by Lee Smith
But my new counselor was very weird. She read aloud to us each day at rest hour from a big book named The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Without asking our parents, she pierced all our ears. Even this ear-piercing did not bring my spirits up to the level of First Session, however. For one thing, it never stopped raining. It rained and rained and rained. First, we couldn’t go swimming—the river was too high, too cold, too fast. We couldn’t go canoeing either. The tennis courts looked like lakes. The horses, along with the riding counselors, stayed in their barn. About all we could do was arts and crafts and Skits, which got old fast. Lots of girls got homesick. They cried during “Taps.”
I cried then and at other odd times too, such as when I walked up to breakfast through the constant mist that came up now from the river, or at church. I was widely thought to be homesick. To cheer me up, my weird counselor gave me a special pair of her own earrings, little silver hoops with turquoise chips in them, made by Navajos.
Then I got bronchitis. I developed a deep, thousand-year-old Little Match Girl cough that started way down in my knees. Because of this cough, I was allowed to call my mother, and to my surprise, I found myself asking to come home. But Mama said no. She said,
We always finish what we start, Karen.
So that was that. I was taken into town for a penicillin shot, and started getting better. The sun came out too.
But because I still had such a bad cough, I did not have to participate in the all-camp Game Day held during the third week of Second Session. I was free to lounge in my upper bunk and read the rest of The Fountainhead, which I did. By then I had read way ahead of my counselor. I could hear the screams and yells of the girls out on the playing fields, but vaguely, far away. Then I heard them all singing, from farther up the hill, and I knew they had gone into Assembly to give out the awards. I knew I was probably expected to show up at Assembly too, but somehow I just couldn’t summon up the energy. I didn’t care who got the awards. I didn’t care which team won—the Green or the Gold, it was all the same to me—or which cabin won the ongoing competition among cabins. I didn’t even care who was Camp Spirit. Instead I lolled on my upper bunk and looked at the turning dust in a ray of light that came in through a chink in the cabin. I coughed. I felt that I would die soon.
This is when it happened.
This is when it always happens, I imagine—when you least expect it, when you are least prepared.
Suddenly, as I started at the ray of sunshine, it intensified, growing brighter and brighter until the whole cabin was a blaze of light. I sat right up, as straight as I could. I crossed my legs. I knew I was waiting for something. I knew something was going to happen. I could barely breathe. My heart pounded so hard I feared it might jump right out of my chest and land on the cabin floor. I don’t know how long I sat there like that, waiting.
“Karen,” He said.
His voice filled the cabin.
I knew immediately who it was. No question. For one thing, there were no men at Camp Alleghany except for Mr. Grizzard, who cleaned out the barn, and Jeffrey Long, who had a high, reedy voice.
This voice was deep, resonant, full of power.
“Yes, Lord?” I said.
He did not speak again. But as I sat there on my upper bunk I was filled with His presence, and I knew what I must do.
I jumped down from my bunk, washed my face and brushed my teeth at the sink in the corner, tucked in my shirt, and ran up the hill to the assembly hall. I did not cough. I burst right in through the big double doors at the front and elbowed old Mrs. Beemer aside as she read out the results of the archery meet to the rows of girls in their folding chairs.
Mrs. Beemer took one look at me and shut her mouth.
I opened my mouth, closed my eyes, and started speaking in Tongues of Fire.
* * *
I came to in the infirmary, surrounded by the camp nurse, the doctor from town, the old lady who owned the camp, the Episcopal chaplain, my own counselor, and several other people I didn’t even know. I smiled at them all. I felt great, but they made me stay in the infirmary for two more days to make sure I had gotten over it. During this time I was given red Jell-O and Cokes, and the nurse took my temperature every four hours. The chaplain talked to me for a long time. He was a tall, quiet man with wispy white hair that stood out around his head. I got to talk to my mother on the telephone again, and this time she promised me a kitten if I would stay until the end of camp. I had always, always wanted a kitten, but I had never been allowed to have one because it would get hair on the upholstery and also because Ashley was allergic to cats.
