Perennials, page 10
After they said the Pledge of Allegiance, the campers and counselors walked to the dining hall for breakfast. Rachel noticed Helen, who had been standing near her at flag raising, dart ahead to catch up with the boys.
“Mikey!” Helen called after him. “Wait up!” Rachel almost laughed at Helen’s overt enthusiasm.
Mikey stopped for a moment, standing among the moving hordes of hungry kids until Helen caught up to him, smiling. Her smile, with its twinge of girlish flirtation, redeemed her overexcitement.
Helen walked next to Mikey with her arm purposely grazing his. But Mikey looked distracted, and Rachel followed his glance over to Sheera, who was walking near Sarah and the other girls in their tent, albeit slightly apart from them. Sheera was from the city, like Rachel, which gave one immediate bonus points at a mostly suburbanite-attended camp. She seemed to be straddling the line between wanting to fit in with the girls and wanting nothing to do with them, and they seemed to be trying to figure out the same with her.
So Mikey liked Sheera, Rachel realized. He was looking at her for just a beat too long for it to be otherwise.
After breakfast, Rachel’s thoughts wandered back to her father. When she woke up, she’d felt okay, but as the new day settled, she let the gravity of the news sink into her bones, and it felt so heavy, so oppressive, that she found herself unable to say much at all.
Rachel and Fiona fed and washed the horses. Rachel’s mind was on one thing now, and that was the thing she wouldn’t discuss. She knew that Fiona was sensitive enough to think Rachel’s quietness had something to do with Fiona herself—maybe something minor Fiona had said or done—but Rachel didn’t have the emotional energy to clarify the reason for it.
All morning, they led girls and bored horses around the fenced-in arena. Rachel and Fiona took the horses out for a longer trail ride during lunch. In the afternoon, Rachel taught older riders how to jump over bales of hay. They fed the horses again before dinner.
Over spaghetti and meatballs, Helen observed, “You’re so quiet today, Rachel.”
“I’m just tired,” she said.
And at lights-out, much to the girls’ disappointment, she skipped roses and thorns in order to make it to the computer lab faster to call her mom.
Since she hadn’t heard anything yet, she knew things were more or less the same. But as she dialed the number, she felt a strange sense of hope bubble up inside her.
“Any news?” Rachel asked as soon as her mother answered.
“Hey, hon,” Denise said. “He’s stable. But he hasn’t woken up.”
“What does that mean, ‘stable’?” Rachel asked. “That sounds sort of good?”
“They have him hooked up to life support because his heart is too weak to work on its own.”
“Oh,” Rachel said. She twirled the telephone wire around her finger. “Do they think it will start working again?”
Her mother paused on the other end of the line.
“Mom?”
“No, honey,” she said. “They don’t.”
—
Rachel was standing outside the computer lab as Fiona came down the hill toward the staff lodge.
“Hey, hot stuff,” Fiona called. “Wait up.”
Rachel didn’t move. Her arms were wrapped around herself, the summer breeze chilling her.
Fiona approached and looked into Rachel’s face as she got closer. Rachel felt on the verge of crumpling, and tears were pooling in her eyes, like they would spill over if she moved just an inch, and all control would be lost.
“Come here,” Fiona said, and took her friend into her arms. “That’s it,” she said to Rachel, stroking her hair. “Let it out.”
—
Later, they sat down at the base of their favorite tree—the huge elm in the center of the flag lawn—and Rachel told her everything.
“How did you guys find out?” Fiona said.
“She called my mom. She thought we should know.”
“Wow,” Fiona said. “That was nice, I guess.”
“I don’t know why everyone keeps saying that,” Rachel said. “He’s my dad. Of course I should know.”
A few British counselors passed by, noticing Rachel and Fiona.
“All right, girls?” one of them asked.
“We’re fine,” Fiona said in an overly cheery voice.
After the Brits went into the staff lodge, Rachel said, “I feel sad but like that’s not how I’m supposed to feel.”
“I don’t think there’s any ‘supposed to’ here,” Fiona said, making air quotes.
“He cut me out of his life. Him dying doesn’t change anything now.” Rachel wiped away a rogue tear. “It should be just like any other day.”
“Yeah, but, it does change things,” Fiona said. “Death is not just not talking to someone. It’s more real than that. It’s final. You know?”
“I guess,” Rachel said. “I guess until now I thought they were the same.”
The girls stood and went into the staff lodge to find themselves some beers.
—
By the end of the day on Wednesday, only Sarah had been asked to the dance, by Danny Sheppard; the rest of the girls in Rachel’s tent were dateless.
So on Thursday, Helen went ahead and asked Mikey herself. He seemed confident but mostly clueless in regard to girls; Rachel had noticed how he kept looking at Sheera at flag raising and free time without saying anything to her. He didn’t ask Sheera to the dance, and so Helen, with her flirty smile, plucked him up first.
Helen was parading her dresses around the tent at bedtime, deciding which she’d wear to the dance the following night. She held a red polka-dot dress against her skinny body. “Should I wear this one?” she asked, and then held up a hot-pink tube dress. “Or this one?”
