Shelter (1994) (13 page)

Lenny glanced over at Cap now. "You know, you could help me with these dishes instead of lying there on your cot like a rich housewife in some soap opera."

"Soap opera. I like that." Cap laughed, stayed prone, and pantomimed a long drag on an imaginary cigarette.

"You don't know what I'm thinking about," Lenny said.

"I don't have to. No matter what you're thinking, I gotta have my cigarette."

"Not likely. There's not a cigarette in this entire campsite, no matter whose tent we searched."

"Then I'll have to make do. Isn't that the term your mother uses, Lenore, 'make do'?" Cap took another long drag out of the air, and exhaled. "It's sad, that term. Don't you think?"

"I guess." Lenny began sorting aluminum forks from spoons, so familiar, so oddly shaped, as though campers shouldn't touch sharp edges. There were no knives in Girl Guide mess kits; the handle of the spoon was to serve a double function, and both implements were meant to be secured by a metal clip inside the larger dish. No rattling in a regulation mess kit.

"On second thought, I don't want to make do. There's got to be a cigarette in this camp. Frank could get them, I bet, from the work crew by the river. They're always sitting around on those pipes, smoking and doing nothing." She sat up. "Those flunkies would give Frank a pack of cigarettes for us. They'd think it was cute."

"You addict."

"Lenny, that's boring." Her feet hit the board floor of the tent and she walked over to stand just beside Lenny. Her ankles and toes were still smeared with the dried mud of Turtle Hole. "How about 'you nasty delinquent/ or 'you fledgling degenerate'?"

"Not so fledgling."

Cap knelt down, her face just opposite Lenny's. "Stick with me, Lenore. We're OK." She smiled. "They can't get us if we're together."

Lenny shoved half the plates and bowls into a confusion of shapes around Cap's dirty feet, and looked into her green eyes. Or not green—emerald, Cap liked to say. There was still a smell of the Chanel No. 5 she sprayed in her hair from a bottle Catherine Briarley had left in her bathroom in Gaither. The bottle now sat incongruously under Cap's bunk beside a sterling silver manicure set that was zipped into a silk pouch.

"Together," Lenny repeated, and let her face nearly touch Cap's. "Are we going to get married and have kids and live in a split-level ranch house?"

Cap sighed. "What am I going to do with you? Ranch houses are never split-level. They're all on one floor, like the ranches of old. Like Ben Cartwright's place on
Bonanza.
" She backed off and began to throw the dirty dishes into an empty backpack, then looked up at Lenny. "Is Frank more like Adam or Little Joe? Let's decide."

"I don't want to talk about it. And you might want to put on some clothes. Like that uniform over there in the corner."

"This one?" Cap retrieved a wrinkled mass from beyond the footlockers. "What's the matter? You don't like my clothes? Just because you got yourself dressed under the covers in something nearly clean? How incredibly modest."

"I'm tired. It's like I didn't really sleep." Lenny felt her eyes well up. Startled, she looked away from Cap and began throwing the rest of the metal dishes into a plastic clothes basket they used as a drainer in the stream.

"Ask me to iron my shorts, why don't you. Ask me anything." Cap shook out the Bermudas, held them up. "Mice and spiders, out! We'll do anything to restore Queen Lenore to her former power. Quickly now, the regime could topple, the people could rise up. Ask, ask, and it shall be granted."

"just get dressed," Lenny answered, then thought she saw a kind of shadow flit across Cap's eyes, or through them, or the shadow was in her voice. Say something harmless, Lenny thought, to keep them from talking. "How did 'Catherine' turn into 'Cap'? Did your mother call you that?"

"Never. I was a baby and my dad called me Cappy, because she forbade 'Cathy,' too ordinary. He did it to aggravate her, then shortened it to Cap. Or I did, maybe."

"Maybe," Lenny answered, turning to leave the tent. She heard Cap behind her, pulling on clothes.

It was true, Lenny thought, she was Cap Briarley to everyone in Gaither. No one but her mother seemed to have ever called her Catherine. Lenny called her Natasha; Natasha was a cartoon spy, an outlaw witch. They pretended they were heroes at school, sometimes at home, righting wrongs with one-liners. They considered Rocky and Bullwinkle to be more real than the Beach Boys or Troy Donahue, whose pictures were plastered on lockers in the basement of the junior high. Cap made fun of movie stars to Lenny, made fun of the other girls, talked back to the boys, bright-eyed, her tongue sharp. Cap and Lenny were together at school, and school was life; home was some afterthought they attended to on the phone, doing algebra while they watched TV. Lenny liked the idea of a flying squirrel with a silk scarf and aviator goggles, and the moose who couldn't keep up, but Cap was nothing like Bullwinkle, except she did take up room, so much room, like a real creature from a cold place, a creature born wet, on the shores of a snow lake. The lake would have a silence around it that was clear, like ice, the air so cold it burned, no one could taste it. Lenny felt Cap hover near her, past her, behind her, to one side or another, pushing her, looking at her. Sometimes there was a point of heat in the back of Lenny's throat, like a hunger. The hunger waited, an old, jagged part of her. Being with Cap reminded Lenny of hunger and noise, of aching.