“What about Ashley?” I asked.
“Never you mind,” Mama said.
So it was decided. I would stay until the end of camp, and Mama would buy me a kitten.
I got out of the infirmary the next day and went back to my cabin, where everybody treated me with a lot of deference and respect for the rest of Second Session, choosing me first for softball, letting me star in Skits. And at the next-to-last campfire, I was named Camp Spirit. I got to run forward, scream and cry, but it was not as good as it would have been if it had happened First Session. It was an anticlimax. Still, I did get to light the very last campfire, the Friendship Night campfire, with my special giant match and say ceremoniously:
Kneel always when you light a fire,
Kneel reverently,
And thankful be
For God’s unfailing majesty.
Then everybody sang the Camp Spirit song. By now, I was getting really tired of singing. Then Anne Roper and I sailed each other’s little birchbark boats off into the night, our candles guttering wildly as they rounded the bend.
All the way home on the train the next day, I pretended to be asleep while I prayed without ceasing that nobody back home would find out I had spoken in Tongues of Fire. For now it seemed to me an exalted and private and scary thing, and somehow I knew it was not over yet. I felt quite sure that I had been singled out for some terrible, holy mission. Perhaps I would even have to die, like Joan of Arc. As the train rolled south through Virginia on that beautiful August day, I felt myself moving inexorably toward my Destiny, toward some last act of my own Skit which was yet to be played out.
* * *
The minute I walked onto the concrete at the country club pool, I knew that Margaret Applewhite (who had flown home) had told everybody. Dennis Jones took one look at me, threw back his head, and began to gurgle wildly, clutching at his stomach. Tommy Martin ran out on the low board, screamed in gibberish, and then flung himself into the water. Even I had to laugh at him. But Paul and his friends teased me in a more sophisticated manner. “Hey, Karen,” one of them might say, clutching his arm, “I’ve got a real bad tennis elbow here, do you think you can heal it for me?”
I was famous all over town. I sort of enjoyed it. I began to feel popular and cute, like the girls on American Bandstand.
But the kitten was a disaster. Mama drove me out in the county one afternoon in her white Cadillac to pick it out of a litter that the laundry lady’s cat had had. The kittens were all so tiny that it was hard to pick—little mewling, squirming things, still blind. Drying sheets billowed all about them, on rows of clotheslines. “I want that one,” I said, picking the smallest, a teeny little orange ball. I named him Sandy. I got to keep Sandy in a shoe box in my room, then in a basket in my room. But as time passed (Ashley came home from Europe, Paul went back to W&L) it became clear to me that there was something terribly wrong with Sandy. Sandy mewed too much, not a sweet mewing, but a little howl like a lost soul. He never purred. He wouldn’t grow right either, even though I fed him half-and-half. He stayed little and jerky. He didn’t act like a cat. One time I asked my mother, “Are you sure Sandy is a regular cat?” and she frowned at me and said, “Well, of course he is, what’s the matter with you, Karen?” but I was not so sure. Sandy startled too easily. Sometimes he would leap
straight up in the air, land on all four feet, and just stand there quivering, for no good reason at all. While I was watching him do this one day, it came to me.
Sandy was a Holy Cat. He was possessed by the spirit, as I had been. I put his basket in the laundry room. I was fitted for my aqua semiformal dress, and wore it in Aunt Liddie’s wedding. Everybody said I looked grown-up and beautiful. I got to wear a corsage. I got to drink champagne. We had a preschool meeting of the Sub-Deb Club, and I was elected secretary. I kept trying to call Tammy, from pay phones downtown and the phone out at the country club, so Mama wouldn’t know, but her number was still out of order. Tammy never called me.
Then Ashley invited me to go to the drive-in movie with her and her friends, just before she left for Sweet Briar. The movie was All That Heaven Allows, which I found incredibly moving, but Ashley and her friends smoked cigarettes and giggled through the whole thing. They couldn’t be serious for five minutes. But they were being real nice to me, so I volunteered to go to the snack bar for them the second or third time they wanted more popcorn. On the way back from the snack bar, in the window of a red Thunderbird with yellow flames painted on its hood, I saw Tammy’s face.
