The Miseducation of Cameron Post (40 page)

Somehow Ruth didn’t tell me her news during our late lunch at the Cattle Company (we all liked their beer cheese soup). Nor did she mention it during the entire trip to Miles City, snow flurries kicking up the closer we got to our exit, flurries that spit out their final flakes during our drive down Main Street, a drive through the early darkness that winter had flung over the town, strings of fat, colored lights crisscrossing above us, the oversize red bells and wreaths hanging from stoplights seeming just a little more garish than I had thought them the Christmas prior. But they were garish in a way that I sort of loved—they were usual, they were just as they always were. Ruth didn’t even spill it when we pulled into the driveway, the house decked out like I’d never seen it, way more than my dad had ever done: every straight line, every angle had a string of white lights along it, every one, our house like a gingerbread cottage outlined in dots of white frosting. There were evergreen wreaths circled with red lights in the center of each window. There was a big wreath, a huge wreath, of silver bells on the front door.

“Holy cow,” I said. “You’ve been busy, Aunt Ruth.” I made myself say
Aunt
and was proud that I had.

“Not me,” she said. “This is all Ray. He worked on this for two weekends. We wanted to have it looking nice for . . .” She stopped there.

“For Christmas?” I said, finishing for her even though I assumed that she must have meant for me, for my homecoming but just didn’t want to announce it like that.

“Mmmmm,” she said, using the remote to open the garage door, acting like it was taking all her concentration to get the FM in there without scraping it up.

And her news, her big news, waited for other things to happen too. It waited for me to say hello to Ray and to comment on how nice the tree looked (artificial, yes, but nice). It waited while the four of us sat awkwardly in the living room together, pink Sally-Q mugs of quickly cooling cocoa in hand, none of us talking about Promise, about where I’d been for months, but instead talking about the high school sports teams, about some babies born to families in the GOP congregation, about new Schwan’s products. Ruth’s news even waited for me to rediscover my room, my dollhouse still there, still hulking in the corner. I was touching some of my works, just running my fingers over the smooth coldness of the flattened coins, the weave of the gum-wrapper rug, sort of mystified by what I’d created, when she said, “Cammie?” from halfway up the stairs, and by the time I’d turned and said, “Yeah,” she was in my doorway.

She had two long garment bags in her right hand and she was holding the hangers sticking out of their tops high above her head, her arm straight up in the air, so that the bags were hanging their full lengths.

“What are those?” I asked.

“So these are just choices,” she said, maybe trying for the bubbly, enthusiastic tone that normally came naturally to her, but it was a shade or two off. She came into my room, laid the bags across my bed like she had those funeral clothes years before.

“Choices for what?”

“I want you to know that I was going to write you, but I didn’t know if you’d even get to read the letter before coming home, because of the—the mail restriction or whatever it was.”

“Because I got in trouble for not stealing some markers,” I said. “For leaving them neatly on the shelf from whence they came.” I just couldn’t help myself. It was so comfortable to be flip with Ruth, so expected.

“But you were going to had you not been caught,” she said.

“But I didn’t.”

She chose a corner of the bed to perch on, careful not to squash the bags. “Okay. Let’s not start this way. I didn’t write because I thought you’d just have to wait to read my letter anyway, and then what would have been the point, because you’d have already come here before getting it and it would be old news by the time you got back to Promise.”

“What news?” I asked. This was like playing some fucked-up version of
The
$25,000 Pyramid
, and Ruth was bad at giving the right clues.

“The wedding news. Ray and I are getting married on Christmas Eve.”

“Two days from now Christmas Eve?”

“Yes,” she said, sort of quietly. Then she smiled at me. “Well, it’s not a sad announcement, is it? I should say it with a little conviction: Yes!”

“Wow,” I said. “Okay.”

“Is that okay?”

“It’s your life—you should get married when you want to.” That’s what I said, but she hadn’t gotten married when she wanted to, not really. She’d wanted to get married in September. I hadn’t asked her to postpone on my account, but she’d done it anyway. “Why’d you pick Christmas Eve?”

Ruth stood, worked the zipper on the top bag. “We just didn’t want to wait any longer, and you’re home, so that worked. The sanctuary is always so beautiful at Christmas with the poinsettias and the candles—we don’t really even have to add anything.” She slid kind of a champagne-colored dress from its sheath. It had a matching coat thing. It was fine. It was just fine to wear to a wedding. “This is choice number one,” she said. “The next bag has two dresses in it, so there’s three choices in all.”

