Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  As we sat sunning on the dock, Sneezy, one of the swimming instructors, came down to the swimming area with a couple of Red Caps. We all wore bathing caps coded to our swimming abilities to help the lifeguards spot someone who was in over her depth and thus in trouble. Celia and I were White Caps, junior lifesavers. Carol, who was at camp, too, was a White Cap. Andy, who hadn’t taken her lifesaving test yet, was a Blue Cap, an advanced swimmer. Green Caps were intermediates. You had to be at least a Green to go out in the canoes or sailboats. Even Marly Boggs, who was at camp that summer and who was in Masquerade, the unit that mostly put on plays, was a Green Cap. Yellows were beginners, and that was bad enough. They weren’t allowed to swim past the roped-in area at the end of the dock and weren’t allowed in the boats. But Red Caps were the lowest of the low, the absolute nonswimmers. They weren’t allowed near the lake without a counselor certified as both a senior lifesaver and a water safety instructor, in case they needed mouth-to-mouth.

  This was the second of three two-week sessions that summer, and Carol and I were signed up for all three. The first session there had been no Red Caps at all, but this one there were two, both black girls from Tampa whom the Girl Scout Council had recruited as scholarship students. One girl, Leemona, was very dark and muscular and looked like she would be great in the stern of a canoe if she ever learned to swim enough to get her Green Cap. The other one, Charlotte, wore the thickest glasses I’d seen on a human being and always looked at the ground when she was walking, like she didn’t trust it to be there. Charlotte, though, had a beautiful smile. She’d smiled at me the morning she arrived when I told her where to stand during the flag-raising ceremony and again when, as a waiter at breakfast, I passed a bowl of oatmeal to her and one to Leemona. Leemona, though, had looked daggers at me and at the oatmeal, like she couldn’t think of anyone or any food in the whole world she hated more. About oatmeal, at least, she had my wholehearted agreement.

  As soon as Celia saw Leemona and Charlotte with Sneezy, she frowned. Up until the two girls from Tampa arrived, Celia had been the only black girl at camp that summer. For some reason I couldn’t understand, her reaction to the two new girls had been immediate and evident dislike—a feeling that Leemona, at least, returned. Now Celia stood up. Sneezy was trying to coax her two charges into the warm, shallow water, but Charlotte was clearly scared and Leemona was ignoring her, glaring instead at Celia. Both Leemona and Charlotte had on identical light blue two-piece bathing suits that clearly had never been in Turtle Lake, whose water instantly stained any color suit a deep iced-tea brown. Charlotte’s suit was too big for her, and Leemona’s was tight across her chest, as if they’d been bought for them by someone, maybe someone at the Girl Scout Council, who had never met them.

  “Let’s give the babies some room,” Celia said, loud enough for them to hear. She walked down the dock to the shore swinging her hips as if she were on the runway in the Miss America contest. Andy rolled her eyes, but we both followed.

  As we passed, I said to Charlotte, “Don’t be scared. The water’s as warm as a bathtub.” Charlotte looked at the ground, as if she was either too scared to smile or had been warned by Leemona not to.

  We trailed up from the lake, heading for the canteen. I wanted a roll of Clorets, which were rumored to discourage mosquitoes because the chlorophyll in them fooled the insects into thinking you were a bloodless plant. Besides, Clorets were as close as the canteen came to candy.

  When we went in, Carol was standing by the window reading a letter. There was a hierarchy to units as well as bathing caps at the camp. General Registration, where Leemona and Charlotte were tentmates, was for the youngest, least-experienced campers. By breaking my back and missing my first summer at camp, I’d actually missed ever serving a stint there. A step up, though in my opinion, not a very high step, was Masquerade, where Marly Boggs was. Masqueraders put on shows for the rest of the camp in the big wooden theater left over from when Turtle Lake had been a WPA camp. Marly had told me that they were going to stage an old-fashioned melodrama and that she was cast as the villain, complete with black moustache and cape. Then, above Masquerade, came Campcraft, where I had spent my first summer in camp the year before, and then Aquatics, where I was now. Above them all was Outpost, whose campers lived on the other side of the lake in pup tents and only canoed across for supplies. Carol was in Outpost. Standing by the open window, bent over her mail, she looked to me like some fierce Indian maiden, if any Indian maidens had straight, long blond hair and wore the green shorts and white shirt of the Girl Scout camp uniform.

