A FAMILY VACATION, Anne Whitehouse [beach books .txt] 📗

A Family Vacation

There was no way of telling that we had passed from Alabama into Georgia except for the sign by the highway. The landscape was the same. Still, I wasn't really looking at the landscape as much as what was in it: I was counting cows, or alternately, other cars by colors. This was a game we played when travelling. I was ten--a good age, I thought--and we included my parents in the front seat and the rest of us, three and all girls, the younger two in the middle, and me in the whole back of the station wagon.
Sometimes I liked to sleep, lying in this part of the car when it was folded out, on its strip of carpet. The motor's vibration under me would lull me into a slumber that was just at the borders of consciousness, for even in sleep I was aware of when the car was moving or stopped. But now, in the early afternoon, I was alert and wide-awake. In our family, a family vacation was a rare event.
Our destination was Camellia Gardens, a "vacation community," where my father had rented a cottage for a week. Every weekday morning there was a circus day camp for children taught by members of the troupe at F.S.U. There was also a lake for swimming and taking out paddleboats. I had read about all this in the brochure back home lying on my mother's dresser.
It was not too far from the state line to Camellia Gardens. We turned off from the highway onto a smaller road, and then onto another. The entrance to Camellia Gardens went through a pine woods, and the shade was pleasant after the relentless sun over the highway. Here the light came down through the trees in splotches on the ground and looked kind and welcoming.
"God damn it, I'm hot," said my mother.
Her remark seemed gratuitous now that we were almost there and in fact had passed under the cooling shade, but she liked to complain to no one in particular, and sometimes we picked it up.
"I'm hot, too," said Shelley.
"I want a drink," said Rachel.
"My legs are tired of sitting," I said.
"Shut up all of you," snarled my father, turning his head back to us.
"Morris, watch the driving," my mother commanded. "You'll kill us."
He did not answer but drove and parked the car beside a cottage at the foot of the road we had driven down, that was marked "Office."
"You get out and get the keys," said my mother. "We'll stay here."
"I want to stretch my legs," I said.
"No."
"Why?" I grumbled the question to myself and sulked in silence. In the middle seat, my two little sisters were fighting over a plastic pig. My mother took it away from them.
"No, no," they screamed. "Give it back."
"Shut the fuck up," screamed my mother, louder than they, "or I'm going to give you what you'll never forget."
My ears burned. Her window was half-rolled down and someone might have heard her yelling that word at us. Her high-pitched curses were a frequent occurrence that I always hated and never got used to.
My father came out of the office with keys and a map. I saw he was sweating. He opened the door of the car and slid behind the driver's seat. "We're in Tupelo Grove," he said. We had to go past the other "groves" to get there, each with a section of houses exactly alike. We almost missed the turn; my mother criticized my father, and then we were there.
Tupelo Grove was a group of A-frame cottages, with decks in front, each equipped with a barbecue grill. Our cottage had a blue door, light sky blue. We all were anxious to see the inside. Even our mother did not make us unpack the car first.
In reality the cottage was dingier and smaller than it had appeared in the photograph in the brochure. I felt a kind of disappointment that I swallowed back; I would try to find something to like.
The cottage was advertised to sleep six; we were five in crowded quarters. The kitchen was built against the wall where we walked in, with a table and chairs in front of it. The space led back without a partition to an arrangement of a sofa, coffee table, and easy chairs. Over this "living area" was a sleeping loft and, to the side of it, a bedroom. There was a bathroom and a half--a sink and toilet behind the kitchen and a larger room with a shower stall that was reached through the bedroom.
The first thing I did was climb the built-in ladder to the loft. "I'll sleep here," I said, knowing I was expected to. Actually, I had already found something to like--the roof coming to a V above the loft and the way it was possible to look down on whoever was sitting on the sofa or chairs. The space was just large enough for three twin beds--two along one side and then another across--and a chest of drawers. Shelley climbed up right behind me and claimed a bed, too, but Rachel, who was youngest and frightened of the ladder, said she'd sleep downstairs instead, on a cot that was against the wall just before the entrance to the bedroom. The atmosphere was stifling, close, and warm; my mother put on the air-conditioning, but it never quite cooled the sleeping loft. I would not have minded if there had been a window to open, but there wasn't.
