Perennials, page 6
“You know,” Rachel said to Fiona, looking over at Steph smoking, “she tells everyone she’s from L.A., but she’s really from Sacramento.”
Fiona and Rachel were the only counselors on this outing who had spent their childhood summers at Marigold. All the others were new. Still, the girls had been fifteen the last time they were there. The summers in between, they had been too old to be campers and too young to be counselors.
Chad and Yonatan now appeared in the rearview mirror carrying two handles of vodka, a jug of cranberry juice, and a case of Coors Light. Chad grunted as he dropped the case onto the ground and knocked twice on the Jeep’s door.
“A little help would have been nice,” he said when they got into the Jeep.
“We’re dainty,” Rachel said.
“Dainty American girls,” Chad said. “There’s an oxymoron.”
Fiona drove a few miles up the main drag toward the Super 8, where they would stay that night and party, the five of them. Lakeville, where Camp Marigold was located—about twenty-five miles up Route 63—was a pretty, rural town. There wasn’t much to do, but at least it had all the idyllic country attributes: farms with grazing cows, charming milk silos, unmanicured fields full of dandelions. Torrington also felt like the country but a less charming version of it. Everything was paved, and the only open spaces were parking lots between the Grand Union grocery store and the KFC and the Applebee’s.
Fiona pulled into the mostly empty parking lot of the motel. The only person in sight was a shirtless fat man smoking outside the front entrance.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Yonatan said.
Chad stayed in the backseat while the rest of them got out of the Jeep.
“You’re not coming in?” Fiona asked.
Rachel and Chad looked at each other. “Only four of us are allowed to stay in a room,” Rachel said to Fiona. “We talked about this.”
Fiona was sure they hadn’t talked about this and that Rachel had withheld this information because she knew that Fiona would not be okay with it. Chad said he would wait in the car and would come to their room—with the alcohol—once they were inside.
Rachel linked her arm in Fiona’s as they walked. “It’s gonna be fine. Just act normal.” She let her gaze linger on the fat man and then turned to Fiona with a disgusted look on her face. Fiona forced a laugh.
As eleven-year-olds, they had become friends riding horses together. They were the best riders at camp. Then they began to tell each other things they’d never told anyone else. Rachel told Fiona that she was the result of an affair; her mom had been a mistress, and her father kept Rachel a secret from his wife of twenty-something years. Fiona told Rachel that she wished her sister, Helen, had never been born.
An overweight twentysomething woman at the front desk typed on a PC with a deadpan look on her acne-scarred face. She was wearing a yellow Super 8 polo that was too small on her, the sleeves cutting into her arm fat. She did not look up at the four of them standing there.
Rachel leaned across the desk and peered at the woman’s name tag. “Hi, Mary Ann,” she said.
Mary Ann looked at Rachel sternly, as if to warn her about crossing too far into her territory. “Can I help you?”
Rachel smiled and told her they needed a room for four.
“How old are you all?” she asked suspiciously.
Yonatan slid his passport across the desk. “We’re twenty-one,” he said.
Mary Ann took the passport and opened it. “You’re twenty-one.”
The girls, all under twenty-one, did not have fake IDs.
“You all from the camp?” Mary Ann asked. “I can’t have any funny business again. Not like last summer.”
“We’re just here to get away for a night,” Rachel said in the voice she put on when she wanted to sound older. “You know how tiring kids can be.”
Rachel was a charming girl, but Mary Ann had yet to be charmed. “Rooms are nonsmoking. I see beer, you’re out. No refund.”
Rachel gave Mary Ann a wink and a thumbs-up.
Mary Ann sighed. She typed into her PC. “I need a credit card on file in case there’s any damage to the room.”
Rachel turned, without hesitation, to her best friend. “Fiona, would you mind?” She knew that Fiona had a family credit card in case of emergencies.
“There won’t be any damage,” Rachel said in response to Fiona’s hesitation. “And we’ll give you cash for the room.”
