Summerlong

by Dean Bakopoulos

  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?”

  “Most likely. I’ll text.”

  Maybe he could make a big sale that day, earn enough in commission to buy the family some time with the bank. If anybody can pull out a ninth-inning surprise, it is Don Lowry.

  “Ruth,” Claire says. “Don’s leaving. Would you like a ride home? Ruth walked here.”

  “You walked here?” Don says. “Why didn’t ABC drive you here?”

  “Who’s ABC?” Claire says.

  “She’s a woman who takes care of Ruth.”

  “We take care of each other, mostly by staying out of each other’s way. And, yes, I would very much like a ride home. ABC loses track of me sometime. She does that. She’s in a fog. Some fogs you never get out of, do you?”

  5.

  Sometime in that hot afternoon, Charlie ducks into the ice-cold air-conditioned dank of Rabbit’s and finds a beautiful woman, younger than him by a few years he estimates, sitting alone. He had expected the usual midday crowd, which his father had always referred to as the formers: former husbands, former farmers, former athletes, former fair queens, former meth heads, former everything.

  She, in this case, he guesses, is a former student: she has thick unwashed dark hair, pulled back into a ponytail, wavy with humidity, fighting the rubber band and springing out behind her. She wears a kind of gray cotton sundress that ties in the back and flip-flops. She has dirty feet and a rubber band around one ankle. She has a beautiful, big smile, full lipped, and her skin is deeply tanned, though he can’t tell if it is always dark or if it is from a springtime of sun or if it is simply the dim light in the bar that makes everything seem darker. Her eyes are bloodshot.

  “Is this seat taken?” he says, pulling out the stool next to him.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Well, fuck that guy,” Charlie says and sits down.

  The woman lets out a whoop of laughter.

  “I’m ABC,” she says.

  “ABC?”

  “My initials. You are?”

  “CG, I guess. Charlie Gulliver.”

  “Gill’s son? I thought I recognized you from the pictures he used to have on his desk! I think you were a senior in high school in that picture—the framed one, on his credenza?”

  “I never knew he had a picture of me in his office on campus.”

  “Well, he did. How is he?”

  “Not good, from what I’ve been told. I just got back. I haven’t seen him yet.”

  The bartender, Rabbit himself, comes over and asks what they’re having.

  “Whatever he’s buying,” ABC says.

  “Two Mooseheads,” Charlie says.

  “No Mooseheads,” Rabbit says. “I got Molson.”

  “Two of those then.”

  “I heard Gill sort of lost his mind,” ABC says. “Is that true? He was brilliant.”

  “It’s a rare form of dementia. Apparently, he has great lucidity one moment and then is totally lost the next. Are you one of his students?”

  “I was. I graduated a year ago, lost the love of my life in a freak accident, and came back here to be sad.”

  “You came back here to be sad?”

  “I wanted to be as sad as possible.”

  “I want to know the story,” Charlie says.

  “Which one?”

  “The one in which your heart gets broken,” he says.

  “Where to begin?” ABC asks.

  “At the beginning,” Charlie says. “Because I have no plans for the day or for the next year or for the next forever.”

  He leans in, and Jesus Christ, he thinks, I’d like to fuck her too. The truth is, he knows, this is when he feels most alive: when a woman is about to fall for him. He looks at ABC, a deep kind of gaze he’s mastered in the past year. He thinks it says this: I want to make you happy.

  “Are you gonna puke?” ABC asks. “You look like you’re gonna puke. Let’s get some air.”

  In college, ABC had come to Grinnell a bit overweight, wearing the same baggy T-shirts and jeans every day. She had oversize glasses and acne. She had been teased mercilessly in high school, the Mexican girls making fun of her bookishness, the white girls making fun of the same. She had never even kissed a boy, and was terrible at dancing and sports. When she had a chance to leave Los Angeles, on a scholarship, she cared nothing about how bad the weather would be and how strange the landscape would seem and how drab Iowa might be compared to where she lived in East L.A. She didn’t even worry that it’d be too white—she had met at least five students of color from L.A. who’d gotten the same scholarship she had from some foundation she had never heard of until her acceptance letter arrived. They’d all gone to an orientation together after they’d been accepted. And once, someone from the college had flown out to see them to help them prepare for the transition to college.

