The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  Ruth stood, worked the zipper on the top bag. “We just didn’t want to wait any longer, and you’re home, so that worked. The sanctuary is always so beautiful at Christmas with the poinsettias and the candles—we don’t really even have to add anything.” She slid kind of a champagne-colored dress from its sheath. It had a matching coat thing. It was fine. It was just fine to wear to a wedding. “This is choice number one,” she said. “The next bag has two dresses in it, so there’s three choices in all.”

  “Are these bridesmaids’ dresses?” I asked, though I meant something more but didn’t know how to work it into the right words.

  Ruth kept her hands busy, her eyes on the bags, unhooking the hangers from one another, a twist tie keeping them bound. “No, I’m just having Karen and Hannah; I’ve talked about them before, you remember; they’re good friends from Florida, from my Winner’s flight crew; they’re both flying into Billings tomorrow and I’m having them. You’re still the maid of honor.”

  That was it. That’s what I was wondering. “I can’t be,” I said.

  Ruth stopped her busy hands, looked at me. “What do you mean?” she asked, but she had to know what I meant.

  She really did look so tired, so un-Ruth, but I said it anyway: “I’ll go to the wedding, I want to, but I won’t be your maid of honor.” I kept talking fast before she could interrupt. “And I don’t think it’s fair to get upset about me saying that. You can’t have it both ways.”

  She shook her head. “What does that mean, both ways?”

  “You can’t ship me away to get fixed and then show me off as your dressed-up niece starring in the role of Maid of Honor.”

  “That’s not what I—that isn’t even . . .” she said. And then she sighed. And then she said, in a quiet voice, “But that’s fine, Cammie. I accept your decision.” She pulled at the big, droopy collar of the turtleneck sweater she was wearing, blew her sigh toward her bangs like beauty-pageant contestants do to show how much they’re trying to keep from crying, but she worked it out, no tears came. She said, “I really thought this would be a good thing. I thought you might do this because it could be a kind of healing moment for the two of us.”

  I stopped looking at her. I fiddled with the dollhouse instead. “I’ve already done a lot of healing this year. This break is supposed to be my vacation from healing.”

  Ruth huffed and threw the bag she had been working the zipper on onto the bed, where it slapped against the others. Her voice had a jagged edge to it. “Now see, I don’t know how to talk to you when you’re like this.” She took a step toward me. “Is what you just said supposed to be funny? Was that a joke or wasn’t it? I’m asking in a genuine way: I really don’t know.”

  “Did you think it was funny?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then I guess if it was a joke it blew.” I snapped off a clump of dried sagebrush from where I’d glued it as one of two tiny bushes flanking the dollhouse’s front path. I’d taken that sagebrush from Coley’s ranch. Now it crunched in a satisfying way in my palm as I tightened and tightened my fist around it.

  “Fine,” Ruth said. “This is obviously still how things are.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  She went back to the garment bags, shifted one on top of the next. “These are nice dresses,” she said. “You can still wear one of them, maid of honor or not.”

  “I’ll wear my Promise uniform,” I said.

  “If that’s what you want,” she said. “I’ll just take them with me, then.” She gathered up the bags, not so careful this time, just folding them over her arm, their hard plastic making a vwoosh noise against her body each step she descended away from me.

  After she left, I let myself feel a little bit terrible for what I’d said, no matter how true, and then vindicated in my decision, and then terrible, and while I was doing this, I kept on exploring the dollhouse, all those bits and pieces of stuff, just this stuff, glued on all the surfaces. I also waited to feel like myself, as if it would land on me all at once, this feeling like I was me again because I was home. And it didn’t come.

  People said it was a nice wedding. I don’t know—maybe that’s just what people say. I thought it was nice, but I didn’t think it was nearly as lavish as the ceremony and reception I know Ruth had planned for all those years. It was nothing like that. I hadn’t been to very many weddings, though, only three or four, with my parents, when I was little; so I didn’t have a lot to go by.

