Wilderness Tips (3 page)

But she knows other things, hidden things. Secrets. And these other things are older, and on some level more important. More fundamental. Closer to the bone.

Or so thinks Joanne, who has a bad habit of novelizing.

Outside the window Darce and Perry stroll by, herding a group of campers. Joanne recognizes a few of them: Donny, Monty. It’s hard to remember the campers by name. They’re just a crowd of indistinguishable, usually grimy young boys who have to be fed three times a day, whose crusts and crumbs and rinds have to be cleaned up afterwards. The counsellors call them Grubbies.

But some stand out. Donny is tall for his age, all elbows and spindly knees, with huge deep-blue eyes; even when he’s swearing – they all swear during meals, furtively but also loudly enough so that the waitresses can hear them – it’s more like a meditation, or more like a question, as if he’s trying the words out, tasting them. Monty
on the other hand is like a miniature forty-five-year-old: his shoulders already have a businessman’s slump, his paunch is fully formed. He walks with a pompous little strut. Joanne thinks he’s hilarious.

Right now he’s carrying a broom with five rolls of toilet paper threaded onto the handle. All the boys are: they’re on Bog Duty, sweeping out the outhouses, replacing the paper. Joanne wonders what they do with the used sanitary napkins in the brown paper bag in the waitresses’ private outhouse. She can imagine the remarks.

“Company … halt!” shouts Darce. The group shambles to a stop in front of the window. “Present … arms!” The brooms are raised, the ends of the toilet-paper rolls fluttering in the breeze like flags. The girls laugh and wave.

Monty’s salute is half-hearted: this is well beneath his dignity. He may rent out his binoculars – that story is all over camp, by now – but he has no interest in using them himself. He has made that known.
Not on these girls
, he says, implying higher tastes.

Darce himself gives a comic salute, then marches his bunch away. The singing in the kitchen has stopped; the topic among the waitresses is now the counsellors. Darce is the best, the most admired, the most desirable. His teeth are the whitest, his hair the blondest, his grin the sexiest. In the counsellors’ rec hall, where they go every night after the dishes are done, after they’ve changed out of their blue uniforms into their jeans and pullovers, after the campers have been inserted into their beds for the night, he has flirted with each one of them in turn. So who was he really saluting?

“It was me,” says Pat, joking. “Don’t I wish.”

“Dream on,” says Liz.

“It was Hil,” says Stephanie loyally. But Joanne knows it wasn’t. It wasn’t her, either. It was Ronette. They all suspect it. None of them says it.

“Perry likes Jo,” says Sandy.

“Does not,” says Joanne. She has given out that she has a
boyfriend already and is therefore exempt from these contests. Half of this is true: she has a boyfriend. This summer he has a job as a salad chef on the Canadian National, running back and forth across the continent. She pictures him standing at the back of the train, on the caboose, smoking a cigarette between bouts of salad-making, watching the country slide away behind him. He writes her letters, in blue ball-point pen, on lined paper.
My first night on the Prairies
, he writes.
It’s magnificent – all that land and sky. The sunsets are unbelievable
. Then there’s a line across the page and a new date, and he gets to the Rockies. Joanne resents it a little that he raves on about places she’s never been. It seems to her a kind of male showing-off: he’s footloose. He closes with
Wish you were here
and several X’s and O’s. This seems too formal, like a letter to your mother. Like a peck on the cheek.

She put the first letter under her pillow, but woke up with blue smears on her face and the pillowcase both. Now she keeps the letters in her suitcase under the bed. She’s having trouble remembering what he looks like. An image flits past, his face close up, at night, in the front seat of his father’s car. The rustle of cloth. The smell of smoke.

Miss Fisk bumbles into the kitchen. She’s short, plump, flustered; what she wears, always, is a hairnet over her grey bun, worn wool slippers – there’s something wrong with her toes – and a faded blue knee-length sweater-coat, no matter how hot it is. She thinks of this summer job as her vacation. Occasionally she can be seen bobbing in the water in a droopy-chested bathing suit and a white rubber cap with the earflaps up. She never gets her head wet, so why she wears the cap is anyone’s guess.

