Camptown Ladies (5 page)

One afternoon, Aunt Aggie forgot to unplug the cord and the old man called Dad. Dad picked up the phone and heard an alarming whisper on the other end of the line.

“Sal? . . . Sal Santora, is that you?”

“Hey there, Lou,” Dad said. “Is everything alright?”

“No!” he said in a louder whisper, “everything is not alright. For the last few days there has been a strange woman here. She’s feeding cats. She’s outside in the yard right now!”

Dad heard a thud. “Lou, you OK?”

The old man continued, quieter, “That was her, slamming the door. I have no idea who this woman is. She feeds the strays, you know, which only makes them come back for more. Everyone in the neighborhood acts like it’s OK, but then she comes in the house and stays for hours. She’s been here for days!”

Dad said to him, “Oh Lou, don’t worry. That’s probably just your brother’s wife. Freddie married Aggie, my sister, remember?”

“But I’ve never seen this woman before,” he said.

Dad answered, “You probably just don’t recognize her. Lou, here’s what you need to do. After you hang up the phone, go tell the woman to put on some makeup and get her fat ass to the hairdresser. You tell her she needs to put more of an effort into her appearance because she’s scaring you. Got it?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Repeat it back to me, soldier,” Dad said, and the old man repeated back every word. Dad said, “Now go tell the woman, OK?

“Yes, sir. I do like that man she calls Freddie,” the old man said.

“Freddie’s your brother. Now go tell the cat lady what I said.”

“To put more of an effort into her appearance,” the old man repeated.

“Because her ugly face is scaring you,” Dad said.

“Yes, sir,” the old man said, before hanging up.

As Aunt Aggie retold the story over the years, she said it was the last bit of instruction the old man remembered perfectly, and every time she told the story Dad would end up laughing so hard he would cry and snort until Mom yelled at him to leave the table.

Aunt Aggie and Uncle Freddie arrived at Camptown Ladies every day like clockwork, and Aunt Aggie emerged from the car in a series of dainty groans, the vehicle rising a half a foot as she did. She outstretched each arm to point to a wayward piece of trash she thought Freddie should pick up, but I knew it was actually to release the underside of her heavy arms from her sleeveless housecoat. Her arms would plop out and glisten like the mounds of homemade dough Dad made on Calzone Sundays. In fact, one of Aunt Aggie’s most admirable qualities was that her fat arms were the exact matte white sheen of pizza dough before Dad bathed the dough in olive oil.

As a kid I got up early to watch Dad make calzones, and always thought Mom wouldn’t approve of him oiling and kneading this stuff that felt exactly like a big booby. I never told this to Mom, since Dad always snapped off a small ball of dough for me to play with, and I was addicted to the feel of it and the delicious doughy scent.
I insisted on getting a drop of olive oil for my little blob of dough so it would feel extra soft and would last longer before drying out and cracking so I had to throw it away or feed it to the dog. To this day, the gentle grasp of a breast (either real or imagined) always brings this memory back, and my mouth waters just the same.

Aunt Aggie stood at the car and surveyed the camp as she had done every day since Lisa bought the place, and said, “Damn, Freddie, you don’t get a friggin’ breeze like that back in the city.”

“We don’t live in the city,” he snorted.

“Don’t be an ass,” she said. I noticed Uncle Freddie tilted his head back, pointing his nose toward the trees. He loved to sniff the pines, just like I did.

Doughy arms sufficiently aired out, Aunt Aggie waddled off, shoving her walker ahead of her as if it were a disobedient child, off to go find Mom at her self-imposed post inside the Gays & Girls Camp Store. Uncle Freddie used this opportunity to sneak away to see what Dad was up to. Their visits always started and ended the same way. Peaceful Aunt Aggie would arrive, but after spending any amount of time with Mom (or Lisa, the other female alpha-male in the family) they would start to bicker. Then, holding her tongue until after Lisa whipped up a delicious lunch, Aunt Aggie would make a noise about how Mom had insulted her by not accepting her help, so, she might as well be going. She would go on about this until around 3:00, before finally leaving in an imagined huff, unless Lisa surprised them with a dessert, in which case, the argument could be extended by another half-hour. Uncle Freddie would trail after her with the same serene smile he had upon his arrival and a little more tomato sauce on his shirt, only to return the next day to begin the ritual again, everyone pretending as if none of it had happened the day before.

It was a particularly warm fall day, and we were all looking for outdoor projects. I asked Lisa if she had any plans for the teen recreation hall.

She answered, “Teen recreation hall, my big, shapely, fat ass! This is going to be my five-star Italian restaurant!”

Oddly, even with its gutted bare concrete slab floor and what
appeared to be shingled roof that looked eaten by woodland creatures, there was a part of me that could not deny Lisa’s genius behind a stove (or hot plate, or grill . . .) or her sheer will to bend the world to do what she wanted.

But then I remembered where we were standing.

Lisa whirled around inside the remains of the teen rec hall like a bull dyke version of Julie Andrews in a baseball hat and camouflage pants, seeing all the possibilities, while Cindy-Lu danced next to her, bouncing off her legs as if it was a new game and she were begging Lisa for the rules. I was trying to ignore the smell of teen boy urine emanating from the corners of the hall, wondering if our baby brother’s pee could have stood the test of that many years. Cindy-Lu had been distracted by the scent too, her tiny high-stepping paws stopping every few feet to sniff around the perimeter of the hall, to find the most pungent spot. Dog’s noses are supposed to be remarkable, so I laughed to myself as I wondered if the dog was thinking: Uncle Vince, was that you?