Rachel had this way of making Fiona feel like certain things were just part of her job as the “responsible” friend: driving the car, putting the credit card down. In a way, Fiona liked it. It made her feel like she had agency, like she was more than just Rachel’s sidekick. Surely Rachel sensed this—that each time she asked Fiona to do something, she was handing over a bit of her own power to Fiona, saying, “Here, hold this. Doesn’t that feel nice?”
Fiona slid her American Express across the table. Rachel took Fiona’s arm again.
“God, what a sad case she was,” Rachel said quietly to Fiona when they had stepped away from the desk, and they took the elevator up to room 304.
—
They could see Chad in the parking lot from their window, and he walked fast with the case of beer. He entered the Super 8 with ease through a side entrance.
The sleeping arrangements were set: Fiona and Steph in one bed, Rachel and Chad in the other (they were “just good friends,” she answered when Fiona had asked about the status of their relationship), and Yonatan on the floor. There were cards, and someone suggested strip poker. It was seven P.M.; Fiona had assumed that, at some point, they’d go out for dinner. She was hungry. But since gaining the weight, she felt as if she could never be the one to bring up the topic of food. It felt like there would be something desperate in that, transparent and obvious. She poured herself a cranberry and vodka and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You’re not playing?” Yonatan asked.
She shook her head. “I hate cards.”
Rachel made eye contact with Fiona. Fiona usually loved when they shared glances across rooms. This one was disapproving. It said, “You’re drawing more attention to yourself by not playing, you know.” Or at least, that’s what Fiona imagined it said. Fiona shook her head again. Rachel shrugged in response.
No one had ever taught Fiona how to play poker, and she didn’t try to follow the game. Everyone was wearing T-shirts and shorts, no shoes, so the clothing would come off quickly. And what did Rachel or Steph have to hide? To think, Fiona used to be that skinny! Fiona’s high school self wouldn’t have played strip poker either, but what a waste. She’d disliked her body then too: those large breasts, which sexualized her without her permission; those thick thighs that rubbed together in the heat. Now her breasts spilled out of the bras that used to fit. Now she pulled at the crotch of her shorts when she walked. What she would have given to get back the body she’d once hated.
Rachel was cheering; she pointed to Chad. “Off.”
He rolled his eyes and took off his shirt. They’d all seen him shirtless anyway, freckled and hairless as he walked along the lakeshore getting kids in and out of canoes.
Fiona poured herself a second cranberry and vodka. Yonatan won a round and told Steph to strip. She pulled her shirt over her head in one smooth motion, the way someone would in a movie. The more Fiona drank, the hungrier she got, and she dug out a bag of SunChips she’d had her eye on from the bottom of a shopping bag. Soon Rachel and Steph were in their bras and underwear, the boys in just their boxers. The game dissolved, but clothes stayed off; Fiona alternated: vodka, chip. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, and her feet did not touch the ground. Yonatan lay next to her and stuck his hand into the bag of chips.
Fiona had noticed Yonatan immediately during staff training. She had been sitting on the bench of a picnic table near the soccer fields; Rachel had been sitting on top of the table, braiding Fiona’s hair. They were chatting with some of the new girls while the guys played a pickup soccer game. Yonatan was the fastest one on the field, darting continually from one goal to the other, seemingly tireless. He had tan skin and muscular calves and curly brown hair, which he wore longer than the boys in America did. His curls kept falling into his face as he ran, and he kept pushing them back. She wondered if it bothered him.
“So you two know each other from a while back?” asked Nell, the pretty redheaded girl at the picnic table. She’d been quiet until then.
“Since last century!” Rachel said, fluffing Fiona’s hair affectionately.
Nell looked at both girls blankly. Rachel looked back.
“You know, ’cause last century was, like, seven years ago,” Fiona explained. She always did this, felt the need to make moments like this one less uncomfortable by filling in the blank spaces.
Nell nodded. “I got it.”
Rachel gave one of Fiona’s braids a tiny pull, the clandestine equivalent of an eye roll. Once Rachel decided she didn’t like someone, that was that.
