The Clover Girls

by Viola Shipman

  “No,” she says. “Maybe he needs to stop seeing you as you were but who you are now and who you want to be. And maybe you need to stop seeing Dad as you always have.”

  My daughter’s words jolt me, and I think of us playing YouTV earlier.

  We all stereotype each other until that becomes who we see rather than who we are.

  “Maybe you need to take off—what were those old sunglasses you used to wear?” Ash asks.

  “Ray-Bans?”

  “Yeah, take off your Ray-Bans.”

  “Thank you, Ash,” I say. “For listening.” I stop. “For everything.”

  “No, Mom,” she says. “Thank you. For everything.”

  “Hey?” I say, before she hangs up. “Are you okay?”

  “I am,” she says. “You make sure of that, don’t you? Gotta go. I’m doing a scene from Lady Bird in an hour.”

  I laugh again. The Greta Gerwig movie is one of our favorites. “Lots of personal inspiration there, right?”

  “Feels sooo real,” she says with a big laugh. “Later, Mom.”

  I hang up, and notice the cicada is eyeing me, buzzing.

  And then I notice that I have wandered into and am standing directly in the middle of the clover field.

  It is blooming, the clover blooms white, nearly purple.

  It has changed from what I remember, as a girl and even from a few days ago. The clover is leggy, beautiful, reaching for the light.

  I think of who I was when I was here. I think of who I became as a model. I think of who I was as a newlywed, then a mother, and now.

  All very different people operating from the same soul and heart.

  I take off my shoes. The clover is cool and still damp, and it awakens me.

  I think again of playing YouTV with Rachel and Liz.

  We are all very different people than we were, as varied as the multisided clover that grows before me.

  None of us are like the stereotypes of the TV characters we yell. We are all deeper people. Maybe we too easily put one another in a box because it’s easier to deal with others that way than deal with our own issues.

  I reach down and pluck a piece of pretty clover and place it behind my ear. I pose in the sunlight, head up, like Twiggy might have done. I am a middle-aged, new age hippie come to life. The light dances around my face.

  Maybe I need to see my friends and myself in a new light.

  I take off running toward the lake, suddenly invigorated. I drop my towel, soap and shampoo, toss my shoes on the ground, take off my shirt and shrug out of my shorts just like a little kid. I grab the soap and shampoo and stand on the edge of the lake, soaping my body and hair. I toss them onto my towel and then race into the water, shrieking the deeper I go. I dive under the surface, rinsing my hair with my hands, and when I come up, the world looks shinier, brighter, newer, cleaner.

  Maybe I do need to see my husband in a different light. No. Maybe he needs to see me that way, too.

  I think back to when my husband and I first met. He was a free spirit, too, an artist who had no boundaries. He was funny, easygoing. We would go weeks without wearing shoes. He would cook for me. He would sing to me. He made me feel that I was more than my fame. He made me feel like a normal person. Most of all, he used to be my best friend.

  I splash my face.

  I did grow tired of modeling. I grew tired of trying to maintain a weight that was more appropriate for a teen than an adult. I grew tired of the travel and the hours. I was just plain tired.

  I believed in David’s talent. He was like Rachel: God gave him a gift. And I knew that he could be even more successful than I had been, and for a much longer time. I was the one who wanted to start a family immediately.

  Did he ask me to stop modeling? Or did I want to stop?

  Did he marry me for my looks? Or did I grow resentful that my looks helped launch him and he now enjoys the light in which I once basked?

  The years have muddled things.

  There is no doubt that he needs to change. He has become as rigid as the house in which we live. Life is not and cannot be as perfect as a photo shoot or a three-million-dollar home. It is often sloppy, lived in, comfortably worn.

  If he wants to live in a perfect world, I am no longer the woman for him.

  I need more than one room to decorate. I need more room to grow. I need friends. And I need my husband to understand and support that, or...

  I look around the camp, the old cabins hovering in the distance.

  Or everything will fall apart.

  I go underwater again and come up for air. The water sparkles.

  And I need to see the world in a different light, too.

  I grew up in a world where girls who looked like me—red-haired and freckled—were not considered beautiful. How many girls of every different race and size still feel that way? And how do we change that?

  How do I change that?

  I head back to shore, dry off, dress and lie back on my towel in the sun.

  I think of YouTV once more. A different question pops into my head: What was our favorite camp game?

  I have a feeling Rach would say Color War or Talent Night, and Liz might say Candles on the Lake. Me? I would say Capture the Flag.

  The object of Capture the Flag is to cross into enemy territory, retrieve the enemy’s base flag, and return it to your side without getting captured by any defenders.

  I was always so good at Capture the Flag, so quick and deft at avoiding confrontation and capture.

  I sit straight up, stunned by my epiphany.

  Suddenly, an idea so grand and idealistic hits me that I have to shut my eyes to keep the world from spinning.

  When I open them again, I notice that the bottom of my threadbare towel has a green flag Magic Markered on the end.

  Emily, Pinewood, it reads underneath in faded writing.

  Em’s towel. Em’s message. Em’s flag.

