“You don’t have to talk to my mother at all,” she said harshly. “It’s not important that she like you.”
He looked at her intently. “Yes, it is.”
Ethan’s face was congested and expressive; all around them people called to him as they had done the first day of camp, when he wore the floppy denim hat that he no longer wore. “You look like Paddington Bear,” Jules had said to him once about the hat.
“And that’s bad?” he asked.
“Well, no, not bad,” she said, hesitating.
“You don’t like the hat.”
“I don’t love it,” she qualified. Always, she would be the one to tell him the truth, even when other people didn’t. The hat made him look worse than usual, and she wanted him to have some dignity.
“If you don’t love it, then I won’t ever wear it again,” he said. “It is already gone. It is dead to me.”
“No, no, wear it,” said Jules plaintively. “It’s not my decision to tell you what you should or shouldn’t wear.”
But the hat never made another appearance, even though he’d been very fond of it before he’d met her. Criticizing how he dressed seemed inappropriate, and she was sorry she’d said anything, because offering an opinion suggested she had a claim over him, and it wasn’t fair to determine his wardrobe when she didn’t want him physically. He would continue on through life as a thick, slightly distorted, doggish-looking boy; and maybe one day, she thought, an equivalent girl would love him, and they would join forces as two homely, wild brains, sitting in bed with pens and pencils and chunky notebooks and gamy breaths. But she was not that girl.
Jules had already also said good-bye to Ash and Cathy and sweet, beautiful Jonah Bay with his guitar. “Jules,” he’d said, taking her hands, “it is so great that you came here. See you soon, okay?” He hugged her, this enigmatic boy who she loved to look at but who she’d never once day-dreamed about.
“Keep playing your guitar,” she said inadequately. “You’re so good.”
“I don’t know, we’ll see,” Jonah said, and he shrugged. Their friendship was even-tempered and not deep.
“See you, Jules,” said Cathy when they said good-bye. “You did well here,” she added, and then she looked past Jules to where two tall, blond, Valkyrian parents were getting out of a long black car. “I’ve got to go,” Cathy Kiplinger said, hugging Jules quickly; Jules could feel Cathy’s breasts push against her and then retreat as she went to greet her mother and father.
Goodman Wolf, to whom Jules had remained silently and stoically attracted all summer, had not sought Jules out even to say a quick good-bye, so she hadn’t sought him out either. But now she wanted to see him one more time, and she strained to find him among all the campers who were on the lawn or lugging bags to cars in the parking lot. Everywhere she looked she saw a mass of crying and embracing people; they seemed to have all experienced a shared trauma. The Wunderlichs wandered among the crowd, telling everyone to work hard and have a good year, and reminding them that they would be together again next summer.
Jules stood looking all around. She picked Goodman Wolf out from behind a screened window in the dining hall, in the now dark, shut-down room. Why was he in there, when everyone else was out here? “I’ll just be a minute,” Jules said to her sister.
“I’m not going to keep loading the car without you, Julie,” said Ellen. “I’m not your frigging maid.”
“I know that, Ellen. I have to go see someone. I’ll be back soon.”
“I didn’t even want to come today,” Ellen added quietly, as if to herself. “Mom made me. She thought it would be nice.”
Jules turned around and went into the dining hall. The smells from breakfast had mostly faded, and would not return for a full year. Still now she could make out a trace of egg and some kind of natural cleaning fluid; but it was all muted and sad, dissipating quickly like skywriting, and the saddest part was the sight of Goodman Wolf sitting at a table by a window, his arms folded, his head half-leaning against the screen, as if in deep, moody thought. When Jules walked in, he looked up.
“Jacobson,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Everyone’s leaving. I saw you and I wondered why you were in here.”
“Oh,” he said. “You know.”
“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”
Ash’s brother lifted his head. “I go through this every summer,” he said. “Today is the bad part.”
“I somehow thought you’d be above it.”
“It’s obvious that what you think and what’s true are different,” Goodman said.
“I guess so,” Jules said, not sure of what she was agreeing with.
Goodman’s body was narrower and longer than at the beginning of the summer, his feet already too big for his very big sandals. He spilled out of every environment he was in. If he had gotten up and walked over to her then, taking her by her shoulders and bluntly laying her down on a tabletop beside the little metal rack with the tamari bottle and the salt shaker studded with rice grains, she would have done anything with him; she would have done it in daylight, with campers everywhere outside, some of them even looking in. As soon as Goodman lay with her on that tabletop, she would have gone into action, moving like one of the occasional sexualized figures in Figland, knowing exactly what to do because Ethan Figman, ironically, had been the one to teach her, both in his animated movies and in the sessions of kiss and stroke that they’d enacted in real life without any success, as far as she was concerned.
“Life is a harsh place,” Goodman said. “At least, my life is. My parents think of me as this fuckup extraordinaire. I want to be an architect—a contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright, you know? But my dad tells me I don’t give it my all. What all? I’m sixteen. And just because I was asked to leave my last school. And because I’m not like Ash.”
“That’s not fair. No one’s like Ash.”
“You tell him that. I am constantly getting shit from him,” said Goodman. “And my mom, she’s a lot nicer about it, but she sort of goes along with him.”
