Week 2 – Tuesday
7:45 pm
Ron had told us that every family would be given a cow the second week of camp, but I’d forgotten all about it until this morning. Gavin and I were pulling up potatoes in the kitchen garden, and suddenly there was Nora, leading a cow by a rope. She looked like she’d marched right out of an illustration from a Mother Goose book, with her cap and her braid and her boots and her long dress that she wore like it wasn’t driving her totally crazy the way mine was.
Week 2 – Tuesday
7:45 pm
Sometimes--and I know this is pathetic--I have to force myself to remember that Nora should not look normal to me, that 1890 should always cause a shock to the senses, but it’s hard sometimes to remember.
When Nora looked up and saw us, she frowned, or at least I think she did. Her sunbonnet was casting a shadow over her face like she was some kind of gunslinger in a Western. She draped the cow’s lead (that’s a word I was about to learn) over a hook outside the barn, and took a few steps toward me and Gavin where we were on the fence, so we could hear her without her having to shout. “You kids ever milked a cow before?” she asked, her hands on her hips, her elbows sticking out. Then she turned and walked back to the barn.
Somehow we knew that we were supposed to follow her, though following Nora was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
I know that no one should expect a girl like me—who grew up in the suburbs drinking milk out of a carton—to know anything about milking a real cow. But still, I couldn’t come up with a single way to admit that to Nora without feeling like she was winning some kind of game.
So when we got inside the barn, where Nora had led the cow and she repeated her question, I said, “Sure, I’ve done it before,” and I’m not sure whose glare hit me first, Nora’s or Gavin’s. The looks they were giving me were like searchlights crisscrossing over my body, looking for some evidence of a lie.
Immediately, I thought, “Should I take it back?” I could say I’d milked a fake cow at the petting zoo we used to go to that had wooden cutout cows with big fat rubber udders filled with water and hanging down so kids could practice squeezing out milk.
But I didn’t say that. I shrugged and I said, “Tons of times. What’s the big deal?” It was stupid, okay, I know that.
“Great,” Nora said. “So you should be all set.”
I was scrambling now, thinking, “What am I doing?” And “Why did I say that?” I was thinking that it would be ugly when it finally came time to try to get milk out of this animal. I was thinking that maybe my dad would know what to do with the cow, the way he’d known all about bears.
For now, though, this was about Nora and me. I had my fight face on, the mask I felt forming during soccer games, when I knew I couldn’t let the other team get even one shot on goal.
My fight face worked. Nora maybe—at least for a second—believed me. Her expression changed. She’s really pretty, or at least she could be—and while she was feeling surprised, she kind of forgot for a second to look mad.
In fact, she looked kind of impressed, and I found myself wishing I did know how to milk a cow because I liked the idea of Nora being impressed with something I could do. For a second I wished she was someone on my soccer team who I could hang out with and practice corner kicks or juggling. She could be pretty cool if she were a normal kid my age.
It was just a second before she pursed her lips right back into the sneer and said, “Okay, then. Jezebel here’s ready to go, so get yourself a bucket.”
“Now?” I asked, and I think it was the question—or maybe the desperation in my voice when I asked it—that gave me away. Nora’s smile uncurled like a snake.
“What’s going on?” my mom said when I burst into the kitchen. I tried not to look too panicked. I was thinking maybe I could figure out how to milk a cow just by trying. I was thinking that maybe all that experience at the petting zoo when I was—what? seven?—would somehow make me look like a pro. And while I was thinking all this I was standing dumbstruck inside the doorway, my hands clenched at my sides. It was all I could do not to put them on my head and pull at my hair and say, “Oh, God what have I done?”
“Gen?” my mom prompted.
I didn’t answer her because just then I was realizing that I’d forgotten what I’d come in for.
As if she could read my mind, Nora called from outside, “Milk bucket’s on a hook by the door!” Oh yeah, I thought, and I grabbed the tin bucket I hadn’t even noticed before, hanging exactly where Nora had said it would be.
I gave myself a pep talk. “Be brave!” I said. I held my head high and carried the milk bucket like I’d been carrying one every day of my life. Actually, I held my head too high. I didn’t see one of the chickens—I still didn’t know if it was Daisy or Pumpkin, it was the one without the orange spots. When I stepped on it, it let out this huge squawk and I was like, “Sorry, sorry!” I kept walking and tried to look like, well, like someone who knew how to milk a cow.
Once I was inside the barn, up close and personal with the cow—Jezebel—I had a moment of intense doubt and I bet it showed.
Jezebel was a reddish brownish color with white spots and big haunches, but the main thing about her up close is that she is just simply very large. The top ridge of her bony back came up to my shoulder, and I’m not sure that Gavin was taller than she was.
I had to think. I had to make a plan. I had to find her udder. I looked down.
