Camptown Ladies

by Mari SanGiovanni

  I yelled for my brother. “Vince! What the hell are you doing in there? Let’s go!”

  He poked his head though a window in the upstairs bedroom and yelled back, “Settle down! The neighbors will know the lesbos have moved in!”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” I yelled back, “no lesbian would wear a shirt that girly!”

  He laughed, walked away from the window, and I heard something smash.

  “Oops,” he said.

  If it was Lisa’s statue of Martina Navratilova . . . Vince was toast.

  I got in the car to distance myself from the scene of the crime. My plan to move out to California had been a simple one after inheriting the family money. I would use my nonexistent career as a screenplay writer to somehow meet (and permanently bed) the elusive actress Lorn Elaine. When I managed to actually pull this off through a freakish series of events starting in Jamaica (a totally implausible story; maybe I should write it up some time) I soon realized that, while other people do it all the time, being a wealthy girlfriend of a Hollywood actress is not really an occupation.

  Plus, being with a closeted girlfriend doesn’t typically offer up boatloads of opportunity to be out together in public, since this makes more likely the chances of a paparazzi attack. Lorn’s career was going well, and I had just come to terms with the fact that my ridiculous dream of being a screenplay writer would likely not pan out in my lifetime. (It turned out that writing my screenplay in order to meet Lorn had been the sole reason for me wanting to be a writer . . . whoops.) So, I decided to do what many wealthy people do—buy myself a career instead.

  Rich people do this all the time. They start fundraising organizations, rescue children in far-flung places in the world, build houses for the needy, open soup kitchens, and for a while I thought about doing something similar since my sister could make some damned fine Italian Wedding Soup and various other savory items in the kitchen, including homemade wine, which could turn quite a profit for a good cause. But instead, I made the slightly less noble offer to buy into Erica’s successful contracting and home decorating business, which catered to Hollywood’s elite. Along with the bargain, I had led my brother Vince to the girl of his dreams, and I was convinced there was no better girl for him than Erica, as in All My Children . . . that is, if Erica would have him.

  Working as a contractor’s nail assistant was a job I grew to love, which surprised me as much as my little brother’s ability to nail a girl as damned near perfect as Erica. It was the variety of the job I loved. One day I would be fetching nails, the next day we were courting prospective movie star clients at ridiculously expensive LA restaurants.

  “Price of doing business in Hollywood,” Erica would say as we ate $50 salads, which barely covered the center of our plates.

  The next day, I would be holding my breath, as Erica would be walking like a ballerina on the clay tiles of a Mediterranean style roof overlooking the property that overlooked Spielbergs’ pool. The day after that, she would teach me how to rip out a septic system she felt wasn’t being done right by the sub-contractors we hired. The following day we would be firing somebody. On those days, I kept a safe distance, like when watching a train wreck. She never fired someone who didn’t deserve it, and she never fired anyone who didn’t try their best.

  Until she fired me.

  “Vince!” I yelled. We were really late now, if you could possibly be late to a campground.

  Finally, he came running out the front door, hopping down the steps.

  “Keys?” I asked him, and he made a face and had to go back in the condo again while I rested my head on the steering wheel and waited again. We were supposed to be at the campground an hour ago. Still, it was hard to get angry at him; he’d been fired by her too.

  I remembered Erica and I had been working together for several months, when she vaguely confessed things weren’t going well with Vince, though he had not mentioned a word about this to my sister, or to me. I had known only that Vince was head over heels in love, so I feared for my brother’s heart. Her confession came while we were splitting a mediocre LA version of a mozzarella and tomato sandwich on the marble dust-covered floor of a rock star’s mansion. It had been a big job for us, and the place had reached the stage where we didn’t want to break and leave for a real lunch, unless we needed to court the next wealthy Hollywood resident for our next project.

  Since we’d lined up several projects, we could relax that we were booked for at least the next six months while we dined alone in our paint-splattered clothes on the mansion’s floor, a comfort level we both preferred to the swanky cafés beneath the Hollywood Hills. Maybe it was this comfort level that made Erica confess, “I’m not sure your brother and I are going to make it.”