I didn’t hesitate for a minute. I was so glad to see her! “Tammy!” I screamed. The position of My Best Friend was, of course, vacant. I ran right over to the Thunderbird, shifted all the popcorn boxes over to my left hand, and flung open the door. And sure enough, there was Tammy, with the whole top of her sundress down. It all happened in an instant. I saw a boy’s dark hair, but not his face—his head was in her lap.
Tammy’s breasts loomed up out of the darkness at me. They were perfectly round and white, like tennis balls. But it seemed to me that they were too high up to look good. They were too close to her chin.
Clearly, Tammy was Petting. And in a flash I remembered what Mama had told me about Petting, that
a nice girl does not Pet. It is cruel to the boy to allow him to Pet, because he has no control over himself. He is just a boy. It is all up to the girl. If she allows the boy to Pet her, then he will become excited, and if he cannot find relief, then the poison will all back up into his organs, causing pain and sometimes death.
I slammed the car door. I fled back to Ashley and her friends, spilling popcorn everyplace as I went.
On the screen, Rock Hudson had been Petting too. Now we got a close-up of his rugged cleft chin. “Give me one of those cigarettes,” I said to Ashley, and without batting an eye, she did. After three tries, I got it lit. It tasted great.
The next day, Ashley left for Sweet Briar, and soon after that, my school started too. Whenever I passed Tammy in the hall, we said hello, but did not linger in conversation. I was put in the Gifted and Talented group for English and French. I decided to go out for JV cheerleader. I practiced and practiced and practiced. Then, one day in early September, my cat Sandy—after screaming out and leaping straight up in the air—ran out into the street in front of our house and was immediately hit by a Merita bread truck.
I knew it was suicide.
I buried him in the backyard, in a box from Rich’s department store, along with Ashley’s scarab bracelet which I had stolen sometime earlier. She wondered for years whatever happened to that bracelet. It was her favorite.
I remember how relieved I felt when I had smoothed the final shovelful of dirt over Sandy’s grave. Somehow, I knew, the last of my holiness, of my chosenness, went with him. Now I wouldn’t have to die. Now my daddy would get well, and I would make cheerleader, and go to college. Now I could grow up, get breasts, and have babies. Since then, all these things have happened. But there are moments yet, moments when in the midst of life a silence falls, and in these moments I catch myself still listening for that voice. “Karen,” He will say, and I’ll say, “Yes, Lord. Yes.”
Dreamers
I got a wife, which might surprise you, seeing as how I’m still so young and all. I got a baby too. Well I’ve got this wife. She looks like Ann-Margret too. But her name is Kim. We live with my moma and my sister, Janice. You ought to see this picture of my wife we’ve got up on top of the TV, Kim making her debut which is something she honest to God did three years ago in Rocky Mount. In the picture, Kim is wearing a long white floor-length fancy dress and pearls and little pearl earrings. She’s got lace and flowers and all in her hair. She looks great. She is staring right out of that picture frame and when you look at the picture, it’s like her eyes will follow you all over the room. You can sit on the couch or you can sit in the recliner. There is a famous painting like that too. I remember this from Art in high school. Anyway when I look at Kim’s deb picture in its fancy frame, I like to think that she is looking into the future. That she is looking for me.
She found me about one year later. See, first Kim was a deb and then she went to St. Marys College over here in Raleigh, they have got a lot of debs at St. Marys. Kim’s mother and two of her aunts went to St. Marys too, what chance did she have. They make a daisy chain when you graduate from St. Marys, and hand it over to the juniors. I have seen a picture of this, Kim’s mother holding up the daisy chain. She is younger in the picture, but she does not look like Ann-Margret. Her collarbones stick out. She looks like a bitch which she is, no wonder Kim’s daddy split.
