Summerlong (6 page)

In the café downtown that morning, Claire sits in the corner, wolfing down a scone and coffee, suddenly aware of how badly she craves the sugar and caffeine. This is her “nice little Saturday,” a term Don took from a comedy he’d watched a million times, a movie about frat boys or something, with Will Ferrell. Or Seth Rogen. Or a Wilson brother. He liked to make a big deal of how Claire got Saturday mornings to herself, until ten thirty, sometimes eleven, to do whatever she wanted.

Two hours! All her own!

With this endless vast freedom, she would usually go to the only coffee shop in town and waste two hours on her computer while eating scones and drinking coffee, because she had no idea what else to do. Two hours, she’d always thought, was not enough time to do anything when you lived one hour away from even a decent midsize Midwestern city.

Don always said, “You should work on your novel!” which is something he had been saying for ten years, which really meant, of late—you should try to make some money.

She logs on to Gmail. She finds an e-mail from an old college housemate, Lonnie Wilson, announcing that a one-man show about growing up gay in rural Iowa,
Queer as Corn
, would premier in some hip Chicago venue the next weekend. She clicks on the link.

Claire’s been invited, along with sixteen hundred other friends of Lonnie’s, whose tiny thumbnail heads smile at her under the banner “Who’s Going?”

Back in the inbox, she begins to delete other things: a slew of marketing messages from companies she’d once shopped at online—Lands’ End, Audible, Athleta; a credit card account update (Re: URGENT—your account is now closed!); a note from an old college professor who is now at NYU, Tim Holiday (Re: My new book is now out from Milkweed!); something from a former college friend, Annabelle Sanderson-Maynard (Re: Sorry for the mass e-mail! Here’s my address in Paris!). Also banished from her inbox: a college pot-smoking pal, Will Molsen (Re: New job in DC!); Bank of America (An Important Notice: Action Required); and Hanna Andersson (60 percent off on select winter styles!).

And like that, all of the exclamation points and all caps and embedded imagery and links to dancing goats and ads for sports bras and Frye boots she cannot afford disappear into some other place, far, far from this outpost in the corn-choked, hog-tied center of Iowa.

“Can I suggest something? Just delete everything.”

“Pardon?” Claire says, turning toward the voice to see Charlie Gulliver grinning, wearing fitted khakis and a bright white T-shirt, freshly showered and shiny.

“That is what I did,” he says. “When I left Seattle. I deleted my whole online identity and threw my cell phone in the bay. It was liberating.”

“Why?”

“So,” he says, grabbing a chair and putting it next to her, rather than across from her. “I was playing Hamlet at Seattle Shakespeare last fall, and I was onstage, and I was killing it, we’d sold out every show, the reviews were good, Gwyneth Paltrow came to see me backstage and got tears in her eyes. She touched my elbow while patting her heart with the other hand. And I remember, on closing night, I was getting into the famous speech, I don’t even have to tell you which one, I’m sure.”

“
To be
. . . ,” Claire says.

“Yep. The role every actor wants to land, wants to nail, and I am
onstage, and I am nailing it. I’m doing ‘To be or not to be’ in a way, I think, that’s never been done before. It was my thing, my interpretation, almost jaunty and crazed instead of grave and tortured, you know? And I was fucking IN LOVE with Ophelia too, the woman who played her, I should say, and I was thinking to myself as I was onstage—well, she’s married, I can’t have her, and then I realized so much of my life is wanting things I can’t have, like certain women, or a lake house, or whatever, and my whole career has been auditioning for things I usually can’t have, but then I get one of those things, like the role of Hamlet, and I start to think all my self-worth is tied up in that role, and it becomes me. I fall in love with Ophelia, for fuck’s sake, right? Her husband is the managing director of the theater.”

“Did you have an affair? Is that why you left?”

“Does that matter?”

The barista calls out a name—Stanley!—to suggest a mocha is ready.

Claire clears her throat. “I don’t know. I think it would matter?”

“I had an affair.”

“You thought she’d leave him?”

“No. No, it always starts out that I think I’m going to love somebody. But then I realize what I am really doing is seeing if she loved me.”

“Did she?”

“She did.”

“That’s why you left?”

“No. Not exactly. I’m checking out.”

“Of what?” Claire asks.