  I had been in mid-bite.

  “Of course you will,” I said, with my mouth stuffed, “you’re perfect for each other.”

  Actually, not true. He may have been my brother, but Vince was still a guy. Generally speaking, it was Erica that was perfect. Smart, successful, and annoyingly attractive in a tool belt, even with her hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. God knows, I didn’t look good on the job.

  She’d stared at me, waiting, I assumed, for a more convincing answer. We ate in silence for a while, and I finally laughed uncomfortably and said, “I bet the two of you will be together long after Lorn and I split.”

  As I heard myself say it back then, my confession sounded as if I was speaking the inevitable out loud. Since Erica had grown silent and uncomfortable, I told Erica my actress was trying to jump back into the closet I had worked so hard to pry her out of. The sad truth was, Lorn had done exactly what my sister predicted she would do. She came out just enough to keep me and allowed one very public kiss at my uncle’s wedding in Jamaica, and the paparazzi ate it up. Soon afterward, Lorn credited Hollywood’s attitude regarding her “new” lifestyle for every lost role or missed opportunity, and although I had more than enough money for both of us, she felt the relationship had cost her. Now it appeared I had introduced my brother to the woman who would cost him his heart as well.

  Erica looked more sorry for me than for herself, so I tried to sound casual as I said, “I love her, but I just can’t see her staying.”

  Erica nodded and I wished I hadn’t said it out loud. Would it have killed her to disagree? The answer was yes, it would have, because Erica wasn’t a woman who pretends, ever—well—except for the whole gay thing to get contracting clients. But that was business.

  Erica ended our business partnership abruptly a few days later while we were scraping a wall with putty knives, along with two hired hands. We were covered in shards of curled wallpaper and gritty drywall bits, and she tried to talk casually as she brushed away a drywall curl, which had landed weightlessly on her forehead, like the Gerber baby hair curl. (The Gerber baby could only hope to have skin like that.)

  “I need to buy back your part of the business,” she had said. Then, not waiting for my reply, she continued to scrape an area that was already stripped clean. I watched as each pass of her blade removed another 3 to 5 millimeters of perfectly good drywall. I grabbed her arm to stop her, which must have startled her, because she pulled her arm away with a fierce jerk. The other men stopped scraping.

  “Why do you want to buy me out?” I asked, feeling oddly heartbroken. “It’s always been your business, I understand that, but did I do something wrong?”

  She looked away from me, then dusted off her clothes. “No. Things have gotten worse between your brother and I, and I need to separate myself from your family. That means you, too.”

  It hadn’t once occurred to me back then that my newfound career as Homo-Depot runner had been riding on Vince’s ability to keep Erica as a girlfriend, especially a girlfriend Lisa and I had both teased was way out of his league.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said, looking back to the wall. “I’ve enjoyed—having you as a business partner, so don’t ever think it was about that.” She took her gloves off and touch
ed the wall to feel the damage she had done with her bare fingertips, but she never looked at me again. “So, will you let me buy you out?” she asked.

  I was crushed at the finality in her voice. Thinking back, she had sounded uncharacteristically sensitive, not Erica’s style at all. I couldn’t think of anything to say, except the right thing.

  “Of course, you can buy me out. I was always just your gopher.”

  “No, you weren’t,” she said, but I was, and we both knew it. And just like that, I hung up my putty knife, and walked numbly to the door. “The Homo-Depot receipts are in our—your tackle box.” I had called the toolbox a tackle box once, and it had stuck. Many things had stuck, but our friendship wouldn’t be one of them.

  “I’m sorry, Mare,” she said, and I heard the scraping of her putty knife start up again, and knew the time it would take for her to repair it all later, alone. As I walked down the driveway I remembered tears stinging at the corners of my eyes as I thought about how she’d just started to call me Mare, like my brother did.

  A week later, possibly escalated by all the time on my hands, which made me more visible to the paparazzi, Lorn called me and made our separation final, asking if I would mail her the last of her things. “I’m sorry, Marie,” she had said.

