“Yes,” the Answer Man says.
Summer
Constance and Ben and their daughters by previous marriages, Charlotte and Jill, were sharing a summerhouse for a month with their friend Steven. There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up — Tracy, India, Yvette, Aster and Bronwyn. The women made a great deal of fuss over Charlotte and Jill, who were both ten. They made the girls nachos and root-beer floats, and bought them latch-hook sets and took them out to the moors to identify flowers. They took them to the cemeteries, from which the children would return with rubbings which Constance found depressing—
This beautiful bud to us was given
To unfold here but bloom in heaven
or worse!
Here lies Aimira Rawson
Daughter Wife Mother
She has done what she could
The children affixed the rubbings to the side of the refrigerator with magnets in the shape of broccoli.
The women would arrange the children’s hair in various elaborate styles that Constance hated. They knew no taboos; they discussed everything with the children — love, death, Japanese whaling methods. Each woman had habits and theories and stories to tell, and each brought a house present and stayed seventy-two hours. They all spent so much time with the children because they could not spend it with Steven, who appeared after 5:00 p.m. only. Steven was writing a book that summer; he was, in his words, “writing an aesthetically complex response to hermetic currents in modern life.” This took time.
Ben was recovering from a heart attack he had suffered in the spring. He and Constance had been in a restaurant, and he had had a heart attack. She remembered the look of absolute attentiveness that had crossed his face. At the time, she had thought he was looking at a beautiful woman behind her and on the other side of the room. The memory, which she recalled frequently, mortified her.
Things appeared different now to Constance: objects seemed to have more presence, people seemed more vivid, the sky seemed brighter. Her nightmares’ messages were far less veiled. Constance was embarrassed at having these feelings, for it had been Ben’s heart attack, after all, not hers. He had always accused her of taking things too personally.
Constance and Ben had been married for five years. Charlotte was Constance’s child from her marriage with Paul, and Jill was Ben’s from his marriage with Susan. The children weren’t crazy about each other, but they got along. It was all right, really, with them. Here in the summerhouse they slept in the attic; in Constance’s opinion, the nicest room in the house. It had two iron beds, white beaverboard walls and a small window, from which one could see three streets converging. Sometimes Constance would take a gin and tonic up to the attic and lie on one of the beds and watch people place their postcards in the mailbox at the intersection. Constance didn’t send postcards herself. She really didn’t want to get in touch with anybody but Ben, and Ben lived in the same house with her, as he had in whatever house they’d been in ever since they’d gotten married. She couldn’t very well send a postcard to Ben.
August was hot and splendid for the most part, but those who stayed for the entire season claimed it was not as nice as July. The gardens were blown. Pedestrians irritably swatted bicyclists who used the sidewalks. There was more weeping in bars, and more jellyfish in the sea.
On the afternoon of the first Friday in August, Constance was in the attic room observing an elderly couple place their postcards in the mailbox with great deliberation. She watched a woman about her own age drop a card in the box and go off with a mean, satisfied look upon her face. She watched an older woman throw in at least a dozen cards with no emotion whatever.
Charlotte came upstairs and told her mother, “A person drowning imagines there’s a ladder rising vertically from the water, and he tries to climb that ladder. Did you know that? If he would only imagine that the ladder was horizontal he wouldn’t drown.”
Charlotte left. Constance sat on a bed and looked around the room. On the bureau mirror were photographs of two little boys, Charlotte’s and Jill’s boyfriends. Their names were Zack and Pete. They were just little boys but there they were. It worried Constance that the children should already have boyfriends. Another photograph, which Constance had not seen before, showed a large dog in front of a potted evergreen. Constance was not acquainted with either him or his name. She got up and began picking up candy wrappers that were scattered around the room and putting them in her empty glass. She was thirty-seven years old. She thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that American lives have no second act.
Constance went downstairs to the kitchen, where Tracy was drinking some champagne she had brought, and waiting for Steven to appear at five o’clock.
“I just love it here,” Tracy said. “I love it, love it, love it.”
Her eyes were shining. She was a good sport but she had rather bad skin. She was a vegetarian; for three days after she left, the children demanded bean curd. She was Steven’s typist in the city, where she and her epileptic lab, Scooter, lived in the same apartment building as Jill’s aunt.
“You were in my apartment a long, long time ago,” Tracy told Jill, “when you were a little tiny girl, and you pulled Scooter’s tail and he growled at you and you said, ‘Stop that at once,’ and he did.”
“I can’t remember that,” Jill said.
“It’s a small world,” Tracy said, pouring herself more champagne. She sighed. “Scooter’s getting along now.”
Charlotte and Jill were sitting on either side of Tracy at the kitchen table, making lists of the names they wanted to call their children. Charlotte had Victoria, Grover and Christopher; Jill had Beatrice, Travis and Cone.
“Cone,” Tracy asked. “How can you name a child Cone?”
Constance looked at the ornately lettered names. The future yawned ahead, filled with individuals, each expecting to be found.
“Do you swim,” Constance asked Tracy.
“I do,” Tracy said solemnly. “I just gave the girls a few pointers about panic in the water.”
“Would you like to go swimming,” Constance asked.
“It’s almost five,” Tracy said. “Steven will be coming down any moment.”
“Cone is both a nice shape and a nice name,” Jill said.
“Would you like to go swimming?” Constance asked the girls.
“No thanks,” they said.
Ben came in the kitchen door, chewing gum. Since his heart attack, he had given up smoking and chewed a great deal of gum. He was tanned and smiling, but he moved a little oddly, as though he were carrying something awkward. Constance got a little rush every time she saw Ben.
“Would you like to go swimming with me,” Constance asked.
“Sure,” Ben said.
They drove out to the beach and went swimming. On the bluff above the beach was the white silo of a loran station, which sent out signals that enabled navigators to determine their position by time displacement. Constance and Ben swam without touching or talking. Then they went home.
—
India came the next weekend. Tracy’s champagne bottle held a browning mum. India was secretive and feminine. She brought two guests of her own, Fred and Miriam. They all lived on a farm in South Woodstock, Vermont, not far from the huge quartz testicle stones there. “There are megalithic erections all over our farm,” India told Constance.