  This wedding immediately followed the GOP Christmas Eve service. Coley and her mom and Ty were at that service, and Brett and his family. They were in the same row, in the middle, not near where we sat at all. The Christmas Eve service was always by candlelight, the place packed, everybody a little dressed up, chatty, excited, but even still: People noticed me. They could have been noticing my blue flannel skirt, its pleats, my collared white shirt sticking out over my navy sweater, my hair shiny and tucked behind my ears, my altogether neat and presentable Promise-approved appearance, but I’m pretty sure it was more than that. I got a couple looks of flat-out disgust, sneers, people doing those big-movement side-to-side head shakes in my direction to perform their disapproval. I guess one semester wasn’t enough to wash off the stain of my perversion. Brett caught my eye as people were leaving, a slow-moving river of bodies working their arms into their winter coats, chins down, inching zippers over their puffy sweaters, shoving hats on the tops of their children’s heads. Ray and Ruth had gone off to the Sunday-school classrooms to change into their wedding clothes. Grandma and I were just waiting out the mass emptying of the sanctuary. Brett took me in fully, didn’t hide his stare, though I couldn’t read his face. And Mrs. Taylor pursed her lips, wore her disgust openly, twisted up her face to do it, but she looked away eventually. Coley was between the two of them, each of them holding one of her hands, but she didn’t look my way, or at least she made it seem like she didn’t. She still looked as perfectly Coley as she ever had, but seeing her didn’t knock me over, it didn’t sock the wind out of me, like I’d thought it might. I guess I’d felt that way, just a little, when first I’d glimpsed her, from behind, during the service. It was seeing the back of her head, her hair, just like all those weeks in the science room. It jarred me. But it wasn’t something I couldn’t withstand.

  Now, as she left, I wanted to let my eyes follow her all the way out and into the vestibule, as far as I could watch, because it was like seeing her new, somehow, but Grandma was looking at me, and probably other people were too, waiting for my reaction, and so I looked away. I didn’t see Ty leave the sanctuary. He wasn’t with them any longer.

  Then Jamie’s mom came toward our pew, and I must have made some face, some hopeful look, scanning the people around her for Jamie, because she frowned at me, and then, in a move I considered prompted by a burst of Christmas spirit, she cut her way between a couple of people and leaned over to me and said, “Jamie’s not here. He’s at his dad’s for Christmas, in Hysham.”

  I said, “Tell him I said hi. I miss him.” I wanted to say other things but I couldn’t.

  “I’ll tell him,” she said. And then she cut back into the stream, but turned to me again, a few steps away, and said, “You look nice.”

  Once people went home to their trees, their eggnog, fifty or so of us gathered in the front few pews. Ray and Ruth looked exactly like the real-life versions of those plastic bride and groom wedding toppers: standard black tux, white dress, a bouquet of roses. Ruth had had, according to Grandma, quite a bit of trouble finding a dress she liked. Her NF tumor, the one she’d had since birth on her back, too close to her spine, had grown some, was more golf ball than walnut now, and she was (understandably) embarrassed by it. She’d found a doctor in Minneapolis who thought he could probably remove at least part of it, but not until April, not in time for a backless gown at her winter wedding. I thought the one she’d settled on suited her, and it had a kind of satin drape thing, like a superlong scarf, a wrap, that went over her
shoulders and hid the tumor entirely.

  Ray had three sisters, a brother, a bunch of cousins. They all came. Some of them had families, and they came too. The church organist, Mrs. Cranwall, played a couple of songs; Tandy Baker sang “How Firm a Foundation.” Ruth cried during the vows. Ray maybe teared up as well. Then we went to the fellowship hall, where Ruth’s stewardess friends, who were sassy and loud—a good time, Grandma said—had strung those old-fashioned crepe-paper bells and played 45s on some record player they’d hauled in. I can’t believe it was quite the reception Ruth was planning on for all those years, but it’s what she got. We ate really moist red velvet cake and those cream cheese pastel pink, green, and yellow wedding mints with the sugar crystal outside—Grandma made those. I ate probably a dozen of them, liked the crunch of the sugar between my teeth followed by all that soft inside, so sweet it made my molars ache. I ate enough that I felt a little sick. People danced, drank ginger-ale punch, snapped photos on those disposable cameras. It was nice. Then it was over. Ray and Ruth went to a cabin out in the Pine Hills that belonged to somebody or other who had apparently set it all up for them, hauled roses and champagne out there. But they were going to return in late morning, and the Florida ladies would be coming over. We were all going to eat brunch, open presents.

