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Far Pasture Camp Wynona was long band of grass and shabby cabins set against a curving third of a clear, Maine lake. It was where rich girls from Greenwich and Aspen and Virginia Beach learned how to rough it without electricity or running water. Holly had been sent there, she suspected, without either of her parents realizing how lawless a place it was. She had discovered slowly, as the weeks wore on, that no one cared if she never confronted the other girls in Arts and Crafts or Cookout Hollow. No one cared if she didn’t play Alaskan Baseball or Honey If You Love Me. For all it mattered she could sit all day on her favorite rock in no man’s land, set between the lower camp cabins and the rising hill that led to the lodge, and just draw. Holly didn’t mind being alone. She hadn’t minded when the groups had formed in her first few days there, weaving precarious webs of friendship first within her own cabin and then spreading into all of lower camp. From the start she had known that the only person in this hidden world that would ever care about her was her counselor. She had understood this in the very first week of camp when Carmen noticed before anyone that tiny lumps were forming and spreading pink halos across her knees. “Are you allergic to wool?” Carmen asked, fingering the coarse blankets on Holly’s bunk. Most of the girls had replaced the army-regulation spreads with their own bright sleeping bags, but Holly hadn’t known to bring hers. The only beds in the cabin that were still cloaked in the dull camo-green were hers and Carmen’s. “No.” Holly said. Carmen had never spoken to her alone before that day, and she remembered her whole body feeling loose and itchy. Carmen sat Holly on the corner of her bed and held up her tiny, spotted leg. It was strange to see her leg out in front of her, stretching the distance between her and her counselor, and the flesh looked pale and dirty. Holly was ashamed, and she wanted Carmen to put it down fast. “Do they itch?” “No.” “Then I think it has to be spiders. I’ll spray your bed this afternoon.” Carmen had gently lowered Holly’s leg back onto the knotty cabin floor and put her hands on Holly’s thighs. “You know I’m so glad to have you in Cabin Five. I know you’re having a hard time here, but you’re not like those other girls. I think you’re a lot like me.” Carmen sprayed Holly’s bed that night, the white chemicals lifting in clouds and making the other girls whine and hold their noses dramatically against what Holly thought was a pleasant, hospital smell. Even though the spiders had come back after a few days, Holly had been so grateful to Carmen for identifying her fears that she had pretended the spiders were gone. She had started to wear sweatpants instead of shorts to cover the new bites and when Carmen had noticed her, as she occasionally did, and asked if the spiders were back Holly had stretched out a grin and each time and said no. She had begun that night to look forward to the last full day of camp when Carmen, as the oldest counselor, would lead the bonfire on the far pasture. Holly looked ahead to that night as something beautiful – where something, hopefully, might come to a head with her and Carmen. The camp newspaper would be distributed that night, and Holly resolved to be in it. She resolved to render a piece of work so moving, and yet so subtle, that could celebrate Carmen without being explicit and reveal the feelings she had harbored since the first rise of spider-killing chemical smoke lifted from her bed that night. So it was then that she had began The Grim Tree.
Since the first lost battle against the spiders, seven more weeks of nights had passed. Some nights Holly could sleep, but most of the time she lay uncomfortable in the dark, her thoughts moving between Carmen’s severe face and the spiders she swore she could feel. But the nights would end. Tomorrow was the final bonfire, and the next day Holly would be gone. She had worked every moment on The Grim Tree, relinquishing all her other activities in order to perfect the comic. But now it had come to the end and there was something fundamental that she could not get right. It had frustrated her terribly, and for days she had done no work. She was supposed to be working on The Grim Tree now, but instead she was watching Tonya look for rocks. Tonya slept beside her in Cabin Five. At first there had been no words between them and they had existed separately in spheres that were both apart from the rest of the girls. But throughout the summer Holly had noticed Tonya orbiting on her rock searches closer and closer each day to where Holly drew, until now, in the eighth and final week of camp, it would have been strange if each of Tonya’s searches hadn’t ended at Holly’s feet. It was getting dark out, and Holly combed a mass of hair out of her face with her