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  Also by Marge Piercy

  Novels

  Going Down Fast, 1969

  Dance the Eagle to Sleep, 1970

  Small Changes, 1973

  Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976

  The High Cost of Living, 1978

  Vida, 1980

  Braided Lives, 1982

  Fly Away Home, 1985

  Gone to Soldiers, 1988

  Summer People, 1989

  He, She And It, 1991

  The Longings of Women, 1994

  City of Darkness, City of Light, 1996

  Storm Tide, 1998 (with Ira Wood)

  Three Women, 1999

  The Third Child, 2003

  Sex Wars, 2005

  Short Stories

  “The Cost of Lunch, Etc.”, 2014

  Poetry Collections

  Breaking Camp, 1968

  Hard Loving, 1969

  4-Telling (with Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon), 1971

  To Be of Use, 1973

  Living in the Open, 1976

  The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing, 1978

  The Moon Is Always Female, 1980

  Circles on the Water, Selected Poems, 1982

  Stone, Paper, Knife, 1983

  My Mother’s Body, 1985

  Available Light, 1988

  Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now (ed.), 1988

  Mars and Her Children, 1992

  Eight Chambers of the Heart, 1995 (UK)

  What Are Big Girls Made Of, 1997

  Early Grrrl, 1999

  The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, 1999

  Colors Passing Through Us, 2003

  The Crooked Inheritance, 2009

  The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2010, 2012

  Made in Detroit, 2015

  Other Works

  “The Grand Coolie Damn” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, 1970 (pamphlet)

  The Last White Class, (play coauthored with Ira Wood), 1979

  Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, (essays), 1982

  The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days, (daybook calendar), 1990

  So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Personal Narrative, 2001; Enlarged Edition, 2005

  Sleeping with Cats, (memoir), 2002

  Louder: We Can’t Hear You (Yet!), The Political Poems of Marge Piercy, 2004 (CD)

  Pesach for the Rest of Us, 2007

  My Life, My Body (Outspoken Authors), (essays, poems, and memoir), 2015

  Summer People

  A Novel

  Marge Piercy

  Chapter One

  DINAH

  The noise from outside broke loud and sudden, as if somebody had begun cutting a superhighway through the woods. Dinah’s first reaction was fury. Bounding up, she spilled her coffee right into the lap of the black velvet robe Susan had made for her. A chain saw screeched nasally but she heard something growlier under it.

  Dinah rose early. Whether she had made love with Willie or Susan during the day or not, she returned to the old house and slept in her own bed. Upon rising, she would breakfast quickly and feed her cats. Except in the stretch the summer people were there or the few times in the winter when the snow was too deep, she would walk around the pond with Figaro, her big orange tabby with a perennial smile like the Cheshire cat, or Bogey, Willie’s dog. In her head she would already be working. The rhythms would start. She would hear what she had so far and begin to enrich or simplify. The moment she walked in, she would toss her jacket across the room and start.

  One of the reasons she liked sleeping alone was to avoid having to talk to anybody before she set down or played those lines, chords, rhythms, those shapes of sound that moved in her. Music was fragile when it started to coalesce. Silence was the ground.

  She stepped into her jeans, pulling a sweater over her tangled curls and headed for the water’s edge. Willie came running from the new house – it was a hundred and ninety years old, but so called because it had been built after the house she lived in. He left the door to his studio open, letting the warmth from the wood stove waste itself, and strode across the carpet of pine needles toward the pond. He had not bothered with a jacket. Willie’s smooth skin was always warm to the touch. She thought of him as having, like the cats, a naturally hotter body temperature than ordinary humans.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she croaked in her hoarse morning voice.

  The noise was loud enough now so that Susan appeared in the doorway, still scrubbing at her eyes, tousled in a pale green nightgown and peignoir.

  ‘You’ll catch your death of a cold,’ Willie called to her. Voice of honey and smoke. North Carolina in it still. ‘Bundle up. It frosted last night. Dinah and me’ll check it out.’

