The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  Lindsey was pressing me hard to come visit her for at least part of the summer. She had no interest in swim team and, with her dad actually in Alaska as anticipated, no reason for coming to Montana at all.

  “I’m supposed to spend all three months with him, but my dad doesn’t give a shit if I stay here. What am I gonna do in motherfucking Alaska, anyway?”

  “Hot Inuit women,” I said.

  “Oh, lookit our little Kate Clinton.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” I said, even though Lindsey already knew this.

  “Dyke comic. You’d like her. Alice is being such a fascist about this whole thing. As if three months in Alaska with my dad is going to make or break my development from fucked-up teenager to functioning adult.”

  “It might be cool.”

  “Yeah, totally cool,” she said. “Maybe it could be. Maybe. But only if you come up and we find some sweet, north-of-the-border drugs and pick up where we left off.” She did a phone-sex operator voice. “I know all the right moves now, Cammie.”

  “Ruth won’t go for that,” I said.

  “Yes she will. You could totally convince her that it’ll be a learning experience. Just bill it as the summer of your lifetime. Get your grandma on board.”

  I knew that she was probably right, and that it might not have taken much at all to convince Aunt Ruth that a month or so in Alaska would be a good thing for me. But Lindsey was pressing for me to come in July, because she wasn’t even going to get up there until mid-June and she needed a few weeks to situate shit with her dad. And July was gonna be Brett-free in Miles City. Despite myself, and the weirdness, and where things were currently with Coley and me, I’ll admit that I was holding out hope: big-time hope.

  So I told Lindsey that I’d try and make Alaska happen, and then I didn’t try at all. Now I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out differently if I’d not made that decision, but you don’t really get anywhere when you think too much about stuff like that.

  Coach Ted had finally gotten his degree and was working as an athletic trainer for some college out East. They couldn’t find anybody to replace him until almost the start of the swim season, and when they did, it was this total hack from Forsyth who usually taught water aerobics to pregnant women and knew about as much as Grandma about flip turns and stroke modification. Also, it was hard to take off weekends as a lifeguard at a lake most popular on the weekends, so with Lindsey gone and Coley around, I didn’t join the swim team. I’d been on it for seven years. Other than school it was the most uniform part of my life. But not that summer.

  While Coley donned an orange mesh vest outlined in strips of pearly reflective material for night jobs and got herself planted on an eight-mile stretch of roadwork hell between Miles City and Jordan, I spent a week with twenty or so fellow lifeguards learning the cross-chest carry, the submerged-victim approach, and, most difficult of all, the dreaded spinal rescue complete with deepwater backboarding.

  The returning guards, many of them home from college for the summer, made the skills look easy and cool, and the few of us who were new tried to joke around with them, but we were too nervous to pull it off very well. The city had only just diverted water from the river to fill the Scanlan lakebed a week or so before our training, and in June that water was like swimming in snow-cone slush. Despite being in her sixties, Coach Ted’s mom, Hazel, was still in charge, her steel-wool-colored hair in a close-cropped bob like a 1920s flapper, and had she smoked her menthol Capri cigarettes from a long-stemmed holder like a flapper, I’m not sure that it would have surprised any of us. But she didn’t. And she certainly didn’t smoke on the guard stands or even on the beach, but outside in the parking lot in the shade of the bathhouse and next to the bike racks, between our emergency enactments, still in her bathing suit, using her vintage-red flip-flops (she called them thongs) to elegantly twist each smoldering butt against the sandy pavement.

