Her Sister's Tattoo

by Ellen Meeropol

  “I really want you to go to camp this summer,” she said. “Is that okay with you?”

  It wasn’t, really, but Esther was so sick and seemed to want this so badly. So I agreed. It was only for a month. How bad could it be?

  Back in the bunk, I sat on my cot waiting for Crystal. Three girls came in, elbowing each other and goofing around, their hair wrapped up in towels.

  “Can you believe the stink of that stuff?” the chubby one said.

  “Why do they have to shampoo all of us? I certainly don’t have lice.” That was the blonde girl. Right away I didn’t like her.

  “Do too, I can see them jump,” the tall one said.

  “You live in Brooklyn—you probably have lice.” That was blondie.

  The tall girl, the one who lived in Brooklyn, plopped herself on the cot next to me, her wide smile showing a gap in her teeth. She introduced herself as Carrie and started drying her hair.

  “They’re Sharon and Poose.” Carrie pointed to blondie and her friend.

  “I’m Molly. What about lice?”

  “On the first day they treat everyone, whether or not you’ve got the buggers. So no one feels bad.”

  “Treat how?”

  “Don’t worry. Nothing toxic at this place. They’ve got organic shampoo that smells like rotten broccoli. It makes the lice run away, holding their noses.” Carrie laughed, demonstrating. Then she dropped the towel on the floor and tugged gray sweatpants and a fluorescent green T-shirt over her bathing suit.

  The other girls jostled each other in front of the narrow wall mirror, spraying water squirts combed from wet hair. They gathered their clothes and towels in their arms and started toward the door.

  The blonde, Sharon, glanced at me and spoke to Poose in a loud whisper. “Can you believe the new girl’s a Twelver?” They tried to squeeze through the cabin door at the same time. “She doesn’t look older than ten to me.”

  Carrie ignored the comment and waited for me while I got my dead broccoli shampoo. Then we joined the rest of the bunk for orientation. Crystal talked about the awesome spirit of Harriet Tubman bunk and All-Camp Share and the Charlie King concert planned for Sunday and how we should start thinking about our skits for visiting day.

  One girl caught my eye right away. She sat cross-legged in the crabgrass, straight across our circle of campers. Her skin was super tan, halfway between Carrie’s brown and my redhead paleness.

  “Returning campers, please pair up with the new folks for the skits,” Crystal said. I wasn’t really paying attention because I kept peeking at that girl, whose hair tangled around her head like a halo run wild. When the girl glanced up and saw me looking at her, she grinned. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but there was something about her.

  “Who’s the girl over there, with the curly hair?” I whispered to Carrie.

  “That’s Emma.” Carrie’s voice sounded different. Impressed maybe. “She lives in Greenwich Village. She’s been coming here for years. Her mom is so famous they named a bunk for her.”

  The girl named Emma intertwined long stalks of clover in and out around her bare toes, leaving the lavender flowers sticking up like dollar store rings. The two girls flanking her wove her wet curls into a dozen tiny braids. Watching her, I understood what Esther meant when she said a person should be comfortable inside her own skin.

  While the counselors talked, I sprawled on my stomach in the grass, my chin heavy in the V of my hands. Carrie chewed on the sweet white part of shoots of grass she eased from their roots, making a pile of the discarded stalks limp with tooth marks. Maybe it was because her skin was dark, but Carrie had the whitest teeth I had ever seen, which made the gap between her top front teeth extra noticeable. She stuck a bunch of the stalks into the extra space and that made me laugh.

  “OK, new campers,” Crystal said. “We have a camp tour before Free Swim. Returning campers, you’re welcome to join us.”

  Six of us set off with Crystal: four newbies plus Carrie and Emma. “I’ll come along in case you forget something,” Emma told Crystal with a grin.

