The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 6

  After Ruth came back, a moving van followed close behind; we had to make room for some of her stuff. This meant tackling the garage, closets, the storage shed in the backyard. During one of these clearing sessions we unearthed a dollhouse my father had made for my fifth birthday. As dollhouses go, it was amazing. It was a built-to-scale reproduction of some big old Victorian in San Francisco—according to my dad, it was a famous one on a famous street.

  The version he built for me was three feet high and a couple of feet wide. It took both Ruth and me, working together, to get it out of the narrow opening of the cluttered storage shed.

  “Should we put this in the car, take it to St. Vincent’s?” Ruth asked after we’d made it through the cobwebbed doorway and were standing together on the lawn, both of us sweating. “It would make some little girl awfully happy.”

  We’d taken carload after carload to that thrift store. “It’s mine,” I told her, though I wasn’t planning on keeping it until right that minute. “My dad made it for me, and I’m not giving it to some stranger.” I hoisted it up by its peaked roof and took it into the house, up the stairs to my room, and shut the door.

  Dad had painted it a blue he called cerulean, and I thought that name was so pretty that I named the first doll to live in the house Sarah Cerulean. The windows had white trim, and real glass panes, and flower boxes with tiny fake flowers in them. There was a fence made to look like ornate wrought iron around the little platform yard, which was done up with synthetic turf scraps left over from the indoor soccer field in Billings. I don’t know how Dad even wound up with those. He’d cut up scraps from real shingles to do the roof. The outside was entirely finished, every detail, but the inside was another story.

  The whole dollhouse was hinged, so you could close it and see it from all four sides, or open it and have access to each of the individual rooms, like a diorama. He’d done the framing for all of the rooms, and put in a staircase and a fireplace, but that was it as far as it got, no other decorations or finishes. He’d wanted to have it ready for my birthday, and he’d promised that we could finish it later, together, which we never did. Not that I minded. Even unfinished it was a better dollhouse than any I had ever seen.

  My mom and I had picked out a few pieces of furniture for it at the crafts display counter at Ben Franklin. Irene and I used to spend hours with that thing, until sometime after my tenth birthday, when I had decided that I was too old for dolls, and therefore, dollhouses.

  While Ruth continued her decluttering, I moved the dollhouse over to the corner of my already cramped room and put it on my desk, which was another thing—a monstrous thing—Dad had built for me, with cubbyholes and all sizes of drawers, a wide top for art projects. But the dollhouse was monstrous, too, and it left me only one small corner of free desktop. Still, I liked having it there, despite its bulk, but for a few weeks that’s all it was: there, hulking and waiting.

  The Klausons had hit it big with their dinosaur farm. “Raising dinosaurs beats the hell outta raising cattle,” I heard Mr. Klauson say more than once. Mrs. Klauson bought a slippery teal convertible even though it was fall in Montana. Irene came to school with all kinds of new stuff. By Halloween it was settled: She was off to Maybrook Academy in Connecticut. Boarding school. I had seen the movies. I knew all about it: plaid skirts and rolling green lawns and trips to some seaside town on the weekends.

  “Where are all the boys?” Steph Schlett had asked Irene, a bunch of us crammed in a booth at Ben Franklin, some of the girls ooohing and aaaahing over a glossy brochure.

  “Maybrook’s a girls’ academy,” Irene said, taking a slow drink from her Perrier. You couldn’t buy Perrier at the Ben Franklin lunch counter, or anywhere else in Miles City; but Mrs. Klauson had taken to buying it in bulk in Billings, and Irene had taken to carrying a bottle with her practically everywhere.

  “Bor-ring,” Steph giggled in this high whinny thing she was known for.

  “Hardly,” Irene said, careful not to catch my eye. “Our brother school, River Vale, is right across the lake, and we have socials and dances and whatever with them all the time. Almost every other weekend.”

  I watched as Steph trailed a french fry through a pool of ketchup, and then into a big plastic vat of the good ranch dressing Ben Franklin made gallons of, before popping the fry into her mouth and starting on another. “But why are you going now?” she asked, the chew of mealy potato thick in her braces. “Why not wait until next fall, or until spring semester at least.”

