She Got Up Off the Couch Page 8

  “Oh,” Claire said, remembering one more thing. “There’ll be a boy at lunch named Scott, you can’t miss him. He’s got brown hair and he’s tan and thin. And tall. He’ll be wearing a jersey from Tri-High cross-country with the number 17 on the back. Just tell him I’m here.”

  After the other girls had left the cabin (whispering about Scott, whoever he was), I jumped down off my bunk and headed for the door.

  “Hey, Zippy,” Claire said. She was raised up on one elbow holding a book calledThey’ll Never Make a Movie Starring Me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember me in your prayers at lunchtime,” she said, smiling.

  I looked at her bandanna; at the pink toenail polish. I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a little silver chain around her ankle. “Sure thing,” I said. I didn’t bother telling her that I wasn’t much for praying, and even if I had been, I wouldn’t have wasted my time on somebody who already had everything.

  Lunch was soup and grilled cheese sandwiches and there was certainly no Coke to be had, which Claire would have known if she’d been any sort of Quaker. But I was beginning to understand that there was a world of difference between Quaker A (the Philadelphia sort, who spent the whole hour in silence and for whom no one was in charge) and Quaker B (our kind, who had ministers and Sunday school and loved to sing songs). This experience was potentially going to be Quaker C (more like the Pentecostals, where people actually got the Fruits of the Spirit and fell down slain). I sensed weeping and salvation in the air, two of my least favorite things. Before lunch we had prayed for a loooooong time, longer than was respectable and something certainly prohibited by Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, where he says prayer should be private and silent. But who asked me.

  I ate alone. I walked back to my cabin alone. The woods around Quaker Haven were dense and hearing people talking but not being able to see them was festive, and I would have given anything not to be there. In the hours following lunch we were to read our Bibles (oh fattest of chances) and then meditate on what we’d read there. Instead I got out my stationery and wrote my first letter:

  Dear Mom listen. Josh likes to have TOO pugs not just one, he likes to keep the blue pug in one corner of his mouth and the pink one in the other corner this is his favrite way. It looks silly and funny and I think that’s why he does it. Now I know it is warm in the days but the nights can still be chilly so tell Melinda to make sure she puts on his BLUE fuzzy jacket with the HOOD and to put the hood UP and TIE IT. Also she should attach BOTH pugs to the Donald Duck thingy because he is forever spitting them out. She will remember that time in kmart when we searched high and low for the blue pug and when we got home it was INSIDE the blue fuzzy jacket. Make sure she does not cook with grease with the flame to high and remind her it is flour not water that puts those fires out as she probably can recall anyway. I hate this place and want to come home it is mean that you made me come. How’s Dad and all the animals? How are you, I miss you even though you did this very mean thing. Love. Xoxo

  I was flat worn out from writing that letter and it sure seemed I would never write another. For good measure, and because some of the other girls were in the cabin, I flipped through my little pink New Testament, read some of my stolen Judy Blume book, then lay down and took a nap.

  We did all the counselors had threatened: we canoed, we swam, we played tetherball. All was done with prayer and with the fervent hope Jesus would be present. Perhaps some built dams, I don’t know. I did everything alone. Then it was time for chapel, and we went back to our cabins to change. This was apparently a very important moment in the lives of Rich Girl, Sport Girl, Valedictorian, Ugly, and Claire, because it meant they got to see one another relatively undressed as if there were a contest, which anyone just walking in the room for the very first time would see was no contest at all because Claire had won before she arrived. She put on a little blue skirt, the requisite panty hose, and a white sweater with her initials embroidered above one breast. She had showered after swimming and now her dark hair fell perfectly straight to her chin.

  The blouse my mother sent had perhaps belonged to one of her friends at church, because the shoulders kept slipping off me. I knew safety-pinning was critical but where? How to safety-pin something to your shoulder? Then there was the plain brown skirt, so big I had to double the waist, and every time I put the pin in and fastened it, it just popped back open and stabbed me. I found that if I pinned it to the minimum amount of fabric it would stay closed, so I took my chances.

