“Lady Jane, Lady Jane,” he said into my ear.
He set me down and I reached for the porch banister to right myself.
“But you need your own title, of course. What, what?” He glanced around, noticed the brilliant orange-and-yellow rays of the diary on the grass. “Lady Sunshine?”
I smiled, accepting the honor. Then he turned from me and yelled: “Angel! Willow! Come meet Jane’s little girl! Hell, where are they?”
He turned back to me. “Willa’s surfing, and Angela’s trodding some board somewhere, no doubt. Well. Man. It’s beautiful that you’re here. Beautiful. Are you settled into our little wilderness okay?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Where are you bunking?”
“Slipstream cabin, down there.”
He picked up the diary from the grass and I stiffened, fearing he would read my page of quick brown foxes. But he closed it without a glance and handed it to me. “You didn’t want to stay in the house, with Willa?”
It wasn’t an option.
“Oh, no, I have tons of work to do this summer, so the privacy’ll be good.” Work? Where did that come from?
“What are you, sixteen? What the devil kind of summer homework have they got you doing at sixteen?”
“Seventeen. I’m writing an extra-credit report for next year’s social studies class. On communal living. That’s why I’m here.” I held up the diary, my “workbook,” as proof. “My school is kind of intense. Didn’t my father say anything about it when he called?”
A funny half smile passed over my uncle’s face, disappearing as quickly as it appeared. “I didn’t speak to him, sweetheart.” Fathoms of information were contained in this admission. He hadn’t spoken to him, didn’t speak to him. Wouldn’t speak to him.
I’d pieced together a story regarding the two men’s differences and history, friction over my mother’s medical treatment during her difficult pregnancy with me. But I didn’t know everything.
I pressed on with my lie. “Is it okay, then, me taking some notes about your home this summer?”
“You scribble away, sugar. Study this motley crew all you want.” He looked at the cover of the diary, the happy, melting cursive of the words. He said, gently, “We’re just awfully glad you’re here.”
He scooped me up again, crushing the diary between us, and twirled me around higher than before. This time I was more prepared, and had enough equilibrium to look up. And over my uncle’s massive shoulder I saw that Willa was up in her bedroom, the window raised, staring down at us. Not surfing, then.
One spin: her pale, gold-aura’d face was there. By the next revolution she’d vanished.
But I knew she’d seen everything.
Ray,
That’s what I’m going to call you, in honor of your hideous kindergarten finger paint sunray cover. Because you’re not dear, you’re a stranger.
I’ll bet you were expecting hearts, and a girl pining away for Chad in homeroom, and doodling “Mrs. Chad Somethingorother” in pink bubblegum-scented ink all over your Tang-colored pages, and consulting with you on if she should let Chad feel her up over or under her bra after pep club. I’ll bet you just live for that stuff, you pervy little thing. Well, get over it. I’m not that kind of girl...
So, I’m settled, I guess. It’s pretty here, but strange. Strange that these people are related to me.
My uncle. Not what I expected. In his old album picture he was thin, almost starved-looking, like James Taylor and Jackson Browne. Now he’s hulking and round-shouldered, with a full beard. He’s not at all handsome, but...arresting.
My aunt Angela. She shares Debbie Harry’s birth name and hair color, but that’s about it. Long fair hair pulled into a loose, high bun, the old-fashioned ’60s style called a “Psyche Knot.” Gentle and pretty, with a vague smile. I’ve only seen her once, from afar. She’s away a lot with some theater troupe.
Willa.
A real hippie, not like those fraud ones who buy feather hair clips at Stern Grove on Saturdays, all free love and do-your-own-thing, then call me Supertramp an hour later. She disappears into the woods, or goes camping down at the beach. The kind of girl who sketches fairies, who perfumes herself with neroli oil from the Nature Shed and survives on nut butter and sprouts. I wear Coty Nuance and my favorite food is French dip. Prob we wouldn’t get along.