  On the dock they stood side by side, blowing steam, staring across the pond of a size she had grown up calling a lake in the Midwest. Willie was a full eight inches taller than Dinah and he always thought he could see farther. ‘It’s the Captain’s house,’ he reported, swaying in excitement.

  ‘Asshole, I can see that. But what are they doing to it?’ She took his arm to soften her tone. She wasn’t mad at him but at whatever was carving great swaths through the woods and the quiet.

  Bogey, who was low to the ground and hairy and cheerful, wagged his tail hard and barked, barked at the trucks and the men. There were only four habitations on the pond, their two houses side by side, then Tyrone Burdock’s spread – the big house, the boathouse and other outbuildings considered as one unit – and finally the Captain’s house.

  Toby Lloyd, who actually had been the captain of a local fishing boat, had lost the house that spring when the IRS landed on him. They were always after the local fishermen, claimed they ran dope in, claimed they never reported their income or their crews’ shares. However, the house had been called the Captain’s house before Toby was born. It had been in his family for generations, as had most of the land stretching between the pond and the road a mile away. The Captain it had been named after had died in 1882, but she had still always thought of Toby as the Captain. She had no idea what had become of him.

  ‘Must be those new people who bought it.’

  Willie and Bogey were eager to go sniffing over, wagging their tails. Willie didn’t mind the uproar. He always had the radio or the TV on when he was welding or cooking up his resins. He was a sculptor and worked in a large studio that he and Dinah had built across the yard from his house, a barnlike space with skylights and shingles just beginning to weather a pleasant grey. ‘I’m going to take a look,’ he said, whistling unnecessarily to Bogey, whom nothing less than a chain would have restrained from following.

  Dinah spat into the pond in the direction of the noise and then swung after his tall lean back. Surprisingly Susan was coming toward them, bundled into her parka. The temperature was close to 40, Dinah estimated, but if Willie was always warm, Susan was always chilly. Even bleary with sleep, she looked lovely, her shoulder length auburn hair tangled in loose waves around her apple blossom skin. Willie and Bogey were forging ahead along the path that skirted the shore of the pond. Dinah waited for Susan, who took her arm and then leaned on her, yawning and sighing.

  ‘What got you up?’

  ‘Mmmmmngh.’ Susan yawned again, pointing across the pond.

  Dinah darkly suspected that it was the glamour of the other side of the pond for Susan that had got her dressed so much earlier than she would normally venture out of bed. Susan liked to have tea in bed and then loll around for another hour or so before she gradually ventured forth. If dishabille had not looked so becoming on Susan, espec
ially in the clothes she made herself, she would have seemed one more brain-damaged housewife unable to tackle her life, Dinah sometimes thought, but Willie and she accepted the slow start of Susan’s day as part of her mystique. Often she would not be fully dressed or entirely focused until noon, when she called Willie into the house for lunch and then climbed to her bedroom to work: Susan was more fragile than the other two, more susceptible to mood swings.

  Dinah was shorter than Susan by several inches, but she was stronger, stockier. She supported Susan’s weight as Susan pushed her way along the narrow path, her long wool skirt catching on the catbriars. They kept having to stop for Susan to pull herself free. Willie had disappeared into the brush, but ahead they could hear Bogey yapping, even through the roar of the machinery that shook Dinah’s ear bones. Dinah would rather have walked free and fast, at her customary pace, but she knew Susan liked to walk arm in arm. Dinah could feel herself letting go of her morning like a good plate that had cracked into several fragments irrevocably beyond gluing together.

  ‘Did you hear about your grant yet?’ Susan asked her, deciding to pat herself together and ask something personal.

  ‘Not yet. Bureaucrats.’ Dinah meant all the foundations to which she had applied. There was no one ‘grant’ on which she was waiting, for she had applications in to six. Sometimes she spent more time writing proposals than writing music. Not teaching was a weird choice for a composer – one she had made years before almost instinctively, for her music, for her health, but it was hard to get by. As a woman, as a nonacademic with none of the respectability and certification even a bush league college lends its faculty, some years she applied for thirty grants and got none.