fingers to see better. Her curly hair was thick and tangled because she hadn’t taken a shower in two weeks. She kept avoiding shower day by saying she had lost her shampoo, but now that camp was ending she knew she would have to give in soon. She knew her parents would not want to see her this way, filthy and greasy as she was, but she was terrified for her cabin mates to see her naked with the spider bites that by this point covered her legs. She especially didn’t want Carmen to see, because then Carmen might think she was a bad counselor. Holly had still never told her the spiders had not died, and she desperately wanted Carmen to leave camp believing she had done Holly a huge favor that first week. If Carmen saw her legs, the memory would be ruined. Holly tipped her head skyward so her heavy hair fell out of her face. Tomorrow it would have to be good weather, because they were going up to the far pasture for the bonfire, but right now dim puffy clouds took up the sky. Holly looked out towards lower camp, and between the trees she saw Tonya coming back from her search. Tonya was wearing the regulation camp uniform: a white t-shirt with a pine tree and hunter green shorts, but the fabric was grungy and torn. She had lifted the corners of her shirt to hold a heavy load of rocks, which poked edges through the thin cotton. Tonya was larger than any of the other ten year olds at Camp Wynona and a lot less smart. People said she was retarded because she asked every day when dinner was, even though everyone at camp knew dinner was at six. But she knew a lot about rocks, and rocks were something, anyway. “That’s all the sharp ones,” Tonya said as she poured a cascade of stone from her shirt. The stones formed a pile at the base of the bigger rock from which Holly was watching. “Will you help me on my comic now?” said Holly. Tonya had flat, oval eyes and a pale bush of hair that licked in and out of the colorless sky. She stared at Holly for a long time until she finally said, “No. I need to get the smooth ones.” Tonya ambled back into the Fairy Woods, crashing through the thin stream and the bed of mud and the long plain of yellow grass beyond. Holly had wanted Tonya’s help in designing rocks for the backgrounds of her comic, but she began to draw anyway. She didn’t have much time. Tomorrow was the deadline for the all-camp newspaper, and her submission simply had to appear. It was the only respectable way for Carmen to see it. Even though Holly was trying to be calm, she knew that the comic was going to go badly, and whenever she remembered the deadline anew she raked her dirty hair. She had planned to draw Carmen today during rest hour, but this morning her counselor had left without notice on her day off. She was due back at midnight, but by then Holly and all the rest of lower camp would be in bed, and it would be too late to draw her. But though Holly had been trying all day, she could not get the picture right. She had spent all her free blocks drawing in the cabin, but finally she had left because it didn’t feel right to be there without Carmen. Her bed had remained empty since rising bell, the coarse army blankets molded to the exact position of her body leaving them. That bed looked right only when Carmen sat on it, her large rear pressing dynamic imprints into the wool, yelling at the girls and getting them into order. But harsh as she was, Carmen had been the one who had found Holly’s shoe when someone had hid it beneath two feet of mildewed polyester in the costume room, and she was also the one who had pulled Holly’s underwear from sixteen locations hidden around the cabin where two of the other girls had stuck them right before Holly needed to change for fourth of July. Holly had stood that day with her arms behind her back and her unruly hair (where an as of yet unknown tick hid sucking) and watched as Carmen deposited, one by one, all sixteen chewed looking pairs of underwear back into the paper-lined bottom of her trunk. Carmen was tall and unsteady with long arms. She had a crew cut and a big stomach and usually wore the same shirt, even though it was not regulation gear. No one questioned her because, even though the kids found her strange, she was the oldest counselor. The shirt was purple and teal tie-dyed with a howling wolf in the middle. That first week when she had found out about the spiders she had let Holly wear it to bed and Holly had tucked all her spindly limbs up into it, with a knee pressed against each nipple and her fingers intertwined over her ankles. She had smelled the whole next day of old cigarettes. Holly wrote The Grim Tree across the upper left hand corner of her sheet, and then framed the letters in a shaded box. That was the name of her comic, which was by now eighty-three pages long. The main character was the Grim Tree, who was a sour tree with big frowning teeth who stayed put in the