  Grandma and I got to spend the rest of Christmas Eve together, just the two of us, though it was nearly midnight when we got home. We had to rush into the house, the night air that sharp, slicing kind of cold, and the wind different from the mountain wind at Promise. It was prairie wind, relentless, building up speed over miles and miles of flat expanse, then hurtling down the small streets of Miles City like hundreds of whistling pinballs loosed and thrashing around corners and curves.

  Once inside, we heard not just the whistling but something clashing against the roof, something hard and fast, and then twenty seconds might go by, and then another quick clash. My heart skipped around. I imagined Ty in his bulky Carhartt jacket outside our house. Ty waiting for us. It made no sense for him to be on the roof, I knew, but why should it make sense?

  “You must have been good enough this year to get you a visit from Santa,” Grandma said, while I tried, unsuccessfully, to press my face against the back-door window in such a way as to see what was out there.

  “No way,” I said, trying to grin. “He’s probably here for you.”

  “You okay, kiddo?” she asked me, studying my face.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Lots of things going on,” she said, touching my cheek.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s find out what this is.” She kept studying me while I put my coat back on, pulled up the hood.

  “How’s that poem go?” she asked. “‘Up on the roof we heard such a clatter, went to see what was the matter’?”

  “Something like that,” I said, opening the door, the wind already taking my breath. “Somebody’s wearing a kerchief, I remember that.” I stepped onto the back porch and the wind slammed the door behind me. I walked down the steps and all the way out into the center of the backyard, the dead lawn coated with just enough snow and ice for my footsteps to crunch, like over a thick layer of cornflakes. I looked up. That prairie wind had torn loose a whole string of Christmas lights from along the roofline and then had caught the string in its gust, was holding it aloft for moments at a time and then letting it dip, sometimes far enough to crash against the roof, before shooting it skyward again. It calmed me down to see that this was what was making the noise, it relieved me, all at once, made me a kind of giddy. And it was beautiful too, this lighted string thrashing against the dark night.

  “What is it, Spunky?” Grandma called from the doorway.

  “It’s lights,” I yelled.

  “What is it?” she yelled back.

  “Come see,” I yelled.

  She did. She hurried out with an afghan draped around her, her big slippers on. She stood next to me, looked up, smiled. “Look at that,” she said, her words coming out in steamy puffs. “They’re still all lit up.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s neat.”

  “It is neat,” she said. “That’s one way to put it.”

  I put my arm around her. She put her arm around me. From out there in the backyard, in the ice wind, for as long as we could stand to, we watched that string of lights dip and soar and crash and rise again.

  Later, after we’d said good night, gone to our beds, I could hear them, right above me, smacking into the roof, scraping along it, and a couple of times I even glimpsed the string, a whip of tiny lights, as the wind carried a part of it past my window. The next afternoon, after the honeymooners returned from their cabin, tired and punch-drunk, Ray hauled out the ladder, put on a thick pair of leather work gloves, climbed up to the roof, and restapled that renegade strand. And then they stayed put until he took them down, with all of the other lights, on New Year’s Day, prompt as he could possibly be, because he said that it really irked him when people left their Christmas lights up practically till Easter.

