Ruth made a gaspy-squeaky sort of noise and shook her head back and forth and blinked her eyes the way one of the Looney Tunes did after smacking into a brick wall.
“Sorry about the shock. I like to get one right away,” the girl told us, letting the big black camera hang around her neck, pulling her head down some. The photo slid forward like a tongue, but she didn’t pull it free. “Just as soon as folks get here I snap one. It has to be the very first moment; it’s the best.”
“Why’s it the best?” I asked her, walking around the Fetus Mobile to see that leg up close. Her real one was bony and pasty white, but the fake one had some girth, some plasticky definition, and was Beach Barbie tanned.
“You can’t use words to describe it—that’s why the photos. I think it’s because it’s the purest moment. The most undiluted.”
Ruth did a weird kind of chuckle after she’d said that. I could tell she was uncomfortable with this girl as our greeter.
The girl finally plucked free the picture and held it up so only she and I could see it. The shot was mostly Ruth’s head too close to the lens and her mouth a line of displeasure, with me seeming far behind her, almost smiling.
“I’m Cameron,” I said. I knew that if I didn’t speak, Ruth would, and for some reason I wanted this girl to like me right away. Maybe because whoever it was I had been expecting to meet us, this girl wasn’t her.
“I know. We’ve all been talking about you coming. I’m Jane Fonda.” She was smiling and rocking a little on that leg. It squeaked like a bath toy.
“Serious? Jane Fonda?” I smiled back.
“I’m always serious,” she said. “Ask anybody. So the deal is that Rick’s in Bozeman at Sam’s Club buying food and stuff. I’ll give you the grand tour and then he’ll be back before too long.” She leaned toward me. “Sam’s Club and Walmart give us a big discount, and free food, sometimes. Mostly chicken breasts and bananas. He does a decent barbecue chicken, but he gets the cheap toilet paper—the scratchy kind you have to double up on.”
“There are worse things,” Ruth said. “Shall we bring the luggage now?”
“Indubitably,” Jane said.
“I can’t believe your name is actually Jane Fonda,” I said. “That’s crazy.”
She tapped her clipboard against her leg two times and it sounded sorta like when I was little and would tap my plastic drumsticks against my Mr. Potato Head. “Talk about the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “We swim in crazy here.”
The grounds at Promise had a little of everything that western Montana is famous for, things that the state tourism board makes sure show up on postcards and in guidebooks: golden-green fields for archery or horseback riding, densely wooded trails dotted with Indian paintbrush and lupine, two streams that, according to Jane, were just aching with trout, and a so-blue-it-looked-fake mountain lake only a mile and a half’s hike away from the main building. Both sides of the campus (the compound) were bordered by the grazing land of cattle ranchers sympathetic to the holy cause of saving our souls from a lifetime of sexual deviance. Even that hot August afternoon, the wind down from the mountains was crisp, and on it rode the sweet scent of hay, the good spice of pine and cedar.
Jane Fonda took us cross-country, that squeaky leg surprisingly springy, and Ruth determined not to lose step with a cripple, even if not losing step meant bouncing the battered, green, Winner’s-Airlines-issued wheelie suitcase now packed with my stuff over prairie-dog holes and sagebrush. I lugged a pink Sally-Q case, one that Ruth had told me she would be taking back with her, but I could keep the Winner’s one. Out with the old, in with the new.
Jane sort of motioned to the chicken coop (eggs were collected each morning by students on a rotating schedule); to an empty horse stable (they were planning to get some horses, though); to a cluster of metal-roofed cabins used only during the summer, for camp; to two small cabins where Reverend Rick and the school’s assistant director, Lydia March, lived. But Jane wasn’t so much a tour guide as someone we might have happened upon in a foreign town, someone who felt obligated to show us around a little. As we walked, I stared at the back of her T-shirt. On it was a black-and-white print of a female athlete, maybe a volleyball player, judging by her shorts and tank top, stretching after an exhausting match—her ponytail limp, her brow dewy. Next to the image were the purple words SEEK GOD IN ALL THAT YOU DO.