The boys took a break and came over to the table for their water bottles. Yonatan poured his on top of his head and shook his hair dry the way a wet dog would. A couple of droplets landed on Fiona’s thighs, and she wiped them off, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
“Sorry,” he said, flashing a smile and then jogging back to the game.
Rachel drummed the fingers of one of her hands on Fiona’s shoulder. “Cu-ute,” she sang quietly.
Now Yonatan was lying on the bed next to Fiona, shirtless, but she didn’t know what to do in situations like these. Some girls, such as Rachel or Steph or even Fiona’s sister, Helen, seemed to be blessed with the flirting gene, but somehow she was missing it. She’d assumed that her college would be filled with girls like her, girls who had been prudish and awkward in high school but were on the path to coming into their own. She soon learned this was not the case. The girls were experienced and confident and self-proclaimed feminists who had sex for sex’s sake. They came from Manhattan; from L.A.; from international high schools in Tokyo, in Brussels. They called themselves “bi-curious.”
Fiona felt like she’d spent most of the year trying to get out of her own skin in the only ways that seemed available to her: smoking weed and ordering Domino’s with the stoner girls on her hall or downing sugary red drinks in a sticky dark basement where Top 40 hip hop blasted and she practiced her nonflirting on some pimply theater major. The drinks, the unlimited d-hall, the late-night munchies—they were all just ways to make it through the discomfort of being herself, which of course resulted in the inverse: Now there was just more of herself to hate.
She knew it was so typical, the Freshman 15 (or, in her case, the Freshman 20). But the commonness of it didn’t make her feel any less uncomfortable about the way she looked. Inside she was uneasy all the time, squirming within herself. She wanted to yell out to every person that met her at her heaviest “This isn’t me! I’m not this person!” But of course, she was that person, inhabiting and maintaining that awful body.
She ended up losing her virginity to a boy named George, who, by second semester, was the only remaining single, straight guy on her freshman hall. He was tall and lanky and nice, and they were drunk, and it was awkward and painful, but she just wanted to get it over with so she didn’t have to carry around the shame of being a virgin anymore. Now that it was done, she could have sex for real, and one might say that the logical person to have it with would be the shirtless guy lying on the bed next to her. But how did one make something like that happen? How did you let the boy know you were interested? And how, most of all, did you do it without making a fool of yourself?
He’d had his hand in the chip bag for longer than the normal amount of time, Fiona thought, and he briefly grazed her fingers with his own. He looked at her and smirked. For a moment, she felt like this was when you did it: When they gave you a bit of something, you took the bait.
Then he took his hand out and crunched a handful of the chips into his mouth. “Arghhhh,” he said with his mouth full, sounding like a pirate or a wild animal. He was just drunk was all. She reminded herself what she looked like, the implausibility of his interest in a person like her. Crumbs fell onto his bare chest. Fiona brushed them off, like a caregiver.
She kept drinking. The radio played; the window opened and shut, opened and shut; and Chad and Steph leaned out to smoke, tapping ash along the side of the building, putting out their cigarettes on the Super 8’s cement exterior. Fiona’s head fell back on the bed, and she looked up at the yellowing ceiling. Rachel’s head met hers. Rachel took Fiona’s face in her hands, kissed her briefly on the mouth. “Love you forever, Fee-Bee,” she said. Why? Fiona thought. Why do you love me?
Yonatan and Chad sang loudly, practicing the camp songs: “Here’s to sister Rachel, sister Rachel, sister Rachel!” Steph went to pour herself another drink. “Ice! We need ice!” she said. She put on Yonatan’s shirt, which came down to just above her knees. She swung the door open, and it stayed that way. “Here’s to sister Rachel, the best of them all.” Fiona felt alarmed about the door being open like that. In her increasingly drunken state, her caution had dissolved, but now it was coming back up, more bitter than before. “She’s happy, she’s jolly, she’s”—and they changed it here—“fucked up, by golly!”