  “This is the center of camp.” Crystal opened her arms to embrace the egg-shaped field with the peace memorial. “It’s called the Heart.” She pointed out the Sacco & Vanzetti dining hall and the Lillian Hellman Theater and the Jackie Robinson ball field. We followed the packed dirt path past bunks named Anne Frank and Elizabeth Gurley Someone toward the infirmary. Walking along, we met two other groups of campers. Everyone seemed to know Emma, so we kept stopping to talk.

  “These are the three Rosas.” Crystal pointed to a cluster of buildings in a clearing of white pine and purple lupine. Back home, lupine grew lush along the back fence in Esther’s garden. “Rosa Parks, Rosa Luxemburg and Red Rosa.”

  There was so much to remember. Except for Anne Frank, who I’d read about, and Rosa Parks, who I studied in fifth grade social studies, I had no clue who those other people were. At least the infirmary didn’t have a fancy name and the nurse was a regular person named Sue.

  Crystal pointed to a building set in a grove of white pines. “That’s the CIT bunk, Emma Lazarus,” she said. “She wrote the poem about the Statue of Liberty. You know: Give me your poor, tired masses yearning to be free.”

  “Were you named for her?” Carrie asked Emma.

  “No, for Emma Goldman. She was an anarchist who believed in free love. My dad used to tell me stories about her when I was little.”

  Anarchist? This camp was a foreign country and I didn’t speak the language. I kicked a stone along the path, trying to keep it from rolling out-of-bounds into the grass.

  An hour later, I sat alone on the shady end of the dock, a leafy tent of willow branches shielding me from the noisy chaos of Free Swim. The branches skipped across the water with each puff of breeze. I watched a group of girls from my bunk—Carrie and Poose and Emma and Sharon—splashing in the roped-off swimming area with some boys. They went all blurry until I wiped a lake splatter off my glasses with a dry corner of the towel Esther had labeled so it wouldn’t get lost.

  “The camp laundry is terrible,” Esther had warned while she packed my stuff. “And the food isn’t wonderful. But everything else about camp is great. You’ll love it there.”

  I hated it. Camp was weird and a dump.

  Then Emma yelled, “Hey, Molly,” from the shallow water. She half-swam, half-splashed her way to the dock. She heaved herself up, coughing and snorting and trying to wipe her face with her wet arm.

  I offered my towel.

  “Thanks.” Emma wiped her face and then her hair, which still smelled a little putrid. “One of these days I’ll learn how to swim.”

  “But Carrie said you’ve been coming here for years.” I shifted my position on the splintery dock. My bare feet bobbled to the rhythm of the waves.

  Emma nodded. “Forever. You want advice on surviving Loon Lake?”

  “Sure.”

  “First lesson: ignore the rules about the toilets. Camp can’t afford the composting ones, so they tell us to conserve water by flushing less often: If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yeah. The second major danger is the dining hall. Say you’re a vegetarian so you never have to eat Mystery Meat. The pasta’s not bad.”

  “Got it,” I said. My best friend Rachel tried not eating meat for a few weeks because she loved animals and wanted to be a vet, but it didn’t work out because she hated vegetables and tofu made her gag.

  “Come on, Emma!” Poose and Sharon called from the swimming area, where they were splashing a boy and laughing.

  Emma waved at them.

  “Everyone here knows you, don’t they?” I asked.

  “Yeah. My parents came here ages ago. My aunt was camp nurse until a couple years ago and I came with her when I was a baby.”

  “Is that how come you know who all those people are, the ones the buildings are named after?” My face burned as I remembered how stupid I felt on the
orientation tour. I picked at the scabs on my thigh. The mosquito bites looked like the big dipper with an extra star in the handle. My parents came to this camp too, but I doubted they would have known important people like Emma’s mom.

  Sharon swam over to our shady spot. “Come on, Emma,” she said, splashing Emma and ignoring me. “We have to plan our skit for visiting day.”

  “Just a sec,” Emma told her, then turned back to me. “Most kids here come from left-wing families. We grow up knowing this stuff.”

  I watched my hair weep drops of lake water onto the big dipper.

  “Aren’t your parents political?”

  Emma asked. “What do you mean, political?”

