Solstice Read online

  How does it feel, Monica boasted to her mirror reflection, to be so exhausted you wouldn’t be capable of crying if there were any reasons to cry—?

  Her chairman has assigned her six days of classes, including a third-form composition class that met on Saturday mornings at eight o’clock: put her on several committees: named her as faculty adviser to one of the student organizations. By magic she had become “Miss Jensen” to her students, “Monica” to her new colleagues, whose names she prided herself upon memorizing in the first two weeks. She didn’t at all mind that she had, in all, more than one hundred students (which meant, among other things, more than one hundred weekly themes to correct): she was in fact grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate just how hard she could work without even good-humored complaint. She liked being exhausted, it had become a kind of drug to her, like walking for hours—for hours and hours—in Manhattan, up from Eleventh Street to Central Park in a drunken zigzag pattern, not minding the airlessness and midsummer heat and the exhaust of those ubiquitous buses. She loved being so drained of energy, so wrung dry, that, before midnight, she could only set the alarm for six-thirty the following morning and fall into bed. (Where her dreams were hallucinatory, careening and vertiginous, rapid flashes of bizarre images played against the raw insides of her eyelids.)

  She was prevented, consequently, from dwelling upon the past, which was after all past. She was prevented from lapsing into self-pity and self-recrimination and self-loathing of the kind she so abhorred in women acquaintances of hers whose marriages had “also” ended disastrously. How did I fail, these stunned women asked themselves, what did I do wrong, how could I have avoided . . . ? I, I, I . . .

  After her first week of teaching Monica had been so stupefied with exhaustion she hadn’t been able to complete her grocery shopping at the Olcottsville A & P—she left the part-filled cart in one of the aisles and made her way, blinking and light-headed, out to her car.

  When she had free hours, on the weekends in particular, she worked at the house, scouring away layers of grime, washing windows, sanding, polishing, preparing to strip wallpaper, deliberating over which rooms to paint and which simply to close off. And should she borrow money to make improvements and buy furniture, or should she restrict herself to what she could afford, month by month—? She had not felt so powerful a sense of ownership and domesticity since the earliest months of her marriage when the setting—the exact, the absolute setting—for hers and her husband’s passion had come to matter more than the passion itself.

  The chimneys, Mrs. Connor had warned her, probably leaked; the cellar would probably flood if there was a great deal of rain. There were loose-fitting windows and shingles nearly rotted through and the condition of the two remaining barns was frankly dangerous—she shouldn’t go prowling and poking around in them, in the hayloft in particular: the owner of the property had seen to it that a clause had been added to the lease exempting him from responsibility along these lines. Nonetheless Monica indulged in daydreams of buying the farm one day. The three-acre property had once included several hundred acres of meadow- and farmland and woods, and she fantasized buying them all back. On three sides she had views of open meadows and farmland, on the fourth side a view of her own weatherworn barns, no other human habitation was in sight; the Olcottsville Road, narrow and poorly paved, had very little traffic. . . . She recalled Sheila Trask’s annoyance at the suggestion that they were neighbors and felt now the logic of it. The woman hadn’t meant to be insulting—she had simply stated a self-evident truth.

  Sometimes, when she was vacuuming or running water she imagined she heard the telephone ringing, but when she stopped to listen she heard nothing—only silence. She received very few telephone calls and made few; nor did she receive much mail. All of which soothed her if it did not entirely please her. The house exuded indefinable odors of age and dust, and sometimes, particularly at night, it seemed to echo with unknown lives and histories: but Monica told herself she was safe here, out in the country, as she had rarely been safe in Manhattan. She shared the house with no one. There was never the possibility of another person slamming open any door she had closed, or calling her name. . . . Though once or twice she imagined she heard her name spoken aloud: Monica: faintly, lightly: Monica—! But not in the cadence of her former husband’s voice. In the cadence of no voice she knew.

