by T. Greenwood
“Dance with me,” she had said one blustery February afternoon. “Alone Together” playing softly on the record player. I was taller than she was, and she leaned into me, resting her cheek against my chest. Her hair smelled like lilacs.
When the record was over, she released me and flopped down into Ted’s armchair. She lit a cigarette and blew three perfect smoke rings into the air. “I am so bored,” she said, her eyes closed.
I felt my heart sink a little.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. What I was feeling must have shown on my face, because she reached over and grabbed my hand. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean now. I mean, in general.”
I nodded, but I still felt hurt, though I would be hard-pressed to explain why. I was bored too. Our lives were boring. But mine had become a whole lot less boring since Eva had moved in. The idea that her life was more thrilling before she met me was something I both suspected and resented.
I found myself missing her when she went home to Ted or I went back across the street to Frankie. I found myself thinking about her as I made dinner or ironed clothes or scrubbed the toilet. I looked forward to our time together in a way I looked forward to little else. Those hours when the kids were in school and the men were at work were like perfect little islands in an otherwise vast and mostly dull sea.
And so while I’d dreaded the annual Girl Scout camping trip in the past, this year I was thrilled by the prospect: three whole days and two nights away from home. No obligations except for teaching the girls how to lash a latrine and dig trenches. How to pitch a tent and build a campfire. The only cooking we had to do was heating up beans and franks over an open fire and assembling s’mores. No house to clean, no husbands to worry over.
Finally spring came, and on the Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, we gathered all of our supplies together and loaded them into the Studebaker. Frankie had agreed to drive us to the campsite and drop us off. The other girls’ parents were to drop them off at the same time. We wouldn’t be retrieved again until Monday at noon.
The weatherman on WBZ had predicted a 40 percent chance of rain, so we made sure to pack our rain ponchos and galoshes. The girls had each made a weatherproof sit-upon to sit by the campfire at night, and our plan was for the older girls to complete the necessary tasks for their Go Camping badge during the trip.
And surprisingly, the weather was gorgeous the first day. All of the girls got new freckles except for Katherine McDowell with her milk-white skin, who wound up with a pretty bad sunburn, which we just slathered with Eva’s Noxzema to cool things off a bit. We hiked through the woods, identifying the local flora and fauna using our guidebooks. Chessy and Donna were two of the oldest Brownies, and they took great pleasure in leading the little girls. Chessy had been on the trip twice and knew the run-down campsite and its surroundings well. Her memory amazed me sometimes. She was the kind of girl who only had to read something once and could recall it verbatim at the drop of a hat even months later. Frankie liked to show her the serial number on a dollar bill, tell her to remember it, and then later, in front of friends, ask her to recall it. He’d triumphantly pull that same dollar from his pocket and exclaim, “It’s photographic! She’s a genius!” But while Frankie saw her skills as some sort of party trick, I knew that her memory would be useful to her later. In college, I thought, she’d ace every test. She could memorize facts about anything; her mind was like a wonderful, intricate trap. Though, like a trap, it could be dangerous too. Nothing escaped her.
“Those are lady slippers,” she said, pointing to a cluster of delicate pink and white flowers growing among a sea of ferns along the hiking trail.
Donna reached down.
“No!” Chessy said. “Don’t pick them. They’re very rare.”
“They’re beautiful,” Eva said, crouching down next to the flowers. “It looks like a baby’s ear. Like a little tiny ear!”
I wondered if she was missing Rose. This was the first time since her birth that she’d been away from her.
Mouse was less concerned with the scientific names of things and, like me, was enticed by the smells and sounds and tastes of the forest. She shimmied up trees and yelled down at us from above. She watched the sky instead of the ground as we hiked, stumbling and falling more than once. She might have been too young to earn her own badges, but she proudly bore the scratches and bloody patches of her various scrabbles with Mother Nature.
The girls had pitched their own tents. We had three girls to a large tent, three tents total, with Eva and I sharing a smaller one at the center. When the sky began to cloud over, I taught the girls how to dig a trench so that if and when the rain came they wouldn’t get drenched. Eva seemed at a loss when it came to wilderness survival, but I assured her not much would happen to us at the Rippling River Campground. We hung our food in bags from the trees to keep the bears from getting it, though there were no bears here. We dug latrines, though there was a canteen only a hundred yards away with fully functioning toilets. And we made fire from flint and steel, though we lit our cigarettes with Eva’s Zippo.
By sunset, the girls were exhausted from the hiking and the sun. They ate s’mores until their bellies ached and then disappeared into their tents, where they giggled for only about an hour before there was a collective silence that fell all around us.
It was too early in the season for anyone other than Scout troops to be out camping, so we had the campground to ourselves. In a month, the sites would be overrun with families from the city trying to get back to nature, but for now, it was peaceful: the only sounds the rustle of sleeping bags inside the tents, the crackle of the fire.
“Shall we?” Eva asked, pulling a bottle of Irish whiskey out of her rucksack.
“Holy cow!” I said as she popped open two of the collapsible cups we’d brought for the girls and filled them to the rim.