  I had wanted to ask the same thing, but was glad that Steph did it for me. I didn’t want Irene to notice how jealous I was. I could see part of that brochure from where I sat: fresh-faced girls playing lacrosse, or cuddled in thick wool cardigans sipping cocoa in rooms filled with leather-bound books. It really was just like the movies.

  Irene took another drink of her Perrier. Then she screwed on the cap really slowly, sort of puzzling her forehead, as though what Steph had asked was just incredibly thought-provoking or something. Finally she said, “My parents think it’s best that I start my education at Maybrook as soon as possible. No offense, you guys,” she said, looking right at me, “but it’s not like Miles City is known for its outstanding school system.”

  Most of the girls around me nodded their heads in agreement, as if they weren’t insulting the next five years of their own education but somebody else’s.

  “They looked at my grades and are gonna let me do independent studies in the classes I was taking here, just to finish fall term,” she said, emphasizing term, somehow giving a snobby ring to it. It so wasn’t how we said things in Miles City. None of us would have even said fall term at all. Well, not before this.

  The next weekend Irene had me out to the ranch. She was leaving that coming Monday. It was incredibly warm for Montana in November, even early November—just freezing at night but midsixties during the day. We walked side by side without coats on. I tried to breathe in that ranch smell of pine and earth, but it wasn’t anymore the place it had once been to me. There were white tents set up everywhere, a circus of scientists and also some earthy, dirty, long-haired types picking in giant trenches, treating the dirt as if it was fragile, like it wasn’t the same dirt Irene and I used to kick at, spit on, pee on behind the barn.

  Now Irene talked like the movies too. “They’ve never found a hadrosaur in this area before,” she said. “Not one this complete.”

  “Wow,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I had thought a lot about that ride on the Ferris wheel. I wanted to tell her that maybe I was wrong about what I had said to her that night. I didn’t do it, though.

  “My parents are building a visitors’ center and museum. And a gift shop.” She actually swept her hand out over the land. “Can you believe that? They might even name something after me.”

  “The Ireneosaur?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “They’ll make it sound more professional than that. You don’t really understand any of this.”

  “My mom ran a museum,” I said. “I get it.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” she said. “That’s a local history museum that’s been around forever. This is a brand-new thing. Don’t try to make it the same.” She turned away from me and walked fast in the direction of the barn.

  I thought that maybe she would lead me up to the hayloft. And if she had started up that ladder, I would have followed. But she didn’t. She stopped just outside the entrance. There were tables set up there, and they were covered with various clumps of that rust-colored mud so greasy it’s mostly just clay, and poking from some of those clumps were the fossils. Irene pretended to examine them closely, but I could tell that’s all it was—pretending.

  “Do you know who your roommate is yet?” I asked.

  “Alison Caldwell,” Irene said, her head all leaned down over some specimen. “She’s from Boston,” she added with that new tone of hers.

  I tried on my best Henry Higgins. “Oh, the Boston Caldwells. Good show, old gir
l.”

  Irene smiled, and for half a second she seemed to forget how important she was supposed to be now. “I’m just glad I know how to ride. At least I know I can ride as well as any of them.”

  “Probably better,” I said. I meant it.

  “Different, though—western, not English.” She turned from the fossils completely, grinned right at me. “They have scholarships to Maybrook, you know. You could apply for one for next fall. I bet you’d get it, because of—” Irene let what she was gonna say drop off.

  “Because of my dead parents,” I said, a little meaner than I felt.

  Irene took a step toward me, put her hand on my arm, a little of that greasy mud smearing my shirt. “Yeah, but not only. Also because you’re smart as hell and you live way out in the middle of nowhere Montana.”

  “Way out in the middle of nowhere Montana is where I’m from, Irene. You too.”

  “There’s no rule that says you have to stay in the place that you’re born,” she said. “It’s not like it makes you a bad person if you want to try something new.”

