The Interestings (22 page)

“Welcome to Underhill,” Lois said when Ash climbed into the backseat.

“Yes, welcome to beautiful Underhill,” said Jules in the sort of voice that might be used to accompany a corny old educational filmstrip. “A bustling metropolis that is home to three art museums and six orchestras. In addition, the next summer Olympics will be held in our fair city.”

Ash pretended not to hear her. “Thank you, Mrs. Jacobson. I am really glad to be here. I had to get away. You don’t know it, but you’re kind of saving my life.”

“First stop, the extremely glamorous and elegantly named Cindy Drive!” said Jules as they pulled into the development of identical ranch houses that sat shoulder to shoulder along the straight street. When you took a shower at the Jacobsons’, you could see right into the shower at the Wanczyks’. Once, Jules and Mrs. Wanczyk had stared straight at each other with a neck-up view, while water simultaneously beat down on their heads. “Did you know that Zsa Zsa Gabor lives across the street?” Jules said to Ash. “No, really, right over there! Nine Cindy Drive. There she is, putting on a boa! She is such a sweet person. Hallooo, Ms. Gabor!”

“Please ignore my daughter, Ash,” said Lois. “She seems to have gone mad.”

The weekend was spent partaking of all the suburban activities that Jules generally hated. Ash Wolf was actually grateful for the Walt Whitman Mall, whose name Jules had mocked mercilessly with her friends in the summer. Decades later, archly describing her childhood at a dinner party, she would say, “Could there be a bigger oxymoron than the
Walt Whitman Mall?
Maybe only . . . the
Emily Dickinson Waterpark
.” Now Jules and Ash walked together around the enormous space, laughing at almost anything, going in and out of stores. They also went to the movie theater to see
All the President’s Men
, and while it played, Jules thought again about Nixon’s departure from the White House lawn, which the entire camp had watched. But really, before that day all the campers had been like industrious cobblers at work in a forest, only partly aware of the outside world—the move toward impeachment, the noise—and willing themselves a way to stay in that indefensible state of half-consciousness as long as they could. Now, out in the world and much more conscious, Ethan had begun devoting his energy to drawing sketches of Jimmy Carter as a figure in Figland, and perfecting that drowsy Southern accent. “I wish we had someone a lot more liberal, but I think he’s pretty ethical, which is rare,” said Ethan. “I’ll take what I can get.”

At night during that weekend in Underhill, Jules and Ash lay together in her bed, with Ash’s head against the footboard. Many years later, they would lie across other beds with their children playing all around them, and it was a relief to know that even in getting older and splitting off into couples and starting families, you could still always come together in this way that you’d learned to do when you were young, and which you would have a taste for over your entire life. Ash, up close in Jules’s bed in Underhill, having performed a series of elaborate nighttime ablutions in the house’s single, peach-colored bathroom, now smelled milky and peppery at once. Maybe the soap she’d brought with her from the city was called Pepper Milk, Jules thought as she grew sleepy. Whatever it was, anyone would want to be around that smell, to drink it in from a girl if they couldn’t drink it in from a bottle.

“So what do you think will happen to Goodman?” Ash asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Because he’s a boy it’s probably easier for him out in the world,” said Ash. “But because he’s Goodman it’s harder. It’s always been harder. He just sort of blunders through. He doesn’t even try to play the games you need to play. Like, I always knew, since I was little, how to please teachers. I would write these really elaborate short stories and turn them in for extra credit. You want to know the secret? The stories were
long.
They weren’t all that good, but they showed purpose. That’s my strength: purpose. I’m sure they wore my teachers out. ‘The Secret of the Gold-Leaf Mantelpiece.’ ‘The Carson Triplets on Wandering Bluff.’ They were exhausting! I also made birthday cards for my parents every year—I mean, I spent hours on them. Once I even
tie-dyed
a card—and Goodman would completely forget about their birthdays, and I’d remind him, and at the last minute he’d ask me to let him sign the card I’d made. But they never thought he’d spent a second on it. I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society,” Ash said. “But girls, at least while they’re still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while. Seem to get the attention. I always did.”

“I never did,” said Jules. “Not until I met all of you.”

“Do you think we’re horrible narcissists—those of us who swept you up into our clutches?”