“Cin cin!” she whispered, giggling, and we touched the plastic cups together and drank. It was cold out, and the liquor felt great going down and even better in the belly. I was suddenly warm. And happy. My feet were tired from all the walking, and I knew I’d be sore the next day.
I pulled out the transistor radio I’d brought to see what I could get to come in. Surprisingly, I was able to get WBZ in Boston, and “Juicie Brucie” Bradley was playing Del Shannon singing “Runaway.” The signal was crackly with static and came in and out, but the music was nice nevertheless.
Eva was bundled up in one of Ted’s flannel shirts, though I’d never seen him wear anything other than his work clothes during the week and khakis on the weekends. It looked like someone’s idea of what a man should wear in New England, that black and red hunter plaid, and Eva swam inside the enormous sleeves.
“You cold?” I asked, pushing a stick into the dwindling fire.
“Nah,” she said. “Another jigger?”
“Why not?” I said, and held out my empty cup. I was feeling pleasantly tipsy when Eva suddenly stood up.
“What are you doing?”
“Going in for a swim,” she said.
“Are you kidding? It’s freezing.”
“Chicken.” She smirked.
The small pond near our campsite was probably teeming with leeches. We never took the Brownies in swimming; in addition to the leeches, it was always too cold. Especially in May.
“You’re drunk,” I said, laughing.
“So what?”
I shrugged. “Have fun. Don’t drown.”
Eva peeled off her clothes until she was wearing only her underwear and bra. I felt myself blushing and prayed that none of the girls got thirsty or scared or needed to pee. I watched her as she stumbled down to the water, worrying suddenly about how much she’d had to drink. Eva was only about a hundred pounds. I supposed it wouldn’t take much to make her drunk.
She slipped into the pond like a water snake, soundlessly, and didn’t emerge again for several seconds. I could feel my heart beating in my throat, nearly choking me as I waited. I stood up, worried an
d starting to think that I should go in after her, but just as I was beginning to panic, she bobbed up, hooting wildly.
“Shhh!” I hissed.“You’ll wake the girls.” But I was so relieved she hadn’t drowned, I felt the momentary impulse to run into the water and hug her. Instead I shook my head, acting as though she were one of my children, and chided, “You’ll get pneumonia!”
She came out of the water then, drying off, using Ted’s flannel shirt as a towel, and then pulled her clothes on. I added a log to the fire and she crouched down next to it to warm up, her teeth chattering.
“I can practically hear Frankie, if he were here. You two girls are off your onion,” I said, doing my best Frankie imitation.
“Ted would kill me,” she said, shivering.
And then suddenly there they were, Ted and Frankie conjured like a mistaken spell. Eva looked at the ground, all that fire snuffed out. We were quiet for a long time, the ghosts of our husbands hovering in the smoke of the dwindling campfire.
“Do you ever wonder what it would be like, if you hadn’t met Ted?” I asked softly, feeling emboldened by the booze, by the quiet, by the night. I had asked myself the same question about Frankie so many times, entertaining alternate versions of my life. I had dreamed entire lifetimes without Frankie, envisaged a thousand other presents and futures, but the moment the question left my lips, I felt as though I were trespassing; these dark woods of Eva’s were ones I wasn’t sure I was permitted to explore.
Eva’s eyes were glassy, though I couldn’t tell if it was from the liquor or something else. She was quiet for a very long time, looking out across the still water of the pond.
“Sometimes, I feel like I’m in quicksand,” she said suddenly, soberly. “Like I’m sinking. Like I’m disappearing.” She turned away from the water and looked at me, studied me. “He’s not a good man. Everyone thinks he is, but he’s not.”
I didn’t know what to say. This is not how we talked to each other. This was foreign territory, a place I didn’t have a compass for. A place without maps. And so I just nodded. I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, what she was insinuating. She looked so forlorn, so sad, I tried to think of a question I dared to ask, a comfort I could possibly offer. I worried that my words were useless. Nothing I could say would change anything. But I also felt a sort of strange relief. I’d spent the last decade with Frankie, going through the motions of a marriage, finding small pockets of contentment inside a vast swath of resentment. The possibility that I was not the only one in the world who held this secret shame, who felt a tremendous cavernous hole where something true and good should have been, was oddly reassuring.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said.“It’s late, and we’re drunk. And you’re going to catch your death. The sleeping bags will be nice and warm.” I helped her up and she obediently crawled into the tent.
I doused the fire with a bucket of water, and made sure to hide the bottle of liquor in her pack. I crawled into the tent, shining the flashlight so I wouldn’t step on her, and found my sleeping bag.
I listened for the sound of her slumber, the way I listened to make sure the girls were asleep each night before I went to bed. But I couldn’t hear anything, and I started to panic. It was illogical; it was the whiskey, it was the disorienting sound of the woods and the water and bears that weren’t there. I lay motionless and tried to still my heart, my own ragged breaths. She moved then, and I felt her arm come around me. “I’m cold, Billie.” Relief.
