Camptown Ladies

by Mari SanGiovanni

  Lisa and I teased him mercilessly, but, for the first time, Vince took no steps to avoid being teased, his way of not denying his love. He got up on weekends as if he was the new parent of an older adopted child, cracking eggs and hovering over the stove until Hanni smelled the bacon and was lured out of the bedroom she shared with us. Out by the pool, the terry robe converted into his beach towel, making Vince appear so small when he wrapped himself up on one of the lounge chairs. Lisa and I thought he was making a total fool of himself. But the truth was I feared for his heart when Hanni returned to her country once the school year ended in September.

  Hanni loved Vince and said he reminded her of her baby brother back home, and I was a little jealous of Vince, who had done what I couldn’t do: hijack Lisa’s friend right out from under her. Hanni liked me well enough, but who could resist the devotion of little boy Vince? It would be like ignoring a shaggy little puppy that follows you around, appreciative of any scrap of love that fell to the floor.

  When it was time for Hanni to go back home, it was difficult for our family. We’d all grown attached to her, but it was nothing compared to what Vince was about to go through. I was still lashing out at him for handing his heart over on his terry sleeve, while I braced myself for his pain. The day she left, Vince said he had a surprise for her in the living room. I wondered what he could have gotten her when he had already spent every penny of his allowance on a ridiculous gift, a red plastic round tablecloth with an umbrella hole cut out of the middle, simply because she said she loved the color red, and it was something he could afford. She had fawned over the tablecloth while Lisa and I shot looks back and forth to each other. Vince had beamed.

  Vince had set up a boom box in the living room and told her to sit on the couch, while Lisa and I watched, uninvited, from the kitchen. He was carrying a wooden spoon and pulled two of the sofa cushions to the floor for his stage.

  “Oh God,” Lisa whispered to me, “the spoon is his microphone.”

  Vince pressed the play button on the boom box and Lisa and I watched in horror as he did an Elvis impersonation in Hanni’s yellow robe, worn out and dingy after a year of dragging on the floor and refusing to let Mom wash it. Vince pumped his arms and used the wooden spoon microphone in spastic, Elvis-like moves.

  Why the fuck Elvis? Lisa and I were both thinking this as Hanni clasped her hands together, eyes tearing up with joy, as she shouted, “I love Elvis!” like only a non-American could do. Lisa and I looked at each other, then ducked out of view to snicker from our humiliated embarrassment of him, like two cruel schoolboys.

  Vince ended the song by spreading Hanni’s tattered robe like giant butterfly wings, then, thrusting the wooden spoon microphone in the air, he bowed his head under imaginary floodlights, to Hanni’s thunderous applause. Lisa and I were covering our mouths, laughing our asses off, even as the pit in my stomach widened for Vince. I peeked around the corner in time to see Hanni storming his cushion stage, giving him a giant hug, lifting him off his feet as he shyly looked away from her, smiling as she told him it was the best present she had ever received in her whole entire life.

  I remember being angry with Vince, but I know now it was because I was devastated for him. I knew the following day Hanni would be gone from our lives and he would be checking into Heartbreak Hotel. I didn’t know it then, but my brother would meet Erica and, so many years later, check right back in.

  Nine

  Patty & Anne Should Have Done The Nasty

  Lisa had planned a dinner at our condo the first Friday night of Erica’s arrival. In this case, “planned” meant she had invited everyone over and the rest was up to me, which meant it wasn’t going to be a home-cooked meal. Mom and Dad took a pass (Mom said her jammies had been calling out to her since 6:00) but, surprisingly, Erica agreed to come, Eddie was his typical “maybe” (which, in gay man speak, meant no, thanks, he was going to hold out for something better to come along, or go out whoring for a date at last call).

  Lisa doubted it had been a good idea once the confirmed crowd turned into just the three of us and Erica, but it was a done deal once Erica accepted. To make matters worse, Vince made my heart ache when he emerged from his room overdressed for the night. It was so obvious that even Lisa resisted the urge to tease him.

