She Got Up Off the Couch (9 page)

“Does that mean you
are
going to make me go?”

Mom pulled out her big gun, as mottoes went, and she had a million. She generally saved it to the end. “Happiness is a decision. You decide how happy or unhappy you’re going to be.”

I stood up and grabbed my backpack by the strap. I marched out to the truck where Dad was sitting waiting for us. He had his arm out the window and a cup of coffee in his hands, as if he were already on the way. I climbed up on my box next to him.

“Ready to go, Zip?” he asked, starting the truck.

“Yes, but I’ve decided to be unhappy about it.”

“Ah. Been talking to your mom, I guess.”

Mom came out and got in the truck with us. “Okay, let’s go!” she said, cheerfully. “Shall we sing on this trip?”

There were five girls in my cabin besides me, all of them between fifteen and seventeen. At first they thought I might make an excellent mascot. One said she had a little sister at home, and she’d be happy to teach me how to apply makeup. I made a vomit face, politely. Within about seven minutes, all the girls had realized I was not going to be the sort of little sister any of them had ever wanted, and took to ignoring me.

I lay on my upper bunk while the girls arrived one by one. There was nothing to do until lunchtime. I’d already looked at the allegedly beautiful lake (it was a lake; I’d seen plenty), and the pier I was undoubtedly going to have to scrub with a toothbrush (intimidating), the dining hall (institutional), the chapel (rustic, the end of the world). Lunchtime. Melinda would feed baby Josh and put him down for a nap in his little yellow nursery room with the sunny face painted on the wall. My stomach started to ache. What if she put him too close to his stuffed bear? What if she forgot to wind his mobile?
What if she set the house on fire again?

I sat up on my bunk and put my head between my knees and took deep breaths. The girls were chattering with one another. It seemed they all had very dramatic problems that they took dead seriously. None of them mentioned babies or burning houses. Rich Girl’s parents hadn’t accompanied her to camp, they’d had her
flown
to some rinky-dink airport in she didn’t even
know
what town and then driven here by a stranger who
smelled.
One girl had a boyfriend who hadn’t called her since he’d gotten to his grandparents’ house in Nevada,
and
she’d had to have surgery on her knees because she’d already worn them out with sports. This girl had taken to using something called dry shampoo while she was recovering in the hospital, and now she used it all the time. It came in a can like hair spray. Sports Girl bent over so her head was upside-down and demonstrated. Her long straight blond hair fell nearly to the floor. She sprayed her scalp with the aerosol, which looked a little powdery, then flipped her hair up and brushed it with the same sort of black-bristle brush my sister used. My sister, Melinda. It was summer, I reminded myself. She wouldn’t be using the Franklin stove when the temperature was 88 degrees. The third girl felt herself to be under an inhuman amount of strain, because she played on her school’s volleyball team, but was also in 4-H, and would probably be the valedictorian of her class. Valedictorian made vague reference to a boyfriend who pressured her. The other girls all nodded in agreement. The fourth girl was, even by my modest standards, so physically tragic she couldn’t possibly know what boyfriend pressure felt like. She wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, she said, and even I could see she desperately needed it. In fact, she probably needed surgery. She had almost no eyebrows and no eyelashes, so she appeared startled and desperate. Her hair was brown and frizzy; she had terrible acne, and her teeth were yellow. I watched the girls very subtly shift away from Ugly, acting at first as if she were one of them, as if they were interested in her, and then as if she were invisible.

And then the last girl entered, late and out of breath, all apologies. “Hi, I’m Claire,” she said, but from the expressions of the other campers, Cher might as well have introduced herself. “I just got here, which bunk is left, oh — good, I’ll just take that one. What a drive, I thought I’d never make it, I hate getting up in the morning. Hi, who are you?”

The girls presented themselves one by one, reminding Claire that they’d been at camp with her for the past three years.

“And who are you?” she asked, popping her head up over the top of my bunk and giving me what by all accounts was a winning smile.

“You can call me Zippy,” I said, studying her. Her dark brown hair was shiny and like liquid, chin-length, and was pulled off her face with a rolled-up red bandanna. The effect made her look casual, even woodsy, and efficient. Her skin was flawless and tanned, and her eyes were the warmest chocolate color I’d ever seen. She had narrow, fine eyebrows;full lips;and teeth so straight they could have come from a Chrissy doll. The little red shirt and white shorts she wore made everything about Claire clear: she was fully baked.

“Well, hello, Zippy. I guess we’re bunkmates.”

“I reckon so.”

Claire looked at the other campers, pointed back at me with her thumb. “She
reckons.
” They all laughed, not wholly at my expense.

Claire moved her suitcases over beside her bunk and flopped down dramatically. “Jesus H. Lord!” she said. “I’ve got cramps something
awful.
”

I leaned over my bunk to see what was wrong with her. Sometimes after riding my bike all day I got charley horses in my legs that made me light-headed.

The other girls in the cabin all fluttered around Claire like hens. “Poor you!”

“Do you need some aspirin?”

“Did you bring a heating pad?”

“Would you like me to bring your lunch back to you?”

Claire looked at Ugly with a wide-eyed vulnerability. “Would you? How sweet you all are! Lunch would be great, and aspirin if you’ve got it. Oh, and if they serve Coke with lunch bring me one but if it’s milk forget it. Unless it’s chocolate milk.”

