Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  I stood, too. “Okay,” I said.

  She put her arms out and gave me a stiff little director-like hug.

  Stepping into the bright sunlight and heat outside the trailer felt like sleepwalking into a wall. I could barely see. I staggered down the steps. “Left flank, not right!” I heard. “How am I supposed to hand off the flag if your back is toward me?”

  “Save me, Doc,” Andy called out when she saw me. “She’s snapped at last. No one can do this many about-faces without getting motion sickness.”

  Celia snorted. “Complain, complain, complain. Are we going to run through this one more time before lunch or not?”

  “Not,” Andy said, shaking her head. She looked at me. “What did Frau Commandant want?”

  I told them about Mrs. Pratt needing someone to move in with Leemona and Charlotte.

  “How dare she?” Celia said. She looked close to tears.

  “She’s the director” I said. “She has to think about what’s best for the camp.” Just then, General Registration trooped by on their way to their Spam salad sandwiches. Leemona and Charlotte brought up the rear like unhappy puppies.

  When Celia saw them, she threw the towel she and Andy had been using to practice the flag ceremony on the ground. “They’re ruining everything,” she said and ran off toward our unit.

  Andy watched her go, then turned back to me. “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to leave you guys, but …” Chappy stepped out the backdoor of the mess hall and rang the bell. Andy just stood there, like there was more to be said. I asked her, “How come Mrs. Pratt didn’t ask you to move?”

  Andy shrugged, “Maybe she thinks anybody whose dad drives a delivery truck has to be a racist at heart. Maybe she’s right. I mean, about not asking me. I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because Celia would never forgive me, and she’s my friend, not Leemona and Charlotte. Why should I hurt her?”

  “Maybe we could all room together,” I said. Usually there were only four cots in a tent, two on each side, but sometimes if a unit was crowded they squeezed in an extra one across the back.

  “Oh, good,” Andy said, “that way when the junior KKK in General Registration wants to burn down a tent with some black campers in it, all of them will be conveniently in the same place.”

  “No one’s going to set the tent on fire.”

  Andy raised an eyebrow. “Celia might.”

  Halfway through lunch, Happy and Sneezy stood on their chairs to announce that Sunday was officially declared a Moon Fest in honor of the Apollo 11 mission. For the occasion, they borrowed from the festival we’d had the first session, Hawaii Aloha, and from one we had last year, Chinese New Year. Tomorrow there would be the usual canoe races and bonfire, plus both a luau and Chinese fire drills. After the luau, we would all get to stay up to see the first astronauts, the first Americans, the first men, set foot on the moon, an event that was going to be broadcast live around the world.

  Celia skipped lunch, still mad, but Moon Fest was too big an operation for her to ignore. She even canceled water ballet practice for the duration. She was determined Aquatics was going to win the decorated canoe contest with her own special Polynesian design. We would use bamboo poles, she explained, to attach an outrigger to the regulation aluminum canoe. The outrigger would be carved from the same block Styrofoam that kept the swimming dock afloat and then covered with crepe paper flowers. Celia was so intent on her plans, she let Andy haul down the flag willy-nilly that night without so much as an about-face or salute—a clear sign she had new priorities.

  We worked on the canoe all afternoon. I’d hoped for a chance to talk to Carol and ask her whether she thought I should move, but Outpost was cooking out and had not crossed the lake for lunch or dinner. We kept working after dinner, not stopping until after midnight, our hands sore from twisting crepe paper into red-and-yellow hibiscus. That night I lay on my cot in the dark, too tired to go to sleep.

  Usually the three of us would talk. Celia liked to hear me go on and on about something—say the giant heads on Easter Island or why Hawaiians ate poi. Anything I remembered, or thought I did, from all the books Pd read. “My, my,” Celia would say, and, “Amazing!” These late-night lectures were why she had nicknamed me Doc. She said I knew as much as any professor. On the other hand, Andy tended to drift off early in these discussions, after snorting a few times like she wasn’t altogether convinced of my sources. When I was really on a talking jag, I could go on half the night, one subject leading to another, until I fell asleep, drained of all thought.

