“Do I remember him? I’m not brain damaged, Ethan.”
“He just came and went. We put him up like idiots, and we got beaten down, and then time passed. Everything,” he said with passion, “is going to move farther and farther away from what feels familiar. I read somewhere that most of the really intense feelings you’ll ever feel take place right around our age. And everything that comes afterward is going to feel more and more diluted and disappointing.”
“Oh, don’t say that. It can’t be true,” Jules said. “We haven’t even done anything yet. Not really.”
“I know.” They were both quiet and somber, considering this.
“But at least you’re starting to,” Jules said. “Parade magazine thinks so.”
“I mean I haven’t done anything, as in have experience,” he said. “Life experience.”
“Oh, experience like Goodman has?” Jules asked, trying to make her voice sound dismissive, as though what she and Ethan had in their platonic friendship was far superior to the physical pleasures Goodman regularly received from and gave to Cathy Kiplinger. Her mouth on his ear. Her dancerly legs opening so his penis could find its rightful notch.
“Yes, all right, sex and other things. Emotional things,” Ethan said. “Dark, dark moods.”
“You are the least dark person I know,” said Jules. Ethan was deep, and a worrier, but somehow he cheerfully adapted to all situations.
“But why do girls always want someone dark and moody?” Ethan asked. “I see a moody person in your future.”
“Oh, you do?”
“Yes. While I sit at home with no food in my fridge, and my little cartoons, weeping over how the Democrats were crushed in seventy-two. Please send me postcards from out there in the world,” Ethan said. “Mail them to the place where I will spend the rest of my solitary life.”
“And where will that be?”
“Just address the postcards to ‘Ethan Figman, Hollow Tree number six, Belknap, Massachusetts, 01263.’”
“That sounds nice,” Jules said, and she pictured Ethan inside his hollow tree, making tea for himself in a kettle over a fire, wearing a quilted maroon satin robe. In this image he was transformed into some kind of C. S. Lewis furred woodland animal character who still bore Ethan’s distinctive facial features.
“But what if things don’t go well?” Ethan said. “At Spirit-in-the-Woods I’ve always been, you know, the weird-looking animation guy, the roly-poly joint roller, while everyone else understood that things essentially suck. I knew they sucked too. Watching the nightly news, sitting there with my dad with the TV on, eating Beefaroni. But you and I and everyone we know, we were just a little too young to actually see it up close. My Lai, all that horrible tragedy. We sort of fell between the cracks.”
“Yes.” It had hardly occurred to Jules to think about what it might be like not to have fallen between the cracks in the way he described. She hadn’t known what it might feel like to be inside real drama. To do something important. To be brave. What an imponderable thought: bravery.
“I can’t decide if that’s good or bad,” he said. “It’s definitely good, in that we’re not dead. I didn’t die some pointless death in Hanoi, probably accidentally shooting myself with my own M16. On the other hand, it’s bad that we missed out on experience. You know what I want?” Ethan said, suddenly sitting up in the dark den. Fluff clung to his hair from the rug, like a dusting of snow that had landed there when he’d briefly poked his head out from Hollow Tree number 6.
“Experience?” Jules said.
“Yeah, that too, but something else. This will sound pretentious,” said Ethan, “but I want to not think about myself so much.” He looked at her for a reaction.
“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
“I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things—other people, in other places even. I am so tired of all the little ironic in-jokes, and reciting lines from TV shows and movies and books. Everything from the . . . circumscribed world. I want an uncircumscribed world.”
“And an uncircumcised world,” Jules said, for no reason other than that it was the kind of thing they said to each other, calling it wit. It was exactly the kind of talk Ethan was saying he no longer wanted. “You can have that,” she quickly said. “I’m sure you can have all of that.”
“It’ll be my New Year’s resolution,” he said. “So what’s yours?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, let me know when you come up with one,” said Ethan, and he yawned, his mouth so wide that she could see his many fillings.
