The Miseducation of Cameron Post (41 page)

Once inside, we heard not just the whistling but something clashing against the roof, something hard and fast, and then twenty seconds might go by, and then another quick clash. My heart skipped around. I imagined Ty in his bulky Carhartt jacket outside our house. Ty waiting for us. It made no sense for him to be on the roof, I knew, but why should it make sense?

“You must have been good enough this year to get you a visit from Santa,” Grandma said, while I tried, unsuccessfully, to press my face against the back-door window in such a way as to see what was out there.

“No way,” I said, trying to grin. “He’s probably here for you.”

“You okay, kiddo?” she asked me, studying my face.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Lots of things going on,” she said, touching my cheek.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s find out what this is.” She kept studying me while I put my coat back on, pulled up the hood.

“How’s that poem go?” she asked. “‘Up on the roof we heard such a clatter, went to see what was the matter’?”

“Something like that,” I said, opening the door, the wind already taking my breath. “Somebody’s wearing a kerchief, I remember that.” I stepped onto the back porch and the wind slammed the door behind me. I walked down the steps and all the way out into the center of the backyard, the dead lawn coated with just enough snow and ice for my footsteps to crunch, like over a thick layer of cornflakes. I looked up. That prairie wind had torn loose a whole string of Christmas lights from along the roofline and then had caught the string in its gust, was holding it aloft for moments at a time and then letting it dip, sometimes far enough to crash against the roof, before shooting it skyward again. It calmed me down to see that this was what was making the noise, it relieved me, all at once, made me a kind of giddy. And it was beautiful too, this lighted string thrashing against the dark night.

“What is it, Spunky?” Grandma called from the doorway.

“It’s lights,” I yelled.

“What is it?” she yelled back.

“Come see,” I yelled.

She did. She hurried out with an afghan draped around her, her big slippers on. She stood next to me, looked up, smiled. “Look at that,” she said, her words coming out in steamy puffs. “They’re still all lit up.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s neat.”

“It is neat,” she said. “That’s one way to put it.”

I put my arm around her. She put her arm around me. From out there in the backyard, in the ice wind, for as long as we could stand to, we watched that string of lights dip and soar and crash and rise again.

Later, after we’d said good night, gone to our beds, I could hear them, right above me, smacking into the roof, scraping along it, and a couple of times I even glimpsed the string, a whip of tiny lights, as the wind carried a part of it past my window. The next afternoon, after the honeymooners returned from their cabin, tired and punch-drunk, Ray hauled out the ladder, put on a thick pair of leather work gloves, climbed up to the roof, and restapled that renegade strand. And then they stayed put until he took them down, with all of the other lights, on New Year’s Day, prompt as he could possibly be, because he said that it
really irked
him when people left their Christmas lights up
practically till Easter
.

I never got my face-to-face with Coley. I never did manage to see Jamie, though he called from his dad’s, once, and we talked for ten minutes or so, Ruth in the other room, not making faces or saying anything but for sure letting me know that she was there, that she was listening, so all the real content had to come from his end. He was dating Andrea Dixon, and unbelievably, according to Jamie, she
put out like a champ
. It made me sad when he told me he had to go, said that he missed my
gay face
. Other than that, I met with Pastor Crawford twice; Grandma and I baked a couple of low-sugar pies; Ray and I played Monopoly a bunch of times and I think he won them all. One afternoon Ruth gave me some worksheets from Lydia to fill out. I sat down and did them at the kitchen table. They were just like all the other stupid worksheets we had to do at Promise all the time. In this packet I had to read an essay by the Reverend John Smid titled “Exploring the Homosexual Myth,” and then answer some questions about it, basic reading-comprehension kinds of questions. It didn’t take long. Ruth asked me to bring the worksheets to her in the living room when I was done. I did. Ray was sitting in there with her. The TV was off and I could tell that they were waiting for me, and I could also tell that this meant we were going to have a
chat
about me, only hopefully this time there wouldn’t be as many tears as there had been at the chat we’d had in August, or at least not as many revelations.