I took her hand and pulled her arm tighter across me. I could feel her against my back. And suddenly every nerve ending in my body was raw. Before I allowed myself to think, to question, to pull away, I rolled over so that I was facing her, but it was so dark it was as though I were looking into space, into nothingness. I was sure she could hear my heart, pounding like a steel drum, echoing in my ears, in my head.
When her lips touched mine they were wet: salty and soft. She’d been crying, and I hadn’t even heard her. We stayed like this, flesh pressed to flesh, darkness to darkness, the steady pounding of my head like a warning.
And then the rain came, as promised, turning swiftly from a few tentative drops to a deluge. It pounded against the canvas tent. Pounded against the hard ground outside. And her mouth pulled away from mine, her body pulled away from mine, and it was over. As if it hadn’t happened. I was numb, paralyzed.
“Billie,” she said, but I couldn’t answer. “The girls are waking up.”
There were times when Frankie would do things or say things when he was drinking that he would later simply erase from his memory. Wine was his great elixir, able to induce total memory loss by the time he woke up the next morning. And if Frankie didn’t remember, then the things he’d said and did simply hadn’t happened, and he couldn’t be convinced otherwise: the time he backed over the mailbox, narrowly missing the neighbor’s kitty, Florence, who had been sleeping in our driveway. The time he went to my rag bag in the basement and came upstairs wearing one of my old bras, singing “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie . . .” at the top of his lungs in front of Francesca and her friend Lo. The time he climbed up on the roof at midnight just to look at the stars and fell off, nearly losing an arm on the gutter. It didn’t matter that his arm was bandaged, our sheets bloody. He always had a story to explain the evidence away, and the worse his transgressions, the deeper the forgetfulness and denial. The times he pounded his fists so hard even the plates on the table trembled in fear. The times he called me frigid, stupid, aricchi du porcu. Ugly as the hair on a pig’s ear. It didn’t matter that the girls heard him, that the neighbors (even Mrs. Macadam, who was deaf in one ear) heard him. In the morning, Frankie went about his day as usual. He wreaked havoc, but his path of destruction was invisible. The girls and I were the casualties of an amnesiac.
I expected that what had happened in the tent, the moment when Eva and I touched, when we kissed, would be like one of Frankie’s escapades. That in the bright light of morning, in the cold reality of day, it would simply disappear, and I’d be left questioning my sanity. Eva had been drinking; we both had been drinking. We were cold. We had pressed our bodies together for warmth, and there had been a kiss. It was as chaste as the kisses we gave our children at night.
But that did not explain the way my whole body thrummed and buzzed and continued to hum like an electric wire. As we raced around the tents in the rain, securing the stakes and ensuring that the girls were huddled deep inside their sleeping bags to stay dry. It didn’t explain the way the thunder and lightning outside seemed to echo whatever was going on inside my own body, my own mind.
I expected Eva to deny it, not with her words necessarily but with her eyes that wouldn’t meet mine. Or worse, that they would, but with no glimmer, no acknowledgment of what had transpired between us.
It is for this reason that in the morning, when the rain had finally stopped its insistent pounding against the world around us, and Eva sat up from her sleeping bag, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and patting her hair down, I was startled and a little scared when she reached for my hand.
We sat there, inside the tent, the little bit of sun that had appeared making everything light up inside our canvas cave, holding hands for nearly a minute before she brought my hand to her face and pressed the back of it to her cheek, closing her eyes.
We didn’t speak about it, but that simple gesture was enough. It was confirmation that I wasn’t crazy, and that I was not alone in my recollections. I was not alone. But while this silent acknowledgment of what had happened eased my mind, it also scared the hell out of me. Sometimes, it was easier to deny things: to pretend that everything was normal, that I was normal. She squeezed my hand before she let it go and opened the front flap of the tent to the new day.
The rain seemed to have come and gone, and the girls were all thrilled for the stories it left them with. They chattered endlessly, obliviously, as they packed their things and recounted the details of the storm. They were filthy and exhausted
by the time their parents picked them up at the campground entrance. I distributed the Go Camping badges ceremoniously, and each of the girls beamed. And after they were all gone, Eva and I sat at a picnic table with our own girls, waiting for Frankie to show up. As we waited, I was terrified to steal even a glance at her, worried that someone might be able to read whatever it was that my expression revealed.
A half hour passed, an excruciating hour, and still no Frankie. It was Sunday, which meant Mass at ten o’clock, but it was already past noon. The campground was only five miles from our house. The girls were restless. I gave them the remaining food we had: some saltine crackers smeared with peanut butter. The bruised apples that had been picked over.
“I’m going to go call him,” I said, grateful for an excuse to leave. “Stay here with the girls?”
“Of course,” Eva said.
I went to the campground office and knocked on the door. The woman who had checked us in was working. “Excuse me, may I use your phone to call my husband? He was supposed to be here to pick us up an hour ago.”
“I wish I could help you,” she said. “Storm took the phone out. The electricity too.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, thank you.”
“You’re the one with the Scouts, right?” she said, nodding and reaching behind the counter. “Here’s a little something to keep them occupied while you wait,” she said, handing over some old coloring books and a coffee can of broken crayons.
