The Interestings (4 page)

But the newly forming friendship was paused briefly by the presence of Cathy Kiplinger, who moved into the center of the teepee, taking off her own big, complicated bra and unharnessing her duo of woman-sized breasts, distracting Jules with the thought that these spheres inside this conical building were the equivalent of a square peg in a round hole. Jules wished Cathy weren’t here at all, and that Jane Zell wasn’t here either, or somber-faced Nancy Mangiari, who sometimes played the cello as if she were performing at the funeral of a child.

If it were just Jules and Ash, she would have told her everything. But the other girls were circling, and now Cathy Kiplinger, dressed only in a long pink T-shirt, was passing around a huckleberry crumble purchased at the bakery in town that afternoon, and a warped fork from the dining hall. Someone—could it have been silent Nancy? Or maybe Cathy?—said, “God, it tastes like sex!” and everyone laughed, including Jules, who wondered if sex, when it was really good, actually offered the pleasures of a huckleberry crumble—all goo and give.

The subject of Ethan Figman was now lost for the night. The crumble went around a few times, and everyone’s lips became tribally blue, and then the girls lay down in their separate beds and Jane Zell told them about her twin sister who had a shocking neurological disorder that sometimes caused her to slap herself in the face over and over.

“Oh my God,” said Jules. “How awful.”

“She’ll be sitting there, just totally calm,” said Jane, “and she suddenly starts to smack herself. Wherever we go, she makes a scene. People freak out when they see it. It’s horrible, but I’m used to it by now.”

“You get used to whatever you get,” Cathy said, and they all agreed. “Like, I’m a dancer,” Cathy continued, “but I have these enormous boobs. It’s like carrying around sacks of mail. But what am I supposed to do? I still want to be a dancer.”

“And you should try to do what you want,” Jules said. “We should all try to do whatever we want in life,” she added with sudden and unexpected conviction. “I mean, what is the point otherwise?”

“Nancy, why don’t you take out your cello and play us something,” Ash said. “Something with atmosphere. Mood music.”

Even though it was late, Nancy got her cello from the storage area and sat on the edge of her bed, her bare legs opened wide, intently playing the first movement of a cello suite by Benjamin Britten. As Nancy played, Cathy stood on someone’s camp trunk, her head perilously near the slant of the ceiling, and she began to perform a slow, free-form routine like a go-go dancer in a cage. “This is what guys like,” Cathy said confidently. “They want to see you move. They want your boobs to swing a little, as if you could hit them in the head with them and knock them unconscious. They want you to behave like you have
power,
but also like you know they’d win the battle if it ever came down to it. They are so predictable; all you have to do is move your hips in a kind of swivel, and get a kind of jiggle rhythm going, and they’re completely under the influence. It’s like they’re cartoon characters with eyeballs popping out of their heads on springs. Like something Ethan would draw.” Beneath the pink T-shirt her body moved in snake segments, and once in a while the shirt would ride up so that the vaguest hint of pubic darkness was revealed.

“We are the modern music and porn teepee!” Nancy cried with glee. “A full-service teepee, to meet every male’s artistic and perverted needs!”

All the girls felt fired up, overstimulated. The stark music and the laughter, drifting from the teepee and scribbling among the trees, headed toward the boys, a message in the darkness before lockdown. Jules thought of how she was nothing like Ethan Figman. But she was nothing like Ash Wolf either. She existed somewhere on the axis
between
Ethan and Ash, slightly disgusting, slightly desirable—not yet claimed by one side or the other. It was right not to have agreed to go over to Ethan’s side just because he had wanted her to. As he’d said, she had nothing to feel sorry about.

•   •   •

O
ver the following few weeks of the eight-week season, Jules and Ethan spent a great deal of time alone together. When she wasn’t with Ash, she was with him. Once, sitting with him by the swimming pool at dusk, with a couple of bats soaring around the chimney of the Wunderlichs’ big gray house across the road, she told him about her father’s death. “Wow, he was only forty-two?” Ethan said, shaking his head. “Jesus, Jules, that’s so young. And it’s just so sad that you’ll never see him again. He was your
dad
. He probably used to sing you all these little songs, am I right?”