But when she bent over the stream, she felt empty and clear. It felt good to be so alone in the woods. She could hear Cap's feet on the path, and the clank of the dishes in the backpack. Lenny stacked tin mess plates into sticky piles. If chores weren't done right, the counselors liked to say, Girl Guides could practice doing chores again. Supper last night seemed weeks ago, but it was only last night, and the plates and cups weren't clean enough. It was only because they'd had pancakes. How could you scrub off dried syrup in water this cold? Goofing around last night, she'd lost the plastic scour pad. Well, they could scrub them with rocks. Use more soap, keep rinse water separate, and pour the soapy water on the ground, not in the stream.

Cap knelt beside her, and they set up their system. Dishes. Soap. Bucket of rinse water. Empty clothes basket for clean mess kits. Later, someone else would have to sort everything and reassemble the kits—they'd all laboriously scratched their initials on each important fragment of the whole.

"I love having everyone gone," Lenny said. "It's so quiet. Like a real woods, not a camp."

"They're gone. They'll see him and we won't," Cap said, soaping plates. "He'll be looking at all of them, wondering."

"I'm glad we're staying here. What if he knew who we were?"

"What if he did? You think he's going to tell someone?" Cap reached out to touch Lenny's bare foot. "He's part of the secret, isn't he? He did it too. You think he's going to find your sneakers and read your name inside? He doesn't even know you were wearing shoes. He won't know who we are unless we tell him, unless we find him again."

"I've got to find those sneakers," Lenny said.

"What for?"

"Oh, god. Let's get finished. I'm hungry, I'm so starved. I want to miss flag raising and go to breakfast."

They traded off, tossing collapsed metal cups into the water, setting the clothes basket in the stream itself to receive whatever seemed clean enough to pass muster. Cap was so silent, Lenny could tell she was scared—or not scared, but puzzling it all out. Crossing the meadow to the woods, with Cap behind her, both of them lugging their silly, cumbersome burdens, Lenny had wanted to tell her it was a pact, like other promises they'd made. But once they'd got to the stream, she couldn't get herself to speak. It was like she was awake and Cap wasn't. Like Cap was always teasing her, pushing, but looking for where to move, how far to go. Mornings, Lenny lay in her cot, waiting for Cap to wake up, listening.

Very early, crows fed in the space of tangled weeds and tall grass behind their tent. Just after dawn the ratchety screams began, sounding near and far, overlapping echoes that approached and faded. The racket never seemed to wake Cap. She was a bronze color now and slept outflung, like a golden net. Her auburn hair had lost the distinct salon shape Catherine Briarley had charged Juanita with maintaining at a shop in Winfield twice a month; now it nearly touched her shoulders and curled in the humidity. Lenny would look into a shaft of sun, closing her eyes to peer into that cranberry red behind her lids; the red was luminous, like lit-up blood; she could watch it dapple and break into black spots that revolved like dividing cells. Cap liked to say the bats and the morning birds were Queen Lenore's minions, a joke mythology. But the bats were a night populace, no joke. They whistled in Lenny's dreams, sucking a black juice. The crows were black too, but glossy, bigger than chickens. Floppy when they walked, slightly drunken. But they could swoop and dive, hunt with their feet. Their noise was adoration Cap didn't seem to hear, a raucous threat, a beckoning; Lenny imagined the crows alighting with offerings of mice and bats, and hard-shelled water bugs, marooned on their scarab backs. It was praise Lenny understood, praise she might organize, like the ritual of throwing flowers in the stream, chains of ripped scraps and ragged stems to dress their ankles.

"Look, Cap, the flowers are still here from yesterday." Lenny was standing in the water, pointing to colors in the current.

"Caught on the rocks. It's so shallow." Cap took the bucket from Lenny and dumped the dishes into a tangled clatter on the bank. "You want more flowers? What a glutton. I could throw some at you."

"They do look like food." Lenny bent down to cup water in her palm, and drank it, mincing a scarlet petal between her front teeth. She smiled at Cap, and the red stain was on her lips.

