Patiently Alice (6 page)

The boys laughed too and splashed us some more, but not too much because their clothes, after all, were getting wet. We could tell that there was a lot of whispering going on out there in the water. We couldn’t see their faces, but the way they clumped together told us we had them stumped.

“They must be getting cold,” Elizabeth said. “The river’s cold even in the daytime.” She grinned.

“They’ve been in for at least twenty minutes,”
said Doris. “I don’t think I could stand it for more than ten. Not at night.”

“Hey, c’mon, girls. You can keep our boxers if you really want them, but could we just have our jeans?” called Andy.

“How are you going to put them on in the water?” I asked.

“There’s a bank over there. We’ll swim to the other side so as not to offend your delicate sensibilities,” said Craig.

We held a conference. They held a conference.

“Nope!” I said. “We like it here just fine. Most comfortable we’ve been all day.”

We figured they’d swim downriver a ways, climb out in the dark, and go back to their cabins to put on something else. We began debating as to what we’d do with their clothes. String their underwear up the flagpole, maybe? Or decorate the trees and bushes with their clothes and be back in the dining hall before they could catch us?

But suddenly there was a great splashing of water, and here the guys came, charging up the riverbank, all six of them buck naked.

We gave a little scream and grabbed on to the guys’ clothes so they’d have to wrestle us to get them back, but they didn’t even bother with their clothes. I don’t know who picked me up—Joe, I think—but each boy grabbed a girl and either
dragged or carried her to the water and threw her in.

We gasped and gagged, shocked at this sudden reversal of fortune. And then the boys were in the water with us. We were all laughing and splashing each other with the palms of our hands.

“Hey, girls, you’d swim a lot easier if you didn’t have anything on,” Ross called.

Pamela giggled. So did Gwen and Tommie.

“Yeah, if anybody wants her shorts unzipped, I’m the man,” said Craig, and we laughed some more.

But none of us girls took him up on his offer. We just floated around, watching each other in the moonlight, knowing the boys were totally naked under the water, and now and then colliding with a hairy leg. If Aunt Sally knew what her “little Alice” was doing right now, she’d probably pass out. It was exciting as anything, and Elizabeth looked positively in shock. Delightedly so.

“Hey, next time we go swimming, let’s make it coed,” said Andy. “Next time you girls have to take it all off.”

“Ha! What next time?” said Doris.

“Next movie night. Deal?” said Ross.

“Deal!” said Pamela.

“Pamela!” Elizabeth and I said together, but we laughed, too.

We talked about ourselves then, just the
basics—where we were from, what year we were in school. Craig and Richard, at seventeen, were the only ones who had been assistant counselors at Camp Overlook before.

“What’s the hardest part of camp for you?” I asked Andy.

“Trying to keep my boys from sneaking over to peek in the girls’ showers,” he said, and the others grinned.

“Trying to keep
himself
from sneaking a peek, you mean,” said Craig.

“Then my girls are right to worry,” I told him. “It’s the main topic of conversation in the showers.”

Richard told us that the full counselors got Saturday nights off, and the assistant counselors got Friday nights. He said we had from six to midnight to go into town if we wanted, as long as we had one of the older counselors drive.

“Think we could get the camp minibus for the evening?” Craig asked.

“I don’t know. Dad might let us. I’ll see what I can do,” Richard promised, and that was something to look forward to.

We could just make out the dining hall from where we were floating about in the water, and when the lights came on, we knew the movie was over and the kids would be having their snack. We needed to be back there in ten minutes.

So we girls pulled ourselves out of the water, our clothes heavy and clinging, our sneakers squishing with every step we took. We stood on the bank a minute, squeezing water from our shorts, then told the guys good night and hurried back to our cabins to change.

“That was fun!” Elizabeth said breathlessly. “You didn’t know where the guys were going to be in the water, and I’m pretty sure my foot touched somebody’s… well…
you
know!”

“No, I
don’t
know,” Pamela said mischievously. “His what? His ear? His arm?”

But Elizabeth only said, “
You
know” again, and we smiled.