  Tonight, my last night in the tent if I was moving tomorrow, we were all quiet. Andy was snoring softly, asleep the minute she got her mosquito netting tucked in. Celia, though, I could tell was awake and so was probably quiet either because she was still mad at me or because her head was full of Moon Fest plans. She had made up a team name, the Dragons, and a chant, which was to be done to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot.” With appropriate accompanying gestures, it went:

  I’m a little dragon, green and stout.

  Here is my tail, and here is my snout.

  When I get all worked up, here me shout:

  All the way, Dragons, make the other teams pout!

  I wasn’t thinking about the Moon Fest. I was thinking about Leemona and Charlotte and whether one white Girl Scout could really do anything to change the world. Once when I was in kindergarten, I’d gone into D.C. with my mother and seen a sign posted in a restaurant window. I asked my mother what it said. “Whites Only,” she told me. She had clearly been embarrassed and explained both the sign’s purpose and her disapproval of it. I remembered being mostly puzzled. “But if we won’t let them come in our restaurants, then they might not let us go in theirs,” I said.

  My mother shook her head. “You wouldn’t want to eat in theirs, honey,” she’d said.

  By the time I was in first grade in Maryland, I always had one or two black kids in my class. In Cocoa, probably a third of my junior high school was black. Two of our six cheerleaders were black. I got the feeling Miss Jepson was careful to be sure that was always the case. Since elementary school we’d been tracked into Advanced, Regular, and Basic classes. Somehow the only black kids who were routinely in more than my PE class or homeroom were two sisters whose father was a doctor. They were my friends, but out of the hundred or so of the other black kids, I could probably only name four or five. The rest were just faces, dark faces, people I didn’t see when I walked the hall looking for people I knew. The black kids I didn’t know seemed to look right through me, my blond hair and pale skin, as if I wasn’t any more real to them than they were to me. At school there just didn’t seem to be any way through that wall, but here, with Leemona and Charlotte, didn’t I have a chance to break through?

  I turned on my back, then my side, then my stomach, then my back again, trying to puzzle it out. I could hear Celia turning, too. There was an art to sleeping at camp. You had to lie stiff and straight, hands firmly at your sides. If any part of your body—your knee, a hand—touched the mosquito netting while you were asleep, in the morning you would have a crop of evenly spaced bites where the mosquitos had been feasting on you through the netting all night. So Celia, like me, was not so much tossing about in bed as spinning in place. She was clearly restless. “Doc?” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

  She didn’t sound angry, but it was hard to be sure. I considered pretending I was asleep, but in the end I answered, “Yeah”

  “How can you like those scholarship girls more than me?” she asked, her voice tight. She was still pissed at me.

  I opened my mouth to say she had it all wrong, that she was my friend, not them, that I was acting out of a sense of duty, of justice. But then how she’d asked, not even using Leemona and Charlotte’s names, made me angry. “How come you don’t like them?”

  “Why should I?” she said. “It’s not like they’ve gon
e out of their way to be nice to me.”

  “You haven’t exactly been sweetness and light to Charlotte and Leemona either.”

  “Why should I be? Do I have to automatically like everyone with dark skin and kinky hair?” she said. “Is that what you think? Like because you’re both white you should like Janet Dobbins?” Janet Dobbins was a girl in Campcraft who had pointed at my odd feet one day when we were walking down the hill to lunch and said, “Hey, camper, can you quack too?”

  “No,” I said, “but Leemona and Charlotte didn’t call you a duck.”

  “Just their being here makes me look bad,” she said. “Scholarship kids in their charity bathing suits. People like that”—she was getting worked up now—“people like Reverend Ralph Abernathy going on TV leading a mule and a bunch of raggedy nobodies to a space launch where there are senators and men who’ve won Nobel prizes, not to mention Walter Cronkite, all staring at them. They just tell everybody in the world that black people are no better than trash, no better than poor ignorant trash. That we’re all poor. That we all need charity. My daddy is paying for me to go to camp, just like yours is. My mother took me out shopping before I came and bought me two new bathing suits. We don’t need any charity. We’re not poor.” She was breathing hard, almost wheezing, she was so angry. I could hear it even over Andy’s snoring.

