Becoming Carly Klein, page 8
Carly hears Serena and Jill speaking in low voices to one another, and the last thing she remembers before finally falling off to sleep, just as dawn is lighting up the countryside outside her window, is a burst of giggles and a hushed “Shhh, she’ll hear us . . .”
When the train reaches Colorado, they transfer to a bus and ride half a day until they get to Red Soil Ranch on the outskirts of a tiny town called Carbondale. They arrive at the end of the afternoon, and there’s only enough time to dump their luggage in their assigned bunks before hiking up the hill to the main house for dinner. Right away, Carly starts making mental lists of complaints to convince her parents to let her come home.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I know you’re going to think I’m exaggerating about how truly horrible Red Soil Ranch is, but you have to believe me that if the authorities ever found out how badly it’s run, they’d close this place down in a heartbeat.
There are no organized or “structured” activities, and other than having to show up for inedible meals and shoveling horse shit, there’s nothing to do. The bunks are filthy, and because there’s a water shortage, we’re only allowed one shower a week. The food is all fattening, high-cholesterol stuff with no fresh fruit or vegetables.
Please, please do not make me spend the summer in this hellhole. Can you please, please let me come home? I promise I’ll be more responsible about doing chores and getting my work done.
Love, Carly
Licking closed the envelope, Carly begins to feel better and more energized. Warming to the subject of how much she hates camp, she settles down with a yellow pad and expands her litany of complaints.
Dear Lauren,
Red Soil Ranch Camp is beyond unbearable. I can’t believe my mother made me come here. It has to be the worst place I’ve ever been in my life.
My bunkmates are total and complete freaks. Mary Ellen Brewster comes from Red Oak, Iowa—does such a place even exist?—and Molly Meisel comes from some suburb of Cleveland. Mary Ellen’s hair is so light it’s practically white. She wears it pulled back in a long braid that accentuates her skinny face and her pale eyes. Is it possible they’re actually pink? She reminds me of the albino guinea pig in the science lab at school.
Molly got accepted by mistake ’cause her parents falsified the required medical report so the camp wouldn’t know she was born without big toes and only has sealed-over stubs for thumbs. There’s no way she can function normally and do all the physical stuff we have to do at this place. She practically can’t button her own blouse—and forget about tying shoelaces!
Mary Ellen’s totally hung up on religion, and every night before bed she gets down on her knees, makes a little tent with her hands, and says prayers. “Lordy be” is her favorite expression.
During a big storm when lightning and thunder were keeping everyone awake, Mary Ellen told us about her “visions.” She described insane stuff like seeing angels on her shoulder and the devil at the bottom of her bed.
Molly is only about five feet tall and has short mousy brown hair that makes her look like a fat little boy. She isn’t exactly retarded, but she’s extremely babyish for her age. She cries when anyone teases her, screams so loud you can hear her up and down the bunk line when she gets angry, and rebels against camp rules and regulations by staging sit-down strikes. Her parents have to be nuts to send such a kid to a camp like this. But like my mom they probably didn’t have a clue about how badly run this place is.
My counselor goes to Queens College. Her name’s Rhona and she comes from Roslyn, so everyone calls her Rhona from Roslyn and imitates her Long Island accent behind her back. She’s over six feet tall and there’s a rumor she has an extra Y chromosome. She dyes her hair shoe-polish black and wears tons of black eyebrow pencil, black eyeliner—above and below her eyes—black mascara, and black tights. Even when she rides horses.
The counselors are supposed to sleep in our bunks, but Rhona never does. Every night at lights out she takes a sleeping bag from under her bed, grabs a flashlight, and warns us if there’s any trouble she’ll personally see to having us murdered in the morning. Molly gets hysterical whenever Rhona does this, and I have to explain that this is just something she says but not something she really means. Molly keeps crying anyway.
How’s Vermont? And what happened with Elliott before you left? Write me soon ’cause I’m going crazy here in this hellhole!