  Emma tilted her head and looked at me. “You know, activists. Demonstrations and stuff?”

  The only time I remembered ever going to a demonstration with my family was a pro-choice rally a year or so before. Esther seemed petrified, even though it was dinky and not scary at all. Nothing like the stuff we saw on the news. One time, when Rachel’s parents invited me to go with them to New York to protest against Three Mile Island, my parents wouldn’t let me go.

  “No,” I said. “They’re not.”

  Emma slid off the dock into the water toward her friends. “So why are you here?”

  My parents wanted to know all my secrets but they didn’t tell me anything. Like why they sent me away to a weird camp four hours from home, even though Esther was sick, even though I didn’t want to come.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted.

  CHAPTER 31

  Molly

  Friday after dinner was All-Camp-Circle. Camp director Eva wept as she introduced the Independence Day speaker, a guy with dreadlocks and a soft voice. She didn’t seem at all embarrassed about crying in public.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked Carrie.

  “Nothing. Eva feels things strongly.”

  The speaker described how his father came to America from Jamaica looking for farm work but ended up on death row in Texas, framed for the murder of a cop. After the father was executed, his sons—the speaker and his twin brother—traveled all around the country trying to convince people to abolish the death penalty. The speaker quoted a line from Gandhi: “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind,” then he turned the quote into a song he taught us, with a reggae beat but a mournful harmony.

  As we sang it over and over in a round, my throat ached with sadness. Maybe my parents had liked coming to camp and being depressed all the time, but it wasn’t my idea of fun. After our voices faded into the evening quiet, I walked with Crystal and Emma and Carrie to the dining hall for the weekly square dance. I wished I were home with Rachel. She always made me feel better when I felt gloomy.

  “You okay?” Carrie asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “That was so sad.”

  Carrie put her arm around my shoulders. “Which is exactly why we do square dancing after All-Camp-Circle.”

  “The campfire programs make us think about important stuff,” Crystal added. “So then we dance and everyone feels better.”

  Emma laughed. “Yeah. That way campers don’t have nightmares and interrupt their counselor’s evening off duty.”

  “Nothing disturbs my beauty sleep,” Sharon said.

  I still didn’t like her.

  I knew about square dancing from when it was too stormy to go outside for school recess. But square dancing at Loon Lake was nothing like that. The caller was Zander, a skinny staff guy with white hair and skin so pale his veins showed blue.

  “Most camps do folk dancing or contra dancing.” Zander introduced us new campers to the weekly dance. “But in square dancing, the eight people in each square have to work together to make the figures come out right. It’s socialist dancing,” he said, leaning his long face to the side.

  The campers groaned in unison.

  “He says that every year,” Emma said.

  “Anyone can be partners in Loon Lake squares,” Zander said. “We don’t say ladies or gents here. We say skirts and pants. So grab a costume from the costume box on the table at the back of the room and pick your partner. Pants on the left, skirts on the right.”

  It made me laugh to watch the Tenner boys dash for wrap-around flowered skirts and curtsy to their girl partners in overalls. Emma rolled her eyes at Poose, who stuffed herself into a low-cut peasant blouse that was too tight and flirted with the pimply boys from Malcolm X bunk. I stayed in my cut-offs, but Emma pulled a lavender tutu over her tie-dyed shorts and stood on my right side. That made her my partner, the skirt. To my left, Carrie wore an orange paisley skirt rolled up at the waist and a cowboy hat.

  “I’m your corner, partner,” Carrie drawled as she bowed to me, then laughed. “Mighty hard to keep this stuff straight.”

  I did feel better when we started dancing. I concentrated hard on square through and shoot the star and wheel and deal, and slowly the images of the sad Jamaican guy and the long death row corridor of prison cells colored gray with loneliness started to fade. But when we rested between dances, fanning our red and sweating faces with folded paper fans, the final words of the song spiraled around and around in my ears. An eye for an eye until we all are blind.

