Bee & Sweety

Bee and Sweetie are going to summer camp this year. “Whether or not you want to,” says their mother Babs. Their stepfather Jerry always agrees with their mother. Bee is thirteen and hates the smell of periods. “Everyone is always bleeding,” she says. Sweetie can’t smell blood. Sweetie chews on a straw and pushes the glittery letters on her t-shirt—SUPERSTAR—a glittering iron-on she made in Jerry’s store. Her wardrobe was slowly turning into a collection of unicorns, gumball machines, and puffy letters on baseball shirts. As a joke, Bee put the name ELOISE on the back of her sweatshirt.

The camp director doesn’t know they weren’t always a family. That they’d been trying Jerry out for the past two years. He’d never seen them in a sleeping bag or knew if they liked tents or counting stars. They were still warming to the idea of Jerry. They’d never had to memorize or remember a man all at once. They tried to replace his likes for their father’s who was buried in a cement wall with a name tag of stone letters.

“The slots fill quickly,” the director, Pam Thompson, says to the room. The listening families sit in beige folding chairs, sipping water and fruit punch from plastic cups.  Pam’s hair is braided into two long gray ropes.

“She’s somebody’s grandma,” Sweetie says, rolling her eyes. The YMCA is a squat building with pale aqua walls. Each room seems to have a function. A party room. A tumbling room. Basketball court. Pool. Lockers. A pasta shell, yarn and glue room. Bee and Sweetie have been coming here their whole lives. They watch ghost games of their dad dribbling across the squeaky bball court. They pretend the net swooshes. They hated the silver fish that squiggled across the shower tiles. They laughed when the wrinkled Asian ladies walked around naked with their flowery bathing caps, their stretched boobs touching everything, speaking in ching-tong language, frog chirps and banana tea breath. They look like they’re already slipping into memories with their faded skin and scratchy black hairs. Look like wrinkled bags from the A & P.  Pam’s eyes don’t seem to blink. She turns off the lights and the slides poped on the white pull down movie screen. There were cabins that looked like they belonged in a maple syrup commercial. There were groups of smiling children playing Frisbee. They were all wearing bold yellow camp shirts. Indian Princesses with the name of the cabin ironed on the back, Sweetie pointed out. “Jerry could’ve made all of those shirts,” she said. “We could dress like them,” she said. The slide show was one long summer party except for one kid, in the fifth slide. Sweetie was counting. The children were playing tug-of-war and the red handkerchief knot was pulled off to the left side. Cabin #7, the PORCUPINES, was beating Cabin #3, The MACARONIS.  Their heels were digging into the mud. Their jaws were clenched from battling, taking sides.

It’s November and the leaves have started melting into the ground, wet brown mess of foliage. Bee and Sweetie are reminded that Babs and Jerry cancelled their appointments and meetings today to come here and watch the camp film. The smiling faces. Sweetie wants to know if Pam has grandchildren, if she has kids and her kids’ kids attended Lake Minee. If Pam raised a troupe of Indian Princesses in her own home. This is the only camp they’re considering. It’s local. It’s easy to sign up, takes no work, little research. Why did they make us come if this is where they’re sending us?

The YMCA letters glow red neon against the gray sky. The CA blinks on and off. This is a sign. They should be going to California, leave Shermer, IL behind. When the C-A disappears, Sweetie reads Y-M and takes the question to heart. “We’re going to die in this camp,” Sweetie whispers in Bee’s ear. They’re not sure why they have to go away. They never did when their dad was alive. Back then, they’d all go to the Camelot Campgrounds and spend the summer weeks in a pop up camper. Brined sardines or herring in tomato sauce with their warm bodies and red sleeping bags. Babs was different then. She tucked small white flowers in her hair. Now she wore chunky gold bracelets and laughed at everything. Cookies on trays. They’re in Fall boots. Everyone in the slides is wearing sandals and T-shirts. Shorts. “Do they look happy?” Sweetie asks. Bee is playing Chinese jump rope making a cat’s cradle. She offers up a web for Sweetie to pinch.

Pam takes all of the kids into the craft room down the hall.  The other director, Dan, stays with the parents. Bee, Sweetie and eight other kids gather together in a circle. Pam says we’re going to play an icebreaker, get to know each other. Sweetie thinks of ice splitting into chunks.

Pam throws an inflated globe. The world is so weightless as its tossed back and forth between everyone’s hands. They practice giving the ball away. Pam gives them instructions. Call out someone’s name and toss the ball to that person. We’ll get to know each other. Sweetie and Bee stand across from each other. When Sweetie tosses the ball to her sister, she says, Beatriz. Bee refuses to catch the ball and lets it drop. Keeps her hands at her side. The ball rolls away under a long lunch table filled with boxes of plastic eyes and pasta shells.

