Camptown Ladies (24 page)

My heart stopped beating as what I feared would happen, did: a beautiful red-headed woman entered the room right behind them. Lorn Elaine, closeted actress, ex-love of my life, the woman who had dumped me three times (or was it four?), was now standing just a water pistol stream away. The door to the war room was still open, so my siblings naturally took advantage of my shock and nailed me repeatedly in the face, and everything went back into slow motion, the water pelting me in the head doing nothing to revive me from my state of shock.

“Oh shit,” Lisa said, as she halted her shooting.

“Oh shit,” Vince echoed.

“Oh perfect,” Erica said, somewhere behind me.

As Lorn moved toward me, I wiped a wet chunk of hair stuck to my face, feeling the sting of running mascara burning my eyes. A shallow thought pushed to the very front of my brain: Why is it when you look your worst, you see the person you wanted to see when you look your best? My body was frozen, but my heart was thudding loudly in my ears . . . or maybe it was the contents of Vince’s emptied water pistol sloshing around in my sinuses.

Katherine and Uncle Tony stepped back to let Lorn approach me first, her eyes boring into mine. Of course she looked amazing. I dropped my full pistol on my foot and stared down at it, as confused by the pain as if my foot had been hit with a steaming meatball. Meatballs would come later, along with some fresh grief from seeing Lorn again.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, and my body betrayed me by reacting naughtily to her voice. When I didn’t answer, she moved closer and said, “I’m so sorry about your Aunt Aggie.”

I could smell her, and instantly my senses came alive like someone had switched me on. A neon sign that had been turned off and cool to the touch, now raged hot and blinking: OPEN TO SERVE YOU. When I at last found my voice, I was thankful it remained ice cold. “You didn’t have to come all this way. You hardly knew her.”

Lorn’s eyes searched for some sign of the woman she knew before. I hoped she saw none.

She said softly so only I could hear, “I came for you.”

I could feel my brother and sister drifting away from the door behind me, leaving a sinking ship, and the ship was me. “You didn’t have to,” I said, “Aunt Aggie didn’t like a lot of people, including me, I think.”

Lorn took another step closer and I could see the tiny flecks of gold in her green eyes, the detail I could see only when we were close enough to touch. I could also see she was fighting back tears. Actress, I thought.

“Marie. I said I came for you,” she said again.

I felt a drop of water release from my chin. “You said a lot of things. I’m saying you wasted a trip.”

Twenty

Punch To The Gut, And I’m To Blame

Lisa was yelling a barrage of questions at me in the car, but I heard only a few:
Why didn’t you tell her off?; Why didn’t you smack her across her pretty face?; Why didn’t you let me smack her pretty face?; etc., etc.

“Lisa—” Vince tried to shush her, but she was not having it.

“I don’t know,” I said as something hot tumbled down my cheek. A tear splashed on my pants and I looked at it, puzzled, as if it were a leak in the car roof. I turned my head to look out the window, hoping they didn’t notice. Lisa’s questions kept coming as I watched the cemetery trees whip by. Another tear rolled down my other cheek, which really pissed me off because I had made the decision not to cry.

As Vince tried to shush Lisa, I felt a hand gently press the middle of my back. It was Erica. Her touch made the floodgates burst open further. Lorn was not supposed to be here, I was not supposed to still hurt this much, and Erica was not supposed to behave sweetly to me. Erica felt the shudder in my back and thought her hand upset me, and took her hand away. It didn’t matter, of course, because I could still feel her there. She had left a scorching mark on me—and I worried if everyone else would see it, too.

We arrived at the cemetery, for which I was grateful, since it’s the only place besides the movies where you can cry in public without anyone asking what’s wrong. Specifically, I was grateful I could cry out of a maddening confusion about Erica, which my siblings would assume was about Lorn.

Lorn was there, but she kept her distance, or, more likely, Vince and Lisa kept me distant from her, since I had been led from the car by both my elbows as if I could lose the use of both my legs at
any moment. I glanced over to Uncle Freddie, who looked sad but also quite strong for a man who had just lost his mate, and I stared at him, using him to will myself to get my frigging act together. I could not appear to be the most shattered person at a funeral for my famously cantankerous Aunt Aggie . . . it was fucking ridiculous.

I took a deep breath and scanned the crowd. Lorn was directly across the grave, her gaze fixed on me. I felt a punch to my gut. The distance gave me courage to risk staring back at her and ignore my inner voice telling me that the more sane option would be to poke my own eyes out and flick them into Aunt Aggie’s new digs. I was scanning the ground for pointy sticks to help me do just that, as I felt Vince’s arm slide around my shoulder.

It was Vince who understood best what Lorn had done to me, and what she still could do to me, if I let her, but it occurred to me that Erica also knew. I looked at Erica and saw that her eyes were also on me, but she shot her gaze away as if I had caught her pitying me. Instead, she turned her attention to Lorn and glared at her across the grave. I saw some hate there, and if Lorn knew Erica as I did, she would best be served by yelping like a wounded dog and running her pretty actress ass back to California.

Erica looked back at me and sadly, almost imperceptibly, shook her head no at me, a Charades-style warning to watch my step around that woman who had hurt me before. I stupidly looked back at Lorn and felt the punch to my gut for the third time. That is not how you should feel when you look at someone, right? I looked back to Erica to acknowledge that her silent warning was likely good, solid advice, but Erica had already left and was walking toward the car. The feeling in my gut was an unexpectedly stronger kick to the stomach.

