The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer Read Free Book Online Page A

childbirth that had done this; the Wunderlichs had been unable to conceive, and though there was pain in this fact, it had been blunted over time by all the teenagers who came through Spirit-in-the-Woods. Edie, back in late middle age, seemed to have been physically rebuilt in the image of a pyramid; no, she was built, Manny realized one day, like one of the teepees they could see out their window across the road—one of the teepees that had lasted all this time and never needed repair, never needed
anything
, because they were so primitive and basic and self-contained.
    “Mona Vandersteen was not a dancer,” Edie said now. “Think again.”
    Manny closed his eyes and thought. Various girls from camp obediently appeared before him like the Muses: dancers, actresses, musicians, weavers, glassblowers, printmakers. He pictured one particular girl with her arms thrust into a bucket of purple dye. Now he felt an old twitch and stir in his hiked-up trousers, though this was only phantom-limb arousal, since he was on hormones for prostate cancer and had budding breasts like a girl and hot flashes of the kind that his fairly stupid mother used to complain about as she fanned herself with a copy of
Silver Screen
magazine in their Brooklyn apartment. Manny was a physical disaster now, chemically
castrated
—his young doctor had actually, cheerfully used that word—and almost nothing got him going anymore. He thought of the name Mona Vandersteen, and a new image rushed to meet him.
    “Yes, she had wavy blond hair,” he said to his wife with false certainty. “Back in the 1950s, she was one of the earliest group of campers. Played flute and went on to join . . . the Boston Symphony Orchestra.”
    “It was the sixties,” Edie said, seeming a little annoyed. “And oboe.”
    “What?”
    “She played the oboe, not the flute. I remember this, because she had reed breath.”
    “What is reed breath?”
    “Didn’t you ever notice that the woodwind players who use reeds always have a certain kind of bad breath? You never noticed this, Manny? Really?”
    “No, Edie, I did not. I never noticed her breath, or anyone else’s,” he said piously. “I just remember that she was so talented.” Also he remembered that she’d had narrow hips and a big, pleasing ass, but this he did not add.
    “Yes,” Edie said, “she was very talented.” Together they ate their potatoes under a shimmer of brown sauce and individually thought of Mona Vandersteen, who had been so talented and who had gone on to greatness for a while. Though if she’d been in the Boston Symphony Orchestra all the way back in the 1960s, then who knew what she did now, or if what she did was lie in her grave.
    The Wunderlichs were older than everyone; they hovered like God and God’s wife, white-headed, still living in the house across the road from the camp. The collapsing economy was terrible for all summer camps—who had seven thousand dollars to spend now so their kids could throw pots? A couple of years earlier they had hired a young, energetic man to do planning and run the day-to-day operations, but the sessions remained pitifully undersubscribed. They didn’t know what they were going to do now, but they knew the situation wasn’t good and that eventually it would reach a crisis.
    Whatever happened, they would not sell the camp. They loved it too much for that; it was a little utopia, and the kids who came to it were self-selecting, always the same type—utopians themselves, in a way. The camp needed to remain intact, serving its valuable purpose of bringing art into the world, generation after generation.
    Each Christmas, former campers crammed the Wunderlichs’ mailbox with letters from their lives, and Edie or Manny walked slowly to the end of the driveway, opened the stiff door of the silver box, then brought the mail back inside the house, where Edie read the letters aloud to her husband. Sometimes she skipped lines or whole paragraphs when they