  During our training she watched from the dock, her small face hidden behind celebrity-size mauve-tinted sunglasses, making notes on a grade sheet she kept dry against a clipboard plastered with a huge Red Cross sticker. While she judged our rescues, again and again and again, she chewed endless pieces of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and snapped tight bubbles that were so loud they seemed like they should have hurt the inside of her mouth. She called us all “honey” or “dear heart” but was easily disappointed and let us know just how much in mandatory sprints of freestyle punctuated by the shrill pacesetter of her Acme Thunderer rescue whistle—which she told us she’d had since her very first time on the guard stand back in the 1950s. I, for one, believed her. And I wanted to impress her. I worked hard. Before and after our group sessions I practiced and repracticed my skills, both in water and out: those for CPR, for first aid. I asked the senior guards to watch my attempts and offer advice. One of them, Mona Harris—a college sophomore with a gymnast’s build and a huge mouth, both physically and in terms of gossip—was the most eager to do this, shouting her corrections from the dock, telling me over and over to “try it again.” And I would. Something about Mona intimidated me. She seemed to know just a little too much about everyone and everything; but she was a strong lifeguard and I was happy to have her help with my training, which apparently paid off, because Hazel soon presented me with three newly laminated official Red Cross certification cards, and also a red swimsuit with GUARD across the chest area in white letters, and my own Acme Thunderer rescue whistle. I had arrived.

  By the time Brett left for soccer camp, Coley and I had, more by happenstance than anything else, developed what became an increasingly treacherous pattern. Scanlan’s open swim hours were from two p.m. until eight p.m. every weekday. Coley would finish her shift, pick up her truck at the just-out-of-town highway department building, and caravan with many of her fellow crew members back into the city limits during my last rotation. This was the absolute best time to be on the guard stand: The sun had quieted its intensity and long shadows were beginning to stretch across the lake; the masses of mothers with tiny toddlers had stopped swarming the shallow end and had headed home for baths and dinners; we turned up the crappy stereo and let it blare, scratchy and tinny, out the bathhouse hatch where we usually returned clothes baskets and gave out sand buckets and kickboards.

  The downtown exit took the highway crew directly past Scanlan. All of them were red faced and dusty and more than ready for a dip in the lake. That time of night, with only a few preteen all-dayers (lake rats) springing from the diving boards and maybe a family or two splashing around the shallow end, we were pretty lax about making anybody pay the entrance fee, especially a crew of dehydrated employees of the state of Montana. Hazel was just fine with this. Her standard policy was free admission to all former lifeguards, most anyone in a uniform, and everyone under the age of six. But she rarely was around to close up shop anyway, instead heading home sometime in the afternoon and leaving us to count the wrinkled bills kids had rolled or wadded and gripped tight and sweaty against their bike handlebars the whole ride to the lake.

  Frequently we’d shoo out the rats, shut the bathhouse doors, and officially close, and then some of us remaining guards would swim around awhile with the highway department bunch, cannonballing off the high dive and competing in strictly-forbidden-during-open-hours chicken fights. Actually, we broke all the rules and regulations: We hung from the low dive, we dove from the deep-end guard stands, we skipped rocks out across the lake, and most horrific of all, we went underneath the docks.

  There were three of them: the two long docks exactly fifty meters apart designating the officially guarded swim area, and one much smaller, square dock in the exact center of the deep end. Swimming down, finding the bottom of their wooden sides, and coming up into the air pocket beneath them was the biggest Scanlan no-no for an obvious reason—we couldn’t see the kids once they were there, which meant we wouldn’t know if they were drowning or doing any number of other forbidden actions. Which is exactly why below-center-dock
make-out sessions were so popular with the preteens on up.

  Sex and Scanlan went together seamlessly. Mona Harris was rumored to have lost her virginity late one night up against the metal ladder on the far side of the high dive; Bear and Granola Eric boasted of countless (and thereby questionable) after-hours locker-room blow jobs; and almost all of us were familiar with the appeal of the relative privacy of the below-dock world: the gentle slosh of the lake, the way the sun came between the soft boards in even slits, how closed in the sides were, making you fit tightly with whichever naked-except-for-a-swimsuit guy or girl you’d managed to bring in there with you. Sometimes somebody managed to pack some booze to these in-the-water soirees, and we’d swim a few cans of beer out below the lake’s surface and crack them open beneath the cover of that sun-warmed wood.