I said to Lisa, “A restaurant? It stinks like the old Elephant House at the Roger Williams Zoo.” But this didn’t seem to trouble my sister.

“I promise you, someday this place will smell just like Grandma and Aunt Aggie’s kitchen used to when we were kids. She pointed to the wall that adjoined the rec hall to the Camp Store. “The mess hall cooking area will be right over there,” she said. I noticed all the walls for the first time, and there was not an inch on any log without some teen melodrama carved into the wood or brazenly drawn in black Sharpie or laundry markers.

“Stop!” I said, grabbing her as she passed by me. “This has been fun and all, but nobody wants to tell you this, so I will: At some point you have to be realistic.”

“What?” she asked, as if she wasn’t surrounded by filth and falling down buildings everywhere you looked.

“A restaurant. Really? Lisa,
Wake up!
We don’t have the skills or the manpower to handle what has to be done to just have a shitty campground!”

She shook me off her arm. “I know,” she said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. She had been just playing a game of what if . . .

“Good. I’m glad you know,” Lisa said, “That’s why I already put a call in to Erica.”

I walked toward her, expecting to see that she had grown an extra head and somehow trained it to talk like an idiot. “Erica, as in
All My Children
? Erica, as in Vince’s Erica? Are you crazy?”

“She’s the best contractor we know, and I want the best. I want certain things done here that she can do. I have plans, Marie, plans you don’t know about—like the rooftops. I want clay tile roofs, like the kind they have in Italy, they’re beautiful and fireproof, and they will give Camptown Ladies a distinctive Italian look that no other campground has.”

“Because it costs a fortune!”

“I have a fortune! Erica can do it, she’s done that kind of work before in California, you showed me the houses you worked on together. I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse,” Lisa said, like the head of the Lesbian Mafia. “Besides, she just bought you out of her business. Maybe she could use the extra money.”

“Erica doesn’t need a dyke campground as a client. And why would she come all the way out to the east coast when she has lucrative jobs lined up all across Burbank?”

“Yeah, well, thanks to our dead grandmother, I can afford to hire the best.”

Lisa wasn’t getting it. “Has it occurred to you that she needs to keep some distance from Vince and our family? She won’t take the job.”

Lisa said, “What the fuck is wrong with him, anyway? He’s let some decent women go before, but this one . . . what a fucking idiot.”

“He says it was her—”

“I don’t believe him,” Lisa said. “He knows we’d think he was an fool to blow it with her.”

Lisa attempted to move a rusty oil barrel disguised as a trash can by kicking it. It made a mind-numbing sound but moved only an inch with Cindy-Lu yelping in protest to the noise. “Fuck. Wow! The acoustics are good in here.”

I could see her wheels turning, and imagined what she was seeing as she looked up at the vaulted ceilings. Would it be a surround system to pipe in Italian music to match her cuisine, or, maybe, God forbid, karaoke? Within the seconds it took for Teen Rec Hall to morph to Gay Dining Hall, I suspected Lisa already had the menu planned.

“You need a backup plan for another contractor,” I said.

Lisa argued, “She might need time away from Vince, but she might need to be around friends, too. This could be a good project for her.”

“Bullshit. You’re hoping to get them back together,” I said.

“Actually, I never really saw the two of them as a match.” She was lying, and she knew that I knew it.

We heard the distant, then blaring thud thudding of techno club music, and were then startled by the sound of tires spinning on loose gravel, ending in a short skid, just outside the hall.

“Hiiiiya girlfrieeeeends!” a voice sang outside the rec hall.

Eddie, Lisa’s most flaming boy pal, was wearing a thin lemon-colored scarf, sitting high on the back of the front seat of his matching yellow convertible as if he were perched on a float made of daffodils. Knowing Eddie, I suspected he may have found the scarf and opted to shop for a car to match.

He sang out, “Heeeere I come to save the gaaaaays!”

“Eddie’s here!” Lisa said, escaping me to gallop outside.

“Snuck right up on us,” I said.

I was thinking how much he would love the Camptown Ladies song as he stepped out of his car on the tips of his pristine white athletic shoes with bedazzled details. He looked down at the ground, absolutely puzzled by the sight of a dirt road. He lifted a toe up in disgust as Lisa grabbed him at the waist and, tall as he was, easily picked up his wispy frame and whirled him around. Eddy squealed in delight with his hands in the air and shouted, “Mr. Load’s Wild Ride!”

I hugged him next, and he kept his arms raised, disappointed that I didn’t attempt to pick him up, too. “Sorry Eddie, not all dykes have Popeye forearms.”

“I forgive you, honey, it takes all kinds. If you weren’t such a lipstick, your sister wouldn’t look so butch and get all the straight girls.”

“Fuck you, Eddie,” Lisa said, slapping him hard on his little, round ass as he squealed again. “Ooooh, yes! Now that you have me primed, where’s that hot brother of yours?”

“Go easy. Vince isn’t himself these days,” I said. “Recent breakup.”

Eddie made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “What a shame,” he said, and I knew he’d drop it there. Eddie was not a guy with whom you could discuss the cruelties of life. If you tried, his smile would remain frozen while his eyes glazed over with a protective coating that shielded him from anything not fabulous. Like a shark biting his prey, Eddie had a protective coating which kept out all that didn’t glitter or have a pretty shine.