  Then there were the panty hose. Claire’s were so sheer and nudely they were just called Nude. Mine were a cross between a Band-Aid and Silly Putty, and Mom had been correct, they were queen size. I wrangled them on, rolled the top down, rolled it down again. It was never going to work, so I ended up putting my underwear on OVER the panty hose to keep them up, something an old woman in church used to do when her dementia really got up and going. I stuffed the oversize panty hose feet in my saddle oxfords and followed my cabin mates down the path to the chapel.

  The minister was an emotional man who was deeply concerned about the temptations facing us as teenagers. I had not yet met a single temptation that hadn’t worked to my advantage, so mostly I stared at him. We had to sing a lot of old-timey emotional songs about the blood of Jesus and the power of the Cross, and sure enough the minister got teary-eyed, and his wife, a woman who looked like a giant canary, was flat distraught. I could feel it — I could feel something building like a high-pressure system, and I did not like it.

  “Margie,” Minister Bob said to his bird wife, “play ‘I Come’ for us, slow and quiet, while I invite these boys and girls to join me at the altar for prayer and healing. This is what you’ve come here for, my friends, to invite the Lord Jesus into your heart permanently. I’m going to stand here with my eyes closed and let the power of the Lord work its way down through my body, and you just come on down to the altar and let the Lord fill you. If you’re not ready, just kneel down and close your eyes and pray along with your brothers and sisters.”

  Kneel down? I looked at the floor of the chapel; it was rough boards with gaps between them wide enough to hold — and this was just in my line of sight — a bobby pin and two pennies. I was a Quaker, not a Kneeler. Rose knelt at St. Anne’s but Catholics were prepared for this sort of thing and thoughtfully provided a little padded rail for the occasion.

  “Just go ahead and get on your knees and ask the Lord what He would have you do,” Minister Bob said, reading my mind. All around me obedient campers were struggling down to the floor, and Margie Canary was playing the same bits of the slow hymn over and over, trying to hypnotize us. I gave up and knelt, joined the people around me, cursing Minister Bob and my mother and indeed the whole of Christendom. I watched with the stink-eye as a number of people went to the altar and got hands laid on them. There was much weeping followed by joy, and I hated everyone there, and when I stood up, the knees had torn in my queen-size panty hose.

  We were supposed to learn to sail on the perfectly flat, windless lake, so I volunteered to clean the kitchen instead. During the Nature Walk I offered to straighten our cabin and take Claire’s turn at latrine duty. I had no experience cleaning anything and Ivolunteered — such was the depth of my despondency. Every day I wrote home to Mom, letters more and more bitter and frantic, certain that Josh had forgotten me or that Melinda had shoved his little head through the bars of his crib by forgetting to tie down the bumper pad. “The bumper pad must be TIED SECURLY,” I wrote, “even if it looks like it’s on their fine TIE IT AGAIN.” Josh was blond, blue-eyed, a perfect perfect American angel specimen of rightness. “You know he’s got that little white hat that looks some like Gilligans, a sort of baby fishing hat. Now you should make sure Lindy puts that on him before going out in the sun or else the strawberry mark on his head will get even brighter and maybe sunburn, I very much hope you are not just throwing these letters away but giving them to Melinda who as you know HAS BEEN KNOW TO SET TH
E HOUSE A FIRE.”

  On the second night of chapel I wore the torn panty hose and believed it might shame me forever. All the other girls had brought more than one pair. I did not accept the altar call, and Mrs. Canary began to give me both the bird-eye and the beak. Claire developed such bad cramps from being religious that on the walk back to the cabin, Scott, who bore an unhealthy resemblance to Shawn Cassidy, was allowed to support her, even though it meant breaching the boy camper/girl camper line. Claire was crying and limping a little, and I noticed a small gold cross on a delicate gold chain against her throat. Scott held her tenderly, and back in the cabin all the other girls ministered to her and she was grateful. A Coke even appeared, as if Jesus himself had sent her a gift.

  On the third day I asked to use the office telephone, explaining that my family was prone to emergency appendectomies (true) and I believed it was my time. Mom answered the phone and I said, “Well, now I’ve gone and gotten really sick and it’s time for my appendix to come out.”

  “Is that right,” she said. I heard her turn the page of a book.

