Perennials, page 13
“I cried a lot. Even when I felt fine, I couldn’t stop,” Nell said. “And then after crying all day, I would go out, drink too much”—she lifted her bottle—“and go home with someone. Then same thing all over again the next day. You know.”
Mo nodded, though she didn’t know.
“So this was my solution.” She swept a hand toward the lake and toward the camp behind them. “I never took the medications. Threw them in the trash.”
“And what do you think? Did it work?” Mo asked, already half-knowing the answer.
“Camp? I don’t know. I’d hardly say it’s won me over.”
—
The next morning, Mo left her bunk sometime before dawn and went down to the stables. She had to move slowly in the darkness down the sloping hill from girls’ camp. She cut across the athletic fields, thick with unkempt dandelions and slick with midsummer dew, to the red-roofed barn.
She normally did not ride in the early mornings, as she didn’t like to deprive Micah of any sleep before his full days with rowdy kids. But she had stirred in her bunk all night, the anxiety of the approaching day resting heavily on her, and this was, and always had been, the only way to alleviate such anxieties. Today, she had a certain impression to make: that her girls were happy and well fed, active but staying out of trouble. She had to meet parents and be much more gregarious than was her nature.
She saddled Micah, who was waking slowly, and led him outside into the lightless morning. It was miraculous, riding’s immediate effect on her: the slackening of her limbs, the slowing of her heartbeat, and the deepening of her breathing; even the full return of her senses—the realizations of the smells of fresh hay and the loamy arena and Micah’s lemon-scented, freshly washed coat, of the feel of the firm but supple leather reins between her fingers.
Most of the kids at Camp Marigold didn’t like riding Micah. He was a brown dun past his prime, and he looked stocky and dull next to the sprightly, shiny Thoroughbreds. The unskilled and impatient riders found him stubborn; the rich ones found him common. But Mo took a liking to Micah and he to her. She’d been riding since she was a child, but she had never been a prizewinner; she felt sure that Micah had never been one either.
She looked across the arena to the dining hall painted the same burnt red as the barn and beyond to the beginnings of the trails leading to boys’ camp and the lake. In the distance were the Berkshires with their fleshy treetops, the mountains rounded against the now dark blue sky. Mo had heard about a lot of beautiful places in her life, but no one had ever mentioned Connecticut.
She was lost in her thoughts until she spotted Jack, the camp director, jogging up the hill below the stables and waving as he got closer. She sat upright and brought Micah to a halt. Mo waved back to Jack, then began to trot Micah to the barn so she could put him in his pen and return to girls’ camp before she needed to explain herself. But Jack continued toward them, then stopped at the fence and beckoned her over.
“Morning, Mo,” he said, cheerful and out of breath, leaning against the fence for support.
“Hiya, Jack,” Mo said. “Have a good run?”
“Mmm.” He stretched a calf against the wooden fence’s bottom rung. Jack was in his forties and handsome. He had a head of thick graying hair that he was always running a hand through.
“And who’s this?” he asked, outstretching his hand above the fence to pet between Micah’s ears. The horse leaned into the touch.
“This is Micah,” Mo said, hopping down. “I hope it’s all right I’m out. I’ll get back before anyone wakes up.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Alone time is important, Mo.” He kept his eyes on the horse, scratching the top of its head. “Hi, Micah,” he cooed.
“He’s a sweet boy,” Mo said.
Jack often played poker or billiards in the staff lodge with the younger counselors; he clearly wanted to establish himself as some sort of cool avuncular figurehead by drinking and staying up late with them. She had trouble with this sort of boundary crossing, but she liked Jack anyway; he asked questions and made friends easily. She was slightly ashamed that, though she was at least ten years his junior, she normally went to bed before him.
The orange sun began to rise over the Berkshires. Jack took a deep breath and looked around the camp’s sloping greenery. “Ready for today?”
“I suppose,” Mo said. “Not quite sure what to expect.” It was time to get back to her section to shower off the equine smells before the rest of the counselors woke up.
“You’ll be great,” he said. “Just be yourself.”
—
Back in December, Mo’s twin brother, Benji, and his fiancée, Jade, were home from London for the holidays. They were sipping wine in her parents’ kitchen, cleaning up after a dinner of roasted chicken and root vegetables, and Benji and Jade were trying to convince Mo to come out with them that night.
“It’ll just be us, Paul, and Oliver,” Benji said. “Maybe David.”
“Where are you going?” Mo asked, drying a dish and handing it to him to put away.
“Dunno.” He shrugged. “Probably just O’Shannon’s or something.” That was the local pub, where they always went when they were all home and caught up on old times while they got obliterated.
“You should come, Mo!” Jade was nice enough, and enthusiastic about everything. She and Benji had met at some swanky bar in London: He was a banker, and she worked in marketing. Mo thought Benji was too smart and too interesting for Jade, who seemed to have no bite to her; she appeared to be the kind of person who breezed through life having never second-guessed a decision, having never been anxious about an unforeseeable future. She was pretty and agreeable, as she seemed to know, and so why wouldn’t things come to her?
