Mom thought she got the picture and suggested a name for the sign: Guys & Gals Camp Store. Lisa agreed. Later, Lisa confided to me she planned to change “Guys” to “Gays” with the flick of a paintbrush. What Mom didn’t know was that Lisa planned a Fairy & Dyke divided camp store, with a line drawn directly down the middle. She was using Mom’s natural tendency to Martha Stewart everything to make it happen in the projected colorways of next spring.
This was all part of a bigger plan. The Camptown Ladies idea had grown into co-ed venture one night while Lisa held us hostage to brainstorm over a bottle of wine at the condo. It had taken two bottles to do the job.
“I’ve got it!” she yelled, knocking her glass over, again.
“Camptown Ladies and—wait for it, waaaaait for it—Camp Camp for the fairies! We’ll double our market, plus, while the dykes do the heavy lifting, the gays will pretty up the place!”
I had to admit, the half-baked, half-boy idea wasn’t a half-bad idea.
“But wait,” I said, “do gay guys camp?” We all hesitated, looking at each other. If we were holding this meeting at camp, the sound of crickets would have been ridiculously appropriate.
Finally Lisa dismissed her own doubts. “I’m pretty sure that’s where the saying ‘Do bears shit in the woods?’ comes from. Of course they must camp.”
We had been though Lisa’s schemes before, and we knew better than to argue. After she had litter box trained her tiny Miniature Doberman, Cindy-Lu (and made her own litter box from a large plastic bin, into which she cut a small dog-size doorway, decorating the front with a welcome matt for Cindy-Lu to wipe her paws, and adding curtains for privacy), she got the idea to market the item. She used an adorable cartoon image of a young Cindy-Lu as mascot and included a booklet called: “Teach Your Dog How To Pee & Poo, Just Like Cindy-Lu!” In the booklet, she described how to train a puppy as small as six weeks old, by using scented puppy pads placed over a bed of sand. Gradually, you use smaller and smaller puppy pads until the puppy is just using the sand. We all thought Lisa was nuts, but she had the last laugh when she partnered with a plastic blow molding company in Massachusetts who made the prototype box shaped like a little doghouse, and then sold it to an online pet company for thousands of dollars. When she would toss this in our face, Vince and I reminded her we were the ones who had talked her out of calling the product: “Litter Box, Doggie-Style.”
We had avoided bringing up the real trouble at the campground—the fact that it was way too much work for our family to handle, and that our family was avoiding it by inventing silly jobs we were qualified to tackle, like raking pine needles and clearing dirt roads of the smaller tree limbs, while the decapitated buildings with caved-in roofs remained untouched. That night, when the three of us drank our wine and Lisa got the idea about expanding a camp we already couldn’t handle, she clapped her hands as if the meeting was ready to adjourn.
“Attention! Before we do anything official about the camp, I need to ask my hairdresser and Spiritual Advisor about adding boys into the mix.”
Vince was shocked.
“Oh, my God. Seriously? You . . . have . . . a . . . hairdresser?”
Lisa hit him in the gut and Vince crumpled into a ball to protect himself just a second too late.
Three
Scents & Insensibility
Once Lisa’s hairdresser and Spiritual Advisor gave her the OK, Camp Camp was added to her Camptown Ladies plan. Lisa insisted on keeping this from our parents for as long as possible, just like our childhood plot to take over Dad’s garden shed as a neighborhood fort. If our childhood fort was any indicator, we couldn’t keep secrets from the parents for very long. That secret had lasted only two weeks before Dad went looking for his gardening tools and instead found our beanbag chairs, toys, puzzles, and empty Heineken bottles Lisa used for spin the bottle games. Lisa had convinced the neighborhood girls they must practice before they got real boyfriends, so she did them a “favor” by pretending she was a boy, and did her best to teach them to kiss like experts. (Before her hairdresser, daytime soaps had been Lisa’s make-out spiritual guides.)