  ‘I saw the most exquisite dress in Vogue last night. It was simple enough in its lines, but the faggoting …’ Susan read all the fashion magazines, as the other two read their respective art journals, and Dinah knew it was important for Susan to talk about what was on her mind. She also knew that both Willie and she tuned out Susan’s reportage of what was coming to Paris, Milan and Seventh Avenue. All Dinah could imagine of the word faggoting was in the nature of bad homophobic jokes.

  A few robins in the rosa virginiana. Not all the robins who lived on the Cape in the summer went south; a small population always spent winters back in the ponds, where the ground tended to stay open. Dinah fed birds all winter; she liked seeing them. ‘I bet you forgot we have appointments with Dr Bridey today.’ Susan pinched Dinah’s cheek.

  ‘What?’ Dinah jumped. ‘Today? Are you sure?’ But she believed Susan instantly. First, Dinah had put off their annual gynecological appointments this year till they were two months late. They usually went in September. Second, Susan kept their social calendar and if she said they had appointments, they had them. They went in together, for moral support and to pass the time pleasantly while they were waiting and during the long drive into Boston and back. Both women had the habit left over from the years abortions had been illegal of having as progressive a doctor as they could find. Both shared a common superstition on the Cape that all the local doctors had failed elsewhere or would rather go fishing. If that had once been true, Dinah was aware it was long out of date, yet they both trucked into the city together for their once-a-year Pap smears and checkups. Then they shopped and had supper out together. One of their rituals.

  As they approached the far side of the pond, Susan fell silent and her languorous gaze slipped past Dinah to rest on Tyrone’s spread, the clapboard outbuildings, the big white porticoed and pillared house that had looked as if it had dropped from some dream of Tara smack into the pinewoods. Both their old Cape houses and the studio could fit into Tyrone’s house and leave plenty of room for a party. It had been built in the twenties by a businessman from New Jersey who had summered there and got richer by local rum-running. One branch of the sand road that ran past their houses ended at Tyrone’s. The Captain’s house was reached from the road by a different track.

  Susan looked at Tyrone’s house as if she could flirt with it, could melt its portico with glances. ‘He’s coming at Christmas,’ she said half breathlessly. ‘Poor Tyrone.’

  ‘If there’s one thing he isn’t, that’s poor.’

  ‘His marriage!’

  Dinah grunted. ‘Number forty-seven down the tubes.’

  ‘Only his third wife. Everybody is entitled to a couple of failures. And he’s never stopped being a good father to Laurie.’

  ‘Anyhow it’s the Captain’s house under attack.’ Dinah disliked Tyrone for what were to her excellent reasons, which she ticked off mentally. (1) He was overbearing, manipulative. (2) Once when he had caught Dinah alone at the little beach in between their houses, he had made a heavy droit de seigneur attempt, falling on her as she lay naked. All he had got for his trouble was a punch in the gut, but she had not liked his manners. (3) He had several times questioned her about her relationship with Willie and with Susan in an overly personal way; and he often gave himself leave to joke about it, that it was quaint and old-fashioned. ‘Monogamy and adultery, that’s the way it’s done now,’ he rumbled. ‘Everyone out here is twenty years behind the times. We were doing that sort of multiple construction in 1972.’

  When they arrived at the clearing, just by where the Captain had had his vegetable garden, Willie was already in conversation with a young bearded guy in a buffalo plaid jacket – Allie Dove, the middle brother of the Dove boys from Dove Hollow. Dinah waved at him, dragging Susan forward.

  Willie turned. He was maybe ten years older than Allie Dove, being forty-eight, with his hair bone white since before Dinah had met him, but he looked younger than Allie because of that smooth boyish skin, his tight lean body and his expression which was always open, interested, wide-eyed. ‘Hey, this is amazing, Susan, Dinah, looky what Allie and the boys are up to. See how they got it shored up. They’re just yanking out the whole innards like sucking the egg from a shell. See, they’re pulling down the walls and ceilings, tearing the floors right out.’

