Perennials, page 7
The others said nothing.
“Yes I can. I can make you leave for”—Mary Ann counted the reasons off on her fingers now—“disorderly conduct. Smoking in a nonsmoking motel. Underage drinking. Sneaking in a nonpaying guest.” She gestured to the closed bathroom door. “And I can call the cops if you don’t go.”
“No one signed a contract,” Rachel said.
“Sure you did. That girl”—she pointed to Fiona—“signed something when she gave us her credit card.” This was Mary Ann’s moment, reminding the kids that she was the adult here. She was the one with the power. “Which I’m charging for damage, by the way.”
Rachel, Yonatan, and Steph all turned to look at Fiona—searing, blameful looks. She wanted to hide herself under the overstarched comforter of the motel bed and fall unconscious beneath its dark weight.
—
Out in the parking lot, they fought over who would drive the car back to camp.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do, Fiona?” Steph was saying. “You won’t drive, but you won’t let anyone else drive either?”
“Someone could come pick us up,” Fiona suggested, half-knowing she’d be shut down.
“We can’t call the camp,” Rachel said. “I can drive. I’m honestly not that drunk.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Fiona.
“Test me,” said Rachel. She put her arms out and walked in a straight line.
“Look at that!” Chad said. “She’s perfect.”
“Fiona,” Yonatan said. “The camp can’t find out about this. Chad and I will lose our visas.” How reasonable it seemed when he explained it.
“It’s only a half-hour drive,” Rachel said, “in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. There’s no one on the road. I’ll drive ten miles under the speed limit.” She put her pinkie out and waited for Fiona to take it.
How did Fiona go from being the one in control—the one who drove them here in the first place, who put her emergencies-only credit card down—to the one being blamed? And how would she explain to her father why there was a charge for almost $350 for one night at a Super 8 in Torrington, Connecticut? This was the underbelly of responsibility: When things went wrong, the fingers turned back at you. Fiona had gotten them to the motel and gotten them the room, but it was a given that she would do that for them: because she had the car; she had the money; she was the reliable one. Now she started to see that reliable people were just the type that more self-respecting people could walk all over.
In the Jeep, Fiona sat in the front seat. She felt totally sober now, and large, and useless. She looked over at Rachel. She told Fiona she loved her in one moment and then turned around and talked shit about her the next. That was just something else that Rachel could do that Fiona couldn’t: be so many steps ahead of the situation that she could remain in control of it. Rachel would not allow herself to be aligned with a narc, even if it meant throwing her best friend under the bus. Sometimes Fiona hated herself for allowing Rachel to do that to her again and again. But in fact, she understood it; she too would have been embarrassed by herself that night.
As they drove, Fiona felt a sort of wounded jealousy of her best friend—if she could be more like Rachel, look more like Rachel, then maybe this wouldn’t hurt so bad. Rachel seemed to know how to do everything that Fiona didn’t: how to flirt; how to gossip in a way you could defend later; how to stay thin; how to drive drunk. She was in awe of the way Rachel could manipulate any situation so that it would end up working out in her favor. Fiona was so envious of Rachel’s compact body that she wanted to dissolve her own and inhabit that one, to be the owner of the thin wrists that capably steered them back to camp.
—
They got into camp and parted ways as they walked back to their respective sections. Fiona lay down in her bunk but couldn’t sleep. She got up after a few minutes, bringing her toiletries with her, and made her way to the Maple girls’ bathroom, walking through the circle of platform tents, every little girl asleep. In the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror above the row of sinks. She looked exactly the same as she had hours ago in the motel: puffy and greasy and ugly. She did not know why she imagined she’d look any different. Mirrors these days were a perpetual and profound disappointment.
She thought about Yonatan, probably asleep by now. What she saw in the mirror was also what he saw, and the reality of that made her cringe and hate herself more.
She ran the water warm and washed her hands. Without thinking about why, she began to turn the cold water valve to the right—turn, turn, turn—until it was all the way off and the water was steaming from the sink, her hands scalding. She closed her eyes and breathed sharply through her nose through the pain. If someone had walked in, she wouldn’t have been able to explain it. It just felt numbing, even good inside the pain, like she was washing away the detestable parts of herself, burning away her mediocrity and powerlessness, her ugliness. She opened her eyes and looked up into the mirror again and was surprised to see herself grimacing.
When she was finished, she pulled paper towels from the dispenser and dried her wrinkled, red hands. She let out a long breath, as if she’d just completed a difficult but worthwhile task. She returned to her tent and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep.
5
It was Sheera Jones’s first summer at Camp Marigold. The lake was, so far, her favorite place on the camp grounds, and she signed up for as many activities there as she could. In the South Bronx, there were plenty of trees, a couple of public pools, the Harlem and East Rivers, but no clear, open water—nothing where, if you were standing in the exact right place on the shoreline at the exact right time, you couldn’t see a single person.