At the petting zoo, I think they had little stools for the kids to sit on, but I didn’t see any of them around. Maybe there was some trick to milking cows on the frontier? Did people slide underneath them on a board on wheels like a mechanic working on a car? Did they squat?
I was getting ready to try that when Nora said, “Stool’s over there.” I followed her gaze to the far corner of the barn, where sure enough I found a three-legged stool. Okay, I thought. This is a good thing. I knew there was supposed to be a stool, and there it is. I can do this!
The first mistake I made was to put the little three-legged stool down behind Jezebel. Fortunately, she kicked it away before I was sitting on it. I quickly picked up the stool from where it had landed, as if I could keep Nora from seeing what had happened, but of course she did. When I glanced up, she was shaking her head like she should have known. I tried putting the stool more to the side of the cow this time, and then I lowered myself on top of it.
From this angle, Jezebel loomed even larger, and when she shifted on her feet a little bit, I jumped up. I’d thought for a second I was about to be crushed. “Easy, girl,” Nora said, rubbing Jezebel on the shoulder, and talking to her so nicely Jezebel calmed right down.
I needed someone to talk that soothingly to me. All my life I’d heard about people milking cows—you think it’s no big deal but with a cow this close I realized I was actually in danger.
When I looked up again, Nora had her eyebrows raised and her lips turned down in a sneer.
Gavin was taking a few steps back and had this kind of psycho smile on his face—like he was half thinking he should run, and half thinking that the entertainment experience of a lifetime was about to begin.
“Well?” said Nora.
I felt like I was in a dream. I adjusted the stool’s position slightly and, even though my stomach felt like it wanted nothing more than for my entire body to collapse around the stool, to bring it nowhere near that cow—and what kind of name was Jezebel anyway? It made the cow sound so angry—I laid a hand on Jezebel’s shoulder like Nora had, and lowered myself onto the stool for the second time.
I pulled the bucket up under the udder. I mean, I’m not totally dumb, I knew where you were supposed to put your hands, and that you needed to squeeze and the milk would come out.
What I didn’t know is that you’re not supposed to squeeze too hard. I guess in my desire to seem like I knew what I was doing, I really wrenched Jezebel the first time. She grunted and moved to the side, but I held on. I squeezed again. Jezebel grunted again, and tried to take a step away.
“You’re supposed to push the milk out with your hands, not send it back up into the cow,” said Nora. “It hurts her, don’t know you that? You want me to show you?”
The only way to combat how humiliating this was was to pretend I hadn’t heard Nora. But when I squeezed again, I relaxed and also pulled down as I was squeezing, gliding along—I don’t know how I knew to do that but maybe I’d seen it on TV or something—and a huge, I mean an enormous, squirt of milk splashed into the bucket. It was so much it actually sprayed my face. I had to wipe off my eye with the sleeve of my dress.
I didn’t dare look up at Nora. I squeezed some more. “You going to milk one-handed?” I heard her say. “We’ll be here all day.” So with my other hand I took another teat and milked that one too. And as I pulled on first one and then the other, I felt like someone out of a movie, which must have meant I was doing it right.
I gave Nora a huge, sticky-sweet bubble-gum-ice cream-with-candy-worms-and-Sour-Patch-Kids-on-top smile. “Surprised that I can do this?” I said.
Nora turned around as if she were somehow bored of the whole thing now, like something about the view through the open barn door was fascinating.
I kept milking. Squirt, squirt—the sound made me want to laugh, like someone had just burped. Little by little, the bucket was filling up. The milk was warm, and the smell reminded me of a road trip when Gavin spilled milk from McDonald’s in the car and we had to live with it all the way to my aunt and uncle’s house in upstate New York. It wasn’t a sour smell, but it was really heavy. We’re talking intense milk.
Nora turned to Gavin. “Cow’s going to be living here, you’ll need to know how to muck out a stall.” She might as well have said “I’m going to take you out back and beat you to a bloody pulp,” her tone was so mean.
Gavin—who didn’t yet know that mucking out a stall meant shoveling straw soaked in cow poo and pee—looked from me to Nora and back to me again. I nodded, to show him that it was okay, and also to show Nora that Gavin couldn’t be bossed around by her—the only person who was going to be bossing him was me.
Before I’d faked my way into milking the cow, I don’t think it would have occurred to Gavin to check with me about something he was going to do. Suddenly, Gavin and I, we were a team.
Ouga, ouga, Welsh!
Week 2 – Tuesday
8:57 pm
For dessert we had warm milk with a few spoonfuls of leftover coffee and this tiny bit of brown sugar my mom’s been saving as a treat--café au lait.
Week 2 – Wednesday
7:56 am
I milked the cow again! I can milk a cow! I’ve done it twice now--in the afternoon yesterday and this morning. Take that, Nora-know-it-all!