The main building was built, I think, to resemble an aspen lodge, with log siding and a grand entrance; but once we were inside, it felt just like Gates of Praise back in Miles City, but bigger, and with dorm rooms. The floors were all that industrial laminate poorly imitating hardwood. The windows were too few, fluorescent lighting everywhere. Someone had made an attempt with the main room—a fireplace, cheap Navajo-style woven rugs, a moose head over the mantel—but even that room smelled like disinfectant and floor cleaner.
“Where is everybody?” I asked, and was first answered by a cavernous echo of my own voice.
“Most everybody’s in Bozeman with Pastor Rick. Lydia’s somewhere in England—that’s where she’s from. She visits a couple times a year. But I think some disciples are at the lake, maybe. Summer camp just ended last week, so this is like transition time before the regular school session starts. Freedom time.” She flicked on a light switch and started down a hallway.
“So you kids just do whatever you want this week?” Aunt Ruth trot-trotted a little to catch her, the suitcase wheels spinning sprays of dirt and grass on those shiny floors.
“I mean not really. We just don’t have as many group activities, but we still do our Bible study and one-on-one sessions.” She stopped at a closed door, which had two things taped to it: a poster of the Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline and a Xerox copy of the Serenity Prayer, the purple ink so faded and the paper so yellowed and curled that it somehow had gained an air of history, almost of authenticity.
Jane tapped the door with her clipboard. “This is you. And Erin. She’s in Bozeman with Rick.”
Aunt Ruth tsk-tsked her head some. She still hadn’t come to terms with the roommate thing. Who could blame her? I hadn’t either. I’d been given her name earlier in the week and I’d been regularly picturing my new roommate, Erin, as a bespectacled, chubby girl with unruly curls and a smattering of acne across her perpetually flushed cheeks. Erin would be a pleaser. I just knew it. She would be working hard, asking God to help her so that the grungy but holy men in that poster on our door might actually do it for her—goose bumps on her neck, a prickle across her chest. Praying to Jesus to help her want them the way she had that girl from her study hall, from her science lab. He’s a tall drink of water she would tell me about some male movie star, some action hero, and then she would giggle. Erin would most definitely be a giggler.
We were still waiting outside the door. Jane nodded at the handle. “You can go in,” she said. “We don’t lock anything here. The doors aren’t usually even shut, but since no one’s in there, it’s fine, I guess.” She must’ve seen my face because she added, “You’ll get used to it.”
I couldn’t quite believe her.
Erin’s half of the room was done up in lots of yellows and purples: a yellow bedspread with purple pillows, a purple lamp with a yellow shade, a massive bulletin board with a yellow-and-purple-striped frame, the whole thing collaged with snapshots and Christian concert tickets and handwritten Bible quotes.
“Erin’s from Minnesota. Big Vikings fan,” Jane said. “Plus she’s a second year, and she’s earned some privileges you don’t have, I mean with the posters and whatever.” She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders. “Yet. You’ll get them eventually. Probably, anyway.”
My half of the room was sterile and blank, and I hadn’t really brought much to change that. We put my bags on the new-looking twin mattress. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to unpack right then, so I just pulled out a few random items and set them on my desk hutch: a stack of brand-new notebooks and a box of pens, purchased by Ruth; Kleenex; a picture of
Mom and Dad and me one Christmas; Mom’s pre–Quake Lake picture; the picture of Margot and Mom, which Ruth had looked at sort of funny while inspecting my luggage but had let me keep. Make an effort, I thought. I added my Extreme Teen Bible.
Ruth was examining that big bulletin board. She seemed to be noticing my lack of color in the face of all that was the Viking Erin. Maybe it made her a little sad for me. She reminded me to grab the reading lamp and alarm clock from the Fetus Mobile before she left with them.
“I think you’re going to do really well here, Cammie. I mean it.” She reached out to put an arm around me and I stepped away from her, pretending that I had a sudden and compulsive interest in looking out the window I’d be looking out all year. The view was unbelievable, so there was that, anyway.
Thank God Jane got us out of there. “Would you like to stop by the dining hall? Rick thought you might be hungry. There’s sandwich stuff.”