  Willie loved machinery and gimmicks and novelty. Dinah stared, appalled. ‘That house is as old as mine. What the hell are they doing to it? Turning it into a McDonald’s?’

  More, they had bulldozed the Captain’s woodshed and toolshed and his chicken house into a pile of old boards. Dinah was glad she’d gotten the last of the chicken shit out of there, because it would be no good mixed with nails and broken glass and smashed wood. Right after the Captain had lost the house, she’d hauled the manure home by boat and let it compost near her garden till she could dig it in. Tyrone had always objected to the smell of the chickens and the crowing of the roosters. Dinah missed both.

  It was too noisy to think and Dinah didn’t want to take out her ill temper on Allie or his crew. They were glad for what looked like a big job, and it wasn’t their idea to gut the old house and replace its insides with high-tech plastic boxes. She turned and started back. Susan and Willie would follow at their leisure. At supper she would hear more than she wanted about what Willie had learned.

  A triangle was a highly stable structure, she remembered learning in high school geometry, and so it had proved with them. Ten years they had been together. She wondered if Willie and Susan would have stayed married if she had not seduced each of them and then been invited in, permanently. They had both been discontented, restless. She had been their tenant, living with Mark in the old house. After Mark died, she had bought the house and stayed on alone. When Mark threatened to rise in her memory; she walked faster, practising the discipline of looking carefully that Susan had taught her. She had always been sensitive to sound, but Susan and Willie between them had taught her to see. Susan was most responsive to colour, Willie to light and shadow and texture. Browning bracken. A grey squirrel crashed through the oak boughs in a hurry, chittering at her as she passed beneath. No, at Figaro who was coming to find her and had stopped to eye the squirrel speculatively. He liked to stalk them on the ground. The grey squirrels were big, the size and colouring of her smaller ca
t, Tosca, who would be curled on her bed or draped on the worktable wondering where she was.

  Why did the IRS have to meddle with people who never had much to begin with? Many of the old Cape families should have been rich, because they had owned so much land, lots that today would go for sixty thousand up; but they had mostly lost the land because of back taxes, usually taxes they never paid, might not know about and could not have found the money for, since they subsisted in a barter economy. It was the real estate developers who had made the money, and nowadays, late in the boom, some of the locals had become developers, but most of them just did the work. After twelve years on the Cape, Dinah knew the Dove family, as she knew most year-round people, both the natives and the washed-ashores, like herself.

  The Captain had been okay as a neighbour. He had been living with Wendy who had two kids, one his, one not, town gossip informed her. Sometimes he had traded Dinah fish for her raspberries or grapes in season. He had always let her have some of his hen manure, as he politely called it, when he had dug enough into his own garden. He was off fishing for days at a time, and if once in a while his buddies got noisily drunk across the pond, that was only once in a while. For two years they had had a goat and she had bought milk from Wendy. One year he had tried geese. If she got stuck, he would come around with his old pickup truck and a winch and chains. When their pump was out one summer, they got drinking water from her. Otherwise they left each other strictly alone: good neighbours.

  I am like the cats, she thought, finding Tosca on her writing table with her ears slightly laid back and her tail beating a tattoo of annoyance. I like my patterns. I like to set up my own games and play by my own rules. At least she could keep the windows shut against the encroaching sound. Summer people always said how quiet it was here and then proceeded to destroy that quality, but it wasn’t ever really quiet. Gulls mewed. Crows cawed and croaked. Chickadees called and sparrows struck their melancholy repeated phrase. Spring peepers gave a high excited shrilling. The great horned owl hooted all winter. As they mated, racoons snorted, whistled, broke branches like runaway locomotives. The pond muttered and the wind lashed off the ocean carrying snow. Sometimes at night the surf was as audible as traffic in the city. The builders would annoy her for a couple of months, then depart. It would be her woods and her kind of silence again, the small sounds of animals at their business.