  I tried to keep things light as Vince and I set the table while Lisa selected her seat at the head of the table and played with her phone.

  “Maybe it was sex,” Vince said, breaking the silence.

  Lisa and I glanced at each other, then back at him.

  “Erica,” he said. “The sex was hot at first, but it fizzled kind of fast.” Then he quietly added, “Well, for her.”

  I moved away from him and the table to find something to appear busy with near the kitchen sink. It was his profound sadness, not the mention of sex that made me want to jump out the nearest window.

  “One question,” Lisa asked, “you went south, right?”

  “Yeah, it went south,” he said.

  “No, you idiot. Did you go south, you know, did you take care of her oral needs?”

  I cringed as I re-washed a cup at the sink. Unfortunately, I could still hear them over the faucet and my insane humming.

  “Oh! Of course,” he said, insulted at the question.

  “Well?”

  “She said she wasn’t really into that,” Vince said.

  “Uh, oh,” Lisa and I both said in unison.

  “What does ‘uh oh’ mean?”

  Lisa said, “Vince, write this down. Every girl is into that. Repeat with me. Every girl is into that. Unless—”

  “Unless?” Vince asked.

  “Unless the guy doesn’t do it right.”

  I winced, but Vince ignored her and said, “It’s just . . . after the chase was over and we finally went to bed—”

  Lisa interrupted, “Wait, how long was the chase?”

  “Well, we kind of had sex right away, but then not again for about two months.”

  I dropped the cup, and it shattered on the floor.

  “Uh, oh,” both Lisa and I said.

  Lisa put her phone down and folded her hands in front of her, looking like an angry dyke therapist who was pissed her client didn’t follow last week’s recommendations. I feared for Vince’s very soul.

  “Did you at least try a vibrator?” Lisa asked.

  Vince said, “What? Of course not.”

  Lisa Therapist shook her head and rubbed her forehead in frustration as she looked down at her non-existing appointment book. She thought this patient was beyond help. The look on her face: Oh, well, maybe my next patient will have a clue. Next.

  Vince defended himself. “I would have done anything to make her happy, but we were so new together I didn’t think we needed—besides, I never got the point of those things.”

  Lisa and I looked at each other again. I was grateful to have the shattered cup to deal with, and I made a small production out of cleaning it up using two magazines, since buying a broom is something wealthy people think of only after something gets smashed.

  The therapist said, “It’s not for you, you idiot. Can you imagine that for even a second?”

  I didn’t look at them yet I knew Lisa had grabbed Vince by the face. “OK, listen up. I am going to teach you the difference between sex with a vibrator and sex with a man.” I braced myself, for Vince’s sake, and dared to sneak a glance to see Lisa pluck three grapes from the bowl in the center of the table. Uh-oh. There would be a lecture, with props.

  Lisa began, “Sex with a vibrator is like having somebody peel grapes and place a bunch directly onto your tongue, one right after another.” She plopped the grapes onto her tongue and savored each one as she chewed them with deliberate slowness. “Mmmm,” she moaned, “yummy and oh, how easy that was. Each grape landed where it was supposed to, deee-lecious!”

  Vince wanted to run, but I could see he also wanted to hear the ending since he was getting secret lesbo information about pleasing women.r />
  “Now,” Lisa said “sex with a man is like being told you might get one grape if you’re lucky, but it’s certainly not going to be peeled, and might not land in the right spot. In it fact, it might be way over here.” With that, she picked up a grape and with her state champion softball pitcher’s arm, she hurled it across the room to splatter against the far wall.

  Lisa’s ‘Licker Is Quicker’ talk—it had been only a matter of time before he got it. She had given it to me on my sixteenth birthday. I remembered it well.

