Summerlong (16 page)

Claire has been generous with the children: she’s allowed them to bring as much as they wanted to the new house and now they are busy upstairs unloading boxes of clothes, toys, books, and keepsakes. Charlie’s been generous too—“Spread out,” he says, “hang stuff on the walls,
mi casa es su casa
.”

“Are you sure? I mean, this is temporary. I know that.”

“I know it’s temporary, Claire,” he says, “but the kids should still feel like it’s home. And I just want you to be happy.”

She has to admit, it does feel like home, already, in little ways. The simplicity of it, the clean lines of an uncluttered life: as she unpacks the kitchen, she can see the next few months evolving; she’s been promised full-time work at the dining hall in the fall, a prospect she once found pathetic and discouraging, and now feels as if it is a step toward something else, some new unseen life. She’ll be a shift supervisor, most likely. She’ll take the kids to school in the morning come autumn, after feeding them a healthy breakfast in this really amazing kitchen, and then she’ll go to work at the college. She’ll chop vegetables and stock the salad bar and put puffs of whipped cream on lemon bars all day, then greet the students—who are a naturally friendly sort at Grinnell, all
please
and
thank you
—and head home before the dinner rush, perhaps, just in time for the kids to be done with soccer practice and after-school art class and piano lessons. On Wednesdays, Don will take them
for pizza. On weekends, he’ll take them on hikes and adventures they’ll remember into adulthood.

It will not be a terrible life. The kids will be okay and so will she, Claire says, hoping she believes it.

And Charlie? Where will he be? Done with his mother’s charge, his father’s study put into order? Perhaps he will be back on one of the coasts, giving acting one more shot? Or maybe he’ll still be out in the guesthouse, editing his father’s abandoned book after all? Or maybe even in the house with Claire and the kids, maybe sleeping in the same bed as Claire? One never knows. She will never admit it to anyone else, but she does picture it. Not necessarily with longing, but with a kind of fictional curiosity. What would that life be like? What would that road lead her to later?

She had tried to store most of her family’s kitchen stuff, but since the Gulliver place was largely empty, she has packed four or five boxes of things and is unwrapping glasses when she sees movement in the long shadows of the backyard: Charlie, shirtless, cleaning the pool.

Despite the waning light, it is still so hot outside.

It is almost unbearable.

On the Fourth of July, Grinnell, like most small towns in America, has a party that includes almost everyone in town. It begins with a Pioneer Pride 5K at seven in the morning, then a parade down Main Street at ten, and then a BBQ chicken dinner at noon at the American Legion. There are games for the kids at the municipal pool, a Vietnam vet who skydives into Ahrens Park at the afternoon ice cream social, and a rock and roll concert/sock hop heavy on patriotic anthems by Willie Warren & the Wayward Sons. The holiday ends with the town’s fireworks display and a series of drunken gatherings to watch said fireworks.

It is not Don Lowry’s day with his children—that will be tomorrow—and as he wanders through the gathering crowd in the sweltering downtown, the only thing he notices are other children. The sweet, happy packs of four and five—two adults at each helm. He sees old high school friends married to their old high school sweethearts, leading their children through the growing maze of people, looking for a spot along the curb. He sees a professor of history with one child on his shoulders, holding the hand of his wife, a professor of political science. He even sees the college president, with his partner, two well-dressed men chasing two running boys across the expanse of the downtown park. Don, unsure of what to do with himself, stops for an iced coffee at Saint’s Rest, and when he emerges, sucking the bitter brew through a straw, he looks across the street to the front of the post office and sees his
own children: Bryan is sitting sullenly in a lawn chair, large noise-protective headphones on (he hates marching bands, fireworks, and gunshots, so he’s pretending to listen to music during the parade, his old trick). He sits next to Claire, who has on a white sundress and white sandals, and she is laughing and looking up at the man standing beside her, Charlie Gulliver, and holding Charlie Gulliver’s hand is Wendy, Don’s younger child, Don’s little girl, and she is pointing with one hand at something coming down the street (the parade is starting!) and with her other hand, she pulls on Charlie Gulliver’s arm.