  She had plans, she calibrated certain strategies, she was a professional woman and no fool, despite her fading golden looks and her soft-spoken manner. She would sink herself for the next ten months in the very pettiness of her work: preparing lessons, correcting student papers (in such fastidious detail everyone would marvel at her idealism), teaching to the best of her abilities, attending meetings, being congenial—but not too eagerly congenial—to her colleagues. To reward herself she would turn her attentions on the house. Scouring sinks and tubs, caulking, varnishing, painting, buying curtains, gay-striped blinds, cushions, pillows. . . . Though her husband had contemptuously given all the furniture to her Monica had been able to furnish only a few rooms of this large house, so there were months ahead, absorbing, self-indulgent months, of browsing through secondhand furniture shops in the country, searching for bargains. She would buy old lamps, old clocks, umbrella stands, antique books . . . she would prop herself up in bed and read novels by authors whose names were long forgotten, romances of the Brandywine and the Delaware valleys, books whose covers were falling off and whose pages were yellowed. . . . A second marriage, Monica thought. Of sorts.

  Time had pleated so queerly, swallowing up eight years of her life. But now it would expand. Now clocks would tick with less urgency. She would never again think of injuring herself, blaming herself, loathing herself. She would never again lie in rumpled sheets smelling of her own sweat and misery, thinking, How have I failed, what have I done wrong, what are the flaws in my character. . . .

  “But why think of the past? Where is the past?” Monica said aloud, suddenly angry. She reveled in the sound of her own voice when it was angry. When no one else was a witness.

  2

  One afternoon in early October Monica was leaning in the doorway at the rear of the house when she happened to notice a horse and rider appear at the edge of a woods some distance away. A man or a woman?—she squinted but couldn’t be sure. It was a warm day, the sunshine blazed. The air was loud with insects. Monica waited for another rider to appear behind the first—she’d seen as many as five or six riders on that lane—and when no one else came along, and the rider turned in her direction, she felt a clutch of fear.

  It wasn’t fear, precisely. It must have been simple alertness, apprehension. She didn’t want anyone intruding on her privacy.

  But she didn’t withdraw into the house. She stared, squinting into the sun, raptly absorbed as the rider drew closer—now cantering, now trotting—in a display of high spirits. Monica knew very little of horses but she thought the horse—an enormous chestnut with a high-held head and white markings—was a beautiful creature: and the rider, leaning slightly forward in the saddle, appeared to be beautifully in control. “It’s her,” Monica thought.

  She could not think of the woman’s name for a few confused moments, then she remembered: Sheila Trask. But she wouldn’t have dared say it aloud, she wouldn’t have known what form was appropriate. Not “Sheila,” surely. But “Miss Trask” was an absurdity.

  Sheila Trask greeted Monica’s smile with an apology, rapidly and not altogether audibly murmured, for dropping in uninvited. But she happened to be riding in the area. She was curious too about what Monica had done with the old Dorr place—a couple named Dorr had owned it some years ago, acquaintances of Sheila’s and her husband’s—she remembered the house as charming in ways and problematic in others. And she could use a glass of ice water. . . .

  “Of course, come in, please come in,” Monica said. She added, blushing, a little rattled: “I was watching you ride and you ride so well, I was hoping you’d turn into someone I know,
and— But of course I don’t know anything, really, about horses—about horseback riding—”

  Something affronted and hesitant in Monica’s voice, some subtle flicker of reluctance in her expression, must have struck Sheila Trask: for a long strained moment she remained sitting stiffly in the saddle, her hands locked at the base of the horse’s neck, regarding Monica with frank searching eyes. She was a very attractive woman in a harsh, rather slapdash way. Her black eyes glinted with something derisive and covert, a childlike offer of complicity, mutual recognition. At the same time she clearly shrank from misjudging her welcome and being rejected. She spoke so quickly and in so low a voice Monica could barely hear. “. . . If I’m interrupting your work, or your plans . . . if you have another visitor . . .”

  “No, not at all,” Monica said.

  “But I am uninvited. . . .”

  “Please have a drink,” Monica said, “ice water or whatever you’d like—I mean, of whatever I have—I think there’s grapefruit juice and soda pop—some wine—of course,” Monica said quickly, feeling her cheeks burn, “—it isn’t first-rate wine, I mean, it probably isn’t anything you would want—”

  “Are you sure?” Sheila Trask asked, staring at her.