  Carol’s shorts were skintight, the coveted sign of a camper who’d been back summer after summer, and her shirt was covered with pins and patches. She was a determined camper and a serious scout. I loved camp, too, that’s why I’d talked my parents into signing me up for all three sessions that summer. Other kids got homesick at camp. I used to joke that when I was home I got campsick. Carol loved all scouting—she was even talking about becoming a lifer, a professional Girl Scout like the camp director—but I found regular scout meetings during the year unbelievably boring. Carol saw me come in and waved me over. “Letter from Dad,” she said, and handed me what she’d been reading.

  My father had taken over writing us that summer; my mother had not sent a word. When Mrs. Boggs had driven Marly and me back to Cocoa for one night between sessions so we could get our clothes washed, my mother had barely seemed aware I’d been away. Dad always sent a letter a week, addressed to both Carol and me, that was mostly clippings from the newspaper. He sent our favorite comics—Pogo for me, Peanuts for Carol—and news he found interesting. The clippings this time were all about Ralph Abernathy and the poor people’s march on the Cape. Reverend Abernathy wanted Americans to remember there were more pressing demands on the federal budget than sending three men on a lunar vacation. I skimmed the article. I wasn’t sure why my father had sent it. Because he approved of the march? Or just because it was local news, something that was bound to be an impediment to tourism since it would have tied up traffic at this morning’s launch.

  “Abernathy’s the next Martin Luther King,” Carol said, as if she were crowning him herself. “But he’s wrong about the space program.” She shook her head, saddened he couldn’t see that walking on the moon was something that would benefit all mankind. “Still, he’s very brave. What he’s doing will make a lot of people angry.” She touched a finger to the picture of Reverend Abernathy leading a mule over the causeway to the Cape, as if that alone would protect him. The year before, we’d gone back to D.C. for a visit only to find out when our plane landed that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. There had been tanks on the Beltway, smoke in the very neighborhood where Carol and I used to go to play with our housekeeper’s granddaughter.

  I put the clipping about the march back in the envelope. My father had also enclosed a short note on paper headed A MEMO FROM THE OFFICE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT, which is what his job was now at the junior college. It had turned out you couldn’t be a real president of a junior college in Florida, as opposed to an acting one, unless you had a Ph.D. So they hired an outsider to replace Dr. Henry. Now my father had a new boss.

  Your mother took Bertha and Lucky to the vet for their shots. I got gas in both cars today. They say all the visitors will suck the county dry by launch time. The traffic is supposed to be terrible.

  This time he’d remembered to sign it Your father. Sometimes he forgot and signed his full name as if this were any interoffice memo.

  “Did you hear the shot?” I asked Carol.

  She nodded. “Coming across the lake. I hear we are all going to get to watch the moon walk on Sunday on TV in the mess hall.” Today was Wednesday. It would take Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins that long to get to the moon.

  “Whose TV?” I asked. As far as I knew, the camp didn’t have one, though there was talk of a black-and-white portable in the counselors’ recreation cabin, a place where there were also rumored to be hot showers and a
Coke machine.

  Carol shrugged. “Beats me.”

  While I was talking to Carol, Andy and Celia had gone back to Lakefront, the collection of tents that housed Aquatics, to change. I bought my Clorets and headed after them, cutting through General Registration. It was empty, the campers still at the ball game except for Leemona and Charlotte, who were presumably still at the lake, if not in it. The tents in all the units in the camp were alike, really halfway to being cabins. They all had wooden floors raised off the ground by a good three feet to help keep out armadillos and snakes and other unwelcome creatures. Inside each tent were four iron cots, and over each cot, a mosquito net hanging from a thin wood-and-wire frame. In front of each bed stood the camper’s footlocker, which held all the clothes and other personal items the mothers had been told by the camp to pack.

