I’ve been writing. Furiously. Visiting that time, seeing the apartment, with its flocked green wallpaper, remembering its smells of stale cigarettes and coffee—we had an electric pot that often would stay plugged in the entire day. Then, the playground, nursery school. I rise to stretch for a moment, shake off the past; Jake lifts his head and lays it down. I hear his sigh and think that years ending in “9” are somehow powerful, pulling their decades along, numbers with curved, lingering tails.
I sit down, and it’s summer 1969—the dude ranch camp again. It’s early evening, after dinner, and I’m alone in the rec room, where we’re having our first summer social, to include the cowboys, a couple of whom will be leaving tomorrow.
I’m early for the party, but happy to be alone, sitting by the large window, looking out at a group of horses nibbling a bale of hay in the fenced upper pasture. Some campers are resting in their bunks, others finishing up their tooled leather pieces in the craft room. Already there are plates of cookies, paper Dixie-Cups, and pitchers of bug-juice on the wooden tables.
The big juke box by the stone wall doesn’t need coins. It’s fixed so that campers can select three tunes at a time—by number and by letter—and the selected forty-fives will play. The machine is large and holds over three hundred records—mostly rock-and-roll and country.
Before coming to camp this summer, I cut my hair. A sort of post-Twiggy style, with a dramatic side part, side bangs that cover one eye, and short, almost shaved up the back. I’ve also taken to wearing makeup, just for summer camp. Rachel Rosenfeld, my inspiration and mentor, has lent me black eye liner, deep blue eye shadow, and pale white-ice shimmering lipstick. In fact, I’m now all made up and wearing my tightest jeans, cowboy boots, snap-front red plaid cowboy shirt, and last year’s tooled Western belt with an enormous silver-plated oval buckle embossed with a brass-colored horse in a dead run.
Now, it’s 7:50; our social begins at 8:00. I lean over the jukebox and play “Light my Fire” by the Doors. The smooth but loud sound fills the room, and I sink into its rolling music—velvety, sexy, penetrating, moody—until I inhabit it. I’m no longer me; I’ve become elemental, my particles charged, transforming me from girl into heat, sensation, a separation of parts, the song carrying me like the horse I’ve chosen for the summer, and named today Queen Mab, from Romeo and Juliet.
Campers drift in. So do cowboys. My favorite cowboy, who spots me standing by the far wall, saunters toward me, boots clanking on the pine wood floor as “Light my Fire” plays for the second time—someone, appreciating my choice, has selected it again.
“Howdy,” Johnny says.
“Howdy yourself,” I say.
“Saw the mare you picked out. Nice gal but sort of frisky.” Johnny wears a woven straw cowboy hat, and as he removes it, he lifts his other hand and smooths out his wet-looking, dirty-blonde hat hair.
“Think I can handle her?” Leaning against the wall near the juke box, I lift one foot against it, leaving my knee bent toward Johnny.
“Haven’t seen you ride.”
“You will.” And as I say this, I understand that we’re no longer talking about horses.
“Me and the boys was wondering how old you are. I guess sixteen.”
I give Johnny a small, tight grin as if the subject of my age is to remain a mystery, as if the old adage, never ask a woman her age, will save me from a direct answer. I like the idea of being sixteen. It isn’t eighteen, the age of consent, but it sounds a lot better than fifteen.
Johnny leans in to kiss me, and I kick off from the wall with my boot. I feel Johnny watch me as I sashay across the rec room, over to my bunkmates sitting at one of the tables. A pitcher of red bug juice and a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies are on the table. I pour juice into a blue swirly Dixie-Cup, remove a cookie from the plate, and sit on a bench built into the wall by the table.
Pamela, a girl from Co-op City in the Bronx, sits by me. She has long blonde hair and cried a lot during the van trip up to camp. She also has a puffy, pink, plastic-covered diary in which she writes every evening after dinner and locks every night with a tiny metal key.
“That your boyfriend?” Pamela asks me.
