Was she really old?
Relatively. But it was much stranger to admit this than it was upsetting. As long as nothing terrible happened this summer—no campers went missing or were injured in a kiln explosion or died (Jules had nightmares of making that phone call to parents)—she wouldn’t have to worry about how much time had passed between then and now. Dennis puttered around with a clipboard, helping send everyone to the right teepee. None of the parents wanted to leave that first day. They lingered on the lawn and in the teepees, helping their children unpack each item individually from duffels and trunks. One mother said, with a wistful face, “Oh, if only I’d known about this place when I was growing up.” Many photographs were snapped of smiling or unsmiling teenagers indulging their mothers and fathers one final time. The parents would post them on Facebook immediately. The day lengthened, the sun dipped, and Jules and Dennis finally asked a percussionist to stand at the top of the hill and bang the gong she’d brought, at which point Dennis called into a megaphone, “Now it’s time for all families to say their farewells.”
Then somehow they managed to send the parents away, and the camp looked the way it was meant to. Not empty, as it had been all spring since Jules and Dennis had moved up here and begun living in the Wunderlichs’ house across the road. Running a summer camp for teenagers wasn’t as challenging as running one for younger kids, Jules had been told by veterans of this world on a summer camp directors’ Internet message board. Hardly anyone got homesick. There were no bullies. There was the likelihood of sexual activity and also drug use, but these would be hidden and beyond your control. Mostly, Jules thought, the kind of teenagers who came to Spirit-in-the-Woods came to do the art they loved and to be around similarly inclined teenagers. Every summer in recent years, though, enrollment had dropped further; a few of the teepees now sat empty. The Wunderlichs had sent Jules and Dennis to man a booth at several camp fairs that winter—loud, dull events held in high school gyms around the tristate area. Parents and kids gathered at other booths that promised a summer of “xtreme” sports, or “a 24/7 soccer extravaganza.” Even the booth for a juvenile diabetics’ camp called, almost tauntingly, Sugar Lake, had more customers than the Spirit-in-the-Woods booth did. The camp could not survive like this much longer.
“What I would love,” Manny had said after Jules and Dennis had been hired, “is for you to give the place new life not through some expensive computer lab or sports team—we’ll do the llamas, but that’s it—but through the passion you feel and the memories you hold.”
Ordering raw chicken thighs and broccoli and extra-firm tofu in industrial bulk was such a new and particular task that it felt revelatory. Overseeing repairs to the theater was gratifying too, though the building itself seemed much smaller than it once had. Being onstage in 1974 had felt like appearing on Broadway; now, the performance space revealed itself as a small square with a floor that was dotted with remnants of old masking tape. As for the teepees: how could anyone bear to live in them? One day shortly before the season started, Jules had gone into Boys’ Teepee 3 and sat down on the floor in the corner. All she could feel was the filth of the room and the choking musk of the years. She stood up almost immediately and went outside to get some air. Apparently you didn’t require air when you were a teenager. You made your own air.
On the opening night of camp, the counselors put on a show introducing the campers to all the different classes that would be available that summer. The music counselor, a rangy guy who called himself Luca T., played piano in the rec hall while the other counselors began to sing a song they’d collectively written:
“You won’t feel like a freak, if you try batik . . .
You can get your ass goin’ with a little glassblowin’ . . .”
At the end, the campers seemed jazzed up; no one could stay sitting anymore, and they jumped to their feet. Jules and Dennis stood at the microphone and made a few comments about what a great summer it would be. Jules told them, “I used to be a camper here myself,” but she was confronted with a squeal of feedback, and even when she repeated her words, she saw that it didn’t matter to them that she, a middle-aged woman with a sweater draped over her T-shirt and the kind of softened, undefined features that their mothers shared, had once been a camper here. They didn’t care, or even really believe it. Because if they did believe it, then they would have had to think that one day they too would become softened and undefined.
“This summer will be amazing,” Dennis said to them when he stood up at the mike. “Just watch.” He liked being here, seeing what Jules had been talking about all these years. Also, being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, its unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow. Up here in Belknap, they lived for free in the Wunderlichs’ big house, and their job was straightforward. No striving was necessary.
Ash had said that she envied them the decision to live a simpler life, and, of course, the decision to return to the place they’d once loved. You almost never got an opportunity to do that in life. Of course, Ash said, Jules and Dennis had to take the job, even though it meant changing and reorganizing their lives around it. “Once you step on that train,” Ash said, by which she meant once they had contacted the Wunderlichs and arranged an interview, “you can’t get off. What are you going to do, not accept the offer? I wish more than anything that Ethan and I could move up there with you.” This was a lie, a friendship lie. Ash was currently directing a gender-reversed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the terrifying central figure was now called Big Mommy. Possible new theater projects were arrayed before her. She would never give everything up to move to Spirit-in-the-Woods, and of course neither would Ethan, but she could see why Jules and Dennis might.