Fiona stood and rushed to the door, slamming it louder than she’d intended. Yonatan and Chad stopped singing.
“What?” Chad said.
“You guys are being so loud,” Fiona said. “We can’t just leave the door open like that.”
A loud rap on the door. Fiona started before remembering Steph.
“Lock me out, why don’t you?” Steph walked past her into the room and added ice to her drink before lighting another cigarette.
The others were all sitting near the window, Chad and Steph on the inside ledge and Yonatan and Rachel on the edge of the bed facing them, forming a neat square. Fiona took a seat next to Rachel, upsetting the symmetry. They gossiped about their campers and their fellow counselors, but there was a hush, a shift in the atmosphere, like they all had to watch themselves around Fiona now.
“I have to pee,” Fiona said. Instead of walking through the square, she rolled awkwardly over to the other side of the bed to get to the bathroom.
She turned on the fluorescent overhead light and closed the bathroom door. She looked at herself in the mirror—her frizzy, unruly hair in a messy bun on top of her head; the skin around her eyes black from mascara that had smeared throughout the course of the night; a greasy face and a few new pimples: one there between her eyebrows, another at the tip of her nose. There was something about the water in Lakeville, or maybe it was summer humidity: She couldn’t keep her skin or her hair under control. Or, maybe, she had just stopped trying. She swayed as she stared at her disappointing reflection; she was drunker than she’d realized. She lifted her shirt and inspected how the night’s vodka and SunChips made her stomach protrude. Her breasts strained against her now-too-small bra, and below the bra’s underwire, her thick stomach stretched away from her body as if it had an agenda of its own.
She sat down to pee, and as she did so, she could no longer hear the conversation in the room clearly. The voices sounded deliberately lowered. When she finished peeing, she stood up from the toilet and put her ear to the door.
“…such a narc,” she heard from Chad.
There was some mumbling, the female voices. Rachel’s so quiet.
“True,” Chad said as Fiona strained to hear. “There’s always the car.”
A few more mumbles; then their voices were normal again.
“I’m starving!” Rachel announced.
Fiona flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and looked at her puffy face once more.
As soon as she emerged, there was another knock on the door.
“Front desk,” came the voice from the other side.
Chad stubbed out his new cigarette and threw it out the window, stupidly using his hands to try to push the smoke outside. Steph gave Yonatan his shirt and put on her own. They were all scrambling to hide the vodka under the bed, and the beers, but there were so many cans now, and rings of condensation on the tables, and probably even the smell; there had to be a smell by now. Chad went into the bathroom and quietly closed the door.
Another knock.
“Coming!” Rachel said, her voice high and cheery as she pulled an arm into her T-shirt.
“Get into bed,” she said to the others in a low voice, and they did as they were told, Steph and Fiona in one bed and Yonatan in the other. Rachel glanced around the room one last time, then opened the door.
It was Mary Ann. She was frowning, and her round face was glistening. “Do you know what time it is?”
“We were just climbing into bed,” Rachel said innocently. “Were we being too loud?”
“We got a noise complaint from the next room.”
“Really?” She cocked her head to the side. “We just finished a movie.”
“The TV was probably too loud,” Yonatan said from the bed. He was sitting up against a pillow, his arms folded over the comforter. “It was an action movie.”
“Someone said they heard singing,” said Mary Ann.
“Weird,” Rachel said.
Mary Ann peeked her head through the doorway. Fiona thought she saw her sniff the air. Her face was red and contorting in an ugly way.
“Unbelievable,” she said. “You camp people are unbelievable.”
“Ma’am?” Rachel said.
“This room reeks.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Is it really that hard to follow rules for one night?” Mary Ann seemed jumpy, almost excited, and then turned to point into the hall. “Get out.”
Rachel’s shoulders slumped, and she pursed her lips into a pout. “But it’s two in the morning,” she whined.
“That’s not my problem.”
Then Rachel stood straighter and folded her arms in front of herself. “You can’t make us leave,” she said. “We’re paying customers.”