  When it wasn’t pouring rain, the heavy canvas front, back, and sides of the tents were supposed to be rolled up and tied in a special Girl Scout way. That was the first thing they taught each camper when she arrived. Fresh air discouraged the bugs and the mildew, we were all told, though since the fresh air they were talking about was about ninety-eight degrees with 100 percent humidity, I doubt this helped much. Still everyone did as they were told, so that the tents in a unit usually looked like no more than a collection of cots, trunks, floors, and canvas roofs.

  But in General Registration, I couldn’t help noticing one tent had all its flaps down and tightly tied, as if we were expecting a hurricane. I stopped and stared, wondering if someone inside was sick, though if that were true, she’d be in the infirmary, another building left over from WPA days. Last summer I had spent a wretched two days there with ten other girls who also had the stomach flu. Then suddenly I knew without being told that the tent was Leemona and Charlotte’s. The tent stood out the same way they did. I stopped there, wondering what it was like to feel so out of place in this place. This took some imagination, since I felt so at home here. I imagined Charlotte and Leemona inside on a dark, hot night listening to the armadillos, who were harmless but sounded like rhinos coming through the palmettos. I imagined the other campers in General Registration laughing and pointing as Charlotte and Leemona walked by on their way to the showers. Nothing good is going to come of this, I thought.

  SATURDAY AFTER WATER ballet practice, I was the last back at the tent. I’d had to put the record player away, hauling it back to the storage room we called the Glory Hole. Celia and Andy were already dressed in their green shorts and white shirts by the time I got back from the shower. Andy was combing her hair, but Celia was just standing there, her arms crossed and her foot tapping the way it did when she was angry.

  She was trying to get Andy to agree to her plan for that evening’s flag ceremony. Our tent was in charge. Celia, of course, was in favor of an elaborate ceremony with much saluting and turning flank left or flank right. I played deaf, gathering up my clothes. I only hoped it wasn’t so complicated one of us would drop the flag. My mother had taught me all about flag etiquette and how dropped flags had to be either burned or buried. Buried probably, now that Vietnam War protestors regularly burned flags.

  Just then there was a knock on the tent pole. Only counselors knocked, other campers just walked in. It was Happy. “Something’s up, Doc,” she said. She was a great one for using campers’ nicknames. After all, she had to use hers, didn’t she? “The camp director wants to see you.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Why?” I couldn’t imagine what Mrs. Pratt could want with me. Except for making announcements at dinner, she spent most of her time in the trailer that was her office working on things like payroll and budget, stuff nobody else had to worry about.

  “Ours is not to reason why, just to do or die,” Happy said.

  “Can’t I get dressed first?” I was still in my underwear, water dripping from my hair.

  “Double-time,” Happy said. “Otherwise, you’ll miss lunch.”

  “Yummm” Celia said after Happy left. “Saturday is Spam salad on white bread and potato sticks. Not to mention the usual thawed, leftover Girl Scout cookies.” The council had introduced a couple of new kinds of cookies that year, Tahitian Treats and Butter Crinkles, but they had failed to sell like the traditional Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies. We had them for dessert every day, either at lunch or dinner. Chappy, our cook, had even taken to crumbling them in vanilla pudding and baking them on top of cobblers. Celia rubbed her stomach in mock joy. “I sure wouldn’t want to miss that lunch.”

  I dressed as quickly as I could and went to Mrs. Pratt’s office. As I knocked on the door of the trailer, I could see Celia and Andy counting off paces by the flagpole.

  “Come on in. It’s open,” Mrs. Pratt called out, so I did. The trailer had the only air conditioner in the camp, and the air pouring out of the window unit was so cold it hurt. The hair stood up on my arms. After all those days in the sun and nights under my mosquito netting, the idea of wanting cold air constantly blowing on you struck me as unnatural, maybe even unhealthy, an odd thought for a girl raised with central air. I halfway expected to see my breath. Mrs. Pratt looked up from her paperwork and blinked. “Oh,” she said, surprised to see a camper and not a counselor. She was not much taller than me and had gray hair that she wore very short, without any permanent wave or hair coloring. Her face was tanned the color and texture of a wrinkled grocery bag. Rumor had it that before she was a professional scout, she’d been a nun.

