Camptown Ladies

by Mari SanGiovanni

  “Because it costs a fortune!”

  “I have a fortune! Erica can do it, she’s done that kind of work before in California, you showed me the houses you worked on together. I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse,” Lisa said, like the head of the Lesbian Mafia. “Besides, she just bought you out of her business. Maybe she could use the extra money.”

  “Erica doesn’t need a dyke campground as a client. And why would she come all the way out to the east coast when she has lucrative jobs lined up all across Burbank?”

  “Yeah, well, thanks to our dead grandmother, I can afford to hire the best.”

  Lisa wasn’t getting it. “Has it occurred to you that she needs to keep some distance from Vince and our family? She won’t take the job.”

  Lisa said, “What the fuck is wrong with him, anyway? He’s let some decent women go before, but this one . . . what a fucking idiot.”

  “He says it was her—”

  “I don’t believe him,” Lisa said. “He knows we’d think he was an fool to blow it with her.”

  Lisa attempted to move a rusty oil barrel disguised as a trash can by kicking it. It made a mind-numbing sound but moved only an inch with Cindy-Lu yelping in protest to the noise. “Fuck. Wow! The acoustics are good in here.”

  I could see her wheels turning, and imagined what she was seeing as she looked up at the vaulted ceilings. Would it be a surround system to pipe in Italian music to match her cuisine, or, maybe, God forbid, karaoke? Within the seconds it took for Teen Rec Hall to morph to Gay Dining Hall, I suspected Lisa already had the menu planned.

  “You need a backup plan for another contractor,” I said.

  Lisa argued, “She might need time away from Vince, but she might need to be around friends, too. This could be a good project for her.”

  “Bullshit. You’re hoping to get them back together,” I said.

  “Actually, I never really saw the two of them as a match.” She was lying, and she knew that I knew it.

  We heard the distant, then blaring thud thudding of techno club music, and were then startled by the sound of tires spinning on loose gravel, ending in a short skid, just outside the hall.

  “Hiiiiya girlfrieeeeends!” a voice sang outside the rec hall.

  Eddie, Lisa’s most flaming boy pal, was wearing a thin lemon-colored scarf, sitting high on the back of the front seat of his matching yellow convertible as if he were perched on a float made of daffodils. Knowing Eddie, I suspected he may have found the scarf and opted to shop for a car to match.

  He sang out, “Heeeere I come to save the gaaaaays!”

  “Eddie’s here!” Lisa said, escaping me to gallop outside.

  “Snuck right up on us,” I said.

  I was thinking how much he would love the Camptown Ladies song as he stepped out of his car on the tips of his pristine white athletic shoes with bedazzled details. He looked down at the ground, absolutely puzzled by the sight of a dirt road. He lifted a toe up in disgust as Lisa grabbed him at the waist and, tall as he was, easily picked up his wispy frame and whirled him around. Eddy squealed in delight with his hands in the air and shouted, “Mr. Load’s Wild Ride!”

  I hugged him next, and he kept his arms raised, disappointed that I didn’t attempt to pick him up, too. “Sorry Eddie, not all dykes have Popeye forearms.”

  “I forgive you, honey, it takes all kinds. If you weren’t such a lipstick, your sister wouldn’t look so butch and get all the straight girls.”

  “Fuck you, Eddie,” Lisa said, slapping him hard on his little, round ass as he squealed again. “Ooooh, yes! Now that you have me primed, where’s that hot brother of yours?”

  “Go easy. Vince isn’t himself these days,” I said. “Recent breakup.”

  Eddie made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “What a shame,” he said, and I knew he’d drop it there. Eddie was not a guy with whom you could discuss the cruelties of life. If you tried, his smile would remain frozen while his eyes glazed over with a protective coating that shielded him from anything not fabulous. Like a shark biting his prey, Eddie had a protective coating which kept out all that didn’t glitter or have a pretty shine.

  “Well, what do we have here?” he said, trying to pretend the call of the filthy rec hall lured him away from the gloomy Vince story.