No one here criticized Goodman, as far as Jules knew. He strode freely around the grounds like some indulged, precious wildlife. Summers were apparently the best time for him. Here he could work on his little models of buildings and bridges; here he could get high and make out with girls and slide through a perfect, easy summer. Camp meant everything to him, and of course it meant everything to her too. For both of them, being here was better than being anywhere else. In this way they were oddly similar, though of course she wouldn’t point it out, for he would have insisted it wasn’t true. One day, eventually, Goodman would get serious and things would come together for him, not just here but out there too, she thought. “They shouldn’t do that to you,” Jules said. “You have so much to offer.”
“You think so?” he said. “I suck as a student. I have no ‘follow-through,’ they tell me.” He looked at her again. “You’re a funny little person,” he said after a moment. “A funny little person who got inside the inner circle.”
“What inner circle? Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, because it was a phrase girls sometimes said to boys who got obnoxious and needed to be put on warning.
Goodman just shrugged. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready to leave or something?” he asked, seeming suddenly very sleepy, starting to retreat from her.
“Shouldn’t you?” Jules said, and she came forward without waiting for an answer. She was aware now that the lit corridor behind her was probably illuminating the corona of what remained of her frizzled and rusty perm. Goodman was arrogant, and she allowed him the full display of his arrogance; it was a flaw in him, just as her own physical imperfections and gawkiness made up a flaw in her. But he was also full of possibility like his sister. His idyll was ending today, and she felt sorry for him, and sorry for herself, for her own idyll was ending too.
Jules reached out to give him a good-bye hug, the same way she’d hugged Jonah Bay, the same measure
d level of hug, but behind her she heard footsteps, and then her sister’s voice said, “We’ve just been standing there while other people are driving away, Julie. Are you going to finish loading the car or not?”
Jules turned hard and saw Ellen and her mother, both of them grossly backlit. Enraged, Jules said, “I told you, Ellen, I’ll be right there.”
“It is a big trip, Julie,” her mother added, though her voice was gentle.
Goodman didn’t even introduce himself. He just said, “See you, Jacobson,” then clomped away in his buffalo sandals and went out the banging screen door. Immediately Jules heard cries of “There he is!” And, “Goodman, Robin has her stepmom’s Polaroid and we want to get some pictures with you!” Jules never got to hug him. She never got to feel the press of the bony plate of his chest against herself. He wouldn’t be around her and the others for too much longer, not that they could have known this—only, maybe, sensed it. Goodman was hard and arrogant but also, she now knew, vulnerable. He was the kind of boy who fell out of a tree or dove off a rock cliff and died at seventeen. He was the kind of boy to whom something would happen; it was unavoidable. She would never have the experience of feeling his chest against hers—what a meager desire, a girl’s desire, the desire of “a funny little person”—though of course she would still be able to sense what it would have been like, for her imagination had been lit this summer, and now she could sense anything. She was clairvoyant. But her mother and sister, appearing doltishly in the doorway of the dining hall at an exquisitely unfortunate moment, had kept her from having this actual experience.
“Is that boy someone special to you?” her mother carefully asked.
“Oh sure, that’s likely,” said Ellen.
Jules Jacobson cried so furiously in the moments before leaving camp that when she finally got into the backseat of the car, she could barely see. She had thought, in recent days, that the summer had made her bigger hearted—for now she was open to music of the kind she would never have listened to before, and difficult novels (Günter Grass—or at least she was planning to read Günter Grass) that she would never have read before, and people of the sort she would otherwise never have gotten to know. But in the back of the green Dodge, slowly going over the barely navigable dirt road that led to the main road in Belknap, Jules wondered whether the summer had made her bigger hearted or just meaner. She saw, as if for the first time, the slight hump of fat on the back of her mother’s neck, as though it had been added there with a putty knife. In the passenger mirror, when Ellen pulled it down to look at herself, as she did within seconds after getting into the car, Jules noted the too-thin, surprised curve of her sister’s eyebrows, which created an aesthetic that labeled Ellen Jacobson as someone who would never have fit in at this camp.
Jules was neither bigger hearted now, nor meaner, she decided. She had gone away as Julie and was returning as Jules, a person who was discerning. And as a result she could not look at her mother and sister without understanding the truth of who they were. They had taken her away from the people she would dream about forever. They had taken her away from this. The car reached the main road and paused there, then her mother made a left and hit the gas. Gravel shot out from under the wheels as Jules was sped away from Spirit-in-the-Woods, like the victim of a silent but violent kidnapping.
• • •
The house on Cindy Drive was worse than when she’d left, but it was hard to say exactly why. She would leave her hot bedroom and go into the kitchen for a cold drink, passing the den where her sister and mother cracked pistachio nuts with their teeth like gunshots, and watched brain-dead TV shows. Jules grabbed a can of Tab from a fleet of them that her sister kept in the fridge, then closed herself in her bedroom again and called Ash in New York City.