During the first week, Sheera had discovered that that exact right time to gain some solitude at the lake was just before the day’s activities started or right after they ended. So on the Monday morning of the second week of camp, She left breakfast the minute the girls were dismissed to get to the beach before anyone else. There were two ways to get there: by road, down a wide gravel drive that rounded the circumference of the hilly camp, or by trail, the more direct but steeper, narrower, and more treacherous of the routes. Sheera always chose the trail. She walked down it enough times that the route became familiar: Here was the fallen log you had to climb over; here was the muddy patch you had to tiptoe around, for it often rained at night; here was where the trail broke for a moment and you walked down twenty man-made steps before you hiked the rest of the way. And here the trail cleared and opened right onto the beach: only a few steps on grass before your toes were in the sand. The lake, she’d learned at the nature lodge, was three miles long—the length of sixty city blocks. The camp used only half of it, mostly for safety reasons. You could see across the width of the lake to the other shore, which was covered in bushy trees, seemingly with not an inch of open space in which to wander; in the distance were the gray-blue outlines of the Berkshire Mountains. But lengthwise, even if you stood at the edge of the beach and craned your neck to the right as far as it could go, you still couldn’t see where the water ended and became land again. Canoes or swimmers could get lost over there.
That morning Sheera was able to get only one or two minutes alone with her toes in the water before she heard steps crunching down the gravel road and then padding in the grass behind her. She turned to see Chad, the boating counselor, pulling canoes from their parking spots on the grass and lining them up in a row along the shoreline, their noses dipping into the shallow water. Chad had a British accent, and he often walked around shirtless, showing off his perpetually sunburned chest. He was unfriendly and played favorites, and Sheera wasn’t one of them.
Chad didn’t say hello to Sheera, nor she to him, but soon after he had lined up the canoes, she heard the quickened footsteps and easy laughter of kids coming down the same gravel road. She turned and walked away from the lakeshore, toward the oar house, to pick out a life vest and a paddle. She tried to blend into the pack of just-arrived kids scrambling for the newer-looking life vests rather than appear as if she’d already been there by herself. This was something she was still trying to balance: not coming off as a loner while still getting the solitude she so desperately craved.
After everyone had their life vests and their paddles, Chad told the campers to get into pairs and pick their canoes; they all appeared to have their partners instantaneously and, in a matter of moments, were walking down to the shore two by two. Sheera had hardly had time to scan the crowd. Something else she was learning about this camp life was that, while she signed up for activities alone, most of the other kids did so with friends. It felt like Sheera’s reason for coming to camp—namely, the opportunity to get out of suffocating, grimy city life, which included, by extension, a certain amount of space between herself and others—was in direct opposition to the reasons of the other campers. They never wanted to do anything alone. It wasn’t that Sheera didn’t want to make new friends—she did, very much. It was more that she thought there would be a greater emphasis on being outside in a more quiet, more peaceful way. Learning about nature, being active in the outdoors: These were things she always wanted more of, and she’d assumed everyone else did too.
“Hey, girlie,” Chad said to Sheera. She’d been at the lake every day the previous week, and he still had not managed to remember her name. “You wanna pick a group to tag onto?”
Sheera didn’t recognize any of the kids except for two girls who lived in her section. She began walking toward them, the load of the paddle weighing her down. How was she supposed to walk with this? Carry it above her head? Beside her like a walking stick? It was oppressively heavy.
When she got to the water’s edge, and the two girls from her section were loading themselves into their boat without acknowledging her, she heard Chad whistle.
“Girlie!” he shouted.
She could see Mikey Bombowski next to Chad, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses. The girls in Sheera’s tent had talked about Mikey before; Helen in particular thought he was cute. But Sheera found nothing attractive about his skinny body and his gel-spiked hair. Though Sheera had gotten her first period two years earlier and now had what her grandma called “a body that could get her in trouble,” she found herself mostly uninterested in the opposite sex. At camp, especially, she regarded the boys no differently than the girls: carefully, attempting to discriminate who had the potential to be her friend. She had three older brothers, and she understood through them what boys were like: fun, yes, and playful, but also crass, and dirty, and dangerous, the kind of danger her grandma warned her about. The way the girls in her tent talked about boys, it sounded like they were imagining an entirely different species, one that was affectionate and romantic and talked about its feelings. Sheera had begun to wonder if rich white boys really were like that, if they were really another species from the boys with whom she’d grown up.
Chad said something to Mikey out of the corner of his mouth, handed the boy a life vest, and nudged him with his elbow. Mikey walked slowly to the empty canoe next to Sheera. The two girls from Sheera’s section stopped paddling for a moment and looked over at her and Mikey curiously.
Sheera directed her gaze toward the lake to avoid Mikey’s, watching the canoes gliding slowly from the shore and the paddles chopping the water. She heard splashes, giggles, was amazed at how the sound traveled over the distance. It had something to do with still bodies of water and echoes; she’d learned this in school once.
“You wanna get in?” Mikey asked. “I’ll push.”
She settled onto the wooden seat that had been indented by hundreds of bodies of campers before her. A puddle of cold lake water sloshed around her feet, and she rested the overbearing paddle on her thighs, which had promptly spread and stuck to each other. Facing the open lake—a motorboat pulling a water-skier, the roped-off swimming hole to their right—she wondered, as she often did, what lay across the way in that densely green and wild forest beneath the Berkshires. She felt the canoe scrape the soft bottom of the lake and turned to see Mikey wading knee-deep through the water, getting their boat out of the muck. He hopped in.