“Sounds good,” Ruth said, already out the door.
Jane squeaked fast behind her. I paused at the bulletin board. There was one girl repeated in every photo. Had to be Erin. I was right about everything but the acne. Her skin was as clear as those girls in Noxzema ads, maybe due to her prayers before lights out. God grant me flawless pores. God grant me a healthy glow.
We were only just finished with egg salad on white when a big blue van pulled up outside, and the sliding door with the silver God’s Promise logo slid open, and my fellow diseased poured out like a rush of holy water to pass over me and cleanse me and envelop me into their stream.
It was Hi, I’m Helen. We’re just so glad that you’re here. And I’m Steve. We just bought tons of Cap’n Crunch. Are you into Cap’n Crunch? So good. And Mark and Dane said they’d show me the lake, and Adam said he’d heard that I was a runner, and that he ran in the mornings and had seen tons of elk and deer and even a moose once or twice. And those things are freakin’ huge. And it was these tight little embraces, and touching my arm, and these shiny, shiny eyes, and everyone smiling at me like we were all plastic characters out of some board game like Candy Land or Hi Ho! Cherry-O. And the thing I kept thinking was: Is it really okay to be doing all this touching?
I looked at Jane, who seemed just as royally awkward, that camera still hanging from her neck, and I checked to make sure, in all this goodness and light, that her fake leg hadn’t suddenly healed itself, sprouted anew and perfect and pure. It hadn’t. That was something.
The Viking Erin was the last off the van. She stepped from it like it was a carriage once sprung from a pumpkin, all these bright-eyed well-wishers her subjects, her court, and me the new lady-in-waiting. She was confident in her denim overalls and sandals, her curls shiny and healthy; everything about her—even her roundness, her softness—made her seem somehow healthy. Maybe I was totally wrong about this girl. Maybe she was their leader?
She shrieked when she saw me. And then the giggle, a trajectory of such giggles. As we hugged, she said everything that prayer on her door, that bulletin board, had told me she would. How she was so glad to again have a roommate, and so glad we would take this journey together, and so glad that I was athletic, because she had been really trying to become so herself. I was more pleased with me in that moment, in the actualization of my intuition, than I would be for weeks.
But while Erin was cheerful and pleasant, she lacked a certain something that some of her equally affectionate classmates did not. I just couldn’t place it, that something. I studied Jane’s face, tried to read it. One final embrace from Adam shrouded me briefly in a sweet, sticky smell that I struggled for a moment to identify, but only because of my surroundings. In the embrace’s release I caught the scent again. Unmistakable. Marijuana. These homos were high as kites.
Ruth was over with Reverend Rick, who was in his rock-star weekend attire of jeans and a T-shirt, and when we caught glances, he gave me a big smile and a wave. He seemed just the same as he had when he’d visited Gates of Praise. And Ruth wouldn’t know this smell if she was handed a joint. If she was handed a bong. Were they all high? Was Pastor Rick high too? I couldn’t get a read on Jane. She was talking with the Cap’n Crunch guy about the group’s purchases. A couple of them were already dispersing to their rooms, to the kitchen. Freedom time, Jane had said. I would have taken my high outdoors.
Despite how unnatural the movement, I leaned in close to Erin as she listed off various furniture arrangements we might try in our room, for fun. I pretended like I was having trouble hearing her. “So you’re all about the Vikings, huh?” I asked, inhaling deeply. Nothing except dryer sheet–smelling overalls.
“You know it! Don’t worry—you’ll get decoration privileges soon. Maybe you’ll become a Vikings fan in the meantime.” Erin started up a lengthy question-and-answer session, and for the second time that day, it was Jane who played my rescuer.
She was just so authentic with that clipboard. “Sorry, you two,” she said. “Rick needs to meet with your aunt. He said I should finish showing you around.”
I thought that I was done with Jane as semidisinterested tour guide, but seeing the clipboard, the implied authority of the good preacher, and Erin was off to our room. She couldn’t wait, though, she told me, until we could just gab and gab.
