by Rachel Cohn
“I want to think that’s not true about myself.”
Perhaps laundry-by-hand was a step toward debunking that myth.
Very liked the simplicity of the experience. Clothes and linens were dirty. She swished and wrung and rinsed them. She hung them to dry on a line out in the sun behind her cabin. And hey now, the stuff not only turned out clean but smelled extra nice and fresh, and felt crisp and lovely against her skin, and she’d made that happen herself. Quite possibly when Very was sprung from ESCAPE and had to get a real job, she might become a laundry person. She’d listen to her ‘Pod while washing clothes all the day long, never getting into trouble. She’d sing to herself to pass the time, and make people really happy with the results of her labor and her off-key but endearing song stylings, and she’d possibly win the Nobel Peace Prize because of her community service work that made her neighborhood, and its citizens and their stuff, so much cleaner, and brighter, and musically well-versed. Or, she could become a nail salon lady, also an important community asset, because doing so much laundry was chipping away at her nails, and her cuticles were a mess, and really, it didn’t seem right that ESCAPE did not offer beauty services in exchange for all the indentured servitude it required of its residents.
It was time to lodge a complaint with Dr. Killjoy about this problem. Or better yet, perhaps Very could circulate a petition on the subject, so that when she presented her case to Dr. Killjoy, it would seem more … fair, and reasonable, and not entirely selfish, because it was a grassroots campaign.
Another strange thing about laundry. The grass. Since the Vermont summer was so pleasant and mild, Very was able, joyfully, to roam the grounds barefoot. On the other hand (or foot), this roaming had created calluses on her feet, but the feel of her feet sinking into plush green grass was so fucking sweet. Very loved standing outside in the fresh air with her feet bare, her toes dancing through the grass as she stood at the laundry line, hanging sheets. She couldn’t believe such a simple chore could bring her so much sheer pleasure.
Others, apparently, could not, either.
“I don’t believe it,” a voice called to Very from behind her as she stood at the laundry line, hanging sheets.
Very’s toes curled in recognition of that voice. It belonged to … Very turned around … “Lavinia!” she cried out. She was so happy to see her friend’s familiar face, she didn’t care that the last time she’d seen it had been in the psych ward.
Very threw her arms up to welcome Lavinia into a hug, dropping her pillowcases to the ground as she did so, but no matter, she’d wash them again; more fun for Very later. Lavinia stepped into Very’s hug. “You smell good, like eucalyptus detergent,” Lavinia said, sniffing Very’s hair. Lavinia let go of Very to appraise her. “But seriously, I’ve been watching you for a couple minutes, and you look like a flame-haired Snow White out here, chirping as you hang laundry. I half expected some birds to land on your shoulder and sing along with you.”
“That would be so awesome if that happened,” Very said, shaking her head in envy at the idea. (But she’d rather be the voluptuous St. Pauli girl instead of Snow White—she wanted at least the promise of some beer and/or fornication after the chirping-along-with-nature costume fantasy.) She grabbed Lavinia’s hand and led her to a nearby bench to sit down. “What are you doing here?”
“I promised you I’d come visit. So here I am. My camp’s not too far away down the lake. Sorry for the lack of warning. This other counselor at camp asked me to switch days off with her at the last minute, so I ended up having today off, and I obviously can’t call you first to schedule a visit, so I figured I’d just show up and take a chance that it was a good visiting time. Is it?”
“It is!” Very said. “I had group therapy already this morning, did my penance at Dr. Joy’s daily lecture, so I’m free until I have to report for kitchen duty in a couple hours.”
“You? Do kitchen duty?” Lavinia said, disbelieving.
“I’ll have you know I am this facility’s most ace user of a Brillo pad on roasting pans, missy.”
“I’m impressed,” Lavinia said.
Very liked that. Impressing Lavinia. It seemed like a worthy goal, beyond the simple technological sobriety Very was now striving to maintain. “I’m eleven days clean,” Very said, in case Lavinia wasn’t impressed enough already.
“Congrats!” Lavinia said. “I’m proud of you. I really am. Sorry I couldn’t visit you during the first week. They told me new people were considered to be too vulnerable then. But they said that if you made it past the first week, then I could come visit.”