But there’s something about her. A calm that floats around her like her cloud of hair. I envy that calm.
But she doesn’t want me here, and I can’t figure out why.
6
No Stalling, No Skipping, No Exceptions
1979
I waited for my cousin to approach me. Nothing. She didn’t show for meals at the long line of shoved-together picnic tables, either.
And I was certain it was because of me.
But a couple days after I spoke with Graham, I met my aunt Angela, who’d just returned from a touring outdoor Beckett production. She was in her garden, an expertly plotted space in the flat clearing behind the house. Rows of vegetables and herbs, a neat shed, a stone well. She wore a straw hat that dwarfed mine, a big newspaper delivery bag slung over her narrow body, brimming with weeds. When she saw me she sat back on her heels.
“Are you Angela?” I’d show these bumpkins some city etiquette. “I’m—”
“Jacqueline.” She stood and embraced me; her slender arms tentative, loosely circling me, the weed-filled newspaper bag between us keeping our bodies far apart. Nothing like her husband’s whirlwind, wind-knocking hug. “You came back here looking for some peace and quiet, I’ll bet. Well. You find a nice shady spot and I won’t bother you. No one bothers me here. You can eat here, if you like. You come any time it gets to be too much.”
“Too much?”
“The visitors, the noise.”
“I don’t mind it.”
“I value quiet time so much, myself, when I’m home. So I understand. Sometimes it can be a bit...” She nodded at the house, indicating what was on the other side—her husband and their guests. Forty or fifty summer visitors of all ages, representing a couple dozen states and the province of British Columbia; I’d surveyed license plates.
My aunt offered me iced tea made from her own mint, running down to the kitchen and returning with two tall glasses. As we sat in the shade and sipped, she asked gentle questions about my hobbies, the drive up here, my home in San Francisco. “And do you like your school?”
Vaughn Academy. I’d transferred in last year because Patricia “wondered if” my public school was challenging enough. I pictured the pink stucco arches and chilly courtyard, the quotes by dead men engraved in the pavers, the classmates I messed around with just to watch their eyes flutter closed. Public school kids called it Vomit Academy behind our backs (I knew because I used to do it).
“It’s a good school, I guess.”
“Is there a theater program?”
“Probably. I haven’t had time to check it out yet.” The truth—each day I bolted the second the bell rang, stuffing my gold-crested blazer into my backpack and rolling down my navy uniform socks, rubbing at the grid of pink, knee-high grooves they left in my calves. “You’re an actress, right? Kate said you’re really good.”
She waved this away. “Just a bit of fun. Amateur productions. They get me out of the dirt. I almost forgot, I made something for you as a little welcome gift.” She flitted to her little slate-covered shed and returned with several bundles of dried lavender tied with black grosgrain ribbon. She smiled shyly and held them out to me. “For your cabin. I saw the baby’s breath decorating your windowsill so I know you like dried flowers as much as I do.”
I took the pale purple bouquets, breathing in their clean smell. I couldn’t correct her about the baby’s breath I’d chucked out the window, not when she’d been so thoughtful. “I love them, thank you.”
; “Well, I’m just so happy you’re visiting. If you need anything, you let me or Kate know.”
And your daughter?
I wished she’d mention her. Ask if we’d met, or apologize for her absence, her lack of manners. Anything to clue me in to why Willa had taken an instant dislike to me. I was no stranger to girls not liking me. None of my female Vaughn classmates did. My public-school-transfer-student stigma plus a reputation for blatantly tugging people’s belt loops upstairs at parties had taken care of that—the hypocrites called me Supertramp in the halls, as though the same upstairs recreation was acceptable if the girl was more discreet. My preference for sharing Saturday Night Live impressions with the guys at the “goober” lunch table didn’t help, either.
But I hadn’t done anything to put Willa off, at least not intentionally. For all she knew, I was the companion she’d dreamed of. A fellow fairy buff.