Turns out there weren’t any tears at all: not from Ruth and not from me. Ruth told me, very calmly, that she had discussed my progress with Lydia and Rick
several times
, and that even if I had a good spring semester, which she
certainly hoped I would
, everyone thought it would be best for me to stay at Promise during the summer—during Camp Promise.

“The summer was a particularly bad time for you last year,” Ruth said. She still looked tired, even now, with the wedding behind her. Her hair was kind of squashed and lumpy and her face looked old. Ray, however, looked like the guy who’d just won the very biggest stuffed animal at the carnival. He’d looked like that since I’d gotten home.

“I think last summer was a particularly good time,” I said.

Ruth frowned at me. “What I mean is that you had too much freedom; there were too many opportunities for you to find yourself in trouble. Part of that is my fault, I know, but I can’t stay home with you all summer and neither can Ray.”

“Grandma’s here,” I said. “I can stay with her and she can babysit me, since apparently that’s what I need.”

Ruth made a tight line with her mouth. “No,” she said, smoothing her lap with her hands. I hadn’t seen her do that in a while. “That’s not an option. If you don’t want to stay at Promise, then there are other Christian summer camps I’m willing to discuss. Reverend Rick recommended several.”

“I’ll stay at Promise,” I said.

“Well, some of them sound very nice. There’s one in—where is that one with all the swimming activities?” she asked Ray.

“South Dakota, I think,” he said. “You still have the brochure, don’t you?” He smiled at me. “It seems pretty fancy.”

“It is South Dakota,” Ruth said. “They have both an in-ground pool and a lake and they—”

“No way,” I said. “I’ll stay at Promise.”

“Okay, that’s your decision,” Ruth said.

I snorted. “Hardly.”

“It’s what you just now said that you wanted,” she said.

“From the limited choices you’ve offered me,” I said, but I could see her ready to rattle off more Christian summer camps, so I added, “But you know what: It’s fine. Whatever.” And then, even though it scared me to ask, I said, “What about next year, for school?”

“Well, we’ll have to see how the summer goes,” she said. “We’ll just have to see.”

On New Year’s Eve the newlyweds went downtown and Grandma and I ordered pizza and made a huge bowl of popcorn and watched the CBS New Year’s special and
not
New Year’s Rockin’ Eve
because Grandma had a grudge against Dick Clark stemming from something or other he’d done on
American Bandstand
years and years before, way before I was born, even. But the less popular special was fine with me. It was the first TV I’d seen in months, and not only that, both Pearl Jam and U2 were going to be on.

“I have something else for you,” Grandma told me while we were getting everything settled in front of the TV. She had a stack of paper plates and napkins in her hand, and I thought that was all, but when she set them on the coffee table, she put one of those padded mailing envelopes down too. “It’s not from me, but I’m the one who snuck it away for you.”

I picked it up. It had one of those professionally printed return-address labels with a silver, blocky monogram of MMK in its corner and California as the location.

“I guess Margot’s not in Germany anymore,” I said, remembering our dinner, the stolen picture. It seemed like a long time ago.

“I don’t know what it is,” Grandma said, “but I thought Ruth might not give it to you, no matter what, and she was such a good friend of your mom’s. It came a week or so ago and I got to it first and hid it. You go on and open it up and I’ll make sure it’s legal.” She winked a big wink at me.

“You’re sneaky, Grandma,” I said.

“You’re sneaky,” she said.

It was the Campfire Girls manual Margot had mentioned to me during that dinner, and also a nice letter about how sorry she was not to have been in touch more, and how she was wishing me well, and how she hoped to make it back to Montana again soon. There were also three hundred dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, but they were pressed flat in the very center pages and I didn’t even find them until I was flipping through it during commercials, and by then Grandma had already pronounced the manual “Just fine for you to have, I don’t see why not,” so I didn’t say anything about them to her. The bills were stuck between a page that listed some of the requirements for becoming a Campfire Girls Torch Bearer Craftsman and a page with a poem, I guess it was a poem, or mantra, “The Torch Bearer’s Desire,” which just floated in a lake of white space given how short it was:

That Light

Which Has Been

Given To Me

I Desire

To Pass Undimmed

To Others

Margot had printed something, very small, beneath those words, tiny letters in pencil:
Here’s hoping that cash is as good as light. Use it well. MMK.