  “This is the teen rec hall I told you about,” Lisa said, “soon to be my dining hall.”

  He stepped inside, unconsciously curling his fingers and wrists toward his body like a drying starfish, to avoid accidentally touching anything. Even his thumbs were recoiling backward in disgust.

  He said, gravely, “Oooh.”

  “What do you think?” Lisa asked, though the “Oooh” should have said it all.

  Eddie’s arms began curling inward now and his back slightly arched to give him courage. His voice was pitched high, but it was quiet, almost mystical, as he said, “It’s very dirty, but the pee smell is making me horny, so that’s a good sign.” When Lisa groaned, he chirped back at her, “Now, now, Lisa, one man’s piss is another man’s perfume.” Then his fingers started fluttering in the air, in a more positive way, as if playing the tinkling high notes on an invisible piano.

  Lisa whispered to me, “Teen boy piss must be Feng Shui for fairies.”

  Eddie spun around as if his track shoes had taps on the heels and said, “I’ll help you girls out, on one condition—”

  “I know, I know, you need total control of the design. You got it,” Lisa said. He tried to interrupt her, but she cut him off, “I know you need an unlimited budget. It’s yours.”

  Eddie gave a ridiculous “Yippee!” and scooped up Cindy-Lu as if she were his long lost accessory, and began surveying the hall by flitting along the edge. “Pretty little girls shouldn’t get their feet dirty,” he cooed at her, while Cindy-Lu enjoyed the graceful ride. Her tiny front legs always bent delicately when she was picked up, but with Eddie holding her, she appeared to be making social commentary on the suppleness of Eddie’s wrists, mimicking him, as he sailed around the rec hall with her.

  Lisa whispered to me, “This is downright creepy, since my hairdresser and spiritual advisor said this place would need a special woman’s touch.”

  “Good choice,” I said, knowing neither of us was up to the job.

  Four

  Think Inside The Box

  “I hung a rainbow flag up for an hour today,” Lisa said, “but I had to take it down because everyone kept asking if our family was Portuguese.”

  Vince and I laughed pretty hard, but it may have been the wine. I filled our glasses again to keep Vince and Lisa both anchored to the table. There would be no brainstorming tonight.

  “I’ve learned that it’s so much harder to stand out as a dyke at a campground,” Lisa said.

  Vince and I both said, “No worries,” at exactly the same time and Vince laughed again until Lisa punched him hard in the gut. Luckily, I was out of reach, or she would have tagged the back of my head.

  “Oof!” Vince said.

  “Dad and Mom seem to be having fun with the camp,” I said.

  Vince answered, “Their version of fun. They have a whole new batch of stuff to argue about. Yesterday, they had an argument about a hole.”

  “Do I want to ask?” I said.

  Vince told it anyway. “First Mom pointed out a rabbit hole, then Dad insisted it was a badger hole. Mom corrected him and Dad wouldn’t let up, saying he saw it on the Discovery channel. Then Mom said he didn’t know what he was talking about because he always falls asleep during that show, and Dad kept saying: Badger hole . . . it’s a badger hole . . . yup, a badger hole. Then Mom went on and on about how he was wrong, until Dad started called her the badger, and when he wouldn’t shut up about that, Mom ended up telling him the hole she was sure she was seeing was an asshole.”

  I said, “They nearly came to blows over whether the oil barrel trash can should have a liner. There will be a full hearing on this issue tomorrow. At 10:00. Oh, and Mom is really pissed
at you.”

  Lisa said, “What now?”

  “She says her only hope for any peace was that Aunt Aggie found getting around the campground a bit challenging, but now that you bought her a scooter, she is going to be there all day long.”

  We started laughing, and Vince said, “You didn’t! Shit. Aunt Aggie is mobile. Nothing good will come of that.” Then he turned to Lisa and asked, “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you, you never told us what the deciding factor was that made you buy the campground?”

  Lisa didn’t answer right away and I wondered, Would it be a rare confession of something sentimental? Could she have known the place would pull our parents and aunt back together to bicker on a regular basis after the inheritance had caused real friction between them?

