The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer Read Free Book Online

small wooden building chug and sway in preparation for liftoff.

TWO
    T alent, that slippery thing, had been the frequent subject of dinner conversation between Edie and Manny Wunderlich for over half a century. They never tired of it, and if someone studied word frequency in the dialogue of this now elderly couple, they might note that
talent
kept appearing; though really, Manny Wunderlich thought as he sat in the underheated dining room of the big gray house off-season, occasionally when they said it, they meant “success.”
    “She became a great talent,” his wife was saying as she served him a spoonful of potato, banging the spoon against his plate to release it, though it apparently did not want to be released. When they first met in Greenwich Village at a party in 1946, she was a modern dancer, and she leapt around her bedroom on Perry Street wearing just a bedsheet, with ivy twined in her hair. In bed, the callused bottoms of her feet were sharp against his legs. Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny’s great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn’t rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded. Edie proved to be a dreadful cook, and throughout their life together the food she prepared was often like poison. When they opened Spirit-in-the-Woods in 1952, they both knew that finding an excellent cook would be essential to the enterprise. If the food wasn’t good, then no one would want to come. Edie’s shy second cousin Ida Steinberg, a survivor of “that other kind of camp,” as someone had tastelessly said, was hired; and in the summertime the Wunderlichs ate like royalty, but in the off-season, when Ida only worked occasionally, for special events, they generally ate like two people in a gulag. Glutinous stews, potatoes in various iterations. The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers who had come through these stone gates and slept in these teepees.
    Lately, as the year 2009 came to a close, they could no longer remember all of them, or even most of them, but the coin-bright ones shone through the murk of the Wunderlichs’ memory.
    Manny had unconsciously begun grouping the campers over the decades into categories. All he needed was a name, and then the thought process and classification could begin. “
Who
became a great talent?” he asked.
    “Mona Vandersteen. You remember her. She came for three summers.”
    Mona Vandersteen?
Dance
, he suddenly thought. “Dance?” he said tentatively.
    His wife looked at him, frowning. Her hair was as white as his hair and his out-of-control eyebrows, and he could not believe that this thick, tough old pigeon was the same girl who’d loved him the way she had done back on Perry Street just after the Second World War. The girl who’d sat on a bed with a white iron headboard and parted her labia in front of him; he had never before
seen
such a sight, and his knees had almost given out. She had sat there, opening herself like little curtains and smiling at him as though this was the most natural behavior in the world. He’d just stared at her, and she’d said, “Well? Come on!” without any indication of shyness.
    Like a giant Manny had crossed the room in one big step, throwing himself upon her, his hands trying to part her further, to split her and yet own her at the same time—conflicting goals that somehow got worked out over the next hour in that bed. She grasped the rails of the headboard; she opened and closed her legs upon him. He thought she might kill him accidentally or on purpose. She was wild that day and for a long time afterward, but then eventually the wildness faded.
    The only part that now remained of that slight, flexible girl was the cheese-grater texture of the heels of her feet. Her body had been stocky since the early 1960s, and it wasn’t