by Anna Maxymiw
“Those are Jack’s boxers.” Each word is clipped.
“They stole the camera,” I say, immediately, defensively.
Tiff’s lips tighten.
“Fucking animals.”
* * *
The next time I go for a swim, I walk out as quickly as I can and drop to my knees. I put my head underwater and feel this odd fever ebb for a moment, and then I scream, mouth full of water, as loud as I can, as long as I can, until I have no more breath.
NAIADS
On nights when the weather is good and the bugs aren’t too bad, when we finish dinner service before the sun goes down, and we’re not too stressed from serving the guests, we spend part of the evening on the staff beach, watching the dark slide in across the water. We can’t be out for too long, since sound travels and the fishermen in the cabins nearby are bedding down, but we cobble together a small fire, warm our hands and the soles of our feet as the night deepens around our bodies, and watch the sky go from powder periwinkle to a deep and dusty blue, rich and dark and foreboding.
Tonight, I’m wading in the shallows, just far enough that the water comes to the knobby bones of my ankles. The lake exhales around me, slowly calming from its day. The stars are starting to poke out, and the treetops stroke the sky as though feeling for the residual warmth from the melting sundown. For a moment, I feel like the conductor of an orchestra, as if I could lift my hands and everything in front of me might respond to my ticking fingers. I put my hand in front of my face and my fingers disappear into the background of the black lake in just a few blinks of my eyes, until it’s suddenly so dark I’m sure I’m just a murky silhouette against the horizon.
Behind me, the girls are roasting marshmallows, painting their toenails, hissing at one another, ripping into care packages sent from home. I turn my head and watch them, witnessing what the guests have seen this summer. We have become one great machine: we move—pass, smile, insult—as a group, our motions a guileless choreography of comfort.
Sometimes, something about the nuances of woman-to-woman interaction is lost on me; I don’t understand the bowing and bobbing of heads, the hierarchy, the need to compliment and not accept compliments in return. So the fact that I have seven new girlfriends—bred from nothing but sweat, proximity, and the ability to humble ourselves—is stunning. As I look at them, I feel gratitude so intense it wraps its hands around my guts and squeezes, and my eyes well up and the fire blurs. I’m so glad it’s dark and no one can see me tearing up on the shoreline, watching these nymphs weave arms around one another and laugh with the clear, cutting trill of water between fingers and stars in the sky.
They are a frieze, perfection—Robin and Syd and Emma searching for good sticks, Aubrey and Alex and Alisa whittling, Tiff craning her neck to see if her marshmallow is golden or on the edge of burnt. The men are on the fringes, partly in the dark, and it’s the women who shine. I gaze at each of them and their faces are lit up with the warm amber glow.
ALISA
Alisa and I lie in Kevin’s bed. Pea is sitting across from us, on an unused lower bunk. He’s taking pictures as we paw through Kev’s clothing, fishing out lush woollen sweaters and neon-coloured long johns. Alisa giggles as we pull on his shirts and roll around in his flannel sheets. Head by head, our blonde and red mixes in eddies, and he’ll be finding long hairs on his pillow for days to come.
Jack appears at the doorway and Alisa looks up. “What do you want?”
Wordlessly, he sticks his ass into the room and farts, and then uses a Rubbermaid bin lid he had hidden by the wall to fan it at us aggressively.
Alisa and I scream, laughing, and it’s at that moment that Pea takes another photo and we are memorialized—arms around each other, mid-shriek, eyes half-closed and angled to Jack, who is standing out of the frame, to the side.
ROBIN
Robin is quieter than the rest of the girls, and that’s why I like her so much. She’s broad-shouldered and strong, and because of this Henry “volunteers” her for some of the tougher jobs, all of which she does without complaint. It’s not surprising to see her mowing the lawn, or using a Whippersnipper to trim the edging along the path—jobs that no other housekeeper dares to take on. She also has a funny habit of breaking everything she touches: toilets, sinks, wheelbarrows. It’s not that she’s clumsy, just that the pieces seem to fall apart in her hands. We joke that she has bad luck, and she jokes along with us, too, but I think it takes a toll on her.