  Why was everyone so goddamn sorry?

  Erica and Vince didn’t have the pressures of the outside world that Lorn and I did, and since I’d built this perfect couple, I was resentful of how casually their relationship was tossed away. Lorn and I had been an expected implosion, one Lisa insisted was long delayed, but my brother’s breakup bothered me as much as my own, and I couldn’t help thinking, if the two of them couldn’t make it, who on earth could?

  Vince climbed in the car, startling me.

  “What the hell were you thinking about?” he asked.

  “Nothing. The Campground.”

  Vince reached for my hand in an overly dramatic gesture, “I’m scared, too.”

  “You are fucking on your own if that was Martina Navratilova you smashed up there.”

  “Yeah, I screwed up. I wanted to post a shot of it online, but at least I didn’t break the arm holding the tennis racket. It was the one Lisa uses to hold her boxers.” His voice was casual enough, but there was real fear in his eyes, and I must confess I’d really missed seeing it.

  I started to giggle. “She is going to Grand Slam your sorry ass.”

  When my sister and I had last talked, it didn’t seem to worry her that the camping season was over, and she didn’t seem concerned that anyone she knew with any real experience running a business was gainfully employed and could not be bothered to help fix all that needed fixing or to run a campground. Lisa held fast to her plans to build a team comprised of people who all had too much time, money, and lack of skills on their hands: the Santora family. I knew we would be a pathetic little Italian army before Vince and I even set foot on the place.

  Since the road was completely overgrown, the only clue of the camp’s entrance was that Lisa was jumping around waving her arms like a lunatic when we pulled up. When I pulled in past her, I saw there was a crudely constructed camp sign that looked equally ancient and under construction. This was just the beginning. Vince and I could tell from Lisa’s hard-sell grin and a quick look around as we rolled the car to a stop, that the hard-sell-grinning-her-ass-off was well deserved. I formulated what must have been the top three qualities that made an irresistible campground to an impulsive and wealthy Italian woman: 1. ancient log buildings, all with rotted (or missing) roofs; 2. overgrown woods with completely obstructed campsites;3. thick beds of pine needles for optimum fire hazards.

  I rolled down the window and Lisa shouted in my ear, “Welcome to Camptown Ladies! Oh, I see you brought a girlfriend, excellent.”

  “Here we go,” Vince said with a grin.

  I was troubled at the sight of the place. Remarkably, there were trailers with year-round campers there, but many looked abandoned for more than a season or two. My sister had bought this place?

  “Lisa, this place—”

  “—Now don’t be so quick to judge, I know it’s a little different than the pictures on the website.”

  “Website?” Vince said. “Were there any color pictures from this century? Because sometimes that can be a hint that there’s a problem.”

  As if on cue, the weight of an adolescent squirrel sent a chunk of roof on the guard shack behind Lisa splattering to the ground. It was so rotted it landed in complete silence, like a thick serving of overcooked minestrone soup.

  Lisa hugged us both roughly as we got out of the car and I surveyed the place over her broad shoulders. I was confident I was looking at the biggest mistake my sister had ever made, and there have been a quite a few. But this one, I reminded myself, would be special, since my brother and I had just signed on to be a part of her crew. I knew Vince was thinking the same, because he was making the girlie noise in his throat he always made when he was trying hard not to laugh.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Lisa said, as she nailed him in the gut, “I have huge plans for this place.”

  I had no doubt.

  There was so much wrong with our personal lives, all Vince and I could do was follow blindly into step with Lisa’s plans. Dad, forever the optimist, had been the first to join Lisa at her breakneck pace of plowing full steam ahead. Dad had already earned the nickname Woody, due to his obsession with making perfect pyramid bundles of split campfire wood, which were stacked into one giant pyramid which he fussed with constantly. He didn’t dare mention it to Dad, but Vince called the woodpile The Jenga-Suit, since it would be a lawyer’s wet dream the day a camper pulled a piece of wood from the pile and it all came tumbling down.

