It was July 2, and there was a swarm of cars and bicycles in front of the Golden Dragon fireworks stand in the corner of the lot. The Elks club ran that stand, and my dad always worked a shift or two. I wondered who was covering for him as I wove my way through the pileup and toward the store, hoping my cap would keep me invisible—I felt like a ghost anyway.
I knew just what I was looking for: Beaches, over with the new releases. I’d gone to see it at the Montana Theatre with my mom the year before. We cried and cried. We bought the soundtrack the next day. Then I went back to the Montana and I saw it with Irene. We argued over who, between the two of us, was Bette Midler and who was Barbara Hershey. We both wanted to be Bette.
Barbara Hershey’s character dies near the end of the movie. Her daughter, Victoria, is left behind, like me. She wears a black velvet dress and white tights and gets to hold Bette Midler’s hand during the funeral. She was maybe four years too young to be my equal, and had only really lost one parent (because her dad, while absent, was at least still alive) and she was just an actor, I knew, playing a part; but still it was something to go by. I felt like I needed something official to show me how all of this should feel, how I should be acting, what I should be saying—even if it was just some dumb movie that wasn’t really official at all.
It was Mrs. Carvell, formerly Miss Hauser, at the register. She taught fourth grade during the school year and worked the video store in the summer—her parents owned it. I’d had her the first year she’d ever taught, but I wasn’t one of her favorites because I didn’t take the after-school tap classes she held in the gymnasium, and also maybe because I didn’t giggle and ask stupid questions about weddings and dating when she’d brought her then-fiancé, Mr. Carvell, to class one day in the spring and had him do dorky science experiments with us. In the end-of-year comments on my report card she had written, Cameron is very bright. She’ll do well, I’m sure. My parents thought this was a riot.
Mrs. Carvell took the case from me and found the video to put in it without much seeing me, but when I had to say “Post” for her to look up our account, she did a double take, peered close beneath the brim of my cap, and flinched.
“Oh my God, honey,” she said to me, just standing there sort of gaping, the video stiff in her hand. “What are you doing in here? I’m so sorry about . . . ”
I filled it in for her in my head—about how your parents swerved off a mountain road and drowned in a lake that shouldn’t even exist, shouldn’t even be there, all of this while you stayed home and kissed a girl, stole some gum.
“I’m so sorry, just—well, I’m sorry about everything, honey,” she finished. There was a high counter between us, and I was glad she couldn’t easily get around it to hug me.
“It’s okay,” I mumbled. “I just really need to rent that right now. I’ve got to get back home.”
She looked more carefully at the title, her wide face scrunched up a little, confused, like she was trying to figure this out, like she could really make sense of it. “Well, you just go on and take this then, okay, hon?” she told me, handing it back without ringing it up. “And you can just call me, even, to come and pick it back up when you’re finished. You keep it for as long as you want.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, unaware that this was the first official time of so many to come when I’d receive the prorated orphan discount. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want Mrs. Carvell “taking care” of me.
“Of course, Cameron. It’s nothing at all.” She smiled her big smile at me, one I’d never been granted personally but had seen, on occasion, when she’d trotted it out for the whole class to share—like the time our room won the school-wide pop-top-collecting contest.
“But I have money,” I said, feeling like I would cry just any second and keeping my eyes away from hers. “I’m gonna want to rent something else soon, anyway.”
“You can rent as many as you like,” she said. “You come see me. I’ll be here all summer.”
I couldn’t let her do this thing for me. It made me twist up inside. “I’ll just leave this and then rent more later,” I mumbled, my head down, putting the ten on the counter and walking as quickly as I could, without technically running, to the door.
“Cameron, this is too much,” she called after me, but then I was out of the store, back on the sidewalk, free from her generosity or pity or kindness, all of it.
Aunt Ruth was waiting for me in my room, her back to the door, new clothes, funeral wear, hung crisp from cheap hangers, in either hand. She was just standing and staring at my new entertainment center and didn’t turn when I first came in. I shoved the movie into the waistband of my shorts, just above my butt. I blushed even as I did it, a flash of the bubble gum, Irene.
“I do already own clothes, you know,” I said.
She turned, did a tired smile. “I didn’t know what to get you, hon, and you didn’t want to come with me. I just brought you a few choices from Penney’s. We can take back whatever you don’t end up wearing. I just hope it all fits—I had to guess.” She put everything on my bed, gently, like laying a baby down to change her diaper.
“Thanks,” I said, because I knew that I should. “I’ll try them on tonight, when it’s cooler.” I didn’t look at her. I focused, instead, on the navy dress, the black skirt and top, the clothes now on my bed that looked nothing like any clothes that had ever been on my bed before, at least not since I could dress myself.
“It must have been hard work getting this thing up here,” she said, patting the TV like she sometimes did me. “I would have been happy to help you.”
“I got it okay,” I said, “but thanks, though.” I kept my back pressed up against the open door.
“You doing okay, kiddo?” she asked me, stepping closer, the requisite arm around me, her signature hug. “Do you want to pray with me a little, maybe? Or I could read you some passages that I’ve been thinking about a lot. They might give you a little peace.”
