“Feminists believe that men and women deserve the same rights. How is that militant?”
“There are just some women who get crazy about it. You know, like…the really butch ones. Who basically look and act and talk like men. There’s something unnatural about that.”
“What’s unnatural,” she said, getting riled up in a way that excited Jack, “is supporting women’s equality in the social stratosphere but also wanting them to stay stunted in their appearance. There’s this reigning mentality that women can be successful and at the top of their game so long as they still look like women, so long as they’re still hot and youthful and thin while maintaining their childbearing hips. If women look too much like men, they’re a threat. If they still look like women, they can do whatever they want, because men are technically safe from them.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Jack said. “I don’t believe that all women need to look and act a certain way. But men and women are different for a reason, biologically. Can you agree with that?”
“Of course,” she said. “But that’s not what we’re talking about.”
“So what are we talking about?”
She looked Jack over once like she felt sorry for him. “You’re lucky you’re handsome,” she said, resting her head on his chest and falling asleep soon after.
—
Jack slept through Rachel’s departure on Thursday morning and awoke to an empty bed. It was only six but already oppressively hot, almost too hot for coffee. After one slam of the snooze button, he got up and stood over the kitchen sink in his boxers, considering the coffee issue for a moment before putting the kettle on. As the water boiled, he dragged the fan from his room into the kitchen until he felt the resistance of the extension cord.
The kettle hissed. He poured and drank his coffee and pulled the dusty blinds open. The camp was still empty, and the morning was hazy; he could not see the lake from his cabin as he could on clearer days, only the downward slope of the green hill leading to it.
The coffee was heating him from inside. He was a glutton for punishment.
He considered not going on his four-mile run but quickly quashed the thought. He ran the same route in snow and rain. If Jack believed in anything, he believed in routine. So he went, jogging down the road, its two lanes marked in faded paint, that ran along the southern edge of camp, out to the gas station and back, counting three trucks, four deer, and zero people. The air was thick, heavy, like he was running against a current.
Back at camp, he ran up the main drive, passing the empty horse arena and cutting through the dew-slippery athletic fields. Still not a person out. He turned the knob on his shower all the way to the right and stood under the ice-cold water for several minutes.
At flag raising, he stood beside the flagpole with his hand at his heart. An Aspen boy was unfolding the flag, and Chad watched from behind the boy, overseeing the whole thing. Jack wondered, in a brief patriotic moment, if he should instate a rule that would reserve that right for American counselors.
The girls were on one side of the green facing the flag and the boys on the other. They were ordered by their age sections, which were named, idiotically, after trees, from the young Maples in the front to the fourteen-year-old Evergreens at the back. He looked out at Rachel from the flagpole; her face was glistening in the heat, her cheeks adorably pink.
After the pledge, he asked, “Are there any announcements?”
Chad raised his hand, then ran it through his messy hair while he announced the coed boat race on Saturday night. Jack resumed his place in front of the flag, and the campers waited.
“I don’t need to tell you all it’s hot out today.” He told them to drink a lot of water and stay in the shade. He told them to take it slow, take it easy today. He remembered Rachel telling him, “You don’t look a day over thirty-eight.”
He clapped his hands together. “Let’s eat.”
Jack walked somewhere in the middle of the pack to the d-hall, watching the boys and girls sloppily flirting, nudging shoulders and elbows with one another, some girls pretending to be annoyed by it, before they split into two groups to go to their separate dining halls. Rachel walked arm in arm with Fiona, ignoring her campers, wearing those short denim shorts that shouldn’t be allowed. He was careful to watch her walking for just a few seconds, her narrow hips swaying back and forth, her pert ass contained in the tiny shorts. He had a moment of ego-stroking disbelief that he got to be the one to sleep with her night after night.
At breakfast, Jack sat at a table at the front of the boys’ dining hall with the male activity and section heads.
“Looks great,” he said to the kitchen boy serving plates of powdered eggs and cubed potatoes.
“You’re too nice,” Chad said to Jack once the kitchen boy had gone to the next group. “I have to eat these shit eggs one more time, I’ll be sick all over this table.”
Jack waved his fork at Chad. “These shit eggs buy you an extra few bucks in your paycheck.”
Chad changed the subject: He had found a bong made from a plastic water bottle, duct tape, and a hollowed-out pen in one of the Evergreen boys’ bathroom stalls. Jack was supposed to crack down on this sort of thing, but the truth was, the rebellious kids were from the richest families and had been going to Marigold forever; their parents sent them there summer after summer so they didn’t have to deal with them. Unless the board caught wind of it, you turned a blind eye.
“It wasn’t poorly done,” Chad said. “But I would have used an apple from d-hall. Less apparatus.”
“You still have it?” Brett, the head of swimming, asked.
The kitchen boy came to refill their coffees.
When he left, Brett asked with his mouth full of potatoes, “You all see Rachel’s shorts today?”
Chad nodded, raising his eyebrows, and went back to his shit eggs.
“Hey,” Jack said, louder than he’d intended, then lowered his voice, “this isn’t a locker room.”
Brett put his hands up. “Just saying what we were all thinking.”
“Well.” Jack stabbed a potato cube. “Keep it to yourself.”
He spent the rest of the breakfast in silence, except for an occasional request for someone to “pass the ketchup” so he could disguise the taste of the powdered eggs.
—
Sometime after lunch, he got in his golf cart and took a ride to the lake. Chad was sitting close to Rachel on the dock, their feet dangling over the edge. A dozen canoes and kayaks were out, kids rowing them unimpressively in circles.
Jack parked his golf cart and walked down the dock.
“Hiya, Chad,” he said. “Rachel.”
They looked up, sunglasses covering their eyes.
“Hey, Jack,” Chad said.
“You guys got some counselors out there on the boats?” He surveyed the scene, listening to the giggles and the unruly splashes coming from the lake. “Doesn’t look like it.” This was important, this act of establishing authority at the appropriate times.