  For those first Brett-free weeks, Coley and I were careful never to be underneath the dock together without at least one other person along. Even though we’d started hanging out again, just the two of us, the weight of what had happened at Coley’s ranch and the inescapably sexual world below those docks made both of us nervous.

  After the lake we’d throw my bike in the back of Coley’s truck and head over to Taco John’s to score free Choco Tacos and nachos off of Jamie, or maybe we’d go to my house and take long, separate (of course) showers, eat whatever Ruth had cooked up, watch some TV, though even there we worked hard not to find ourselves alone in my bedroom for any reason, at least not without the door wide open. There was a steady crackle that buzzed between us during those early-summer days, like a radio set between station signals, the volume low, and neither of us said a thing about it. But it was there.

  Coley was over one such night and we were half watching a Magnum, P.I. rerun with Grandma, the windows open and a big old black fan whirring in front of them but doing us no good, just blowing the curtains and the hot air around the three of us. We had a bowl of quickly thawing frozen grapes on the coffee table and a fat, black housefly was buzzing about them.

  During a commercial Grandma said, “We have the cemetery on Saturday. I want you to go to Friendly Floral and get some nice arrangements.” She produced two fresh-from-the-bank-crisp twenties from the pocket of her housecoat and handed them to me. She’d obviously been planning this moment, the announcement of this task, which made me that all-of-a-sudden kind of sad.

  I’d cleared the day off with Hazel at the start of the summer, but it had seemed further away then than it actually was. “Ruth is at that big Sally-Q thing on Saturday,” I said, loud and looking right at her, because Grandma’s hearing was worse than ever and she had the TV turned up.

  “I know she is,” Grandma said in a stage whisper, because Tom Selleck was back on, jogging on white Hawaiian sand. “It’s just going to be you and me, kid.”

  “I didn’t know it was this weekend,” Coley said, putting her hand on top of my hand, and even though it made us both flinch, she didn’t move it right away. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I’ve never been to the Miles City cemetery before.”

  “Your dad isn’t . . .” I asked, without wanting to finish that sentence.

  She shook her head. “He was cremated. He wanted to be left at the ranch.”

  This was territory that Coley and I hadn’t ever covered in much detail, and now I think that avoidance seemed extra strange to the both of us, since dead parents was such a particular kind of commonality.

  “I don’t really know what my parents wanted,” I said. “But the Miles City cemetery is what they got.”

  Coley squeezed my fingers. “You want me to come with you Saturday?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would be really cool of you.”

  So she did, and it was three instead of just the two of us, on a day a lot like the day we’d had the funeral, hot and dry, and Grandma even wore the same black dress she’d worn then, and the same rhinestone-studded brooch. Coley wore a little floral skirt and a linen top. I wore khaki shorts and a white button-down oxford shirt Ruth had bought me, a tiny polo player embroidered where the pocket would have been if it had a pocket, which it didn’t. In honor of the occasion I did a sloppy job of ironing both the shorts and the shirt, and tucked the shirt in, too—but I rolled the sleeves just the same. It was too hot not to.

  Grandma’s forty bucks bought two big bouquets of everything except the white lilies I refused, and Ruth had arranged for a couple of really nice planters to be installed at my parents’ plot, big copper things filled with red geraniums and ivy. Coley said how nice the gravestones were, and squeezed my shoulders while I squeezed Grandma. I cleared some papery brown leaves that had gathered up against the cold granite. Grandma took out one of her embroidered hankies and used it. She told a little story about my dad once trying to cook something or other fancy for my mom, early on in their courtship, but he messed it up and started a kitchen fire. From that plot at the crest of the hill we could see across the main road and over the top of a backyard fence to watch a little girl as she went down a teal slide into an aboveground pool. Up the ladder, down the slide, and repeat, her long brown braid flopping behind her as she ran around the deck.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said to Coley, still watching the girl.

  “Me too,” she said. “This is a really nice place. It’s not what I expected.”