“No,” said Jules. She let her fingers drape through the cold water. But then suddenly she remembered that her father had sung her one song, once. “Yes,” she said, surprised. “One. It was a folk song.”

“Which one?”

She began to sing in an unsteady voice:

“Just a little rain falling all around,

The grass lifts its head to the heavenly sound,

Just a little rain, just a little rain,

What have they done to the rain?”

She stopped abruptly. “Go on,” Ethan said, and so, embarrassed, Jules continued:

“Just a little boy standing in the rain,

The gentle rain that falls for years.

And the grass is gone,

The boy disappears,

And rain keeps falling like helpless tears,

And what have they done to the rain?”

When she was finished, Ethan just kept looking at her. “That killed me,” he said. “Your voice, the lyrics, the whole thing. You know what that song’s about, right?”

“Acid rain, I think?” she said.

He shook his head. “Nuclear testing.”

“Do you know
everything
?”

He shrugged, pleased. “See,” he told her, “I heard that back when it was written, when Kennedy was president, the government had been doing all this aboveground nuclear testing, which put strontium ninety into the air. And the rain washed it down into the ground, and it got into the grass, where all the cows ate it and then gave milk, which children drank. Little radioactive children. So this was a protest song. Your dad was political? A lefty?” he said. “That’s very cool. My dad is a bitter slug ever since my mom left. You know the fighting that Wally Figman’s parents do in my cartoons? The shrieking and wailing? I think you can guess where I get my ideas.”

“My father wasn’t political,” said Jules. “And he definitely wasn’t a lefty, at least not in a big way. I mean, he was a Democrat, but he certainly wasn’t radical,” she said, with a laugh at the absurdity of this idea. But she clipped off her own laugh as she thought of how she hadn’t known her father all that well. He had been Warren Jacobson, a quiet man, a ten-year employee of Clelland Aerospace. He’d once told his daughters, without their having asked, “My job does not define me.” But Jules hadn’t asked him what did define him. She had almost never asked him anything about himself. He was thin, fair-haired, burdened, and now he was dead at forty-two. So she began to get stirred up thinking of how she would never know him very well. And then she and Ethan were crying together, which led to inevitable kissing, which wasn’t nearly as bad this time, because they both tasted identically of mucus, and it didn’t matter to Jules that she didn’t feel excited. Instead, she felt mostly desperate thinking about her father being dead. Ethan intuited that this was the exact kind of foreplay Jules Jacobson required.

They went along like this, and she came to expect that they would sometimes go off together and have such moments. In this and other ways, Jules’s life was changing rapidly here, advancing like a flip-book. She’d been
no one
, and now she was right in the middle of this group of friends, admired for her previously unknown sly humor. Jules was a source of interest to all of them, and she was Ash’s great friend and Ethan’s object of worship. Also, since she’d been here, she’d instantly become an
actress,
trying out for plays and getting parts. She hadn’t even wanted to audition at first. “I’m not nearly as good as you,” she’d said to Ash, but Ash had advised, “You know the way you are when you’re with all of us? How great it is? Just be that way onstage. Come out of yourself. You have nothing to lose, Jules. I mean, if not now, when?”

The theater department would be putting on Edward Albee’s
The Sandbox
, and Jules was given the part of Grandma. She played the role as an ancient but lively crone, talking in a voice that she didn’t know she had. Ethan had given her voice lessons, telling her how he came up with voices for
Figland
. “What you want to do,” he’d said, “is speak it exactly the way you hear it in your head.” She played a woman older than anyone she’d ever known; at the performance, two actors carried her onstage and set her down gently. Even before Jules started speaking, but just made vague cud-chewing facial movements, the audience began to laugh, and the laughter fed upon itself in the way it sometimes did, so that by the time she spoke her first line, a couple of people in the audience were snorting in laughter, and one excitable counselor almost seemed to be shrieking. Jules
killed,
everyone said when it was over. She absolutely killed.

The laughter seduced her that time and every time afterward. It made her stronger, more serious, poker-faced, determined. Later, Jules would think that the rolling, appreciative laughter of the audience at Spirit-in-the-Woods had cured her of the sad year she’d just gotten through. But it wasn’t the only element that had cured her; the whole place had done that, as though it was one of those nineteenth-century European mineral spas.