Love, Carly
Although she doesn’t like to make it obvious, Carly actually feels sorry for Molly. She can’t help thinking about how hard everything is for her and how ill-equipped she is to deal with practically everything that goes on. When no one else is around, Carly makes a special effort to be nice to her and to help her with little stuff like buttoning up and tying her shoelaces. But because she realizes it makes Molly feel self-conscious in front of other kids, Carly does this only when they’re alone.
Carly doesn’t really like Molly all that much or think of her as an actual friend, but sometimes when she’s helping her with things Molly has trouble with, like brushing her hair, she kind of make-believes that Molly’s a younger sister. Carly thinks of Lauren, who doesn’t act nice to her brother Marc most of the time, but when he needs something or when Tibou reminds Lauren that she has to help her younger brother, Lauren steps up and does what’s needed.
A whole week goes by before Carly gets a card in her cubby with a photo of rolling green hills postmarked from Vermont. She turns it over and reads the brief text: Got your letter from hell. Ditch Colorado and come to Cabot. Lauren has made a pencil sketch of a black-and-white cow with a smiling face and signed her name the way artists do in the lower right corner.
Nothing arrives from her mom or dad, but she is handed one more little handmade envelope with Carly’s name and address in Lauren’s handwriting. Inside is a torn-off piece of paper on which Lauren has scribbled:
Hey Carly, sorry I forgot to tell you I slept with Elliott. We just did it once, the last night before I left for Vermont. I mean, we did it a few times, but all in one night. It was cool, but of course I’m not in love with him, so it doesn’t mean anything. Hang in there. Nothing lasts forever, especially not virginity. I’m glad I don’t have to get rid of THAT anymore.
Even though Lauren finally answered her question about Elliott, it doesn’t feel fair that she hasn’t bothered to react to any of the descriptions about camp that Carly took so much time and trouble to write. She is jealous that while she’s trapped at Red Soil Ranch, Lauren gets to spend a free summer in Vermont. Walking back to her bunk, Carly remembers the way Professor Pietro ended his last class and imagines the Lensky family hiking along lush mountain trails singing “Do-Re-Mi” the way the von Trapp family does in The Sound of Music. Thinking about the Lenskys makes Carly feel even more homesick than usual, and even though she’s used to not getting much mail from her parents, she can’t help wishing they would send something.
On Saturday night, Red Soil Ranch has a square dance in the main house with its “brother” camp, a mile away across Moonstone Lake. When Carly arrives, a fat man with a very red face and a string tie is playing the fiddle and calling the dances. The director’s wife, wearing a long plaid skirt and a white apron, is serving graham crackers and bug juice punch from a big black stewpot. She scoops exactly half a soup ladle full of the watery orange liquid into Carly’s paper cup and reminds her to save the cup in case she wants seconds.
Carly has never square-danced and has no interest in participating. The whole setup seems totally phony compared with scenes she loves watching on Little House on the Prairie, where Pa plays the fiddle and Laura and her sisters dance around the campfire with their friendly neighbor, Isaiah Edwards.
To avoid being asked to join in, Carly slinks off to a dark corner of the room, sips her punch, and watches Rhona gyrating and slinging her hips as she do-si-do’s with the head cowboy, a craggy-faced, Western-drawling, bowlegged, balding man named Sonny that all the older girls in camp have fallen in love with. Carly thinks the draw is his clear eyes—blue as the Colorado sky—and the way he looks you up and down when you unsaddle and rub down the horses.
At the end of the evening, the lights dim as the caller puts aside his fiddle and announces that it’s time for a last “regular social dance.” In his country twang, he pronounces it “regaller.” By now he has big sweat stains under the arms of his shirt. As he begins crooning “Blame It on the Rain” into the raspy microphone, a tall, skinny dark-haired boy with a face full of acne comes over and asks Carly to dance.
“I’m Lance,” he says, and grabs her low around her waist, pushing her right against him so she feels his rock-hard erection pressing into her. As he grinds his pelvis harder and harder against her tummy and hips, she stares out over his shoulder, trying to look like she’s not aware of what’s going on down below.
