Our annual Scout camp-out always comes up just after Easter. I just dread it. I’m in the middle of reading a truly inspiring book called Judy’s Journey. It’s all about this girl who’s exactly my age, and she and her whole family are migrant workers. They have to travel from place to place, living hand-to-mouth. Judy works in the fields and never complains, and she is brave, and a hard worker, and very popular with all the other migrant kids. Her father plays the harmonica, and her mother is so kind and quiet. I fantasize around fifty times a day about being her instead of me. I would just kill to stay in my room and finish that book instead of going on a stupid camp-out, but you’ve got to do these things whether you want to or not. Otherwise any chance you have at popularity can go straight down the drain and you will never get it back.
You have to start early if you plan to be popular. Mama was extremely popular when she was growing up. She was elected Most Well-Liked, she was head cheerleader, captain of the girls’ tennis team, and assistant editor of the yearbook. Everyone at Thornton High knew who she was. Even though it sometimes wore her out, she said Hi! to every single soul she passed in the hall. It was a lot of work, but that is how her reputation was built. Mama understands the gospel of popularity and she is passing it on to me so I won’t be left out on the fringes.
We head out to Camp Mary Alice real early on a Saturday morning. It is twenty or so miles from Thornton, in the deep piney woods. They named the camp for this very famous Louisiana Girl Scout who gave up her entire life for scouting. There is a main lodge built of logs with a huge fireplace at one end, long tables set up in the middle, and a big kitchen at the other end. Not far away, at the edge of the woods, there is a screened-in cabin filled with bunk beds where you sleep.
Right off the bat, Necie backs her Country Squire station wagon into the flagpole and bends it in half. I’m inside the cabin unfurling my bedroll when I hear this big uproar. I bolt out the door and—wouldn’t you know it—there is the Girl Scout flag flapping in the breeze a couple of inches above the ground! The Louisiana state flag with the mama pelican feeding her babies is right next to it, and the American flag is right next to that.
Mama is laying on the ground kicking her feet up and down, just howling with laughter. Tooty, she yells, quit it! I’m tee-teeing all over myself!
“Tooty” is Necie’s Ya-Ya nickname, and all the Scouts flutter around me squealing, Sidda, why is your mother calling Mrs. Ogden “Tooty”? Why is your mother wetting her pants?
Well, I could have predicted that something like this was going to happen. You can’t go anywhere with Mama without things getting nuts. If it’s going along too smooth she will invent something just to stir things up. Sometimes we’ll be downtown shopping and everything’s going normal, and Mama will put her fingers in her mouth and let out the loudest, most piercing whistle you ever heard in your life. Then everyone gets startled and drops what they’re doing and looks around to see where the noise came from. And Mama, she’ll just bend over and pretend to be looking at a pair of shoes. Then she’ll lift her head and look around, acting like she’s just as puzzled as everyone else. But later, once she gets us in the car, she’ll laugh her head off, saying, Did yall see how I shook up those old fuddyduddies?
And that is only one of her tricks.
Necie sits in the car hooting her head off, too, and finally Mama pulls herself up off the ground and goes over to Necie, walking like Red Skelton.
She says, Good going, dahling. Done like a true Ya-Ya!
Necie says, Vivi, when in the hell did they put a flagpole there? And they both crack up again and Mama lights them each a cigarette.
I stand off to the side behind one of the big loblolly pines, hoping Mama can’t spot me, but she yells out: Sidda, dahling, go get me my file out of my purse. I think I’ve broken a fingernail.
Great, I think, just great. This is going to be a perfect camp-out with my perfect mother, who I wish would shrivel up and blow away. Then I say a quick prayer so I won’t burn in hell for having such thoughts about my own mother. It can wear you to a nub, trying to be a popular person and a good Catholic all at the same time. There is no way in the world she can pull this off. It’s one thing for her to act half-normal in an hour meeting at the parish hall on Wednesday afternoons, but trying to act sane and sober for a whole weekend is a whole different ball of wax.
