Now again I stood looking out: in front of me was a waste dotted with womanly cows, a floodplain toothed with debris and leached down to rock ribs, sharp stumps and gray broken things, and everything thrumming-earth and sky-with a smoky, mossy luster. “Cheese,” I whispered in awe, “what is this place?” “Better get a sample,” said Lou Rae, and bent at my feet to scratch it with her pencil. One maple leaf still dangled from a bobby pin at her forehead. Suppose I had been my sister Margaret, I might have run a hand right then down the long purplish ruffles of her hair, so that she looked up in-pleased or not-surprise just as it slipped past her throat and found the weight of her breasts in their red wrapper.
But I’m not Margaret. Already Lou Rae was prying up the barbed wire on top, and I was holding flat to earth the barbed wire on the bottom. We pushed through. The bedspread signed its name on a barb in a long, lazy red thread. We crossed the meadow, and there on a rise I saw the castle for me and my princess. It was a hollow half- tree as big as a cave, as gray as death, and no dirtier than a kiosk at a city bus stop. Where the core of the stump was rotted away, the pulp had washed out and there was a kind of ledge you could sit on, the two of you pressed in each other’s face like halves of a fruit hacked open but not sliced clean through.
I climbed in. Naturally I never said you come too, but she did and then I could smell her breath, feel the warm twin gusts of her nostrils on my lips. Between my legs came a soft lurch as of a bubble breaking free in the windowed cavity of a carpenter’s level. And my nipples and a hot bull’s-eye around my belly button turned into magnets from the nearness of her, stuck on me and trying to stick on her as well. I decided if she didn’t touch me I would die of it. She said sumpm and I only saw the melted pink jewel of her tongue. I didn’t dare hear her, I was afraid she would ask me why I was blinking my eyes in that stuttering way, yes I was sort of trying to hypnotize her, come to me come to me. “What did you say?” You have to understand how she looked at that moment: wood nymph, her throat and shoulders so greeny white under the grapey bunches of her hair, the round momps so distinct, tiny as she was, inside the split red peel of that damn bedspread, and the big green leaf rakishly starring her forehead. I had to kiss her, and if I were Margaret, I would have, I would have felt myself beaming and believed that her hidden coneyhole was as loud with me as a radio. I would have kissed her and then if she had pushed me away I would have merely hated her and an end to it. But if Margaret loved her, she would have been a boy, and small loss.
Here I was in my tough paradise for girls-no, just now I had crashed or bumbled out of the barbed wire fence of it, on the track of girls who until this summer had been pure as scenery. Nothing you would think of touching, they were, taken together, and this was exactly their spell, so complete, so perfect without me-those Maine girls, their wet ponytails black as tornados and dripping like perfume funnels. And let us not forget, they loved me back. So going to them every summer was dying and going to heaven for me, chaste as a ghost, only I didn’t know I was dead until now, when I came to life on the wrong side of the fence, ugly, starving thing that I was. Fitting that I should be curled in a dead tree like a claw, like a grub, a trilobite.
But I knew my way back. Didn’t I? After all, nobody knew. I wasn’t kicked out of camp just like that. Was I? It wasn’t too late? What did you say? My princess? “I said we’ve lost chunkagunk.” “Not again?” I choked out. “Alas, yes, Flotilla.” It went without saying that she was princess, I horse-faced mademoiselle. Very well, I agree to anything, come to me, kiss me, press your doll-faced momps, those broken-off upside-down champagne glasses, against me or I’ll
She laid a finger on the back of my trembling hand and I thought it safe in a hurry to pick up two of the long chocolate scraps of her hair pooling in my lap and place them in my mouth, for this could only amuse her. I could play I was a walrus, all right I was a walrus and I could eat her hair, which tasted like fried flowers. And it did amuse her, cowbells bouncing down a glass staircase, that was her laughter. “We’ve lost chunkagunk,” she repeated with a tragic sob and I dared to hold her eye with mine, well I may have crossed my eyes a bit to be safe, and muttered around my walrus mustaches: “How shall we make it up to ourselves?” Then her face, already so near, blurred into mine and her pink tongue, which I had been looking at before, slid into my mouth, poked in there surprisingly long and small and alive-
Then I was lost, o a thousand times more lost than she was. Good godzilla the nothing I knew when I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody! Nowadays I know how a girl like Lou Rae operates: Being wooed is meat and drink to the girlgoyle, and sex just spoils her appetite, so she keeps her orders small as sparrows, and if you ask for more- yes, in short, that dirty rotten Lou Rae, she loved me and left me.