We had to help carry the belongings from the car and unpack. I was told to make my bed and to oversee Shelley, which meant I had to make up Shelley's bed, too. I resented this because, having seen the interior of the cottage, I was anxious to have a look round outside. I wanted to see where the lake was, and the circus tent. But I would have to wait.
I had a secret, unspoken to anyone, that was my fantasy and my wish. More than anything, what I wanted from the vacation was to make a friend. As I unpacked my shorts and shirts and folded them into a drawer of the chest, I imagined this friend, how I would recognize her and what I would say to her. For there did not seem to me to be any doubt that I would know here when I first saw her.
We drove by the lake that evening, after hamburgers cooked by my mother and heated-up baked beans from a can. What we saw in the dying light was a disappointment, a sign prohibiting swimming. "Why?" I wondered, but of course none of us knew. There was a contraption sticking out of the middle of the water, a machine that was utterly still, like a huge stationary sculpture. This, we were to learn the next day, was the circulation system of the man-made lake, and it wasn't working, hence the warning against swimming. By the light of that next day, the color of the water was green-brown and stagnant, but it was hard for me to find any body of water unwelcoming; my sisters and I would still play on the muddy, sandy beach and wet our calves splashing in the shallows.
That first night it seemed I was as much a witness of my sisters' sleeping as asleep myself. I kept waking up and falling back into dreams, and I wasn't sure in which state it was that I saw my sister Shelley sit up in bed and then lie back down, not quite a sleepwalker. The image of her face, sightless and expectant, haunted me all through the night, while below me I heard rustles and mutterings, the restless sleep of my sister Rachel.
Our unease became something else the next morning. My mother, looking hollow-eyed and tired, was standing at the stove making coffee and boiling water while we selected brands of cereal from the Variety-Pak. "If you snore like that again, Morris, you'll have to sleep out on the couch. I can't stand it," she snapped to my father who had just walked into the kitchen area.
"But I'm in the living room," protested Rachel.
"Well, you'll just have to sleep upstairs."
"But I'm afraid to climb the ladder."
"Then you can just stay on the cot, and you can endure your father."
My father said nothing to all of this. He took his glass of juice from the table and downed it in a single gulp. He was wearing a robe over his pajamas and slippers. My mother was in what she called her housecoat. Only we were already dressed in shorts and t-shirts, for right after breakfast we were going for our first day at the circus day cam. My father opened a package of cream of wheat, poured it into a bowl, and sat at the table. He was waiting for the water to boil.
My mother poured the water into his bowl, and he stirred it. "Can't you measure it?" he said. "It's too runny."
"You put breakfast on the table then, if you don't like it."
"All we're having is cereal," I said.
My mother turned to me with a glare. "And you, miss, can shut your mouth up, or it will be shut for you." She poured out her coffee, and sat down, too, lightening it with milk and sweetening it with saccharin. We had already poured milk on our cereal; I was listening to the snap! crackle! pop! of my Rice Krispies before I ate them. Back in my mouth, a tooth was becoming loose, and I worried it with my tongue.
My father suddenly let out wind. We all heard it. "Morris, must you fart, too?" my mother complained instantly. We giggled into our cereals. My father looked sheepish, embarrassed; my mother looked pleased. This was what I had been born into; she would criticize, and he would say nothing, but eventually something would explode, and we would be caught in it.
I wanted to escape, and with me were my sisters. I looked at the nurse's watch on my wrist. It was eight thirty-five. "Hurry up," I ordered Shelley and Rachel, "or we'll be late."
"Morris, you take them," my mother said. "they don't know the way."
We'll find it," I said, "It's all right."