  The doorbell rang, so Lisa was forced to release Vince’s baffled face from the vise grip of her non-pitching arm and he looked at me with helpless confusion, which only magnified when Lisa opened the door for Erica. Poor Vince. He was the best of any of the guys on the planet, but (from what I had heard my straight friends complain about) what most men knew about pleasing a woman in bed evaporated after the first six months of dating. I flashbacked to overhearing Aunt Aggie saying: “I’d like to kick the balls of the man that convinced the rest of them if they just stick that thing in, we’ll hear angels sing. Most often it’s like hearing a drunk on karaoke with the microphone not on.”

  I felt better about Vince being overdressed when I saw Erica, but I heard Vince let out a little groan, though it may not have been him. My sister took a step back to leer at the whole Erica package from dress to girly shoes. “Wow. Don’t walk too close to me dressed like that,” Lisa said.

  “Like what?” Erica said.

  “Like a girl that wants to be fucked by me.”

  “Lisa!” I yelled.

  Erica laughed, but Vince was too busy having his feet melt onto the kitchen floor to force a laugh.

  “Hi, Vince,” Erica said.

  “Hey,” he said casually, sounding like a boy in a high school gym pretending his prom date hadn’t dumped him in front of all of his friends.

  Erica looked away from him a bit too soon. “Thanks for inviting me, Marie,” she said, and I wondered if she had ever used my first name more than a handful of times. Despite her feminine appearance, Erica was more of a last name kind of girl. I could only imagine how it must have pained my brother to look at her. As I was admitting to myself how stunning she was, I heard a wet “splat” sound as the wet hunk of grape dropped from the wall behind her. Erica turned to see a dribble of grape from the spattered wall.

  “Come on in,” Lisa said. “We were just making wine the old fashioned way, and talking about . . . grapes.”

  Vince shot Lisa a look that could kill. I was thinking tonight was a huge mistake, when Lisa said, “I know just how to get this party started.”

  She popped on some music and rushed to prepare a tray with eight generous shots of tequila. I wondered what it said about us that we didn’t have a broom or a laundry basket, but we did have a full set of twelve shot glasses. The four of us gratefully downed our two shots each and I excused myself to pull the Mexican food from the oven. Vince tried to make small talk, and before the shots did the job, I was cringing for him again, pretending it was the heat from the stove.

  “So, what have you been up to since, um, how’s business?” he asked Erica.

  “I’ve been busy,” she said. “Which is good.”

  I missed working with Erica and said, “I remember. It was fun while it lasted.” It sounded a bit more sentimental than I would have liked. She smiled, and I felt another deep pang in my gut for my brother. That smile had to be hard to give up. One glance at my brother’s face and I knew I’d been right. He reached a little too quickly for his next shot.

  “I have a new assistant,” Erica said.

  This time, the pang in my gut was for me, but as Vince poured another round of shots, I said, “My Homo-Depot skills were that easy to replace?”

  “Real, easy,” she taunted me, but then threw me a bone and said, “not really.” Then she asked Vince, “Do you still have your camper?”

  “I do,” he said, “It still needs work, but it’s sitting for now since Campground Ladies has taken over our lives.”

  “It will be taking over mine soon enough,” she said.

  “We’re all glad you’re here,” he said, and it sounded so awkward that after a few seconds of silence, we all laughed at him, and Vince laughed too.

  “So, how are Mom and Dad doing with all this?” Erica asked.

  I said, “They’re the same. They don’t change.”

  Lisa said, “I give them shit to do, but never enough to keep them entirely off our friggin’ backs. I have to admit the camp store is coming along pretty good, if Mom doesn’t kill Aunt Aggie.” Erica nodded as she laughed. She’d witnessed more than a few scuffles and enjoyed the show.

  “I’ve been enjoying that,” she said quietly, and again I thought about how she seemed so different. Softer. If my brother noticed it, then we both hoped the softer side meant she might still be in love with him.

  Later, many drinks later, we were between laughs and stunned silent when Lisa said, “Last night I was too tired to change the channel on the TV. The remote was across the room so I watched the movie classics channel. Seriously, I know I’m not the only one who thought Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft should have done the nasty in The Miracle Worker.”