  Lisa said, “I bought it because one of the website pictures showed the gate at the entrance. It gave me the whole idea to turn the place into a lesbian camp.”

  “Huh?” Vince and I said in unison.

  “You know the old coin box on the gate that doesn’t work?”

  We both nodded as we drank, not getting it.

  Lisa said, “It’s the perfect welcome sign for a lesbo camp. It says:”

  Vince and I joined her in saying: “To insert, tap box lightly to open—DO NOT POUND!’”

  “Damned fine advice,” she said, as Vince cleaned up his dribble from his wine glass. It made perfect sense she would be drawn to this, since Lisa always had Think Inside The Box mentality.

  That was how Lisa decided things. When she bought her place in Maine several years ago, she’d decided to purchase the property not because the backyard butted against a stone quarry and Lisa sculpted stone in her spare time from running her illegal restaurant, but because it had three giant V-shaped trees in the backyard. “See, a vagina! Three in a row! How can I not buy it?”

  I had no argument. They were three vaginas, all in a row.

  Lisa lifted her glass for a toast, and Vince and I joined her in unison with a toasting chant from our junior high school days: “Never drink water, fish fuck in it!” We clinked glasses, careful to look each other in the eyes as we clinked, to avoid the punishment of seven years of no sex if there was no eye contact. At the rate the three of us were going, we shouldn’t take any chances, and I wondered if we were all thinking exactly that as we carefully made eye contact and gulped.

  “Do you guys know how many times we’ve all been single at the same time like this?” Vince asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Five,” he said without hesitation, and we didn’t laugh. Vince looked miserable again.

  It was still too raw for me to ask him, and Erica had been so distant on the phone the last time we spoke, that I dared not ask her, but their breakup didn’t make any sense. They seemed fine the last time they were together. Vince loved living in LA, and Erica and I had been having great success in her business, pulling in several big clients. We were doing so well we had to subcontract to our most talented competitor, rather than refuse the work. Vince would join us mid-day, doing what he could to assist Erica’s assistant (me), and we would work into the night, smuggling in a few beers after the end of the day and eating designer pizzas on plastic-covered floors in the houses of the latest Emmy or Golden Globe winner. Aside from our work making me see more of Erica than Vince did, all else seemed fine between them.

  I remembered one night Erica and I had a laugh at Vince’s expense, but he never knew it, since that night he’d insisted we smoke a joint, which ignited a case of belly laughs. Some time before, I’d made the observation to Erica that whenever Vince smoked pot, he would stare down at his leg with a spaced-out smile, as if he had fallen in love with his own knee. That night he did it again, and with the flick of an eye I signaled to Erica and she barely could contain herself as she watched that spaced-out grin on his face, staring down at his leg, and I knew she was remembering me saying he looked like an ass, like someone had left an invisible rose on his knee.

  To make her lose it further, I busted out in an old Leo Sayer song, with a minor adjustment: “When I kneeee love . . . I just close my eyes and I’ve got love . . .”

  When Vince, clueless and never breaking eye contact with his knee, said dreamily, “I love that song,” Erica laughed so hard she rolled backward onto an open box of pizza. When she rolled back upright, there was a slice, complete with pepperoni and green peppers, pasted flat against the side of her hair. That was when I became a traitor and sided with my brother and laughed my ass off at her.

  It went like that. There was never any loyalty. Whoever was the idiot of the moment would get gang-goofed on, and some of the best laughs of my life had been with my brother, sister, and Erica. Now, they were apart, and I wondered if we would ever have a moment like that together again.

  Lisa broke into my thoughts as she asked him accusingly, “You ever going to tell us what happened with her?”

  “She ended it,” Vince said as he got up to grab the local newspaper.

  Lisa said, “She loved you, you idiot. What the hell did you do?”

  I feared she might start a fight, but Vince just shook his head. “Something I never do. I got too serious too fast and I tried to talk to her about marriage and some day having kids. I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of the end.”

  I jumped in, hoping it would shut Lisa up, “None of us can claim we’re good at relationships.” But my plan backfired, and now Lisa’s crosshairs were on me.