  The next day, the five of us argued about the campfire program as we walked back from the lake, towels slung around our shoulders. Emma and Poose agreed with the speaker, that the death penalty was wrong. Carrie said sometimes it was justified. I just kicked at last year’s leaves, already fractured into small brown pieces, covering the dirt path like a skin disease. I wasn’t sure what I thought.

  “What about a guy who rapes and murders a little girl?” Carrie asked.

  “And what about the Nazis?” I added. “Didn’t they deserve the death penalty?”

  “Don’t you know anything?” Sharon made a nasty face at me. “Most people on death row aren’t Hitler.”

  “Most of them are poor and black,” Emma said. “And they can’t get a good lawyer or a fair trial. Anyone who’s not white and rich is screwed in the courts.”

  “There goes Emma again,” Carrie said with a laugh. “Race you back.” She took off down the dirt trail with Poose and Sharon close behind.

  I stayed back with Emma. “But if someone kills a person, shouldn’t they pay for the crime?” I asked.

  “Sure, they should pay for it, in prison. But if killing is wrong, why is it right for the government to do it?” Emma asked with a triumphant tone.

  I sucked in a deep breath of the spicy forest air, tasting the tangy flavor on my tongue. I wished I had a smart answer for Emma. A gust of wind turned the leaves over with flashes of silver and I grabbed a branch. “My dad says when the leaves expose their bare bottoms like this, they’re flirting with the wind.”

  “Don’t change the subject.” Emma’s green eyes skewered me. “Didn’t you learn any history in your school? Innocent people get executed all the time. Like Sacco and Vanzetti. They lived in Boston too.”

  “I live in western Massachusetts, not Boston. Didn’t you learn geography in your school?” I walked tall, facing straight ahead. Emma was such a know-it-all.

  I tripped on a twisty root in the trail and fell hard. The root was gnarled and tortuous like the hard veins in the crook of Esther’s arms. Sclerotic was what the oncology nurse called them. The chemo made her veins thick and dense, like petrified wood. Thinking about chemo made my eyes fill and spill over. I sat in the middle of the path rubbing my knees and trying not to bawl.

  “You okay?” Emma asked.

  I didn’t mean to tell her. I didn’t mean to say anything about Esther, but I just blurted it out. “My mother has cancer and I’m afraid she’s going to die.”

  Emma squatted next to me in the broken leaves. “Is she getting, you know, treatment?”

  “She had an operation. Now she gets chemo.”

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stand it if my mom was sick.”

  I wiped my eyes. “What am I doing here? I shoul
d be home.”

  Emma put her arm around me and steered me toward our bunk. “Listen. Tonight, after everyone is asleep, I want to show you something. It’s how come I know about the courts and how crooked they are.” She paused and then added quietly, “It’s about my mother.”

  After lights out, Emma and I pretended to sleep. Finally the whispers and giggles around us faded into the moth-wing breathing of a dozen sleeping campers. We slipped out of the bunk and I followed Emma past the organic vegetable gardens, breaking off a few velvet-skinned string beans. We stopped in front of a squat building, tacked like an afterthought behind the camp office.

  “This is the archive. It’s supposed to be off-limits to campers, but they never lock the door.” Emma eased the rusty padlock from its perch and creaked open the heavy door, then fumbled along the wall until she found the light switch.

  Three walls were crowded with floor-to-ceiling shelves. The fourth was covered with camp photos, labeled with dates in clumsy calligraphy and grouped by decades. A panoramic photo represented each year, the fingernail-sized faces mostly shaded by baseball caps or squinting against the sun. I stepped forward to examine the smaller bunk groupings labeled TENNER BOYS—JOE HILL or CIT GIRLS—ROSA PARKS surrounding each large photograph.

  “Maggie used to bring me here a lot, while she looked at old stuff. It was boring and the dust made me sneeze.”

  I turned back to Emma. “Who’s Maggie?”

  “My mom’s best friend. I call her my aunt. She was camp nurse before Sue. Starting when I was really little, I came to camp with her as a counselor’s brat.” Emma looked right at me then. “My mom was in prison.”