“Not yet,” I reply, though I hate my flippant response. I get up, lean back against the rough wall, take a bite of my cookie and a slug of the juice, which tastes awful, a kind of watered down, over-sweetened Kool-Aid-like drink, dyed with red food coloring.
“Angel of the Morning” plays now on the juke box. Johnny still stands across the room, joined by a friend, but he glances my way, smiling at me every so often. He’s placed his hat back on his head—and with his hat, his slender body, Western-style shirt, slim jeans, and tall boots, he creates a kind of romantic cowboy image, fitting, I think, for Bonanza, a show that my brother sometimes insists we watch. I hate TV Westerns, but I love the real thing, right in front of me now.
There’ll be no strings to bind your hands
Not if my love can’t bind your heart
And there’s no need to take a stand
For it was I who choose to start
I see no need to take me home
I’m old enough to face the dawn
Just call me angel of the morning, angel
Just touch my cheek before you leave me…
I take a good, long look at Johnny and stare hard. He returns my gaze, nods, and tips his hat ever so slightly. Then he walks down the rear stairs that lead outside.
“Excuse me,” I tell Pamela, walk toward the front stairs, and look down the dark well from the narrow alcove that empties into it. Here the music is muted, and the song plays its final soft melody, carrying it to its inevitable end. I find the banister and walk slowly down the stairs to find Johnny.
k
I save my document, then rise to use the bathroom. When I return, Jake snores lightly, and I hear his troubled breathing add tension to the room.
As I sit down to write, I’m back in 1959—not ’69—early summer now, and I give myself permission to be here, to allow connections to emerge. Coherent narratives, I tell myself, are overrated.
I’m at the fort behind the chain link fence by the concrete playground, with Teddy, Glenn, and Barbara—the club’s only members—and we’re having a disagreement about membership. Teddy wants to disbar Barbara and me because we’re girls. Barbara, hair pulled back into a ponytail like her mom wears, and I, with my shoulder length hair pulled into a half-ponytail and fastened away from my face by a metal barrette, stand near the oak tree by the boulder that marks the entrance to our fort. The boys are sitting on the crinkly brown-leaved ground.
“If you throw us out, you’ll only have two members,” Barbara argues.
“That’s right,” I add. I’m wearing a seersucker button-down, short sleeve shirt with a bright red balloon stitched into the front pocket and polka-dot pedal pushers that cover my scabby knees. A few days ago, I fell on the concrete playground.
“Girls can’t climb,” Glenn says, and looks at me. He was the one who helped me when I fell. “And they can’t fight and can’t keep secrets.” Glenn is adamant. Teddy nods in agreement, his deep dimples visible when he talks.
“Can too…” Barbara asserts.
“And they got to go behind the Big Bushy Bush to pee,” Teddy adds. “The guys do it outside the fort room.” Teddy raises his voice. This last point seems like a slam-dunk, the final argument that will seal his case.
“All right. Listen here,” I begin. I put my hands on my hips, begin walking back and forth, gathering my thoughts. “We don’t split. We’ve all taken the oath. Boys and girls alike. We four are together. We’re all the same.”
The group is silent, and I realize that I’ve gotten everyone’s attention. My time to lead is now. “Girls are as good as boys,” I continue. “Sometimes better, sometimes not. We all have good and bad points…”
“But…” Teddy interrupts.
“No, let me finish,” I insist, pacing, my voice raised. “We’re the same. Boys and girls. Our hair is different. Girls wear it long; boys wear it short. Other than that, we’re the same.”
“But…” Glenn tries to interject.
“We’re the same!” I shout at the group, bending aggressively toward them. “Who tells me that’s not the truth? How else are we different? Girls and boys are the same.”
Nobody speaks, though I know that what I’ve just said isn’t true. They know, too. The earlier reference to the different bathroom needs of girls and boys indicates that Glenn and Teddy know there are other differences. Also, Barbara has a new baby boy cousin, and I’ve seen her help her mom change his diapers. I take baths with my brother, and sometimes we pee together—me sitting while Dennis aims between my legs. But my argument holds, nonetheless.