Jerry, Babs, Sweetie and Bee sit around the dining room table. The chandelier is dimmed, the small bulbs of electric flames. Sweetie thinks there should be electric bugs at camp that can attack electric zappers.  The glass, the flame-shaped bulbs, a circle of fire hanging above their heads. The drapes around the windows are new. A heavy golden-green brocade replaced the whispy sheers. The chandelier is like a lantern under the heavy drapes that tent the room. Dinner is a bucket of chicken with sides: mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and corn. They’re eating picnic food on glass plates. Six weeks. Six weeks of fun, sun and friends the brochure promises. Jerry points to the boy on the back, sitting in the canoe with a half smile. “That’s Pam’s son,” Sweetie says.

“He looks so happy,” Babs says.

“I guess,” Sweetie says. “He’s dead. He drowned in the lake.”

“That’s absurd,” Babs says.

“Ask Bee if you don’t believe me,” Sweetie says.

Bee picks up her spoon and tosses it across the table and yells, “Jerry!” 

He catches it in his hand, unsure what to say or do next.

Make a T-shirt. Iron on a lake and a moon over a cabin.

The cabins were nice. Everyone did smile around the fire. Bee liked the ghost stories the best. She learned a lot of things in the first week. A séance was a way to communicate with her dead father. A girl usually gets fingered by an older boy when you sneak away from the campfire. Even if you’re not ready. Especially if you’re not ready. Finger rape. Purple cars tend to vroom pretty loud. She learned about trees and poison ivy and what happens if your cabin wakes up and the Pocahontas doll as been placed at the front door. She wasn’t sure why her parents wanted them to go away. Why should we get fingered because you’re too busy to take care of us. You don’t want to look at us because we remind you of dad. Sweetie’s going to be with him. She thinks it’s too weird to fit into someone’s family. She tells Bee while they’re eating cheese and crackers between horseback riding and Archery. Trees have teenage years that will outlast Sweetie. Our father turned into a tree. Our father owns the lake. Our father makes the camp T-shirts. 

A cluster of plastic cups full of punch.  Hands grabbing.  There were 40 cups.  But only eight of us, waiting as the projector fan kicked on and the cc Arlene counted the slides in the carousel wheel.  “We’ll being,” she hesitated, counting heads.  “Let’s give everyone a few more minutes to arrive,”  Traffic wasn’t bad.  Where would these other people be coming from?  Crappy cups on a card table in one of the church classrooms.  Folding chairs used in the assembly hall for the Christmas pageant and bazaars.  The light stiched off and slide show began.  The first picture showed a group of children in front of a cabin tucked in the woods.  Everyone was smiling, arms around each other, wet hair as if they’d finished tubing and tan freckled noses.  The sky full of powder blue and one happy, free-floating cloud.  Click.  The next slide was a large open air room, wooden tables, in a mess hall.  We were there to be sold on a summer camp in Big Bear Woods.  I was waiting for a picture of a big black bear, waiting to see his paws and gnashing claws, lurking in the background, eyes in darkness, yellow drops that could be mistaken for fireflies.  Six weeks of fun and sun.  Arlene took down everyone’s info—clipboard and a can of pens—but Bil was doing all of the talking, showing pictures from the brochure, bigger on the roll-down screen.  My mother stared at the glossy program. Excited.  I could already feel the prickly tags she’d iron inside my clothing, everything labeled—Lindsay Pepper.  L.  Pepper scratching my skin.  I knew this is what you did because all of the clothes mom bought from garage sales all the kids names pressed into their collars and in the waist of their shorts & jeans. 

This year I’d be going.  I didn’t know a lot about camp, other than the gossip that came with it, followed into the school year.  Missa D. had been fingered in the boat house, which I pictured as a stone room with mossy green walls and Missa’s shorts sliped to the side and a thick, pokey finger spider walking up her thigh and sliding inside.  All I could see was a finger not who it belonged to and all I could smell were damp life preservers and wet rope that was green/gray with age. 

Girls smoked cigarettes and gave each other hickies, pretending they were from some secret boyfriend who lived twenty miles outside of the school district.  I imagined everyone was friends, smiling like SLIDE #1 and #4 and #7.Where friends made friendship bracelets and lit punks.  That wood lint smell of dry backed leaves.  Late-night ghost stories. pranks. Horrible orange hotdogs. Dusty beds. Damp towels. Braiding hair, make-up, hula hooping and making up dances.  No one mentioned little Felix drowning or how one of the camp leaders went into town one night, had a few drinks, and woke up bruised with a deep cut above her brow, her wallet gone and her legs and abdomen sore from some indiscriminate rape.