As happy as Very was to see Lavinia, she couldn’t deny that seeing her former roommate also brought back hard feelings: humiliation at her Jay friends’ “intervention,” and anger, and a sense of displacement that they could apparently carry on so casually with their own lives while Very was left muddling through the muddy, grassy swamp-mess she’d enmeshed herself in.
But the joy—and relief—that Lavinia had come to see her more than outweighed any sheepishness Very might have felt at their reunion. “How’s Camp Hoochie going?” Very asked Lavinia. “Since I obviously can’t read the blog updates you’ve undoubtedly been compulsively posting.” Lavinia, an avowed non-blogger, shuddered. She loathed blogs—or “brags,” as she called them.
Lavinia was a camp counselor at Camp Hoochinoo, an all-girls camp a few miles down the lake from ESCAPE. It was known as “Camp Hoochie” because of the wealthy, sophisticated tweens who visited the camp each summer, eight-to-eleven-year-olds going on thirty-year-olds, whose favorite game was role-playing Sex and the City episodes and quizzing one another on “Are you a Carrie, a Miranda, a Samantha, or a Charlotte?” (Very thought of Lavinia as a Charlotte, and herself as a Samantha-who-wanted-to-be-a-Miranda. Carrie was just … blech. Who’d want to be that shallow bitch?)
“Camp’s fine,” Lavinia said. “Although most of the girls in my bunk this year are Carries. Yuck. The Carries are the worst. You’d think it would be the Charlottes who’d be the most annoying—too high-maintenance—but at least the Charlottes tend to be sweet. The Carries are just brutal. If I see one more mean girl at camp trading candy for designer shoes, I’m going to lose it.”
“I’m trying to be more Miranda, less Samantha,” said Very.
“Just be Very,” Lavinia said. “Please.”
“You’ll still love me even without my gadgets?”
“Even more so. For putting in the time and work to get yourself together.”
“Thanks,” Very mumbled. This impressing Lavinia thing was … almost as satisfying as doing laundry. “Wanna take a look around and see the mortuary—I mean, grounds—here?”
“I do,” Lavinia said, standing up.
Per familiar pattern, they locked pinkie fingers and began a leisurely stroll. As they wandered past the buildings and the other residents, Very explained the social order. “There are two sets of social hierarchies here that I’ve been able to identify. The first applies to the old people versus the young. That stuff mainly only plays out in the dining hall, though. The second applies to all spectrums of ages. I call it the ‘Acolytes versus the Resistance Movement.’”
“Acolytes? How so? I thought this place was nondenominational.”
“Acolytes like groupies,” Very clarified. “The people who’ve fallen hook, line, and sinker for Dr. Joy’s 12 Steps / New Age blah blah blah. They’re the ones who talk at group therapy while the others just shrug and feign listening or try to nap.”
“Don’t tell me,” Lavinia started. “You’re in the—”
“Napping category,” Very finished. “Affirmative. So the Acolytes worship Dr. Joy and want to do things for her all the time, like trim the hedges so Dr. Joy won’t have to pay for professional gardeners and shit. She’s got them convinced that it’s part of their spiritual purification and that they’re learning valuable skills.”
“Aren’t they?”
“If they live in New Jersey or something
, maybe.”
“I’m from New Jersey. Trimming hedges might be a useful skill at my parents’ house, actually.”
“Whatever, Jersey girl. The point is, you might want to garden, but you probably have enough sense of your own identity that you wouldn’t fall under the Cult of Dr. Joy. See, look at them.”
Very directed their walk toward the gardens, where a parade of Acolytes stood at attention for Dr. Joy. The Acolytes wore gardening gloves and rubber boots and had determined smiles and glazed eyes. Dr. Joy pointed to a pile of shovels. She directed them: “Today we’re going to dig areas for placing these tomato plants in the ground. These tomatoes will sprout roots to your souls. You must dig, and irrigate, and tend to these souls.”
“I had salad for lunch,” Lavinia remarked. “It was good. So who are the people in the Resistance Movement?”
Very steered them toward Jones’s house. “They’re the ones who smoke, and obsessively needlepoint, and bitch about being here, but they’re not so much against the whole thing that they escape or drop out of the program. They’re progressing.”
