But for the last fifteen years or so, it had sat empty. Uncle Joe had died, and Esther, in her final years, had moved to an assisted-living facility.

      We’d have to sell it. We lived, at the time, halfway across the country, and what would we do with an old camp? The question started to resolve itself only when I asked myself why we lived halfway across the country. Why still. We had gone to Chicago when David was offered a career-making opportunity. But we had no family there. And by then I had no real job. And David’s career-making opportunity had become a source of growing bitterness about the corporatized direction his organization, an architecture firm that was supposed to specialize in housing for low-income populations and the homeless, was heading in. He said he wished he worked with his hands again. He had spent summers in school doing construction.

      An idea took hold and I laid it out. We would move. To the camp. We would make it into a resort. Camp for adults, it was something of a trend at the time. I’d heard of ones in the Hudson Valley and Wisconsin. A place for companies that considered themselves forward-thinking to hold retreats, for the kind of weddings that became weeklong events. Why couldn’t we do this? Maybe, in the off-season, we could host a residency for artists. We would spruce it up just enough, add a few elevated touches: nice sheets, striped wool blankets, interesting but unobtrusive enameled fixtures. Stationery for guests to write letters home. The bunks would be cozy. The dining hall awash in elegant light. Half Adirondacks lodge, half turn-of-the-twentieth-century Austrian sanatorium. And the food. The food! We would have a marvelous chef. Some friend of a friend who was superb but underappreciated. We would grow our own ingredients. I would learn about greens and root vegetables. I would buy overalls and wear them.

      “That sounds like a fantasy,” said David. “An Internet-fueled fantasy. And kind of cynical.”

      “And?”

      I admitted I no longer knew what cynicism was and if there was a point when it doubled back on itself and became belief. But I was convinced we wouldn’t be building an exclusive enclave, we’d be building a welcoming microcosm. I put it this way to David, to dovetail with his principled view of the world. If it all went well, perhaps we could even apply for grants, establish some sort of partnership where we provided housing and helped people—homeless families, refugees—get back on their feet.

      “That’s not really how it works,” he said. But there was something encouraging in his smile, a pleasure in seeing a spark in me he’d thought was gone.

      “Look who’s cynical now.”

      I had a goal, a new possibility, a different way to keep track of time. I populated spreadsheets. I determined the proposition was risky but possible. I convinced David. We let our lease run out, sold off some of our furniture, packed up the rest in a truck, and set off for New England in the winter, leaving one cold climate for another. We’d counted on red tape in getting the proper permits and licensing and loans. We anticipated the surfacing of unseen structural problems. We had thought that time plus money plus will could result in achievement, but it turned out we didn’t have the right amount of each variable to resolve the equation.

      The clouds threatened rain all morning, and when it came, sheets of it hitting the shutters, Stella and I were in her bunk, flashlights and an old lamp I’d found for her in the lodge glowing against the gloom. I’d turned on the bunk’s electric supply for her. We were playing jacks, the set she’d found on a shelf. She’d had to look up the object of the game on her phone. She needed to remind me, too, but though I’d forgotten the rules, the weight of the tarnished, pointed metal pieces was so familiar in my palms. The glinting green rubber ball hadn’t deteriorated at all. We scoured the floor for rough spots—there would be no splinters today.

      Her nails were still that galactic blue, though it had come off a little. Time to repaint, she said. So that’s what we did when we’d had enough of jacks. She had two bottles of polish, the blue and a dark, glossy red. Crimson, she said, choosing for me. She expertly used only a minimum of polish remover on a cotton ball and then brushed on a fresh coat of the navy lacquer. I struggled to look as skilled as Stella. It took me forever to do one hand, the color going all over my fingers because I’d had no practice. I rarely did this.

      “Here,” she said, taking my other hand, in a competent, caring, practiced manner, like I’d first taken hers, when removing that splinter, and she placed it on the floor in front of her. But there was also a tenderness in her touch. And—I don’t think I was imagining it—an electricity. Something transformative, too: In no time, my fingers seemed to belong to a woman with dark brows and cutting cheekbones, holding an apple to her open mouth, in a silk dress and the highest heels, in front of a camera lens somewhere in Paris in the 1980s.

      “That’s totally your color,” she said.

      “Really?”

      “I mean, it’s the only other color I have. But yeah.”

      She looked from my hands to my face and then my neck as if she were answering a question she’d asked herself.

      “I think I have something that belongs to you,” she said, and she got up, opened the top drawer of her dresser, and turned around, holding out a gold necklace, a chain with a small disc imprinted with an “E.” It shone out of the low light. David had given it to me as a birthday present years back and I’d lost it a month or so before. By the water, I’d thought, though I couldn’t be sure.

      “Yes, that’s mine.” I was relieved to see it again, but that relief didn’t squash a wrenching in my gut and a tightening I could feel across my face.

      “I found it down by the lake. I figured it could have been anybody’s though probably yours. But at the time, I didn’t know how to return it to you without either letting you know I was here or totally creeping you out. Like, I mean, if I’d left it visibly on your porch or something, you’d be like, what the fuck, who put that there, right?”

      “Right. Yeah.”

      “Here,” she said, and because my nails were still drying, she moved behind me to put it around my neck, brushing my hair to the side. She didn’t linger when she hooked the clasp, she efficiently performed a task, like a hairstylist or a doctor or any other professional who might have cause to touch the back of your neck. But I’d never before replayed to myself—as I did on my way back to the house, when the rain let up a little—the motions, the positioning, the feel of any hairstylist or doctor who’d ever touched the nape of my neck.

      “It’s so pretty on you,” she’d said, stepping around to look at me. And I’d lowered my gaze to the disc hanging around my neck, so I didn’t have to look at her looking at me.

      Back at the house, I didn’t even get out of my raincoat, I went straight up to my room, taking the stairs in twos, to examine the tray where I kept a few bracelets, and with my glossy nails—polish made them feel different, more object-like—I opened a velvet-lined box. I didn’t own much expensive jewelry but what I had, a couple of pendants, an emerald ring from Aunt Esther, was all still there, exactly where I remembered it being. Stella was honest, I reassured myself. If there was dishonesty here, it was my own, СКАЧАТЬ