“Are these bridesmaids’ dresses?” I asked, though I meant something more but didn’t know how to work it into the right words.

Ruth kept her hands busy, her eyes on the bags, unhooking the hangers from one another, a twist tie keeping them bound. “No, I’m just having Karen and Hannah; I’ve talked about them before, you remember; they’re good friends from Florida, from my Winner’s flight crew; they’re both flying into Billings tomorrow and I’m having them. You’re still the maid of honor.”

That was it. That’s what I was wondering. “I can’t be,” I said.

Ruth stopped her busy hands, looked at me. “What do you mean?” she asked, but she had to know what I meant.

She really did look so tired, so un-Ruth, but I said it anyway: “I’ll go to the wedding, I want to, but I won’t be your maid of honor.” I kept talking fast before she could interrupt. “And I don’t think it’s fair to get upset about me saying that. You can’t have it both ways.”

She shook her head. “What does that mean,
both ways
?”

“You can’t ship me away to get fixed and then show me off as your dressed-up niece starring in the role of Maid of Honor.”

“That’s not what I—that isn’t even . . .” she said. And then she sighed. And then she said, in a quiet voice, “But that’s fine, Cammie. I accept your decision.” She pulled at the big, droopy collar of the turtleneck sweater she was wearing, blew her sigh toward her bangs like beauty-pageant contestants do to show how much they’re trying to keep from crying, but she worked it out, no tears came. She said, “I really thought this would be a good thing. I thought you might do this because it could be a kind of healing moment for the two of us.”

I stopped looking at her. I fiddled with the dollhouse instead. “I’ve already done a lot of healing this year. This break is supposed to be my vacation from healing.”

Ruth huffed and threw the bag she had been working the zipper on onto the bed, where it slapped against the others. Her voice had a jagged edge to it. “Now see, I don’t know how to talk to you when you’re like this.” She took a step toward me. “Is what you just said supposed to be funny? Was that a joke or wasn’t it? I’m asking in a genuine way: I really don’t know.”

“Did you think it was funny?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Then I guess if it was a joke it blew.” I snapped off a clump of dried sagebrush from where I’d glued it as one of two tiny bushes flanking the dollhouse’s front path. I’d taken that sagebrush from Coley’s ranch. Now it crunched in a satisfying way in my palm as I tightened and tightened my fist around it.

“Fine,” Ruth said. “This is obviously still how things are.”

“Yep,” I said.

She went back to the garment bags, shifted one on top of the next. “These are nice dresses,” she said. “You can still wear one of them, maid of honor or not.”

“I’ll wear my Promise uniform,” I said.

“If that’s what you want,” she said. “I’ll just take them with me, then.” She gathered up the bags, not so careful this time, just folding them over her arm, their hard plastic making a
vwoosh
noise against her body each step she descended away from me.

After she left, I let myself feel a little bit terrible for what I’d said, no matter how true, and then vindicated in my decision, and then terrible, and while I was doing this, I kept on exploring the dollhouse, all those bits and pieces of stuff, just this stuff, glued on all the surfaces. I also waited to feel like myself, as if it would land on me all at once, this feeling like I was me again because I was home. And it didn’t come.

People said it was a nice wedding. I don’t know—maybe that’s just what people say. I thought it was nice, but I didn’t think it was nearly as lavish as the ceremony and reception I know Ruth had planned for all those years. It was nothing like that. I hadn’t been to very many weddings, though, only three or four, with my parents, when I was little; so I didn’t have a lot to go by.

