Wilderness Tips (2 page)

Right now it’s Joanne reading. She reads in a serious, histrionic voice, like someone on the radio; she’s been in a play, at school.
Our Town
. She’s got her sunglasses perched on the end of her nose, like a teacher. For extra hilarity she’s thrown in a fake English accent.

The story is about a girl who lives with her divorced mother in a cramped, run-down apartment above a shoe store. Her name is Marleen. She has a part-time job in the store, after school and on Saturdays, and two of the shoe clerks are chasing around after her. One is dependable and boring and wants them to get married. The other one, whose name is Dirk, rides a motorcycle and has a knowing, audacious grin that turns Marleen’s knees to jelly. The mother slaves over Marleen’s wardrobe, on her sewing machine – she makes a meagre living doing dressmaking for rich ladies who sneer at her, so the wardrobe comes out all right – and she nags Marleen about choosing the right man and not making a terrible mistake, the way she did. The girl herself has planned to go to trade school and learn hospital management, but lack of money makes this impossible. She is in her last year of high school and her grades are slipping, because she is discouraged and also she can’t decide between the two shoe clerks. Now the mother is on her case about the slipping grades as well.

“Oh God,” says Hilary. She is doing her nails, with a metal file rather than an emery board. She disapproves of emery boards. “Someone please give her a double Scotch.”

“Maybe she should murder the mother, collect the insurance, and get the hell out of there,” says Sandy.

“Have you heard one word about any insurance?” says Joanne, peering over the tops of her glasses.

“You could put some in,” says Pat.

“Maybe she should try out both of them, to see which one’s the best,” says Liz brazenly.

“We know which one’s the best,” says Tricia. “Listen, with a name like
Dirk!
How can you miss?”

“They’re both creeps,” says Stephanie.

“If she does that, she’ll be a Fallen Woman, capital F, capital W,” says Joanne. “She’d have to Repent, capital R.”

The others hoot. Repentance! The girls in the stories make such
fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.

“Wait,” says Joanne. “Here comes the big night.” She reads on, breathily. “My
mother had gone out to deliver a cocktail dress to one of her customers. I was all alone in our shabby apartment.”

“Pant, pant,” says Liz.

“No, that comes later.
I was all alone in our shabby apartment. The evening was hot and stifling. I knew I should be studying, but I could not concentrate. I took a shower to cool off. Then, on impulse, I decided to try on the graduation formal my mother had spent so many late-night hours making for me.”

“That’s right, pour on the guilt,” says Hilary with satisfaction. “If it was me I’d axe the mother.”

“It was a dream of pink -”

“A dream of pink what?” says Tricia.

“A dream of pink, period, and shut up.
I looked at myself in the full-length mirror in my mother’s tiny bedroom. The dress was just right for me. It fitted my ripe but slender body to perfection. I looked different in it, older, beautiful, like a girl used to every luxury. Like a princess. I smiled at myself. I was transformed
.

“I had just undone the hooks at the back, meaning to take the dress off and hang it up again, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Too late I remembered that I’d forgotten to lock the door on the inside, after my mother’s departure. I rushed to the door, holding up my dress – it could be a burglar, or worse! But instead it was Dirk.”

“Dirk the jerk,” says Alex, from underneath her towel.

“Go back to sleep,” says Liz.

Joanne drops her voice, does a drawl.
“ ‘Thought I’d come up and keep you company,’ he said mischievously. ‘I saw your mom go out.’ He knew I was alone! I was blushing and shivering. I could hear the blood pounding in my veins. I couldn’t speak. Every instinct warned me against him – every instinct but those of my body, and my heart.”

“So what else is there?” says Sandy. “You can’t have a mental instinct.”

“You want to read this?” says Joanne. “Then shush.
I held the frothy pink lace in front of me like a shield. ‘Hey, you look great in that,’ Dirk said. His voice was rough and tender. ‘But you’d look even greater out of it.’ I was frightened of him. His eyes were burning, determined. He looked like an animal stalking its prey.”

“Pretty steamy,” says Hilary.

“What kind of animal?” says Sandy.

“A weasel,” says Stephanie.

“A skunk,” says Tricia.

“Shh,” says Liz.

“
I backed away from him,”
Joanne reads.
“I had never seen him look that way before. Now I was pressed against the wall and he was crushing me in his arms. I felt the dress slipping down …”

“So much for all that sewing,” says Pat.