  Vince said, “The one about Helen Keller and her teacher?”

  Lisa said dreamily, “I had such a crush on Patty Duke when I was younger. She may have been wearing a dress, but she looked like a second baseman to me. Anne was hot, too. They should have banged in that movie. I’m just saying what everyone else was thinking.”

  I turned to Erica and said, “Actually, that has never, ever happened.”

  Erica laughed her head off and it was so infectious that I joined her until we were both snorting over our food. Lisa and Vince just stared at us, wondering what was so funny, and that just made us laugh harder.

  Our laughter was followed by an awkward silence, until Erica lifted her glass of wine to the three of us. “Thanks for including me. And, I mean, not just for tonight.”

  As we clinked our wine glasses with hers, I wondered why Erica’s eyes looked a bit watery, since of all the things Erica was not, she was definitely not a crying girl. She took her last swig and said, “I’ve missed this, you fucking crazy Italians.”

  We drank to that, and although Vince looked happy for the first time in a long while, I knew he would have preferred she’d said she missed him.

  Ten

  Sticks Or Stones

  “Attention Happy Campers! Good morning to all!” Erica was barking sarcasm at her crew—a small group of men, but smart (they feared her). At an alarming speed, they were tearing off the Camp Store roof, and shards of rotted roofing shingles were flung like nail-filled Frisbees from every corner of the building.

  “Did I hire a bunch of friggin’ pansies? It’s almost ten and I can’t believe that roof is still on!”

  They appeared to be working at breakneck speed to me, until she yelled at them, and they moved in double time. I noted once again that knowing how to motivate a work crew was an essential part of being a great contractor. The tiles spewed off the roof and I took a few steps back after a roofing nail flew by my head.

  “Looks like it’s going well,” I said to Erica.

  “If this were the only building, maybe, but after this office building, we have the camp store, six bathroom houses, and last but not least, a rec hall to be turned into a restaurant.” Now didn’t feel like the right time to warn her my sister was considering building a dozen individual log cabins to bring up the caliber of the campers. Less tents equals less drunken college kids, she had said.

  Erica continued, “Not to mention all the other buildings that need minor structural work, which is all of them. What a flipping mess. Good thing I didn’t know the extent of this on the phone, or I never would have taken this job. As it is, we need to line up a second crew of workers to handle the specialty Italian clay roofs; these guys here are strictly demolition. We’ll switch them out as needed.”

 
I bent down to grab some nails and one of the crewmen let out a short whistle. When he turned back around, Erica flung a roof tile at him and hit him on the back of the head, but she never stopped talking. God, I missed her. She said, “Lisa considers the rec hall to be the heart of the camp, so I need to make sure my best guys work on that building. Not these bozos.”

  We’ll switch them out, she’d said. So maybe it wasn’t just my hopeful imagination that she considered us a team again. “What can I do?” I asked.

  “We should call the dumpster delivery place to see what the holdup is. This is going to be one huge mess to clean up since they didn’t have the dumpster ready this morning.”

  “I’ll get on them,” I said, knowing Erica hated to repeat an order, and when she said “we” she really meant “you.” I noticed a burst of excitement coursing through my veins, which I hadn’t felt in a long time; I was a part of Erica’s crew again. I headed to my phone and when I turned back to see if she had anything to add, I was surprised to see her eyes not on the crew, but on me.

  “Hurry up,” she snapped, “before we make a bigger mess here.”

  No, we wouldn’t want that.

  I had the dumpster guys on speed dial and was harassing them within seconds of Erica’s harassing of me. That was why we had made a great team. I finished the call and was thinking this and smiling when I saw Uncle Freddie across the road, watching the roof progress from under the pines. He was sitting in one of the rocking lawn chairs Lisa had given him and Aunt Aggie. Despite the fact I should have been asking for Erica’s next order, I walked over to him.