Sometime during the dance, when she feels like she can’t bear another moment, the pressure of his body against hers lets up, and she realizes, as she hears him suck in air, that he just came. When the dance finally ends and they separate, the front of his pants are dark and wet. Walking back to her bunk, Carly realizes Lance doesn’t even know her name. She stops at the washhouse and goes into one of the foul-smelling stalls. When she puts two fingers down her throat and applies pressure, a thin, orangey liquid and chunks of mealy graham cracker spurt into the toilet.
As disgusting as the evening was for her, Carly decides to use it as fodder for her correspondence with Lauren. Instead of telling what really happened, she plans to embellish her report so Lauren will be impressed by her sexual progress.
Dear Lauren,
Last night at the dance with the boys camp I met this guy named Lance, and we wound up making out behind the barn. He was lying on top of me and wanted to take our clothes off, but I wasn’t that much into it. I think he came in his pants. We’ll probably get together again next Saturday night, and not because I especially like him but mostly because I’m so bored, I may decide to let him go farther.
Are there any cool dudes in Vermont?
It rained all last week, and one afternoon Rhona from Roslyn taught a bunch of us how to smoke a joint. Mary Ellen doesn’t get the difference between smoking pot and just plain smoking and kept calling the joint a cigarette. She sat pouting on her bed, reading the Bible. The rest of us sat in a circle on the floor and passed around the joint. When Mary Ellen said God was gonna punish us, Rhona told her to shut up and keep her repressed religious hang-ups to herself. I think I’ll write home to my mom about this so she’ll let me come home.
That’s the news from Red Soil Reformatory. Write soon and let me know how much better life is on the outside.
Love,
Carly
Carly doesn’t mention how sorry she felt for Molly and leaves out the description of how much trouble she had holding the joint. Instead of positioning it between her thumb stump and forefinger, the way everyone else was doing, she alternated hands and lodged the joint between her middle and index fingers, the way movie stars in old movies on television held cigarettes. She stuck her stubby thumbs straight up in the air to keep them out of the way, and while Carly didn’t mean to stare, she couldn’t help noticing the way the flesh rounded over her stumps and met to form a tiny hole at the tip.
Chapter
ELEVEN
Carly’s doing barn chores when Serena and Jill, who haven’t spoken to her since the train trip west, come up and greet her as though they’re best buddies.
“Hey, Carly, we’ve heard the wicked word about your counselor,” Serena says.
“Do you guys ever go spy?” Jill asks, raising her eyebrows meaningfully and rolling her eyes toward Serena.
She’s wearing one of those Indian beaded belts pulled tightly around her “Yale Sucks” T-shirt.
“What’re you talking about?” Carly asks.
Apparently, this is the cue they’ve been waiting for. They each take one of Carly’s arms and lead her off to a clump of tall, blue-green fir trees that shades a clearing behind the barn. Carly learns that her counselor Rhona has been sleeping with Sonny.
“They do it late at night in the ravine that separates the bunks from the main house,” Jill tells Carly.
“When you guys are sleeping,” Serena continues in a teasing tone of voice.
“So what’re we gonna do about it?” Jill is looking straight at Carly as she asks this. “What d’ya think, are you guys game?”
At first Carly thinks she’s asking whether she, Mary Ellen, and Molly are willing to sleep with Sonny in the ravine, but then she realizes Jill’s talking about something else.
“We’re ready to go,” Jill is saying. “We’ve got the Super girls organized for tonight.”
Before Carly can make sense of it all, Serena is asking her whether they can count on her to organize the first-year girls. At quarter to midnight, they’re all to meet at the flagpole. Everyone should have a flashlight, but no one should use it until they reach the ravine. The older girls think they know the exact spot where Sonny and Rhona “do it” every night, and when they get there—silently so Sonny and Rhona won’t realize—the girls will all flash their lights down into the ravine, taking them by complete surprise and catching them in the act.