But first I carried her away. I had no thoughts, only rose waves, oceans of muscle, she weighed nothing, I carried her off and she let me, and I laid her down between the rock ribs of the clammy meadow whose little grass the cows had gnawed to the bone and I threw myself on top of her. I had no idea what I was doing. I just tore open the red wrapper, my paws sank in up to the elbow and had at her pretty breasts by the handful. Which is how I know how hard they were: hard but alive, hard as a baby’s head. These were the first I ever touched, outside of my own spongy bags, and they were some immortal nymph’s on their way to becoming Elgin marbles. Dayenu! if I had only been content with that, o lord! but I wasn’t, I wasn’t thinking-nowadays I think but back then I wasn’t-so maybe if I had never lifted my fingers from her momps and crossed her belly to the pink nylon panties, her wetness wrapped there like a mouth in cellophane, like suffocating-I peeled that away and my pinky I only wish went up inside her but in fact just brushed the little fin standing there at attention knee-deep in her pond. She screamed bloody murder and of course I froze and remembered where I was. But just then, sumpm slapped me. How can I describe it? A pink thing, a grimy, scratchy, gray-pink thing exactly like a wet seat cushion from a 99-cent movie theater, slapped me softly across the face. Those womanly cows had come over and taken a front seat at my wooing and were getting their tongues in too.
Which is more than I can say for Lou Rae, whose legs had snapped back together like the prongs of a clothespin. She sat upright, just as if a spring had popped somewhere. She was scared, I can see that now, and it wasn’t those cows that had scared her, though she was never one to talk levelly about things of this world and there was a yearling bull in the pasture. She was looking at him, he was looking at us, I was looking at her and she was wearing red-for she had wrapped back up in her red thing as fast as she could yank it out from under me. And now she was rolled in her bedspread tight as a red cigar. “I think we better go back to camp,” she said.
From the hard ground I stared at her, knowing I had lost camp for good now, and would not even have Lou Rae Greenrule for five whole minutes to make good my loss.
I hoped the bull would perforate us both! or maybe at the last moment I would save her: “Come on, Ferdinand,” I encouraged him, “do your worst,” but his fuddy maleness just gave me a cross-eyed look, and turned and walked away. Even if she never told anybody-and what could she tell, in that Venusian Pig Latin she talked, full of lost beaute, ensorcelled princesses and wandering serving maids, that anybody would understand? But I could never believe in my love of camp again: my love was out to get some girl, I was a wolf in evergreen camp shorts and gimp lanyard, looking for live feed I could catch.
Lou Rae had asked me once, as we lay on our cots one starry night waiting for the mosquitos to wail: Did you usta want to be a princess when you grew up? Er, sort of, I said, knowing she had, wanting to draw her nearer to me, though that was Sister Margaret who had had the royal girlgoyle ambitions, not me. But not to boss people, I added sweetly, meanwhile thinking: they want to be princesses, and not even to boss people, what’s wrong with you girls! Did you? said I, and was shocked when I heard a suspicious noise and turned on my flashlight and sure enough her eyes began to puddle up with tears.
She blurted: “I won’t be able to stand it if everything is ugly around me. When I’m a grownup I won’t be able to wear those dogface shoes my mother wears, or look down at my slacks and think wow that belly belongs to me, it’s like an anthill in Africa, and I’ll never be able to sleep in the same bed with some pee-smelling half-dead gramps scribbled all over with iron hair… I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” So she was that kind of girl ya see, mortally afraid of everyday rot, and if I had known what I know now I would have said: Come with me and I’ll never let anything that smells mortal or perishable-certainly not a fuddy male-come near you. But of course I didn’t know it and she wouldn’t have come with me if I had. Probably she had to pass through any number of pretty, feckless boys who went downhill before she became, o, let’s see, what I find in my crystal ball is a one-girl condo cleaning service in Maui in later life, gold lame smocks she finds at St. Vincent de Paul, paisley slippers and fantastical babushkas:
What is your fortune, my Magic Maid?
My face is my fortune, sir, she said.