  Dad outfitted himself in an impressive array of lumberjack flannels (an outfit Lisa called Oscar-de-la-lezzie) and a giant ax he got from Wal-Mart, with the handle decorated in a burned wood signature of Paul Bunyan himself. Vince walked by him, swatting him on the back in praise, “Nice attempt with the Bounty guy outfit and the ax, Dad, but Lisa is still the most butch member of Camptown Ladies.”

  I didn’t have the heart to mention that since Dad purchased the wood pre-split, the blade of the ax was destined to never lose its shine, and the butt of the blade would forever stay its pristine Coleman red. (And if he attempted to split the wood into smaller pieces, any missing fingers or toes would not ruin the red paintjob on his ax.)

  He was so pleased with himself that the rest of the family agreed not to discuss openly that his new career was less lumberjack and more shrink-wrapper. He rolled and wrapped the wood bundles in clear plastic wrap and shrank them with biggest Conair blowdryer he could find at Wal-Mart. (Unfortunately, it was available only in a tween-pleasing lime green.) He kept the blowdryer at the ready, installed at his hip in a homemade holster he’d fashioned out a large piece of white PVC pipe and an old leather belt. Dad didn’t know it, but Vince was campaigning hard to change his nickname from Woody to McGay-ver for his ingenuity and dazzling pop of color holstered at his hip.

  If it weren’t for the 43 rolls of non-biodegradable plastic wrap, the sparkling wood pyramid might have passed for an odd tribute to the wilderness by the rarely seen, non eco-friendly Saran Tribe. This might all have been ignored by a busy camper, if Dad had not found a price-tagging gun in the camp store and hit each one with a florescent hunter-orange sticker that read: $3.99 or 2 for $5.00. Lisa wasn’t troubled by this, as the stack of pine kept Dad busy, and at least once a week my sister walked by and pointed out to Dad a football-shaped knot in a piece of wood and yelled, “See, a vagina!”

  No matter where he was in the camp, Dad, aka Woody, never missed it when someone dared to touch his pile.

  “Hands off my wood!” he’d shout.

  “Most men don’t say that,” Vince told him as we laughed. But we all worried how he would handle it when the camp reopened and campers attempted to carry the wood away to have it perish in their campfires.

  Vince said to me
one day, “If we ever get this campground going and they burn any of his wood, do you think Dad will hear the Screaming Of The Limbs?”

  “Seriously, we should prepare him that people will be burning the wood,” I said.

  “Mom is bound to mention it,” Vince said, and we agreed to let her break the news.

  My Mother didn’t have to be convinced to be a part of the Camptown Ladies project, but then, Lisa hadn’t told anyone but us that she intended to transform a rundown family campground into a place that catered to gays. Mom was happy to sign onto a project with such a huge chance of failing, securing her a front seat for when it all unraveled and she could say: “I told you so.” She shadowed Dad’s every project, offering worst-case scenarios from the safety of the cheap seats, waiting until it would be time to take the front row.

  Typically, she shouted observations from inside the camp store—by the looks of things, it was the only sound structure on the grounds, and smartly, this was the turf she had claimed as her own. Her first order of business for the camp store was a good cleaning, but she kept the screen door open to allow for a full view of everyone else’s doomed activities. Within the first week I had stopped to listen at the store door, since Lisa was giving Mom vague instructions for her plans.

  “Mom, I want half the store to be very girlie, you know, Yankee Candles, proper tablecloths, nothing ugly. I want to get some pretty lanterns and lots of tiny twinkle lights, you know, fairy lights—in all the colors of the rainbow. Oh, and let’s sell porcelain plates in sets of two, not ceramic. Porcelain is actually more durable, less likely to chip, and has a higher perceived value. And no friggin’ paper.”

  Mom’s rare silence meant she was baffled. Or pissed that she was being told what to do in so much detail—but time would tell on that one.

  Lisa continued, “The other side of the store needs to be for the rough and tumble campers. You know, citronella bug candles, tent stakes, fire starters, basic tools, hammers, saws, and sets of these blue-speckled metal enamel cookware and plates. That’s where the paper plates will go, with all the manly stuff on this side of the store. Nothing girlie on this side. You got the picture?”