Kim herself did not get to do the chain thing. She got pregnant, and married me.
See, last spring I went over there to St. Marys with Creative Landscaping. I was working two jobs then because Daddy was in the hospital at Dorothea Dix which he has been in and out of for years. He sees things. He hears them too. You can’t keep him on his medicine. It is another story. Anyway I had already graduated from Broughton High and I was working these two jobs, so I went over there to St. Marys College with Creative Landscaping. We had a contract with them. They have these big long rows of bushes going everyplace, and if any one of those bushes started dying, we would come in and take it out and replace it with another one the same size. And we used to change the flowers around the fountain and the sundial and all along there in front of the chapel, whatever was prettiest that was in season, first daffodils then pansies then petunias then gardenias then mums in the fall. Something is always blooming at St. Marys College. Everything is the same size. It looks great. So I liked that job a lot, I like to see things looking good. In fact I got to thinking I might go over to State and get a degree in that. I had thought English, before I got the Creative Landscaping job. I had $1,900 saved up, but then I got married.
I used to have this weird little man teacher at Broughton High named Mr. Burton, he thought I was great in English. When we did Shakespeare, we had to write a sonnet. The end of my sonnet was,
So let me be a candle burning bright
With hope and love against the coming night.
That is a couplet. It knocked him out. He gave me an A plus. Then he came over and sat down next to me in the cafeteria at Lunch. He had this big salad. He said he was a vegetarian.
“Joe,” he said next, “what are your plans for next year?”
“Work, I reckon,” I said.
He said he hoped I was considering college. He hoped I had looked into the possibilities for financial aid. But on account of what had happened with Daddy and all, I had dropped out once already. So my grades were not too hot. For a while there I couldn’t concentrate. I got plenty of Cs. But then Moma quit drinking and got another job and I came back for senior year.
But I did not want to get into all this with Mr. Burton.
He had a pink shirt on. This buddy of mine, Roger, always said Mr. Burton was gay but I don’t think so. “I’ll be glad to write you a recommendation anytime, anyplace,” Mr. Burton said. He had salad in his teeth. “Do you want to go to college?” he asked me. We stood up with our trays.
“It is my dream,” I said.
As soon as I said this, I knew it was true. And who knows? I might get there yet. But I’ve got a family to take care
of now. I try to do the right thing.
So this is how I met Kim. It was spring, everything blooming and the right size on the campus at St. Marys College. Azaleas, forsythia, periwinkle, you name it, it was blooming. We were edging the walks. So that day I had to work bent over which made my jeans too tight. I took my wallet and my knife out of my pocket and put them up in the crotch of a tree. Then when I got halfway home I remembered this, so I had to get off the Beltline and turn all the way around and go back. So I was pissed. It was hot, and I was pissed. I went back over there.
Now the grass was full of girls, soaking up the rays. Classes must have been over for the day. Lord. Tits and ass and long, long legs, and all of them winter white. This was just about the first day it was hot enough to lay out, see.
Then I saw her. Oh lord. Kim was laying on her back on her towel, wearing this little bitty pink bikini bathing suit. She had cotton pads over her eyes. She had this aluminum, I guess it was, reflector under her head, so she would get more sun. Oh lord. She was all pink and curvy. She looked as good as it gets. I got my knife and my wallet out of this crotch in the tree and put them in my pocket and then I just stood there. I couldn’t of moved if you’d paid me. I stood there awhile and then two things happened real fast.
Kim sat up all of a sudden and the cotton pads fell down off her eyes. “What do you think you’re looking at?” she said. But she did not act mad. She had a little line of sweat on her upper lip. She looked so good.
At the same time she sat up, this big security guard in a brown shirt and pants started across the grass toward us. “Hey, buddy!” he was hollering. They keep a real close watch on those girls. By then, though, I didn’t care if he shot me.
“I’m looking at you,” I said to Kim.
She crinkled up the corners of her eyes then the way she does and smiled at me, she was ready for adventure, I could tell.