After our failed coup of his tool shed, Dad was inspired by our efforts to turn his shed into a clubhouse of his own. He still kept his garden tools hanging up, but they got moved to the outside of the shed, where they fashionably turned into shabby sheik-style rusted wall décor. Inside, he rigged a sound system, powered by full electricity and added a mini fridge with a padlock to stock his beer and chilled tequila. Dad had invited me to the shed for my “first” legal drink, so, when I checked out what he had done with the place on my twenty-first birthday, I asked, “Tequila shots without lemons?”
“Lemons are for fanuks,” he said. (Fanuks: Dad’s affectionate Italian slang for gays.)
“Ahh,” I said. “What about salt? Is that a heterosexual condiment?”
“Salt is ok, unless it’s on French food,” he said, “I wouldn’t generalize, but they have more than their share of fanuks over there.” I feared the day Dad decided to generalize.
Soon after the Camptown Ladies co-ed decision was approved (by a wide-eyed, protein-starved vegetarian spiritual advisor from a hair salon called “From Hair to Eternity”), Lisa announced we would add another member to our team. “It’s not enough just to have Vince here. We need one more gay guy.”
“I’m not gay, you big dyke,” he managed to yell, despite the huge chunk of pizza hanging from his mouth. To be fair to Vince, his lack of table manners should have proved his point.
How many times had I heard the conversation that was about to take place? It started when Vince was seven years old, so it had to be in the thousands by now. One look at Vince, and you knew he was not a gay man. A sloppy thick crest of black hair well past his forehead, the in-between stage of his beard (not the fashionable kind, the careless kind), plus, the dead giveaway: functional, not fashionable, clothes. His pants and shirts were paired so poorly that I wondered if he had the week laid out in advance to make sure he didn’t accidentally match something.
Mom and Dad joined us at the picnic table and Dad happily dove into the food without a word. Mom said, “We could eat indoors like civilized people,” but, even as she said it, she too was lured by Lisa’s homemade grilled pizza and helped herself.
Something about the way Lisa was studying Vince tipped me off that she was about to launch into a tirade about him. I’d had my fair share of tirades launched my way, so I was sure I wanted out of there, even before she said, “Can I just say something?”
Uh oh.
“Another perfectly good girlfriend with wife potential bites the dust because you think the pussy’s always pinker somewhere else.”
“Lisa!” Mom said, with her mouth full. Dad cackled with his mouth completely filled yet still managed to stuff two thick slices of sausage and pepperoni.
“That’s not what happened,” he said, but Vince looked like he didn’t have the energy to fight with her today, and typically, Lisa had missed the subtlety of this. I saw it coming, but not before I could stop her with hand signals behind Vince’s back. Dad pretended not to notice, and I could see Mom calculating the best moment to jump into the mix.
Lisa leaned across the picnic table and got into Vince’s face as she said, “You butthead, you really think you’ll find someone better than Erica?”
“No, I don’t,” Vince said, before getting up from the table and walking away, leaving Lisa quietly defeated, possibly for the first time in her life. Lisa pretended she didn’t like the homemade pizza she’d made, which was better than any pizza, except maybe in Italy, and she angrily tossed her slice Frisbee-style into the woods, and left the table to go after Vince.
I could see from Dad’s heartbroken and hesitant glance into the woods that if the slice had landed cheese side up, he would have fought the dog for it. Mom clucked her tongue, both at the waste of good food, and a missed opportunity to lecture all three of us at once. She settled for two.
My Aunt
Aggie made Uncle Freddie take her to Camptown Ladies every afternoon so she could bathe in what Lisa called the “crispy breeze” that blew through the center of the camp. My Aunt was probably the only Italian woman (besides my sister) that loved the cold, though due more to her large size than her heritage. Aunt Aggie’s clothes were perpetually damp, but strangely she always smelled good, like the same salty pasta sauce that scented her house.
It occurred to me that seeing Aunt Aggie at Camptown Ladies was the only time I’d seen her with zero humidity on her upper lip. Possibly because at her home her head was always over a simmering pot on the stove (but just as probably, it could have been the facial hair). When Aunt Aggie greeted you at the door, she always had a wet kiss waiting, and I was about ten years old when I finally realized it wasn’t spit but actually sweat that she left behind from her smooches—not that it bothered me less.
