Camptown Ladies (4 page)

My Mother didn’t have to be convinced to be a part of the Camptown Ladies project, but then, Lisa hadn’t told anyone but us that she intended to transform a rundown family campground into a place that catered to gays. Mom was happy to sign onto a project with such a huge chance of failing, securing her a front seat for when it all unraveled and she could say: “I told you so.” She shadowed Dad’s every project, offering worst-case scenarios from the safety of the cheap seats, waiting until it would be time to take the front row.

Typically, she shouted observations from inside the camp store—by the looks of things, it was the only sound structure on the grounds, and smartly, this was the turf she had claimed as her own. Her first order of business for the camp store was a good cleaning, but she kept the screen door open to allow for a full view of everyone else’s doomed activities. Within the first week I had stopped to listen at the store door, since Lisa was giving Mom vague instructions for her plans.

“Mom, I want half the store to be very girlie, you know, Yankee Candles, proper tablecloths, nothing ugly. I want to get some pretty lanterns and lots of tiny twinkle lights, you know,
fairy
lights—in
all the colors of the rainbow. Oh, and let’s sell porcelain plates in sets of two, not ceramic. Porcelain is actually more durable, less likely to chip, and has a higher perceived value. And no friggin’ paper.”

Mom’s rare silence meant she was baffled. Or pissed that she was being told what to do in so much detail—but time would tell on that one.

Lisa continued, “The other side of the store needs to be for the rough and tumble campers. You know, citronella bug candles, tent stakes, fire starters, basic tools, hammers, saws, and sets of these blue-speckled metal enamel cookware and plates. That’s where the paper plates will go, with all the manly stuff on this side of the store. Nothing girlie on this side. You got the picture?”

Mom thought she got the picture and suggested a name for the sign: Guys & Gals Camp Store. Lisa agreed. Later, Lisa confided to me she planned to change “Guys” to “Gays” with the flick of a paintbrush. What Mom didn’t know was that Lisa planned a Fairy & Dyke divided camp store, with a line drawn directly down the middle. She was using Mom’s natural tendency to Martha Stewart everything to make it happen in the projected colorways of next spring.

This was all part of a bigger plan. The Camptown Ladies idea had grown into co-ed venture one night while Lisa held us hostage to brainstorm over a bottle of wine at the condo. It had taken two bottles to do the job.

“I’ve got it!” she yelled, knocking her glass over, again.

“Camptown Ladies and—wait for it, waaaaait for it—Camp Camp for the fairies! We’ll double our market, plus, while the dykes do the heavy lifting, the gays will pretty up the place!”

I had to admit, the half-baked, half-boy idea wasn’t a half-bad idea.

“But wait,” I said, “do gay guys camp?” We all hesitated, looking at each other. If we were holding this meeting at camp, the sound of crickets would have been ridiculously appropriate.

Finally Lisa dismissed her own doubts. “I’m pretty sure that’s where the saying ‘Do
bears
shit in the woods?’ comes from. Of course they must camp.”

We had been though Lisa’s schemes before, and we knew better
than to argue. After she had litter box trained her tiny Miniature Doberman, Cindy-Lu (and made her own litter box from a large plastic bin, into which she cut a small dog-size doorway, decorating the front with a welcome matt for Cindy-Lu to wipe her paws, and adding curtains for privacy), she got the idea to market the item. She used an adorable cartoon image of a young Cindy-Lu as mascot and included a booklet called: “Teach Your Dog How To Pee & Poo, Just Like Cindy-Lu!” In the booklet, she described how to train a puppy as small as six weeks old, by using scented puppy pads placed over a bed of sand. Gradually, you use smaller and smaller puppy pads until the puppy is just using the sand. We all thought Lisa was nuts, but she had the last laugh when she partnered with a plastic blow molding company in Massachusetts who made the prototype box shaped like a little doghouse, and then sold it to an online pet company for thousands of dollars. When she would toss this in our face, Vince and I reminded her we were the ones who had talked her out of calling the product: “Litter Box, Doggie-Style.”

We had avoided bringing up the real trouble at the campground—the fact that it was way too much work for our family to handle, and that our family was avoiding it by inventing silly jobs we were qualified to tackle, like raking pine needles and clearing dirt roads of the smaller tree limbs, while the decapitated buildings with caved-in roofs remained untouched. That night, when the three of us drank our wine and Lisa got the idea about expanding a camp we already couldn’t handle, she clapped her hands as if the meeting was ready to adjourn.

“Attention! Before we do anything official about the camp, I need to ask my hairdresser and Spiritual Advisor about adding boys into the mix.”

Vince was shocked.

“Oh, my God. Seriously? You . . . have . . . a . . .
hairdresser?
”

Lisa hit him in the gut and Vince crumpled into a ball to protect himself just a second too late.

Three

Scents & Insensibility

Once Lisa’s hairdresser and Spiritual Advisor gave her the OK, Camp Camp was added to her Camptown Ladies plan. Lisa insisted on keeping this from our parents for as long as possible, just like our childhood plot to take over Dad’s garden shed as a neighborhood fort. If our childhood fort was any indicator, we couldn’t keep secrets from the parents for very long. That secret had lasted only two weeks before Dad went looking for his gardening tools and instead found our beanbag chairs, toys, puzzles, and empty Heineken bottles Lisa used for spin the bottle games. Lisa had convinced the neighborhood girls they must practice before they got real boyfriends, so she did them a “favor” by pretending she was a boy, and did her best to teach them to kiss like experts. (Before her hairdresser, daytime soaps had been Lisa’s make-out spiritual guides.)