“I just want to be alone right now,” I told her. If I could have, I’d’ve recorded that line on one of those handheld machines with the minitapes and then worn the whole thing on a chain around my neck, just hit Play maybe eight or nine times a day.
“Okay, sweetie. I can sure help you with that. We’ll talk when you’re ready, whenever you are; it doesn’t matter when—I’ll be here.” She kissed my cheek and was two stairs down when she turned back. “You know you can talk to God best alone anyway. You can just close your eyes and be with him, Cammie—ask him anything you want.”
I nodded, but only because she seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
“There’s a whole world beyond this one,” she said. “And sometimes it helps even just to remember that. It helps me a lot.”
I stayed with my back to the door until she was well down the stairs. I was afraid she’d see the outline of the movie, or that it might slip from my waistband and clatter hard on the wide planks of the floor. I didn’t want to have to explain anything about Beaches to her. I wasn’t sure it made sense even to me.
I shut the door to my room and put the tape in the VCR and settled back on my bed, right on top of the new clothes. My twelve-year-old mother grinned down at me from another world, one beneath the shady pines and cedars, one where she was giddily unaware that she was just hours away from escaping a tragedy—and a lifetime away from a day that tragedy would find her anyway.
The navy dress was bunched weird beneath my neck. I shifted, shifted again. I couldn’t get comfortable. I kept hearing Ruth’s advice about talking to God. I didn’t want to hear it but I did. It wasn’t like I’d never prayed before, I had: at the Presbyterian church sometimes, and when my goldfish, four of them, had died—one after the next—and other times, too. Those times I had tried to talk to something greater, something out there in the world bigger than me. But all those times, no matter what the occasion, it had eventually ended up feeling sort of phony, like I was playing at a relationship with God, just like any little k
id playing house or grocery store or anything else, but not like it was real. I knew that this is where the faith part was supposed to come in, and that faith, real faith, that’s what was supposed to keep the whole thing from just being make-believe. But I didn’t have any of that faith, and I didn’t know where to get it, how to get it, or even if I wanted it right then. I felt like it could be that God had made this happen, had killed my parents, because I was living my life so wrong that I had to be punished, that I had to be made to understand how I must change, and that Ruth was right, that I had to change through God. But I also thought, at the exact same time I was thinking the other stuff, that maybe what all this meant was that there was no God, but instead only fate and the chain of events that is, for each of us, predetermined—and that maybe there was some lesson in my mom drowning at Quake Lake thirty years later. But it wasn’t a lesson from God; it was something else, something more like putting together a puzzle, making the pieces fit to form an image. I didn’t want to have those thoughts running simultaneously and constantly, constantly. What I wanted to do was to hide from all of it, to be small and unseen and just to get along. It might have comforted Ruth to talk to God, but it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe, like drowning, the diving wells again.
I lifted the remote control, pushed the Play button, and started the video. I guess, in that moment, I also started my new life as Cameron-the-girl-with-no-parents. Ruth was sort of right, I would learn: A relationship with a higher power is often best practiced alone. For me it was practiced in hour-and-a-half or two-hour increments, and paused when necessary. I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that my religion of choice became VHS rentals, and that its messages came in Technicolor and musical montages and fades and jump cuts and silver-screen legends and B-movie nobodies and villains to root for and good guys to hate. But Ruth was wrong, too. There was more than just one other world beyond ours; there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and at 99 cents apiece I could rent them all.
Chapter Three
The first semester of seventh grade they had me in the counseling center for one period a day—the orphan in residence. On my schedule that period was listed officially as study hall, but Aunt Ruth, my new legal guardian, had spoken with the administrators, and everyone but me had decided that it would be best for me to spend that hour sitting on one of the center’s sea-green vinyl couches, talking with Nancy the counselor about one of her many pamphlets on loss: “Teens and Grief.” “All Alone with My Troubles.” “Understanding Death and Letting Go.”
Mostly I spent my time in the counseling center fiddling at homework or reading a paperback, maybe eating the little thises and thats the secretaries would sneak me from the teachers’ lounge—a couple of brownies folded up in a napkin, a plate of somebody’s seven-layer dip with Triscuits—gifts they’d present to me with kind smiles and soft pats on my shoulder. These small offerings of food, of looking out for the kid, somehow made me feel more alone than when the secretaries didn’t remember to include me at all.
They’d gotten used to me over at Video ’n’ Go, and now that school was back in session, Mrs. Carvell was gone and it was almost always Nate Bovee behind the register, and he let me rent whatever the hell I wanted—no questions, just a wink and a grin creeping from behind that scraggly goatee he was always trying to grow but never quite did. I just had to hide the cases from Ruth, keep the volume semilow.
“Whatcha pickin’ up today, sweetheart?” Nate would ask me, his squinty blue-gray eyes hawking me as I wandered the aisles. I always got a couple of new releases and then kept working my way through the older stuff.
“I don’t know yet,” I’d tell him, trying to stay behind the shelves farthest from the register, which didn’t help much, ’cause he could just watch me in the big shoplifter mirror hung above the door to the back room. When I went in the afternoons, right after school let out, it was usually just the two of us in the store. Video ’n’ Go always smelled too strongly of some carpet cleaner they used, like chemical roses, and I began to associate that smell with Nate—as if it radiated from him.
