Perennials, page 16
—
Early in the morning she left the tent and called her mother on Skype in the computer lab.
“Hello?” Her mother was looking closely into the webcam that Nell had installed on the home computer before she left. She searched Nell’s pixelated image on the other end as if in disbelief that such technology—the ability to see her daughter in real time across the Atlantic Ocean—was possible.
“Hi, Mum,” Nell said. She’d Skyped with her mother only once earlier in the summer, even though she’d originally promised that she would a few times a week.
“I was just sitting down to lunch.” Her mother, delighted, lifted up a salad and a fork to the camera. But when she put the bowl back down and said, “So what’s going on over there?” her face got stuck, mouth ajar and fork aloft.
“Mum?”
The sound came across in unrecognizable tidbits and bleeps, and then those cut out too.
“Mum, they killed a horse last night,” Nell said.
Now her mother’s voice moved in super, undecipherable speed, catching up. Then it stopped. Her face began to move again, peering too closely into the camera.
“Nell? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Nell?”
The face froze again, up close, imploring.
“They killed a horse last night,” Nell repeated to her mother’s motionless, expectant expression.
10
The staff lodge was a decrepit place that hadn’t been refurbished in at least twenty-five years. The felt was coming up at the corners of the pool table downstairs, its wooden sides splintering, and the vending machines were unplugged and unstocked. There were a few plastic tables and folding chairs where the counselors played poker and drinking games, though they never had a full deck of cards to work with. Upstairs, stuffing burst from the seams of secondhand couches.
The counselors cheered when Jack walked in. One of them offered him a Coors Light. He sat down next to Yonatan at the card table and played a couple hands of five-card draw. There was only one air conditioner in the lodge, on the bottom floor next to one of the card tables, and though most evenings grew cool enough for open windows to suffice, that night was so hot that the counselors took turns crowding around the AC.
“Fuck, Jack,” Yonatan said, folding again. “I forgot how good you are.”
Jack allowed himself a momentary feeling of pride.
Yonatan lifted his empty beer can in the air. “Another?”
Jack shook his head.
After Yonatan left his seat, Rachel replaced him in it. Jack nodded at her and took a sip of his beer.
When he was going through job applications during the winter, he’d stopped a beat too long on Rachel’s passport-sized photo. It was objectively a bad photo: She stood against a white wall, unsmiling and washed out by the drugstore’s fluorescent lighting. But she still looked glamorous in an offhand way: She wore her thick, dark hair over one shoulder and was looking up, surprised, from beneath lowered eyelashes, as if someone had just called her name. Her most notable feature was a slightly oversized nose. It was distinguishing, regal; it set her apart from the prototypical Pretty Girl.
He had noted the age: nineteen. From her résumé, he learned that she had been a camper at Marigold and then a CIT, a counselor-in-training, at age fifteen. Now she was back after four summers away.
She looked somewhat bored at the poker table watching the men play, though she expressed no interest in joining the game. She was wearing a white ribbed tank top and no makeup and had gotten darker since the beginning of the summer. Good-looking young men like Chad and Yonatan were more her speed, more age appropriate. Jack himself was forty-four. She was a kid; his own son was seven years older than her.
“Jack, you want in this round?” someone asked.
He glanced at his watch but didn’t register the time, acutely aware of Rachel’s presence. “One more, then I’ve got to hit the hay.”
A counselor split up the chips—checker tiles and pieces from a Connect Four game—and they threw in the ante. Jack felt self-conscious knowing that Rachel was looking at his shitty hand: two threes, the queen of hearts, the eight of diamonds, the five of clubs. One of the threes was a club. He switched out his eight and got the two of hearts back. He folded.
“Smart move,” she said.
“You missed my straight,” he said. Immediately, he felt ridiculous for wanting to impress her.
They watched the rest of the round in silence. He felt the perspiration on his palms; it was so hot in the room. He wiped his hands on his shorts, and as he did so, his pinkie finger accidentally grazed Rachel’s thigh. He took note of how thin the sliver of space between their legs was, and then he felt her closing in, pressing the edge of her thigh against his. Did she think that he had done that on purpose?
He played one more distracted round this way, not daring to move his leg, because if he did, he’d be admitting to the contact. He checked his watch again, noting the time now—close to midnight—and separated from her. Underneath the table, she grabbed his wrist and slid a piece of paper into his hand.
He stuffed the paper into his pocket and stood. “Have a good night, guys,” he said with a grin. “Don’t stay up too late.”
The counselors promised they wouldn’t. Jack could hardly wait to get outside, where, underneath the dim light above the lodge’s screen door, he read the note: “Tennis courts @ 1.” Had she just had it ready all night to give to him?
Of course, he didn’t go.