So what do our great leaders do? They just walk away from that station wagon and that bent flagpole like nothing ever happened and lead us off on the big hike.
Now, I just hate hikes because they always get me out of breath. Plus, I would rather simply look at the great outdoors than actually be in it. But I step along as quick as I can to keep up with M’lain and Sissy with their Ladybug shirts tucked into their pants. They’ve both got these neat walking sticks that they found, and their hair is done up in dog-ears, and everything about them is clip-clip.
You’ve got to understand the social structure of Troop 55. There are
The Popular Girls. M’lain and Sissy, and maybe Mimi Plauché. And me, if I do things right on a lucky day.
The Almost-Popular Girls. They try real hard but never quite make it. For instance, their leader is Rena Litz, whose father is the manager of the very first K-Mart in Central Louisiana. She dresses in brand-new clothes all the time but they’re cheap-cheap-cheap, and she has an accent from Ohio that sounds like she always has a stuffed-up nose.
The Unpopular Girls. At least they love each other.
and
4. Edythe Spevey.
Edythe Spevey is in a class all by herself. She has kind of a crow face with pimples around her big old honker nose, and hair so oily that M’lain says you could wax the floor with her head. (Oily hair is the worst thing you can have at Our Lady of Divine Compassion parochial school. If you have oily hair, you might as well just lie down and die and get it over with.) And—just to top things off—old Edythe wears cheap pointy eyeglasses and crinkled-up shoes. She looks like an orphan, even though we know she has this fat mother who takes in sewing. In fact, just last Christmas, Edythe’s mother made her this special holiday dress of green felt that was designed to look exactly like a Christmas tree. Edythe wore it to a Catholic Youth Organization party and the thing actually had little balls dangling off of it, and every time she bent over to pick up the ones that fell off, you could see her underwear. Now, a true Catholic would try to be kind to Edythe, but I just can’t. It’s too dangerous. You could get lumped in with her, and then maybe even become her, and end up living in a trailer the rest of your life watching Dialing for Dollars.
Anyway, we’re hiking along like little marching rats, and Mama has on her white sunhat and sunglasses, and she’s holding the Super-8 like she’s shooting a movie in Hollywood. She adores that Super-8 and won’t let anyone touch it but her. She films all of us walking through the piney woods, and yells out, Yall do something! This is a movie camera!
You can smell the sun hitting the needles and see little mushrooms under your feet. If you quit thinking about everybody and everything, it gets real quiet and private, like swimming underwater with your eyes open. I stop for a minute to feel some bark peeling off a pine like it’s the tree’s skin. And then I look up and suddenly realize that Edythe has almost caught up with me.
She says, Siddalee, did you see that monarch butterfly?
I wouldn’t mind seeing a monarch, but I panic at the thought of being left behind with Edythe. I act like I don’t hear her and take off running to the front of the group where my popular friends are. The sprint gets me winded, and I have to pretend I’m coughing, and palm my asthma inhaler to stop the wheezing.
I pray: God, please don’t let me get stuck with Edythe, and please don’t let M’lain see me sucking on this inhaler like Daddy.
Then Mama says, Okay yall, we’re gonna sing now! And she starts up with her old camp songs that only the Ya-Yas and their kids know the words to. I wish I could crawl off and hide from her voice and her legs marching like she is
the general of the world. She sings:
I go with the garbage man’s daughter,
Slop! Slop!
She lives down by the swill
She is as sweet as the garbage itself
And her breath is sweeter still
Slop! Slop!
Oh, she just makes me so sick! Who does she think she is, Mitch Miller? I signal to M’lain and Sissy that my mother drives me crazy. I’ve got to let them know that I am not like her. But then—don’t you know it—they start trying to sing along with her! Stumbling over the words, acting like they’ve sung it a hundred times, when they’ve never heard it before in their lives. Mama keeps leading the big sing-along, and we march through the woods like in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Finally, I start singing too, all loud and full-throated. Mama always says, If you can’t sing it good, Siddalee, at least sing it loud.