“Striving. Trying to get what I want?”

“Love.”

“Laid,” he says.

Claire widens her eyes.

“Kidding,” Charlie says. “I mean, I am checking out of anything that prevents me from enjoying each day. And e-mail and all of that
shit actually prevents me from living in the moment. I’m done; no more. Expectation, anticipation, fear of change. Good-bye to all that! To desire things one can have or can’t have or whatever—all desire leads to the same thing.”

“What if you need to communicate with the outside world? E-mail is practically a necessity,” Claire says.

“This is what e-mail is: either a cowardly way for people to ask favors of you that they would never ask in person, or a way for people to pretend they are having a friendship with you when they really are not.”

She looks at him with a smile, a kind of smile she hasn’t smiled in years. It even feels different in her cheeks and lips, a tingling, a buzz.

He seems to notice. “Most of our relationships with people are fleeting. All relationships are, essentially, disposable. When they’re done, they’re done,” he says. “Shit like Facebook keeps everything alive way too long.”

He lowers his voice and points to a tab on her screen. “Click there and you’re free of all of these fuckers.”

“Here?” she says and then she does it.

A warmth begins to flood her body. She’s flushed.

“Yep. And then there,” he points to another button, his hand grazing hers.

“Type your password and then click okay,” he says. His hand touches the small of her back.

The computer asks her if she’s sure.

“You can never be sure,” Charlie says. “That’s why I played Hamlet. But you have to act.”

He is leaning in as if they are studying, together, something on the screen, and she catches his smell, he’s so close, bourbon, chlorine, coffee, and the scent of overpowering soap, like the little harsh bars you get at cheap motels.

“Ha!” she says and then clicks I Am Sure on the screen in front
of her. A box of coded letters appears and she has to decipher them and type them into a box. The box disappears, replaced by
You have deleted your Gmail account
.

“You really did it!” he says. “Good for you.”

She’s all heat now, and a dampness at her center feels like it’s spreading out inside her body.

Her calf touches his. He exudes a kind of tangible aura, a palpable heat, as if the air between them is solidifying. If they were in darkness, she imagines that his skin would glow and the air between them would be phosphorescent with a strange solid light.

“You use Facebook?” he asks. “Log in.”

“Yes, I go on it every morning and keep refreshing it, hoping for justification for logging on in the first place.”

She logs on, then turns and looks at him expectantly. “What do I do with this?”

“Oh boy!” he says, reaching over and commandeering the mouse. “Someone took a picture of the brunch they were enjoying in Boston. A couple in golf shirts with blond hair! And look, Claire, that waifish girl who won’t look at the camera just posted a link to an article about her upcoming art installation in Detroit. She is sooooo way talented. Also you can see right down her shirt. No wonder you can’t sleep. You’ve got all of this useless bullshit ruining your brain synapses.”

“Well, shit,” Claire says.

“Good reaction,” he says. “What do we have here? A notification!”

One “friend” has updated his relationship status and Charlie reads it aloud: “
Sam Kukla is in a relationship!”
Then he adds, “Yay!”

“You’re really invading my privacy here. You know that?”

“There’s no privacy in Grinnell,” he says. “You don’t need Facebook, Claire! It’s all people bragging about their awesome lives, or pretending they have awesome lives, or cluttering up your intellect with the things that should be steeping in their own intellect, you
know, ideas that require some time before they are shared with the world. Or pictures from people who are living a fuller life than you.”

“You’re totally right. I know that.”

“Are you living a full life, Claire?”

He still has the mouse. He moves through the Facebook menu with a series of clicks and says, finally, “May I?”

He hovers over a button that says, Deactivate My Account.

“Sure,” Claire says. “Why the fuck not?”

He does it. Five friends pop up—Sara will miss you! Tyrone will miss you! Marisol will miss you! Simms will miss you! Okkar will miss you!

“God, that is so sad,” Charlie says. “Poor fuckers.”

“They won’t really miss me.”

“What’s your password?” he says.

“Um, Ophelia69.”

“No way!” He types the password.

“I’m kidding. It’s WendyBrybry.” She types it instead.

Facebook asks her to type a random phrase to verify her humanity. She types the words that appear in the box:
FAIL HARD
.

They bust up laughing over that, she hanging down her head and pressing her forehead into his shoulder. Heat.