  “But Celia,” I said, “Leemona and Charlotte can’t help it if they’re poor.”

  “Yes, they can. They can go to school and stay there. Then they can have good jobs. My father says so. Then they can send their kids anywhere they want. Nobody in America has to be poor.” I had never been poor, but my mother had as a child, I guess, at least compared to my father. She might have gone to camp on a scholarship, if she had ever had the chance. After his father lost all his money, my father had gone to West Point on what amounted to a government-paid free ride.

  “So are you still going to do it?” Celia pressed. “Move, I mean?”

  Then I knew for sure. Moving was the right thing. “Yes,” I said.

  “Go to General Registration then,” she said. “Go to hell.”

  “Likewise,” I said, turning my back toward her. I could be angry, too.

  15

  The next morning, I slept in. Partly to avoid Chappie’s Sunday breakfast of oatmeal and stewed prunes, mostly to avoid Celia. When Happy stuck her head in the tent to say Mrs. Pratt wanted to see me in her trailer, I was just getting dressed. I hadn’t packed my trunk yet, but I figured it wouldn’t take me long. Maybe Leemona would help me carry it over to General Registration. If not Leemona, Andy. I felt calm, sure of my decision.

  The trailer was still frigid inside. “Please sit,” Mrs. Pratt said. I sat, the metal folding chair like ice on the back of my legs. She sighed. “I’m afraid I was premature in talking to you yesterday. I spoke with Leemona and Charlotte, and they don’t want another tentmate.”

  I blinked. “Leemona …” I started.

  Mrs. Pratt held up her hand. “Actually” she pursed her lips, then unpursed them, as if I was forcing her to say more than she wanted, “it was Charlotte who objected.”

  I stared at Mrs. Pratt. Charlotte?

  “I knew about this before she came,” Mrs. Pratt said, “but I thought at camp, well …” Mrs. Pratt shrugged. “Charlotte’s father gave permission for her to come, but Charlotte lives with her grandmother, apparently a very old-fashioned woman. She doesn’t allow whites in her house. Leemona said she didn’t care one way or the other about your moving in, but Charlotte started crying and said she liked you, but she couldn’t sleep if there was a white person in the bed next to her. She said she was sorry, but that was the way she felt.”

  I sat there stunned, not knowing what to say. I’d wanted to be seen as a hero, now I felt like a fool. “I’m sorry, Jesse,” Mrs. Pratt said, standing to see me out.

  Outside, the camp was buzzing with preparations for the Moon Fest. Marly walked by carrying a brush and can of paint. Rumor was, Masquerade was our main competition in the decorated canoe contest. Should I pump Marly about their plans, I wondered, and report what I found to Celia? Celia, oh God. What was I going to say to Celia about why I wasn’t moving? She was going to ask me. I wished now I hadn’t told her about it at all. I didn’t want her laughing at me or making fun of Charlotte. The last shouldn’t have bothered me—it was Charlotte who didn’t want me around —but I felt protective of her. She was as afraid of me as she was of the lake and the armadillos.

  “You girls!” It was Chappie. Marly put down her can of paint and went over. I followed. “You’re drafted. I need two pairs of quick young hands to help me,” Chappie said. She put us to work on the fortune cookies for the luau. Happy had typed out little slips of paper that said things like Confucius say: A Good Scout Is Loyal and True, or, the one that struck home with me, Confucius Say: Make New Friends but Keep the Old. Chappie showed Marly and me how to put the fortunes between two Tahitian Treats and glue them together with a little dab from a giant silver can of U.S. Department of Agriculture Surplus Peanut Butter. Being with Marly felt like the old days in fifth and sixth grade. I told her what had happened with Charlotte, about Charlotte’s grandmother.

  “My grandmother can’t stand black people,” Marly said, meaning her father’s mother who lived in Alabama, not her abuela, her mother’s mother, who still lived in Cuba. “She certainly wouldn’t let one in the house who wasn’t her maid or some kind of repairman. When Bill Cosby was on the cover of TV Guide for being in I Spy, Grammy cut out his face before she’d let the magazine in the house. She said just the thought of black people on TV made her sick.” Marly stuck a few more cookies together. “So why does it seem so weird to you that Charlotte’s grandma would feel the same way about white people?”