I think Robin feels as if she’s on the periphery, that she doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the girls and that maybe she should. I like the things that set her apart: her willingness to work hard, the fact that she doesn’t run her mouth or talk about inane things. When something goes wrong, she doesn’t offer up stupid advice for the sake of talking. Instead, she sits and listens.
So I’m glad it’s her who I find when I burst into the lodge, hot-faced and manic, holding two pillowcases in my hands.
“I need help,” I say.
I can’t remember how to fold the linens the way we’ve been taught. Normally, I love laundry days: the laundry room is so isolated from the rest of the camp that to work in it all day is to isolate oneself, too. The dull thrum of the washing machines can be soothing, and the room is warm and low-ceilinged, always damp because it’s located partly underground beneath the motel. There are bottles of cleaning products on the dusty wooden shelves, and, in the very back, there’s a storage room that hasn’t been excavated in years. When some of the housekeepers peek back there, we find a child’s fishing rod from the 1990s, and a mesh baseball cap with a lodge logo from long before that.
Today I’m panicky. This is not how I expected my breakdown to happen. Each of us is due for an emotional routing, and sometimes the smallest things are the triggers. So far I’ve seen Kevin lose it over good-natured ribbing by the girls, Emma crumple into tears over an unwashed plate waiting for her in the dishpit, Sydney lose her cool over the stressful nature of steak night. Running on so little sleep, completely emotionally peeled as we are, some days are generally weepy. I didn’t expect that laundry was going to be my thing.
Robin walks me back to the laundry room, grabbing my damp hand as soon as we’re out of sight of the lodge. It seems like such a small kindness, but it’s so large in that moment. I lose my words, and press the clean sheets to my face. I cry into the linens, my shoulders hunched, vibrating with the frustrations of shitty sleeps and sexual tension and feeling geographically helpless. Robin doesn’t say anything silly. All she does is put a hand between my shoulder blades. Standing beside me, leaning against the chest freezer, so close our bodies touch, she guides me through the different ways to fold the linens. When I’ve calmed, she crushes my shoulders in a reassuring sidelong squeeze, and leaves to continue watching her movie.
AUBREY
Aubrey sits beside me at the staff dinner table; we’re chewing miniature pizzas as fast as we can, taking huge bites and trying to scarf down as much food as possible before it’s time to go back to work. She’s wearing a lodge jacket from the 1980s to keep pizza sauce from getting all over her serving whites. I grin at her, tomato sauce caught between my teeth.
“Little Henrys,” she says with a moan through a full mouth. That’s what these pizzas are called, disturbingly—Little Henrys, like our boss. They’re about a billion calories apiece, but they’re so good we beg Sam to make them at least twice a week. Tonight, he’s acquiesced, and Aubrey and I are making the most of it by shoving them into our mouths before the real Henry slides back in and extricates us.
Aubrey’s mostly quiet and judicious in a way that makes her seem stilted at first, so it took me longer to get to know her. She speaks slowly to get her point across; she makes important observations. On her afternoons off, she’d rather take a canoe out with Wade or Pea—and not just for a half-assed ride along the shore. They go on adventures, genuine paddles, because that’s where Aubrey releases her stress, in nature, away from camp and away from the
shenanigans.
Still, there are times when she’ll say something so funny, so out of the blue and spot on, and those are the moments I feel closest to her, when she lets loose her unexpected, rich blare of a laugh.
Pea walks in and tosses Aubrey a potato. “From the dockhands,” he says.
The potato is heart-shaped, and carved into it is “WE LOVE U GUYS.” She starts laughing, and I can’t help but join in.
ALEX
Alex walks into the staff dining room as I’m sitting, reading and eating a piece of buttered bread.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing really,” I say.
