Authors: Diana Spechler
Like everyone else’s, my body was diminishing. Week two and I could feel there was less of it. According to the scale, I had lost seven pounds. But my clothes said I had lost more.
“Are your tits shrinking?” Mikey asked me on the phone.
They were. In the cups of my bras there were wrinkles, where once the fabric had been taut.
“Come home. I’ll massage them back to health.”
“I’ve never felt healthier,” I said, and it was true. Since the night at Chinese Buffet, I had eaten only what I was given.
“Are you going to turn into one of those girls who’s always wearing a sports bra?”
“When wasn’t I one of those girls?”
“Listen. If you want to sleep with Richard Simmons, I’ll give you a pass. I know how summer can be.”
He did know how summer could be. We’d fallen in love in the summer.
Five summers later, our love was tired, but fresh love was in bloom all around me. After dinner, Whitney and Pudge sat on the stone steps that led up to the cafeteria, Pudge at the bottom in his wheelchair, Whitney beside him on the first step. In Whitney’s presence, Pudge looked regal, a king on a throne, holding court. Sometimes Whitney leaned her face against his shin and he palmed the top of her head as if to bless her.
And Miss had begun wearing Brendan’s North Carolina State hat, her thick blond ponytail pulled through the hole above the size adjustment strap.
Spider asked me, “Are counselors allowed to have girlfriends who are campers?”
I didn’t know. Camp Carolina was light on rules.
“Brendan might want to have sex with Miss, and she’s just a kid.”
“Brendan’s a kid, too,” I said.
“No,” Spider said, “Brendan’s in college.”
Brendan and Miss walked around the loop together every morning, Miss in a white hooded sweatshirt, unzipped, hood up; Brendan trying not to pant, pushing his undersize glasses up the sweaty bridge of his nose.
“Doesn’t Brendan just scream ‘virgin’?” Sheena said to me one morning as we made our way into the cafeteria for breakfast. “He’s got a big red bow tied around his cock.”
“He’s only nineteen,” I said.
Sheena snorted. “I’m nineteen! I’ve been having sex since I was eleven.”
“That’s disturbing.”
“Gray, sometimes I think I’m so much older than you.”
I would like to think that she was right. I was young. I didn’t know anything. But I would just be excusing my own summer love.
Look, I would never have talked to Bennett if he hadn’t talked to me. Would never have asked for his time had he not offered it first. He was a man who could twirl a whistle on a shoelace, who could lift a soccer ball with the front of his foot and with the slightest flick send it neatly to his fingertips.
I saw myself in contrast to him—a girl who spent too much time and money in Manhattan bars, who kept her head down in the street instead of smiling a southern hello. I was the girl who couldn’t throw, who couldn’t catch, who knew words like “reps,” “sets,” “electrolytes,” “core strength,” “body mass index,” and “medicine ball” only because I was terrified of fat, not because I was an athlete.
He called me Angeline. He sang to me, “Lookin’ at the bright lights, searchin’ for the silver screen.” And what a thrill it was not to be Gray, to be a whole new angelic person, to be some girl from some song. When he said, “Angeline, come help me set up the gym for kickball,” or, “Hold the stopwatch while the kids run sprints,” I felt anointed. This was not high school. I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman. But in the glow of Bennett Milton, I felt nothing short of anointed.
I told myself,
There’s nothing wrong with having a crush.
I told myself,
I’m allowed to have friends of the opposite sex.
Then I thought of Mikey saying, “Don’t you know by now that men don’t want to be your friends?”
Usually when he said that, he meant comedians. Comedians, back when I was booking clubs, were interested only in what I had to give them. I knew that. “I’m not naïve,” I always told Mikey. But sometimes after I’d talked with an audience member at a club or a friend of a friend at a party, he would say, “New friend, huh?”
“That guy’s really cool,” I’d say. “He—”
“Gray. He’s not
cool
. He’s trying to fuck you.”
“You think everyone’s trying to fuck me.”
“Nope. Just that guy.”
“You always say that.”
“You know how he asked you about your college major?”
“Yeah?”
“And about your favorite movie?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s male code language. Allow me to translate: ‘I’m trying to fuck you.’ ”
But Bennett never
tried
to do anything. His whole existence was one effortless, fluid movement—a sea turtle gliding through the water.
“Who’s Camille?” I asked him one night.
I was what Lewis called “Head O.D.” O.D. stood for “on duty,” and Head O.D. was in charge of the whole camp until midnight, which meant I had to sit on the cafeteria steps, holding a useless flashlight and a walkie-talkie that barely worked in case one of the other on-duty counselors radioed in from the dorms with a problem. From the steps, I could see part of the loop, and beyond that, the library, the girls’ dorm to the right, part of the boys’ dorm to the left. And always against the white of the buildings, trees as green as putting mats.