  I tried to pin down what I did think. I thought about Martin Luther King suffering in the Birmingham jail like a saint, the students on the freedom rides getting beaten but never raising a hand. “I guess I thought blacks were better than us.” Or at least I had thought that of Charlotte.

  Marly raised her eyebrows. “What, like they aren’t human?”

  After that, I wormed out of Marly that Masquerade was building a volcano out of papier mache in the middle of their canoe and were planning to use a bug bomb to spew real smoke during the water parade.

  I didn’t see Celia until lunch, when she and Andy came in. I thought she would ignore me, but instead she sat right next to me. “Wait until you hear the news,” she said, raising her eyebrows. Before she could say another word, Mrs. Pratt rang the little bell she used to call for silence. She announced that, sadly, two campers, Leemona Bishop and Charlotte Mintey, would be going home later that afternoon. Celia poked me. Somehow she had known. My first reaction—relief—was not noble. If Charlotte and Leemona were leaving, then no one, not even Celia or Andy, would have to know they’d refused to have me as a tentmate.

  Mrs. Pratt sat down, leaving the camp to guess why, with only one week to go, Leemona and Charlotte were leaving. But Andy had gotten the full story out of Sneezy. Celia nodded as Andy told the story. That morning after breakfast, Andy said, Sneezy had taken Charlotte to the end of the dock to watch the teams practicing for the canoe races. Sneezy had tied Charlotte into a life vest just in case she fell or got knocked into the water. Instead, Charlotte, looking down as usual, had let the glasses, without which she couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face, slip off her nose and disappear into the muddy water of Turtle Lake.

  By the time Sneezy realized why Charlotte was crying so inconsolably, the canoes had reached the dock and ten teams of girls were wading where Charlotte’s glasses had taken their plunge. In spite of Sneezy’s best efforts, no one could find them. Andy and Celia had missed seeing any of this firsthand because they had been too busy madly hairpinning the last paper garlands to the Styrofoam outrigger of our unit’s decorated canoe. According to Sneezy, Charlotte had been so upset, the nurse gave her a shot. When Mrs. Pratt called her, Charlotte’s grandmot
her had a reaction that was almost as severe. Mrs. Pratt had offered to personally buy Charlotte a new pair of glasses, but Charlotte’s grandmother and then Leemona’s parents had demanded the immediate return of their girls.

  Celia shrugged as if none of this interested her much. Last-minute adjustments had to be made to the canoe. “Good riddance,” she said, with a flip of her hand.

  I wanted to slap her. It didn’t feel over to me. I wanted to see Charlotte one last time, maybe to prove to her I wasn’t like other white campers. Maybe to show her I was a better, more forgiving, person than she was. So after lunch, while the Aquatics canoe, paddled by Andy and Happy, was competing in the floating parade, I went looking for Leemona and Charlotte. Mrs. Pratt was loading their trunks into the camp’s station wagon. I could hear the Dragon cheer being chanted full tilt as our glorious if slightly top-heavy outrigger canoe made its ceremonial circle of the lake. I watched as Mrs. Pratt slammed the back of the station wagon shut then wiped her hands on her shorts. She saw me standing there, one foot digging at the sandy ground.

  “It’s probably all for the best,” she said, patting me on the back, as if something terribly unfortunate had happened to me, too, and not just to Charlotte. Then the nurse came out of the infirmary leading blind and weeping Charlotte by the arm. Behind them came the assistant director, Chipmunk, with one hand firmly on Leemona’s shoulder, as if she were under arrest.

  “Watch that last step,” I heard the nurse say to Charlotte just as she tripped down it.

  As Charlotte passed, I leaned forward and started to say, “Charlotte, I’m sorry,” but she jumped, as if the white blur of my face was what she saw in her nightmares. She began crying even harder. The nurse hurried her past me toward the waiting car. At just that moment, Celia came walking up. Seeing her, Leemona shrugged free of Chipmunk’s grasp and stepped forward. She pushed her face into Celia’s, her fists clenched at her sides.

  “Bitch,” Leemona said.