One night, the entire camp was instructed to gather on the lawn; no other information was given. “I bet the Wunderlichs are going to announce that there’s been an outbreak of syphilis,” someone said.

“Or maybe it’s a tribute to Mama Cass,” someone else said. The singer Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas had died a few days earlier, supposedly having choked to death on a ham sandwich. The ham sandwich would turn out to be a rumor, but the death was real.

“When is it going to start? The natives are restless,” said Jonah as they all waited.

Ethan and Jules sat together on a blanket on the hill and waited. He leaned his head against her shoulder, wanting to see what she would do; at first, she did nothing. Then he moved his head down into her lap, settling himself in and looking up at the darkening sky and the jumpy Japanese lanterns strung on wires between trees. As if cued to do so, Jules began to stroke his head of curls, and each time she did, his eyes closed in happiness.

Manny Wunderlich appeared before everyone and said, “Hello, hello! I know you’re all wondering what’s going on, and so without further ado I’d like to introduce our very special surprise guest.”

“Look,” said Ash from down the row, and Jules craned between the people in front of her to see a woman in a sunset-colored poncho carrying a guitar by its neck, picking her way across the grass to take her place on a platform. It was Jonah’s famous folksinger mother, Susannah Bay! In person she was beautiful in the way of very few mothers, her hair long and black and straight—the opposite of Jules’s mother with her acorn-cap hairdo and Dacron pantsuits. The crowd cheered her.

“Good evening, Spirit-in-the-Woods,” said the folksinger into a microphone when everyone was quiet. “Are you having a great summer?” A series of affirmative calls rose up. “Believe me, I know this is the best place on earth. I spent a couple of summers here too. Nothing is as close to heaven as this little patch of land.” Then she strummed hard on her guitar and began to sing. In person her voice was as strong as it sounded on her albums. She sang several songs that everyone knew, and some folk standards to which the audience was invited to sing along. Before her last song, she said, “I’ve brought an old friend with me tonight who happened to be in the neighborhood, and I’d like to invite him to join me now. Barry, would you come on up? Barry Claimes, everybody!”

To applause, the terrier-bearded folksinger Barry Claimes, formerly of the sixties trio the Whistlers, and, as it happened, briefly Susannah Bay’s boyfriend back in the summer of ’66, came up beside her with a banjo strapped around him. “Hello, my lads and ladies!” he called out to the crowd. Though the Whistlers had all worn peaked caps and turtlenecks in concert and on their album covers, Barry had abandoned both when he struck out on his own in 1971. These days, he tucked his wavy brown hair behind his ears and wore soft, checkered shirts that made him look like a mild mountaineer. He waved modestly to the campers and then began to play his banjo while Susannah played her guitar. The two instruments came together and then backed off shyly, then came together again, finally forming the preamble to Susannah’s signature song. Quietly at first, then more forcefully, she began to sing:

“I’ve been walkin’ through the valley, and I’ve been walkin’ through the weeds

And I’ve been tryin’ to understand just why I could not meet your needs.

Did you want me to be like she was?

Is that all that was in your heart?

A prayer that the wind would carry us . . .

Carry us . . . apart . . .”

After the performance, which was full of feeling and warmly received, everyone stood around and ladled up pink punch from a big metal bowl. Tiny fruit flies twittered on the surface of the punch, but mostly no one could see the rest of the bugs in the descending dark. The number of them ingested that summer was formidable: bugs in punch bowls, in salads, even scarfed down on the inhale in openmouthed sleep at night. Susannah Bay and Barry Claimes mingled with the campers. The two old friends and ex-lovers, moving among the crowd of teenagers, looked happy, flushed, natural—elder-statesman countercultural figures who were treated with appreciation.

“Where’s Jonah?” someone asked. A girl said she’d heard he’d slipped out during his mother’s concert and gone to his teepee, complaining of nausea; several people said it was a shame he didn’t feel well on this night of all nights. Looking at Susannah, it was easy to see the origins of Jonah’s beauty, though it was more tentative and unassuming in its boy form.