“Are you in that camp?” Lavinia asked.
“I’m sort of in the middle. Indifferent. Trying to put in my time and make it through, but not really socialize too much with either camp, really.”
Lavinia laughed heartily. “Yeah, right.”
“Really!” Very said.
Lavinia fondled a strand of Very’s flame-red hair and tucked it behind Very’s ear. “Sure, sweetie,” she said.
Lavinia’s lack of faith in Very was unsettling. “So how many counselors at your all-girls camp have you been—ahem—‘socializing’ with?” Very countered.
Lavinia said, “FYI, there are men at Camp Hoochie, too. Lifeguards and administrative staff. It’s not entirely sapphic there. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Any special sapphic someone in the Arts and Crafts building you’ve got your eye on?” Very asked. “Perhaps a nice sophomore from Oberlin College, a folk singer double-majoring in Women’s Studies and Bioethics?”
“Ha-ha,” Lavinia said. “But if you really want to know, yes, there is someone special I might have my eye on. A lifeguard. Just finished junior year at UMass. Sports Management major, on the football team. Fills out a Speedo nicely. And smart, too.”
Very covered her ears with her hands. “La la la,” she said. “Can’t hear you. Don’t want to know.”
Lavinia wasn’t supposed to have a romantic life unless Very could be there to oversee every aspect of it. The first person who took Lavinia’s innocence and hurt her … Very would kill him. Or her. Whomever.
They’d passed the smokers and the sewing circles on the porch at Jones’s house and circled back to the pool, nestled under several large trees. Because the pool wasn’t heated in the summertime, few people used it, preferring the natural pleasures of lake swimming, available not too far away. Because of its lack of popularity, the pool was poorly tended. Parts of the cement around it were cracked, the handrail on the ladder was broken, and the water had leaves and dead bugs floating on top.
Lavinia grabbed a cleaning net propped against a pool chair and swatted it through the water. “Shame this nice pool doesn’t look like it gets used much,” she said. “The girls in my bunk would go crazy for a pool. The Charlottes, especially. They hate swimming in the lake. Those girls are so prissy.”
Lavinia wasn’t really a priss. Perhaps she wasn’t such a Charlotte after all. What would that make her? Just … a Jennifer?
Very sat down on the pool ledge and dangled her feet in the water as Lavinia cleaned it. “So what’s happening? You know, out in the world?”
“Politics and war and stuff?”
“No. I mean, everyone from school. How’s everyone doing?”
“Bryan’s fine, if that’s what you mean. Got that internship in Portland; it’s going well. Haven’t heard from Jean-Wayne. Haven’t heard much from anyone, really. I hardly ever go online to check messages. Since I have my phone with me for anyone who really needs to reach me, I don’t bother using the computer terminals at camp much.”
“How do you live like that?” Very asked. She genuinely wanted to know. How was it possible to have online access, whenever, and not care about that privilege?
“Are you kidding? It’s a relief to be offline. I’m enjoying this quiet summer by the lake, away from the world and information overload, just swimming and canoeing and, yeah, making the occasional pot holder with the Mirandas, who are more industrious than the other ones, let me tell you.”
“What do you want to be?” Very asked Lavinia.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, after you’ve finished school. Have you decided on a career?”
“Funny you should ask that,” Lavinia said, circling the pool and tending to it like an experienced nature expert. “It’s what’s been on my mind. One of the reasons I went back to camp was to give myself one last year of fun and no pressure, but I also wanted to try to figure out what I want to do during this downtime. I’ve been going to this camp since I was eight. Now that I’ve graduated to camp counselor, I wanted one last summer there before I have to start doing internships and getting on a real career path. I think I’ve decided I’d like to be a doctor.”
“That’s what I want you to be!” Very exclaimed, excited.
“So I can take care of you?” Lavinia asked.
“No,” Very said, deflated and insulted. “Because I think you’d make a great doctor. I think you’d enjoy helping people. Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”
“Can you?”
“Watch me.” Very jumped into the water, fully clothed. She let herself fall to the bottom, flailing her arms wildly, as if she couldn’t swim.