  I tried to imagine Mrs. Pratt in a black-and-white habit like the Flying Nun on TV, but couldn’t quite do it. She was wearing a camp T-shirt and shorts and seemed not to notice the cold. Mrs. Pratt was the one who assigned the counselors their nicknames. Campers weren’t allowed to know the counselors’ real names, though presumably Mrs. Pratt used hers. She waved me to a chair beside her desk. “Cookie?” she said, offering me a Tahitian Treat.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  Mrs. Pratt took off the half-glasses she’d been using to read and let them dangle by a cord around her neck. “Do you know why I’ve asked you here?”

  “No, ma’am.” I had no idea.

  “I have a problem and only you can help me. You’d like to help me, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded, not wanting to seem rude, but not wanting to commit to a favor without knowing what it was. When Carol and I were little, sprawled out watching TV in the evening, my mother used to ask, “Do you love me?” If either of us said yes, she would invariably add, “Well, then how about getting me my slippers?” This had made me suspicious of seemingly innocent questions.

  Mrs. Pratt sighed. “The problem is with our two scholarship students, Leemona Bishop and Charlotte Mintey. You know who they are, don’t you?”

  I hadn’t heard Leemona and Charlotte’s last names before, but I nodded again. “Everybody knows,” I said.

  Mrs. Pratt rubbed her nose where her glasses had rested. “Indeed. Well, the problem is no one in General Registration will be their tentmates. The girls who were assigned there asked to be moved yesterday. There was some disagreement about leaving the tent flaps down at night, I believe, and no one will agree to take their place.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, trying to sound as if I was as worried as she was. Did she want me to suggest a punishment for the General Registration campers who were showing so little unit spirit?

  “Of course,” she went on, “it’s bigger than just tent flaps. There are some girls, I am sad to say, who do not want to sleep in the same tent as a Negro camper.”

  Especially, I thought, one as unfriendly as Leemona. “Mmmm,” I said, shaking my head. I didn’t know what advice I could offer. I wasn’t a counselor, or even an adult.

  Mrs. Pratt put her hand on my arm—her fingers were frigid—and said, “Jesse, I know you’re not prejudiced.” I wondered how she could be so sure. For a second, I thought she had somehow seen the clipping about the poor people’s march my father had sent. “Because you’ve
been such a good friend to Celia.” I suddenly saw myself the way she saw me—as a camper who obviously had no qualms about accepting a black tentmate. “So, I’m asking you, for the good of the camp, if you would consider moving into Leemona and Charlotte’s tent.”

  I should have seen her request coming a long way off, but I hadn’t. I stared at her. Did she understand her own camp enough to know what she was asking me to do? “But Leemona and Charlotte,” I said, speaking slowly to be sure of making myself understood, “are in General Registration.” General Registration where the campers spent their days braiding lanyards and wrapping God’s Eyes and learning to sing “Frère Jacques” in rounds.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Pratt said, “they are.”

  “And I am in Aquatics.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Pratt said, “I think you can still do some activities with your old unit. The water ballet, for instance. I understand from Happy that that is going very well.” She squeezed my arm a little. “I know it will be a sacrifice. But do you want Leemona and Charlotte to go home and tell their parents that all the campers at Turtle Lake were prejudiced against them?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want Charlotte, especially, to go home thinking that at all. Leemona, it seemed to me, already had her mind made up, but then I would probably have felt about the same if I had been in her place. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted Mrs. Pratt to think she had been right about me. I wanted Carol to think I was a good scout, a good person. But did I want to do the right thing enough to go sleep in Charlotte and Leemona’s stuffy tent with the babies in General Registration? To give up Celia and Andy as tentmates? To give up Aquatics for arts and crafts and lose my friends in the process?

  Mrs. Pratt stood up. “Will you think about it?” she asked. “You can tell me tomorrow after breakfast.”