I was thinking back to the time when Elizabeth confessed to me that she had never seen a man naked. I guess her dad never walks between the bedroom and bathroom in his birthday suit, and she hadn’t had a little brother yet. So, to help out, I’d gone through a pile of old
National Geographic
magazines looking for naked men, but there always seemed to be a spear or a shield in front of the very places Elizabeth would want to see most.

I had hardly got into a pair of dry shorts when the Coyotes trooped in, looking for us. Mary and Josephine were in the lead, Mary holding Josephine’s hand, and were followed by Latisha,
looking as belligerent as ever, then Estelle and Ruby and Kim. Kim was near tears because we hadn’t been there in the dining hall to escort them back to the cabin and they’d had to set out on their own. Kim clung to Gwen when she came in.

“Where
was
you?” Latisha demanded. “You’re our counselors, and I’ll bet you been swimming!”

“Right!” I said. “As a matter of fact, I got thrown into the water, and I’m just now drying off.”

That shut them up in a hurry. They looked at us wide-eyed.

“Who threw you in?” asked Mary.

“Some of the guys,” I told her.

“You gonna tell?” asked Ruby.

“No.” Gwen laughed. “It was all in fun.”

Kim still seemed on the verge of tears. “I don’t want anybody to throw me in,” she said.

“I won’t let anyone do that to you, girl-baby,” Gwen purred. “And if somebody did, I’d be right there to pull you out, so don’t you worry.” She put both arms around Kim and held her close, and that just seemed to be the opening bell, because all the other girls edged in for a hug. Even Estelle. But Latisha watched with a jaundiced eye.

“Bet one of ’em’s your boyfriend,” Latisha said to Gwen.

“Yeah? Which one?” Gwen said.

“I don’t know. Andy somebody?”

“Nice guy,” said Gwen. “But what about Joe?”

“Ohhhh! Jooooe!” the girls chorused.

Latisha gave a hoot. “They’re gonna go off behind the cabins and kiiisss!” she said.

Gwen just smiled at her and looked mysterious, but the girls were still giggling and grinning.

“Well,
are
you?” Estelle asked.

And when Gwen raised an eyebrow, Estelle said, in a hoity-toity voice, “Are you going to go behind the cabins and
make love
?”

Now the girls really hooted.

“Joe is just a friend of mine, like all the other guys here are friends. We just met,” said Gwen.

“She going to!” Latisha stage-whispered, and the girls went laughing and giggling to the showers.

There was an incident Wednesday night that almost got Pamela’s cabin mate, Doris Bolden, dismissed from camp.

She and Pamela had a particularly difficult girl in their cabin, a nine-year-old named Virginia, who was living in her third foster home, and had a vocabulary that would have shocked a sailor. When somebody displeased her, her first reaction was to clobber them on the head or the back, or make a quick jab with her elbow.

Doris had warned her that there would be
consequences if she physically attacked another child again, but that night in the showers she knocked a girl down for using her towel, and when Doris grabbed her, she’d yelled, “Get your hands off me, nigger.”

Pamela and Doris’s girls had come down early and showered with us, as the girls in cabins eight and ten had cleanup duty in the dining hall that evening. So Gwen and I saw the whole thing. Punishment had to be swift and sure.

“Get dressed, Virginia,” Doris had said. “You and I are going for a walk.”

Gwen and I didn’t think much about it. I thought that Pamela would probably get the other girls to bed, and then Doris would take Virginia for a “cool down” and discuss what had happened in the showers.

Back in our own cabin we went through the nightly ritual of confiscating the food that Ruby and Mary—the usual culprits—had sneaked out of the dining hall in fists or pockets, promising that if they got hungry, the food would be right there in our metal lockbox waiting for them. They didn’t have to steal, only ask.

Mary insisted that Josephine say her prayers at night, and Ruby and Estelle said theirs as well. I asked the other girls to keep a respectful silence while they prayed.

Then we had a few stories while lying in our beds with the light off—made-up stories and tales about what had gone on during the day—when suddenly there came the most terrible far-off scream… then another and another, followed by loud sobbing.

I think the entire camp was on alert. If we heard a disturbance, our first duty, we’d been told, was to check for fire, and if there was no fire, we were to keep the girls in our cabins until there was word over the sound system as to what we should do in an emergency.