From above the water, she could see Lavinia looking down at her, shocked, and concerned, and not sure whether Very needed to be rescued, but taking off her clothes to dive in just in case. Wow, even from beneath the water, Very could see Lavinia’s muscle definition now that she was down to her skivvies, and the girl was in some tight-ass shape. All that exercise Lavinia did really paid off. Too bad Lavinia was always covering up the results of her hard work under nondescript jeans and T-shirts. Maybe Lavinia was more a Miranda than Very realized. Hopefully this Speedo lifeguard whom Lavinia was sweet on wouldn’t turn her into a Samantha.
Very waited until just before Lavinia hit the panic button. Then Very pressed her feet hard against the pool’s cement bottom and pushed herself to the surface, flinging her arms out as she sprang from the water. She swam to the ledge where Lavinia was poised to dive. “I wouldn’t jump in if I couldn’t swim,” Very told Lavinia.
Lavinia sat down on the ledge and extended her hand to help Very up and out of the pool. “Okay. Good. I wasn’t sure.”
Very sat down next to Lavinia. “I can handle it,” Very muttered. “The pressure.” She wrung the bottom of her shirt onto Lavinia’s leg so Lavinia could share the cold shock of wet.
Lavinia took Very’s hand, pressing her thumb along the inside of Very’s palm. “I want to believe you,” Lavinia said.
“Believe me,” Very said. She turned her face to look into Lavinia’s eyes. “Please. Believe in me.”
CHAPTER 27
“You’re wearing that?” Aunt Esther said as Very greeted her in the main lodge for their scheduled visit, repeating the classic refrain from Great-Aunt Esther’s Greatest Hits.
“You’re Wearing That?” could have been Aunt Esther’s Native American tribal name when Very was in high school. (Very would have chosen “Tender Morsel” for her own tribal name, only no one had bothered to ask.) Very had never understood how someone so nearly blind as Aunt E. could be so consistently critical of every outfit Very wore. Very knew that if her great-aunt had her way, the seemingly nice old Jewish lady would have sent Very off to public high school every day wearing a Catholic school uniform—the nonsexy, not the Britney, kind, long skirt with shirt-buttoned-to-the-neck—and a Muslim burka co
vering her head and face. As it was, Aunt Esther could barely contain her contempt for cutoff jeans, jeans ripped at the knee, any shirt that exposed shoulders or cleavage, halter tops, T-shirts with suggestive words printed on them, miniskirts, flip-flops, and so on. In fact, Aunt Esther didn’t contain her contempt at all. She simply pursed her lips, raised an eyebrow, and said, “You’re wearing that?”
“Yes, I’m wearing this,” Very said, tugging at the ends of the sweater she wore over her jeans. It was the sweater Aunt Esther had made Very for her nineteenth birthday.
“I didn’t know you liked my sweaters,” Aunt Esther said. “I’ve never seen you wear one before.” Her lips pursed, as if she was about to express displeasure; then, as if she realized the automatic reaction was inappropriate to the circumstances, her mouth changed course and turned into a hesitant smile.
“I freaking love your sweaters,” Very said.
“Language,” Aunt Esther scolded.
“I said freaking, not fu— Oh, never mind. Yes, I love your sweaters. Thank you.”
“Who knew?” Aunt Esther said. She shrugged, but was clearly pleased. “You look well, young lady. Better. Did you change your hair?”
“No,” Very said. “I just bothered to brush it today.”
Aunt Esther grimaced, but pleasantly. “Who knew?” she repeated. “Such a lovely face. Nice to finally see it.”
Very knew her aunt wouldn’t want to walk all the way to Jones’s house, where the cool kids hung out, so Very led her into the crafts room in the main lodge for their visiting time. “Would you like some tea?” Very asked Aunt Esther.
“Excuse me?” Aunt Esther said.
Thinking the old lady was going deaf, Very started to repeat herself, loudly. “I SAID, WOULD YOU LIKE—”
“I heard you the first time,” Aunt Esther snapped. “I’m just not used to you extending such courtesy.”
“I’m not a completely feral beast,” Very said. “I know how to offer a person tea.”
“Who knew?” Aunt Esther said again. “Yes, I’d love some tea. I prefer English Breakfast, with two sugars. Thank you.”