  But Monica was sure, Monica protested that she was sure, feeling ridiculous in her unbecoming old clothes, standing in a doorway waiting for a visitor: she hardly knew what she was saying or what she really felt. “I’ve been working since early this morning . . . I’d like to stop for a while . . . I mean I’d like very much to . . .”

  “Well—I don’t want to intrude,” Sheila said slowly. She dismounted, fussed with the horse, wrapped the reins around a fence post, looping and knotting them swiftly as she spoke. “. . . I know what it’s like, people dropping by. You assume you’re safe in the country and then unexpected visitors turn up because they’re lonely and you’re put in an awkward position. . . . You do remember me, don’t you? We met at the Greenes’? Sheila—?”

  Monica protested that she certainly knew who she was but hadn’t known how to address her.

  “‘Sheila’ is fine,” she said, laughing.

  She was perspiring freely and slightly breathless. Her brown jodhpurs were soiled, her cotton pullover shirt was stained at the armpits, her riding boots were well-seasoned with dirt and manure. Her hair was remarkably thick, yet lusterless, frizzy, exploding out about her head as if with an excess of nervous energy. In the brilliant October sunshine she looked both malnourished and oddly flushed, exuberant.

  “And I remember your name—Monica? Yes? But your last name was muddled, I didn’t quite hear—”

  Monica told her the name and they shook hands and at the strong dry touch of Sheila’s hand she felt an unaccountable sensation of panic, lasting hardly more than an instant, a fluttering in the chest, an unpleasant constriction of the throat. Afterward Monica was to conclude that she had felt vulnerable at this moment because she’d come close to telling Sheila her married name, which had been Bell. And that would have been a hateful blunder.

  Of course, Monica had planned on opening her house to visitors—colleagues from school primarily, and students, and any friends who cared to make the trip—but she wouldn’t have done so, she wouldn’t have felt psychologically prepared, for several weeks. It hurt her pride to be forced to see the skimpiness of her life through another’s eyes, to risk evoking pity, or displaced sympathy. Now Sheila Trask of all persons was striding into the house, into the kitchen, as if she had been there many times and knew her way around. A brash, pushy, disagreeable person, Monica thought, her cheeks burning more intensely than before, even as her voice rattled away like that of any good-natured friend or neighbor, assuring Sheila that she certainly was welcome, she was in fact her first visitor, and perhaps she could offer Monica advice, much-needed advice. . . . Monica had never rented a house in the country before; she had never rented a house at all. And this one was so special, so large. . . . Clearly it would present so many problems. . . .

  To which Sheila Trask replied merely, as no one else in her situation would have done: “Yes. You’re right.”

  She was still panting slightly and in the close quarters of the kitchen she smelled frankly of perspiration. And of the horse as well—Monica supposed it must be the horse—something gamey, rank, leathery—not altogether unpleasant but certainly distracting.

  And—yes—Monica’s keen gaze dropped to her boots—she would certainly trail dirt about. And take no notice of what she did.

  They settled on iced tea for both of them—fortunately Monica had made up a pitcher that morning. Sheila said she was dying of thirst. The sun was warmer than she’d expected. With no more self-consciousness than a child she tore off several paper towels from a roll lying on Monica’s kitchen table and wiped her wet face.

  Monica showed her through the uncarpeted dining room, into the living room, speaking of the house and its problems, supplying the pretext for a conversation as Sheila, saying very little, looked about inquisitively. She was slightly taller than Monica and moved in an erratic fashion—now quickly, now in a languid slantwise step. Her mouth was wide, fleshy, mobile, but her smiles were rather more nervous tics than anything else, and often when it seemed she was about to reply to one of Monica’s remarks she said nothing at all. An odd person, Monica thought, but, oddly, charming: even rather attractive: the quick darting eyes in particular. And the strong cheekbones. The long straight nose.