By the time we stop to cook our food, I’m dizzy from all that hiking and singing. We have to dig out these little pits in the ground and drop hot coals in there, and then plunk our tinfoil packets full of potatoes and vegetables and hamburger meat down in there and let it all cook together. It takes forever and you get dirt under your fingernails and I just hate it. Mama acts like she’s an Indian princess in the great outdoors. But I notice that she’s got her these little packets of peanut butter crackers that she unwraps and eats, and a Coke that she slips out of her knapsack and gulps down. My throat is all dry and it’s too dusty out here. I don’t see how my Daddy can stand it, working in the fields all day long.
When we finally finish up eating and head back to camp, M’lain whispers to Sissy and Mimi and me, Yall watch Edythe. Look at how she walks.
And we stare at Edythe the whole way back. She walks all bunched up, like invisible hands are squeezing her shoulders together. It gets me embarrassed just to look at her. I want to go over and hit her on the back and say: Edythe, walk right! Quit being such an I-don’t-know-what!
Back at Camp Mary Alice, Mama and Necie get out the Hershey bars and jumbo marshmallows and graham crackers and we make s’mores. I’ve got to have my marshmallows done perfectly light brown all the way around or I will not eat them. I don’t see how anybody can stand to swallow the burnt-up ones. After I get mine just perfect, I slip it off my coat hanger right on top of the Hershey bar. I bite into that crunchy cracker and taste that marshmallow and chocolate down to the tip of my toes.
Mama says, Yall keep rotating those marshmallows constantly and they will roast evenly. When anybody’s—even Edythe’s—marshmallow falls off into the dirt, Mama laughs and hands them another one. One thing about Mama: She is never stingy with food.
This is the fun part. Around the campfire those flames lick up into the black sky and you can see the stars so good. Mama does what she does best—tell stories. She acts out scary stories, like the one about the old-maid sisters in the big house on Evangeline Street right in Thornton who got eaten to death by giant ants. All their skin got chewed off and the only thing left was their bones and shoes.
Mama says, I saw it with my own eyes when I was about yall’s age. Isn’t that true, Necie?
Necie nods her head and says, It’s the gospel truth.
M’lain whispers to me, You can tell your Mama was a New York actress.
That makes me feel the best I’ve felt all day. I walk by Mama’s side on the way back to the cabin and hold her hand for a minute.
Mama and Necie rig up sheets all around their bunks so they can get some privacy. We take sponge baths and put on our nightgowns, and then we’re supposed to go to sleep. M’lain and Sissy and Mimi and I all have our hair rolled up on spoolies, because who knows what kind of things might pop up the next day that will make demands on our hairdos? My legs are twitching they’re so tired, but in that cabin with all the other girls, far away from home, and the smell of the pines and the shadows on the screens—well, you couldn’t go straight to sleep for a million dollars! All the lights are out except a nightlight that Mama has plugged in at our end of the cabin and a little lamp that lights up Mama and Necie behind the sheets like they’re shadow puppets. Moonlight shines down through the trees and you can hear the frogs croaking and the ten-thousand crickets hopping around our cabin like Mexican jumping beans.
I put my head down on the pillow and close my eyes—but then I get that second wind that makes you punchy and giggly and bad. M’lain hits me with her pillow and I’m up in a flash, wonking her over the head, and then Sissy joins in, and Mimi, and we’re whacking each other and laughing and screaming and jumping on the beds.
I start tickling Sissy, which always gets her going, and she’s yelling, Stop, please! Really, please stop! just like I do when my brother Little Shep or Daddy tickles me.
Cigarette smoke drifts up out of Mama and Necie’s cubbyhole, and you can barely hear a Texas late-night station playing Fats Domino on Mama’s transistor radio.
Mimi says, I know a nasty joke. Yall wanna hear?
Her joke is all about this man who gets his Thing stuck in a hole in the floor, and I laugh and laugh even though I don’t think it’s all that funny. I have seen both of my brothers’ Things and they look like turkey necks to me. Like if you’re not careful they could get slammed in a door and fall right off on the floor. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad I’m a girl with everything tucked up inside where things can’t get at it so easy.