woods and screamed sarcastically at anyone who passed by. Mostly those who passed by were other plants with other personalities, like the Grim Adolescent Tree who had braces made out of mahogany and the Grim Imposter Tree who tried sometimes, with nothing but a cheap mask, to pass for Grim himself. Holly’s favorite character was the Frail Flower, a tiny tulip that was constantly plagued by giant insects. No one in the comic was a real person, but last week Holly had cast Carmen as the stunning rhododendron, with whom one day soon the Grim Tree would fall in love and begin a family. She had been drawing The Grim Tree for ages it seemed, through every solitary, sweltering day that summer, and it seemed hard to imagine that his wooden heart would so soon soften for anyone, even a rhododendron as startling as Carmen. It would be a tricky narrative turn, and she wasn’t quite sure how to maneuver it. For now, however, she was working through a simpler plot: the rhododendron would save the Frail Flower from an insect attack. As carefully as she could, Holly was trying to sketch out the rhododendron in such a way that Carmen might recognize herself in it. But as much as she drew she erased, and soon the paper in front of her was grey and wrinkled. When she lifted it to work the details rubber eraser crumbs rained on her spider-bitten knees. It wasn’t until Tonya sneezed that Holly realized she was being watched. “Couldn’t find any smoothies,” Tonya said. “That’s what I call the smooth rocks.” When Holly didn’t respond Tonya edged in on the rock next to her. She squeezed her hands between her legs and slid them up to the crotch of her green shorts. That was how she always sat, and the other girls called her a pervert for it. For a minute she watched Holly work, but soon Tonya’s gaze drifted into the distance, beyond the yellow field to where the cabins were. When Holly looked up she could see what had attracted Tonya’s eye: the silhouettes of the lower camp girls had begun to fill the field that separated the cabins from the lake. It dawned on Holly they were probably getting ready for vespers, and she began to draw with more urgency. Vespers meant it was almost bedtime. But the faster she worked, the worse her paper looked. Tonya was pushing against her for room on the small flat surface of the rock, and before she knew it Holly felt herself slip down the face and fall, her papers sucking up into the air as she hit the ground. The gravel stung her spider bites, some of which had already opened into white heads. Now one of them was bleeding through her pants. “Jeez,” Holly cried. “Why the stinking heck did you do that?” Now the entire comic was out of order, and Holly had lost the few minutes of vital time it would take to re-sort it. But all Tonya did was stare back with her flat eyes. “I think it’s vespers,” she finally said, and began to lumber away, her hair bobbing like a yellow cloud above her head. Frantically shuffling the pages of The Grim Tree, Holly hurried back to the cabin area. But by the time she crossed the stream and the mud pile and the yellow field and made her way up to lower camp, everyone had already joined hands and Reese, the counselor in training who was on evening duty, glared at Holly as she squeezed into the circle. They sang the vespers song in atonal voices while the sky went red over the lake and the leaves got bright and then faded until they were black and blue and the sun was gone. Then Holly found Tonya and they went together into Cabin Five and changed into their pajamas. They had single beds next to each other in the farthest corner from the door. It was dark now, and Reese had lit the kerosene lamp in the center of the cabin. The girls prepared themselves in silence at the flickering limits of the light. Tonya moved in the darkness beside Holly, and piece by piece her glowing skin appeared as she shelled off her clothing. Then she turned her wide, blank back to the cabin and her flesh disappeared again under the blankets. Holly stuck her long underwear into her socks before she got in the bed beside her friend. The spiders still could bite through the thin, waffled material but at least this way they hurt her less. Reese entered the cabin from the gaping black of the outside, and paid each girl a special goodnight. Some of them she even kissed. Then Reese said that she would be the only one on duty tonight because most of the counselors were up at the lodge planning the bonfire, but that if they needed something they could find her at the lookout post in the center of the field. She took up the lamp when she left. In darkness Holly watched the light bob through the windows as Reese crossed the field to put the next oldest cabin to bed. For a while some of the girls whispered on the other side of the cabin, but they faded into sleep before long. Since the spiders had started to plague her and Holly