First of all, young lady, we’ll do you,” Betsy said. I was standing in her bedroom, taking in the tiny room’s sloped ceiling, dormer window, a dresser with big round knobs, and a four-poster bed that was high off the ground and covered with a quilt. A twin bed was pushed off to one side. Did their daughter sleep in their room? With them?
Betsy put her hands on her hips, looking at me up and down. “So tall,” she said. “Lucky.”
I didn’t say anything because I guessed Betsy didn’t know what it was like to be taller than all the boys in your grade, to be known as the girl who hung Robby Brainerd upside down by his ankles after she found him throwing frogs against the playground slide. To be the girl who always plays fullback on the soccer team, the one who has never been asked out by a boy.
Betsy gestured to the big bed, where she’d laid out some clothes. There was something dark brown, something blue with flowers, and other things that were all white and fluffy. Betsy ran her palm underneath the leg of what looked like pants—only they were white, with ruffles at the bottom and a pink ribbon at the waist. “I have a girl come out from town to run these up for me,” she said. “We used the measurements you all sent in and I think they ought to fit you pretty well. Have you ever worn clothes that were made just for you instead of fabricated in China and sold in mass quantity at the G-A-P?” Her big blue eyes were sparkling, like it was Christmas morning, and she was Santa. And yes, she spelled “Gap” like it was a dirty word.
My mom rubbed the fabric between her fingers. She took in a deep and reverent breath, as if she were meeting someone holy. “They’re just lovely,” she said. “And so simple.”
Now, I know from simple. I am the kind of person who wears jeans every single day in the winter, and shorts with good pockets every day in the summer. My mom always wants me to keep my hair long, and I do, but I brush it in the morning, put it in a ponytail, and don’t think about it again all day. These clothes—there was nothing simple about them.
And speaking of hair, just then Betsy looked into my face—she actually leaned in so she could see all the way under the bill of my baseball cap. “Darling,” she said, “shall I put your lovely long hair into braids?”
“Umm …,” I said, thinking, “Cell phone, cell phone.” Before I knew it, she had whisked off the cap and begun brushing and pulling and tugging and otherwise making my scalp burn, wrestling my hair into two braids. My friend Ashley wears braids sometimes. It’s part of her prep look—you know, a short plaid skirt, kneesocks, oxfords, glasses? It’s cute. When I wear braids, it doesn’t look cute. It looks like I have a fat face.
“There,” Betsy said, smiling—she was like the Cheshire cat, this woman—and turning me so I could face my mom.
“So sweet!” my mom gushed. I turned away. It was hard to see her this happy when I was feeling like a trussed turkey.
Next, Betsy had me out of my jean shorts, my Chucks, and the Yosemite T-shirt I’d bought at Urban Outfitters, and into more clothes than I would normally wear in a week. There was a tank-top thing she called a bib; a petticoat, which is a kind of skirt you wear underneath your other skirt; pantaloons, which are pants you wear instead of underwear—they are open in the back so you can go to the bathroom without pulling them down; and wool stockings, which are actually very long socks that button onto straps hanging down from your bib. Over everything, you wear a long wool dress that weighs as much as ten algebra textbooks. Betsy lovingly pointed out the double stitching on the seams, the rickrack bib work, the puffs at the sleeves. “This was the fashion in 1890,” she said. “A girl your age would already be considered a young lady, so I was careful to pick styles for you that are more sophisticated than what the little girls are wearing.”
“Sophisticated,” I repeated as I strapped on boots with twenty different hooks you had to wrap the laces around, and Betsy showed my mom the clothes she’d laid out for her. “So what year did you say you’re pretending it is?” I asked. “1890?”
“Oh, no,” said Betsy. “We’re not pretending. 1890 is the year it is.”
How I wished Kristin or Ashley were here so I could catch their eyes and whisper, “Crazy!” Desperate, I stole a glance up at my mom, but her back was turned as she struggled to attach her stocking to the straps.