The raid seems like a crazy idea to Carly, who can’t imagine a whole gang of girls being quiet enough to sneak up on Rhona and Sonny without being heard. And once they’ve shined their flashlights down on them, what are they all supposed to do, just run away?
“I don’t know about my bunkmates,” Carly starts to protest. “I’ve got the crippled kid with no big toes, and Mary Ellen’s a religious fanatic—”
“Are you making excuses?” Jill cuts her off before she completes her list of reservations. “Are you chicken, or what?”
“It’s not me,” Carly explains. “It’s the others I’m worried about.”
“You can convince them, Carly, if you try. We chose you because you’re a leader and we believe in you.” Serena pats her on the back as she says this.
“We’re counting on you, Carly. We know you can do it.” Jill squeezes her arm.
Carly mutters that she’ll do what she can and turns to leave. Behind her she hears one of them say, “You’d better, Carly,” and then the other one—Carly can’t tell their voices apart—add, “Or else.”
Carly gets the same feeling she always gets around the popular kids at school. They’re more experienced and know more than she does, as though they have special access to what’s going on in the world around them.
On her way back to the bunk, Carly stops by the main house to check her mail cubby. She recognizes her mother’s handwriting from the envelope lying with the return address facing up. In spite of herself, Carly’s heart lurches, and even though she doesn’t like to admit it, she’s happy to be hearing from her mom. She tears open the envelope and reads as she walks along the dirt path that leads to the bunk line. Gwen writes about how hot and sticky it is back East and how lucky Carly is to be in the beautiful Rocky Mountains.
Carly realizes Gwen has absolutely zero conception of where Red Soil Ranch is located, miles from any mountains on a parched, waterless flatland where practically the only things that grow are scrub weed and desert cactus. There’s no mention of her dad, and at the bottom of the page is a P.S.: Don’t worry. Everyone gets homesick at first. It will pass. In her next letter, Carly decides, she’ll tell Gwen how her counselor spends her nights.
When Carly reaches the rickety footbridge that crosses the ravine, she stands there a while looking down into the ravine in which Rhona and Sonny supposedly “do it” every night. The slopes are lined with rocks and weeds and roots of overturned trees that have long ago dried up and died. Carly can’t imagine where a sleeping bag could lie flat in this whole long, rubbly trench.
Molly is sitting on her bed, cutting her toenails, when Carly gets back to the bunk. She has set for herself a nearly impossible task. She holds the scissors between the index and middle finger of her right hand—the same way she holds a joint—and takes forever setting the blades in place, steadying them, and then cutting the toenail. Another thick white curl flies up into the air, and Molly calls out gleefully, “Gotcha!” She follows the trajectory with her beady brown eyes until the nail lands out of sight among the dust balls on the floor. Then she hunkers down over her foot and goes on to the next toe. The fact that she doesn’t have big toes doesn’t seem to bother her at all or make her the slightest bit self-conscious.
“Where’s Mary Ellen?” Carly asks, remembering her assignment from Serena and Jill.
“No idea,” Molly says.
“But it’s almost dinnertime. Where do you think she could be so late?”
“Dunno.”
Carly could kill her for being so useless.
“Guess what I found out?” Carly asks in her most seductive voice.
“Dunno,” Molly says again, steadying the scissor blades around what would be a middle toenail if she had big toes.
“You’re not gonna believe this, but I had it firsthand from some Super girls—”
“So what? They make up tons of stuff just to impress us.”
“But this isn’t a lie. It’s about Rhona and Sonny and what they do at night together.”
Carly watches Molly carefully, hoping for a slight quickening of interest.
“Like what, for instance?” Molly looks up from her toes for the first time.
“Late after we’re in bed at night, they meet and do it in the ravine.” There’s a ring of victory in Carly’s voice.
“What? Do what?” Molly asks.
Her face is as blank and impassive as if Carly had told her grass was growing on the ground.
“I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe what a baby you are, Molly.” Carly can’t stop the feeling of wanting to be cruel. “Do you mean to tell me you’re so dumb and immature you don’t understand what ‘doing it’ means?”