“Yes.”

“You do? Thanks a lot.” Ash tossed a pillow at her in a halfhearted attempt at female playfulness. But that was not what their friendship was. They didn’t sit around polishing their nails and talking dreamily; their roles were different from that. Ash still fascinated Jules and showed her how to be in the world; Jules still profoundly amused and comforted Ash. She still cracked her up without cracking her up.

“I’m kidding,” Jules quickly said. “Of course you’re not narcissists. And by the way, you smell really good right now.”

“Thank you.” Ash yawned. “Maybe, if I don’t make it in the theater, they can write that on my gravestone: ‘She smelled really good.’”

“‘She had olfactory brilliance.’”

They were quiet. “I wonder exactly when we’ll die,” Ash said. They both thought of their own eventual deaths and felt sorry for themselves, but that passed quickly, like a shiver. Then Ash said, “I wonder when Goodman will die. And if he’ll do anything with his life first. If only he’d had someone like Old Mo Templeton to guide him along and be his mentor. Help him with his architecture, or whatever else he decided to do. If only he’d had a talent that was brought out and
worked on.
That would have helped. Talent gets you through life.”

At the end of the weekend in Underhill Ash seemed stronger. “I can’t thank you enough, Mrs. Jacobson,” she said as she stood in the kitchen, clutching her weekend bag. “It’s just been so stressful at home, and I didn’t know what to do—” Here her voice collapsed, and Jules’s mother impetuously hugged her.

“I’m so glad you came,” Lois said. “I see why Jules is so fond of you. And you’re beautiful too,” she added. Jules knew that mentioning Ash’s beauty was an indirect comment on Jules’s lack of it, but somehow it was okay, even pleasurable, to hear her mother say this. Jules took pride in Ash’s beauty, as if she’d had something to do with it. “You are welcome anytime,” Lois went on. “Just say the word.”

“Yes, there’s always a place for you on exclusive Cindy Drive,” Jules said. “Only three blocks away from the Dress Cottage.”

Ash said, “Oh, shush,” smiling, and waved her off.

That afternoon, after they’d driven Ash back to the train and then returned home, Jules went into the drawer of the hutch cabinet and took out the ashtray and the embroidered pillow, returning them to their rightful places in the living room. Within half an hour, though, she saw that her mother had removed them again. From then on, Lois Jacobson didn’t seem to feel as threatened when Jules went into the city weekend after weekend.

Life at the Wolf household remained in trauma mode. Still no one knew where Goodman was; he might be anywhere at all. Whenever he was found, or whenever he returned home, he would immediately be arrested; the lawyer had made this clear to them. They waited for Goodman to call or write so they could find out if he was okay and urge him to come home, telling him they knew he’d gotten frightened, but this wasn’t the way to handle it. They knew he was innocent, they would remind him, and soon everyone else would know it too. Come home, they would say. But he didn’t contact any of them, and the school year ended like a regular school year, except Goodman didn’t graduate from high school, didn’t advance in life as he was meant to do. He hadn’t had a chance to mature into something other than what he was. His story paused there.

This was to be the last summer the rest of them would spend at Spirit-in-the-Woods, except now Ash didn’t even know if she could bear to go. Cathy wouldn’t be coming back, of course; she still wasn’t speaking to any of them. Troy was too old now even if he’d wanted to come back, which of course he didn’t. The absence of Goodman—who also would’ve been too old to come back, since he was supposed to have gone off to college in the fall—made the idea of a summer there seem wrong. But the following year they would all be too old, so Ash, Jules, Ethan, and Jonah decided they would go back one more time.

Not long after Jules arrived again in Belknap at the end of June, she knew it was a mistake. Most of the other campers seemed so much younger
now. There were plenty of new ones, and some were a little different from campers of the past. On the path to the lake, Jules overheard a very basic, crude
fart
joke
.
Did these kids not know that if you were going to make a fart joke, the punch line would have to have something to do with, perhaps,
Brecht
? In Girls’ Teepee 2 for this final summer lived Jules, Ash, Nancy Mangiari, and Jane Zell. Sleeping in Cathy Kiplinger’s old bed was a new girl, Jenny Mazur, an introverted glassblower with a habit of talking in her sleep, the only time she let loose. “Mother! I did not betray you!” she cried as the others listened with prurient fascination.