  “Yes. I don’t believe I need to remind you that Danny’sburst on theoperating table and had to be removed with aspoon, and if you’d waited too long you’d be sonless.”

  “Tell me what your symptoms are,” Mom asked, without inflection. My mother could not abide a sick person in any form, not fevers, burns, protruding bones, heaving, headaches, diabetes, or amputations. She had once been a Christian Scientist and it had gotten in her like a virus and even though she had been a Quaker since long before I was born, she still believed the Seven Beautiful Daughters of the Seven Beautiful Kings were Perfectly Healthy Within Us.

  “I’ve got an ache in my side.” That’s what I remembered from when Julie had it.

  “Where in your side.” Again, this was not a question.

  “Over, you know, between my ribs and the rest of me.”

  “Which side?”

  Blast the woman! Blast her eyeballs! I only had a 50–50 chance and those were not good odds as any daughter of Bob Jarvis would know. I did the only thing I could: I guessed. “The left.”

  “I’ll see you at the end of the week, sweetheart,” she said, hanging up.

  I would not sing Kum-Bye-Ya around the campfire. I would roast marshmallows but I would not sing. I would not play games of tag in the dark, where the boys and girls were allowed to hunt for one another, and find each other, in ways that made my veins run cold. The air was desperate, scented with blood. I snuck back into the mess hall and washed all the tables with bleach.

  During the days we swam. Scott was a lifeguard and wore practically nothing, just trunks, sunglasses, and a whistle around his neck. He looked like he was preparing for a life as an anemic Erik Estrada. The T-shirt Claire wore over her string bikini somehow managed to be more revealing than the suit itself. Every day she would swim languidly out to the dock where Scott was sitting. She’d pull herself up slowly, water streaming off her as if she were a seal, then sit in the chair next to Scott where it was perfectly obvious no one else was allowed to sit. They would talk, and then something frisky would happen and wrestling would commence, and Claire would get thrown in the water, and the whole thing would begin again. I lay on an inner tube not far from the shore, floating around in circles in Melinda’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt, watching.

  I did not accept Jesus as my personal savior on Tuesday night, or Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday. My panty hose were now in shreds. It was Friday night that Claire decided to go, having waited for most everyone else to take their moment up front with Minister Bob. It turned out that when Claire did open her heart it was a wide, wide avenue, because she sobbed and vowed to change all her secret ways, and Bob was so moved he kept his hands on her a long time, and Mrs. Canary bobbed her head so steadily it appeared she might go all the way down and take a drink of water. Nearly everyone wept that night. I stayed on my bruised, abraded knees and imagined the light in Josh’s nursery first thing in the morning, the way he woke up babbling a happy baby language. Claire was so saved, as a matter of fact, that Scott had to walk her back to the cabin, only halfway there they took a turn and disappeared into the woods and I was the only one to see them go.

  At breakfast on Saturday morning, which would be our last full day and night at church camp, Mrs. Canary told me that I was the only camper who had not taken the walk to the altar. She had tears in her eyes as she said this, and told me that it was a great pain to Minister Bob and to all the staff but most especially to Jesus himself. Couldn’t I just? she asked me. Couldn’t I just put whatever was stopping me aside and accept eternal salvation? And if I couldn’t, did I realize I wouldn’t be able to attend the going-away sock hop that night? Because I could be an influence, she said, still on the verge of crying. I could be a dark influence on all the beautiful souls who had already said yes.

  At chapel Saturday night the moment for the altar call came and I could not move. Because it was the last night, like the last night of a fair, everybody streamed past me, making my stubbornness even more apparent and perverse. There was loud praying and shouting; Claire, I think, came close to fainting, and there I stayed, on my knees. The safety pin in my skirt had come undone and was performing the appendectomy I didn’t yet need. The old bird at the piano watched me with her one black eye, and I watched her back, and when we left the chapel that night everyone else headed to the dining hall for the sock hop and I headed back to the cabin.

  I sat on the front stoop in my cutoff shorts, barefoot. My T-shirt and bathing suit and towel were hanging on the line in the moonlight, drying, and for some reason I found the sight very reassuring. No one was around; the crickets were noisy, and I could hear the music from the dance coming up the hill very clearly, but it wasn’t for me and I didn’t want it. I heard footsteps and feared an assault by a ministerial brigade, but it turned out just to be Robin Hicks, my neighbor. He said, “Hey, you.”