Angela went back to her weeds, loosening them with a long-tined fork, setting them in her grass-stained San Francisco Chronicle bag.
I was about to leave when she said with a small smile, a nervous quiver in her voice, “Jacqueline? Don’t feel like you have to go to their campfires when they start up. I never do.”
Later, much later, I would remember my aunt’s choice of words: their campfires.
* * *
Dear Ray,
Campfire
That’s what it’s called. No “The.” Just campfire.
Campfire is what we do here every night after dinner. You’re picturing marshmallow-roasting and singing, and a bucket of water for safety, and a circle of a few dozen people smiling and talking around snapping flames, warming their hands against the night, watching sparks spiral slowly way up to the sky. And all of that is accurate.
But I can tell you that your idea of campfire is completely, epically, fantastically wrong. Because you’re imagining the feeling of a normal campfire. Casual, winding down before bed, relaxed.
And there’s nothing peaceful about campfire...
Campfire always started the same way.
At dusk, that evening after I first met Angela, I was with Kate in the kitchen, stacking the mugs I had wiped dry onto the wire racks, when I looked out the window and noticed a growing imbalance in the field. It was subtle, but unmistakable: bodies moving to one side of the big open circle at the center of the property. People emerged from their cabins, or hiked up from the beach, their hair still damp, or wandered over from the picnic tables or Rec Room or pool. They held their children’s hands, or their long-necked yellow Uno D’Oro beer bottles, or both.
There was a feeling of expectation in the air, like before a concert or school assembly.
Kate glanced out the window and said casually, “There’s your uncle’s flock gathering for his nightly service. He’s officially in session again.”
In the space of a few days, Kate had become, whether she wanted to be or not, my local guide and interpreter. Kate was paid but had no title. She was simply Kate—she kept things running while Angela roamed with her acting troop. Kate was the syllable you uttered if you had a headache or found a wounded bird. She was bouncer, carpenter, chef, nurse.
“You’re not serious about it being religious, are you?” I asked.
She relented. “No, it’s just campfire. Go. Record all in that diary of yours, Margaret Mead.”
“Are you coming?”
“I work for your aunt, not your uncle.”
“Is it work to sit around a campfire? I thought it was supposed to be fun.”
“You have it all figured out.”
When Kate said, “You have it all figured out,” I always knew I was dead wrong.
I joined the rest. The circle of seats around the firepit was around twenty feet in diameter, made up of stumps and stones and split logs. My uncle sat on a large stump on the east side of the circle, his back to the house. His seat was as rustic as anyone else’s, but because the field sloped up there, his was the highest point of the circle. I chose the low stone directly opposite him: if he was twelve o’clock, I was six.
After a few minutes my uncle rose, his beer dangling from his large hand, and started the fire himself, his large body crouched over the small ring of stones in the center of the larger circle. Pausing to take casual swigs of his beer, he stacked kindling into a cone and used a flint.
“Matches are for pessimists,” he boomed. I would hear him say this often throughout the summer.
My uncle added to the kindling, blew on it, coaxing the wood until it smoked and caught. Meanwhile, the circle around him filled in.
By the time it was dark, the fire was roaring. And only then, only when the crackle of anticipation in the air had become as strong as the snapping fire, did he sit.
My uncle took one long, final slug of beer, tipped it to empty the last, pale gold drops, set it in the dirt in front of him, and spun.
Until tonight I’d encountered twelve bare breasts, plenty of alcohol and weed, some dazed-looking smiles that surely came from a substance other than alcohol or weed. But nothing too shocking, nothing I hadn’t seen in junior form at high school parties.
But now, I thought, This is it. Here is where things start to get freaky.
People are going to have sex in the middle of the circle. Threesomes. Foursomes. ’Somes I’d never imagined, lit by the flickering fire in front of kids casually roasting marshmallows, under the innocent stars.
But I was wrong. The person the bottle pointed to was not expected to perform acts of love. They only had to perform.
