The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer Read Free Book Online Page B

grew too boring. Neither of them was particularly interested in the family lives of these former campers: where their children had been accepted to college; who had had a coronary bypass—
oh boo hoo,
everyone’s life was hard, and if you’d survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough. Sometimes Manny thought that the campers should have sent the Wunderlichs a pared-down, expurgated version of a Christmas letter, and all it would contain would be evidence of the great talent of that person. Slides, audio samples, manuscripts. Examples of what he or she had gone on to accomplish in the years and decades after leaving Spirit-in-the-Woods.
    But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place. Most of the time Manny Wunderlich took the former view, though lately, as his head and eyebrows gathered even more white hairs, giving him a snowy and deceptively mellow appearance, he thought that he and his wife had merely been like railroad conductors on a talent train, collecting the tickets of many brilliantly able kids as they passed through Belknap, Massachusetts, on their way to somewhere even better. He thought dispiritedly that the main thing Spirit-in-the-Woods had created in anyone was nostalgia. At the bottom of a card, a camper would write lines like:
    Dear Manny and Edie,
    I wanted you to know that I think about my summers at camp every day of my life. Though I have performed in Paris, Berlin, you name it, and though the Barranti Fellowship last year gave me the freedom to really concentrate on my libretto and not have to teach at the conservatory anymore, nothing has been as wonderful as Spirit-in-the-Woods. Nothing! I send you my love.
    Whenever Manny Wunderlich became despondent, he sank into himself and felt his heart working hard, and he looked across the road and out over the winter lawn, where the tips of the teepees poked up. He felt himself falling, and only his wife’s voice could pull him back, as though she were yanking him by his suspenders, or as though an earlier, sexually devilish version of her were bringing him back into vitality. “Manny,” she said from across time. “Manny.”
    He looked up from behind the glaze of his failing eyes, into her eyes that were hard and blue. “What?” he said.
    “I saw you disappear,” she said. “Let’s talk about someone else. We received a very interesting card today. With one of those Christmas letters inside.”
    “All right,” he said, waiting. Which former camper would he have to try and remember now? Would it be a flutist, a dancer, a singer, a designer of surreal theater sets? All of them had passed through here at some point or another.
    “You’ll like this one,” said his wife. Then she smiled, her mouth appearing soft in a way it rarely did anymore. “It’s from Ethan and Ash.”
    “Oh!” he said, and he was silent, appropriately reverent.
    “I will read it to you,” she said.

THREE
    T he envelope, made of a vellum so thick and smooth that it seemed to have been massaged with lanolin and special oils, remained unopened on the little mail and keys table in the front hallway of the Jacobson-Boyds’ apartment for a day or two before they decided to open it. For many years this had been a way of tolerating the inadequacy of their own lives in relation to whatever was described in the annual letter. Whenever they opened one of these envelopes, Jules felt as if a wall of flames might roar up and fry the air above it. With enough time and age her envy of her friends’ lives had diminished and become manageable; but still, even now, when the Christmas letter arrived Jules allowed herself to experience a new, small surge of a very old feeling. It wasn’t as if Ash and Ethan’s Christmas letter had ever been