100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  On the second day of camp, Troop 909 was dancing around the mound of nail polish–decorated hockey balls, their limbs jangling awkwardly, their cries like the constant summer squeal of an amusement park. There was a stream that bordered the field hockey lawn, and the girls from my troop settled next to it, scarfing down the last of lunch: sandwiches made from salami and slices of tomato that had gotten waterlogged from the melting ice in the cooler. From the stream bank, Arnetta eyed the Troop 909 girls, scrutinizing their movements to glean inspiration for battle.

  “Man,” Arnetta said, “we could bum-rush them right now if that damn lady would leave.”

  The 909 troop leader was a white woman with the severe pageboy hairdo of an ancient Egyptian. She lay sprawled on a picnic blanket, Sphinxlike, eating a banana, sometimes holding it out in front of her like a microphone. Beside her sat a girl slowly flapping one hand like a bird with a broken wing. Occasionally, the leader would call out the names of girls who’d attempted leapfrogs and flips, or of girls who yelled too loudly or strayed far from the circle.

  “I’m just glad Big Fat Mama’s not following us here,” Octavia said. “At least we don’t have to worry about her.” Mrs. Margolin, Octavia assured us, was having her Afternoon Devotional, shrouded in mosquito netting, in a clearing she’d found. Mrs. Hedy was cleaning mud from her espadrilles in the cabin.

  “I handled them.” Arnetta sucked on her teeth and proudly grinned. “I told her we was going to gather leaves.”

  “Gather leaves,” Octavia said, nodding respectfully. “That’s a good one. They’re so mad-crazy about this camping thing.” She looked from ground to sky, sky to ground. Her hair hung down her back in two braids like a squaw’s. “I mean, I really don’t know why it’s even called camping—all we ever do with Nature is find some twigs and say something like, ‘Wow, this fell from a tree.’” She then studied her sandwich. With two disdainful fingers, she picked out a slice of dripping tomato, the sections congealed with red slime. She pitched it into the stream embrowned with dead leaves and the murky effigies of other dead things, but in the opaque water a group of small silver-brown fish appeared. They surrounded the tomato and nibbled.

  “Look!” Janice cried. “Fishes! Fishes!” As she scrambled to the edge of the stream to watch, a covey of insects threw up tantrums from the wheatgrass and nettle, a throng of tiny electric machines, all going at once. Octavia snuck up behind Janice as if to push her in. Daphne and I exchanged terrified looks. It seemed as though only we knew that Octavia was close enough—and bold enough—to actually push Janice into the stream. Janice turned around quickly, but Octavia was already staring serenely into the still water as though she were gathering some sort of courage from it. “What’s so funny?” Janice said, eyeing them all suspiciously.

  Elise began humming the tune to “Karma Chameleon,” all the girls joining in, their hums light and facile. Janice began to hum, against everyone else, the high-octane opening chords of “Beat It.”

  “I love me some Michael Jackson,” Janice said when she’d finished humming, smacking her lips as though Michael Jackson were a favorite meal. “I will marry Michael Jackson.”

  Before anyone had a chance to impress upon Janice the impossibility of this, Arnetta suddenly rose, made a sun visor of her hand, and watched Troop 909 leave the field hockey lawn.

  “Dammit!” she said. “We’ve got to get them alone.”

  “They won’t ever be alone,” I said. All the rest of the girls looked at me. If I spoke even a word, I could count on someone calling me Snot, but everyone seemed to think that we could beat up these girls; no one entertained the thought that they might fight back. “The only time they’ll be unsupervised is in the bathroom.”

  “Oh shut up, Snot,” Octavia said.

  But Arnetta slowly nodded her head. “The bathroom,” she said. “The bathroom,” she said, again and again. “The bathroom! The bathroom!” She cheered so blissfully that I thought for a moment she was joking.

  According to Octavia’s watch, it took us five minutes to hike to the rest­rooms, which were midway between our cabin and Troop 909’s. Inside, the mirrors above the sinks returned only the vaguest of reflections, as though someone had taken a scouring pad to their surfaces to obscure the shine. Pine needles, leaves, and dirty flattened wads of chewing gum covered the floor like a mosaic. Webs of hair matted the drain in the middle of the floor. Above the sinks and below the mirrors, stacks of folded white paper towels lay on a long metal counter. Shaggy white balls of paper towels sat on the sink tops in a line like corsages on display. A thread of floss snaked from a wad of tissues dotted with the faint red-pink of blood. One of those white girls, I thought, had just lost a tooth.