Gwen and I were on our feet instantly, staring through the screen door, but there was no smell of smoke or hint of fire. There was, however, the sound of running feet and a flashlight coming from the direction of the camp director’s cabin, another coming from Jack Harrigan’s.

The screams came again, then we heard Doris Bolden saying, “Hey, be quiet now,” and finally, as we all gawked, our girls gathering behind us at the cabin door and windows, we saw Doris and Virginia and Connie and Jack all coming back from the campfire circle, Virginia crying loudly. They dropped Virginia off at Pamela’s cabin, but Doris was escorted to the camp office.

When we’d got our girls settled down again at last, Gwen and I whispered together outside our
cabin, trying to figure out what could have happened.

“You don’t think Doris would hit her, do you?” Gwen whispered.

I shook my head.

Obviously, however, something terrifying had happened. It wasn’t until the next day that we found out. Pamela told us.

As punishment for pushing a girl down in the shower, Doris had taken Virginia out to the campfire circle. She’d told Virginia that she was to sit alone on a log and think about how she could control her temper in the future and that Doris would be back for her later.

Doris had not actually left. She had gone back in the trees to keep watch over her, but Virginia had panicked, terrified at being alone at night. She would have preferred “getting smacked,” she’d told Connie between sobs.

In Connie’s office Doris had been lectured and almost let go. The whole idea of camp, Connie had said, was to get city kids in tune with nature, not to scare them with it, and with that punishment, she had set Virginia back even further than she’d been when she came.

But because Doris was well liked by the other little girls and had not actually left the child alone, it was decided that she would stay here on probation
and apologize to Virginia, which she did. She had gone back to their cabin, Pamela reported, where Virginia was still sniffling and, in front of the other girls, had told Virginia that she had made a serious mistake in making her think she was alone out there in the dark, that she would never have left her alone unwatched.

Doris assured her that it would not happen again but that if Virginia continued to hit other girls, she would have to sit in the director’s office for a long time-out and would miss the next movie as well.

That seemed a fair punishment all around. Doris kept her job and her dignity, Virginia received the apology and the warning she deserved, and the rest of the assistant counselors got a lesson in discipline.

“It’s like walking a tightrope,” Tommie said. “One step to the left, you’ve gone too far. One step to the right, you haven’t been assertive enough.”

“It’ll take every single bit of patience I’ve got,” said Gwen.

“And you’d better not have your mind on anything else, because you need to concentrate totally on your girls,” said Pamela. She sighed. “Maybe that’s a good thing. It’ll keep me from worrying about Mom and what
she’s
up to.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then I asked, “So
what’s going to keep us going for the next two weeks?”

This time Elizabeth and Pamela both grinned. “Friday night,” said Pamela. “Assistant counselors’ night out!”

Gwen and I tried not to have favorites among the Coyotes because they were each needy in a different way. Kim needed all the reassurance she could get, and Ruby seemed to sail through the week without any particular problems as long as she got hugs now and then. But Latisha was mad at the world and took it out verbally on anyone who was handy.

“What you looking at, girl?” had been her first comment to Estelle the day we arrived, and of course Estelle had issues before Latisha even opened her mouth.

“Not you, that’s for sure,” Estelle had said, and the way Latisha bristled, we were prepared for flare-ups between the two.

But Mary and Josephine were my own little case study, as Gwen put it. I couldn’t figure out why Mary felt so responsible for her sister—doing
things for her that Josephine could probably do herself. At our first staff session I talked to Connie Kendrick about putting one of the sisters in another cabin.

“Better not,” Connie said. “We had to pull a lot of strings to get them here in the first place, and they finally came on the condition that they not be separated. We take what we can get, and these two kids really needed a break from home.” She winked at me. “Of course, they don’t have to stick together like Siamese twins. There’s no reason you can’t be creative.”

So at breakfast on Thursday, as Mary led Josephine to our table, I said, “I can’t decide which of you two girls I want to sit beside most. So I’m just going to have to sit between you, and then I’ll have one of you on each side. Lucky me!”