Bennett and I sat side by side, drinking water from Camp Carolina water bottles, surrounded by crickets and stars. I felt the way I constantly felt with Bennett—as if he was about to get up and walk away. The feeling always compelled me to ask him a lot of questions.
Bennett glanced down at his tattoo. “I swear, I have to get that thing removed,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to do it. But it’s not cheap.”
“How not cheap?”
“Maybe a thousand. Or more.” He inspected the tattoo more closely, ran his finger over the letters of Camille’s name. “It’s a lot of ink.”
I looked at his arm. The heart throbbed red and full.
“Not much gets by you,” Bennett said. He leaned back on his elbows.
“Plenty gets by me.”
“Think so?” He yawned.
There it was, my favorite part of talking with Bennett: how our banter would seem to be building momentum, until he would throw out an absentminded stock phrase, like a crisis line operator reading from a script. So different from Mikey, who was always on, always waiting for his chance to be funny, his skin buzzing with anticipation.
“You been into Melrose yet?” Bennett asked. “We should drive into Melrose one of these nights. Get some ribs. Pitcher of beer.”
Two weeks ago, I could have devoured multiple rib cages if given the chance, and then licked every last drop of barbecue sauce from my fingers. But with my eyes on Bennett, I felt no hunger. Ribs were a meal that hungry people ate.
“The personal trainer eats ribs?”
“Don’t tell the kids,” he said.
I laughed, and then I saw it for the first time: the cross around his neck. It was small and wooden, dangling from a leather thong at the base of his throat.
“Know what I’m famous for with my friends? Ask me about the specials at any fast-food place. Go on. I always know.”
“KFC.”
“Free medium soft drink with any plated meal.”
“What’s a plated meal?”
“A meal on a plate.”
“Makes it sound healthy.”
“Never claimed it was healthy.”
“Mia was telling the kids the other day that they should always eat off a plate. Where you get in trouble is if you start eating out of the bag.”
“Because you won’t know when to stop.”
“Knowing when to stop is half the ba—” I cut myself off. I was so very sick of my platitudes.
“Give me another,” Bennett said.
“I don’t know. Burger King?”
“A free vampire collector’s glass with any value meal.”
“What’s a collector’s glass?”
“A glass for collectors.”
“But who would collect—”
“Do you know what a value meal is?”
“Isn’t it . . . No, actually.”
“Bunch of items that cost less all together than they would individually.”
“How gestalt.”
“Pardon?”
I shook my head. “So you’re one of those hypocrite trainers,” I said. “I can’t believe you eat fast food.” I almost nudged him with my elbow, but I stopped just short of touching him.
“I’m not a real personal trainer yet. My test isn’t until October.”
“So come October, you’ll stop eating Burger King?”
“Come October, a lot of things will change. I’ll strike out on my own, for one thing. I’m already getting to the end of my rope with Lewis. This camp is a mess. Do you know how many employees here are unqualified?”
“How many?”
“All of us. Pretty much. Look, I know plenty about fitness. Still, though. He couldn’t find a real trainer? Not that I’m complaining. Just saying. You know, Mia doesn’t have her RD certification. She’s practically a kid. And Brendan sure as shit shouldn’t be anywhere near that climbing wall, and KJ, let me tell you, is no lifeguard. Then there’s Nurse, who’s, what, fifty years old? And hasn’t gotten her nursing certification yet. That woman’s crass as all get-out. She thinks Couth is her uncle, she’s so country.”
“You don’t like Nurse?”
“I like everyone.”
I leaned back on my elbows like Bennett. Above us, the stars winked.
“And you,” Bennett said. “Do you know what water aerobics
is
?”
“No.”
“How’d you even hear about us, all the way down here?”
“I was reading about weight-loss camps once,” I said, crooking my nails to study them. I added, “On the Internet,” as if to substantiate my credentials.
“Don’t even get me started on Lewis,” Bennett said. “For some godforsaken reason, that man thinks he’s better than everyone at everything. He’s sure that one day he’ll prove it.”
“I love your accent,” I said.
“I don’t have an accent.”
“ ‘Godforsaken.’ What does that even mean?”
“Beats me,” Bennett said, sitting back up and rubbing his knees. “Watch. That man is going to go down. I don’t know when. I don’t know how. But you watch. It won’t be pretty.”
“I know about narcissists,” I said. I sat up, too. “They tend to self-destruct. I used to work with comedians.”