“Mikey was my canoeing partner the other week,” Sheera said. Rachel could not tell if Sheera’s tone was genuinely innocent or meant to challenge Helen.
But Helen didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah,” she said. “I heard it was ’cause he didn’t have a choice.”
—
For hours on Friday, the girls primped in the bathroom with curling irons and straighteners, blue eye shadow and glitter lotion, perfume that smelled like cotton candy. Helen had never straightened her hair before, so Sarah did it for her—first blow-drying Helen’s wet curls upside down, then drying each section with a paddle brush, then mechanically clamping and gliding the straightening iron over the entire head of blond frizz. In the end, Helen’s hair was sleek and at least two inches longer, with a severe part down the middle. She wore the hot-pink tube dress.
Sarah borrowed the red polka-dot dress, which was too tight over her chest, and Sheera wore a simple black dress that fit her well. Rachel also was wearing black. As the girls began to leave for the dance, Rachel slipped a Poland Spring bottle filled with vodka—left over from their most recent night off—into her tote bag.
“You can never go wrong with an LBD,” Rachel said to Sheera as they left the tent.
Sheera looked back at Rachel blankly.
“Little black dress?”
“Oh.”
“I mean you look great.”
“Thanks,” Sheera said. They chatted about their real lives as they walked down to the basketball courts where the event was taking place. They were both from New York. They were both from single-parent homes. Sheera went to a charter school in the Bronx that was near the magnet school Rachel had attended.
When they got to the courts, Top 40 music was playing from a set of speakers, and clumps of boys and girls were standing separately, not yet dancing. “Promiscuous girl,” the song went, “you’re teasing me. You know what I want, and I got what you need.” Rachel and Sheera had fallen behind, and the rest of the girls from their tent were already standing on the courts with one another, shuffling their feet and pretending not to be waiting for their dates to approach.
“Don’t you want to go out there?” Rachel asked.
“Okay,” Sheera said, though she hesitated for a moment. Of course, Rachel knew, if Sheera had wanted to go out there, she already would have politely exited their conversation.
Sheera walked toward the dance and then turned briefly back to Rachel, waving, like a younger girl leaving her mother on the first day of school. Rachel felt sorry that, up until now, she hadn’t tried to get to know Sheera.
She saw Fiona then, standing with the counselors from her section in a simple white halter dress made of linen. Very preppy, probably from J.Crew.
“Look at us,” Rachel said as she approached. “The devil and the angel.”
“That’s fitting,” Fiona said, and hugged her friend. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” Rachel said.
“No word yet?”
“No.”
“Keep me posted?”
“Of course.” Rachel stood back to appraise her friend. “You look great,” she said, meaning it.
“Really?” Fiona said. She looked down and straightened out the skirt of her dress.
“Really,” Rachel said. “Let’s dance.”
As Rachel and Fiona danced—with each other, with Chad, with some of the other counselors they were friendly with—Rachel often found her thoughts turning to her father, and as a knee-jerk reaction, she would look away, as if to look away from the memories, and her glance would land fondly on her girls, who were beginning to dance with the boys now, or on Jack walking around the perimeter of the basketball courts with his arms crossed, or on Yonatan, who was DJing the dance, playing music from his iPod.
Some of Yonatan’s friends or campers would go over and say hi to him or request a song, and he would bop along as he humored them, but he seemed mostly interested in picking what songs played next himself. He could very easily have made a playlist for the dance and left the iPod playing on its own so he could enjoy himself, but he was clearly interested in curating the music live. Rachel was dancing and also watching him, so curious about who he was, what his life was like back in Israel, when she felt a soft hand on her shoulder. She turned around to see Mo, the British woman who was her boss, the head of the Hemlock section.
“Rachel,” she said, “you have a phone call.”
Mo was an uptight person, aloof. She kept Rachel at a cold distance as if she were Rachel’s supervisor in a stuffy office setting, not at a summer camp.
“Rachel?” Fiona said, understanding as quickly as Rachel did. “Should I come?”
Rachel shook her head, and she walked to the camp office with Mo in silence. She wasn’t sure if Mo knew exactly what had happened or not, but she was suddenly grateful for Mo’s silence. As they ascended the hill, the gleeful talk of children and the blaring pop music receded while the truer sounds of summer resurfaced: the birds chirping at one another from their treetops, the evening breeze sighing over the high grass. It was as if she and Mo were walking onto a higher, more peaceful plane. If only for a moment, the landscape made Rachel feel at ease. It was an ease that felt like the calm, knowing moment before a downpour, when the leaves on the trees turn upward and the clouds roll in and you know you have a few minutes to find shelter. An ease entirely at odds with what she was on her way to do: pick up the phone and learn that her father, who had disowned her three years earlier, was now actually, heart-stoppingly dead.
—
When Rachel was fourteen, she didn’t want to spend time with either of her parents. She had started high school and had begun to discover the joy of getting sexual attention, the way it made her feel instantly powerful. Boys were such a quick fix. There had been a “Piece of Ass” list that went around the cafeteria during her first week of high school, with a list of the five hottest girls from each grade. She ranked as number two in her freshman class of four hundred girls. How easy it was to pretend to be offended.
