I was wrong about men being blind to women, apparently, because it took Chuck only a minute—maybe two—to figure out that I was not his wife. At first, he just stirred in the dark, eyes closed, sleepily running his hands up and down my body as I pressed myself against him. He must have connected with something that felt familiar at first: the soft texture of Elli’s T-shirt, the rise of her hip, the heft of her hair. And the smell of her perfume, surely that was right.
I lay there for a moment, steeling myself against a sudden wave of revulsion. Hadn’t I screwed plenty of men I didn’t like when I was drunk? I told myself. Why was this any different? And then I reached for his sweatpants. He shifted slightly to let me work on the drawstring, which was tied in a tight knot. I fumbled at this, with fingers that didn’t know how to obey. I could feel him growing hard and hot below my hand, and he kept trying to kiss me, though I turned my head from his lips, feigning focus. The alarming reality of the situation was quickly setting in—this is a terrible idea—but I kept at the knot, tearing at it madly. Eventually, I gave up and tried to tug the sweatpants down without loosening the drawstring.
The room spun in giddy circles around me; I realized that I was dangerously close to throwing up.
The sweatpants lodged on his hips and wouldn’t budge. And now he was awake enough that he finally opened his eyes. “Here,” he said, “I’ll do it.” He reached down with his own hand and began to work at the knot and then he suddenly shifted, his eyes going sharp, and he was looking at me.
“Elli…?” It wasn’t a question so much as an expression of hope. Please be Elli.
But he already knew the answer. Maybe it was my breath, still shot with booze, that had given me away. Maybe Elli had a gentler touch, as opposed to my panicky, aggressive fumble. Regardless, he jerked upright, sitting up so quickly that I slid straight off the couch and onto the floor with a loud thump.
He stared at me in disbelief. “What the fuck, Sam.”
I lay on the floor, stunned, my head ringing from where I’d made contact with the edge of the coffee table. “I’m sorry—I’m…just trying to help.”
His voice was awfully loud. “By trying to have sex with me?”
Already, I could hear noise overhead, the soft patter of bare footfall on floorboard. I’d woken up my sister. Shit.
“I didn’t want to have sex with you. I was just trying to…make a baby, for you guys.” The words felt thick and convoluted in my mouth, making no sense even to me. “Because I love Elli. Because I want you guys to have what you want because you have been so good to me.”
He wrapped his arms protectively around his chest, as if he thought I might fling myself at him again. “That’s insane, Sam. You need help.”
And suddenly Elli was standing in the doorway, holding a silk bathrobe closed with one fist, her hair wild, eyes swollen into slits. She stared at me, rolling around on the floor, trying and failing to sit upright.
“Are you drunk? Seriously? Oh, Sam.”
The notes of concern and disappointment in her voice—that this, my sobriety, was what she was most worried about at this particular moment—nearly broke me in two. A momentary uplift of hope: She doesn’t know what I just did. Why would she? I was on the floor, drunk. Chuck and I were both dressed. Maybe I’d get away with it. Maybe Chuck would help me sweep it under the rug, a terrible mistake we would pretend never happened, to preserve Elli’s feelings.
I think I understood then, for the first time, just how fragile my sister was, and that this might be the moment that would break her.
I rolled on the floor, fumbling my words. “I’m so sorry—it was just a few drinks…a onetime thing…I’ll go back to rehab.”
But Chuck was speaking over me, his voice pleading and needy. “I swear, Elli, I didn’t do anything. She just climbed under the blanket and…nothing happened, I swear.”
Now my sister froze, suddenly understanding—or misunderstanding—the situation. “I’m sorry, what?”
I finally maneuvered myself into a sitting position, trying to ignore the dangerous heave in my stomach, the bile lifting in my throat. “No—you don’t understand…It’s not what it sounds like.”
“You’re wearing my clothes.” She blinked, took a step backward. “Oh Jesus. Oh my God. Please tell me you didn’t.”
I had pushed myself to a full stand, but now I slid sideways against the couch. “I was just trying to help you. I want to be your surrogate. Maybe this was a stupid way to do it, but I want to do this for you and I thought”—I was crying now, sober enough to see that I had done something unfathomably stupid, something irrevocably terrible—“I thought you wouldn’t let me.”
She had gone white, her face a pale moon in the dark.
“Get out,” she whispered hoarsely. “Get out now and don’t come back.”
* * *
—
And so I did.
* * *
—
And that was the last time I spoke with my sister: 388 days ago. Not that I was counting.
18
GENFEM HAD ONCE BEEN a summer camp, probably built in the 1950s. The campus stretched out under a canopy of oaks, a sprawl of old clapboard buildings that gripped the hillside. The road on which I entered with Suzy and Ruth wound on through the trees, past an empty swimming pool, and ended at a small parking lot that held a bright red Land Rover, a gold Mercedes, and a cluster of other cars, mostly expensive and European. Just past this lot was the main building, a two-story lodge with a wraparound porch and a flagpole. An old wooden sign on a heavy post lay splintered in the weeds at the edge of the parking lot: WigWam Woods Christian Youth Camp. Someone had lodged an axe between the W and the i.
The rest of the buildings—smaller bunkhouses and bathrooms—nestled farther up the hill, half-hidden between the trees. The bunkhouses had whimsical Hansel and Gretel trim around the windows and doors, which had been painted in a bright collection of rainbow hues, as if a child had come in with a box of crayons and decided to add some color to the scene.
At the center of camp, between the main lodge and the bunk buildings, was a great lawn that had gone brown from too much sun. On the far end was an amphitheater, with benches tiered around a stage; and at the center of this was a small, altar-like platform that looked like it might have once supported a giant cross. Now it held another one of those statues of the naked female form. She was at least seven feet tall and had been constructed out of barbed wire, an arm lifted toward the sky.
Everywhere I looked, there were women in white linen. A half dozen of them sat in a circle on the great lawn, intently listening to another woman who seemed to be giving some sort of lesson. Other women scurried between the bunkhouses, carrying mops and buckets, duffel bags, stacks of books, nothing at all. A few wore red, and the one teaching was in yellow—these women, I noted, had normal hair—and I wondered if these dresses denoted status, or duration of their stay. If you looked past the drastic haircuts and the shapeless garb, these woman didn’t look particularly brainwashed. They looked…happy. A pair of middle-aged women walked past me toward the main lodge, giggling, clutching each other’s hands. Another woman sat cross-legged, reading, serene, in a patch of sun under a tree.
The overall effect, with the smiles and the Crayola paint job, was less cultish and more monkish, as if these women were novitiates in some colorful new religion.
One of the women holding hands nodded at me as she passed. “Shanti shanti, Eleanor,” she said and smiled. Or maybe it was enchantée? I felt disoriented, as if I’d found myself in a foreign land where I didn’t understand the language.
Once we were inside the gate, Ruth grabbed the groceries from me, her eyes scanning the women in the field, as if someone out there might be watching. I followed the two women up the road toward the main lodge, searching every face that passed me. None was Elli’s. Maybe she was out in the group on the lawn? But from a distance everyone looked the same, a blur of naked heads and white forms slipping between the sun-parched trees.