It was true that I was looking for work, I explained. I told her about the job postings I scrolled through each day with descriptions that all read like advertising copy for an extreme sports drink. “Are you ready to kick ass and take names?” No. “We believe work is play. Have you got game?” I’m not sure. “Do you have a passion for juices?” I like juice, but no, I wouldn’t say passion. Still, I hit send on my résumé. Every click showed me my age. Thirty-nine. I wouldn’t have hired me if I were these people.
“I’m not exactly sure what it is that I do,” I told her. “I inherited this camp and we came here thinking we would redo it, make it into a kind of resort, but that hasn’t really worked out.”
“No?”
“Well, I don’t know. You’re our guest, I suppose. Guest number one.”
She and Alice had actually come here together, she said, in late May. But they’d broken up. Alice went back to Cambridge. She was going to be a senior at Harvard in September. Stella was going to be what she’d always been, a townie. Her word.
Stella laughed again, from her chest and with her shoulders.
“Who the fuck has a passion for juices?” she said.
Stella had asked me what it was that I did. In what seemed more and more like another life, I had been a journalist. Or maybe “a writer of service journalism” was a better way to put it. I talked to people who wanted to talk, who had something to publicize, and punched that up into a story. But I wasn’t the best at coaxing information from someone who wasn’t already eager to share. When I’d started working at a newspaper, just out of college, I imagined I might do it for a few years and then apply to graduate school—a writing program, maybe a film program—but I never did. It turned out I liked my job, or I liked the way it kept me from interrogating my own ambition. For a while, anyway. If you don’t try—if you tell yourself you can’t try because certain circumstances prevent you—then you can’t fail. And there was still a gruff, ink-stained glamour to the profession at the time I got into it. The hard-boiled investigative reporter, Gene, who leaned back in his swivel chair and grumbled at whoever was on the other end of the line: “Look, you’re either a source or a target. What do you want to be?” He liked me because I liked him and I knew who Rosalind Russell was, I had seen His Girl Friday more than once. But I remember thinking, Is that all it takes? Knowing the right references to flatter the vanity of this middle-aged man? It went some distance, but it wasn’t all it took, of course. Gene accepted a buyout two years before my job was eliminated and then the paper essentially became a listings guide.
I moved into public relations work, in New York and then in Chicago, and for a while I had enough hustle to disguise my lack of conviction, but eventually people—clients—could tell. One of them, who considered herself a friend, encouraged me to go with her to a gathering at a wine bar for “professional women.” It was the kind of event where you couldn’t make a joke about being an “amateur woman.” I went home and felt terrible about myself.
But what kept me from feeling too terrible was that I had already shifted my focus elsewhere. David and I were trying to have a child. I would be a parent and—problem solved—that would be my primary identity. I knew better than to talk about it this way, for any number of political, cultural, and psychological reasons. I knew, from conversations with my friend Liz, a mother of two young girls, that it didn’t really work that way, even if you wanted it to. But, I secretly thought, I’m not Liz. Liz is not me. And I was right about that, at least. I wasn’t Liz. I wasn’t able, it seemed, to have one child, let alone two.
We had sought out fertility specialists. We had sat in waiting rooms exchanging expectant looks of hope and vulnerability with the people waiting with us. I remember one stylish, fox-faced woman whose appearance suggested expertise and sophistication, that she knew how to move through the world, how to do everything successfully, everything, that is, but this. Her tight air of determination initially struck me as a caricature, until one day I realized I was setting my mouth in the same grim little line.
But then. But then! All of the science, the shots, the waiting, the failing, the trying again. It worked. It actually worked. I felt it almost immediately, my body recalibrating itself, reshaping itself. My body forcing my guarded mind to accept that this was happening. I’d read—God, I’d read so much—that you wouldn’t need maternity clothes for a few months at least, but though I could fit into the pants I owned, they all felt too restrictive. It was as if, on a cellular level, I had been enlarged overnight. Like my blood had thickened. I wanted space and ease. I wanted soft, stretchy waistbands from the get-go. And I was exhausted all the time. No shit, said Liz, when I called her. Your body is making another body. And David and I marveled at how uncanny that was. What my body could do. My body could make another body! My body could even get my hopes up.
You would feel betrayed, wouldn’t you, by someone who got your hopes up only to dash them. You would think that at best, that someone was recklessly naive, and at worst, extremely cruel. At fourteen weeks in, our doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. I’d had what’s called a missed miscarriage. One of the few things I hadn’t read about, couldn’t bring myself to read about. And so, though I vaguely knew what a D&C was, I hadn’t comprehended that I would need a procedure to remove everything that had been growing inside of me, the body that my body, so recklessly naive, had been making. For three months, I had felt so powerful in a purely biological, unthinking way. And then, for no particular reason anyone could determine, my body became a tender, faulty thing and all I could do was think.
I didn’t quite know how to make sense of time, after we lost the baby. I kept organizing my life, my hours and days, around something that no longer existed in time: This is when I would have started to feel it kicking, this is when I would have given birth. David told me he did the same, but I did it for longer. I did it for so much longer I felt I had to start keeping it a secret, because if anyone knew, they would—out of concern for my sanity—try to take that compulsion away from me, too.
When our child would have been about three months old, my great-aunt Esther died of heart failure, of age essentially, and I learned she’d made me her beneficiary. She’d left me the whole camp, with no instructions or provisions on what to do with it. For more than fifty years, a couple hundred girls had come to Camp Alder every July and August, including me. But for the last fifteen years or so, it had sat empty. Uncle Joe had died, and Esther, in her final years, had moved to an assisted-living facility.
We’d have to sell it. We lived, at the time, halfway across the country, and what would we do with an old camp? The question started to resolve itself only when I asked myself why we lived halfway across the country. Why still. We had gone to Chicago when David was offered a career-making opportunity. But we had no family there. And by then I had no real job. And David’s career-making opportunity had become a source of growing bitterness about the corporatized direction his organization, an architecture firm that was supposed to specialize in housing for low-income populations and the homeless, was heading in. He said he wished he worked with his hands again. He had spent summers in school doing construction.
An idea took hold and I laid it out. We would move. To the camp. We would make it into a resort. Camp for adults, it was something of a trend at the time. I’d heard of ones in the Hudson Valley and Wisconsin. A place for companies that considered themselves forward-thinking to hold retreats, for the kind of weddings that became weeklong events. Why couldn’t we do this? Maybe, in the off-season, we could host a residency for artists. We would spruce it up just enough, add a few elevated touches: nice sheets, striped wool blankets, interesting but unobtrusive enameled fixtures. Stationery for guests to write letters home. The bunks would be cozy. The dining hall awash in elegant light. Half Adirondacks lodge, half turn-of-the-twentieth-century Austrian sanatorium. And the food. The food! We would have a marvelous chef. Some friend of a friend who was superb but underappreciated. We would grow our own ingredients. I would learn about greens and root vegetables. I would buy overalls and wear them.