The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ didn’t turn around, so I couldn’t see if there was any irony in her expression. If she had some knowingness about my conversational calculations, all the assumptions I made and tried to get out of in my questions.

      In the middle of the lake was a small wooded island. Or more like a mound of land thick with trees. Alder trees, for which the lake was once named, though it was actually a pond, according to an old surveyor’s map that hung on an office wall up at the lodge. Everyone at camp, though, had always simply called it “the lake.” We circled the island and decided not to get out—ticks, and we weren’t wearing pants and long sleeves—but we stopped paddling and just floated and Stella told me she had explored the island one day. That if you walked to the middle, there was a clearing, which was spooky because you never saw anybody maintaining it. It was like a crop circle or something.

      “Do you believe in that sort of thing?” I asked her. And I wondered about the clearing—the phenomenon of an absence that just keeps existing, that nature hadn’t covered over and restored.

      “What, like aliens?”

      “The supernatural.”

      “I’m not sure. I like astrology, though.”

      “Well, yeah. Your name. It means—”

      “Star, yeah. I know.” We shared an awkward laugh. Her mother had told her when she was small, I imagined, looking up at the night sky or telling her a story before bed. She’d been told by anyone since then who had tried to hold her attention. She didn’t need me to tell her.

      “My mother was—is—a huge David Bowie fan. Ziggy Stardust. All that. That’s why she named me Stella. Or that’s what she’s always said.”

      She turned to face me, smiling, and she didn’t ask me what my sign was. She told me. She knew. Or she guessed and she was right. Then she turned back around and we continued floating in the canoe. Silent, aimless, absorbing the sun. A green-and-purple dragonfly landed on my knee and I stared at it, expansively curious, as if I were communing with it, as if its iridescence were going to tell me a secret, as if I were drugged.

      We paddled back, eventually, pulled the canoe up onto land and left it there. Stella removed her life jacket and went into the water for a swim, out to the aluminum dock, and I sat in sand that was soft as velour, realizing that I still had my own life jacket belted around me. I finally took it off and leaned back on it. The brightness of the day, filtered through the leaves of a scraggly tree, glowed orange-red through my closed eyelids.

      I thought of a hot night when neither of us were sleeping and David and I came down here with flashlights and swam in the dark, warm water.

      I thought of Esther and Joe, one September, maybe. After Labor Day, when the season was over but it was still warm, the air still soft but with a hint of something sharper and metallic on the way. The two of them by this lake they’d loved for so long. It wasn’t chlorinated, Olympic-sized, it didn’t appeal to a new generation of parents or their children.

      “We could have built a pool,” Esther says.

      “We have a goddamn lake.” Joe’s voice cracks as it rises. A lake! What the fuck is wrong with people?

      To live was to make so many compromises. One had to draw the line somewhere. This was their principled refusal. No pool. And so, the last Alder campers had come and gone more than fifteen years ago. Esther and Joe had considered selling to a developer. Up by the lodge, across the street, there was a housing tract. Homes built in the early ’90s that now looked neither new nor old. The people who lived there were what used to pass for upper middle class, better off than many of the people in this town, who inhabited deteriorating houses that had belonged to their grandparents, or boxy, cheaply fabricated homes. I pictured Stella growing up in one of those small, square houses with thin walls, a few towns over. Where her mother told her the meaning of her name.

      That night I dreamed about the lake, only there were old stone steps that led down to it, the same kind of worn steps that might lead up to an ancient temple. And the lake in the dream was merely an antechamber to a larger body of clear water. I researched the meaning of this, and got so many conflicting interpretations that I decided to hold to the residual feeling that had led me to look it up in the first place: good fortune.

      There were two women I knew from New York. We were friends, friendly, though not actively so. They looked alike in the way that white, well-educated, well-dressed women in creative fields can look alike. They were not exactly shy, but they were shrewdly reticent and their shrewd reticence was sometimes mistaken for quietness, softness, by people, men, who weren’t as shrewd and smart as they were. About the same age, my age, they both wrote for a middlebrow magazine some people considered highbrow or a highbrow magazine some people considered middlebrow. Depended on the people. I confused these women once in a dream, or one turned into the other, and they’d since become the same person to me. I had to think for a moment when I wanted to distinguish them in my mind. That article about how the fate of an obscure fishery could tell us a lot about climate change. Was that Anna? No, Carrie. Right?

      I considered writing quasi-professional emails—of the I’m still here variety—to Carrie and Anna. I could write one and send it to both of them.

      There was no confusing Stella. She was only herself.

      In the athletics shed, Stella and I had found two tennis rackets, strung and in decent shape, the handles not too stripped or eaten away, along with an air-sealed container of tennis balls. Neither of us played tennis, but what a jaunty thing to do. We’d go over to the old courts by the woods, where the sun was never too strong. We’d rig up the crumbling net. We’d have a few matches and then make spritzy drinks. Lying back in Adirondack chairs, admiring our nails.

      The only message I’d received that morning was a brief rejection for a position I’d applied to, thinking I might at least be called in for an interview. They’d filled the role internally, I was informed, but they would be happy to keep my materials on file. Best of luck!

      So I gathered the tennis equipment and brought it over to Stella’s cabin. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. No note. She’d switched her shift at work, maybe, and I wasn’t too concerned. We hadn’t made a definite plan. But I had built my day around this. More than my day.

      It was as if I were waking up. This was the way dreams ended, without conclusion. It was Friday, I realized. I’d taken out Stella’s splinter on Monday. Days so narcotic that time had slipped from its track. It hadn’t even been a week.

      When David got home that evening I asked him to go for a walk before dinner, down the road, past the semicircular, flattened spot in the woods that had once been used for archery, and the cabin where the kitchen guys lived in the summer, by the old infirmary. I’d been sick once for what seemed like days in that infirmary. Lying in bed, feverish, in a paneled room with sheer curtains and an old TV, wearing a soft, hot pink T-shirt that said ARUBA on it in white script. I’d never been to Aruba. I don’t know where that shirt came from. Aunt Esther was in the room, at one point, with a tray and a deck of well-used playing cards. Navy blue and white on the back, an intricate, scrolling Victorian design. She sat on the bed, placed the tray between us, and taught me how to play hearts. She showed me how to shuffle the pack, bending it into a falling arch. She felt my forehead and held my hand. In and out of sleep: the first time I woke she was still there, the second time I was alone. It didn’t occur to me to wonder where my parents were or what was happening to me. I was just there and it was just happening.

      I tried to get back to that state—the just being there, the just happening, come what may—as СКАЧАТЬ