Jules suspected that her resolution wouldn’t be noble like his. She would want something that concerned herself and her own gratification. And then she suddenly knew what it was: she wanted to be loved by someone who was not Ethan Figman. The cruelty in this realization could knock her over, but she knew she wanted to be loved by someone and to respond to him, even if he was not worthy. Goodman would have been so perfect. She thought of his hand in Cathy Kiplinger’s hair, and his mouth smeared with that other girl’s colorless lip gloss. But Goodman Wolf was already taken, and in so many ways he was a horrible choice, not to mention the critical fact that he did not desire Jules, and would never desire her—and that was the most important element here: He needed to desire her too. She wished she could make Goodman do that this year, which would be the last full year that all of them would be together. Even not knowing that yet, she felt an intuitive urgency. What she wanted—and wanted now—was to be loved by someone who excited her. There was nothing wrong with that. But still it felt unkind to Ethan, and unfair.
In other rooms, the revelers were winding down. “I’m sorry to say that though I am really enjoying this conversation, I have to go to sleep,” said Ethan, and he turned away from Jules, unaware of her secret resolution, giving her the curved wall of his back, which rose and fell into the morning and the true start of 1975.
• • •
Over that next year, the changes among them all were subtle instead of striking. Their faces became longer, their handwriting altered slightly, and their sleeping arrangements shifted. Jules’s New Year’s resolution did not come true, and she stayed absorbed in the relationship dramas of her friends, all of whom went to different schools in the city. In Underhill, Jules sat in the classrooms of her enormous high school, looking out the window in what seemed to be the general direction of New York City. Ash and Jonah were no longer a couple, having broken up in late February, for reasons that were only vaguely explained to the others.
“I’m glad we had a relationship,” Ash would say to Jules on the phone, “but now it’s over. Of course it’s sad, but I’m really busy, so it’s probably just as well.” Ash had written a one-woman play called Both Ends, which was about the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It had been performed at Talent Night at Brearley, her all-girls’ school, and her friends had gone to see it. The auditorium went silent and attentive as Ash stood onstage in a nightgown, holding a single candle, and began to speak so deliberately quietly that everyone instinctively leaned forward so as not to miss a word. “‘My candle burns at both ends,’” she recited. “‘It will not last the night . . .’”
Jonah, since the breakup, had also been reticent about it, but this was more in keeping with his usual way of being. He’d gotten involved in the robotics club at Dalton, and though the other boys who stayed late in the science room with their mechanized creations were nothing like Jonah—none of them had had a girlfriend yet, and none of them would ever have a girlfriend like Ash unless they created her out of robot parts—he didn’t mind, and actually felt serene among cogs and motors and batteries. In Jonah’s reserve, his friends sensed great feeling; to them, Jonah and Ash had experienced a potent but fragile love.
A month later, Goodman and Cathy’s breakup was as loud and difficult as Ash and Jonah’s had been mild. The Wolf family had gone on vacation in March 1975 to Tortola in the British Vi
rgin Islands, and on the soft white beach Goodman met a British girl who was staying at the hotel with her family. Jemma was pretty and sly, and at night Goodman went off with her after both sets of parents were asleep. He came back to the hotel suite once at two a.m. bearing a fresh hickey like a badge, and his father was furious. “We had no idea where you were,” Gil Wolf said. “We thought you’d been kidnapped.” But they hadn’t thought that at all.
Upon the Wolfs’ departure from Tortola, Goodman sensed he wouldn’t ever again see Jemma, the girl who spoke and looked like a sexier and more experienced Hayley Mills, but now he didn’t want to go back to being the boyfriend of Cathy Kiplinger, who made so many demands on him. He bluntly broke up with Cathy the morning after his family returned home, and she cried and called him a lot to try and make him change his mind, and she required long phone calls and hasty meetings with Ash, Jules, Jonah, and Ethan, but still none of them were seriously worried about her.
Then there were a few weeks of social discomfort, and when they all got together on a weekend, either Cathy or Goodman would not appear. They tag-teamed each other in this manner for a while, until finally it seemed that they had both moved on and could bear being in each other’s presence again. But unlike Jonah and Ash, who had simply returned to their previous friendship incarnation, Cathy and Goodman were now strained and strange when together.