Betsy brought out a mirror. It was about the size of a small book, but I could move it up and down my whole body to see what I looked like.
And let me tell you: it was worse than I had expected.
I think that even as I’d been dreading the idea of wearing all this stuff, deep down, I secretly hoped that my mom would be right and that inside these long dresses and frilly clothes, I’d look pretty. Wait, I take that back. It sounds so lame.
Let me try again. When I look in the mirror at home or in the locker room, or just walking by a storefront, I’m always surprised. And kind of horrified. How come I have such big cheeks and not enough forehead? How can I be so ordinary and also ugly at the same time? Wouldn’t one of those be bad enough?
But even shock is not the right word to describe what I saw now. In my dress and braids, I didn’t look plain and ordinary, disappointing, or simply ugly. I looked like a freak. I looked like someone I had never seen before in my life. I had to remind myself that I was actually still there, inside what I was wearing. I pulled a few strips of hair out from the braids so my face had a little something covering it, but that just made me look like a freak who’d been caught in a windstorm.
Betsy and my mom couldn’t get enough of me though. “Oh, Genevieve,” my mom cooed, and there were actual tears in her eyes. “This is amazing. Don’t you feel like we’re genuinely traveling back in time?”
I tried very hard to get her to stop being ridiculous just by staring at her. “I look like I’m in the Thanksgiving play,” I said. “I look like I’m six.”
Betsy smiled and then she was back to business, pulling a burlap sack down from a hook on the wall. “Everything you brought with you goes in here,” she said. “Your toothbrushes, your socks and underwear. I lock it up and we don’t get it out again until you go. This experiment won’t work—it isn’t good for you, it doesn’t change you—unless you leave behind every aspect of the modern world.”
“Um…,” I said. “Everything?”
“Everything,” Betsy answered, and she dumped the contents of my knapsack out onto the bed. “This gadget,” she said, holding my iPod, “has no place in this world.” She fingered the lip gloss I’d packed even though I don’t wear it—I was just seeing what would happen. “No, dearie, sorry.” One by one everything I’d decided to bring was thrown in the burlap bag.
But when her hand closed around my boxed set of travel-size Clearasil products, I grabbed it back.
“No,” I said.
“Genevieve,” my mom counseled. “We talked about this.” Horrible enough to recall, we had. That conversation—about how at Camp Frontier they didn’t brush their teeth, no one wore deodorant, and bathing was a weekly (maybe), not a daily, event—that conversation goes down in history as one of the worst talks my mom and I have ever had.
So I knew. No Clearasil.
But I was looking at my mom now, not Betsy. I mean, let’s cut to the chase—Betsy could giggle away in her bonnet and dress and believe that it was any year she wanted, but it was my mom who had written the check and I’m sure no one would have cashed it if it had been dated 1890. “I will cry every night,” I said in a low voice. “I will walk all the way home.” I could see on her face that she was close to giving in. “It’s just this one thing,” I said. “I’m giving up my whole summer, and all I want in return is to start high school not covered in acne scars.” She was deciding, I could tell, and then she frowned, which told me I’d won. She turned to Betsy.
“We’re asking an awful lot of a thirteen-year-old here,” she said. “I think we’ll still get the bulk of the experience even if we make this one exception.”
Betsy raised her eyebrows. “All right,” she said, “though my personal opinion is that clean water and proper nutrition—”
My mom cut her off. “Let’s drop it,” she said. She turned toward the stairs, her back straight and tall in her black dress that looked so much like mine. I was reminded for a horrific moment of the matching mother-daughter dresses she tried to force me to wear on Christmas when I was ten and already way too old for it.
I couldn’t help but wonder now: if I’d just sucked it up about the mother–daughter dress back then, would my mom have gotten this kind of thing out of her system, and let me spend the summer hanging out at the rec-center pool where I belonged?
The thought was enough to make me want to cry all over again.