  “Still no word from the actress?”

  Vince tried to rescue me, “Hey, why don’t we have a parade?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I shot back, misunderstanding him.

  Lisa said, “The campground, stupid. We need an annual parade. He’s right, for once, it would be great publicity.” She clapped her hands in joy at her own idea, not in a girlie way, but more like an inebriated football coach. “Oh, the gay boys will love that! Any excuse for a parade. We need to start promoting July 4th with Camp Camp’s First Annual parade! I’ll put Eddie right on it.”

  “But what about Camptown Ladies? The girls will need to have a parade of their own, or the drag queens will completely take over.”

  Vince offered, “How about a parade where the women can walk their giant Dobermans and vegetarian rescue dogs—or their kids.”

  Lisa yelled, “The Dykes and Tykes Parade! Or, wait, I’ve got it: The Million Mullets & Mutts March!”

  “Yes!” Vince laughed hard at her names, but I knew he was just happy that Lisa was off his trail.

  I was laughing too, but I said, “I know you don’t care, Lisa, but not everyone finds that kind of joke funny. More importantly, are you prepared to tell Mom and Dad about this?”

  Lisa said, “No way. We’ll just send them off on an old fart cruise if we need to.”

  I found it strange Lisa would suggest this, since we all knew Mom and Dad shouldn’t be in any close quarters together, due to their duplex personalities. (They should be living in a duplex.)

  Lisa raised her glass. “To being rich!” We clinked glasses while looking dutifully into each other’s eyes. Lisa was determined to make Camptown Ladies and Camp Camp a unique experience for her guests, and despite her not having any commitment from a contractor, she was wearing her trademark overconfident smirk that made me believe anything was possible, good or bad.

  I saw that same smirk one summer when I was twelve and Lisa was fourteen, and we decided to surprise Mom and Dad by helping around the house while they were working. Lisa explained I’d be inside, cleaning the entire house, while she would work outside, getting to mess around with Dad’s lawn mower and weed whacker. I agreed to the idea since Lisa and I worked better when there was space between us, similar to Mom and Dad.

  I started with vacuuming, and by the time Lisa was done mowing, I had moved on to dusting. That’s when all hell broke loose and a swarm of bees attacked me. Well, it was probably just one bee, but I was in full panic mode. While I never saw the bee or bees, th
ey were dive-bombing very close to my ears. My first order of business was to run out of my parent’s bedroom, smacking my own head with the dust rag. My panic grew worse as the swarm followed me to the next room and, to my horror, to the next. I started screaming for my sister, but Lisa couldn’t hear me over the weed whacking she was doing outside.

  In the end, I managed to get her attention by barreling through the screen door, ripping the screen clean off the doorframe with my hands. I was flailing my arms and still smacking my head violently with the dust rag as I tripped down the front steps, riding the screen door like a boogie board until I twisted around, falling on my ass right next to Lisa.

  Busting outside must have confused the shit out of the attacking bees, since the buzzing in my ears suddenly stopped, but I still beat on both my ears with my fists, just to be sure they had not crawled into my ear canal to make honeycombs or lay eggs. I started screaming at the thought, as I pulled off my shirt, convinced that the grass trickling down my back was the bees moving from my ears to my back.

  “Now I can’t hear them!” I shrieked. Oh, God, I was deaf!

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Lisa asked, her huge shadow looming over me.

  What was I doing? Wasn’t it obvious? I was out of breath with panic, sitting in our front yard, now just in my shorts and bra, my shirt flung into a nearby birch tree. But even in my panic, I knew Lisa would never let me forget how ridiculous I looked, she would learn the sign language for this, even if I could make her realize how I’d been nearly killed.

  “I was dusting in Mom and Dad’s room, and, out of nowhere, I was attacked by a swarm of bees!”

  “A swarm,” she said, perfectly calm.

  “Or maybe it was just a few, but they could still be on me! I couldn’t get away from the buzzing no matter what room I went in!” I said. “They were in my ears!”