Three months later in late June, back at Spirit-in-the-Woods again, the six of them resumed their summer formation full force, though Cathy Kiplinger showed up for their gatherings in Boys’ Teepee 3 less and less frequently. “Where is she?” Goodman asked the other girls, and the answer was always, “Dancing.” Cathy, finally recovered from Goodman, had returned to the dance studio, and despite her too-big breasts and too-wide hips, she still danced with great relief and strength. Her talent wasn’t overlooked here, but was instead celebrated.
“Go get Cathy,” Goodman told Ash one night as they all sat around Boys’ Teepee 3. “Tell her that her presence is requested in this teepee.”
“God, Goodman, why do you care if she’s here?” his sister asked.
“I just want everyone together again like we used to be,” he said. “Come on, go get Cathy. Jacobson, see that she goes, okay?”
So Ash went off with Jules beside her, the mission feeling important and exciting. Already from down the path, music could be heard: Scott Joplin’s saddest rag, “Solace.” Through the unscreened window of the dance studio, the big blond girl was dancing with a tall black boy while a record spun. His name was Troy Mason; he was seventeen, and this was his first summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods. He was from the Bronx, here on scholarship like Jules, a quiet, strongly built dancer with a wide Afro, one of only five nonwhite kids at the camp. (“We must do more outreach,” Manny Wunderlich said.) At lunch earlier that week Troy had mentioned that not only had he never eaten mung bean sprouts before, he had never heard of them. In response, Cathy had piled them on Troy’s plate from the salad bar, and he’d loved them and wanted seconds. Now he was dancing with her to this mournful rag in a dreamy but disciplined way.
Jules and Ash stood at the window like orphans looking in on a feast. Love. That was what they were seeing. Neither of them had had it yet—not the beautiful Ash or the unbeautiful Jules. They were outside love, and Cathy was in. Her breasts would sink the possibility of her dancing professionally, but right now she didn’t have to think about that at all. She had gotten over Goodman Wolf, that exciting but unmanageable figure, that disaster of a boyfriend, and had turned toward someone else. They couldn’t bring her back to Boys’ Teepee 3 tonight, and maybe not any other night either.
From their place in the blackberry bush in the dark, Ash whispered, “What am I supposed to tell my brother?”
• • •
In the late afternoon of the last full day of that second summer, Manny and Edie Wunderlich gathered everyone on the lawn. Some people assumed Susannah Bay was about to appear—she hadn’t yet shown up at all—but Jonah told his friends that his mother wasn’t coming this year. She was finishing a few tracks of an album, having signed with a new label after being rudely dropped by Elektra. This album wasn’t even folk, really, but actually it had “a disco quality,” Jonah said, keeping his voice as unjudgmental as possible. “Disco folk.”
“Dolk,” corrected Ethan.
The Wunderlichs had gathered everyone not to listen to Susannah Bay, and not to watch another president resign, but to have an aerial photograph taken with all the campers lying on the grass head to toe. “Your counselors will be walking around to help you get into position,” Manny boomed to them through a megaphone. He looked ecstatic whenever he got a chance to address the entire camp. Beside him, Edie stood beaming. The Wunderlichs seemed like dinosaurs of the arts, and how could you not respect that? They had known people like Bob Dylan, who, in the early 1960s when he was a lamb-faced, milk-complexioned boy, had sat in their Greenwich Village apartment, sent there by Susannah Bay, a friend of his from the emerging folk scene. “Crash at Manny and Edie’s,” Susannah had apparently told him. “I used to teach guitar at their summer camp. They won’t give you any grief.” The young boy folksinger had shown up on the Wunderlichs’ doorstep in a thin coat with the collar turned up and a hat that looked Cossack, and of course they’d had the generosity and foresight to let him in.
