The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  Pleased with this memory, she let it play out for a while, imagining the counselors and campers seeing her as she really was—combat boots, vintage frock, teaching the feint and philosophy of draft dodging—until she recalled, with flaring embarrassment, how the lessons had actually gone. Nearly every boy she’d approached, saying, “Excuse me, do you want to learn about conscientious objection?” had answered with some variation on “I dunno, you want to suck my dick?”

  Rebecca, who had some complicated feelings about dick-sucking, never having had the opportunity to try it, unsure of how exactly one did it (teeth?) had found no clever rejoinder. Who felt the pulse, the fright of an approaching war? Not Berkeley’s fine young men, all apparently stoned and happy, proud to come of age in peacetime.

  So perhaps not a hologram of that precise moment. Amid the discomfort of recalled humiliation, the white telephone began to look like a very compelling portal. She lifted the receiver, dialed.

  Caleb had described the rules for phone use with more detail and admonition than he did for chain saws, fires, or bowie knives, casting it as a unique tool of destruction to be avoided except in emergencies, and even then, only at night. Flouting this—it was just a telephone, after all—she’d started calling home willy-nilly. Evening, morning, broad daylight. Her only emergency was the need to say “Don’t tell Dad, but I hate it here” and receive sympathetic maternal clucks from Georgia, which would restore her to her full self: knowable, complete, daughter.

  Her parents’ phone rang twice, and on the third ring, there was a knock on the office door. “Caleb? You in there?”

  The door opened, and Don Talc entered, holding a length of hose. “Oh, pardon me. Just looking for . . .”

  “Hello?” Georgia said on the phone. “Hello?”

  “Caleb. But if you’re . . .”

  Rebecca hung up the phone. “No, no, not at all,” she said to Don, feeling her face flush.

  Caleb always deferred to Don. “Don’s the one that should be explaining this,” he’d say. “He’s really in charge of everything.” And although Don clearly held no authority and Caleb never asked Don to explain anything, he was entirely allied with Caleb. A sidekick. A trusted assistant.

  She began to apologize. It was a true emergency, she said. Her mother was sick. Terribly sick. She said the word “cancer” and then regretted it, seized by a certainty that her mother’s healthy cells would now turn malignant by a devious god that toyed with atheists by taking them literally.

  Don said he was very sorry to hear about her mother.

  “Actually, she’s not sick,” she said, unable to bear the danger she’d put Georgia in. She knew she sounded crazy, so she began telling him, in a gushed explanation for her erratic behavior, that she was just very much in love with this room and couldn’t stay away from it. “I like to think about the woman who lived here, back when it was a bedroom, because, I mean, look around, it was clearly a bedroom, and clearly a woman’s bedroom. I can tell.”

  “Pammy,” Don offered, stepping forward to drop the hose on the desk. He took a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and placed one in his mouth, a gesture that seemed, coupled with his leathery skin, pale mustache, and taciturn demeanor, to be almost too stereotypical, imitating the Marlboro Man imitating a cowboy.

  “Alright,” she said, surprised that he would play along. “We can call her Pammy. Pamela. I like it.” She imagined telling her friends, “Oh, camp? It was great. I got to know this cowboy. We formed a bond over our mutual admiration of a bedroom.”

  She spoke for a while about how she pictured Pammy picking out the wallpaper, choosing these cheerful daisies over, say, more sentimental roses or maudlin lilies from the pages of a Sears catalogue.

  “You can stop making up your stories,” Don said, removing the cigarette with two fingers. His gaze focused on the window. “Pammy was an actual person. My wife, actually. She chose the wallpaper, twenty years ago now.” He turned to her with a look of malice that surprised her. “That was a few years before she died in this room. It was cancer, just like your mom has.”

  She’d seen Don’s trailer, as small as a four-square court, up the dirt road from the ranch house. Why would his wife have died in this room or chosen its wallpaper? But she said only that she was sorry, so sorry. So sorry. Sorry. She kept apologizing as she grabbed her backpack and ran halfway down the stairs before calling up, softly, so the gods would hear, but not necessarily Don, “My mom doesn’t have cancer, though.”