  Rachel

  “How was your lake bath?”

  V stares right through Liz as if she’s a ghost. She walks toward The Lodge, her hair still damp, and turns in a full circle. She walks into Pinewood and emerges with her bag. She pulls a pad of paper and pen from it and begins to draw.

  “Still old-school?” Liz says. “Me, too!”

  V acts as if she doesn’t hear her, instead walking over to sit on the stoop of Sassafras Bunk and continuing to draw.

  “You’re sitting on the doorstep of our sworn enemy,” I call.

  V glances up. She looks dazzlingly beautiful right now, so natural in nature, the filtered sunlight giving her the oddly gorgeous but childlike expression of a paint-by-numbers picture.

  “We need to stop stereotyping ourselves,” she says, returning to her pad. “We need to stop stereotyping each other...all women.”

  Her words knock me off kilter.

  Is she saying this to me? Or to herself?

  “Me, next,” I say, standing. “Nothing more old-school than bathing in a lake.”

  I grab the soap and shampoo, nab a fresh towel that Em left for us and head toward the lake. When I reach the knoll before the path that leads to Birchwood, the cell in my pocket begins to ding repeatedly, as if I’m standing directly beneath Big Ben at noon. My stomach drops.

  I shouldn’t have listened to Liz when she offered to recharge my cell in her car this morning. I shouldn’t have brought my cell with me. I shouldn’t have traversed over the only hillside that gets two bars of reception. Big mistakes.

  I take a deep breath.

  Have you seen this?

  This is bad, Rachel.

  Rachel! Please advise!

  CALL ME! NOW!

  I click the link attached to the first text.

  A shaky video, obviously recorded by a cell phone, shows Ralph Ruddy outside of a bar.
He’s turned toward the person holding the cell, his face even redder and angrier than usual.

  “Why do you hate women?”

  “I don’t hate women, young lady,” he says, slurring slightly. “I love women. And they love me.”

  Oh, no, Ralph. Please don’t.

  The cell phone holder turns the camera on herself. It’s a young woman wearing a university ball cap. “We do?” she asks. “What we demand is equal pay. We demand paid leave. We demand that you leave our bodies alone. We demand the same protections and rights that you have. More than anything, we demand respect.”

  Applause explodes around her.

  Emboldened, the woman continues.

  “You recently said men pay enough when women are pregnant. Do you even realize how disgusting that is?”

  The camera rotates to Ralph.

  “That was a joke!” Ralph yells, spittle flying from his mouth. “Women can’t even take a joke anymore.”

  “Because it’s not funny,” a woman yells off-camera.

  “You know what’s funny?”

  Please, Ralph.

  “All of you angry women protesting for your rights and your bodies, like any man is ever going to touch you in the first place.”

  Boom!

  The women boo.

  “You will never be a man’s equal. Because you aren’t equal.” Ralph walks toward the woman. You can see the camera moving backward. “And you want to know the really funny thing? Nothing’s ever going to change. Check back in ten years, and let’s see how you’re doing.”

  All of a sudden, the footage shakes, and the cell tumbles to the ground. You can see Ralph’s foot come down on top of the camera as if it’s quashing the young woman.

  I fall to my knees. I am shaking harder than that young woman’s cell. I am on sacred ground here. Birchwood raised women to be independent, strong, smart and fierce. Birchwood raised women who stuck together and supported one another.

  I think of my friends watching this video. I think of V’s daughter. I think of all the Birchwood campers whose voices rose and sang as one every single night before we went to bed.

  I think of my mom.

  Ding! Ding! Ding!

  I stand, ignoring my cell, and race toward the water, kicking off my shoes and clothes until I’m just in my undies. I throw the towel and cell down at the last minute, jumping in the lake. I lather up and scrub my body and hair and clothing as if I’m trying to wash away years of dirt and guilt. I burst out of the water and swim out to Friendship Rock. I crawl atop it, setting the soap and shampoo in one of its deep crevices, and stand.

  In the distance, I can see an American flag waving over Taneycomo. I am catapulted back in time, thinking of when we would all play Capture the Flag. I was always so good at it. So was V. No one could ever get me. I was too elusive. I think of how that has served me so well: I never get captured by my enemies. I always stay one step ahead of them. And I use that flag for my own goals.

  And yet this lifelong game has also kept me a prisoner.

  Without warning, I become emotional watching the Stars and Stripes flap in the summer breeze. It’s such a simple flag really, and yet what it stands for—and those who have died for it—is so profound. That flag does not stand only for those boys, or just for men, or even just for women, but for all of us, every single one of us, no matter our gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, differences.

  It unites us.

  It does not divide us.

  In the distance, my cell continues to ping. But over it, I hear birds singing, joyously, on a perfect summer day. They flit and they fly. They are free.

  I am again catapulted back in time to a Talent Night when Em asked me to recite poetry rather than sing and dance. I had wanted to sing Pat Benatar, or “Bette Davis Eyes,” but Em literally begged me to recite a Maya Angelou poem that had recently been published and that she loved.