had stopped sleeping, she had gotten used to hearing each girls’ breathing ease into its nightly rhythm. She lay flat on her back and stared into the black that collected so densely at the ceiling and tried not to think about tomorrow. The comic was not done. It would have been perfect save the fair rhododendron, but her character was the key piece. The Grim Tree was nothing but meaningless doodles without her. Holly lay staring at the ceiling for as long as she could, but she was beginning to feel the pointed feet of the spiders through her socks and she couldn’t keep her eyes closed for more than a moment. Pushing up from the thin cot mattress she flipped onto her side and leaned in towards Tonya. But silver beads of drool had already slicked her lips, and Holly pulled back when Tonya’s exhale heated her face. It must have been at least two hours she lay there, tossing from side to side under the rising temperature of the coarse blankets, kicking the spiders from her toes and trying not to worry that at seven a.m. she would have to turn in, unfinished, the most important piece of work she had ever done. When she finally gave in and lit up her digital watch it was already almost midnight. That was when she realized that, in five minutes, Carmen was due back at the lodge. She felt a burn surge between her legs at the thought and crossed them tightly and squeezed. The feeling made her uncomfortable. She rolled over on her other side. Then it occurred to her: there was a chance she could find Carmen now, and secretly draw her from the window. Holly lifted the blankets to the cool air and set her feet on the floor. It took her a long time rummaging through the mess of her trunk to find the pages of the comic that needed the rhododendron’s presence, but she found them without waking anyone. When she stepped out of the door the field felt enormous, like it was opening up to her as she entered it, and the stars and the cricket chirps were the only forces containing it. Each of the cabins was dark along the edge of the field, but Reese was reading by lantern at the center. Keeping to the far perimeter, Holly crept silently from cabin to cabin towards the lake. When she was safely out of sight she looked up the hill behind lower camp to the flashlights and lanterns that peeked from the cabins higher up, beyond the trees in senior camp. Holly headed back the way she had raced earlier with the disordered pages of her comic; back down through the yellow field that at dawn was used for all-camp service and in the afternoon for capture-the-flag. Tomorrow at rising bell this field would be a different space than it was right now. The girls of Camp Wynona would swarm over it in cabin groups. At the end of morning service there would be announcements, and the last, most important announcement would end in the collection of newspaper submissions from each cabin group. The eight and nine year olds would have foolish pictures drawn in marker of scenes at camp: contorted bathing suits writhing in a saturated lake at free swim or perhaps a monochromatic page colored to represent the summer day with green sky, green hills and green water. The fourteen and fifteen year olds would have written pieces, mostly epic histories of camp friendships, detailed accounts of each event that led to bonding, the long winters in different states apart and finally the reunions on June twenty-fifth each year. Holly found these pieces to be especially silly, and when she imagined writing a testimonial to Tonya it made her almost laugh out loud on the empty field. At the edge of the grass the ground dipped down into the Fairy Woods. Holly forgot the mud patch and her shoeless foot sank to the ankle in what felt for a suffocating moment like quicksand. But when she released herself, pulling her leg up until her foot broke the suction and popped out, she stepped back and walked the precise outline of the small mire. Then she crossed through the Fairy Woods, telling herself over and over when she was scared that she had slept every night with ghostly arachnids: she could handle a few darkened trees. She passed the rock that she had watched Tonya from that day, and she even scanned the grey grass for pages of her comic that might have blown out of her sight, but there were none that she could see. When she passed out of the forest she knew she had completed the biggest obstacle, because beyond that all she needed to do was pass by the arts and crafts building and the tiny theater and then she would see the lodge looming. She would creep nearer and see Carmen and merge her perfect profile into the curling leaves and blossoms of the rhododendron until she had completed her piece. Holly thought for some reason then of her parents and her brother at home. She wondered what it would be like, in four days, to go back to Battery Park City and not have Carmen anymore. Before