  On the Meadow, she felt conspicuously solitary. Everyone was in groups or at least paired up, even the little kids. Rebecca puttered a bit in Caleb’s orbit. Before she’d arrived at counselor training, they’d met only once, after his dad died. She was just born and he was thirteen, so it was hardly a meeting. But her whole cognizant life she’d been hearing about his mom and stepdad, PR flacks for congressional liberals whose names in the New York Times always set off a howl of contempt from her parents, and she’d assumed that their son would be similarly mealy, pedantic, smarmy; somehow she thought she’d be able to discern on his face the boring mind of a middling Democrat.

  In actuality, he was tall, brawny, competent, much more of a man than she’d expected. He strolled around camp with purpose but without hurry, a creature totally at ease, carrying his sprinkler nozzles and slingshots. She found herself waiting to be noticed by him, and in that way, at least, she was like everyone else here.

  When it became clear that he wasn’t going to notice her this morning, she moved closer to a group of campers engaged in one of those mild teenage orgies of permitted touch, flopping against each other, leaning on someone else’s bent legs or sitting back-to-back. David was in the very center, a girl braiding his hair. As if they had no idea the loner he actually was. She hadn’t spoken to him since the day he’d arrived, but now she felt compelled to flaunt their shared past in front of everyone. “Hey, David,” she called. “I talked to Ira yesterday.” She was standing far enough from him that she had to shout out her father’s predictions about the likelihood of a war in Kuwait over oil.

  David shrugged, unperturbed. “That’s why it’s so awesome to be here. Worlds away.”

  “And that’s a good thing?” she shouted, remembering why it was that she never tried to have these conversations with him. “Just hanging out, pretending a war’s not coming? Ignorance is bliss? As if we’re not implicated just by the gas we used to get here. If nothing else.”

  David’s friends began laughing at her, not loudly, but the silent, amused chuckle with which the mellow apprehend the vehement.

  She set her gaze on them. “And wow, it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s funny that boys like you will be killing other boys and dying. Have you thought about that? Exactly like you. And if there’s a draft, then not just boys like you, but you.” She pointed at the teenage boys in turn. “You and you and you.” At last, she felt like herself, the true Rebecca, holographically appearing on the plateau. War resister, Ira’s daughter, bearer of bad news. Let them stare. Let them listen. Let a shadow fall across their wide-open futures.

  Once the kids were all ushered into activities after breakfast that third morning, Caleb set off from the Meadow to find Kai. Kai wasn’t Suze. But she was a girl as beautiful as anything in nature, a girl like Mesa Verde, like the night sky.

  And what was Caleb? Walking across the field, he was a tuning fork. That’s how he thought of himself. Listening, taking the hum of the place, and then noting who was off. Rebecca zinged into his mind. Or maybe he was more like a piano tuner. Finding the wrong pitch, tightening the offending string inside the soundboard—was that how it happened? In any case, his cousin was plinking wrongly. Her sullen attitude; the way she stood alone, looking willfully pissed-off; her odd decision to tell some boys that they might get killed, which Jenny P. had told him about at breakfast. And yet she’d practically begged to come here. Hadn’t Ira called on her behalf, describing her deep desire to be a counselor, her preternatural talent with kids
? Caleb decided that he would talk to her right away. After Kai.

  Before he even made it across the ditch, however, he came upon Patrick just sitting in the dirt, sifting it through his fingers, his new fat settling like beautiful hills. Caleb loved him, loved all the kids. It killed him to imagine what might have happened to Patrick over the past year, his thirteenth year, the year the world rises up to laugh at you. He put a hand on the soft pudge of Patrick’s upper back. “Come walking with me.”

  “Do I have to?” Patrick asked. He wore a soccer medal over an enormous Lakers shirt and sat in the area of nothingness between barn, shower house, and infirmary teepee. From here, Caleb could see Mikala, a counselor for all eight years of Llamalo, through the wire garden fence. She was crouched over lettuce shoots, her ass and hips in loose jeans, her green tank top, her frizzy brown braid like a furry animal, all so familiar to him, and all still somewhat—even three years after they’d last fucked—turning him on.

  “I need your help,” he said to Patrick.