  I never got my face-to-face with Coley. I never did manage to see Jamie, though he called from his dad’s, once, and we talked for ten minutes or so, Ruth in the other room, not making faces or saying anything but for sure letting me know that she was there, that she was listening, so all the real content had to come from his end. He was dating Andrea Dixon, and unbelievably, according to Jamie, she put out like a champ. It made me sad when he told me he had to go, said that he missed my gay face. Other than that, I met with Pastor Crawford twice; Grandma and I baked a couple of low-sugar pies; Ray and I played Monopoly a bunch of times and I think he won them all. One afternoon Ruth gave me some worksheets from Lydia to fill out. I sat down and did them at the kitchen table. They were just like all the other stupid worksheets we had to do at Promise all the time. In this packet I had to read an essay by the Reverend John Smid titled “Exploring the Homosexual Myth,” and then answer some questions about it, basic reading-comprehension kinds of questions. It didn’t take long. Ruth asked me to bring the worksheets to her in the living room when I was done. I did. Ray was sitting in there with her. The TV was off and I could tell that they were waiting for me, and I could also tell that this meant we were going to have a chat about me, only hopefully this time there wouldn’t be as many tears as there had been at the chat we’d had in August, or at least not as many revelations.

  Turns out there weren’t any tears at all: not from Ruth and not from me. Ruth told me, very calmly, that she had discussed my progress with Lydia and Rick several times, and that even if I had a good spring semester, which she certainly hoped I would, everyone thought it would be best for me to stay at Promise during the summer—during Camp Promise.

  “The summer was a particularly bad time for you last year,” Ruth said. She still looked tired, even now, with the wedding behind her. Her hair was kind of squashed and lumpy and her face looked old. Ray, however, looked like the guy who’d just won the very biggest stuffed animal at the carnival. He’d looked like that since I’d gotten home.

  “I think last summer was a particularly good time,” I said.

  Ruth frowned at me. “What I mean is that you had too much freedom; there were too many opportunities for you to find yourself in trouble. Part of that is my fault, I know, but I can’t stay home with you all summer and neither can Ray.”

  “Grandma’s here,” I said. “I can stay with her and she can babysit me, since apparently that’s what I need.”

  Ruth made a tight line with her mouth. “No,” she said, smoothing her lap with her hands. I hadn’t seen her do that in a while. “That’s not an option. If you don’t want to stay at Promise, then there are other Christian summer camps I’m willing to discuss. Reverend Rick recommended several.”

  “I’ll stay at Promise,” I said.

  “Well, some of them sound very nice. There’s one in—where is that one with all the swimming activities?” she asked Ray.

  “South Dakota, I think
,” he said. “You still have the brochure, don’t you?” He smiled at me. “It seems pretty fancy.”

  “It is South Dakota,” Ruth said. “They have both an in-ground pool and a lake and they—”

  “No way,” I said. “I’ll stay at Promise.”

  “Okay, that’s your decision,” Ruth said.

  I snorted. “Hardly.”

  “It’s what you just now said that you wanted,” she said.

  “From the limited choices you’ve offered me,” I said, but I could see her ready to rattle off more Christian summer camps, so I added, “But you know what: It’s fine. Whatever.” And then, even though it scared me to ask, I said, “What about next year, for school?”

  “Well, we’ll have to see how the summer goes,” she said. “We’ll just have to see.”

  On New Year’s Eve the newlyweds went downtown and Grandma and I ordered pizza and made a huge bowl of popcorn and watched the CBS New Year’s special and not New Year’s Rockin’ Eve because Grandma had a grudge against Dick Clark stemming from something or other he’d done on American Bandstand years and years before, way before I was born, even. But the less popular special was fine with me. It was the first TV I’d seen in months, and not only that, both Pearl Jam and U2 were going to be on.

  “I have something else for you,” Grandma told me while we were getting everything settled in front of the TV. She had a stack of paper plates and napkins in her hand, and I thought that was all, but when she set them on the coffee table, she put one of those padded mailing envelopes down too. “It’s not from me, but I’m the one who snuck it away for you.”

  I picked it up. It had one of those professionally printed return-address labels with a silver, blocky monogram of MMK in its corner and California as the location.

  “I guess Margot’s not in Germany anymore,” I said, remembering our dinner, the stolen picture. It seemed like a long time ago.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Grandma said, “but I thought Ruth might not give it to you, no matter what, and she was such a good friend of your mom’s. It came a week or so ago and I got to it first and hid it. You go on and open it up and I’ll make sure it’s legal.” She winked a big wink at me.