  “I know that,” I said, and I tried to picture me cropped into one of those glossy brochure photos, me on a green lawn recently covered in an Oriental carpet of fall leaves, me in my pajamas reading one of those leather-bound books in the common room. But all I could see were versions of those pictures with both of us in them, the two of us, Irene and me, together in the boathouse, in the chapel, on a flannel blanket on that thick lawn, as roommates . . .

  Irene could read my thinking, just like old times. She moved her hand from my arm, grabbed my hand. “It would be totally awesome, Cam. I would go first and get used to the run of the whole place, and then you’d come next fall.” Her voice had the kind of excitement it got when we used to dare each other, something we hadn’t done in what seemed like forever.

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking that it did sound so easy, in that moment, the almost-winter sun hot on the tops of our heads, the clink of the tools from the digging paleontologists, the feel of Irene’s hand in mine.

  “Why maybe? Just yes. Let’s go ask my mom to get you an application.” Irene pulled me with her toward the house. Mrs. Klauson smiled at our plan, everything so easy, as always. She said she’d be sure to have someone at Maybrook send me an application. She drove us back to town just after that. She had the top down, of course, and we made wind snakes off the sides, our arms rising and dipping with the rush of air. The weeds alongside the highway were partially gilded in death from the frosts at night—parts of them gold and ochre, dried and curled, but the rest of the weeds still green, hanging on, trying to keep growing. If you squinted your eyes, the wind snakes looked almost like they were swimming through those weeds. We did them for miles, until we were off the highway, back on town streets. And then Mrs. Klauson dropped me off in front of my house. And then Irene was gone.

  Chapter Four

  My parents had been half-lapsed Presbyterians. We were a church-on-Easter-and-Christmas Eve kind of family, with a few years of Sunday school thrown in for good measure. Grandma Post said she was too old for churchgoing and could get to heaven just fine without it. Aunt Ruth was not either of these kinds of Christian. We had been attending services at First Presbyterian practically every Sunday since the funeral, because it had been the “family church,” but Ruth made it clear during the car rides home that the mostly elderly congregation and dry sermons were not to her liking. For my part I liked them well enough. I liked, at least, that I knew the people in the pews around us, and that I knew when to stand and sit, how most of the hymns went. I liked the stained glass in the sanctuary, even though crucified Jesus was really bloody, too bloody for stained glass, I thought, all those red and magenta pieces filtering sunlight. I didn’t feel close to God at the Presbyterian church, but some Sundays I felt really close to my memories of being at church, at this place, with my parents. And I liked that feeling.

  Ruth held on through the holidays, but when we were taking down the Christmas tree, she told me that she’d been thinking that the First Presbyterian just wasn’t quite right for us anymore. She embedded this deep in another conversation we were having about how just because I didn’t have mandated sessions with gooey Nancy the counselor during the spring semester, that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t need to continue to talk with someone.

  “You know, Greg Comstock and his family go to Gates of Praise, and the Martensons, and the Hoffsteaders,” she told me. “And they all seem to just love it. First Presbyterian doesn’t have the kind of fellowship we need right now. There’s not even a youth group.”

  “What the heck is a youth group, anyway?” Grandma asked from behind the Outrageous Detective Stories magazine she was reading on the couch. “I thought children go to Sunday school until they’re old enough to behave during the service. Can’t you behave yourself, Cameron?”

  Ruth laughed the way she did when she wasn’t sure just how much Grandma was teasing and how much she was serious. “Gates of Praise has a group just for teenagers, Eleanor,” she said. “According to Greg Comstock, they do all kinds of community service projects. It might also be nice for Cammie to hang out with some Christian teens.”

  As far as I knew, everybody I “hung out with” was a Christian teen, and even if some of them maybe weren’t so convinced, not a one of them was talking about their doubts. I knew what Ruth was getting at, though; she wanted me to hang around with the kids who carried their Bibles class to class. She wanted me to wear the T-shirts of Christian rock bands and to go to the summer camps, the rallies, to talk the talk and walk the walk.