  I said, “Hey, Robin.”

  He smiled at me and there was that broken tooth — I had done that and he still liked me just fine. He was seventeen, and I was eleven. “I came up here to see if you’d like to dance.”

  The song that began was “If,” by Bread, a song I already found so painfully beautiful I couldn’t add it to my record collection at home.If a face could launch a thousand ships, then where am I to go? I stood up in the leaves and pine twigs, and took a step toward Robin. He very gently put one hand on my waist and one on my right shoulder, and we swayed so slowly I bet to the stars it looked like we weren’t moving at all. When the song was over he kissed the top of my head and walked back down to the dance, and I went inside the cabin to pack. To go home.

  Hairless Tails

  Our three faces had seen better days. Rose was sitting in her backyard studiously avoiding bees or any reference to bees, because she had become convinced that she was allergic to them. She no longer walked barefoot because of the premeditated way bees hung about in the grass exactly where her foot might land. Her sting-allergy fear was unrelated (except perhaps at some very deep level) to the fact that the whole left side of her face was swollen and bruised, the result of a dog bite by a Saint Bernard at a family reunion. The dog, a grown male who had been unprovoked, had gone for her eye — her good eye, the one that didn’t wander — and had missed by about a quarter of an inch. She was full-out traumatized, and I feared by the dejected way she was sitting that she might become afraid of anything with teeth, anything with stingers, and eventually, anything with seeds, like a woman in our church who was constantly pointing out the seeds in certain vegetables and fruits.

  Three days earlier, Maggie, in an act of derring-do, had twisted the rings on the swing set until they were only about two inches long, then hung on them as they righted themselves. By the end she had looked like a little tornado. Her feet got out of control, and the momentum moved up her body, ending with her head, which smacked against the swing set at about the speed of sound. Remarkably, the soft part of her temple
connected exactly with one of the swing set bolts, which entered her head as if it had been made of butter. She had required stitches, and now the side of her head was all a greeny-yellow bruise, and she refused to leave her bandage on, so the stitches were crawling across her temple like a black bug.

  After bragging to great excess, and for many years, that I was immune to poison ivy, I had contracted a deadly case of poison sumac while camping the previous weekend. It was, apparently, a rare form of creeping rash, because it had begun in the bend of my elbow, had crawled all the way up my arm, my shoulder, and my neck, and was currently inflaming the left side of my face. I told all the white trash kids in town it was leprosy, which made them run inside to their fat mamas.

  Rose was so deeply worried by her dog bite and Maggie’s head injury that I didn’t know what to suggest we do. My boredom and her quietness were both so acute that I started to feel spooked. Maggie was sitting on the swing, not really swinging, because her head insides were still wobbly.

  Rose’s house was bordered at the back and on one side by alleys; across the side alley sat an abandoned house. It was a good-looking house, as far as I was concerned, although it had occurred to me that I coveted nearly every house in town, and spent a fair amount of time imagining living in them. This one was large, wooden, and had a variety of shapes, like a house a witch would live in. At the back was an enclosed sitting porch that had floor-to-ceiling windows with so many small panes that they had probably been cleaned once in the past century, and then by someone conscripted, as atonement for acts of public indecency. The sitting porch was the only part of the house I had explored — the rest was too frightful even for someone as intrepid and with such low standards as myself. What stopped me in the living room, in addition to the general metric ton of detritus, was a pair of men’s overalls, lying spread out in the doorway as if their occupant had simply vanished while crawling into the house. Something had eaten a hole clear through the bottom and into the crotch, and I was deeply afraid, not of the hole or the crotch but of the Something. The sitting porch, however, was about as civilized as some parts of my own house. There were some metal chairs still arranged, by accident, as if to accommodate a long conversation over lemonade. The floor was covered with broken Ball jars. Walking on them created a noise that was akin to a whole, dreadful lifetime of tooth grinding. I enjoyed it. There were some intact jars in there too, blue ones and green ones that had bubbles right in the glass, and old whiskey bottles. I considered telling my dad about them, but it was a private place, as far as such things went.