“…   and his hand was on my breast, his hard mouth was seeking mine. I knew he was the wrong man for me but I could no longer resist. My whole body was crying out to his.”

“What did it say?”

“It said,
Hey, body, over here!”

“Shh.”

“I felt myself lifted. He was carrying me to the sofa. Then I felt the length of his hard, sinewy body pressing against mine. Feebly I tried to push his hands away, but I didn’t really want to. And then –
dot dot dot –
we were One
, capital O, exclamation mark.”

There is a moment of silence. Then the waitresses laugh. Their laughter is outraged, disbelieving.
One
. Just like that. There has to be more to it.

“The dress is a wreck,” says Joanne in her ordinary voice. “Now the mother comes home.”

“Not today, she doesn’t,” says Hilary briskly. “We’ve only got ten
more minutes. I’m going for a swim, get some of this oil off me.” She stands up, clips back her honey-blonde hair, stretches her tanned athlete’s body, and does a perfect swan-dive off the end of the dock.

“Who’s got the soap?” says Stephanie.

Ronette has not said anything during the story. When the others have laughed, she has only smiled. She’s smiling now. Hers is an off-centre smile, puzzled, a little apologetic.

“Yeah, but,” she says to Joanne, “why is it funny?”

The waitresses stand at their stations around the dining hall, hands clasped in front of them, heads bowed. Their royal-blue uniforms come down almost to the tops of their white socks, worn with white bucks or white-and-black saddle shoes or white sneakers. Over their uniforms they wear plain white aprons. The rustic log sleeping cabins at Camp Adanaqui don’t have electric lights, the toilets are outhouses, the boys wash their own clothes, not even in sinks but in the lake; but there are waitresses, with uniforms and aprons. Roughing it builds a boy’s character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

Mr. B. is saying grace. He owns the camp, and is a master at St. Jude’s as well, during the winters. He has a leathery, handsome face, the grey, tailored hair of a Bay Street lawyer, and the eyes of a hawk: he sees all, but pounces only sometimes. Today he’s wearing a white V-necked tennis sweater. He could be drinking a gin and tonic, but is not.

Behind him on the wall, above his head, there’s a weathered plank with a motto painted on it in black Gothic lettering:
As the Twig Is Bent
. A piece of bleached driftwood ornaments each end of the plank, and beneath it are two crossed paddles and a gigantic pike’s head in profile, its mouth open to show its needle teeth, its one glass eye fixed in a ferocious maniac’s glare.

To Mr. B.’s left is the end window, and beyond it is Georgian Bay, blue as amnesia, stretching to infinity. Rising out of it like the backs
of whales, like rounded knees, like the calves and thighs of enormous floating women, are several islands of pink rock, scraped and rounded and fissured by glaciers and lapping water and endless weather, a few jack pines clinging to the larger ones, their twisted roots digging into the cracks. It was through these archipelagos that the waitresses were ferried here, twenty miles out from shore, by the same cumbersome mahogany inboard launch that brings the mail and the groceries and everything else to the island. Brings, and takes away. But the waitresses will not be shipped back to the mainland until the end of summer: it’s too far for a day off, and they would never be allowed to stay away overnight. So here they are, for the duration. They are the only women on the island, except for Mrs. B. and Miss Fisk, the dietitian. But those two are old and don’t count.

There are nine waitresses. There are always nine. Only the names and faces change, thinks Donny, who has been going to this camp ever since he was eight. When he was eight he paid no attention to the waitresses except when he felt homesick. Then he would think of excuses to go past the kitchen window when they were washing the dishes. There they would be, safely aproned, safely behind glass: nine mothers. He does not think of them as mothers any more.

Ronette is doing his table tonight. From between his half-closed eyelids Donny watches her thin averted face. He can see one earring, a little gold hoop. It goes right through her ear. Only Italians and cheap girls have pierced ears, says his mother. It would hurt to have a hole put through your ear. It would take bravery. He wonders what the inside of Ronette’s room looks like, what other cheap, intriguing things she’s got in there. About someone like Hilary he doesn’t have to wonder, because he already knows: the clean bedspread, the rows of shoes in their shoe-trees, the comb and brush and manicure set laid out on the dresser like implements in a surgery.

