The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

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СКАЧАТЬ and bossiness weren’t alien to Stella. They were, in fact, like a more fully realized and externalized version of qualities Stella knew she, Stella, inwardly possessed. Or maybe, just maybe, Stella would occasionally think in the months to come, she was the more fully realized and externalized of the two and Alice was only playing that role.

      “I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” said Stella. “But do you know what I mean?”

      I propped myself up on my elbows and stared down at my towel, gold and moss green, from a set left in Esther and Joe’s linen closet. I think she may have meant that Alice’s glamour and bossiness was based on habit and insecurity, while her own ability to meet and to match that glamour and bossiness, when she so wished, derived from self-respect. And Stella had entranced Alice in this way, perhaps—through her aura of self-respect.

      “Alice thought I was interesting.”

      “You are interesting.”

      “No, but interesting like a specimen. Like something to study,” Stella said. “At first I thought that was our thing. Like we were our own kind of project. We weren’t just, like, a couple. We were creating something that gave us purpose. Only, she could keep going with it in her mind, keep spinning it out, like our attraction was a philosophical game or something for her, and I didn’t care enough about that game, not in the way she did.”

      “Maybe you cared about something else more.”

      “A lot of the time I could already see myself as someone she would look back on years from now. So maybe I wasn’t totally in it either. We were going to come here together for the summer. I’d told her about this place.”

      “You were going to summer here.”

      Stella gave me a smile like I’d seen children give: guilty, amused, expecting to be rewarded for their mischief.

      “Yeah, we were going to be the kind of people who summer somewhere. As a joke, but we’d actually go, so, not a joke. But she got this fellowship and decided to stay at school.”

      Stella reached for her backpack, pulling out her phone to show me a photo of Alice. Her long, thick hair pulled back in an undone braid, like a nineteenth-century woman on the wall of the Musée d’Orsay. All entitled, voluptuous composure and insolence.

      I asked Stella if she and Alice were still in contact.

      “I don’t know. Not really. But she’s still in my phone, you know? People think I don’t give a fuck about things. Something about my face, I guess. Or maybe I don’t give a fuck about what they need me to give a fuck about. But my point is, I generally do give a fuck about things. And I think that was a problem for Alice. That I gave a fuck about things she didn’t. I’m sure she’s deleted me. I’m long gone from her world.”

      “I doubt that.”

      “Well, you haven’t met Alice. But yeah, I get that maybe it’s easier, for me, to think that she can be so absolute about it being over.”

      “What did you give a fuck about that she didn’t?”

      “I don’t know. People? Feelings? I’m not even sure she liked me, as a human being. I think she liked me as a model for some kind of nonambition. And like I was a weird novelty to her in that way. If I had ambition it was a kind that didn’t correspond to what she’d been raised with, that didn’t even understand itself in those terms. I mean, just because I don’t go to Harvard doesn’t mean I don’t want to do anything with my life. I don’t want to be a barista forever. But it’s all right for now, you know?”

      I said that I understood that. How ambition was complicated. When you wanted something badly, you could become invested in the wanting. And then when that wanting didn’t result in the imagined outcome, or maybe even when it did, you were left in a situation where you had to give up the state of wanting you’d gotten so used to. Who were you, in a way, when the wanting was gone?

      I was thinking out loud, I suppose. Voicing some ongoing conversation I’d been having with myself.

      “You mean this camp, not being able to make it into a resort or whatever?” Stella asked.

      “No, I guess I’m thinking more about how we got to this place, how we even ended up here at Alder.”

      Stella had been digging her heels in the sand, creating shallow channels, moats. She stopped for a moment.

      “Did you think about trying to revive it as a camp for kids?” she asked.

      “No.”

      “Why? Do you hate children?”

      She hadn’t expected me to laugh.

      “I mean—”

      “I don’t hate kids.”

      At twenty-two, she was closer to being a child, in years, than she was to being my age.

      “No, I get it,” Stella said. “I don’t want to have kids.”

      “Ever?”

      “Yeah. Why? Why would you do that to yourself and to another human being?”

      “It’s that bad?”

      “No.” Her consideration of the subject played out across her face—slightly raised brows, skewed, pensive mouth. “But sometimes. Yeah.”

      “Well, you never know, you might change your mind.”

      She nodded, conceding but unbelieving. As if the concepts of reversal and ambivalence were possible but abstract. Like she could only place herself in them the way she could place herself on an imagined ice floe in Antarctica.

      “Do you want to have kids?” she asked me.

      There was something so straightforward about Stella’s question—as if she had no idea how loaded such a question could be. Coming from her, it was a simple inquiry, which somehow made it possible for me to answer. I sat up, wrapping my arms around my knees, facing the water and the dock, with Stella in my peripheral vision.

      “We tried. I always wanted a child in a kind of abstract way, like someday it’d be nice to have a family. I never imagined it in great detail but I sort of just always saw it as happening one day, though I never had the biological urgency some women talk about. But there’s this point where everyone around you is having kids. And maybe it sounds shallow and wrong but that made me want it in this even stronger, more immediate way. Like I’d be left behind. I’d be missing out. So we started trying. And it wasn’t happening. And then I had a miscarriage. And.” And and and.

      “I’m sorry.” She brought her hand to my forearm, her blue fingertips resting on my wrist.

      And then I found myself apologizing. I barely knew her. I shouldn’t have been telling her all of this.

      “We might keep trying,” I said, brightly, like I’d made her sad and now I needed to cheer her up. “You know, with more fertility treatments and all that. Maybe adoption. We can’t really afford more trying, though. It just seems like . . . like a lot now.”

      I thought of my brother’s son, of visiting СКАЧАТЬ