“Do you tweet?” he says.

“No,” she says.

“Good for you. My work here is done,” Charlie says.

“Thanks,” Claire says. “I just lost eleven hundred of my closest friends.”

“Your friends who love you!” Charlie says, almost shouting. And then he stands up and gives a kind of awkward wave. Oblivious to the ears of all the other café goers, unconcerned with who might see or hear him, Charlie says, “I’m the only friend you need.”

How do these things happen in a small town? What odd and awkward conversations Claire finds herself in that day. For instance, there she is, under a tree on the lawn at the city pool, next to Ruth Manetti, an old widow whose lawn Don used to cut as a boy. She’d been a faculty wife, Claire knows that much, and must be in her eighties now. She’s sitting in a deck chair, her walker beside her, wearing a pair of yellow capri pants, orthopedic white sneakers, and a thin white hoodie, as well as a large sunhat and giant blue blocker shades. She’s in a small circle of shade near the fence, shade made by a leafing-out redbud tree. The redbuds had bloomed early that spring, bursting forth in the gloom of mid-March.

Claire, undoing her oxford shirt to reveal her new navy-blue-and-white-striped bikini, just arrived from Lands’ End, sets up next to Ruth in one of the only patches of lawn left on that crowded opening weekend.

Claire’s in full sun but skips the sunscreen.

Ruth sips from a large bottle of Gatorade, a dazed kind of smile on her face as she watches everyone frolic about the pool. She turns the dazed smile toward Claire; Claire knows she has to say something. Claire smiles back. The woman looks stoned, Claire thinks, and wonders if she too is suffering from dementia, like Charlie’s father, as if senility is moving through Grinnell like a plague in the warm miasma of late May.

“Hot day,” Claire says.

“It feels excellent!” Ruth says. “I didn’t think I’d survive the winter.”

Ruth giggles, which, Claire thinks, is an odd thing for an elderly woman to do, though it is certainly a giggle. There is no other way to describe her laughter. She is giggling.

Claire scans the pool, mentally checking off each member of her family, something she does every two minutes at the pool, a kind of mothering habit that is likely the impulse sent out by a gene somewhere deep in her female DNA.

Don has gone off into the water with the kids, joining the other farmer-tanned fathers, all of whom seem to be in a competition as to who could be the most fun. In the pool, on the diving boards, on the waterslides, and the kiddie section, fathers, set free from their desks and factory floors for Memorial Day weekend are shouting, splashing, and hurling their children through the water, as the kids scream with delight and beg their normally sullen dads to “do it again” and “higher” and “catch me if you can!” Later, these fathers will grow distant, drinking beer in a deck chair, but for now, they are omnipotent heroes and joyful, smiling gods.

Claire sees a man she knows vaguely, an administrator from the college, look at her for the third time. Tall and bearded and handsome, he waves at her and she pretends not to see him. Everyone is looking at everybody.

At the start of swimsuit season in the Midwest, it is hard not to inventory your peers and note how they fared over the course of the brutal winter. Claire does her best to ignore the lifeguards in red trunks and sporty bikinis, all impossibly sexy and young, something about their skin suggesting a glow, a pressure, as if they might burst into flame or light at any second. She also does her best not to see the college students, easier in their sexuality than they had been as high-schoolers, flirting with a kind of arrogant abandon. She pretends not to notice a young woman in a gold bikini, full hipped, big breasted, shimmering near the entrance to the pool’s shallow end, luxuriously piling up her brown hair on her head, nor
does she acknowledge the fact that Don watches this minute-long process with something like a tortured look on his face before he shakes himself away from the siren and returns to the game of sea monster he has been leading with nineteen or twenty children.

Claire focuses on the many middle-aged women, mostly mothers, around her, also wearing bikinis, but none of them, as beautiful as some of them are, suggested that kind of pending eruption she sees in the half-naked young people around her. No, Claire and her almost-forty contemporaries stand about suggesting the virtues of endurance. They’ve made it to middle age with a remnant of hotness, and despite the attendant sagging and indignities of aging, they’ve managed to transcend the reality that a tattoo above the ass or behind the shoulder had been a bad idea. Yes, many of the women, Claire included, have approached forty with a verve and vigor, had Pilated and power-walked themselves into a level of fitness that they had not seen since sixteen, and when they went to the city pool, the self-loathing they’d been taught to feel as teenagers had been replaced by a sexy confidence. Many of them love fucking in a way they have never loved fucking before, and when Claire thinks this to herself, she cannot help but think of Charlie Gulliver, whom she knows she could have fucked that morning, last week, in the pool.

