Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“Okay,” she said. “I’m Princess Isabella and you’re my loyal handmaiden Mademoiselle, er, Flotilla. Remember when we sailed our pinnace down Missionary Lake to claim the lost chunkagunk for-for la beauté?”

“O yeah,” I humored her, “that was when we, er, brought torah to the red women.”

“That was the missionary part. This was the cosmetic part.”

“So I forget, did we find the lost chunkagunk?”

“Did we find the lost chunkagunk! Well suppose I tell you this dump was the capital of la beauté, under the czars! Or anyway near it.” And now her voice slid low in her throat and she leaned towards my ear, so that her cascading ringlets and the bare breasts under them grazed my shoulder. “Want me to show you where?”

And that was it, never mind Wood Wiz, off we were going to find the site of the lost chunkagunk. I didn’t even think what dank bower Lou Rae might lead me to, only that we would be alone. If I had known that I would end up losing camp, I might have dragged my feet. Lou Rae had a red bedspread. She cinched it around her with a yellow cinch belt and clapped on a pair of sixty-wrapper white Mr. Peanut sunglasses, and held on tight to her bandaid box (“for samples”) and tucked the pencil bobbing behind her ear. I followed her onto the beaten path between tentlines. Far off at its dusty fork I saw girls doing normal stuff in green camp shorts, but Lou Rae suddenly struck off into the zigzag pine forest on no trail at all. Hot-cheeked, I watched her red bedspread decapitate saplings, drag leaves and sticks, snag on ferns and lasso blackberry spurs with its tendrils.

We went on so long I knew that Wood Wiz must be over. The woods thinned out. We came to a barbed wire fence sagging off a wormy fencepost. On the wrong side (wrong because I knew at once that this was the end of camp) were cows, cows of a pale brown the exact tint of used tea bags, with the same dark melancholy shadings along their edges, ringing their ears and their great brown eyes. I stood and stared at them. They were the most beautiful, the most womanly, cows I had ever seen, and not only because I knew the gnawed-down pasture they stood in could not be camp. It was a forbidden place, and it looked it: the crust was lunar, the cows slender and agile, like enchanted girls, the cattle of some sorceress.

I had never before gone off camp grounds, and of all the rules of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls , this was the strictest: she who left camp and got caught would never be let back in. It was a funny feeling even to stand inside camp looking out, as I did every morning waiting for the bugle for Lake Sci, staring across the slate of cold lake at houses the size of dice along its far shore, knowing there were regular people in them, grownups with jobs and diseases, dully eating breakfast. When it finally came, Get in the water you dirty bums on that same scratchy record, the icewater lake was a relief.

Now again I stood looking out: in front of me was a waste dotted with womanly cows, a floodplain toothed with debris and leached down to rock ribs, sharp stumps and gray broken things, and everything thrumming-earth and sky-with a smoky, mossy luster. “Cheese,” I whispered in awe, “what is this place?” “Better get a sample,” said Lou Rae, and bent at my feet to scratch it with her pencil. One maple leaf still dangled from a bobby pin at her forehead. Suppose I had been my sister Margaret, I might have run a hand right then down the long purplish ruffles of her hair, so that she looked up in-pleased or not-surprise just as it slipped past her throat and found the weight of her breasts in their red wrapper.

But I’m not Margaret. Already Lou Rae was prying up the barbed wire on top, and I was holding flat to earth the barbed wire on the bottom. We pushed through. The bedspread signed its name on a barb in a long, lazy red thread. We crossed the meadow, and there on a rise I saw the castle for me and my princess. It was a hollow half-tree as big as a cave, as gray as death, and no dirtier than a kiosk at a city bus stop. Where the core of the stump was rotted away, the pulp had washed out and there was a kind of ledge you could sit on, the two of you pressed in each other’s face like halves of a fruit hacked open but not sliced clean through.

I climbed in. Naturally I never said you come too , but she did and then I could smell her breath, feel the warm twin gusts of her nostrils on my lips. Between my legs came a soft lurch as of a bubble breaking free in the windowed cavity of a carpenter’s level. And my nipples and a hot bull’s-eye around my belly button turned into magnets from the nearness of her, stuck on me and trying to stick on her as well. I decided if she didn’t touch me I would die of it. She said sumpm and I only saw the melted pink jewel of her tongue. I didn’t dare hear her, I was afraid she would ask me why I was blinking my eyes in that stuttering way, yes I was sort of trying to hypnotize her, come to me come to me . “What did you say?” You have to understand how she looked at that moment: wood nymph, her throat and shoulders so greeny white under the grapey bunches of her hair, the round momps so distinct, tiny as she was, inside the split red peel of that damn bedspread, and the big green leaf rakishly starring her forehead. I had to kiss her, and if I were Margaret, I would have, I would have felt myself beaming and believed that her hidden coneyhole was as loud with me as a radio. I would have kissed her and then if she had pushed me away I would have merely hated her and an end to it. But if Margaret loved her, she would have been a boy, and small loss.

Here I was in my tough paradise for girls -no, just now I had crashed or bumbled out of the barbed wire fence of it, on the track of girls who until this summer had been pure as scenery. Nothing you would think of touching, they were, taken together, and this was exactly their spell, so complete, so perfect without me-those Maine girls, their wet ponytails black as tornados and dripping like perfume funnels. And let us not forget, they loved me back. So going to them every summer was dying and going to heaven for me, chaste as a ghost, only I didn’t know I was dead until now, when I came to life on the wrong side of the fence, ugly, starving thing that I was. Fitting that I should be curled in a dead tree like a claw, like a grub, a trilobite.

But I knew my way back. Didn’t I? After all, nobody knew. I wasn’t kicked out of camp just like that. Was I? It wasn’t too late? What did you say? My princess? “I said we’ve lost chunkagunk.” “Not again?” I choked out. “Alas, yes, Flotilla.” It went without saying that she was princess, I horse-faced mademoiselle. Very well, I agree to anything, come to me, kiss me, press your doll-faced momps, those broken-off upside-down champagne glasses, against me or I’ll

She laid a finger on the back of my trembling hand and I thought it safe in a hurry to pick up two of the long chocolate scraps of her hair pooling in my lap and place them in my mouth, for this could only amuse her. I could play I was a walrus, all right I was a walrus and I could eat her hair, which tasted like fried flowers. And it did amuse her, cowbells bouncing down a glass staircase, that was her laughter. “We’ve lost chunkagunk,” she repeated with a tragic sob and I dared to hold her eye with mine, well I may have crossed my eyes a bit to be safe, and muttered around my walrus mustaches: “How shall we make it up to ourselves?” Then her face, already so near, blurred into mine and her pink tongue, which I had been looking at before, slid into my mouth, poked in there surprisingly long and small and alive-

Then I was lost, o a thousand times more lost than she was. Good godzilla the nothing I knew when I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody! Nowadays I know how a girl like Lou Rae operates: Being wooed is meat and drink to the girlgoyle, and sex just spoils her appetite, so she keeps her orders small as sparrows, and if you ask for more-yes, in short, that dirty rotten Lou Rae, she loved me and left me.