The first person chosen was a rail-thin man in a jean jacket. He stood and ad-libbed a limerick about Skylab falling down, elevated above silliness thanks to an elegant, deadpan delivery and the fact that he walked with a cane. He’d had his right leg blown off in Vietnam, Kate had told me.
If this had been The Gong Show, a program I’d watched devotedly since it first came on the air, someone on the panel would have picked up the giant mallet and walloped the gong before he’d completed his first stanza. But the man delivered his bad poem with panache, and when he finished, Graham bowed so low that his hair touched the dirt.
As I sat on the bench that first time, I was too rapt to even pretend to record notes. But if I had, I’d have written that you couldn’t worry about how you came across. You got picked and you sang for your supper. (And lodging, and food, and, perhaps most of all, Graham’s infectious, booming laugh.) Anything would do, as long as it was served up boldly. A limerick, a joke, a card or yo-yo trick. A woman did the splits. A lot of people sang.
“No stalling, no skipping, no exceptions!” the circle of revelers would chant if a newcomer hesitated, or tried to claim lack of talent or a hangover. Other than that, there were no official rules.
There were plenty of unofficial rules.
They could be read on Graham’s broad, expressive face, how bored or pleased he looked during the proceedings. Confidence was good. Weaving a mention of Graham or his home into the theatrics somewhere—also good.
Hesitation and fear were bad. Looking too polished—not ideal, there was a little sheepishness in it, but it wasn’t disastrous.
I summed up campfire like this in my diary later—Silliness is fine, if delivered with confidence. The fatal mistake is shame.
That entire summer, I saw only one person skip their turn, and she was six. The little girl, who was hiding her eyes behind the curtain of her straight black hair, turned shyly toward her mama and the pass was granted.
The formal entertainment portion of the evening always went on for the space of ten bottle-spins, and then Graham left for his solo evening hour at the top of the waterfall, while his company roasted marshmallows, drank, talked, smoked, carried the little ones to bed.
At my third campfire, I realized two things: 1. Graham never performed. And 2. Willa never got picked. Even when the bottle was clearly po
inting straight at her, her father would call out the name of the person to her right or left.
I wondered if this bothered her, but her face, lit soft gold from the fire, always remained tranquil as she smiled, clapped, played with kids, who all seemed to be drawn to her.
I needed that bottle to land on me, so I could do one of my Saturday Night Live imitations. I was a good mimic, and would show them I wasn’t the rich priss from the city, the interloper from the stiffest branch of the family tree.
And prove to my cousin I wasn’t someone to ignore.
But the beer bottle hadn’t chosen me yet. And when campfire broke up, Willa always floated off, serene, into the woods behind the house before I could confront her.
* * *
“Last one,” Graham announced.
It was my fourth campfire, and I was starting to believe it was a trick bottle, rigged to avoid me.
The bottle whirled, slowed, stopped. Pointed a few inches to my right. If anyone had wanted to get official and whip out a surveyor’s marker to extend its true line across the fire, it might not have touched me, and we’d have watched the new girl to my right belly dance or do backbends or something.
But it was close enough. My uncle said, “Lady Sunshine,” and I stood.
I was quick, confident. Fearless. Not too rehearsed, though I had a general plan. I did Gilda Radner as Judy Miller, the girl who produces a TV show from her bedroom, and got...polite claps. Jane Curtin as the wry “Weekend Update” newscaster—no better. Everyone smiled kindly at me, but they hardly seemed wowed like my lunch mates had always been. Why had I thought this was a good idea?
The one genuine laugh I got was right before I sat, when I said dryly, “I’ll work on my card tricks.” I’d been so cocky, thinking I’d figured out the rules here. Some phony anthropologist I was.
My uncle clapped, though. “Brava for committing, Lady S.”
The only person who hadn’t watched me was Willa. The entire time I’d performed, she’d looked down at her feet as if I wasn’t there.
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