Don walks into the street. He turns to his right and sees that yes, the first fire trucks of the parade are maybe twenty-five yards away. He stops in front of them, right in front of Claire, and Charlie, and the kids.

“Daddy!” Wendy yells.

The fire engines inch closer, two firefighters throwing candy from the bucket of the cherry picker.

The band is playing Sousa, behind the fire engines.

Wendy and Bryan wave, squinting into the sunlight.

Claire says, “Don!”

Charlie says, “Dude, come over. The parade’s gonna mow you down.”

Dude?

Don keeps staring at his family, unable to speak or move. In front of the approaching fire engines, the parade marshall, Olympic speed skater Leslie Hammer, is waving to the crowd. She wears red, white, and blue shorts; sneakers; and a white warm-up top. She is ten yards away. The candy flies from the fire engine. Her smile meets Don’s eyes and then her smile fades and Claire says, “Don! Move!”

It is a police officer who finally moves into the road, and escorts Don to the side, away from his family, and when the slow fire trucks pass between them, Don Lowry disappears.

The heat would not break and even the sun at the city pool could grow unbearable after ten minutes, and so, because it is Don’s day to take the kids, his first outing as the noncustodial parent, he drives them to an indoor waterpark outside Des Moines; Claire has found him a deal on Groupon, a cost-saving move she’s taken to since the separation, and he is grateful for the idea.

Back home, in the sultry late afternoon, Charlie takes an ice bucket of six beers out to the deck by the still-empty pool. On his fourth beer, he reads another cache of his father’s letters; these he finds in a manuscript box in a bursting file cabinet in the closet. Letters in front of him, both from the admirers and to the admired—fervent declarations to Melinda and Sidney and Jamaica spilling out in front of him, all of them carefully photocopied and dated and saved in manila folders. His father had been serious about saving these, and he wonders, if early-onset dementia comes for him someday, would there be something shameful like this that he too will leave behind?

Do we all have secrets and do we all leave evidence behind of such secrets when our end comes without notice? What would Charlie want burned if he were to become incapacitated someday? Maybe that is the sign of a good, ethical life? The idea that there is nothing you need to burn before you die.

He watches Claire walking through the backyard toward the pool. She is wearing a pair of paint-spattered white overalls over a
white ribbed tank top. She has been eager to earn her keep around the place, and has taken to painting the mildewed walls of the laundry room and the downstairs bath. She tells Charlie it will help him sell the place quickly when he’s ready to do so. She’d said so yesterday as she recaulked the upstairs bathtub where Wendy would soak for almost an hour nearly every night.

“Don called,” Claire says to Charlie now. “They’re having so much fun that he is using that coupon to stay at the hotel tonight. The kids seem happy about it.”

“Oh,” Charlie says, barely looking up. He is reading a letter about a woman wanting to go back to a riverfront hotel in Davenport with his father and he reads it aloud to Claire: “‘Gill
,
can’t believe you got me to go to a gentlemen’s club! That was kind of naughty. I was drunk!’”

“Jesus,” Claire says.

“Right?” Charlie says. “Crazy, right?”

“He wrote a lot of letters. But why torture yourself?”

“Some to you? Maybe?” Charlie says. “There were some to ABC and some to a woman named Claire.”

“I am sure we wrote notes. I took like four classes with him. And then I was his colleague for two years. All of this before e-mail. So we wrote notes. Not like that one though.”

“At any given moment,” Charlie says, “it seems like my father was in love with a hundred women.”

“I think you shouldn’t read these,” Claire says. “We could burn everything without reading them and set you free.”

“But there’s a book somewhere in these piles. His life’s work, Claire.”