Some weekend in the fall, not long after September 11, she and her father went for a hike an hour upstate.
“I wanted to take you out of the city,” he explained in the car. Rachel was annoyed; she had been asked to go to the movies that day with an eleventh-grade boy.
“With everything that’s been happening,” he said, “I think it’s healthy. Don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“I try to convince your mother to move to the suburbs. I think it would be better for you both.”
“We would never leave the city.”
“I know.”
He exited the highway, and they drove onto a winding road that wrapped around and ascended the side of the mountain. About halfway up, he pulled into an inconspicuous dirt parking lot off the side of the road.
“Here we are!” he joked. “Hike’s over!”
She didn’t laugh.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “This is where our trail starts.”
He wasn’t a healthy man by any means, and it was unusual for him to suggest something active for them to do together; meals and “cultural” activities, like going to museums or the theater, were much more the norm. He had a solid paunch around his middle and still smoked a pack a day, as he had been doing since he was a teenager. He was almost sixty now, and when he and Rachel went to dinners, he always ordered some sort of red meat and glass after glass of red wine, which he slugged back like it was water. So it was strange—sweet and a little sad—to see him in his version of active wear now: Adidas gym pants with the white stripes down the side, some sort of spandex-looking T-shirt that clung too much to his extra weight, and what looked like brand-new sneakers. He was carrying a backpack that was way too big for the two-mile hike they were about to embark upon. Rachel was used to seeing him dressed in an expensive suit.
“I brought sandwiches,” he said.
They climbed mostly in silence. Once they got onto the trail, Rachel did not think as much about what she was missing in the city. She would not admit that it was, indeed, nice to get out. She was in good shape from field hockey, but her father often needed to stop, sit on a rock, and drink from his water bottle.
“I’m good. I’m good,” he’d say after a minute, pressing himself back to standing.
When they got to the top, he poured some water over his head, like a football player who had just gotten off the field.
They sat on a boulder overlooking the Hudson River.
“That’s Bear Mountain.” Her father pointed to the other side. “See, there’s the ice-skating rink. I took you there once, when you were really little.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Your mom was with us.” Rachel wondered, as she imagined the scene, which she didn’t remember, if he had been nervous that day, taking his second family around so close to his first. Then Rachel realized he’d probably planned it all out; he’d made sure he knew where his real family would be that day so as to not run into them.
He took out the sandwiches from a white plastic bag in his backpack. “Turkey and pastrami on a roll, lettuce, tomato, mustard, banana peppers.” He handed it to her.
She couldn’t remember the last time they’d eaten deli sandwiches. “You didn’t even ask if my order was the same.”
“Is it?” A look of panic crossed his face.
She kept a straight face for a beat and then broke into a smile. “Yeah,” she said. He smiled back.
They ate their sandwiches with their feet dangling in front of them, like children. The mountainside sloped dramatically beneath them, with thorny brambles and miles of woods leading all the way down to the Hudson. Across the way was the quaint Bear Mountain Bridge, with its drawbridge and its two lanes, and beyond it a range of blue and green mountains. A large tugboat was pulling a much smaller motorboat along the murky river.
He took another bite of his roast beef sandwich, chewed thoroughly, and swallowed.
“So,” he said. “Your mother tells me you’re starting to date.”
Rachel glanced at her father and then fixed her gaze on the mountains ahead. “She doesn’t know anything about me.”
“I highly doubt that, my dear.” He patted her knee. “She probably knows you better than you know yourself.”
“Don’t call me that.” She moved her knee away. Sometimes this sensation of hot anger roiled inside her, even when she was having a fine time. She couldn’t say where it came from, only that there was some sort of disconnect between what she wanted and what was happening in front of her. The mountains, the river, those were all fine, but it was this—this man next to her, her father, who could take her on a hike and memorize her sandwich order and call her pet names and yet had to be back home, back to his other home, by sundown.
“She’s an intuitive woman, your mother,” he continued. “She feels so much.”
He looked so pathetic in those brand-new sporty clothes. The anger was alive; she could feel it wanting to erupt out of her.
“Where does your wife think you are right now?” Rachel asked, her face hot. She had never asked this before; that was part of the unspoken deal.
He swallowed again, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. “What?”
“It’s a Saturday. I can’t remember the last time I saw you on a Saturday.”
He bunched the wax paper from his sandwich into a ball. He took a deep breath.
“Golf,” he said quickly and quietly. “But, Rachel, sweetie, there’s no need to—”
“Don’t call me ‘sweetie.’ ”
He took another deep breath. “Sorry. Rachel. I don’t think this is good for you, talking about this.”
“How would you have any idea about what is good for me?”
He stood. “I think we should start heading back.”
“You’re just not going to talk to me about this?”
Now the anger was coming in its other form: that familiar wave of fragility that caused her voice to crack and tears to form despite her most intense efforts to make them stop.
“How come you’re so ashamed of me?” she asked.
He shook his head and looked at Rachel with such sadness. It wasn’t empathy; it wasn’t like he could feel how she felt or was even trying to. It was pity. Like he was very, very sorry for her.