Now the floor of the rec hall was cleared, a DJ station was hastily set up, and music chugged through the long room. Jules recognized none of it. It was jangly, slidey techno, with an occasional human voice speaking almost accidentally. The DJ, an electric bass player named Kit Campbell, was fifteen, small, appealing, and capable. She had short spiky dark hair and pale skin. She was stylish in miniature, her shorts hanging low, her combat boots unlaced. This was her first summer here, and the other kids seemed drawn to her. By the end of the night Kit was ringed by several campers—a plain, white girl; an unplain black girl; two boys—one in eyeliner, the other studlike and swaggering, his baseball cap on backward—and they headed out, the girls doing hip bumps, the boys with hands shoved into pockets, all of them in a puppyish, coed knot.
Jules and Dennis walked across the dark lawn with flashlights, following the campers who zigzagged and looped around and hollered. She wished she could drop her flashlight with a thud and run ahead to catch up with them. But she had no place there, and so she stayed with her husband, who she could tell was content walking slowly, just the two of them. Finally, up ahead, the girls went one way and the boys went the other. Jules wondered if some of them had arranged to meet up later, though as camp directors she and Dennis were supposed to keep that from happening. It wasn’t that this place was about sex; it was more about the end of childhood aloneness, that lone-pilgrim-in-a-bed situation you found yourself in up until adolescence, when suddenly aloneness started to become unbearable, and you needed togetherness at all hours of the day and night.
Here was Dennis now, clicking off his flashlight and pulling open the unlocked door of the Wunderlichs’ house. “We will reconvene at some mutually agreeable point near the end of the summer and see where we stand,” Edie had said to them before she and Manny moved to a cottage they’d rented in Maine. For now, the Wunderlichs had left all their belongings behind, and the walls of the house were a tribute to summers past, and also to a Greenwich Village folk scene that no longer existed. Campers had never been invited in here; when Jules and Dennis arrived in April, it was the first time Jules had ever seen the inside.
“Aren’t you glad not to
be sleeping in a teepee tonight?” Dennis asked as they walked through the dim entrance and turned on an overhead light. “You grew up, and so now you get to sleep in a real house.”
“Yes, thank God,” Jules said, mostly to be agreeable. She didn’t want to be in one of the teepees, but she also didn’t particularly want to be in this house now, either. She was restless, suddenly realizing that there was nowhere to go at night here, unless you wanted to wander around in the dark. She hadn’t felt that way before tonight. The city at least gave you the option of night-crawling; if you couldn’t sleep, you could find an all-night diner, not that Jules had done that many times in her life. But she and Dennis were here in the house for the night, the whole summer, perhaps years, perhaps for good. She wondered what was happening off in the teepees right now. Maybe she’d volunteer to do patrol before bed one night this week, a task that was almost always left to the counselors.
Upstairs in the bedroom, Dennis lay down on the side of the high old bed that he’d claimed in April: Manny’s side, clearly. When they moved in, Manny’s night table still held pieces of male paraphernalia: nail clippers, a much-squeezed tube of cream for athlete’s foot. “So?” said Dennis when Jules climbed into bed and turned off the light. “It started out okay, yes?”
“Yes. That’s what we’ll tell people. ‘It started out okay.’ And then we’ll segue into the terrible story.”
“The kiln tragedy,” he said.
“Or the sprouts tragedy.”
“They looked so innocent, those sprouts,” Dennis said. “The kids just piled them on their plates. If only we’d known!”
They laughed tentatively, as if they could ward off the possibility of something actually going badly wrong. Whatever happened, it would be their responsibility now. Already they’d received a couple of e-mails from parents. “I’m going to call Rory,” Jules said. “She told me to let her know right away how it was going.”
“Tell her I liked her e-mail,” said Dennis. “The one with the link to all those camp jokes. Lots of punchlines about bears and latrines.”
They’d gotten a crash course in camp directorship from Manny and Edie. The word “safety” came up a lot. The property had to be a secure place, with outsiders kept out and with campers and staff operating all the equipment in the workshops correctly. Though there were endless worries, and provisions for emergencies to consider, you could delegate a lot of the menial tasks to the underpaid but cheerful counselors, who had come here from all over the United States and, for some reason, Australia. American summer camps were routinely packed with Australian counselors. Jules had had a brief but unrealistic fantasy that somehow Rory would want to join the staff, but she preferred to spend the summer with her friends in Oneonta, where she had a job in a plant nursery. She promised to visit at the end of the season, “to see your midlife crisis in action, Mom,” she had written in an e-mail.