the spiders had gotten so bad and Holly used to take showers, she had sat wet and naked, with her towel drooping over her lap while Carmen had brushed out the tangles in her hair and told her stories about going to college at the University of Vermont. Once Carmen had taken Holly’s pointed chin in her hand and looked into Holly’s blue eyes and told her that she would be a handsome girl one day. “Why don’t you ever brush your hair?” Carmen had asked that afternoon, but Holly had just looked away. It was scarier than the woods at night sometimes to see her counselor’s face so close. When Holly reached the edge of the crafts cabin she began to hear the noise, blending with the hum of the frogs and the bugs like another tiny animal. But as she got closer, beyond the theater, and could for the first time see the lodge, the voices became loud. In fact they were loud enough that it almost startled her they didn’t travel farther, that they didn’t glide across the pond through the otherwise silent night and wake the campers in their bunks. The light from the windows was so bright that it lit the weeds at the building’s foundation and around the concrete steps to the door. The weeds looked like spider legs lifting from the dirt, and Holly’s bites ached. She stood for a long time staring at the building and listening to the clattering cups and the music that underscored them. After a few minutes she went up to the first window and stood close to the dark-washed wood paneling. The window frame ended above her head, so she moved over a stone to stand on. Even that did not raise her high enough, so she put her hands down flat on the frame and pushed herself up. For a moment she saw the yellow-lit lodge and what must have been almost all the counselors inside. Then her hands slipped on the dust and she barely caught her balance. There was no way Holly could see much from this position, much less do any careful drawing, even if she was able to hold herself up for any length of time. She realized her only choice was to work from the screen door. As she approached the steps and went up them she began to get scared. There were no toilets in the lodge, and with that number of people there would surely be someone, at some point who would need to leave. She would just have to make sure that she didn’t get too absorbed in her drawing and forget to be on the lookout. Everyone was sitting at the first three of the long pine tables. There were bags of chips out, and an acoustic guitar was breaking up on the radio. But Holly could not find Carmen. Almost everyone was drinking beer, and empty aluminum cans covered every table, as though the counselors had moved through the night from the back of the lodge to the front, downing beer after beer as they went. As Holly’s eyes followed the empty vessels back into the shadows of the lodge, she saw that there were two figures there, somehow entwined. She leaned closer to the screen, until the tip of her nose almost pressed against it. She could smell the alcohol now. Then Holly saw that the two figures in the shadows were Carmen and another girl counselor. They were sitting on a tabletop and leaning against the wall. It was hard to see them clearly in the darkness, but when Carmen’s cropped hair moved into the light, and Holly could see the stubble curl around the top of her ear, she knew it was her counselor. She was sitting on the other girl, her hands digging under her t-shirt and up towards her chest. Holly could see a tongue lick in the air, and the strange movements they were making and she suddenly couldn’t breathe. She knew somehow that she had been waiting for this all summer, and she felt herself burning like she had in bed before. She sucked in a breath and swayed in the air for a moment. Then the tip of her nose and her shoulder tapped the screen and, as though she had slammed it with all her force, the door flew open and, in surprise, Holly lunged into the room. When she entered the light of the lodge everything went still. Though the music kept playing and some of the counselors kept talking, most of them turned to the sound of the door, put down their cans and stared. Holly realized, suddenly, how she must look. Her star speckled long underwear had come out of her socks and ridden up her leg half way to her knees, exposing the twin rows of inflamed spider bites. Her feet were bare and one was crusted in mud, and pine needles from the Fairy Woods stuck to her chest in odd patterns. She could feel her hair was twice as large as her skull from tossing in the static field of her wool blankets, and her eyes were probably red from so many days without enough sleep. After nearly eight weeks mostly in the company of other ten year olds, seeing so many adults in one place made her feel as small as the Frail Flower felt standing next to an entire army of Grim Trees. But then, what was worse was the single