“Well, girls. Almost done?” She never calls the waitresses by name. To their faces they are
girls
, behind their backs
My girls
. They are her excuse for everything that goes wrong:
One of the girls must
have done it
. She also functions as a sort of chaperon: her cabin is on the pathway that leads to theirs, and she has radar ears, like a bat.

I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I’m thirty. She knows this absolutely. It’s a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she’ll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.

This is no country for old men, she recites to herself. One of the poems she memorized, though it wasn’t on the final exam. Change that to old women.

When they’re all in their pyjamas, ready for bed, Joanne offers to read them the rest of the True Trash story. But everyone is too tired, so she reads it herself, with her flashlight, after the one feeble bulb has been switched off. She has a compulsion about getting to the ends of things. Sometimes she reads books backwards.

Needless to say, Marleen gets knocked up and Dirk takes off on his motorcycle when he finds out.
I’m not the settling-down type, baby. See ya round
. Vroom. The mother practically has a nervous breakdown, because she made the same mistake when young and blew her chances and now look at her. Marleen cries and regrets, and even prays. But luckily the other shoe clerk, the boring one, still wants to marry her. So that’s what happens. The mother forgives her, and Marleen herself learns the true value of quiet devotion. Her life isn’t exciting maybe, but it’s a good life, in the trailer park, the three of them. The baby is adorable. They buy a dog. It’s an Irish setter, and chases sticks in the twilight while the baby laughs. This is how the story ends, with the dog.

Joanne stuffs the magazine down between her narrow little bed and the wall. She’s almost crying. She will never have a dog like that, or a baby either. She doesn’t want them, and anyway how would she
have time, considering everything she has to get done? She has a long, though vague, agenda. Nevertheless she feels deprived.

Between two oval hills of pink granite there’s a small crescent of beach. The boys, wearing their bathing suits (as they never do on canoe trips but only around the camp where they might be seen by girls), are doing their laundry, standing up to their knees and swabbing their wet T-shirts and underpants with yellow bars of Sunlight soap. This only happens when they run out of clothes, or when the stench of dirty socks in the cabin becomes too overpowering. Darce the counsellor is supervising, stretched out on a rock, taking the sun on his already tanned torso and smoking a fag. It’s forbidden to smoke in front of the campers but he knows this bunch won’t tell. To be on the safe side he’s furtive about it, holding the cigarette down close to the rock and sneaking quick puffs.

Something hits Donny in the side of the head. It’s Ritchie’s wet underpants, squashed into a ball. Donny throws them back and soon there’s an underpants war. Monty refuses to join in, so he becomes the common target. “Sod off!” he yells.

“Cut it out, you pinheads,” Darce says. But he isn’t really paying attention: he’s seen something else, a flash of blue uniform, up among the trees. The waitresses aren’t supposed to be over here on this side of the island. They’re supposed to be on their own dock, having their afternoon break.

Darce is up among the trees now, one arm braced against a trunk. A conversation is going on; there are murmurs. Donny knows it’s Ronette, he can tell by the shape, by the colour of the hair. And here he is, with his washboard ribs exposed, his hairless chest, throwing underpants around like a kid. He’s disgusted with himself.

Monty, outnumbered but not wanting to admit defeat, says he needs to take a crap and disappears along the path to the outhouse.
By now Darce is nowhere in sight. Donny captures Monty’s laundry, which is already finished and wrung out and spread neatly on the hot rock to dry. He starts tossing it up into a jack pine, piece by piece. The others, delighted, help him. By the time Monty gets back, the tree is festooned with Monty’s underpants and the other boys are innocently rinsing.

They’re on one of the pink granite islands, the four of them: Joanne and Ronette, Perry and Darce. It’s a double date. The two canoes have been pulled half out of the water and roped to the obligatory jack pines, the fire has done its main burning and is dying down to coals. The western sky is still peach-toned and luminous, the soft ripe juicy moon is rising, the evening air is warm and sweet, the waves wash gently against the rocks. It’s the Summer Issue, thinks Joanne.
Lazy Daze. Tanning Tips. Shipboard Romance
.