  She was kneeling on the hardwood in the living room, plucking pine needles one after another from the tree skirt, an antique lace one that my mother had loved. She was putting each one she retrieved with her right hand into the cup of her left hand, like picking blueberries. Her blond curls—she’d taken to spending a lot of time in the mornings smoothing a special cream into them and then blow-drying them just so—hung in front of her face as she did this, making her look young, cherubic even.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked her. “We always just take the tree skirt outside and shake it.”

  Ruth ignored my question and kept plucking. “You must know lots of kids from school who go there, don’t you, Cammie?”

  Now I ignored her question. The real, live, bought-from-the-VFW-booth Christmas tree was a concession of Ruth’s. My mother had been a big proponent of live Christmas trees. Every year she’d put up several at the Tongue River Museum, themed, of course, and we always had one at home, too. We used to go get them all in one trip, just the two of us, load them up into the back of my dad’s pickup, and then maybe stop off at Kip’s Minute Mart for ice cream. My mother had also been a big proponent of winter ice-cream cones.

  “Well, we don’t have to worry about these melting,” she used to say, holding a cone in her elegant, leather-gloved hand, her breath visible in the air even as she took a bite.

  The question of Christmas trees had come up at Thanksgiving. Ruth mentioned that she had been eyeing some very nice synthetic trees in a couple of the advertising inserts in the paper, and I had thrown a little fit at the table, Grandma backing me up the whole time. It’s her first year without them, Ruth. Let her keep her traditions. And she had let me keep those traditions. She had gone out of her way, in fact, to ask me about the exact recipes I wanted for Christmas dinner, and where to hang certain decorations, and we’d gone together to the downtown Christmas Stroll. She’d baked batch after batch of sugar cookies and peanut-butter blossoms, and Ruth really had done everything that was supposed to be Christmasy even more perfectly than my parents had ever quite managed. And instead of making me feel better, Ruth’s perfect imitation of a Post Family Christmas had just made me feel worse.

  I’d been cranky, Grandma said, for weeks, and now Ruth’s continued plucking made me grit my teeth. “It’s just gonna spill more needles when we try to take it out of here, Ruth,” I said. Sometime that December I
had started dropping the “Aunt” out of her name, mostly because I knew that it annoyed her. “It’s stupid to try to pick them up by hand. That’s what they invented vacuum cleaners for.”

  This stopped her. She sat back on her feet and brushed her hair to one side with her non-needled hand. “Maybe that’s what they invented artificial trees for,” she said in that crispy-sweet voice she was so good at. “Which is why we’ll be getting one next year.” It was near impossible to get her to go beyond that hard-edged sweetness, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

  “Whatever,” I said, flopping on the couch next to Grandma and purposefully knocking a box of lights and tinsel off the corner of the coffee table with my foot. “Let’s just not get one at all. Why don’t we just skip Christmas altogether?”

  Grandma put her hand inside the magazine, marking the page she was reading, and swatted my arm with it, hard, a definite smack—like the one you’d use to kill a big spider. “Cameron, you pick those up,” she said. She turned to Ruth. “I’m not sure this one is yet ready for one of your youth groups. First she’d best learn to act like a teenager and not a two-year-old.”

  She was right, for sure, but it made me flinch to have her side with Ruth.

  “Sorry,” I said, untangling strands of tinsel and not looking at either of them.

  “So I think we’ll try Gates of Praise next Sunday,” Ruth said in that Ruth way, everything better. “Something new. I think it might be fun.”

  Gates of Praise (GOP) was one of those industrial-size churches that look more like a giant feed shed than a house of worship. It was a one-story metal building on a hill just outside the city limits, surrounded on three sides by a cement parking lot and on the only remaining side by a very small, very square patch of grass.

  After the stained glass and worn mahogany pews of the First Presbyterian, GOP felt something like an office building, or even a factory. And it was, kind of. This was especially true in the main chapel, which was large enough to comfortably hold the congregation of over four hundred, and then some; it was all echoes, with bulky black speakers here and there, fluorescent lighting hanging from high above, and about an acre of blue office-building carpet spread out over the floor.