—
By noon the next day, it was ninety-seven degrees in the shade. Jack spent as much of the day as he could inside his air-conditioned office. He sat in a swivel chair at his desk, which was cluttered with stacks of overstuffed file folders and a clunky PC, and scanned through emails, mostly from parents and forwarded by his secretary, Nan. (“Why can’t our daughter keep a cellphone at camp? I’d really just feel better about having her away for eight weeks if we were able to text her now and again.” “Allison tells us the horses are not purebreds—we were not made aware of this when we initially decided on Camp Marigold.”) He put the emails in his “Answer Later” folder and pulled up his bank account. The birthday check he’d sent to his son a month ago still had not been cashed. He had even written a note in the card this year: “It’s really beautiful here. I don’t know if you’re a fan of nature, but I think you’d love it. You’re welcome to visit at any time. I’ll pull out all the stops.”
A fan of nature? Pull out all the stops? He felt ashamed of his transparency, imagining the three of them—Junior and Laura and the doctor husband—laughing over the note.
He left the office right before lunchtime. He saw Rachel over in the stables, brushing a brown-and-white-speckled horse.
He went to the staff lodge again that night and played some rounds of poker. He drank his one Coors Light, and halfway through the night, Rachel took the empty seat next to him, pressed her thigh against his—that same crisis of inaction eating away at him—and, as he was leaving, grabbed his wrist and passed him a note. He read it outside: “Barn @ 1.” Again, he didn’t go.
—
Before Laura got pregnant, Jack had had ideas for himself. He wouldn’t be so bold as to call them dreams. He was an okay student, okay enough to get into a Connecticut state school, the only thing he’d be able to afford to pay back. (Single mom; college was on him.) Not good enough at football to get a scholarship somewhere, but his future wasn’t hopeless. He imagined a big school, maybe one with a study abroad program. London intrigued him; the English countryside intrigued him. It seemed far and foreign enough but manageably similar to home. He liked the idea of a place so heavy with gray fog that, on the occasion that it lifted, the sun would feel that much more earned.
They were high school sweethearts, and they got married fast, three months into the pregnancy. They were seventeen. It was the right thing to do, yes, but also, as they were going through all the motions of picking a place (her backyard) and an officiant (their local pastor), never once did he feel like it could turn out to be a mistake. She was bright; she made him laugh; she poked fun at his stoic nature, brought him out of his funks. Her family had more money than his, and Jack began to work in construction for her father’s company. Laura had the baby: John Michael Pike, Jr. They lived in Laura’s parents’ house, in the windowless basement. Sometimes the darkness at night made Jack want to scream out. But he got a lot of sunlight during the day at least. Neither of them went back for senior year.
They lasted almost until Junior’s first birthday, when Laura left Jack for her ob-gyn. She told him tearfully, sitting him down on the edge of their bed in the basement apartment, that they never would have worked out. Dr. Whatever-the-Fuck was, unlike Jack, her “intellectual equal.”
He left the job with his father-in-law, moved out of the basement. Moved back in with his mom. Got his GED. Bagged groceries, took night classes at the community college. Was promoted to assistant manager at the Stop & Shop. Saw Junior once every two weeks, picking him up from the doctor’s mansion in West Hartford. Jack’s mom died—lifelong smoker, lung cancer. He sold her one-floor house, which turned a surprisingly okay profit. Moved to his own apartment in the same shitty part of Hartford. Was promoted to manager at the Stop & Shop. Got his bachelor’s, graduating with a degree in physical education. Got a job as a PE teacher at a local elementary school. Twenty years hopping around schools until he eventually became the director of PE at one.
He knew Al Billings, the head of athletics at Marigold, from one of his previous schools. Al reached out because he thought that Jack could be a great fit for the open camp director position: hardworking, tons of experience in schools, a real self-starter. Great with kids but tough when necessary. Al’s call came at just the right time; Jack was just getting out of, or trying to get out of, something with one of the kindergarten teachers at school. She was his age, never married, pretty but slightly overweight, unbelievably insecure. A history of abusive boyfriends, Jack learned, and he was the first who wasn’t. It had initially been an arrangement of two lonely people, he had thought, but she had begun to treat him like some sort of savior, to dote on him, ask questions about their future together. He would have rather been lonely than trapped. He took the Marigold job.
It came with a pay raise and a year-round cabin. He’d looked forward to the mix of social and solitary aspects, for he thought of himself that way, as someone who liked to be around people but, after some time with them, needed to retreat, recharge. During the summers, he would be surrounded by campers and counselors; but from Labor Day to Memorial Day, he’d live in his house in the woods, put in a few morning hours in the office, and spend the afternoons running along the trails, hiking in the snow, and reading books he’d never bothered with before. Maybe he’d start a vegetable garden. Maybe he would get a dog.
He just hadn’t anticipated how long that first winter would be. The action-packed summer went fast, and the cold days dragged on. Lakeville was a seasonal town; the local men were drunks, and the local women were ambitionless, cloying. It did not take him long to realize it was less lonely to stay in and get a good night’s sleep than it was to drink his Jack Daniel’s neat in a mostly empty tavern. Before spring’s first thaw, he found himself anxious for the summer again. In early April, using a book from the Lakeville library as his guide, he planted cucumbers, tomatoes, and red peppers. He built a trellis and waited for the vines to start climbing.