beautiful rhododendron bush. Carmen extracted herself from the other girl and made her way across the cherry wood floor, pounded with paths from a hundred years of hungry children. She knelt down in front of Holly and rolled down her long underwear. “Looks like those spiders didn’t die,” she said. --- After morning service and breakfast the next day Carmen led her cabin up to the far pasture to say goodbye. They walked in a line up the hill of cabins, past lower camp and middle camp and up towards senior camp. They passed by the older girls, who were only just now getting up, spitting toothpaste foam into pits in the ground. Over-dry bathing suits rattled on their lines and a group somewhere was singing: “Two, two, the lily-white boys, clothe them all in green-hoe, one is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.” At the very end of the line Tonya stalked with a heavy rock in each fist. “It weighs me down,” she grunted without prompt. Holly felt listless that whole day, as though she was leaning up the mountain instead of walking, as though the wind was pushing her. Her legs were sticky now, because Carmen had brought her to the nurse before breakfast for a special ointment. And even though camp was over in a couple of days she had sprayed Holly’s bed again and changed the blankets. After the mist of chemicals had cleared they had found, at the foot of the bed, three fat spiders lying on their backs with their legs twitching. Holly had wondered if that was all that had been bothering her, because whenever she pictured them there were at least a dozen. Carmen had plucked them by their bellies and flattened them on the floor with her bare feet. Beyond senior camp at the top of the hill was the Kissing Gate that opened into the flat, liminal zone of the far pasture. Beyond the pasture was the boys’ camp where only the nurses ever went. It was only once or twice a season that anyone from lower camp got to go into the pasture, and when the girls entered it now no one chatted. They laid the blanket out in the center of the wide, bright field and watched the white horses watch them. They ate blueberries until the first activity bell rang and then, after the other girls started down the hill, Carmen put her hand on Holly’s back and kissed her in the middle of her dirty hair. That night, even though it wasn’t shower day for Cabin Five, Holly went up to the washhouse and scrubbed her body for a full hour. She rubbed the dry pink soap everywhere, even places she had barely touched before. She rubbed until her skin was purple. It felt vulnerable to get rid of the dirt that had protected her for so many weeks. When she came back down into the cabin she took off her towel in front of everyone. Then, while Carmen stared, she sat on her bed and applied a luminous smear of ointment to each one of her spider bites. --- When Holly rode back towards New York in the back of her parents’ station wagon, she couldn’t believe how quiet it was to be the only child again. The car bumped down the pebbled road out of Camp Wynona, and out onto the hilly Rutland highway. Through her window she watched the cows and the hills and the blue sky, and every second she knew she was further away from something, although what exactly she didn’t know. Beside her on the plastic seat sat the largest rock that Tonya had found that summer, and in her hand she clasped the all-camp newspaper. On page seven, towards the back, was the last strip of The Grim Tree Holly would ever draw. It depicted the wedding of Grim and the Fair Rhododendron. Each detail was explicitly rendered, the flowers and leaves of the rhododendron slipped ambiguously around Grim’s trunk in the final panel as the two plants came together in the first embrace either one had ever known. When she had seen her weak pictures, hastily finished before dawn yesterday, glowing in the orange bonfire light, Holly had felt at once inadequate and powerful. She looked from the mass of other girls at Carmen, her silhouetted frame imposing against the flames, and she knew she had been let in on a secret that she couldn’t articulate yet, but that she would keep with her throughout the entire year. The last thing she thought of before she drifted to sleep with the newspaper still clasped in her hand was the first poem she had ever written. She remembered looking at the ceramic doll her mother had given her for Easter, and thinking if there was a way somehow, on paper, that she could make its existence make sense. She had realized then, almost, how its perfect lips had made her uncomfortable, aroused thoughts in her she had never had before. She had written the poem and then put the doll in her closet forever. Now, as her eyes closed against the last leg of Vermont the final lines of the poem came back to her: Sitting, staring/never glaring/the doll.
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