But Mo was tired and full, and she knew she’d likely be expected to stay somewhat sober and drive them all home at the end of the night, and as much as she loved Benji’s friends, she would have liked to catch up with them without Jade there, as Jade seemed so conscious of gender divides that she always clung to Mo as the only other woman at such events. She would make pithy asides about lads being lads and roll her eyes at their dirty jokes, jokes that Mo actually enjoyed.
“Mo,” Benji said, a wide grin on his face, preparing to tease her, “if you keep saying no to every social invitation, we are eventually going to stop asking you.” He sipped his wine, and Jade playfully swatted him on the arm.
“He doesn’t mean that,” she said.
“I know,” Mo said, miffed because obviously she understood Benji’s sarcasm much better than this girl who’d only known him for two years.
“Hey”—Benji put his wineglass down on the counter and raised his hands, grinning, as if to say “Not guilty”—“Not my fault if you die alone.”
She was used to his bone-dry humor, and had been conditioned to laugh at or at least shrug off the most brutal teasing from him over the years. She was surprised to find that this last remark hurt. And she could see from Jade’s stunned expression that Benji had most definitely crossed a line.
Benji took note of the silence in the kitchen. “What?” he said.
What Mo hated most was Jade’s apparent distress, as if Jade too was truly afraid that Mo dying alone was an absolute possibility.
“I’m going to bed,” Mo said, abruptly placing her wineglass down and retreating to her childhood bedroom.
—
As a kid and a teenager, Mo had latched on to her brother in school and become an accessory to him and his friends, which she had hoped made her seem like a cool girl, who mostly spent her time with boys, instead of a desperate one. On the weekends, she rode at Silvershoe Stables, keeping to herself, intimidated by the tight-knit clans of prissy girls there. She wasn’t as wealthy as they were; her family knew the owner of the stables, and they got an even better discount due to Mo’s additional volunteer hours there, which she performed happily.
Her parents were outgoing people—both of them teachers and popular in their respective schools—and she was an introvert in a family of extroverts. But despite her discomfort around her contemporaries, she enjoyed the honesty and transparency of kids. It was like they did the work of being outgoing for her. They were easy to get to know, to understand, because they said what they felt and thus encouraged her to do so too. She became a teacher herself, intent on feeling as if she was doing something more productive and beneficial with her life than just riding horses. And she was good at it.
For seven years now, Mo had taught eight-year-olds at the same Montessori school in York. Every day, she went for a run after work, came home to her studio apartment, made dinner, ate it in front of the television, graded homework and prepped for the next day, and was in bed by ten. On the weekends, she stayed with her parents in the suburbs and went riding at Silvershoe, where she now knew all the horses intimately.
But as the holidays ended, after Benji had long ago apologized, and he and Jade had returned to London, his comment continued to eat at her. Suddenly, when she woke up on a Monday in January and taught the same lesson in long division that she’d taught the year before and the years before that, she saw her life going on this way forever. And the most unbearable part was that, now that she was aware she was likely going to die alone, she realized that everyone else in her life must have been aware of it too. When she went for her run in her neighborhood after work, she felt exposed, as if the shop owners who waved to her as she passed were actually silently judging her for her boring reliability, for the fact that they knew they would see her at five P.M. each day like clockwork. All along, she’d thought her dedication to routine was commendable, but really, it was pitiful. When the parents at Silvershoe were asking about her personal life, they weren’t doing it to make conversation; really, they were curious as to whether her answer would, just once, be different, include an allusion to a man or even a friend, anything other than “I just spent the holidays with my parents.” A woman her age who didn’t seem to have any attachments unnerved people.
All her friends, from work and from university, were married or in serious relationships, and she was growing tired of them trying to fix her up with someone every time they knew of a single man, no matter his intelligence or looks or potential compatibility with Mo.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to meet someone. She just felt like it was too late. A thirty-year-old virgin: Who wanted to deal with that? She wasn’t exactly a knockout—not ugly, but nothing special—and she was shy too. Boys began to come on to her when she was a teenager and continued to through university, but she’d found she was always inexplicably afraid of them. She felt fiercely protective of her body and herself, as if someone coming into her space—literally entering her—would feel violating and wrong. She could not understand why this was. She would develop crushes sometimes, but she rarely had desires beyond kissing. She did not even learn how to properly masturbate until she was twenty-five. It was as if she was so afraid of doing the wrong thing when it came to being naked with someone else that she avoided the prospect entirely. And now it was too late for her. Now if she engaged in anything, she’d only be making a fool of herself.
She finally told her brother her secret about a month after his comment, in a fit of lonely desperation. He had pointed out the bleak nature of her life from the outside, and sarcastic though he was, the petrified look on Jade’s face had confirmed it all. Everyone would continue to pity her unless she made some sort of a change.
“You’re kidding,” he said over the phone.
She hoped that her silence indicated that she wasn’t.
“How does that even happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to for a long time. And then it was too late, and I was embarrassed.”
“Well,” he reasoned, “maybe you’re a lesbian.”
“You can’t just decide to be a lesbian,” she said, although the thought had indeed crossed her mind. Once, in a particular kind of mood, she had sought girl-on-girl porn online and then, immediately afterward, panicked about her sexuality. In a tizzy, she had read online that it was common for straight girls to watch lesbian porn.
