The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro
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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 new. Alice taught me before she left. She learned at camp.”
Stella 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,