  Or was it four summers since Mikala? Last year it had been Anja, and the summer before that? Ever since Suze left, someone had come up to Caleb’s yurt in the evening after a campfire, the kids all asleep. Caleb had a small repertoire of gesticulatory invitations, a hand resting on a shoulder, slipping down the back, a suggestion of finishing up a conversation later. There was nowhere to knock on a yurt, so the girl had to push open the curtained door. Oh, hi, I just thought. No, sure, come in.

  “We need to see what’s going on up at the Gathering,” he said, still looking at Mikala, thinking the phrase “one ass leading to another,” and then, “for all time, ass begot ass.”

  He’d gone all winter without, all spring and fall. It was an appropriate loneliness then, an appropriate hardship, part of living here; hermitage was the cool underside of isolation. Summer, though—summer was different: a jostling busy world, a world of careful calibrations every hour, an explosively alive world. And sex was appropriate in this world.

  Caleb helped Patrick to his feet. He never said to the kids, “Why are you just sitting here?” He never said, “Is something wrong?” He said, “Come along with me,” and they came. Some chose to spend every morning like this, waiting to be found by Caleb. They pulled on his arm, and as he walked around Llamalo, he heard himself spoken about: Caleb told me we’re having sloppy joes tomorrow. Caleb says that’s the most rare hawk to see here. Even when he’d said nothing of the sort.

  Caleb led Patrick to one of the three footbridges he’d built across the irrigation ditch. The Gathering—he often regretted naming it with a gerund—was a fenced-in circle of dirt that had once been the Talcs’ winter corral. It was the highest meeting point in camp, beyond the platforms and just after the craft shacks, a twenty-minute walk from the irrigation ditch. Kai would be there now, in her red shorts and with a smile like she was offering a gift.

  But once across the bridge, Caleb and Patrick were further detained by another camper, Nicole, who waved a black trash bag, “Caleb, come see!” During announcements, lithe Jamal with the chest-length dreads had stood up, shirtless, to invite campers to help him clear star thistle from the trails that connected the boys’ platforms to their toilets. All the girls from puberty on up were now clasping gloved fingers around thorned stems.

  Last year, Nicole had worn the same shirt as everyone, tie-dyed, food-stained, oversized (Frank’s Farm and Feed sold only larges), as well as a single lace glove. Every day, she unpeeled it for Caleb, and they inspected her skin for signs of tattooing from the sun. “A grand accomplishment!” he’d said, at the end of the summer when she’d removed the glove and waved her latticed hand in his face.

  But this year, she’d arrived with two school friends who’d never been here before, Tanaya and Shauna, and they all wore the same white polo shirts, Ray-Bans, Reeboks. At announcements, they sat on plastic bags, lest their khaki shorts be stained with dew. It was these friends of Nicole’s, the popular kids, the kids who belonged at camps with competitive sports and weekly phone calls home, whom he worried about more than the stragglers. Would they relax enough to become part of Llamalo?

  “Caleb,” Tanaya said, “aren’t we doing an amazing job?”

  “Caleb,” Shauna said, “aren’t we so nice for doing this for the boys?”

  Now, all the girls stopped working and gathered around Caleb and Patrick.

  “Caleb, are there tacos for lunch today?”

  “It’s Thursday, isn’t it,” another girl answered. “Always tacos on Thursday.”

  “Caleb, are we doing self stories this year?”

  “What are ‘self stories’?” Tanaya asked, rolling her eyes. “Sounds like something nasty.” Her giggling body collapsed onto Shauna’s.

  Little jappy girls, Caleb thought, but he didn’t chastise them. It would happen this summer like it happened before: nail polish chips away, leg hair grows in, alligators fall off, dust settles on white cotton.

  The trick, although he never said this to anyone, was simply to love them. He had to feel the love in his chest. He had to listen to them and say “Excellent” and “How fantastic” and “Tell me more at lunch.” These phrases now allowed him and Patrick to leave the boys’ area, Patrick’s soccer medal metronoming their way as they passed the small open-faced shacks: Nat was demonstrating how to make baskets from pine needles, like the Indians did; Scott, laying out black floss to sew patches on the backpacking packs; Jeremy, shaving juniper branches into bows; Rebecca, holding up a clump of mud and asking, “Can you identify this animal track?”