It wasn’t like anyone she knew would have a problem with her being gay. The thing was, she didn’t know what sex was like, so how could she know if she liked it with a man, let alone with a woman? One time when she was drunk at uni, a girl had kissed her, but the anxieties about not knowing what to do, the fears of failure, had felt the same as they would have been with a man, and she had gone back to her dormitory alone that night.
This was how, at age thirty, she ended up at a place where no one knew anything about her. A place where people could suspect her life was actually full of excitement and possibility. This was how she came to do the most impulsive thing she had ever done: taking a job as a “section leader” at an American summer camp, the same camp that her brother had worked at years earlier, some five thousand kilometers from home.
—
The girls in the Hemlock section had been preparing all week, sweeping the floorboards of their platform tents, straightening up the belongings in their cubbies, and removing stray socks and bikini bottoms from the clotheslines. As the returning counselors explained, Visitors’ Day meant the girls having free time with the boys while the adults socialized, getting to leave camp, enjoying a meal beyond the dining hall, and most significant, it meant the counselors relinquishing their power for one day to the higher powers: the girls’ parents.
Mo put a wake-up mix in the CD player at seven-fifteen. She’d made dozens of these mixes before coming to camp and agonized over the song choices. Is this song still popular, or is it overdone now? Is this one only big in England, or do they like it in America too? Unlike on most mornings, today she didn’t need to raise the volume at the second song to get the girls out of bed. By the end of the first track, they were already beelining toward the showers in their towels and flip-flops. She sat on the wooden step at the entrance to the head tent, where she and Nell slept, and watched the procession unfold.
Sheera, one of Mo’s favorite campers, stopped in front of the head tent on her way to the showers.
“Mornin’, Mo,” she said, swinging her shower caddy.
“Good morning, Sheera.”
“Mo, what are you going to do while we’re all with our visitors today?”
“I’ll be down with the horses. Helping Nell.”
“Are you going to watch us ride?”
“I hope so,” Mo said. “Also, when all of you are having fun outside camp, I’ll probably rummage through your trunks and eat your new snacks.”
“Mo!” Sheera opened her mouth in faux shock. “Appalling!”
“Where did you learn such big words?”
Sheera rolled her eyes. “My daddy’s coming today,” she said. “He’s bringing me Starbursts and baby 3 Musketeers. Huge bags of them.” She looked hard at Mo. “I’m locking my trunk.” She turned on her heels and sauntered toward the showers.
Mo liked that Sheera could joke with her; the rest of them treated her like she was too old to be fun.
—
The cafeteria building was split into two single-sex dining halls. Apparently, the boys and girls sat on opposite sides of the same room years ago, but there had been too many distractions—the kids didn’t eat, just socialized—so they built a wall to separate the two sides. Mo felt grateful for any same-sex separations like this; she had had the idea that maybe she would meet a man that summer, and yet the more divisions there were between the genders, the more excuses she had to not meet one.
The girls sang some sort of grace before every meal. This morning they sang “The Birdie Song,” linking their thumbs together and fluttering their fingers above their heads.
“Way up in the sky, the little birds fly,
While down in their nest, the little birds rest.”
The girls made beds for the invisible birds with their arms, rocking them back and forth like infants.
“With a wing on the left and a wing on the right,
The little birds sleep all through the night.”
Rachel, the counselor for tent three, led her girls, putting her hands together against her ear and resting her head on them like they were a pillow.
“The fuck is she wearing?” Nell whispered.
Rachel and her friend Fiona were Americans who grew up going to Camp Marigold. Normally, Mo would have said something bitchy to Nell about the girl’s too-short dress. But Mo knew, because she was Rachel’s boss and had to deliver the news from the outside world, that Rachel’s father had died just a few days earlier. She was shocked that Rachel hadn’t left, let alone seemed cheerful and happy to still be at camp. So instead of making a snide comment to Nell, she simply shrugged.
The campers raised their voices at their favorite part of the song and yelled: “Shhh….You’ll wake the dang birdies!”
They laughed, clapped, and sat, and the kitchen workers came out of the swinging doors wheeling carts filled with identical breakfast trays. Mo and her table of camp leadership were served the sausage links and French toast sticks first.
“Of course breakfast is good on Visitors’ Day,” Nell said, dousing her meal with syrup. “So the first thing a Maple kid will tell their parents is, ‘Mom, we had French toast sticks for breakfast!’ ” she said, mimicking an American accent.
After breakfast, the parents began to arrive. They parked their SUVs on the lower fields and carried picnic baskets, balloons, and shopping bags to the boys’ and girls’ camps. The weather wasn’t ideal: The sunny morning had quickly morphed into a gray day, and a uniformly cloudy sky had cast itself over the camp, the freshly cut grass appearing a dull, dirty green.
“This makes me miss my mom,” Rachel said to one of her counselor friends outside the head tent, where Mo was also standing. The dads stayed outside their daughters’ tents, peering in, while moms straightened up bunks and took items out of shopping bags: shaving cream, gum, Pixy Stix, cups of ramen, Seventeen magazines, nail polish, Snapple iced teas.