“Rachel is right,” Barbara chimes in. “You all know that. So what if we put on dresses sometimes, wear our hair long. Boys and girls are the same.”
And with that, the argument is won. The criteria for club membership will remain gender neutral.
k
It’s almost 5:00 p.m. now, on a sultry, August late afternoon in Fayetteville. I’m walking Jake in a field behind the university, where we usually go for our short jaunts. Young male students are tossing a baseball, and two girls jog by, headed toward the nature trails and the Cape Fear River that serves as the eastern border of the university’s five-hundred-plus acre campus. There are ticks in those woods, so I never hike the trails in warm weather, but I do like to walk there in winter.
Years ago, however, before the tick problem became bad, Nick and I would often take Cal and Will and our other dogs—first Byron, then Jarrett, and Gandhi—on long nature walks through the elaborate trail system. We’ve seen eastern rattlesnakes, grouse, black bear, fox, and wild turkey. This geographical region, known as the Sandhills, provides a climatic enclave, where the temperature is warmer and the soil composition is sometimes clay, but mostly sand. Longleaf pine forests once covered the entire coastal plains, but this was during the Miocene Epoch, twenty million years ago. The sea fossils found here indicate that this area was once under water before the sea receded the ninety or so miles to the current coastline.
I’ve grown to love this landscape, the mixed vegetation, even the stifling blood-thinning summer heat. I love the subtle season changes, short winters, occasional warm January days with their much-needed reprieve from the cold. I’ve developed an appreciation for Carolina blue skies and for thunderstorms with their sheet or streak lightening, dramatic rain showers, downpours, and wild flash flooding.
What I haven’t grown to love are many aspects of Southern culture. And today, as I walk old Jake, who hobbles with an unsteady back hip and has stopped to sniff the borderland between grass and woods, I think about being called ma’am, men who insist on opening doors for women, or who won’t swear in “mixed” company, and the million other smalls ways that polite Southern manners irk me.
Why? I wonder. Do other women struggle, or is it just me? I think back to the page I just wrote—how sexualized I seem. And too young. Why, why, why?
I yank Jake, who resists then yields, happy to move next to the big grass clump by the electrical power box near the trailhead. But my cell phone is ringing, I realize. Opening my bag, I hear it more clearly. On the face screen is the word “Nick.”
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello back,” Nick says.
“Good day?” I ask, immediately recognizing his cheerfulness.
“Yeah, went for a hike this morning. Cold here. Then wrote for most of the day.”
“What you working on?” I’m by the ballfield and ready to turn around, head for the car. Jake has just pooped, and he’s limping more than usual.
“Poems mostly. But I began a new piece. Sort of a personal essay. Memoir. How about you?”
“I’m good,” I say, now crossing the asphalt parking lot and nearing the car.
“Your work, I mean. The novel. How’s that going?”
“Sort of. Not really. I’m kind of lost. Writing a little. Just stuff.” I press the key fob button, popping the door lock, and open the back door; Jake jumps in.
Nick is quiet for a moment, lets it go. I’m grateful. “Hear from Cal or Will? I’m feeling out of touch,” he says.
I’m in the car now, cranking it up and turning on the air. Jake is panting on the backseat.
“No,” I say. “I’ll give Cal a call during the weekend if I don’t hear from him. I think he’s got an IBM conference in Chicago. And Will, he’s probably fine too, just busy. I’ll give him a call…”
“So, you’re managing?”
I’ve decided to drive around the deserted parking lot. I work Ruby into second gear, throw her into neutral and coast in a large circle.
“Yeah, of course,” I answer. But then I feel tears well up, a convergence of shame, guilt, sadness, regret…
“Write it,” Nick says. “It. Everything.” But he can’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t even know.
A car is driving down to the back lot where I’m making my circles, so I decide to put Ruby in gear and head out. “Gotta go,” I say.
“Love you. Take good care of yourself. Hear?” Nick replies.
“Love you, too. Speak with you tomorrow.”