When Stepmother got back to the campsite where they had an army-green, four-person tent for the kids and a pop-up camper for Mother and herself, she sat in the folding chair outside and carved pictures of mountains and rhododendron into the face of the fungus, then set it on the folding tray table to harden. The woods always reminded her of the good parts of back home: the mountains and flowers and camping with the Girl Scouts, and the smell of the mildewed tents.
That night, at the campfire, she brought her guitar, but Michael was the king of the group and always led the songs. She could sing much better than he could, but what could she do? She hadn’t been there as long, and he stayed all summer, as opposed to the week or two she managed. Still, one day she’d get her chance to sing John Denver or Judy Collins and strum the chords, and then they would see all that she had to offer—see that she was better than Michael by a long shot.
Earlier that day when she snuck away to the two-person outhouse—she was always constipated out here, because the outhouse had only three sides and no door—Michael had walked in and plopped down on the second seat next to her, chatting as he made a BM. Stepmother finished up as quickly as she could and decided to try again later, hoping he didn’t notice how red her face was.
Mother had found this place back when she was in college. She told her brother about it, and he had gone, too, but they always coordinated their schedules so they’d never run into each other. Or they had tried to, until her brother’s wife decided that was silly and had made them go on the same day. Mother still laughed when she thought of it—her brother sitting on his blanket next to her, both of them staring straight ahead, so careful not to look at each other. She missed him.
Mother worried that her children suffered from the lack of a strong male role model, and wished yet again that her father or brother were still alive. Her father had been the best man she knew, and she had always been “Daddy’s girl,” calling him Pop, or Popsicle when she was feeling silly. Her brother had been four years older, and he had always looked out for her. Once, back in high school, he hit his best friend in the mouth and knocked out a couple of his teeth when his friend wouldn’t stop kissing his girlfriend in front of her. Mother’s brother had been an Eagle Scout, and he had helped her with math in college, and she, in turn, had helped write his essays. If only he had lived … but he got chicken pox, and that led to pneumonia. Her brother had gone into the hospital one day and died the next. When a nurse pulled Mother aside and told her that she could sue, that mistakes had been made, Mother had walked off, refusing to listen. There was no point in thinking about things like that—no point in blame or what-ifs.
Mother liked going camping—Stepmother was happy, the kids played by themselves, and she could read a paperback novel all day long with no chores or guilt about what she should be doing instead. Mother wore thick prescription glasses, and the sunglass tint was on the purple side of black, tinting the pages of her book slightly lavender. She swatted absentmindedly at a mosquito buzzing around her thigh and glanced up at the children. The sun picked red tones out of her daughter’s brown hair. Her son’s glasses were slightly askew, and Mother smiled her closed-lipped smile as she watched them standing on the raft. Brother used the long pole to push them around the pond, and Girl lay on her belly, her head hanging over the edge, watching the opaque water flow by.
That night in the tent, after Brother went to sleep, Girl’s hand went between her legs as she thought about penises and wondered what they felt like. They looked so vulnerable, flopped over on the legs of the men at the beach. She wondered if testicles felt like hardboiled eggs (they seemed to be the right shape and size). That night, she fell asleep and dreamed that she was a doctor. She carefully slit Batman and Robin’s scrotums open and removed their testes, replacing them with assorted objects: golf balls, cherry tomatoes. Then she carefully sewed them up and put the superheroes in little cradles hanging from a tree, where the wind could rock them softly until they healed up enough to put their tights and shiny crime-fighting briefs back on and return to the TV show she watched every afternoon with Brother.
alaskan unease
There was something creepy about Father that Girl couldn’t quite put her finger on. He told too many dirty jokes and he talked too often about sex. He never wore clothes around the house or hid the fact that he and #Four smoked pot and had sex with other people. The children knew that Wanda with the long, gold fingernails slept in Father’s bed with and without #Four. Father always stayed at Sarah and Ira’s house on the occasions he came to Rochester, and Father and Sarah weren’t embarrassed when the children caught them taking a nap together in the afternoon while Ira was at work. No one asked the children not to tell Sarah’s husband. Girl assumed they slept all together in one big bed.
Once when Girl and her brother were young, maybe seven and eight, they were spending the summer in Alaska at Father’s house. They snuck into the living room where Father and #Four slept on a king-sized futon. In the corner was a heap of multi-colored floor pillows #Four