  After a few more minutes Grandma needed to get out of the sun and so we all went to Dairy Queen and Coley and I had cherry Dilly Bars and Grandma first had just onion rings and complained about how much she wanted ice cream, and so then she had most of a Hawaiian Blizzard even though she shouldn’t have, and we had to rush her home to shoot her insulin pretty soon afterward.

  While Grandma napped, Coley sat on the edge of my bed and I sat in my desk chair. We had on Adventures in Babysitting, which Coley had never seen, but I don’t think either of us was much watching Elisabeth Shue and her perfect blond curls hitch a ride from a hook-handed big rig driver, sing in a Chicago blues bar, and fight off the mob, all in one night.

  I had taken a bunch of wrapped alcohol pads during CPR training, little squares of soft white paper with blue writing, like tiny pillows. I was planning to use them to make a padded cell in one of the dollhouse bedrooms, but right then they were just arranged in neat stacks in front of me—stacks I kept undoing and redoing. Coley got up, took the Quake Lake picture of my mom down from the TV, and studied it close, though she’d asked about it before and I’d told her the story.

  “Your mom looked a lot like you,” she said.

  “When she was little,” I said. “Not as much if you see her pictures from high school.”

  “What did she look like then?”

  “She was really pretty. Miles of style.”

  “You’re pretty,” Coley said, like she hadn’t just said that at all.

  “No, you’re pretty, Coley,” I said. “That’s not my area.”

  “Then what’s your area?”

  “Dollhouse interior design,” I said, getting up and crossing in front of her to my swim bag, flung on the floor the previous night. I had a pack of gum in there, its waxy paper packaging damp from a week of wet towels.

  Coley stood up and put back the picture, and when I tried to go to my desk chair she was still standing there, in that tiny walkway between the dresser and my bed, and I couldn’t get past her.

  “You want?” I asked her, holding out the orange Bubblicious.

  “Nope,” she said. And then we were kissing. That’s exactly how it happened. I had a sugar-crystally lump of not yet really chewed gum lodged in my molars and Coley’s mouth was all over mine and the door to my room was wide open and there was no going back and so we didn’t go back. We went onto my bed, me on top of Coley, because she pulled me there, and we kept all our clothes on and made out to Adventures in Babysitting and Coley didn’t seem nervous and she didn’t seem unsure and we didn’t stop until Grandma was calling up the stairs and asking about what we wanted to do for supp
er.

  “We’ll be right down,” I yelled, turning my head toward the door but still very much on top of Coley.

  “I’m still with Brett,” Coley said to me then, as if that settled anything at all.

  I think Coley got pretty good at convincing herself that what the two of us were doing with each other night after night after hot, still, big-sky Montana night was just some bound-to-happen-in-college-experimentation thing come early. And I tried hard not to let on that I knew otherwise, or at least desperately hoped for otherwise.

  Our new thing was to go to the movies. Coley would come get me at Scanlan, take me home, and I’d shower fast while she chatted with Grandma. Then we’d head off to see whatever was showing. The only problem being that the Montana Theatre kept the same two movies, a seven o’clock and a nine o’clock, for a week at a go. And we never were in time to make the seven o’clock. So that summer we saw A League of Their Own, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman Returns, and Death Becomes Her three to four times each. On the big screen, feet and feet of Michelle Pfeiffer as Cat Woman, Bruce Willis as a dorky plastic surgeon and not an action hero, Madonna in a vintage peach baseball uniform and a falser-with-every-screening Brooklyn accent. Though it was a theater built for hundreds, at the Tuesday- and Wednesday-night showings it was sometimes Coley, me, and fewer than ten other people in the entire place. Which is how we liked it.

  “You girls are going to the show again?” Ruth asked us on more than one occasion when she happened to be home while I was changing. “The same movie? It must be pretty fantastic.” But Ruth was with Ray, and always busy with Sally-Q and GOP, and by then we’d learned pretty well how to stay out of each other’s way, especially because Ruth so loved Coley and thought she was good for me.