The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ room bed, carrying a pillow on which he’d arranged an assortment of stuffed animals. Two of his cherished “Lolos,” what he interchangeably called these bears with formless velour handkerchief bodies, a small plush owl, and a fox he’d considerately picked out for me. He asked if he could sleep in this bed with me and I said sure, thinking that my brother wouldn’t approve but that I couldn’t refuse him. He got under the covers and I reached over to touch his cheek and then his so-thin shoulder and, already more than half asleep, he took my arm into the fold and held it close to himself, as if it were another one of his animals. It wasn’t entirely unlike the tender way Stella had taken my hand in hers when she painted my nails, or the way her fingertips had rested on my wrist just now.

      “Alice would say something like, I don’t know, she’d say we make our own families. Or like, what even is family? She’d reduce it to something that’s not worth having. A social construct that’s dangerous and divisive.”

      “Why is she still in your phone?”

      “I don’t know.” She smiled, shrugged. “Why haven’t you told your husband I’m here?”

      In an office in the lodge, the old microphone of the PA system still sat out on a large wooden desk. When I’d gone to camp here, every night at lights-out, a counselor would sing “Taps” into it. All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.

      The one summer I worked there as a counselor, my closest friend was a girl my age named Berrie Lerner. She had wildly curly hair and gray eyes and a boyfriend back home she was going to break up with because she couldn’t stop thinking about John, one of the boys around our age who worked on the kitchen staff, whom she had been with all July. I was with Stuart, another “kitchen guy,” as they were called, and the four of us would go down to the lake some nights and go swimming or just sit in the sand, or on the low concrete retaining wall, and fool around. Stuart and I quickly came to an unspoken understanding that we liked each other, liked each other’s body, but that neither of us fascinated the other. Berrie and John fascinated us. When the four of us were together, we were spectators and Berrie and John were the show.

      When it was Berrie’s turn to sing “Taps,” her voice, a steady contralto, would come through the PA system strong and clear but also soft. A voice to tuck you in and kiss your cheek. Berrie thought the last line went God is night. I could have corrected her when she came out and we sat on the steps with our flashlights, the heat of the day replaced by a coolness that required a sweatshirt. We’d be quiet for a while before we began to whisper about the girls or something that had happened that day or what we would do on our day off, how high school and our towns seemed so far away. Berrie would make a pronouncement about field hockey or blow jobs, in a you-know-how-it-is way, like a jaded forty-something divorcee, and then she would giggle or moan and—oh, shit—remember where we were and what time it was and lower her voice. God was nigh. God was night.

      Stella had left me a note on a piece of blue scrap paper, slipped through the mail slot in the front door of my house and onto the small kilim rug in the front hall, sometime after David headed out in the morning. She would be back this afternoon, said the note. We could go boating, maybe? She included her cell phone number and signed it: S. Her handwriting was girlish, looping, pleased with itself, more feminine and bubbly than I would have expected. It didn’t have the ageless quality of a certain kind of cursive that used to be taught—the penmanship of Aunt Esther, script that you could read pages and pages of. Irrationally, I used to think my own handwriting would evolve, as I got older, to resemble Aunt Esther’s hand. But it remained crabbed and illegible.

      I could’ve tossed the note—I had her number now—but instead I took it upstairs and buried the blue paper in my nightstand drawer. And then I waited. I went online and read an article on how to build a professional network and counted this as a productive use of my time.

      I looked at old pictures of Esther and Joe. I’d come across a shoebox full of photos in the house and an album in the lodge—green imitation leather, a three-ring binder of yellowed adhesive pages covered in flimsy plastic. In the early ’70s: Some windy day. Esther in her trench coat, her dark, wavy hair pinned up under a thin scarf tied at her chin, her burgundy leather pocketbook. Joe in his belted trousers, his undershirt visible beneath his collar, his shirtsleeves rolled to reveal his still muscular, hairy arms. In the late ’40s: Esther in a dark floral silky dress, patent leather heels with cracks and creases in them, Joe in a suit and tie. The ’50s: In front of their house (our house) where saplings had just been planted.

      Esther and Joe never had children, though they’d tried. This fact had occurred to me before, vaguely, but I never felt the force of it, the force of that absence, until I experienced it myself. Until we’d entered into that world of biological chance, until pregnancy became something I sought rather than sought to avoid, I’d mostly thought childlessness was a choice. Or I hadn’t given it much thought either way. The final time I saw Esther was at a bar mitzvah shortly after I’d been through another failed IVF round—the last fertility treatment I believed I could endure (though it turned out I would endure one more). She’d asked about my life, the two of us at a table, David buttonholed into small talk elsewhere in the reception room, and I told her the truth. How could I not? We had been each other’s favorite in our family. And somewhat hunched-back now, wearing a black robelike dress, she reminded me of a large, friendly owl blinking through her thick glasses. Surely she had some wisdom to impart.

      “All the people we knew,” she said, “all they did was talk and talk and talk, but not about that. Or they would talk about it happening, like gossip, but they would never talk about it with you. The only person I could talk to was Joe, because it was his loss, too. But even then, there was a loss that was only mine, and I couldn’t keep losing.”

      “I can’t either,” I said. I took in the dance floor, where my cousin’s thirteen-year-old son and his friends had gathered, some of them obnoxious, some tentative, a few spontaneously giving themselves over to the music.

      Esther placed her bony, spotted hand on mine, gently patting it first, and then squeezing.

      About a year later, I learned she’d left the camp to me. For as long as I could remember, I’d seen Esther and Joe as an iconoclastic duo that had sneaked away from, but still had strong ties to, the neighborhood they came from. Their families. Their brothers and sisters. Esther had lost two older brothers in the Second World War and Joe had lost one, yet there were still so many of them. Esther had four other siblings and Joe had six. There were so many of them that none of them, not even my grandfather, my father’s father, were entirely real to me. Except for Esther and Joe, the youngest in their families, a half-generation younger than their oldest siblings. I knew most of them only as a small child, and the women were all one woman to me: folds of powdery skin, curled silver hair, Bakelite jewelry, enormous breasts that could smother you. The men: out-of-shape heavyweight boxers, cologne, ill-fitting suits, thinning straight hair or wild wiry locks. They were like illustrations in one of my picture books. I associated all of them with deli platters, Jordan almonds, those toothpicks with the crinkly cellophane flourish on top, Yiddish.

      We might have lived in their house and inhabited their camp but David and I were not Esther and Joe. We didn’t have an extended family of campers and staff. We had—I had—Stella.

      The paddles and lifejackets we got from the boathouse. The canoe was already down by the water. Stella sat in the front and I took the back. We made our way through weeds and a tangle of lily pads—the rhythm of the strokes returned to me easily and Stella knew it too.

      “When did you learn how to canoe?”

      I asked when, not how, because I didn’t want her to think I’d made certain assumptions about her—that her life, her circumstances, wouldn’t have contained boats.

      “It’s СКАЧАТЬ