Aunt Aggie was a typical older generation Italian, who never let chewing a large bite from a heavy meal delay her from talking. Once, after visiting her, I went to my sister Lisa’s, and her Miniature Doberman practically mauled my tits to get at the Aunt Aggie flecks of meatball shrapnel from the front of my shirt. Yet another clothing casualty due to an Aunt Aggie story that just couldn’t wait between bites.
Aunt Aggie is my Dad’s older sister and despite their mature ages, they still fought like children. Case in point: Several years ago, after Uncle Freddie’s brother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he had to come to live with Aunt Aggie and Uncle Freddie in their cramped little house. He was in his late eighties and his memory was evaporating quickly. Aunt Aggie warned Dad that Uncle Freddie’s brother had started making random phone calls.
“Friggin’ annoying,” Aunt Aggie said. “That man can’t remember his own brother’s name, yet he’s like a walking phone book. Last week he called the friggin’ army, asking for his old sergeant that been dead for over twenty years.” Aunt Aggie said she had to keep the phone cord in her housecoat.
One afternoon, Aunt Aggie forgot to unplug the cord and the old man called Dad. Dad picked up the phone and heard an alarming whisper on the other end of the line.
“Sal? . . . Sal Santora, is that you?”
“Hey there, Lou,” Dad said. “Is everything alright?”
“No!” he said in a louder whisper, “everything is not alright. For the last few days there has been a strange woman here. She’s feeding cats. She’s outside in the yard right now!”
Dad heard a thud. “Lou, you OK?”
The old man continued, quieter, “That was her, slamming the door. I have no idea who this woman is. She feeds the strays, you know, which only makes them come back for more. Everyone in the neighborhood acts like it’s OK, but then she comes in the house and stays for hours. She’s been here for days!”
Dad said to him, “Oh Lou, don’t worry. That’s probably just your brother’s wife. Freddie married Aggie, my sister, remember?”
“But I’ve never seen this woman before,” he said.
Dad answered, “You probably just don’t recognize her. Lou, here’s what you need to do. After you hang up the phone, go tell the woman to put on some makeup and get her fat ass to the hairdresser. You tell her she needs to put more of an effort into her appearance because she’s scaring you. Got it?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“Repeat it back to me, soldier,” Dad said, and the old man repeated back every word. Dad said, “Now go tell the woman, OK?
“Yes, sir. I do like that man she calls Freddie,” the old man said.
“Freddie’s your brother. Now go tell the cat lady what I said.”
“To put more of an effort into her appearance,” the old man repeated.
“Because her ugly face is scaring you,” Dad said.
“Yes, sir,” the old man said, before hanging up.
As Aunt Aggie retold the story over the years, she said it was the last bit of instruction the old man remembered perfectly, and every time she told the story Dad would end up laughing so hard he would cry and snort until Mom yelled at him to leave the table.
Aunt Aggie and Uncle Freddie arrived at Camptown Ladies every day like clockwork, and Aunt Aggie emerged from the car in a series of dainty groans, the vehicle rising a half a foot as she did. She outstretched each arm to point to a wayward piece of trash she thought Freddie should pick up, but I knew it was actually to release the underside of her heavy arms from her sleeveless housecoat. Her arms would plop out and glisten like the mounds of homemade dough Dad made on Calzone Sundays. In fact, one of Aunt Aggie’s most admirable qualities was that her fat arms were the exact matte white sheen of pizza dough before Dad bathed the dough in olive oil.
As a kid I got up early to watch Dad make calzones, and always thought Mom wouldn’t approve of him oiling and kneading this stuff that felt exactly like a big booby. I never told this to Mom, since Dad always snapped off a small ball of dough for me to play with, and I was addicted to the feel of it and the delicious doughy scent. I insisted on getting a drop of olive oil for my little blob of dough so it would feel extra soft and would last longer before drying out and cracking so I had to throw it away or feed it to the dog. To this day, the gentle grasp of a breast (either real or imagined) always brings this memory back, and my mouth waters just the same.
Aunt Aggie stood at the car and surveyed the camp as she had done every day since Lisa bought the place, and said, “Damn, Freddie, you don’t get a friggin’ breeze like that back in the city.”