  “For me, Rach, please,” she begged. “Please. Do it for me.”

  I did. And I lost. For the first time. Poetry and distracted young girls do not an ideal mix make, I learned quickly. “It’s okay you didn’t win, Rach,” Em told me. “You did in the big scheme of things.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” she said, before draping a homemade medal around my neck that said, #1 4-EVER!

  It’s as if Em knew those words would take root in my soul, just like friendship, and continue to grow, even if I didn’t realize it.

  Until today.

  I stand atop the rock and yell into the Michigan sky, the words from “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” coming to me as easily as they did decades ago.

  I suddenly understand the meaning of the poem, of why Em wanted me to recite it.

  I am no longer caged.

  The flag does not need to be “captured.”

  I can sing with my own voice.

  I look at Birchwood glimmering in the distance, and I can see its infinite possibilities.

  Just like mine.

  “I am free!” I yell, my voice high and lilting and strong as an eagle’s cry. “I am free!”

  Liz

  Where is everyone?

  I tilt my head left and right, holding it still for the longest time, just like the blue jay that is watching me, one single eye cocked on me.

  “Shoo!” I yell. “Shoo!”

  I suddenly think of my mom. She only disliked two kinds of birds: purple martins and blue jays. She had my dad install a purple martin house in our backyard when I was tiny, and they took over, acting as if the land were their own, dive bombing my mom every time she would head outside to pick tomatoes or hang laundry from the clothesline. I would laugh so hard watching her from the front window as she ducked and waved her arms, tossing tomatoes at them or dropping a bucket of clothes and running for the hills. It was one of the few times I ever heard her curse, and she would curse a blue streak—bluer than even the martin’s belly—when they’d get too close. The martin house came down after a couple of years.

  She hated blue jays even more because they would eat the newly laid eggs from a robin’s nest. My mom adored robins, and when a nest was new, she would stand vigil by the window, watching, as protective as the baby birds’ mama herself.

  “Shoo!” I yell again, and the blue jay takes off with a flutter.

  The camp turns still, and my mind returns to my mother.

  I need to call. I need to check in. I know probably nothing has changed. And yet I know probably everything has changed. I can detect the tiniest of declines in my mother: the way she breathes. The color of her skin. The brightness of her eyes. How tightly she grips my hand.

  In many ways, she is like this camp: a shell of its former self and yet still alive, still filled with memories, love and goodness. I can’t save her, though. I know that. It’s too late.

  But Birchwood...?

  I look around.

  This always happened to me here. I’d be lost in the day, designing in The Lodge or our bunkhouse while Em read, everyone else running around out in the world.

  So much has changed. So little has changed.

  I used to tell my parents that I would be nothing like them when I got older. And yet I am. The stupid phrases they used on me—Were you born in a barn? If you keep making that face, it’ll freeze that way. Turn your music down NOW! If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? Don’t make me turn this car around!—I used on my own children and still do to this day.

  But there was something beautiful about my parents’—and this camp’s—old-fashioned ways. I learned to respect those around me. I learned that my social influencers were my elders and not eighteen-year-old, half-dressed strangers on my cell phone. I learned to be incredibly self-sufficient. I learned that kindness and friendship were incredible gifts.

  And yet, despit
e all of this, I am alone in this new-old world. When my mother dies, I will be the last thread tying the past to the future. My children and grandchildren are concerned about little else than themselves. It’s not that they’re busy. We all are, especially young parents. It’s that they’re selfish. They think only of themselves. And once my mother passes, I will be all alone, and I am not delusional about this reality whatsoever.

  I stand without warning, as if to make sure my legs are still strong and sturdy, and scan the camp.

  It’s still as empty as I suddenly feel. But at my heart, I am a caretaker, just like Em was. I don’t know how long the three of us will remain here, but I know that we need some supplies and groceries to keep us going.

  I head into the bunkhouse and grab my purse, which is propped in an ancient bentwood chair. I scan my purse for my car keys and head out the screen door.

  “Where are you going?” a deep voice asks.

  I scream without even glancing up, throwing my purse toward the face of the intruder and giving the body before me a mighty shove.

  When I look up, I see the words CAMP TANEYCOMO sprawled on the ground.

  “Billy? Oh, my God, Billy!! I’m so sorry.”

  Billy Collins lies in the dirt, moaning.

  “Is this how you sell a house?” he asks.

  “Yep,” I say. “That’s why I usually get full asking price.”

  He laughs, and I reach out a hand.

  “I came in peace,” he says, pretending to flinch. “Uncle! Uncle!”

  I grab his hand and help him to his feet. Billy stands with a groan, dusts off his butt and rubs his back.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just wanted to get beat up,” he says. “I have to go now.”

  I laugh this time. “I’m so, so sorry. I was lost in my head. The last thing I expected was to see a man at my doorstep.”

  “Been that long since you’ve had a date?” Billy asks with a wink.

  “You have no idea,” I say.

  “I felt badly about how things ended so abruptly the other night,” he says. “I came over for a couple of reasons, actually. You said you needed some names and numbers. And a lot of therapy, which I can now understand.”