Bennett stopped rubbing his knees and stared at me. He wore a Carolina Hurricanes baseball cap, worn and faded; a Rolling Stones T-shirt with a lips-and-tongue logo; cutoff khaki shorts; his black-and-white-striped soccer sandals. “I like how
you
talk,” he said. “It’s so fancy.”
I thought,
Dumb jock
. Then I felt guilty for thinking it. Then I felt turned on. Then I sucked air and words into my chest. And when I opened my mouth, I said, “I like that idea. Ribs and beer. Melrose. Pick any night when I’m off duty.”
My heart pounded like wild fists, but Bennett just yawned and stretched his arms. “I forgot I even said that,” he said. “I must be tired.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, we don’t have to.”
Bennett laughed. “You want ribs? Who am I to deny Miss Angeline?” He stood. Stretched. Gave my ponytail a noncommittal tug. Then he jogged down the steps and vanished.
The second Saturday of camp, the youngest girls decorated the cafeteria for the social (Lewis’s Camp-ese for “dance”). Before it began, Miss sat against the wall in our hallway in the dorm, wearing jogging shorts and a T-shirt, complaining, “This is going to be
so gay
,” as everyone else walked around in towels, borrowing one another’s clothes, battling the humidity with blow dryers. Whitney had her music cranked up, and Eden was dancing in the hallway, piling her hair up on top of her head, letting it fall as she twitched her hips. When no one joined her, she danced to the bathroom to shower.
I was sitting outside of Eden’s room, pretending to do something important with my cell phone.
“So gay,” Miss went on. “So retarded. Who are you all dressing up for anyway? There’s no one hot at this whole camp, except Bennett, and he’s, like, a dad.”
Spider slid down the wall across from her, wearing a mustache of white foam.
“You’re bleaching your
mustache
?” Miss said.
Spider pointed to it, and then said something in sign language.
Whitney came out into the hall wearing skintight jeans and a hot pink tube top. “Maybe you should wear a North Carolina State bikini,” Whitney said, nudging Miss’s arm with her foot. “Brendan would get such a trombone in his pants.”
When Whitney and Miss began to giggle, Spider, across from them, waved her hands frantically, pointing to her mustache bleach. Finally, unable to contain herself, she jumped to her feet and ran.
From inside the bathroom, she roared, “Trombone!” and exploded into laughter. “Whitney! You made my bleach fall off!”
Harriet stepped into the hallway wearing a black turtleneck dress.
“You’re going to sweat to death,” I told her.
“No, I won’t.”
I returned to my phone, pretending not to notice Eden walking out of the bathroom in her towel and flip-flops, another towel twisted around her wet hair.
“Harriet, are you going to a funeral?” Miss asked.
“No.”
“I see. Are you a ninja?”
Harriet pulled her turtleneck over her mouth and nose, and then headed back to her room.
“Sorry. I mean, are you a mime? No. I didn’t mean that. Are you a stagehand? Are you going to change the set between acts in the dark?”
Whitney snorted, but her laughter stopped abruptly when Eden pointed to her and said, “I was totally going to wear jeans, too.”
Whitney sighed and leaned against the wall, a brown roll of fat inflating like an inner tube between the button of her jeans and the bottom of her cropped shirt. “Of course you were.”
“I’m obsessed with jeans,” Eden said.
“Congratulations,” Miss said. “You just won the Most Retarded Sentence of the Week Award.” She stood and whispered something into Whitney’s ear, and Eden watched for a second, blinking rapidly, and then wandered into her room.
From the bathroom, Spider called, “Don’t say ‘retarded.’ It’s insensitive.”
“I can say whatever I want,” Miss called.
“It’s a free country,” Whitney said.
I stood, facing Miss. “You don’t have to be mean.”
“Who was mean? I’m not mean.”
“Harriet looks pretty,” I said.
“She’s gorgeous,” Miss said, yawning. “I must be jealous.”
“You didn’t have to make Eden feel bad.”
“Eden jacks my style!” Whitney said. “She tries to talk like she’s black all the time. It’s
annoying
. She said the
N
word yesterday. I’m sick of dumb white bitches thinking they’re black. Eden’s a racist.”
“She’s not a racist.”
“This is why I hate females.”
“That makes no sense,” I said.
“There are so many dumb bitches at this camp.”
And then a scream came from Eden’s room, so loud and shrill, my vision blurred. Spider ran out of the bathroom, her face scrubbed clean. She was wearing nothing but day-of-the-week underpants. Tuesdays. Ever since the drastic weight losses from the first weigh-in, it was not uncommon for everyone, except Harriet, to be stripped down to underwear.