Jane said something to Reverend Rick. He nodded at me again, everything just so, well, cool, relaxed. Then Jane took me to the hayloft of the main barn. She struggled climbing the ladder, its wood old and gray, but she struggled like it was a common thing. I could tell she came here often. Me a townie kid and always discovering things of such importance in barns.
“So now you’ve met your fellow sinners,” Jane said as she motioned for me to sit at the loft’s edge, which I did, while she settled in next to me. She had to put her hand against a post to do it, but she was surprisingly nimble. Everything was surprising: Jane, the place itself. “Any thoughts, observations?”
I just went for it. Why not? “Were they all high?” I asked as our legs swung free over the edge, Jane’s with that squeak every second and a half or so.
She laughed a small laugh. “Good for you,” she said. “It’s not everyone—there’s actually only a few of us repeat offenders.”
“So you too?”
“Yeah. Me included. You didn’t think Erin was one, didja?” Jane did this little smile, but not at me. Out at the barn.
“No. I figured that out pretty quick.” I flicked pieces of hay over the edge just to watch them flutter and sail. “Doesn’t Reverend Rick catch on? A couple of them smelled like they came straight from Woodstock.”
“He can’t smell. Not at all. He hasn’t ever been able to—since birth. You’ll hear all about it. He loves to find meaning in his not being able to smell.” Jane flashed a quick picture of some falling hay. She used that camera like a whip.
“What about everybody else?”
“You just met them. They don’t need to get high. God is the best high, right?” Jane actually hooked my eyes to hers with that line. But she wouldn’t let them stay that way.
“Why don’t they tell on you?”
She smiled to herself again. “Sometimes they do.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll see. Whatever you think this place is, you’ll be in for a surprise. I mean it. You just have to be here for a while and you’ll understand.”
“It’s not like I have a choice,” I said. “I’m stuck here. This is where I am.”
“Then I’m guessing you’ll want in.”
“With what?”
“The pot,” Jane said, so matter-of-factly.
I hadn’t thought it would be this easy. Or maybe it wouldn’t be easy at all, but she had offered. “Absolutely,” I said.
“Do you have any money?”
“Some,” I said. We weren’t supposed to bring any money with us; that was in the manual. But I’d rolled about $500 worth of lifeguarding cash and leftover bills from Dad’s dresser drawer, twenties and fifties, into tight little bundles barely thicker
than chopsticks, and I’d hidden those in various locations throughout my luggage, so that even if some of them were found, others might escape.
Jane was messing with the straps and buckles on her leg, pulling at things. It was grossing me out. The stump was all covered with a brace and padding, but I was afraid that if she didn’t stop messing with it soon, it wouldn’t be.
She noticed me noticing this. “I keep some of the stash in my leg. I have a little compartment hollowed out. You’ll get over it.”
“I’m fine with it,” I said, throwing lots of hay and not looking.
“No you’re not. But you will be after a couple of hits.” In her fingers was a baggie with a good amount of pot in it, and also a soapstone pipe.
I was impressed. “I’m impressed,” I said.
Jane packed the pipe like someone who had done it plenty of times before, replaced the bag, and pulled forth a red Bic. “I’m resourceful. I’m actually a bit of an off-the-land type, you know? I was born in a barn.”
It seemed like the setup for a punch line. “Oh yeah. You and Jesus.”
“Exactly,” she told me, exhaling, passing the pipe.
It was strong but harsh, potent is maybe the word, though not necessarily enjoyable going in. My eyes watered immediately.
“You’ll get used to it,” Jane said as I hacked like a sick cat. “I do the best I can for what’s essentially ditch weed.”
I nodded at her, squinting, and tried again, let the smoke fill me up while closing my eyes, passing her the pipe before letting myself fall back into the hay. “Where do you guys buy from?”
“From me. I grow it a couple of miles from here, just enough to last us the winter. If we’re careful,” she added before sucking in again.
I propped myself up on my elbow and studied her as she held in the smoke. “No shit? You’re the resident weed farmer?”
She passed the bowl again and settled herself down in the hay with me. “I just told you; I’m an off-the-land type.”
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 24