I’ve been walking the grounds at Ten Chimneys. The morning sunlight twines through the trees like yellow ribbon. Birds twitter overhead. My footsteps are quiet, the paths covered with cedar chips that are swollen and soft with dampness.
It’s late October and not just chilly but cold today, thick Wisconsin clouds scudding across the sky like a school of predatory fish. Goose bumps rise along my arms. The paths twist along the bowl-shaped depressions of the kettles, then rise over the moraines to the Lunts’ house. Tourist buses will pass by starting at ten and I’ll see a docent standing up front, as Eva once did, telling the guests how back in the seventies Lynn and Alfred donated this land—thirty-eight acres—to the town of Genesee Depot.
Facts, I think bleakly. Like wooden sticks. People believe if they rub them together long enough, they can find the truth.
Yesterday, I sold Weathering, the collage I started last summer when Kelly was here. The piece wasn’t really about weather but about secrets or damage or…maybe truth. Are secrets always true? Always damaging? Or are they only damaging when revealed?
Does any life exist without secrets?
Spencer started high school last month. His latest fascination is volcanoes. Did we know lava could travel 450 miles an hour? That 80 percent of Earth was formed by volcanoes? Or that when Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815, the volcanic ash spewed into the atmosphere blocked the sun for so long that it was called “the year without a summer”?
The year without a summer.
That’s how this past summer felt.
It’s impossible not to compare it to the one before.
Yesterday I read that the summer of 2006, “our season of perfect happiness,” was the second-hottest summer in 112 years. Temperatures broke records that had stood since the Dust Bowl. It surprises me, for in memory, even the weather was idyllic: skies like backdrops on stage sets, nights like a giant pinball machine, the silver ball of the moon ricocheting against the clouds.
And yet, we must have felt the press of heat on those nights sitting on each other’s back decks, must have complained about the humidity, felt the heaviness in our bodies. Or did we really not notice?
The actor Peter Brooks once compared the Lunts’ performances to one of Seurat’s pointillist paintings: “Each little dot is not art but the whole is magnificent.” A description not only of their acting but of their lives—and maybe ours too last summer.
Only in stepping back can I see the whole.
We had our Saturday nights, taking turns at each other’s houses. Annabelle and I went shopping and I bought three full-skirted dresses—a black and white polka-dot with a pink sash; a sleeveless orange with matching earrings; white serge patterned with big red poppies. “Your party frocks,” Erik called them. I loved the look in his eyes when I modeled them, and I loved how I felt wearing them.
One night, we attended an event for the children’s theater camp Ten Chimneys ran. The party was held on the back lawn, complete with a topiary garden, of a nineteenth-century mansion overlooking Lake Michigan. Props from stage sets were scattered about: A leather armchair and ottoman beneath a maple tree. A coatrack at the entrance to the drive. A silver tea service balanced on the wooden seat of a rope swing.
The theater kids had been asked: If you could trade lives with any famous person, whose life would you want? They’d read biographies of their person, designed costumes and props, memorized mannerisms and speeches. And so, scattered about the grounds were Harry Houdinis and Abe Lincolns, Michael Jordan, Beyoncé, Georgia O’Keeffe, Serena Williams.
“Who would you guys be?” Annabelle asked that Saturday night. “Anyone in history.” We were at our house, a hurricane lamp throwing light across the table. “I can’t decide between Stevie Nicks and Chrissie Hynde.”
“Really?” Eva knit her brows. “But you don’t sing.”
“I wish I could, though. I wish I had something that was wholly mine, like you guys do.” She nodded at me and Eva. “Something no one could ever take.”
“You have your children,” I said.
“Who will be grown and gone before I can blink.”
Eva chose Meryl Streep.
Erik, Alfred Lunt.
“Could you be any more predicable?” Eva ruffled his hair, and he swatted her away.
Scott wanted Elvis. “Skinny Elvis! Not that fat dude in the white jumpsuit.”
“Neil Armstrong,” Gabe said. “To stand up there…” He lifted his eyes to the moon, partially hidden behind clouds as thin as silk scarves. “I can’t imagine anything more incredible.”
“All right, Claire,” Annabelle said.
Scott did a drumroll on the tabletop.
“Wait,” I said. “What if I don’t want any other life?”
“Nice try,” Annabelle said. She was happy. This was her kind of conversation: What was your best age? What quality of your parents’ do you have that you wish you didn’t? If you could have one day to live again…“Come on. You’ve never wanted to be someone else?”
More times than I could count, I thought, but now that I had this life with this husband and these friends, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. There was no way I could say this, though. Oh God, that’s so sweet I’m going to be sick, Annabelle would have said, and Scott would have suggested I hadn’t drunk enough. Their teasing would have been good-natured, but I didn’t want to make light of it. Maybe because I’d already had the chance to trade one life in for another, I didn’t want to joke about trading it in again. “Amelia Earhart,” I finally said, grabbing the first name that popped to mind, although later, it would occur to me that she too had disappeared from her own life.
“An aviatrix, huh?” Gabe teased, and then someone was asking another question—If you could have any superpower…
Days, then weeks, and suddenly it was July Fourth, the peak at the top of the roller coaster we would soon begin speeding down. We spread blankets on the hill near the elementary school to watch the fireworks (away from the crowds at the Expo Center). Other families had the same idea. Flashlights, voices, a girl’s laughter lifted in the dark. And then the fireworks began, exploding over us as I hugged Hazel and Annabelle held Phoebe and Erik held Spencer, all of us gazing up, families around us oohing and ahhing.
Spencer told me that a day on Venus lasts almost as long as a year on Earth, and I recall all the times I wished that summer that our days could last so long. The six of us would be sitting out back at one of our houses, and it would be one of those perfect Wisconsin nights where we were all silent, staring up, a little drunk maybe, but content, so content, and someone would comment on how fast the days were going, and despite whatever fun we were having, despite the happiness I know was real, I sensed there was a finite number of days when we could be happy—maybe when anyone could—and ours would soon be gone.