  The restroom looked almost the same as it had the night before, but it somehow seemed stranger now. We had never noticed the wooden rafters before, coming together in great V’s. We were, it seemed, inside a whale, viewing the ribs of the roof of its mouth.

  “Wow. It’s a mess,” Elise said.

  “You can say that again.”

  Arnetta leaned against the doorjamb of a restroom stall. “This is where they’ll be again,” she said. Just seeing the place, just having a plan, seemed to satisfy her. “We’ll go in and talk to them. You know, ‘How you doing? How long will you be here?,’ that sort of thing. Then Octavia and I are gonna tell them what happens when they call any one of us a nigger.”

  “I’m going to say something, too,” Janice said.

  Arnetta considered this. “Sure,” she said. “Of course. Whatever you want.”

  Janice pointed her finger like a gun at Octavia and rehearsed the line she’d thought up, “‘We’re gonna teach you a lesson.’ That’s what I’m going to say.” She narrowed her eyes like a TV mobster. “‘We’re gonna teach you little girls a lesson!’”

  With the back of her hand, Octavia brushed Janice’s finger away. “You couldn’t teach me to shit in a toilet.”

  “But,” I said, “what if they say, ‘We didn’t say that. We didn’t call anyone a N-I-G-G-E-R’?”

  “Snot,” Arnetta sighed. “Don’t think. Just fight. If you even know how.”

  Everyone laughed while Daphne stood there. Arnetta gently laid her hand on Daphne’s shoulder. “Daphne. You don’t have to fight. We’re doing this for you.”

  Daphne walked to the counter, took a clean paper towel, and carefully unfolded it like a map. With this, she began to pick up the trash all around. Everyone watched.

  “C’mon,” Arnetta said to everyone. “Let’s beat it.” We all ambled toward the restroom doorway, where the sunshine made one large white rectangle of light. We were immediately blinded and shielded our eyes with our hands, our forearms.

  “Daphne?” Arnetta asked. “Are you coming?”

  We all looked back at the girl, who was bending, the thin of her back hunched like a maid caught in stage limelight. Stray strands of her hair were lit nearly transparent, thin fiber-optic threads. She did not nod yes to the question, nor did she shake her head no. She abided, bent. Then she began again, picking up leaves, wads of paper, the cotton fluff innards from a torn stuffed toy. She did it so methodically, so exquisitely, so humbly, she must have been trained. I thought of those dresses she wore, faded and old, yet so pressed and clean; I then saw the poverty in them, I then could imagine her mother, cleaning the houses of others, returning home, weary.

  “I guess she’s not coming.”

  We left her, heading back to our cabin, over pine needles and leaves, taking the path full of shade.

  “What about our secret meeting?” Elise asked.

  Arnetta enunciated in a way that defied contradiction: “We just had it.”

  Just as we caught sight of our cabin, Arnetta violently swerved away from Octavia. “You farted,” she said.

  Octavia began to sashay, as if on a catwalk, then proclaimed, in a Hollywood-starlet voice, “My farts smell like perfume.”

  It was nearing our bedtime, but in the lengthening days
of spring, the sun had not yet set.

  “Hey, your mama’s coming,” Arnetta said to Octavia when she saw Mrs. Hedy walk toward the cabin, sniffling. When Octavia’s mother wasn’t giving bored, parochial orders, she sniffled continuously, mourning an imminent divorce from her husband. She might begin a sentence, “I don’t know what Robert will do when Octavia and I are gone. Who’ll buy him cigarettes?” and Octavia would hotly whisper “Mama” in a way that meant: Please don’t talk about our problems in front of everyone. Please shut up.

  But when Mrs. Hedy began talking about her husband, thinking about her husband, seeing clouds shaped like the head of her husband, she couldn’t be quiet, and no one could ever dislodge her from the comfort of her own woe. Only one thing could perk her up—Brownie songs. If the rest of the girls were quiet, and Mrs. Hedy was in her dopey sorrowful mood, she would say, “Y’all know I like those songs, girls. Why don’t you sing one?” Everyone would groan except me and Daphne. I, for one, liked some of the songs.