The water gurgled, dappled with flowers that still looked fresh. Pale blue chicory winked and floated, thrown in yesterday by the handful, and the spidery yellow loosestrife bobbed on woody stems. The bee balm were deep red, like wounds in the cold water, and clumps of mountain laurel were the size of snowballs.

"I have a dream about us being in the stream," Lenny told Cap.

It was true. Lenny dreamed about Cap when the bats were flying. She dreamed when the crows screamed. Lenny floated on her back in the dream, and she wore a sequined gown like the dress Cap kept draped in plastic in the back of her closet. Catherine Winthrop had worn the dress as a debutante. She really had been Catherine Winthrop then, Cap said, in Connecticut, her brocade skirt sewn with pearls. In Lenny's dream the heavy bodice of the dress was even more elaborate, an armor of beaded flowers bearing Lenny up, and she couldn't open her eyes. Cap stood over her, gently directing the float of her body with long sticks.

Lenny knew the beaded dress probably still hung in Cap's closet, but Cap's mother was gone. She was turning into Catherine Winthrop again, for real, taking back her maiden name and living in Connecticut with Cap's grandparents. Cap was supposed to be Catherine Briarley now; she was supposed to leave Gaither in the fall and be rewarded with her own sports car. Like Catherine Winthrop of Connecticut, Catherine Briarley was destined to attend a good eastern boarding school and then go on to Barnard, but Catherine Briarley existed nowhere on earth. If she did exist, Cap liked to intone in a vicious hiss, she would be dangerous and vengeful, a desperado implemented to avenge Catherine Winthrop, who likewise did not exist in Gaither, West Virginia.

A long time ago, Cap had learned to curse as her father cursed, voice held in check, the flat, buttery Georgia inflection and the words burned in, branded on the flesh of their intended:
You want I should send her off to some horse-infested snoot school, pay to get her bedded bucked and fucked by some married faculty shit who digs for urns in Turkey and then gives schoolgirls the clap, wasn't that how it went?
Lenny was supposed to join in then, doing Cap's mother's voice, a funny, broken tone, defeated, choked with rage:
You ignorant rube, you like it that she spends her time with kids whose fathers crawl around in that mine of yours. One of these days she'll marry some grease monkey from the Texaco station and then you'll be satisfied, write her a big check when she hasn't got a dime and be the hero.
Now Cap's version of Henry's laughter, picking up words in a mocking interrogative:
Big check? Why, she won't need any big check? She'll have that famous trust fund your daddy will invent any day now? She can marry the fucking janitor out at Consol and fly him to some ritz penthouse?
Then, flatly:
Let her do anything, but don't let her be you—you ate done for.
Now an exaggeration of Henry's disappointed, self-mocking chuckle:
You have been done many times. And remember, if you condescend to play golf in Gaither, you'd better be playing with somebody's wife. This is not Westchester County or New Haven, your checkered career is over.

Their fights had taught Cap the only version she knew of her mother's history, and she'd taught Lenny that history as intimate sport between them. Catherine Briarley was nothing like Lenny's experience of a mother, nothing like Audrey, with her endless stories and harangues. Catherine told her daughter nothing, only said, softly, to Juanita, Henry is a bastard. She said it so Cap heard; she said it for Cap. In Gaither, no friends picked Catherine up in convertibles; she'd had only Juanita. Catherine was gone now but Juanita was still there. Juanita was the maid who wore no uniform because there were no maid's uniforms in Gaither, whose husband dropped her off in the pickup each morning and retrieved her after supper. Last fall, shortly after Catherine Briarley had decamped, Juanita would sit peeling potatoes while Lenny and Cap did their homework at the same kitchen table. She tightened her lips while the girls traded lines, repeated, arms akimbo, giggling, the same words she'd once heard float down from the ceiling in the raised voices of the original speakers. Juanita would click her tongue and watch the kitchen clock. When Cap mouthed some of Henry's more colorful epithets, she'd cross herself and begin to giggle too, darting her eyes at her charge as though half afraid and half delighted. Cap said Juanita was a gypsy from over around Dago Hill. She'd never really been a maid but she was the only one who'd answered the ad.
She's punctual and she doesn't steal,
Lenny was supposed to say when they were alone in Cap's room upstairs.
What the hell would she want that you've got,
Cap would laugh, being Henry. Cap told how they broke glasses quarreling, drinking cocktails, and Juanita would clean up the mess before she left. At night, Henry went to Catherine's room. Juanita had gone home and didn't hear the muffled sounds Cap thought were more fighting until she was old enough to discern the difference.