The idea of calling Rory tonight became less necessary. Rory would want her mother to be happy, and that was all. On the phone they would murmur at each other in the way they always did. Their worlds were far apart: the plant nursery and the dream of art. They didn’t need to speak tonight; they could talk tomorrow. Jules and Dennis turned to each other, as much because of the oddness of their new life here as anything else. They both wanted motion and forgetting. They wanted sex because they could have it, unlike the kids across the road, who were told they had to lie separately each night, their bodies poised in a clench of anticipation, while counselors circled with an intrusion of dancing flashlights. Dennis propped himself up on an elbow and craned his head toward her. His black hair had become increasingly spattered with gray in recent months, and his body, always so hairy, now seemed like a forest floor, all silver pine needle and turning leaf. You accepted this when you were this age. Jules thought of her mother, alone in the bed in the house in Underhill. Spending her forties alone, and her fifties, and her sixties, and then her seventies! All of those decades, alone and aching, just like the teenagers across the road, but without the reassurance that all of it would probably end in a blissful sexual fusillade. Why hadn’t her mother ever gone out on a date? How had she lived without sex or love? Sex could be love, or else, like now, it could be a very good distraction.
Dennis’s mouth was opening, his head tilting, his large hand cupping Jules’s breast that dropped down like a crookedly hung ornament. Isadora Topfeldt had long ago claimed that Dennis was “uncomplicated,” and though this wasn’t really true, what was truer was that he’d never felt as entitled as Jules did. He was here with her in Belknap because it was what she wanted, and she’d convinced him it could work. It took care of so many unmet needs. Dennis, cupping her breast, stroking her arm, said, somewhat anxiously, “You’re happy?” He wished his intermittently envying wife could finally, finally be fully happy again. Happy and electric. He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned her away from him, on her side, her face almost flush against Edie Wunderlich’s night table, which held a very old framed photograph of a young man and a young woman, bohemians from a long-ago day whooping it up on a rooftop in the city. Behind Jules, Dennis moved into a good position, and with an indecipherable syllable of acknowledgment, and with the briefest of overtures, he began to impel himself into her. Her own immediate replies made her self-conscious, as if one of the teenagers from the camp might have stealthily slipped into the house, and was even now standing in the doorway of the darkened room, shifting from foot to foot while watching an improbably carnal scene between these two people in their fifties. At any moment the gangly teenager would quietly say, “Um, excuse me? Jules? Dennis? A boy in my teepee has a nosebleed that won’t stop.”
But the campers were on the other side of the road, with no interest in making the crossing. If anything went wrong, a counselor would call. The Wunderlichs’ heavy red rotary-dial telephone sat on Dennis’s night table, at the ready. It would certainly ring in the night over the course of the eight weeks; Manny and Edie had warned them that it always rang at least once a summer, sometimes more than once, and sometimes it was serious. For now, on the first night, no one was calling, and they were alone in the old groaning maple bed. Sex between these middle-aged people—not quite the Wunderlichs but not remotely teenagers—seemed to have no reason to be except for pleasure or escape. She knew it excited Dennis to think that she was fully happy, that what she had now was acceptable, satisfying, a good way to be. But she saw herself from the viewpoint of the phantom teenager in the doorway, and she was too aware of what she and Dennis were doing, and how old they were, and where they were. She didn’t know if she was happy yet; she really had no idea.
“Your turn,” he said into her neck after his heart had returned to a normal thump.
“No, that’s okay.” Her thoughts had pulled her from him.
“Really? But this is so nice,” said Dennis. “We could continue. I’d like to.”
But no, she didn’t want to anymore; she told him she was tired, and then, it seemed, she was. For now, though, she needed to sleep. In the morning when Jules awakened, Dennis was already off to start the day, which began with the wake-up music, Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, a tradition that the Wunderlichs had upheld over the decades. Jules dressed and stood outside, looking across the road and beyond it to the lawn, and then she walked toward the smells of camp cooking. The dining hall was in partial bloom; half-alive teenagers carried their bowls to the tureens of oatmeal and glass canisters of muesli. Girls wanted to know where they could find soy milk. “Latte,” a boy whispered dramatically. “Latte.” No one was completely awake yet. After checking to make sure the kitchen workers had all punched in their time cards and that she wasn’t needed, Jules sat at a table with a group of earnest girls, all dancers.
“How are things so far?” she asked.
“Buggy,” said Noelle Russo from Chevy Chase, Maryland, showing off her arm, which was already lined with a row of pink buttonlike bites.
“Maybe there’s a hole in your screen,” said
Jules. “I’ll have someone check that.”
“My dad said there are no requirements here,” Noelle’s teepeemate, Samantha Cain from Pittsburgh, said. “Is that true? I don’t have to take swimming lessons or anything?”
“No requirements. Just take what interests you. Sign-up’s at ten. Put down your first three choices for each time slot.”
They all nodded, satisfied. Jules noticed that almost none of them were eating much and that all of them had only token amounts of food on their plates. She realized she’d probably stumbled into a little nest of eating disorders. Dancers—no surprise.
“So, still happy?” Dennis asked Jules one afternoon in the second week, walking with her through the trees. They passed the animation shed, where a light was lit: a couple of kids were working after class had ended, standing around a table with the instructor, a young woman named Preeti Singh, who was today’s version of Old Mo Templeton.
“I’m just relieved it’s not unmanageable,” Jules said. “I was really afraid we weren’t going to be able to handle it somehow. That it would require too much competence, and we wouldn’t be up to the task.”
“We are very competent,” he said.