“You look lovely,” Ruth says suddenly and Claire feels as if she has been caught doing something illicit. “When I grew up in Minnesota, my mother used to swim, every morning, in the frigid waters of Lake Superior, completely naked!”

Again, a giggle and a sparkle in her eye, and Claire wonders if there is any possible way that this seemingly near-delirious old woman might have seen her swimming with Charlie Gulliver, skinny-dipping just before dawn the weekend before, but she knows where Ruth Manetti lives—Don has been waiting for that particular listing for several years, assuming she’d be dead soon—and there is no way to see Elm Street from Broad. It is impossible; even if she had been on her roof with binoculars, the monolithic science building would have blocked her view.

It’s a coincidence.

“Swimming naked with a man, alone, in midsummer,” Ruth says, her voice lowering, “is perhaps the greatest pleasure of adult life. Seeing each other come out of the water, slick and cool, smelling of salty sweat.”

Another coincidence?

She licks her lips and pulls a cookie from her purse and takes a bite.

Claire has brought a book to the pool and begins to read it, while the old woman dozes off in her chair. She cannot concentrate on the book though, because this is not a pool, really, but a goddamn fucking waterpark, complete with the blare of Top 40 music from megaphonelike speakers near the snack bar. Behind her, Claire hears the thump of a song by Taylor Swift that she’d once caught Don singing in the shower:
You belong tooooo meeeeee
. She smiles thinking about him singing with his unsteady crooning, then watches him flinging himself about the pool again, both of his children clinging to his broad shoulders and back. How could she ever stay angry at such a dork? How could she separate herself from him? No matter how dark her thoughts had been the past week, no matter how mad she’d been at him for his secrets, whatever they were, she’d also been mad at herself, how her own head had been in the sand of her own petty miseries, refusing to see that her family was falling apart and that Don was working himself to near death.

Trying to read again—she’d vowed to finally finish
Anna Karenina
that summer—she hears a mother a few chairs down from her say, “Oh my God, I’m totally gonna tweet that!” and another mother, in a red two-piece, screams, “I’ll kill you if you do!” The mothers both thumb furiously at their phones, giving their necks a painful-looking curve downward.

She watches as a group of girls near the slide begin to sing along and dance to a second Taylor Swift number. They kick and scream and make a spectacle of themselves, likely for the benefit of some nearby boys. Behind them stands Wendy, apart from them but
watching, sullen, with a huge inflatable tube at her side. Claire has a twinge of regret watching this—her own shyness, her inability to join the chorus lines of laughter that more fun women often share has been passed on to her daughter.

“I like watching your daughter,” Ruth says, out of nowhere, again, as if she is reading Claire’s mind. “She seems to have more sense about her than most of these kids. Would you call her an old soul?”

Claire, snapped from her trance, says, “Oh, yes. Thank you. I thought you were asleep.”

“How can I sleep,” Ruth says, “with the inane cackle of grown women posting selfies on Instatweet or whatever the fuck it is?”

Claire howls with such force she clasps her hands over her mouth.

“It’s like your daughter—what’s her name?”

“Um, Wendy.”

“It’s like she already understands how much of this is bullshit.”

“I hope so. She is kind of an old soul.”

“It shows she has a good mother. I wish I had helped my daughters understand bullshit more, but I was only then figuring it out. It was a different time.”

“I’m sure you were a good mother.”

“I was,” Ruth says. “I loved them so much. But I was afraid of telling my kids the truth. I was afraid of scaring them. It gets lonely when you’re not honest with your kids. When you try to be something you’re not; when you pretend the world is better or simpler than it is. And once you get lonely, you start to fall apart.”

“You’re not in touch with them?”

“I try to be. But I did something they consider unforgivable.”

“I won’t ask what it was,” Claire says. “But I’m sure it was forgivable.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ruth says. “Nobody forgives mothers.”

“Oh?”