“He won’t know the difference. And if there was a book, why would—” she says, and then stops herself, reframing her statement. “Wouldn’t he have published it if he had wanted it published?”

“He was a perfectionist,” Charlie says. “He would have been afraid to, I think. Afraid of rejection, maybe?”

“I understand that. One bad review in the
Times
is enough.”

“Your book got a bad review?”

“The worst!”

Claire stands near him for a long time, not speaking. She is glad to see him. Her whole body sways, as if she might fall on him without meaning to, and she plunges her hands into her pockets and feels the warmth there.

“Why didn’t you ever write another book?” Charlie says.

“I didn’t want to,” she says.

“Is that the truth?”

“Something happened to me,” Claire says. “I don’t know what. I stopped wanting things.”

“And now?” he says.

“Now,” she says, “I just want.”

The house is filthy, at least by Ruth’s standards, and had, in her able-bodied days, been impeccable. ABC knows she has not been as good a live-in aide as she had first set out to be when she arrived in Grinnell. She loves Ruth. She genuinely wants to do a good job, and she knows she has left Ruth home alone for stretches that are too long, spending her time with Charlie, sorting through his father’s papers, or with Don, smoking, hoping to take a nap beside him and dream of Philly again. She knows she has not made the meals as nutritious as they should have been—frozen pizzas and grilled burgers. She knows the house is not as clean as it could be. But it is an odd situation, incredibly informal. In exchange for room and board (ABC has a monthly grocery store allowance to spend on Ruth’s behalf) and a small monthly stipend, Ruth hasn’t asked for much: an eye on her, keep her company, help her with whatever she needs help doing.

Mainly, ABC has helped the old woman stay high.

So that morning, ABC apologizes to Ruth for any recent oversights and inadequacies.

“I’m afraid I am not taking very good care of you,” ABC says.

Ruth says, “Oh, phooey, honey. Who cares? I’m dying, and hopefully soon. You have a life to live. Anyway, there’s only one thing I can’t do for myself. I can’t drive to Newton and buy my grass.”

“The house is dirty. I will clean all day. It’ll look better,” ABC says.

“God, the hours of my life I spent cleaning,” Ruth says. “Some of the only hours I regret. I was a housewife. They used to call us that. And I cleaned so much, as if it was the only way to demonstrate my value to the world.”

“Well, this is no way to live,” ABC says. “You deserve better.”

“I’m done living,” Ruth says. “And I am not trying to be dramatic here.”

“I understand,” ABC says. “We went to see my friend’s dad at the Mayflower. He’s gotten a kind of dementia that comes and goes. He’s a lot younger than you. It doesn’t seem like a dignified way to go. I wouldn’t want to go that way.”

“Gill,” Ruth says.

“You know him?”

“They don’t let people go in a dignified way anymore,” Ruth says. “You promise me, if you find me on death’s door one morning, you won’t call 911? You give me some weed, maybe some painkillers—or whiskey if that’s all you have—and don’t call a soul until you are sure I am gone.”

“I got it.”

“This is the one major kindness the young can do for the old, yet they are all afraid to let it happen. They call 911, and you get six months of medical care and a month of hospice instead of an easy way out.”

ABC looks at Ruth, whose eyes have taken on a dark sheen, the pupils overwhelming the deeply blue, almost purple, irises.

“Okay,” ABC says, although she isn’t sure she could do what has just been asked of her.

“You see?” Ruth says. “This is why I like you more than anybody else. When I give you the straight dope, you don’t reel off some optimistic bullshit.”

“I understand wanting out,” ABC says.

Ruth pats ABC’s hand.

“I’ve lived a full life,” Ruth says. “A very full life indeed,” she says.

Anytime Ruth says “a very full life” in a dreamy whisper, ABC will stop whatever she’s doing and sit down and listen to the story at hand. On this particular morning, Ruth talks not of a trip to Europe with her husband, or something she’d studied in college, when she was the first woman from her small town in Minnesota to ever go away to college, but of something that happened later in life.