You never knew who was going to answer the phone at the Wolfs’ apartment. It might be Ash or Goodman or their mother, Betsy—never their father, Gil—or else it might be a family friend who was staying in the Labyrinth for an indefinite period of time. There, then, was the answer to a puzzle that had been laid before Jules when the name “the Labyrinth” had been casually mentioned at camp. Jules had thought maybe it referred to a private club. Instead, it was the building on Central Park West and 91st Street where the Wolf family lived. “Cerberus is our doorman,” Ash had said, and it wasn’t until Jules went to the Underhill Public Library to look up “Cerberus” in the encyclopedia that she even got the reference.
“Come into the city,” Ash said.
“I will, I will.” She could not admit her fear—that in the hard, school-year light of New York, the others would realize they’d made a mistake with her, and they would send her back to where she had come from, gently telling her they would call her soon.
“We’re just hanging around the apartment all day,” Ash said. “Our dad is hysterical about it; he says Goodman is undisciplined and will one day be unemployable. He says he wishes we’d both gone to banking camp. He told me I have to write a big play and make a fortune. My version of A Raisin in the Sun. The white version. He expects nothing less of me.”
“We’re all going to be unemployable,” Jules said.
“So when are you coming?”
“Soon.”
Sometimes at night Jules composed letters to Ash and Ethan and Jonah and Cathy and even to Goodman. The letters to Goodman, she realized, were highly flirtatious. When you wrote flirtatiously, you did not say what you felt; you did not write, “Oh, Goodman, I know you’re not entirely nice, and in fact you’re sort of a dick, but despite everything, you are my heart’s desire.” Instead, you wrote, “Hey, it’s Jacobson here. Your sister says I should come to the city, but I hear it’s a SLUM.” How different this was, she thought, from the way Ethan had been with her. Ethan had said exactly what he felt; he hadn’t tried to hide any of it. He had presented himself before her, letting her know that he was offering himself up, and did she want him? And when she’d said no, he hadn’t pretended that this wasn’t what he’d meant at all; he’d simply said, let’s try again. So they had tried. And though at the end of the failed experiment there were no hard feelings, he’d finally admitted he would always be a little wounded by her rejection. “Just a tiny amount,” he’d said. “It’ll be like when you see someone who’s had a war injury and now it’s a million years later, but their foot still drags a little. Except in my case, you have to know about the injury in the first place in order to see it. But it will last my whole life.”
“That isn’t true,” she said uncertainly.
She wrote Ethan a dutiful letter describing the awfulness of her days in Underhill, and he wrote back at once. His letter was covered with Figland figures. They danced, fished, jumped off buildings, and landed with stars over their heads but otherwise unhurt. They did everything but kiss and have sex. He would not draw those images in a letter to Jules, and because his cartoons often included a depiction of sexual activity, its absence here was notable. But, again, as with a very slight war injury, you had to know about it to see it, or in this case to see that it wasn’t there.
“Dear Jules,” Ethan Figman began, his handwriting thin and tiny and delicate, so different from the thick hand that held the pen.
I am sitting in my room overlooking Washington Square now, and it’s 3 a.m. I’m going to describe my room for you so that you can experience the ambience for yourself. First, imagine the scent of Old Spice in the air, creating an atmosphere both mysterious and nautical. (Should I wear Canoe, like a certain person we know? Would that drive you wild?) Then imagine a room with bars on the window, because my dad and I live on the first floor of this crappy building (no, not ALL people from Spirit-in-the-Woods are rich!), and junkies like to wander around outside. My room is absurdly cluttered, and though I would like to tell you it’s cluttered with the stuff of an artiste, it’s actually filled with Ring Ding wrappers and TV Guides and gym shorts: the kind of room that would make you want to run from me forever. Oh wait, you’ve already done that. (A JOKE!) I know you
haven’t run, exactly, though if I were drawing a cartoon of you, I’d certainly make your hair fly up, as if the wind was carrying you . . .
Carrying you “apart.”
(By the way, you are so fucking right about “carrying you apart” making no sense as lyrics in “The Wind Will Carry You.”)
All right, I am very very tired. My hand has been working all day (cue the jerking-off jokes) and it needs sleep, and so do I. Ash and Goodman want to get everyone together at their place for a reunion very soon. I miss you, Jules, and hope you’re surviving the start of autumn in Underhill, which I hear is known for its fall foliage, and for you.
Love,
Ethan
P.S. A weird thing happened this week: I was chosen for this dumb article in Parade magazine called “Teens to Watch Out For.” The principal at Stuyvesant, my high school, told them about me. An interviewer and a photographer are coming to see me. I will have to commit ritual suicide when the article comes out.
• • •
They all met up in the city on the Saturday after the school year began; Jules took the Long Island Railroad train in, emerging from low-ceilinged Penn Station with a backpack strapped onto her as if she were going hiking. There they were, waiting for her on the wide steps of the main post office across the street—Ash, Goodman, Ethan, Jonah, and Cathy. Already there was a difference between her and them. She had her big bag with her, and a sweater tied around her waist, which suddenly struck her as a bad, senior-citizens-on-holiday type of choice. Her friends were in thin Indian cotton shirts and Levi’s, carrying nothing because they lived here and didn’t need to take their belongings with them like nomads wherever they went.
“You see?” said Ash. “You survived. And now we’re all together again. We are complete.”