The Almost-Popular Girls are playing Go Fish with Girl Scout playing cards. The Unpopular Girls are reading their own individual books, which for a minute makes me wish I was one of them so I could lay up and finish Judy’s Journey.
Edythe just sits on her bed with her hands in her lap and stares at me. I cannot believe it: She is wearing a housecoat and slippers like a little old lady, and an actual hairnet like a cafeteria server. Why is she looking at me? I am not the ringleader over here in the Popular group. I am barely here myself. I wish she would turn her beady eyes away and stare at someone else!
M’lain and Mimi are playing cat’s cradle, and me and Sissy start pretending we’re Gidget in the dorm at college. Then do you know what happens? Edythe gets up and walks right over to us on M’lain’s bed and just stands there. I can see the way her veins are all purple on her hands. Her face is all red in spots, like she has been picking at it. Why doesn’t she say anything? She just stands there looking at me, like she’s waiting for something.
Finally I say, Edythe, what do you want?
I think: Oh God, what if she asks to sit on the bed and play with us?
But she says, It is time to go to sleep now. It’s way past our curfew. Yall are breaking the Girl Scouts of America rules.
Well, that just cracks us all up and M’lain says, Hey Edythe, why don’t you go on back to your bed and pick your zits?
Then Mimi says, Yeah, but don’t aim in our direction!
Edythe looks at me like I’m responsible for the whole world. Then she turns and pads back to her bed and keeps on staring at me. If she doesn’t quit doing that, I am either going to lose my mind or have to get up and clobber her!
We start singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” which is an extremely stupid song, but that’s how it is when you’re in a group. We get all the way down to sixty-eight bottles and then here comes Edythe again. And she puts it all to me again, like I am the ambassador to the Popular Girls (which I definitely am not).
She says, Siddalee, I’m giving yall one more chance. If yall don’t go to sleep right now, I’m going to tell your mother.
God, why can’t she leave me alone? Edythe Spevey has been tailing me around since first grade. Just because one single time I smiled at her at the water fountain, she has tried to leech onto me for life. What does she think she is, my shadow or something? Does she think we are blood sisters for life?
I would like to reach out and touch the cuff of that awful bathrobe and tell her: Just relax, Edie, everything’s okay. To show her she’s not really as cootified as we treat her.
But M’lain and Siss
y and Mimi are watching me, waiting to see what I’ll do. I know they’ll banish me forever if I am nice to Edythe. I know how close I am to being kicked off the Popular bunk for life. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to have a good personality and I will not let Edythe ruin everything now.
Hey Edythe, I finally say, Why don’t you go on back to your bunk and eat your boogers for a midnight snack like you always do at home?
Well, that comment really sends my friends, and I’m a big hit. But then I see Edythe’s face. It’s like something has fallen on it and crumpled it in. Somehow she looks so familiar that I can feel her bones inside my own body. And I start to feel sort of sick.
She turns and walks away and M’lain says, Ten points, Sidda, ten points.
Why don’t you shut up, M’lain? I say. Then I laugh like I didn’t really mean it.
Edythe walks the full length of the cabin to Mama and Necie’s cubbyhole. She isn’t kidding. She’s going to tell on us. If she tells Mama what I said to her, Mama will jerk my arm out of its socket right on the spot. One thing Mama will not stand for is deliberate cruelty. Deliberate cruelty is the reason I got belt-whipped last Thanksgiving and couldn’t go to dance class for two weeks because of the marks on my legs.
I tiptoe to the edge of the cubbyhole. My bare feet are cold against the plank floors. I can feel goosebumps on my arms. I pull back one of the sheets just a hair so I can see inside. They’re up on the top bunk smoking; Mama is polishing her toenails. I can see the name on the bottle—“Rich Girl Red.”
Edythe is looking up at my mother. She says, Mrs. Walker, the nine o’clock curfew is a national Girl Scout rule. It is almost twelve o’clock midnight now. Yall should make them go to sleep, and turn out your light, too.