—
Weekends at camp were more unstructured than the weekdays, so Jack rode around in his golf cart that Saturday, the day after Rachel passed him the second note. He was so distracted that he had to brake quickly to stop himself from hitting two older kids on their bikes.
“Watch where you’re going, boys!”
He went back to the staff lodge that night because, he told himself, it was a Saturday. He had never gone two nights in a row before, let alone three.
At the poker table, she sat next to him, pressed her thigh against his, and made brief but imploring eye contact with him. She was older than her years, he began to tell himself. She must have been. She was self-possessed, mature. She knew exactly what she was doing.
She passed her note. He left and read it outside: “Oar house @ 1.”
He wouldn’t just be fired if the board found out; his nascent career as a camp director would end nearly as soon as it had begun. He’d probably never get another reputable job.
He wasn’t even the type to go for younger women. It felt creepy, unseemly, the difference in their ages.
And yet.
Somehow.
He suspected that to Rachel he was a conquest—an authority figure, a commodity. Her youth reflected his own aging self back at him. It made him grasp his own mortality more clearly, feel simultaneously free of and shackled by time.
So nothing really mattered. And therefore, everything did.
—
Inside the shed, it smelled like dust and overgrown dandelions. They knocked down paddles leaning against the walls, life jackets from their hooks. He felt too serious to laugh. It had been a while, and he finished too fast, but then he worked on her and took them both by surprise. They lay on a plastic tarp after, and he let her sleep for half an hour before waking her and telling her it was time to go back to her section. When she woke, there was no glimmer of regret as he’d expected there to be. She simply stood, brushed herself off, gave him a long kiss, and left the shed without a word.
—
The next day, Jack rode around on his golf cart feeling high. He kept thinking about Rachel and at one point rode past the girls’ Hemlock section—for the thirteen-year-olds, where she was a counselor—just to catch a glimpse of her. He saw her chatting with a pair of campers, and when she saw his golf cart approaching, she looked up and shyly smiled. The thought of that smile distracted him throughout the day, but it also gave him a certain levity and confidence as he spoke at flag lowering, at dinner, at the opening campfire.
Later that night, she slithered so swiftly around his bedroom and under his sheets, knew exactly what to do in a way he hadn’t experienced in half the grown women he’d been with. But then came the reminder: She mentioned that she had just completed her freshman year at Michigan.
He already had a son when he was her age, he told her.
“Where is he now?” she asked.
“Medical school.”
“Were you married?”
“Briefly,” he said.
It continued like this for three more nights: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. The heat still had not broken. She spent each night in his cabin and left early in the morning in order to make it back to her tent before the campers awoke. The sex was good for both of them. And he was getting used to the pillow talk, which he hadn’t had with anyone since the kindergarten teacher over a year ago. She was a smart girl, Rachel. One night he asked her, postcoitus, what she was studying at school. She said she was thinking of majoring in gender studies.
“You’re not one of those militant feminists, are you?” he joked as he twisted a piece of her hair between his fingers. In truth, he felt intimidated by her intelligence. Why did he always do this to himself, go for the women he was too stupid to actually be with? Sometimes he felt like a token to them: a working-class guy, athletic, dumb, good with his hands.
She jerked her head away. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I was kidding.”
“Feminists believe that men and women deserve the same rights. How is that militant?”
“There are just some women who get crazy about it. You know, like…the really butch ones. Who basically look and act and talk like men. There’s something unnatural about that.”
“What’s unnatural,” she said, getting riled up in a way that excited Jack, “is supporting women’s equality in the social stratosphere but also wanting them to stay stunted in their appearance. There’s this reigning mentality that women can be successful and at the top of their game so long as they still look like women, so long as they’re still hot and youthful and thin while maintaining their childbearing hips. If women look too much like men, they’re a threat. If they still look like women, they can do whatever they want, because men are technically safe from them.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Jack said. “I don’t believe that all women need to look and act a certain way. But men and women are different for a reason, biologically. Can you agree with that?”
“Of course,” she said. “But that’s not what we’re talking about.”
“So what are we talking about?”
She looked Jack over once like she felt sorry for him. “You’re lucky you’re handsome,” she said, resting her head on his chest and falling asleep soon after.
—
Jack slept through Rachel’s departure on Thursday morning and awoke to an empty bed. It was only six but already oppressively hot, almost too hot for coffee. After one slam of the snooze button, he got up and stood over the kitchen sink in his boxers, considering the coffee issue for a moment before putting the kettle on. As the water boiled, he dragged the fan from his room into the kitchen until he felt the resistance of the extension cord.
The kettle hissed. He poured and drank his coffee and pulled the dusty blinds open. The camp was still empty, and the morning was hazy; he could not see the lake from his cabin as he could on clearer days, only the downward slope of the green hill leading to it.
The coffee was heating him from inside. He was a glutton for punishment.
He considered not going on his four-mile run but quickly quashed the thought. He ran the same route in snow and rain. If Jack believed in anything, he believed in routine. So he went, jogging down the road, its two lanes marked in faded paint, that ran along the southern edge of camp, out to the gas station and back, counting three trucks, four deer, and zero people. The air was thick, heavy, like he was running against a current.