“No paddling past the buoys!” Chad yelled from the shore.
They didn’t discuss steering or a plan of where to go. They paddled out into the center of the lake, and when Mikey stopped, so did Sheera. He exhaled, looking around in wonder at the lake and back at the camp in the distance, like he was seeing them anew. The girls from Sheera’s section paddled beside her and Mikey’s boat, trying to catch Mikey’s attention by splashing each other, looking over, hoping he’d laugh or even look in their direction. He didn’t.
Chad had gotten into a boat with two younger boys and was helping them paddle just past the dock, not paying attention to any of the other campers.
“It’s your first summer here, right?” Mikey asked.
Sheera nodded. Growing up, she had gone to some day camps in the city, and they’d taken field trips into the country, but this was her first summer at a sleepaway camp. She didn’t know any kids from home that went away to camp, but she’d watched a reality show on Nickelodeon about a camp in the Berkshires, and a bunch of the kids on the show were from the city and looked and talked like her. They climbed rope courses and rode horses and hung out with one another and with the white kids—which she wasn’t used to seeing, all the groups mingling like that. Most of her friends at school were black or Hispanic—because most of her school was black and Hispanic—but something about the appearance of seamless diversity intrigued her, as if nature itself was some kind of great equalizer.
So she looked up “Berkshires summer camp” on the Internet, and she found Camp Marigold, which had a website with happy diverse kids too. Her dad refused to let her go until she did enough research to find out there was scholarship money. And once they got a bunch of it, he was okay with the idea. It would be one less kid he’d have to worry about that summer.
But when she got to Camp Marigold, very few of the kids did look like her. She’d never been in a place so predominantly white, and she was sure her father hadn’t either. “Watch out for yourself,” he had said to her quietly the day he dropped her off, right before he got into his car to drive back to the Bronx. The girls in her section were nice enough, but they didn’t seem to care to make any new friends; most of them knew one another already. Sheera didn’t know until she got to Marigold that thirteen was considered old for one’s first summer at sleepaway camp.
Mikey turned around now, checking for Chad. They sliced their paddles into the water. “Paddle forward,” Mikey kept saying. As he paddled faster, so, in imitation, did Sheera. Closer ahead now were bushy-leaved trees with wide, imposing bases and a shoreline surrounded by elephantine gray rocks. As they inched forward, Sheera didn’t say, “We’re not allowed to be here,” but she turned around to look at Mikey in a way she hoped conveyed it. If they were to get in trouble, she didn’t want anyone to think it was her idea.
“It’s fine,” he said, and his tone of voice made her believe him.
After they steered toward a narrow space between two rocks, he unbuckled his life vest and threw it onto the bench of the canoe, climbed onto one of rocks, and, once he’d steadied himself on it, told Sheera to throw him the rope from within the canoe. He stood tall on the rock, pulling the canoe in while keeping his balance.
With the weight now upset in the boat, Sheera tipped forward slightly as Mikey bent to tether the rope to the thick branch of a tree. He held his hand out to her. She climbed over the rocks and landed on the soil on her hands and knees. She stood quickly, collecting herself, wiping dirt on her thighs.
“Whose property is this?” she asked, looking around and feeling small. The impressions she’d had of the place from afar were confirmed: The land was dense and overgrown, and there seemed to be no discernible trail.
“It belongs to the state, I think.”
Camp Marigold lay directly across from them now. A few remaining red canoes sat docked at the lakeshore. To the left, in the swimming hole, heads bobbed like beach balls on the surface. Sheera saw the beginnings of the hiking and biking trails—worn-out, rocky paths blazed between the trees—but they disappeared into the hills that held everything else.
Mikey turned away from the lake and led Sheera to a trail she wouldn’t have noticed herself; it was not cleared out like the trails at camp, and was so narrow that the two of them had to walk single file.
“Where are you from, anyway?” Sheera asked, following Mikey through the woods. There were pesky roots and loose stones and untamed branches that scratched her arms as she passed. She wished she weren’t wearing flip-flops.
“I’m an army brat,” he said. “You know what that means?”
She shook her head.
“It means I ain’t from nowhere.” He laughed. “In Alabama, they said ‘ain’t’ and ‘y’all’ a lot. It’s actually pretty useful.”
“But where do you live now?”
“Near Chicago. My dad works at a military school there,” he said. “I guess I could say I’m from there now.”
“You come here all the way from Chicago?”
He shrugged.
They were walking on a steady incline. She was breathing heavily but trying to conceal it because Mikey wasn’t.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“The Bronx.”
“No, I mean…where are you from?”
“The Bronx,” she said louder, thinking he hadn’t heard her.
“But, like…where are your parents from?”
“My dad is from the Bronx too,” she said. “My mom was from the Dominican Republic, but she died.” She forgot until she saw Mikey flinch that this was shocking news every time she told it. “I don’t remember her,” she lied, by way of apology.
“Oh,” he said. “Do you speak Dominican?”