Behind Ronette’s bowed head there’s the skin of a rattlesnake, a big one, nailed to the wall. That’s what you have to watch out for
around here: rattlesnakes. Also poison ivy, thunderstorms, and drowning. A whole war canoe full of kids drowned last year, but they were from another camp. There’s been some talk of making everyone wear sissy life-jackets; the mothers want it. Donny would like a rattlesnake skin of his own, to nail up over his bed; but even if he caught the snake himself, strangled it with his bare hands, bit its head off, he’d never be allowed to keep the skin.

Mr. B. winds up the grace and sits down, and the campers begin again their three-times-daily ritual of bread-grabbing, face-stuffing, under-the-table kicking, whispered cursing. Ronette comes from the kitchen with a platter: macaroni and cheese. “There you go, boys,” she says, with her good-natured, lopsided smile.

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” says Darce the counsellor, with fraudulent charm. Darce has a reputation as a make-out artist; Donny knows he’s after Ronette. This makes him feel sad. Sad, and too young. He would like to get out of his own body for a while; he’d like to be somebody else.

The waitresses are doing the dishes. Two to scrape, one to wash, one to rinse in the scalding-hot rinsing sink, three to dry. The other two sweep the floors and wipe off the tables. Later, the number of dryers will vary because of days off – they’ll choose to take their days off in twos, so they can double-date with the counsellors – but today all are here. It’s early in the season, things are still fluid, the territories are not yet staked out.

While they work they sing. They’re missing the ocean of music in which they float during the winter. Pat and Liz have both brought their portables, though you can’t pick up much radio out here, it’s too far from shore. There’s a record player in the counsellors’ rec hall, but the records are out of date. Patti Page, The Singing Rage. “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” “The Tennessee Waltz.” Who waltzes any more?

“ ‘Wake up, little Susie,’ ” trills Sandy. The Everly Brothers are popular this summer; or they were, on the mainland, when they left.

“ ‘What’re we gonna tell your mama, what’re we gonna tell your pa,’ ” sing the others. Joanne can improvise the alto harmony, which makes everything sound less screechy.

Hilary, Stephanie, and Alex don’t sing this one. They go to a private school, all girls, and are better at rounds, like “Fire’s Burning” and “White Coral Bells.” They are good at tennis though, and sailing, skills that have passed the others by.

It’s odd that Hilary and the other two are here at all, waitressing at Camp Adanaqui; it’s not as if they need the money. (Not like me, thinks Joanne, who haunts the mail desk every noon to see if she got her scholarship.) But it’s the doing of their mothers. According to Alex, the three mothers banded together and jumped Mrs. B. at a charity function, and twisted her arm. Naturally Mrs. B. would attend the same functions as the mothers: they’ve seen her, sunglasses pushed up on her forehead, a tall drink in her hand, entertaining on the veranda of Mr. B.’s white hilltop house, which is well away from the camp proper. They’ve seen the guests, in their spotless, well-pressed sailing clothes. They’ve heard the laughter, the voices, husky and casual.
Oh
God
don’t tell me
. Like Hilary.

“We were kidnapped,” says Alex. “They thought it was time we met some boys.”

Joanne can see it for Alex, who is chubby and awkward, and for Stephanie, who is built like a boy and walks like one; but Hilary? Hilary is classic. Hilary is like a shampoo ad. Hilary is perfect. She ought to be sought after. Oddly, here she is not.

Ronette is scraping, and drops a plate. “Shoot,” she says. “What a stunned broad.” Nobody bawls her out or even teases her as they would anyone else. She is a favourite with them, though it’s hard to put your finger on why. It isn’t just that she’s easygoing: so is Liz, so is Pat. She has some mysterious, extra status. For instance, everyone
else has a nickname: Hilary is Hil, Stephanie is Steph, Alex is Al; Joanne is Jo, Tricia is Trish, Sandy is San. Pat and Liz, who cannot be contracted any farther, have become Pet and Lizard. Only Ronette has been accorded the dignity of her full, improbable name.

In some ways she is more grown-up than the rest of them. But it isn’t because she knows more things. She knows fewer things; she often has trouble making her way through the vocabularies of the others, especially the offhand slang of the private-school trio. “I don’t get that,” is what she says, and the others take a delight in explaining, as if she’s a foreigner, a cherished visitor from some other country. She goes to movies and watches television like the rest of them but she has few opinions about what she has seen. The most she will say is “Crap” or “He’s not bad.” Though friendly, she is cautious about expressing approval in words. “Fair” is her best compliment. When the others talk about what they’ve read or what subjects they will take next year at university, she is silent.