Sheena popped her head out her door. “What the hell is going on?”
Harriet reappeared, too.
Eden burst out of her room, still screaming, still wearing her towel, her wet hair now loose on her arms and back. “Someone put cockroaches in my fucking bed!” She stopped screaming and wrapped her arms around herself.
“There are no cockroaches in this part of the country,” Spider said, scratching at a peeling patch of skin on her cheek. “Earwigs, maybe. But cockroaches are city dwellers.”
Eden closed her eyes and balled up her fists at her sides. “Cockroaches. In. My.
Bed
.”
I looked around. Whitney was looking at the floor. Sheena was looking at Miss, who was twirling a yellow lock of hair around her finger, watching Eden with a face as blank as a plate. Harriet was crying.
“Harriet, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I hate when people scream,” she muttered, and then she stomped into her room and slammed the door.
“What is everyone’s problem?” Sheena said. “We’re at camp. Bugs get inside sometimes. Deal with it!”
“We’re at a boarding school!” Eden said. “It’s not a real camp.”
“Maybe it was a hate crime,” Spider said.
“Y’all are drama queens,” Whitney said.
Whitney and Miss linked elbows and scurried into Sheena’s room. Sheena followed them in and closed the door.
Eden turned to stomp into Spider’s room. I heard the squeak of the mattress springs when she threw herself on Spider’s bed. “I’m not sleeping in my room!” she shouted. “Ever again!”
“I’ll trade with her,” Spider said.
“You don’t have to do that, Spider.”
“I like earwigs.” She scratched her forehead. It was pink from all the scratching. “I wouldn’t mind having an earwig farm.”
“Yuck.”
“Want me to get them and take them outside?”
I watched the pink spread across her forehead. I nodded. “I hate bugs,” I said. I thought,
My sister and I hate bugs.
“But it’s not your job, Spider. So don’t do it if you don’t want to, okay?”
“Everyone thinks earwigs crawl into people’s ears,” Spider said. “And lay eggs in their brains.”
I shuddered.
“But that’s an urban legend. Or maybe a rural legend.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“Of
bugs
?”
I looked at the antidote necklaces draped around Spider’s neck. “You’re brave,” I told her.
Spider lifted her arms away from her body and then dropped them as she made her way toward Eden’s room. “People are so afraid of things that aren’t even scary.”
I went to Spider’s door and placed my palms on it. For a second, I thought I felt a heartbeat. “Can I come in?”
Eden didn’t answer.
“Spider’s in your room getting the bugs out of your bed.”
After another minute of silence, I opened the door and stepped into Spider’s dim room. The air smelled medicinal. A Japanese flag hung in place of blinds, suspended by the breeze from the window fan. Below it, Eden was sprawled facedown on the bed.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said into the pillow.
I sat on the edge of the bed. “We don’t have to.”
“I don’t want to
talk
. At all. About anything.”
“Okay,” I said. “But don’t you want to go to the social?”
Eden rocked her forehead right and left on the pillow.
No
.
I looked at her wet hair and pictured my father’s hand cupping the back of her head. I could hear his voice saying, “Cheer up, sleepy Jean.”
I thought of Eden’s mother, her eyes locked with our father’s. I wondered how they’d met. How much time had they spent together? When he died, had she still loved him? Had he loved her? Had he kissed the great wave of her bangs? Had they sat side by side in an air-conditioned movie theater, his palm cupping the nape of her neck? Had he held her beneath a summer-night sky? Had he pointed to the heavens, his belly at her back, and whispered into her hair? (“See how the moon loves the stars? Don’t I love you like that?”)
I didn’t touch Eden. But I wanted to give her something. I could have just said it. Told her what I’d come to tell her. It certainly would have taken her mind off the cockroaches or earwigs, or whatever they were.
But when I opened my mouth, nausea rose inside me. I could do it. No, I couldn’t. I had to. No, not yet. Not yet. Yes, now. Now. I inhaled sharply. But suddenly it felt like a lie.
Eden, I’m your sister.
It was ridiculous. What was I thinking? This was the first time I’d been close to her. This was not The Moment. She would scream for Sheena. I would be taken away in a straitjacket.
I slowed my heart by remembering that I had time. The program was working. I felt . . . surrendered to it. I could wait out the summer. By August, everyone would say, “Gray and Eden are like sisters.” We would be like sisters. Then I would tell her.
In the meantime, I offered a fortune cookie fortune, since that was what I did best. In fact, I gave her my father’s words: “Most people,” I said, “are schmucks.”