Ugly dashed over to her suitcase and ripped a page out of a diary with an orange sherbet-colored cover (which bore the title
All About Me
) and began writing with a little pencil. She took Claire’s order as if we were all at Bill’s diner in New Castle on fried chicken night. I watched the proceedings with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh,” Claire said, remembering one more thing. “There’ll be a boy at lunch named Scott, you can’t miss him. He’s got brown hair and he’s tan and thin. And tall. He’ll be wearing a jersey from Tri-High cross-country with the number 17 on the back. Just tell him I’m here.”

After the other girls had left the cabin (whispering about Scott, whoever he was), I jumped down off my bunk and headed for the door.

“Hey, Zippy,” Claire said. She was raised up on one elbow holding a book called
They’ll Never Make a Movie Starring Me.

“Yeah?”

“Remember me in your prayers at lunchtime,” she said, smiling.

I looked at her bandanna; at the pink toenail polish. I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a little silver chain around her ankle. “Sure thing,” I said. I didn’t bother telling her that I wasn’t much for praying, and even if I had been, I wouldn’t have wasted my time on somebody who already had everything.

Lunch was soup and grilled cheese sandwiches and there was certainly no Coke to be had, which Claire would have known if she’d been any sort of Quaker. But I was beginning to understand that there was a world of difference between Quaker A (the Philadelphia sort, who spent the whole hour in silence and for whom no one was in charge) and Quaker B (our kind, who had ministers and Sunday school and loved to sing songs). This experience was potentially going to be Quaker C (more like the Pentecostals, where people actually got the Fruits of the Spirit and fell down slain). I sensed weeping and salvation in the air, two of my least favorite things. Before lunch we had prayed for a loooooong time, longer than was respectable and something certainly prohibited by Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, where he says prayer should be private and silent. But who asked me.

I ate alone. I walked back to my cabin alone. The woods around Quaker Haven were dense and hearing people talking but not being able to see them was festive, and I would have given anything not to be there. In the hours following lunch we were to read our Bibles (oh fattest of chances) and then meditate on what we’d read there. Instead I got out my stationery and wrote my first letter:

I was flat worn out from writing that letter and it sure seemed I would never write another. For good measure, and because some of the other girls were in the cabin, I flipped through my little pink New Testament, read some of my stolen Judy Blume book, then lay down and took a nap.

We did all the counselors had threatened: we canoed, we swam, we played tetherball. All was done with prayer and with the fervent hope Jesus would be present. Perhaps some built dams, I don’t know. I did everything alone. Then it was time for chapel, and we went back to our cabins to change. This was apparently a very important moment in the lives of Rich Girl, Sport Girl, Valedictorian, Ugly, and Claire, because it meant they got to see one another relatively undressed as if there were a contest, which anyone just walking in the room for the very first time would see was no contest at all because Claire had won before she arrived. She put on a little blue skirt, the requisite panty hose, and a white sweater with her initials embroidered above one breast. She had showered after swimming and now her dark hair fell perfectly straight to her chin.

The blouse my mother sent had perhaps belonged to one of her friends at church, because the shoulders kept slipping off me. I knew safety-pinning was critical but where? How to safety-pin something to your shoulder? Then there was the plain brown skirt, so big I had to double the waist, and every time I put the pin in and fastened it, it just popped back open and stabbed me. I found that if I pinned it to the minimum amount of fabric it would stay closed, so I took my chances.

Then there were the panty hose. Claire’s were so sheer and nudely they were just called Nude. Mine were a cross between a Band-Aid and Silly Putty, and Mom had been correct, they were queen size. I wrangled them on, rolled the top down, rolled it down again. It was never going to work, so I ended up putting my underwear on OVER the panty hose to keep them up, something an old woman in church used to do when her dementia really got up and going. I stuffed the oversize panty hose feet in my saddle oxfords and followed my cabin mates down the path to the chapel.

The minister was an emotional man who was deeply concerned about the temptations facing us as teenagers. I had not yet met a single temptation that hadn’t worked to my advantage, so mostly I stared at him. We had to sing a lot of old-timey emotional songs about the blood of Jesus and the power of the Cross, and sure enough the minister got teary-eyed, and his wife, a woman who looked like a giant canary, was flat distraught. I could feel it — I could feel something building like a high-pressure system, and I did not like it.

“Margie,” Minister Bob said to his bird wife, “play ‘I Come’ for us, slow and quiet, while I invite these boys and girls to join me at the altar for prayer and healing. This is what you’ve come here for, my friends, to invite the Lord Jesus into your heart permanently. I’m going to stand here with my eyes closed and let the power of the Lord work its way down through my body, and you just come on down to the altar and let the Lord fill you. If you’re not ready, just kneel down and close your eyes and pray along with your brothers and sisters.”

Kneel down? I looked at the floor of the chapel; it was rough boards with gaps between them wide enough to hold — and this was just in my line of sight — a bobby pin and two pennies. I was a Quaker, not a Kneeler. Rose knelt at St. Anne’s but Catholics were prepared for this sort of thing and thoughtfully provided a little padded rail for the occasion.

“Just go ahead and get on your knees and ask the Lord what He would have you do,” Minister Bob said, reading my mind. All around me obedient campers were struggling down to the floor, and Margie Canary was playing the same bits of the slow hymn over and over, trying to hypnotize us. I gave up and knelt, joined the people around me, cursing Minister Bob and my mother and indeed the whole of Christendom. I watched with the stink-eye as a number of people went to the altar and got hands laid on them. There was much weeping followed by joy, and I hated everyone there, and when I stood up, the knees had torn in my queen-size panty hose.