Something about her movement distracts me from my book, and so I take a better look at her. She’s unfocused, her lanky body unusually heavy. Her movements are manifested in subtle but distressed tics.
“What’s wrong?”
She’s still for a moment. The two of us are suspended in a tableau of in-between before she finally speaks. “My sister phoned and told me to phone her back right away. And now I can’t get in touch with her.” I realize, suddenly, that Alex is beyond panic, and that’s why I didn’t immediately identify her upset: she’s in that deep stage of terror. “It’s my family. I know it is. I think—” She stops. I stare, not wanting to move for fear of scaring her off. “Maybe one of my parents died.”
It seems like a dramatic jump, but it’s not. Because we’re so isolated, it takes time for news of home to reach us, and so it’s easy to think the worst. My body tenses. There’s nothing I can say, no platitudes that will ease her anxiety. The only thing to do is to wait for the satellites to shift back into alignment and to stay with her while she phones home—if that’s what she wants.
Later, when Alex sits at the phone and learns that it’s her grandfather who passed away, she sobs so hard that her body shakes, the kind of weeping where sound doesn’t even come out, not even tears, just harsh, jolting movements. I try to wrap myself around her. It’s not a gesture that takes any thought, just a warm animal instinct of trying to protect one of my own.
“Yes,” Alex says to her sister. “No. I’m not alone.”
SYDNEY
“Look!”
Syd has her camera in her hand, and she’s waving it back and forth, ambling toward me down the motel hallway. She’s in charge of cleaning the bathrooms today, and I’m on my way to bring some towels to room number eight.
“Oh no.”
“You wanna know what I’ve been doing today?” Her eyes glitter in the dim motel light.
“Did you…bring your camera to clean rooms?”
“Do you wanna know what I’ve been doing today?”
I already have a pretty good idea of what she’s been doing today, because I also do it every week, but I start giggling immediately. “What have you been doing today?”
“Cleaning up shit.” She emphasizes the last word so heavily it sounds like shet. “Pubic…scrubbed…like, the shit out of everything.” Pubic scrub is not a technical term in the housekeeping lexicon, but I know exactly what she means. Sometimes the toilets and the showers get to such a state that we’re not sure if the men are shedding or just pulling their own hair out and spattering it on the ceramic.
“Look,” she says, switching on the camera and flipping through a few photos. I’m doing that kind of laughing where I’m keeping my mouth closed to try to stave it off, but it’s escaping anyway, in high-pitched nasal squeaks.
“Why do you have your camera?”
“Every time I find a bad shit stain on one of the toilets, I take a photo of it.”
“Wh—”
“Because I want to remember the fucking work I’m doing here! Because no one will believe me when I tell them!” With that, she turns the camera around and shows me what’s on her screen. My mouth falls open. “How do you even do that?”
I can’t help it. I start laughing so hard that I have to bend over to try to keep it from tearing me open with its strength. She’s still attempting to keep the camera in my sightline, and I’m trying to wave it away.
“How?”
I grab at her body from where I’m doubled over. I paw at her thighs and her stomach and her waist, trying to anchor myself. But it’s no use; she’s taken my legs out from under me, with just one interaction, one picture, and I’m floating away, carried on a ream of lawless, lusty laughter that can only come from being completely comfortable with another person. She can’t help it: she starts, too, her indignation melting a little bit.
“How?!”
EMMA
Emma and I sleep close together in the top bunks, and because of this, we share a strange bond, a connection forged in the intimate, fuzzy moments as we nod off and right after waking up. She is so different from me—younger, fair, petite, immature in a way that I know will even out once she figures out who she is and what she wants. We are close to being complete opposites, save for our fierce senses of humour.
One night, I bundle myself into my sleeping bag and say my goodnights to her through the double mesh of our bug nets.
“Blue jean baby,” she murmurs back.
“What?” I roll over to face her, frowning. “Oh no.”