Often, Ruth begins her story by asking ABC a question. “Your friend Philly. Was she your first lover?”

“It was something new to us. It had just happened. We’d been friends first.”

Ruth nods slowly. ABC is afraid Ruth will fall asleep. She wants to talk more, wants desperately for Ruth to remember this conversation, to bring her some insight and meaning, two things she feels are perhaps no longer existent in the world. Certainly none of the events of the last year indicated that insight is a real possibility, or that meaning is something one could discover.

“We grieve for lovers differently than we grieve for friends or parents,” Ruth says. “The physical separation—it can be unbearable.”

ABC feels as if she can hardly move, or as if something inside her body will turn to water, will liquify and turn to nothing. And she’ll cease to exist. She feels—there was no other way to say it—suddenly unsolid.

“The way that you carry your grief,” Ruth says, “it’s the look of passion, taken away before it had run its course.”

“Yes,” ABC says. “We’d just begun.”

“Do you only like girls?” Ruth says. It is funny, the way she says it, laced with bluntness and naiveté all at once. If some frat boy had phrased it that way, ABC would be offended and angry.
But she understands that to Ruth it is a real question, a desire to know her better;
girls
was a generational term. To Ruth, ABC is so young. A girl.

“I don’t know,” ABC says. “I loved her. I wanted her to be my lover. I have not loved a woman like that before.”

“Or anybody?” Ruth says.

“No.”

“Do you love Don?” Ruth says.

“When I am near him, if I fall asleep near him, I still have those dreams of Philly, you know, emerging from that body of water. Only if he is here, only after we smoke pot and lie down together, do I dream of Philly. Those are the only times I get her in a dream.”

Ruth stares off into the dark corner of the room, as if she can see something there, and then her face lights with recognition. Ruth says, “Oh, I see. He’s a vessel.”

Ruth has gone pale and her voice is almost inaudibly hoarse. And then, just as swiftly, she perks up and resumes talking in her usual way.

“Ruth, are you okay?”

“Your generation, all of this shame!” Ruth says. “My generation—our parents didn’t think about us much. And if they did, they whacked us when we were in trouble. But ever since your generation’s parents gave up spanking? They’ve shamed their children into submission. Even the very good people in your generation, especially the very good people, just have so much shame. Everything you do makes you feel guilty.”

“True,” ABC says.

“I was over fifty,” Ruth says. “Can you believe it?”

ABC smiles, but she doesn’t follow.

“When I took my first lover, other than my husband. When I finally had a second lover, I was practically an old lady.”

“Wow.”

“How many lovers have you had?” Ruth says.

“There was only one who mattered.”

“Hmm,” Ruth says. “I think that is a good thing, sweetie. I loved my husband, loved him since we met the summer I turned twenty, wanted to have a family with him, wanted to feel him next to me each night. We had a good life, but, well, when the kids left, there was some distance, and I was, I was too old to consider the dangers of it. I’d always wanted a lover, deep down; somehow I knew I would take one if an opportunity arose. I wasn’t looking for it though, and assumed it would happen only if something happened to John.”

She gets teary for a moment, dabs at her eyes with a tissue. “And he had his. I am sure Mr. Manetti had his. Back then, it was different. In the seventies, professors did that sort of thing. With students. He traveled with one girl and I could see the sadness in his face when the trip was over. A conference in England. He said he had gone alone.”

ABC, suddenly exhausted, shrugs. “I’m sorry.” What else can she say? She stands up and thinks she might put some soup on the stove for lunch. Ruth is tired. She’ll nap soon and probably forget the entire conversation.

“I was slender, still, and walked every morning, and I did my weights and exercises, my hair was still dark, not as black as it had been, but with the exercise, which back then, was not a very common thing to do, and the hair, and my figure—my hips had always attracted men. I was so sad when I broke one a few years ago. I had always considered my hips my best attribute. I used to wear the dresses and blue jeans that flattered them. I was somewhat vain! It’s hard to believe, right, with this afghan on my lap, my hair a whitened bird’s nest.”