  She told Monica that she and her husband had known the couple who had owned the house some years ago; in fact, they themselves had owned the property for a while, for a reason never altogether clear to her: tax purposes? But now it belonged to someone who lived in Philadelphia and who couldn’t be bothered with it—a pity, since it was so beautiful, so private. And lonely. “You’ve just moved out from Manhattan, have you?—someone was telling me,” Sheila said. “That horrible woman, the chaplain’s wife. She was talking about you.”

  Monica laughed, surprised. She felt an immediate sisterly pleasure at Sheila’s intimate tone, but really didn’t know how to respond to it—the chaplain’s wife, Jill Starkie, had been extremely kind to her since her arrival in Glenkill, and seemed quite clearly a warm, generous, well-intentioned person, like her husband, James; it was hardly proper for Monica to pass judgment on her. Certainly Mrs. Starkie was a rather florid personality, given to hand-clutching and embraces, and an enthusiasm that could be most fatiguing, but Monica was grateful for her warm regard. So she replied carefully to Sheila’s remark, supplying only a modicum of information: yes, she had just moved from New York, she had taught part-time for years but never in a preparatory school, it was all quite new to her, the immersion in the school’s life, the intensity . . . wonderfully challenging. . . . The change in her life had been badly needed. . . .

  Sheila strode about the living room, a lithe, trim figure in her stained jodhpurs and white cotton shirt, curious as a child, examining the rattan furniture, the mismatched tables and chairs, the fine-grained Scandinavian bookshelves, the pale green carpet Monica had bought at a remnant outlet in Edgarsville for thirty-five dollars. Though Sheila said nothing Monica’s heart lifted with the hope that Sheila approved of the things, the jumble of textures and colors and styles, one or two costly items amidst the “bargains.” She didn’t in any case sneer at them.

  Sheila drained her iced tea and set the glass down on a pile of student papers. She said, idly: “A change badly needed? Some sort of trouble with a man? You have that dazed precarious look, it’s one of the visible symptoms, but charming in its way, as if you were carrying your life in a pyramid of eggs. . . .” She made a gesture, turning her hands palm upward, extending the fingers. “. . . Though the image isn’t very likely. But you know what I mean. Someone happened to mention that you were recently divorced and that Glenkill wasn’t a very hospitable place for single women. All in the same breath. But it is a hospitable place for a single woman, don’t be deceived. Don’t let them coerce you into feeling lon
ely.”

  Monica was taken aback by this rush of words and had no idea how to reply. Sheila said, more thoughtfully: “Don’t let them coerce you into anything. Harry Greene is famous—I should say infamous—for working his junior faculty like dogs.”

  Monica managed to say, with a fair degree of spirit and conviction, that she hadn’t found Glenkill at all lonely so far and she didn’t consider the work load at the school extraordinary, she liked in fact to work, she liked to feel herself strained to the limits, she was coming to believe she might be a born teacher. . . . And the Greenes and the Starkies and a number of others had been extremely helpful so far. . . . Her voice rattled on. She was slightly shaken by the woman’s frank, intimate, yet oddly negligent tone, the way she glanced at Monica, half-smiling, her sloe eyes narrowed and her heavy black brows nearly meeting at the bridge of her nose. So this was Sheila Trask? The woman about whom everyone spoke in ambiguous terms, puzzled, vaguely disapproving, clearly in awe?—yet certainly a stranger to most of them.

  In the midst of Monica’s defense of her situation Sheila drifted away and went to examine her bookshelves, squatting to look at the lower shelves. She did no more than grunt a vague reply to Monica: a rude gesture in anyone else, but probably quite incidental, even innocent, in Sheila Trask. Monica’s words trailed off into silence and she thought, her cheeks burning as painfully as ever, that it was appropriate, it was the correct response, she had only been chattering away nervously and inconsequentially, she could not have said whether she meant these things or not, only that she ought to mean them. . . . Sheila ignored her for some minutes, pulling paperback books out and examining them with sudden interest. Her black hair had frizzed badly in the humid air but gave her a kind of hoydenish charm. Her thin cotton shirt was damp with perspiration and strained tight against her back, showing every bony knob of vertebrae; wisps of curly hair glistened beneath her arms. She might have been twenty years younger than her age, not a woman of distinction, surely not the widow of Morton Flaxman.