Now Manny Wunderlich stood with his wife on the lawn, explaining how all the campers were going to form letters of the alphabet with their bodies for the aerial photograph, spelling out Spirit-in-the-Woods 1975. The hyphens would be formed by the three youngest and shortest campers. It took more than an hour to get everyone curving the right way, and Manny and Edie walked around and made adjustments like the choreographers of a massive avant-garde performance.
Jules lay with the top of her head against the bottoms of Ethan’s cold bare feet; her own feet touched the big head of Goodman, and she felt with certainty that this was the closest she would ever in her life come to touching him. How pathetic it was that because she was a girl who looked the way she did, she would have to use her feet, and her feet only. For good measure she bent her toes, pressing down against the hard, masculine nut of Goodman’s skull. And as she did, she could feel Ethan’s feet pressing against her own head, for he too was getting in a surreptitious little foot feel, the only kind now permitted him.
As they all lay still, the sounds of an airplane churned in the sky, and then the twin engine came into view. The cook, Ida Steinberg, was up there with Dave, the groundskeeper, who had a pilot’s license. Ida lifted the Nikon F2 and recorded the moment.
That night, at the farewell party in the rec hall, Cathy Kiplinger and Troy Mason held each other and danced to every number, slow or fast. The Rolling Stones played and Cream and the Kinks, with Goodman serving as DJ for the first hour. But the sight of Cathy being held by her dancer boyfriend was too much for Goodman, and he abruptly headed back to Boys’ Teepee 3, where a hasty round of V&Ts were mixed, and Goodman knocked back a few drinks, with everyone else becoming respectfully silent, until he suddenly announced, as if bewildered by this realization, “I am totally plastered.”
From outside the teepee came a particularly strong round beam of light, and behind it appeared the weaving teacher and lifeguard Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, with her hardy Icelandic flashlight, whose chunk of a battery would probably outlive them all. She came into the teepee, saying, “Relax, this is a friendly visit,” and uncharacteristically sat down on one of the boys’ beds, where, even more surprisingly, she lit up a cigarette. “Do not ever do what I’m doing,” Gudrun told them after she took a drag. “First of all, the result of smoking—cancer—is proven. Then there is the safety issue. What is the expression: ‘This place can be engulfed like a tinder-chamber’?”
“That’s not an expression,” Ethan said. “At least,” he added politely, “not one that I’ve heard.” They sat for a while, but after Gudrun put out her cigarette in a collapsible cup and said she should leave, they begged he
r to stay a little longer. She was twenty-eight years old, dark-blond-haired, slightly worn looking but subtly exotic. Jules wondered what it was like to be a bohemian in Reykjavik, and whether Gudrun felt alone there. No one had ever thought to ask the counselor anything about herself. She taught weaving and watched over the swimming pool here at a place where most people didn’t exactly swim. In the mornings she gave diving lessons to a motivated few, though the pool didn’t have the most pristine surface. Leaves would collect, and in the unfurling mist right before the wake-up recording of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony that was played at seven a.m. each day, Gudrun Sigurdsdottir could be seen at poolside with a net, skimming the surface for all the dropped bits of nature and the dead or doomed frogs that had haplessly seaplaned there overnight.
“Gudrun, tell me something,” the very drunk Goodman said. “Why do you think women act the way they do? Being all needy and then getting you completely drawn in, then screwing things up. Doing this little back and forth with you. Why are relationships so fucked up? Does it ever change? Is it different in Denmark?”
“I am not from Denmark, Goodman.”
“Of course you’re not. I knew that. I was just wondering if you knew how it was in Denmark.”
“Nice save, Wolf,” said Ethan.
“What are you asking me exactly?” Gudrun said. “Why do I think the problems between the men and women of the world are the way they are today? You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel—will they follow you over the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?”
Goodman shifted in discomfort. “Something like that,” he said.
“Yes,” said the counselor in a suddenly plangent voice. “Always they will be aching. I wish I could tell you something else, but I wouldn’t be telling the truth. My wise and gentle friends, this is the way it will be from now on.”