Sydney joins in the song from the bunk below me and I groan, my visions of an early bedtime evaporating. She sings the next line with such a warble that I’m sure Robin is now awake, if she wasn’t before. “Shut up,” I say, somewhere between good-natured and exhaustedly fed up.
“Ballerina—” This is belted out from Robin’s bunk, and I know she’s been awake this whole time. Their three voices are so very different, but together they are a beautiful chorus, even bone-dead tired and lying in their dirty sleeping bags, their voices filtered through netting. My irritation is gone because how can it not be? I’m caught in the web of their song, and I’m smiling.
“Here it comes,” Emma hollers, suddenly sitting up in bed, and I start to laugh outright in anticipation until the chorus of “Tiny Dancer” finally rolls around and I join in, my mouth half-hidden in my pillow, my voice not as strong as their voices—but the four of us sound better than any concert, and I wonder if the bears, the wolves, the sleeping crows can hear us from wherever they are.
“You had a busy day today.”
TIFF
Tiff cradles a mickey of rum in her arms as the housekeepers stand on the beach, our heads craned as far back as we can manage.
“Show us the North Star!”
“Show us the planets!”
She motions with one arm, and, to me, she could be pointing at anything. The sky is filled with stars, a depthless well of wishes that probably never came to fruition but still glow with conviction anyway. Away from the light and the pollution of cities, the constellations shiver and stretch, taking up more of the sky than their boundaries should allow. We follow the arc of Tiff’s finger, looking from one pearled point to another, our necks burning, our arms looped around each other’s waists and shoulders.
“That’s the Big Dipper,” she says in that placid, beautiful voice, the voice that calms the most truculent personalities in camp, that guides us through the stressful prime rib dinner service, that coaches us in our hospital corners and pillow plumping.
“We know that!”
“We’re not stupid!”
Actually, we might be a bit stupid, especially when it comes to the stars, but Tiff only smiles kindly and continues pointing.
“The Little Dipper,” she says, tracing the shape with her finger.
“Okay, okay!”
She continues, naming constellations like she’s reciting some sort of heavenly spell, words like Lyra, Hercules, Draco, Aquila. She’s never impatient, making sure our heads follow wherever she’s gesturing to, our eyes wide and our mouths wider.
I know absolutely nothing about what I’m looking at. But we’re together, filling the quiet with our sounds, and even though there’s no fire to keep the bugs away, even though we’re supposed to be in bed and we’re going to be exhausted come morn
ing, we don’t want to leave the beach for bunks. I could stay out here all night.
We stand up from the cold sand and jig to keep warm. We take on the greens and blacks of the night glow, the skin of our faces and the backs of our hands alive with the light of the stars and the yawn of the moon. We spin. We spin and spin until we can’t tell the difference between the two sides of the horizon, until we drop. Until the biggest adventure we can manage is trying to find each other’s bodies in the dark and hold on tight until we can’t laugh anymore.
* * *
The girls decide to go swimming one evening. The boys are still pulling boats, and we don’t have the patience to wait for them. The sun is setting, and the lake is so still that it looks like a golden scrying pool. By some lovely fluke, it’s a beautiful almost-dusk: the perfect temperature, and the sky, clear and orange and red, is a bowl without boundary.
We drag a canoe onto the water. Some of us perch in the boat, and some of us swim alongside to pull it. We wait for the boys to realize that we’re missing; I know that once they’ve done the pull, they’ll come and find us. They’ll grab our clothes from the shoreline and roar at us to emerge from the water so they can ogle. We’ll ignore them, flicking our hair and turning our backs.
I plant my feet on the sandy bottom and look into the dipping sun. I’m so lucky to be here. The feeling strikes me like a bolt that goes all the way to my core and settles there. The thankfulness is so acute it hurts. Somehow, we’ve forged a family. We’ve cleverly forgotten about differences that would be glaring back in the default world. Being away from the things that we thought defined us, working hard and showering less, doesn’t make us less human. Somehow, it makes us even more human.