  ABC cared only about leaving, about fleeing her neighborhood, where she never fit in, the girls at her school boy crazy and fashion crazy and money crazy. And she also wanted to, if she was honest about it, leave her exhausted and often drunk mother, a failed artist/waitress/cleaning woman/substitute bus driver, who took care of ABC and took care of ABC’s abuela, but did nothing to care for herself and was now entering the diabetic phase of her rum and Coca-Cola and Catholicism-fueled life.

  At Grinnell though, with its clear, clear skies, she met others who wanted to be smart. They devoured scholarly articles and philosophical novels like candy, drank coffee under the trees, and pondered the historical forces that still worked against feminism. They got stoned before attending French films at the Harris cinema. They proclaimed themselves atheists and vegans. They dressed in an eclectic blend of hip grunge; sexy shlubbery, Philly had called it. They debated the causes of poverty in America, took a break for Frisbee, and then debated the causes of civil strife in Syria. In the cafeteria over large bowls of ice cream, they discussed the reading for the next morning’s seminar. They felt everything so intensely, the strange flattening golden hues of the sunsets in September and the rainbows that appeared almost weekly in the post-shower skies above Old Main. They attended office hours in small groups, bringing their questions and thermoses of tea to intense professors who got almost teary over the students’ earnest enthusiasm. They baked cakes for each other’s birthdays, they babysat for the children of their faculty advisers, and they alternated between the ravages of smoking, poor nutrition, and sleep deprivation and periods of juice fasts, mindfulness meditation, and workouts at the rec center. It was all so heated and perfect and what ABC loved was that it was no longer shameful to be smart and different and to question everything relentlessly. How weird could you be? Simply as weird as you wanted to be, provided the weirdness was the result of resisting social c
onvention rather than conforming to it. This was the heart of Grinnell. And this was the life she had always wanted, and here it was, before her, a gift.

  By the end of her four years of college, it was as if her happiness extended into her physical body. She almost effortlessly lost weight that first year—giving up Coke and McDonald’s was easy to do—and she got contact lenses through the student health plan, and her skin cleared up and developed a healthy glow. By her second year, ABC had gone from kissless to making out with half a dozen other students. She went on dates. She liked the heat she could feel between bodies. She liked how everyone tasted different. She had a few bouts of strep throat and one of mono. Still, she savored all of the affection. Her professors liked her and treated her with enthusiastic kindness. They invited her to their homes for dinner with their families. Her female friends confided in her, brought her small presents whenever they traveled, and stayed up late in her dorm room drinking tea and sometimes smoking weed and always spilling their guts. She was secretary of the Latino/a Students Association. They would cook together on Sunday nights and listen to ranchera music. She even went to the dances at Harris—twice she had made out with women and found it as pleasurable and more thrilling than making out with men—and found she liked dancing and had a reasonably good rhythmic sense about her. She could work her hips and her newly slimmed legs in a manner that made people watch her and often they would try to dance with her. She’d dance with anybody if they could keep up with her. Who knew? ABC was an excellent dancer!

  Philly was her best friend though. It was Philly she often danced with at these events. She and Philly ran in the same social circles, but some weekends the closeness of the campus was overwhelming, and, since Philly had a car, she and Philly would drive to Iowa City or Des Moines, or, if they were feeling more ambitious to Madison or Chicago or Minneapolis. They’d rent a cheap motel room if they had the money and crash in a king-size bed in some Red Roof Inn or they’d stay up all night and doze in parks during the day. One night they slept at a lakeside park in Madison, huddled together in a double sleeping bag, shivering, ABC burying her nose in Philly’s chest for warmth—or was it for warmth? Was she trying to crawl inside Philly?