Ash’s sadness and preoccupation with Goodman were known throughout the camp. Sometimes at night, when the trees scratched the roof of their teepee, or a flashlight popped on through the pines and then the beam dashed away, Ash briefly held the fantasy that Goodman had come back. “It’s not impossible, Jules. He knows where to find us,” Ash once whispered. “He’ll tell us he’s been hiding out somewhere around here, maybe living in some shitty apartment in Pittsfield. There was this Grimms’ fairy tale that our mother used to read us,” she said. “A brother and sister run off into the woods to get away from their evil stepmother. It’s always a stepmother, never a stepfather; even fairy tales are sexist. Anyway, the brother gets really thirsty, but the stepmother has enchanted all the springs. And there’s this one spring that, if he drinks from it, he’ll turn into a deer. And the sister says, ‘Please don’t drink from it, because if you turn into a deer you’ll run away from me.’ And he says, ‘No, no, I promise I won’t,’ and he drinks from it and of course he turns into a deer.”

“And runs away from her like she predicted, right?” said Jules. “To join a hunt? I remember this fairy tale.”

“Yes, right. And she’s devastated. But he keeps coming back to visit her in his deer form, and with his hoof he knocks on the door of the house where she’s staying, and he says, ‘My little sister, let me in.’ He keeps doing this, night after night, and he goes back and forth into the woods. And one night he comes to her and says, ‘My little sister, let me in.’ And she lets him in and sees that he’s been wounded. That’s what I keep thinking,” said Ash in an agitated voice. “That Goodman’s going to show up one night, and he’ll be wounded in a way. Something will have happened to him out there. And I’ll let him in, and take care of him, and make him stay with me.” She looked somewhat childishly at Jules. “Don’t you think it could happen?” she asked.

“In real life?” Jules said, and Ash nodded. “Maybe,” was all she could bring herself to say.

But Goodman didn’t come. The scratching heard on the roof was an overhanging claw of a branch, and the footsteps outside the teepee were wandering counselors, whose flashlights threw yellow scattershot beams among the pines. Everything was different this summer. Even Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, the Icelandic weaver and lifeguard, had not returned. Someone said she’d gotten married over there. The Wunderlichs, too, seemed exponentially older. Ida Steinberg, the cook, looked especially tired. Those three had been there since the founding of Spirit-in-the-Woods—the Wunderlichs
were
Spirit-in-the-Woods—and they always said that the camp kept them young, but perhaps you could not drink from that particular spring forever.

Ethan did the best work he’d ever done, working side by side with Old Mo Templeton, who was now, Jules remarked once to Ethan—then immediately regretted it—Decrepit Mo Templeton. One day Jules saw Ethan helping Mo walk to the animation shed, carefully holding the arm of his mentor to make sure he didn’t trip and fall. Sometimes, Ethan would mention to Old Mo a detail from the early days of animation and ask him a complicated question about it, and in the past Old Mo had always replied expansively. But now, when Ethan referred to the short
Skedaddle
, from the Slowpoke Malone series of 1915, Mo smiled and just said, “Yes, that was good work they did back then.” Yet when Ethan wanted to hear more about it, Mo touched his hand and murmured, “All your questions, Ethan, all your questions.” And that was that. It was as if Mo Templeton was conserving his energy for waking up in the morning when the day started, and walking down the hill, and sitting among these teenagers and their ideas, and looking at their drawings of figures who seemed suddenly and exhaustingly in motion.

It was time for the old to step aside and the young to take a big step up. It was unequivocally time. Over the summer, Jules and Ash walked everywhere together around the grounds, going deep into the pine forest where they’d never wanted to go before. Two girls less interested in nature and natural phenomena could hardly be found anywhere on earth. But now nature walks seemed to be called for, and the Dr. Scholl’s sandals that Jules and Ash both wore pressed down on the bed of red and brown pine needles. Occasional groups of mushrooms popped up after a rainstorm like carbuncles. Both girls jerked away when they saw an embryonic bird that had been munched upon by a carpet of flying and walking creatures. When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.