“Fathers get forgiven. A million novels and movies about that—but
mothers, mothers die and then the forgiveness comes. If they’re lucky, there’s a deathbed sort of confession. Maybe they weep over your ashes. That’s not what I want.”

“You know, you look amazing for your age. Very healthy; there’s still time to reconcile.”

“I feel like I want to be done with all this,” Ruth says. “I want to leave.”

“The pool?” Claire says.

“Yeah, you could say it that way.”

“Well, my husband could take you home, if you’d like.”

“I walked here today. The woman who takes care of me was out doing whatever it is she does on Saturdays, her day off, and I was in the mood to see people. So I walked here.”

“You walked here? From Broad Street?” Claire says, scanning the pool again. Bryan shivers in line for the diving board, standing in front of Don, who is standing sucking in his gut and flexing just a little bit, in a way Claire can notice but nobody else would. And Wendy: no longer with the gaggle of kids.

Wendy?

“It’s about half a mile,” Ruth says. “I barely made it. I bought a Gatorade and then collapsed into this chair.”

Claire’s close enough to the pool to keep an eye on the kids, though in the crushing throng of a hot Saturday she often loses them. Both of her kids are excellent swimmers, and the hormone-addled lifeguards keep a decent kind of watch on the pool, but she still panics if she scans the pool and can’t find them with ease. When her kids were very small, she always refused to go swimming unless Don could come. It stressed her out too much to be solely responsible for their survival.

“Just a moment,” Claire says and stands. She moves to the edge of the pool, scans the perimeter, a rise in her heart rate making her face feel flushed, her eyes momentarily blurry. She yells for Wendy.

Then she sees on the steep red slide her daughter rushing in
a torrent of water to the pool below. She watches her daughter emerge, smiling, and she heads back toward her chair.

“Sorry,” Claire says, flopping down again. “I lost one of my kids for a second.”

“It’s scary when that happens,” Ruth says.

“You’ve lived in Grinnell a long time?” Claire says. “Right?”

“I was married at twenty, moved to Grinnell that year. My husband was twenty-seven and he had a job teaching history,” Ruth says. “We thought we’d come here briefly—he was from Boston and wanted to be farther east, in a larger place, but we ended up having our life here. I dropped out of college at St. Olaf after I met him. He’d been there for a job interview, which he bombed, and I was the waitress at the diner he came into to bury his sorrows in a piece of pie. He ordered three slices of pie in a row and then asked for my phone number.”

“Do you regret that?” Claire says. “Marrying young, I mean.”

“You mean do I think I wasted my life?”

“No,” Claire says. “That sounds much harsher than I intended it to sound.”

“I was alive and then I was dying,” Ruth says. “Who knows when that transition takes place? It’s different for everyone. And that would have happened anywhere. Everything else is insignificant.”

“You started to die when? When you got married?”

“I’ll sound terrible saying this, but yes. That’s when some people, usually women, start dying.”

The loud whistles of the
Baywatch
wannabe lifeguards signal, along with a garbled announcement from the loudspeaker, that it is now adult swim. Claire stands up and sees Don and the kids schlepping toward her. She readies their towels, giving one to each kid, then four quarters apiece to hit the snack bar. When she is handing Don his towel, she finds herself leaning into him as she wraps it around him, giving him a hug that turns into a kiss. She is feeling warmth toward him for the first time in days, and wants to let him
know. How easy it is, sometimes, to think of life’s simple pleasures.

“You look amazing,” Don whispers in Claire’s ear. “Amazing.”

And for some reason this annoys her, the affection bursts and goes cold.

Don, dry now, exchanges pleasantries with Ruth, then finds the phone in his duffel bag, checks his messages, and, after a few silent minutes, hangs up his phone and says to Claire, “I have to go show some houses. This couple, they’re just in town for one day and they’ve still not found the right place. They decided to up their price range, I don’t know, I guess they wanted a real deal—anyway, it’s gonna be a good commission if I can show them one of the listings I have in the three hundred thousand range.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Claire says, her nose back in her book. “You tend to overexplain things.”

“We could really use the money from a sale,” Don says.

“Well, I’m not helping matters any in that department, reading
Anna Karenina
in a new bikini that cost ninety-five dollars.”

“You deserve it,” he says, though she doesn’t believe she deserves it.

“Good luck,” she says. “Will you be home for dinner?”