The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

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СКАЧАТЬ David asked about my day. Any job prospects?

      I told him I had a lead on something. A lie. I knew we’d eventually need another income if we wanted to keep living as we were and continue to pay off our medical bills (how could there be more medical bills? still?) and the debt we’d taken on to finance our plan for reviving this place. But I didn’t want to think too hard about it right now, about my employability or how necessary, how urgent it might be for me to find work.

      I put my hands on the kitchen table, daring David to know something was up, but he didn’t notice, or he pretended not to notice, what I’d spent a good deal of the rest of that afternoon doing: admiring my crimson manicure. Stella was honest, and she’d said it was my color, so it was.

      “How was your day?” I asked him.

      Work was a series of disappointing client meetings, he told me, and I tried to be interested and consoling, because he’d found a job when we couldn’t make a go of the resort, because he worked hard, because I loved him, because he was starting to resent me, because I was pleased with my nails.

      When we finished our dinner of pasta and tomato sauce from a jar, I washed the dishes with a sense of purpose. I’d started living according to a certain arithmetic: If I did enough dishes, David couldn’t resent me as much. I took a glass vase out of a cupboard, rinsed it, too, and placed it on the counter, thinking that the next day, I would fill it with flowers. I would set a table. I would open a cookbook and make us a proper meal.

      David sat on the living room couch in semidarkness, looking at his phone.

      “David, David, David,” I said.

      He held on to his phone longer than he should have, out of habit, but before this could depress me, I took it from him, standing over him. He looked up, called back to a place that, out of habit, we hadn’t been for far too long. Then he took my hand, pulling me toward him.

      “I like your nails.”

      “Thank you.”

      “You found it,” he said, reaching up to touch the gold disc resting below my collar bone.

      I climbed on top of him. There was nothing covering the bay window in that room. It faced a backyard that turned into brush. I kept looking at the glass as if I might see someone outside, but all I got was my own reflection.

      Stella was golden in the sun. We lay on towels in the sand and she glittered, smooth and tan, after we’d been swimming in the lake. I had on a form-fitting, long-sleeve shirt, made of bathing-suit material, and though it protected me from getting burned, from ultraviolet damage, I wondered what the point was. My skin didn’t look like Stella’s did, like it sought out a two-piece in a kind of mandated-by-nature symbiosis. It might have, when I was younger, but I hadn’t known then to appreciate it. Or I knew—the world was always telling you—but I couldn’t comprehend it, I didn’t feel it. And maybe I had never been like Stella. I had thought she must put something in her short, straight black-brown hair, a balm or a spray, to make it fall so sharply around her face, with the sweep of bangs angled to the outer corner of her eye. But it naturally dried that way. Falling just so.

      In this effortlessness, she reminded me of the older girls at camp who had fascinated me when I was eight, nine, ten. Those girls were visions. Part mothers, part sisters, heroines, idols. They were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Some were thin, some muscular, some chubby. Their features had come into fullness and it seemed like they could never be dulled and they were all equally beautiful. But I can see that’s only true in retrospect. At the time, we younger girls absorbed—as if by osmosis, nobody ever said a word—the workings of an intricate caste system. We understood there was a hierarchy even if we couldn’t have said what it was or how, exactly, you came to occupy your place. At the top, the girls could be quiet or loud, careful or bold, academic achievers or average-grade getters, from wealthy Westchester or one of the less affluent towns outside Boston, attending camp with the assistance of a scholarship fund Esther and Joe had established. There were no specific criteria you could point to. But we all knew where each of the older girls stood. They had their favorites, too. Younger girls to whom they were especially kind or attentive, the shining girls in whom they saw themselves, and occasionally the girls they thought were less fortunate, whom they could pity with their charitable hearts.

      At the end of each season a themed banquet was held. Under the Sea, On Safari. The bunk of older girls who put it together each year would dress accordingly. The rest of us would wear our best outfits and, for about a half an hour before the dinner started, the girls who’d come to camp with disposable or compact cameras took pictures of each other. An exercise in exclusion, in documenting who was part of your group and who didn’t make it into the frame.

      When I was ten, the banquet theme was Outer Space, and my friend Wendy and I got dressed early and went to the bunk of older girls who were putting the finishing touches on their costumes. They loved Wendy, with her freckles, her sweetness, and her athletic ability. They told her how cute she looked, while one of them braided her hair. I sat quietly on the bed next to her, wearing a pink shirt Wendy had let me borrow. It had a perforated mesh pocket, above which was stitched the name of a popular French label. I wore my own denim skirt, brand: unknown, provenance: discount store.

      An older girl who had dressed as an alien—in a plastic headband with springs stuck into glitter-coated Styrofoam spheres—noticed me and said, “Hey, sweetie.” A loaded term of endearment; I thrilled to it even as I intuited she didn’t know my name. “Is that top yours?”

      The question wasn’t a question. She knew, somehow, that it wasn’t mine and wanted me to know that. I smiled strangely and shook my head, wanting nothing more than to dash out of there and back to my bunk to change, but I had nothing to change into. “Well, you look nice,” she said. I had never before been complimented in a way that seemed designed to make me ashamed, with no real understanding of what I was being shamed for or what it was I sat there feeling ashamed of.

      I’d turned onto my stomach, resting my head on my folded arms, my hair falling over my face, and Stella, sitting on her towel now, lifted a piece of it, like a curtain—you there?—and I looked up at her through my hair, which was still as dark as it had always been, only stray grays here and there. I shifted so all I saw was Stella against the trees and sky.

      “Who cuts your hair?” I asked her.

      “Alice, most recently. She was really good at it. I’ve been doing it myself but it doesn’t turn out as well.”

      For a while I had wanted the story of how she and Alice met, and now Stella decided to tell me. She’d been living in Boston. Somerville, to be exact. Working at a music venue and a different coffee place. The music venue tended to attract college kids, and one night, at a show, Alice arrived and she kept looking at Stella and sometimes Stella would make eye contact in return.

      Alice had darkly made-up eyes. She wore a deep green slip dress and a fuzzy purple jacket when everyone else was in black jeans and T-shirts. Stella supposed Alice thought herself intimidating, and Stella wasn’t particularly interested in intimidation. But after the show, Alice came over and said she had to talk to her because the two of them were the only ones there with amazing hair. It meant something, didn’t she think? Stella wasn’t sure but she supposed it wasn’t nothing.

      Alice came from New York. Brooklyn Heights. In her junior year at Harvard, after taking a couple of semesters off. Studying comparative literature. Stella liked that these facts, as Alice presented them to her, weren’t accompanied by the kind of embarrassment that rich girls so often expressed when they spoke to her—as if her presence, her existence, shamed them. Alice didn’t pretend she СКАЧАТЬ