I was grateful that Lorn didn’t come back to our condo after the funeral. My Uncle Tony and Lorn’s mother Katherine did, however, and although I really liked Katherine, I tried to avoid her until she cornered me in the kitchen and completely disarmed me with a warm hug.

“I’ve missed seeing you,” she said. “You know my daughter still loves you.” Katherine’s directness was the last thing I needed to hear
as my heart pounded with the confirmation that Lorn was still mine, in some small way.

“I can’t do it again,” I said.

“Good,” she said, surprising me. “As much as she needs you, it really wouldn’t be best.”

I was disgusted by the regret that roiled up inside me. Maybe I was secretly hoping her daughter had changed and she could somehow guarantee she would not run from me again. But I knew this wasn’t true.

Katherine gently held my chin until I looked her in the eyes. It didn’t help that her eyes were an exact match of Lorn’s. “You need to do what’s best for you. I told Lorn she shouldn’t come, but you know how my daughter doesn’t listen to her mother.”

“What daughter does?” I said.

Katherine looked at me with concern. “Protect yourself.”

“She could never be with me, not in the way I wanted.”

It occurred to me that I was finally speaking in the past tense, the first time ever when it came to Lorn. Katherine hugged me again and over her shoulder I looked for Erica, but she had disappeared again. When our hug ended, I asked her, “How’s life as a newlywed?”

“Marrying your Uncle Tony was the smartest thing I ever did,” she said, and her bright smile and voice reminded me so much of Lorn, but, luckily, by then, my gut had gone numb and I could no longer feel the punches.

Lisa, Vince, and I returned to the camp just in time to see a trail of cars arriving, a fully decorated truck leading three other cars, with five gay boys in the back of the flatbed, shrieking like puppies, happily exaggerating the danger every time they hit a small bump, and fabulously presenting themselves as if they were in the Macy’s Day Parade instead of on a dirt road leading to a campground. I heard a high-pitched voice sing out: “The Camptown Laaaaadies are heeeeere!” They went on to chant the classic version of Camptown
Ladies, minus Lisa’s original dildo refrain, which I knew Lisa would be teaching them, ASAP.

Eddie heard the approaching tribe too, and bounced out of the rec hall, where he had been installing sets of gauzy bug-proof curtains he had custom-sewn. Eddie squealed, and I worried for all the glass in the camp lanterns. Two of the boys were in full drag, and one was wearing an extra long colorful boa flitting out behind him, making it appear as if the flatbed truck was wearing a scarf. One of the young men was Eddie’s new boyfriend from P-town.

I watched the campers they passed, nobody willing to stand near the road, instead watching from the safety of their sites and inside their dark trailers. Always one to sense a party, Lisa joined me outside the office as the boys waved and squealed.

Lisa said, “The girls! They’re here at last!”

Dad poked his head out of the office. “I have this feeling Aunt Aggie is with us right now.”

I was rather touched. “Really, Dad?”

He said, “Sure. That screeching would have woken the dead.” He disappeared back inside just as Mom came out with her clipboard, looking like an army sergeant dressed by Ann Taylor’s poorest cousin.

The boys whooped and cackled when the truck came to a stop in front of the office, and shoved each other like high school boys (in prettier clothes) to be the first ones out of the truck. Mom greeted them and began giving them what seemed a well-rehearsed speech about store hours, check-out time, and quiet hours, as if they were checking into a Marriot. I saw several of the boys’ eyes glazing over, so I stepped in front of Mom.

“Welcome boys!” I said. “Since you won the award for Best Arrival, we’d like to show our gratitude by asking you to join us as our guests for best Italian dinner of your lives at the rec hall tonight, or as soon as it’s finished.” There was more whooping and cheering as Eddie made his way around to inappropriately hug each of the boys. When they were done hugging Eddie hello, I suggested, “Why don’t you all pile back into the flatbed so we can give you a tour.”

“Hey, where are you from?” Lisa yelled at the beautiful caramel-skinned young man with the pretty accent.

“I’m from Jordan,” he said, his voice revealing that he was instinctively a little afraid of her. A smart man for his young years.

“That’s in the Middle East. That’s alright,” Mom assured the young man.

“I’m sure he appreciates that, Mom,” Lisa said as she moved to take a closer look at him. “Jordan, huh? What a coincidence, that’s where Italian people get all our wedding candy from.” He looked confused, but didn’t ask.

Lisa turned to me, “Hey, Marie, remember when I found a sack of insect eggs in a spider web and I told you they were mini-Jordan almonds?” I remembered. “That was a fun day,” she said with a sigh as my stomach lurched. I’d always hoped she’d been kidding, though the historical odds were stacked against me.

As I wondered if you could throw up from something you ate twenty-five years ago, the boys insisted I give them a tour and they pig-scrambled back into the truck, spanking each other’s asses and fighting as if there were amazing and horrible seats to be won in the back of a pickup truck. Several hands reached for me at once and hoisted me into the truck, propelling me, crowd-surfing style, across the pack of them. I felt hands everywhere as they carried me into the truck. “Nice tits,” one of them said politely as I laughed, “Momma like.”

“Why, thanks,” I said, meaning it.