This wedding immediately followed the GOP Christmas Eve service. Coley and her mom and Ty were at that service, and Brett and his family. They were in the same row, in the middle, not near where we sat at all. The Christmas Eve service was always by candlelight, the place packed, everybody a little dressed up, chatty, excited, but even still: People noticed me. They could have been noticing my blue flannel skirt, its pleats, my collared white shirt sticking out over my navy sweater, my hair shiny and tucked behind my ears, my altogether neat and presentable Promise-approved appearance, but I’m pretty sure it was more than that. I got a couple looks of flat-out disgust, sneers, people doing those big-movement side-to-side head shakes in my direction to perform their disapproval. I guess one semester wasn’t enough to wash off the stain of my perversion. Brett caught my eye as people were leaving, a slow-moving river of bodies working their arms into their winter coats, chins down, inching zippers over their puffy sweaters, shoving hats on the tops of their children’s heads. Ray and Ruth had gone off to the Sunday-school classrooms to change into their wedding clothes. Grandma and I were just waiting out the mass emptying of the sanctuary. Brett took me in fully, didn’t hide his stare, though I couldn’t read his face. And Mrs. Taylor pursed her lips, wore her disgust openly, twisted up her face to do it, but she looked away eventually. Coley was between the two of them, each of them holding one of her hands, but she didn’t look my way, or at least she made it seem like she didn’t. She still looked as perfectly Coley as she ever had, but seeing her didn’t knock me over, it didn’t sock the wind out of me, like I’d thought it might. I guess I’d felt that way, just a little, when first I’d glimpsed her, from behind, during the service. It was seeing the back of her head, her hair, just like all those weeks in the science room. It jarred me. But it wasn’t something I couldn’t withstand.

Now, as she left, I wanted to let my eyes follow her all the way out and into the vestibule, as far as I could watch, because it was like seeing her new, somehow, but Grandma was looking at me, and probably other people were too, waiting for my reaction, and so I looked away. I didn’t see Ty leave the sanctuary. He wasn’t with them any longer.

Then Jamie’s mom came toward our pew, and I must have made some face, some hopeful look, scanning the people around her for Jamie, because she frowned at me, and then, in a move I considered prompted by a burst of Christmas spirit, she cut her way between a couple of people and leaned over to me and said, “Jamie’s not here. He’s at his dad’s for Christmas, in Hysham.”

I said, “Tell him I said hi. I miss him.” I wanted to say other things but I couldn’t.

“I’ll tell him,” she said. And then she cut back into the stream, but turned to me again, a few steps away, and said, “You look nice.”

Once people went home to their trees, their eggnog, fifty or so of us gathered in the front few pews. Ray and Ruth looked exactly like the real-life versions of those plastic bride and groom wedding toppers: standard black tux, white dress, a bouquet of roses. Ruth had had, according to Grandma, quite a bit of trouble finding a dress she liked. Her NF tumor, the one she’d had since birth on her back, too close to her spine, had grown some, was more golf ball than walnut now, and she was (understandably) embarrassed by it. She’d found a doctor in Minneapolis who thought he could probably remove at least part of it, but not until April, not in time for a backless gown at her winter wedding. I thought the one she’d settled on suited her, and it had a kind of satin drape thing, like a superlong scarf, a wrap, that went over her shoulders and hid the tumor entirely.

Ray had three sisters, a brother, a bunch of cousins. They all came. Some of them had families, and they came too. The church organist, Mrs. Cranwall, played a couple of songs; Tandy Baker sang “How Firm a Foundation.” Ruth cried during the vows. Ray maybe teared up as well. Then we went to the fellowship hall, where Ruth’s stewardess friends, who were sassy and loud—
a good time
, Grandma said—had strung those old-fashioned crepe-paper bells and played 45s on some record player they’d hauled in. I can’t believe it was quite the reception Ruth was planning on for all those years, but it’s what she got. We ate really moist red velvet cake and those cream cheese pastel pink, green, and yellow wedding mints with the sugar crystal outside—Grandma made those. I ate probably a dozen of them, liked the crunch of the sugar between my teeth followed by all that soft inside, so sweet it made my molars ache. I ate enough that I felt a little sick. People danced, drank ginger-ale punch, snapped photos on those disposable cameras. It was nice. Then it was over. Ray and Ruth went to a cabin out in the Pine Hills that belonged to somebody or other who had apparently set it all up for them, hauled roses and champagne out there. But they were going to return in late morning, and the Florida ladies would be coming over. We were all going to eat brunch, open presents.

Grandma and I got to spend the rest of Christmas Eve together, just the two of us, though it was nearly midnight when we got home. We had to rush into the house, the night air that sharp, slicing kind of cold, and the wind different from the mountain wind at Promise. It was prairie wind, relentless, building up speed over miles and miles of flat expanse, then hurtling down the small streets of Miles City like hundreds of whistling pinballs loosed and thrashing around corners and curves.