Wilderness Tips Read Free Page B

This seems too formal, like a letter to your mother. Like a peck on the cheek.
    She put the first letter under her pillow, but woke up with blue smears on her face and the pillowcase both. Now she keeps the letters in her suitcase under the bed. She’s having trouble remembering what he looks like. An image flits past, his face close up, at night, in the front seat of his father’s car. The rustle of cloth. The smell of smoke.
    Miss Fisk bumbles into the kitchen. She’s short, plump, flustered; what she wears, always, is a hairnet over her grey bun, worn wool slippers – there’s something wrong with her toes – and a faded blue knee-length sweater-coat, no matter how hot it is. She thinks of this summer job as her vacation. Occasionally she can be seen bobbing in the water in a droopy-chested bathing suit and a white rubber cap with the earflaps up. She never gets her head wet, so why she wears the cap is anyone’s guess.
    “Well, girls. Almost done?” She never calls the waitresses by name. To their faces they are
girls
, behind their backs
My girls
. They are her excuse for everything that goes wrong:
One of the girls must
have done it
. She also functions as a sort of chaperon: her cabin is on the pathway that leads to theirs, and she has radar ears, like a bat.
    I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I’m thirty. She knows this absolutely. It’s a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she’ll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.
    This is no country for old men, she recites to herself. One of the poems she memorized, though it wasn’t on the final exam. Change that to old women.
    When they’re all in their pyjamas, ready for bed, Joanne offers to read them the rest of the True Trash story. But everyone is too tired, so she reads it herself, with her flashlight, after the one feeble bulb has been switched off. She has a compulsion about getting to the ends of things. Sometimes she reads books backwards.
    Needless to say, Marleen gets knocked up and Dirk takes off on his motorcycle when he finds out.
I’m not the settling-down type, baby. See ya round
. Vroom. The mother practically has a nervous breakdown, because she made the same mistake when young and blew her chances and now look at her. Marleen cries and regrets, and even prays. But luckily the other shoe clerk, the boring one, still wants to marry her. So that’s what happens. The mother forgives her, and Marleen herself learns the true value of quiet devotion. Her life isn’t exciting maybe, but it’s a good life, in the trailer park, the three of them. The baby is adorable. They buy a dog. It’s an Irish setter, and chases sticks in the twilight while the baby laughs. This is how the story ends, with the dog.
    Joanne stuffs the magazine down between her narrow little bed and the wall. She’s almost crying. She will never have a dog like that, or a baby either. She doesn’t want them, and anyway how would shehave time, considering everything she has to get done? She has a long, though vague, agenda. Nevertheless she feels deprived.
    Between two oval hills of pink granite there’s a small crescent of beach. The boys, wearing their bathing suits (as they never do on canoe trips but only around the camp where they might be seen by girls), are doing their laundry, standing up to their knees and swabbing their wet T-shirts and underpants with yellow bars of Sunlight soap. This only happens when they run out of clothes, or when the stench of dirty socks in the cabin becomes too overpowering. Darce the counsellor is supervising, stretched out on a rock, taking the sun on his already tanned torso and smoking a fag. It’s forbidden to smoke in front of the campers but he knows this bunch won’t tell. To be on the safe side he’s furtive about it, holding the cigarette down close to the rock and sneaking quick