“We don’t live in the city,” he snorted.
“Don’t be an ass,” she said. I noticed Uncle Freddie tilted his head back, pointing his nose toward the trees. He loved to sniff the pines, just like I did.
Doughy arms sufficiently aired out, Aunt Aggie waddled off, shoving her walker ahead of her as if it were a disobedient child, off to go find Mom at her self-imposed post inside the Gays & Girls Camp Store. Uncle Freddie used this opportunity to sneak away to see what Dad was up to. Their visits always started and ended the same way. Peaceful Aunt Aggie would arrive, but after spending any amount of time with Mom (or Lisa, the other female alpha-male in the family) they would start to bicker. Then, holding her tongue until after Lisa whipped up a delicious lunch, Aunt Aggie would make a noise about how Mom had insulted her by not accepting her help, so, she might as well be going. She would go on about this until around 3:00, before finally leaving in an imagined huff, unless Lisa surprised them with a dessert, in which case, the argument could be extended by another half-hour. Uncle Freddie would trail after her with the same serene smile he had upon his arrival and a little more tomato sauce on his shirt, only to return the next day to begin the ritual again, everyone pretending as if none of it had happened the day before.
It was a particularly warm fall day, and we were all looking for outdoor projects. I asked Lisa if she had any plans for the teen recreation hall.
She answered, “Teen recreation hall, my big, shapely, fat ass! This is going to be my five-star Italian restaurant!”
Oddly, even with its gutted bare concrete slab floor and what appeared to be shingled roof that looked eaten by woodland creatures, there was a part of me that could not deny Lisa’s genius behind a stove (or hot plate, or grill . . .) or her sheer will to bend the world to do what she wanted.
But then I remembered where we were standing.
Lisa whirled around inside the remains of the teen rec hall like a bull dyke version of Julie Andrews in a baseball hat and camouflage pants, seeing all the possibilities, while Cindy-Lu danced next to her, bouncing off her legs as if it was a new game and she were begging Lisa for the rules. I was trying to ignore the smell of teen boy urine emanating from the corners of the hall, wondering if our baby brother’s pee could have stood the test of that many years. Cindy-Lu had been distracted by the scent too, her tiny high-stepping paws stopping every few feet to sniff around the perimeter of the hall, to find the most pungent spot. Dog’s noses are supposed to be remarkable, so I laughed to mysel
f as I wondered if the dog was thinking: Uncle Vince, was that you?
I said to Lisa, “A restaurant? It stinks like the old Elephant House at the Roger Williams Zoo.” But this didn’t seem to trouble my sister.
“I promise you, someday this place will smell just like Grandma and Aunt Aggie’s kitchen used to when we were kids. She pointed to the wall that adjoined the rec hall to the Camp Store. “The mess hall cooking area will be right over there,” she said. I noticed all the walls for the first time, and there was not an inch on any log without some teen melodrama carved into the wood or brazenly drawn in black Sharpie or laundry markers.
“Stop!” I said, grabbing her as she passed by me. “This has been fun and all, but nobody wants to tell you this, so I will: At some point you have to be realistic.”
“What?” she asked, as if she wasn’t surrounded by filth and falling down buildings everywhere you looked.
“A restaurant. Really? Lisa, Wake up! We don’t have the skills or the manpower to handle what has to be done to just have a shitty campground!”
She shook me off her arm. “I know,” she said.
I breathed a sigh of relief. She had been just playing a game of what if . . .
“Good. I’m glad you know,” Lisa said, “That’s why I already put a call in to Erica.”
I walked toward her, expecting to see that she had grown an extra head and somehow trained it to talk like an idiot. “Erica, as in All My Children? Erica, as in Vince’s Erica? Are you crazy?”
“She’s the best contractor we know, and I want the best. I want certain things done here that she can do. I have plans, Marie, plans you don’t know about—like the rooftops. I want clay tile roofs, like the kind they have in Italy, they’re beautiful and fireproof, and they will give Camptown Ladies a distinctive Italian look that no other campground has.”
Camptown Ladies Page 3