Joanne is toasting a marshmallow. She has a special way of doing it: she holds it close to the coals but not so close that it catches fire, just close enough so that it swells up like a pillow and browns gently. Then she pulls off the toasted skin and eats it, and toasts the white inside part the same way, peeling it down to the core. She licks marshmallow goo off her fingers and stares pensively into the shifting red glow of the coal bed. All of this is a way of ignoring or pretending to ignore what is really going on.

There ought to be a tear drop, painted and static, on her cheek. There ought to be a caption:
Heartbreak
. On the spread-out groundsheet right behind her, his knee touching her back, is Perry, cheesed off with her because she won’t neck with him. Off behind the rocks, out of the dim circle of firelight, are Ronette and Darce. It’s the third week in July and by now they’re a couple, everyone knows it. In the rec hall she wears his sweatshirt with the St. Jude’s crest; she smiles more these days, and even laughs when the other girls tease her about him. During this teasing Hilary does not join in. Ronette’s
face seems rounder, healthier, its angles smoothed out as if by a hand. She is less watchful, less diffident. She ought to have a caption too, thinks Joanne.
Was I Too Easy?

There are rustlings from the darkness, small murmurings, breathing noises. It’s like a movie theatre on Saturday night. Group grope.
The young in one another’s arms
. Possibly, thinks Joanne, they will disturb a rattlesnake.

Perry puts a hand, tentatively, on her shoulder. “Want me to toast you a marshmallow?” she says to him politely. The frosty freeze. Perry is no consolation prize. He merely irritates her, with his peeling sun-burnt skin and begging spaniel’s eyes. Her so-called real boyfriend is no help either, whizzing on his train tracks back and forth across the prairies, writing his by-now infrequent inky letters, the image of his face all but obliterated, as if it’s been soaked in water.

Nor is it Darce she wants, not really. What she wants is what Ronette has: the power to give herself up, without reservation and without commentary. It’s that languor, that leaning back. Voluptuous mindlessness. Everything Joanne herself does is surrounded by quotation marks.

“Marshmallows. Geez,” says Perry, in a doleful, cheated voice. All that paddling, and what for? Why the hell did she come along, if not to make out?

Joanne feels guilty of a lapse of manners. Would it hurt so much to kiss him?

Yes. It would.

Donny and Monty are on a canoe trip, somewhere within the tangled bush of the mainland. Camp Adanaqui is known for its tripping. For five days they and the others, twelve boys in all, have been paddling across lake after lake, hauling the gear over wave-rounded boulders or through the suck and stench of the moose-meadows at the portage entrances, grunting uphill with the packs and canoes,
slapping the mosquitoes off their legs. Monty has blisters, on both his feet and his hands. Donny isn’t too sad about that. He himself has a festering sliver. Maybe he will get blood-poisoning, become delirious, collapse and die on a portage, among the rocks and pine needles. That will serve someone right. Someone ought to be made to pay for the pain he’s feeling.

The counsellors are Darce and Perry. During the days they crack the whip; at night they relax, backs against a rock or tree, smoking and supervising while the boys light the fire, carry the water, cook the Kraft Dinners. They both have smooth large muscles which ripple under their tans, they both – by now – have stubbly beards. When everyone goes swimming Donny sneaks covert, envious looks at their groins. They make him feel spindly, and infantile in his own desires.

Right now it’s night. Perry and Darce are still up, talking in low voices, poking the embers of the dying fire. The boys are supposed to be asleep. There are tents in case of rain, but nobody’s suggested putting them up since the day before yesterday. The smell of grime and sweaty feet and wood smoke is getting too potent at close quarters; the sleeping bags are high as cheese. It’s better to be outside, rolled up in the bag, a groundsheet handy in case of a deluge, head under a turned-over canoe.

Monty is the only one who has voted for a tent. The bugs are getting to him; he says he’s allergic. He hates canoe trips and makes no secret of it. When he’s older, he says, and can finally get his hands on the family boodle, he’s going to buy the place from Mr. B. and close it down. “Generations of boys unborn will thank me,” he says. “They’ll give me a medal.” Sometimes Donny almost likes him. He’s so blatant about wanting to be filthy rich. No hypocrisy about him, not like some of the other millionaire offshoots, who pretend they want to be scientists or something else that’s not paid much.