  “C’mon, everybody,” Octavia said drearily. “She likes ‘The Brownie Song’ best.”

  We sang, loud enough to reach Mrs. Hedy:

  I’ve something in my pocket;

  It belongs across my face.

  And I keep it very close at hand in a most convenient place.

  I’m sure you couldn’t guess it

  If you guessed a long, long while.

  So I’ll take it out and put it on—

  It’s a great big Brownie Smile!

  “The Brownie Song” was supposed to be sung as though we were elves in a workshop, singing as we merrily cobbled shoes, but everyone except me hated the song and sang it like a maudlin record, played at the most sluggish of rpms.

  “That was good,” Mrs. Hedy said, closing the cabin door behind her. “Wasn’t that nice, Linda?”

  “Praise God,” Mrs. Margolin answered without raising her head from the chore of counting out Popsicle sticks for the next day’s session of crafts.

  “Sing another one,” Mrs. Hedy said, with a sort of joyful aggression, like a drunk I’d once seen who’d refused to leave a Korean grocery.

  “God, Mama, get over it,” Octavia whispered in a voice meant only for Arnetta, but Mrs. Hedy heard it and started to leave the cabin.

  “Don’t go,” Arnetta said. She ran after Mrs. Hedy and held her by the arm. “We haven’t finished singing.” She nudged us with a single look. “Let’s sing ‘The Friends Song.’ For Mrs. Hedy.”

  Although I liked some of the songs, I hated this one:

  Make new friends

  But keep the o-old,

  One is silver

  And the other gold.

  If most of the girls in my troop could be any type of metal, they’d be bunched-up wads of tinfoil maybe, or rusty iron nails you had to get tetanus shots for.

  “No, no, no,” Mrs. Margolin said before anyone could start in on “The Friends Song.” “An uplifting song. Something to lift her up and take her mind off all these earthly burdens.”

  Arnetta and Octavia rolled their eyes. Everyone knew what song Mrs. Margolin was talking about, and no one, no one, wanted to sing it.

  “Please, no,” a voice called out. “Not ‘The Doughnut Song.’”

  “Please not ‘The Doughnut Song,’” Octavia pleaded.

  “I’ll brush my teeth twice if I don’t have to sing ‘The Doughnut—’”

  “Sing!” Mrs. Margolin demanded.

  We sang:

  Life without Jesus is like a do-ough-nut!

  Like a do-ooough-nut!

  Like a do-ooough-nut!

  Life without Jesus is like a do-ough-nut!

  There’s a hole in the middle of my soul!

  There were other verses, involving other pastries, but we stopped after the first one and cast glances toward Mrs. Margolin to see if we could gain a reprieve. Mrs. Margolin’s eyes fluttered blissfully, half-asleep.

  “Awww,” Mrs. Hedy said, as though giant Mrs. Margolin were a cute baby. “Mrs. Margolin’s had a long day.”

  “Yes indeed,” Mrs. Margolin answered. “If you don’t mind, I might just go to the lodge where the beds are. I haven’t been the same since the operation.”

  I had not heard of this operation, or when it had occurred, since Mrs. Margolin had never missed the once-a-week Brownie meetings, but I could see from Daphne’s face that she was concerned, and I could see that the other girls had decided that Mrs. Margolin’s operation must have happened long ago in some remote time unconnected to our own. Nevertheless, they put on sad faces. We had all been taught that adulthood was full of sorrow and pain, taxes and bills, dreaded work and dealings with whites, sickness, and death.

  “Go right ahead, Linda,” Mrs. Hedy said. “I’ll watch the girls.” Mrs. Hedy seemed to forget about divorce for a moment; she looked at us with dewy eyes, as if we were mysterious, furry creatures. Meanwhile, Mrs. Margolin walked through the maze of sleeping bags until she found her own. She gathered a neat stack of clothes and pajamas slowly, as though doing so were almost painful. She took her toothbrush, her toothpaste, her pillow. “All right!” Mrs. Margolin said, addressing us all from the threshold of the cabin. “Be in bed by nine.” She said it with a twinkle in her voice, as though she were letting us know she was allowing us to be naughty and stay up till nine-fifteen.