Sometimes I thought about Margot, randomly, like maybe when I couldn’t sleep. I would wonder what she was doing, which exotic locale she might be in. And I would wonder what she’d think of my exile to Promise, always deciding, ultimately, that she wouldn’t think much of it at all.

“Why do you think she sent you that?” Grandma asked, nodding at the book and loading my plate with too many pieces of pizza.

“Because she and Mom were Campfire Girls together,” I said. “She said she thought I’d get a kick out of it.”

“It was a nice thought,” Grandma said. “You write her a nice thank-you and I’ll send it.” Then she added, “You don’t need to go on and on about your treatment in it.”

“I won’t, Grandma,” I said. It would be completely embarrassing, even though I knew she wouldn’t approve of such a place, to tell Margot Keenan all about Promise in a thank-you card. “That doesn’t even sound like me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t. You not being around has me forgetting your ways.”

We watched the TV special pretty much in silence after that, except for one of us commenting on the size of the crowd a few times, how cold it looked. But then the host—this comedian, I guess, or actor, Jay Thomas—was doing some crappy shtick where he pretended to read from
TV Guide
the other options for television audiences should they want to change the channel, and none of his fake options were funny, something about Shannon Doherty and something about Suzanne Somers, but then he started talking about this “lost episode of
The Andy Griffith Show
,” one where Gomer tries on a bunch of women’s clothing and heads downtown to walk around until they “send him to the Marines to straighten him out.” And it was stupid, and nobody laughed, but Grandma, on the couch next to me, she tightened up a little at those words:
straighten him out
. I could feel her do it. And maybe that would have been that, but maybe ten minutes later, this Jay Thomas guy, he cuts to his cohost, Nia Peeples, who’s actually freezing it out down in Times Square in her leather coat and her hat and gloves while he stays warm in the Hard Rock Cafe with all the bands, and he tells her, “Remember, Nia, Times Square: Men are men. Some of the women are men. Some of the men are women, so be careful who you pet when you’re out there.”

And this Nia lady basically says that she can take care of herself, and the joke is over, or they move on, whatever, but right after that Grandma turned to me and said, “I don’t know why they think those queer jokes are so damned funny.”

“He sucks, that’s why,” I said.

Grandma waited a moment and then said, quietly, “It’s not so bad there, is it, Spunky?”

“In Times Square?” I asked. “How would I know?”

“At your school,” Grandma said, making sure not to look at me, but plucking stray kernels of popcorn from the coffee table, the couch, and putting them back into the bowl. “Is it very hard for you there?”

And I said, “It’s not so bad, Grandma. It’s pretty much fine, actually.”

Then she waited a few more moments, the band on the TV superloud, their electric guitar noise almost painful to hear because they were maybe drunk and also because she had the volume up so high. She said, “But are you feeling any different because of what they’ve got you doing out there?”

I knew what she meant by different, she meant better, fixed,
straightened out
; but I answered her based on the word she’d actually used and not her intended meaning, and I said, “I do feel different. I don’t really know how to explain it.”

She patted my hand, looked relieved. “Well, that’s good then, huh? That’s what matters most.”

We watched until the ball dropped, welcomed in 1993. It was the first year, after a ban that had been in effect for decades, that they reinstated confetti, all colors and sizes, the long curlicue pieces and the tiny metallic cutouts, all of it flung from the upper-level windows and rooftops of those buildings surrounding Times Square. On the screen it rained and rained confetti, for minutes, and that glitter-rain, plus the cameras flashing and the lights from the billboards and the awesome mass of the crowds in their shiny hats and toothy smiles, made that world pop and shine and blur in a way that makes you sad to be watching it all on your TV screen, in a way that makes you feel like, instead of bringing the action into your living room, the TV cameras are just reminding you of how much you’re missing, confronting you with it, you in your pajamas, on your couch, a couple of pizza crusts resting in some orange grease on a paper plate in front of you, your glass of soda mostly flat and watery, the ice all melted, and the good stuff happening miles and miles away from where you’re at. At least that’s how it made me feel that year.