ABC finds a brush in the junk drawer. “Should I brush it?”

“Sure,” Ruth says and ABC stands behind Ruth, behind her chair, and brushes as gently as she can. The old woman feels as if her neck is easily breakable, as if brushing might take out her remaining hair.

“It was a summer morning, and I was walking, briskly,” she says, “dumbbells in hand, out on the path that goes behind the observatory, and I met a young man, a new professor, dashing—that’s the only way to describe him.

“I would see him out there every morning and our nods and hellos soon became friendly exchanges. It was summer. He’d just arrived, hadn’t taught his first class yet, and one day, I just . . .”

Ruth smiles.

“What?” ABC says, still brushing.

“I blew him,” Ruth says.

ABC shrieks with a kind of shock and begins to laugh. Ruth’s slender shoulders shake with laughter too, silent laughter. It takes ABC almost five minutes to recover.

“In some ways, it’s terrible, but now, it’s just, well, it’s just a fact.”

“Where did you blow him? Right there on the path? Oh my God!”

“That’s what they said then. It was 1982. They said ‘blow job.’ They said, ‘She blew him.’ Isn’t that still what they say?”

“I guess so. Sometimes we say oral sex.”

“Oral sex? Sounds clinical.”

ABC smiles.

“Did you have oral with Philly?” Ruth says.

ABC says, “That’s private.”

“I did always wonder about that. I always thought a woman would know just what to do.”

ABC smiles. “Yeah, pretty much. So, oh my God, you just blew this guy?”

ABC wants details before Ruth loses her energy and clarity.

“I didn’t just blow him. The kids were gone by then. Away. Grown. And John was at a conference in London, was spending most of the summer there. John annoyed me. It was hard to get used to being a couple without kids around. Everything he did annoyed me. And I think it was mutual. I wanted time away from
him, just away from his snoring and the slurping of cereal and the general noise of him. It was the first time I’d ever lived alone in my life, that summer.

“And so, one day, on the path, this man, this shirtless beautiful man, was tying his shoe when I passed him. And so we got to talking. He was new to town, to the college, he said, and I invited him for coffee, I said I could tell him about life in Grinnell, and he looked at me, looked at my breasts, my face, my hips, and I felt him looking at me, and he said he’d finish his run and take a shower and come over.”

“And you did? Then?”

“All summer, we kept it up, and then John returned and school resumed, and it was different. He found a young woman to marry. He stayed on in the English department, and so I would see him, from time to time, and yet it was actually never that awkward. It was kind of, I don’t know, compartmentalized? It didn’t feel like my real life. It felt like some self-contained interlude . . . Jesus, I’m tired, ABC. All of a sudden I need to sleep.”

ABC helps her to bed.

As Ruth starts to fade, ABC asks, “When did all of this happen?”

Ruth, now smiling, closes her eyes, lets out a sigh. “Oh, years ago. Three decades ago. 1982, it was.”

“1982?”

“Yes. He wrote me some letters that fall. He disguised them by using envelopes he had stolen from the Presbyterian church. My husband always thought I was just getting the Presbyterian Women newsletter.”

“Clever,” ABC says.

Ruth, dozing now, murmurs, “He always wrote wonderful letters. I have some of them still. We should get rid of them, you know. Before I die. Remind me tomorrow.”

“Is this why your kids don’t talk to you anymore?” ABC says, though she’s already figured this out from the tears that flood
Ruth’s eyes. “Your kids are lucky to have a mom like you,” ABC says. “You think they’d be more forgiving, you know?”

“Mothers have secrets,” Ruth says. “I mean, all women do. But mothers? Oh, they die full of secrets. There are certain things nobody wants mothers to say, to think, or to feel. There are restrictions, rules. And if those secrets get out? Unforgivable.”