  “C’mon, everybody,” Arnetta said after Mrs. Margolin left. “Time for us to wash up.”

  Everyone watched Mrs. Hedy closely, wondering whether she would insist on coming with us since it was night, making a fight with Troop 909 nearly impossible. Troop 909 would soon be in the bathroom, washing their faces, brushing their teeth—completely unsuspecting of our ambush.

  “We won’t be long,” Arnetta said. “We’re old enough to go to the restroom by ourselves.”

  Mrs. Hedy pursed her lips at this dilemma. “Well, I guess you Brownies are almost Girl Scouts, right?”

  “Right!”

  “Just one more badge,” Drema said.

  “And about,” Octavia droned, “a million more cookies to sell.” Octavia looked at all of us. Now’s our chance, her face seemed to say, but our chance to do what I didn’t exactly know.

  Finally, Mrs. Hedy walked to the doorway where Octavia stood, dutifully waiting to say good-bye and looking bored doing it. Mrs. Hedy held Octavia’s chin. “You’ll be good?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “And remember to pray for me and your father? If I’m asleep when you get back?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  When the other girls had finished getting their toothbrushes and washcloths and flashlights for the group restroom trip, I was drawing pictures of tiny birds with too many feathers. Daphne was sitting on her sleeping bag, reading.

  “You’re not going to come?” Octavia asked.

  Daphne shook her head.

  “I’m also gonna stay, too,” I said. “I’ll go to the restroom when Daphne and Mrs. Hedy go.”

  Arnetta leaned down toward me and whispered so that Mrs. Hedy, who had taken over Mrs. Margolin’s task of counting Popsicle sticks, couldn’t hear. “No, Snot. If we get in trouble, you’re going to get in trouble with the rest of us.”

  We made our way through the darkness by flashlight. The tree branches that had shaded us just hours earlier, along the same path, now looked like arms sprouting menacing hands. The stars sprinkled the sky like spilled salt. They seemed fastened to the darkness, high up and holy, their places fixed and definite as we stirred beneath them.

  Some, like me, were quiet because we were afraid of the dark; others were talking like crazy for the same reason.

  “Wow,” Drema said, looking up. “Why are all the stars out here? I never see stars back on Oneida Street.”

  “It’s a camping trip, that’s why,” Octavia said. “You’re supposed to see stars on camping trips.”

  Janice said, “This place smells like the air freshener my mother uses.”

  “These woods are pine,” Elise said. “Your
mother probably uses pine air freshener.”

  Janice mouthed an exaggerated “Oh,” nodding her head as though she just then understood one of the world’s great secrets.

  No one talked about fighting. Everyone was afraid enough just walking through the infinite deep of the woods. Even without seeing anyone’s face, I could tell this wasn’t about Daphne being called a nigger. The word that had started it all seemed melted now into some deeper, unnameable feeling. Even though I didn’t want to fight, was afraid of fighting, I felt as though I were part of the rest of the troop, as though I were defending something. We trudged against the slight incline of the path, Arnetta leading the way. I wondered, looking at her back, what she could be thinking.

  “You know,” I said, “their leader will be there. Or they won’t even be there. It’s dark already. Last night the sun was still in the sky. I’m sure they’re already finished.”

  “Whose flashlight is this?” Arnetta said, shaking the weakening beam of the light she was holding. “It’s out of batteries.”

  Octavia handed Arnetta her flashlight. And that’s when I saw it. The bathroom was just ahead.

  But the girls were there. We could hear them before we could see them.

  “Octavia and I will go in first so they’ll think there’s just two of us. Then wait till I say, ‘We’re gonna teach you a lesson,’” Arnetta said. “Then bust in. That’ll surprise them.”

  “That’s what I was supposed to say,” Janice said.

  Arnetta went inside, Octavia next to her. Janice followed, and the rest of us waited outside.

  They were in there for what seemed like whole minutes, but something was wrong. Arnetta hadn’t given the signal yet. I was with the girls outside when I heard one of the Troop 909 girls say, “NO. That did NOT happen!”