After our failed coup of his tool shed, Dad was inspired by our efforts to turn his shed into a clubhouse of his own. He still kept his garden tools hanging up, but they got moved to the outside of the shed, where they fashionably turned into shabby sheik-style rusted wall décor. Inside, he rigged a sound system, powered by full electricity and added a mini fridge with a padlock to stock his beer and chilled tequila. Dad had invited me to the shed for my “first” legal drink, so, when I checked out what he had done with the place on my twenty-first birthday, I asked, “Tequila shots without lemons?”

“Lemons are for
fanuks,
” he said. (Fanuks: Dad’s affectionate Italian slang for gays.)

“Ahh,” I said. “What about salt? Is that a heterosexual condiment?”

“Salt is ok, unless it’s on French food,” he said, “I wouldn’t generalize, but they have more than their share of fanuks over there.” I feared the day Dad decided to generalize.

Soon after the Camptown Ladies co-ed decision was approved (by a wide-eyed, protein-starved vegetarian spiritual advisor from a hair salon called “From Hair to Eternity”), Lisa announced we would add another member to our team. “It’s not enough just to have Vince here. We need one more gay guy.”

“I’m not gay, you big dyke,” he managed to yell, despite the huge chunk of pizza hanging from his mouth. To be fair to Vince, his lack of table manners should have proved his point.

How many times had I heard the conversation that was about to take place? It started when Vince was seven years old, so it had to be in the thousands by now. One look at Vince, and you knew he was not a gay man. A sloppy thick crest of black hair well past his forehead, the in-between stage of his beard (not the fashionable kind, the careless kind), plus, the dead giveaway: functional, not fashionable, clothes. His pants and shirts were paired so poorly that I wondered if he had the week laid out in advance to make sure he didn’t accidentally match something.

Mom and Dad joined us at the picnic table and Dad happily dove into the food without a word. Mom said, “We could eat indoors like civilized people,” but, even as she said it, she too was lured by Lisa’s homemade grilled pizza and helped herself.

Something about the way Lisa was studying Vince tipped me off that she was about to launch into a tirade about him. I’d had my fair share of tirades launched my way, so I was sure I wanted out of there, even before she said, “Can I just say something?”

Uh oh.

“Another perfectly good girlfriend with wife potential bites the dust because you think the pussy’s always pinker somewhere else.”

“Lisa!” Mom said, with her mouth full. Dad cackled with his mouth completely filled yet still managed to stuff two thick slices of sausage and pepperoni.

“That’s not what happened,” he said, but Vince looked like he didn’t have the energy to fight with her today, and typically, Lisa
had missed the subtlety of this. I saw it coming, but not before I could stop her with hand signals behind Vince’s back. Dad pretended not to notice, and I could see Mom calculating the best moment to jump into the mix.

Lisa leaned across the picnic table and got into Vince’s face as she said, “You butthead, you really think you’ll find someone better than Erica?”

“No, I don’t,” Vince said, before getting up from the table and walking away, leaving Lisa quietly defeated, possibly for the first time in her life. Lisa pretended she didn’t like the homemade pizza she’d made, which was better than any pizza, except maybe in Italy, and she angrily tossed her slice Frisbee-style into the woods, and left the table to go after Vince.

I could see from Dad’s heartbroken and hesitant glance into the woods that if the slice had landed cheese side up, he would have fought the dog for it. Mom clucked her tongue, both at the waste of good food, and a missed opportunity to lecture all three of us at once. She settled for two.

My Aunt Aggie made Uncle Freddie take her to Camptown Ladies every afternoon so she could bathe in what Lisa called the “crispy breeze” that blew through the center of the camp. My Aunt was probably the only Italian woman (besides my sister) that loved the cold, though due more to her large size than her heritage. Aunt Aggie’s clothes were perpetually damp, but strangely she always smelled good, like the same salty pasta sauce that scented her house.

It occurred to me that seeing Aunt Aggie at Camptown Ladies was the only time I’d seen her with zero humidity on her upper lip. Possibly because at her home her head was always over a simmering pot on the stove (but just as probably, it could have been the facial hair). When Aunt Aggie greeted you at the door, she always had a wet kiss waiting, and I was about ten years old when I finally realized it wasn’t spit but actually sweat that she left behind from her smooches—not that it bothered me less.

Aunt Aggie was a typical older generation Italian, who never let chewing a large bite from a heavy meal delay her from talking. Once, after visiting her, I went to my sister Lisa’s, and her Miniature Doberman practically mauled my tits to get at the Aunt Aggie flecks of meatball shrapnel from the front of my shirt. Yet another clothing casualty due to an Aunt Aggie story that just couldn’t wait between bites.

Aunt Aggie is my Dad’s older sister and despite their mature ages, they still fought like children. Case in point: Several years ago, after Uncle Freddie’s brother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he had to come to live with Aunt Aggie and Uncle Freddie in their cramped little house. He was in his late eighties and his memory was evaporating quickly. Aunt Aggie warned Dad that Uncle Freddie’s brother had started making random phone calls.

“Friggin’ annoying,” Aunt Aggie said. “That man can’t remember his own brother’s name, yet he’s like a walking phone book. Last week he called the friggin’ army, asking for his old sergeant that been dead for over twenty years.” Aunt Aggie said she had to keep the phone cord in her housecoat.