I tried to like him because he let me rent the R-rated videos and because sometimes he’d offer me a free pop from the cooler up front, but I didn’t like that he knew every movie I took out of that store, watching me, watching me pick them up and bring them back. It felt like in knowing that, he knew more about me than anyone else right then, definitely more than Nancy the counselor, and more than Aunt Ruth, too.
Sometime in late September Irene Klauson came to school with the kind of smile kids wear in peanut-butter commercials. She and her dad had been out building onto their new corral and branding area. Irene said she was the one working the shovel when they first found it. A bone. A fossil. Something big.
“My dad’s already called some professor he knows at Montana State,” she told a few of us who were clustered around her locker. “They’re sending out a whole team.”
Within weeks scientists, “paleontologists,” Irene would remind us, sounding like our fucking science book, had swarmed all over the Klausons’ cattle ranch. The paper called it a hotbed for specimen recovery. A gold mine. A treasure trove.
Irene and I hadn’t seen each other much since our robot-hug at my parents’ funeral in June. Mrs. Klauson kept trying to arrange sleepovers and day trips to the mall in Billings, to a rodeo in Glendive, but I would back out at the last minute.
“We understand, sweetheart,” Mrs. Klauson would tell me over the phone. I guess the “we” she was speaking of included Irene, but maybe she meant Mr. Klauson. “We’re not going to stop trying though, okay, Cam?”
When, in late August, I had finally agreed to go with them to the Custer County Fair, I spent the whole evening wishing that I hadn’t. Irene and I had done up the fair before—we’d done it up big. We’d buy the wristbands that let you ride all the rides you wanted. We’d eat graveyard snow cones—lime, orange, grape, cherry mixed together—and pacos from the Crystal Pistol booth—seasoned beef in a cocoon of hot fry bread, the orange grease squirting and burning the insides of our cheeks. We’d wash everything down with lemonade from that stand with the wasps buzzing all around it. Then we’d make fun of the blue-ribbon craft projects and dance a wild jitterbug to whatever lame-o band they’d brought in. In years before, we thought we owned the fair.
But that August we haunted the midway like ghosts—stopping in front of the Tilt-A-Whirl, then the fishbowl game, watching like we’d already seen everything there was to see but couldn’t quite pull ourselves away. We didn’t talk bout my parents, the accident. We didn’t say much of anything at all. Everything was painted in ringing noises and flashing lights and shouting and screaming, crazy laughter, little kids crying, the smell of popcorn and fry bread and cotton candy thick in the air, but it all just sort of floated around me like smoke. Irene bought us tickets for the Ferris wheel, a ride we’d deemed too boring the year before, but it seemed like we should be doing something.
We sat in that metal car, our bare knees just touching. Even when we’d jerk them apart, they’d wind up magnetized again some moments later. We were closer together than we had been since the night her father knocked on her bedroom door. We were lifted up into the hot embrace of the ever-blackening Montana sky, the lights from the midway sluicing us in their fluorescent glow, a tinny kind of ragtime music plinking out from somewhere deep in the center of the wheel. Up on top we could see the whole of the fair: the tractor pull, the dance pavilion, cowboys in Wranglers leaning cowgirls built like sticks of gum up against pickups out in the parking lot. Up on top the air smelled less like grease and sugar, more like just-baled hay and the muddy waters of the Yellowstone as it lazed its way around the fairgrounds. Up on top it was quiet, everything squashed down below us, the loudest noise the squeak of the bolts as the wind shifted our car just so. Then we had to float back down into all of it, the whole midway pressed up against us, and I held my breath until we were back on top again.
Our third t
ime up there Irene grabbed my hand. We stayed like that for one full rotation, saying nothing, fingers wound together, and for that forty seconds or so I pretended like things were just as they always were: me and Irene at the fair.
When we got back to the top again, Irene was crying, and she said, “I’m really sorry, Cam. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
Irene’s face was bright against the dark of the sky, her eyes all shimmery wet, pieces of her hair blown free from her ponytail. She was beautiful. Everything in me wanted to kiss her, and at the same time it felt like everything in me was sick. I pulled my hand away from hers and looked out over my side of the car, dizzy with nausea. I closed my eyes to keep from throwing up, and even then I could taste it. I heard Irene next to me saying my name, but she sounded like she was saying it from beneath a pile of sand. They had stopped the ride to let people off and on down below. We shifted in the wind. We started up again, moved a few clicks, stopped. Now I wanted to be back on the midway and in the rush of all that noise. Irene was still crying beside me.
“We can’t be friends like we were before, Irene,” I told her, keeping my eyes fixed on a couple all twined up in the parking lot.
“Why?” she asked.
The ride started up again. Our car jerked and we were lowered a few clicks. We stopped. Now we hovered half in the sky and half in the midway—level with the bright canvas tops of the game booths. I didn’t say anything. I let the music plink. I remembered the feel of her mouth that day in the hayloft, the taste of her gum and the root beer we’d been drinking. The day she dared me to kiss her. And the very next day my parents’ car had veered through the guardrail.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 4