  Could Rebecca even identify it? Caleb doubted it. He stopped to listen but was distracted by a cackle and the moan of the generator coming from behind the black sheet that covered the opening of the photography shack. Inside were troughs of chemicals and a red lightbulb and prints hung on a clothesline, but there was no photography on Thursdays.

  Caleb walked over, knocked on a wall. He heard a familiar “Oh boy,” and then four young boys appeared from behind the sheet, squinting into the sun, followed by David.

  “I developed the rolls left over from last summer,” David said. “They’re drying now.”

  “Cool. Cool,” Caleb said, nodding his head, pleased that David had taken it upon himself to teach the younger boys that the past could be brought back and hung on a clothesline.

  The boys copied David—his slouch, the bob of his head—just as David had spent the past eight years copying Caleb, so they all stood there in a semicircle, slouching the same, nodding cool.

  “Wanna see them? There’s Saskia doing that face. You remember Saskia’s face?”

  Instead of answering, Caleb rested his hand on David’s shoulder. This was perfect, actually. “Could you show them to Patrick? I need to check on something.”

  Now he could arrive at the Gathering unaccompanied. Four kids, dipping their Farm and Feed shirts into cauldrons of dye, called hello. Kai was kneeling on a tarp, untangling a length of basting string, broken rubber bands beside her. One of her hands was the color of an angry ocean. She glanced at him, returned to her tangle. Her black hair was loose. A T-shirt cut low showed breasts tan and braless. He came to her side and crouched.

  “Oh fuck, are you here to tell me I messed something up? I didn’t realize the rubber bands would all just snap.” She was jocular but defensive.

  He reached out to tap her blued fingers. “What happened here?”

  Dropping the string, she held the dyed hand out for examination. “I know! I know! I totally forgot to use gloves. It looks awful.”

  “Actually”—he reached out again and caught this hand and held it—“I like it.”

  “Are you shitting me?” she asked. He returned her smile and shrugged, and then the first lunch bell rang. But that was fine; he’d done enough.

  “Alright, everyone, clean up,” she yelled, and her wards set their tie-dyed shirts on a sheet pinned down by rocks. The sheet lapped up blue and green and yellow from the twisted, tourniqueted shirts, stra
itjackets for clowns.

  “Don’t wash it,” he called, walking away.

  Caleb heard the banging noises of cleaning up in the shacks, and then, as he continued the trail alone, he heard aimless guitar-strumming from Suze’s Meadow. There was the second lunch-time, lunch-time clang of the cowbell that only Scott was allowed to ring, the running of feet to the picnic tables, the silence of the moment of silence, the drum solo of forks scraping, and then voices joining in. And all these were the right noises, washing away in the huge cauldron of sky that was Llamalo, until they were interrupted by the bristled sound of high-pitched giggling, that timbre calculated both to draw attention and to exclude. He looked over to see Nicole, Shauna, and Tanaya, all at the same table, hunched close and laughing.

  “Ha,” Tanaya said, like a lightning bolt striking a juniper. “Ha,” Shauna answered, like a plate of food dropped. “Ha,” Nicole echoed. “You’re so funny, Tanaya.”

  Caleb rose slightly from his seat, feeling the hot need to shout at them, to shut them up somehow, before he remembered it was just laughing, just children, before he remembered about love.

  He forced himself to sit down again and pass the rice and listen as a girl beside him spoke of the remarkable tricks she’d taught her cat. At the end of lunch, campers and counselors gathered on the Meadow. When Caleb came around the house and stood before them, they quieted. He smiled at them and began one of his talks about how you can allow yourself to change when you’re in the wilderness, how it’s one of the only times in your life you might be entirely open to change. This was not an overt reprimand for those girls, those little jappy girls, but rather words washed in meaning and exhortation, like a rubber-banded T-shirt dunked in blue dye to make blue spiderwebs.

  As Caleb was watching everyone head across the footbridges to wait out the hottest hour of the day supine on their platforms, Don approached, squinting up at him. “Wondering if I could take a minute to go over something with you.”