Camptown Ladies Read Online Free PDF Page A

they have more than their share of fanuks over there.” I feared the day Dad decided to generalize.
    Soon after the Camptown Ladies co-ed decision was approved (by a wide-eyed, protein-starved vegetarian spiritual advisor from a hair salon called “From Hair to Eternity”), Lisa announced we would add another member to our team. “It’s not enough just to have Vince here. We need one more gay guy.”
    “I’m not gay, you big dyke,” he managed to yell, despite the huge chunk of pizza hanging from his mouth. To be fair to Vince, his lack of table manners should have proved his point.
    How many times had I heard the conversation that was about to take place? It started when Vince was seven years old, so it had to be in the thousands by now. One look at Vince, and you knew he was not a gay man. A sloppy thick crest of black hair well past his forehead, the in-between stage of his beard (not the fashionable kind, the careless kind), plus, the dead giveaway: functional, not fashionable, clothes. His pants and shirts were paired so poorly that I wondered if he had the week laid out in advance to make sure he didn’t accidentally match something.
    Mom and Dad joined us at the picnic table and Dad happily dove into the food without a word. Mom said, “We could eat indoors like civilized people,” but, even as she said it, she too was lured by Lisa’s homemade grilled pizza and helped herself.
    Something about the way Lisa was studying Vince tipped me off that she was about to launch into a tirade about him. I’d had my fair share of tirades launched my way, so I was sure I wanted out of there, even before she said, “Can I just say something?”
    Uh oh.
    “Another perfectly good girlfriend with wife potential bites the dust because you think the pussy’s always pinker somewhere else.”
    “Lisa!” Mom said, with her mouth full. Dad cackled with his mouth completely filled yet still managed to stuff two thick slices of sausage and pepperoni.
    “That’s not what happened,” he said, but Vince looked like he didn’t have the energy to fight with her today, and typically, Lisahad missed the subtlety of this. I saw it coming, but not before I could stop her with hand signals behind Vince’s back. Dad pretended not to notice, and I could see Mom calculating the best moment to jump into the mix.
    Lisa leaned across the picnic table and got into Vince’s face as she said, “You butthead, you really think you’ll find someone better than Erica?”
    “No, I don’t,” Vince said, before getting up from the table and walking away, leaving Lisa quietly defeated, possibly for the first time in her life. Lisa pretended she didn’t like the homemade pizza she’d made, which was better than any pizza, except maybe in Italy, and she angrily tossed her slice Frisbee-style into the woods, and left the table to go after Vince.
    I could see from Dad’s heartbroken and hesitant glance into the woods that if the slice had landed cheese side up, he would have fought the dog for it. Mom clucked her tongue, both at the waste of good food, and a missed opportunity to lecture all three of us at once. She settled for two.

     
    My Aunt Aggie made Uncle Freddie take her to Camptown Ladies every afternoon so she could bathe in what Lisa called the “crispy breeze” that blew through the center of the camp. My Aunt was probably the only Italian woman (besides my sister) that loved the cold, though due more to her large size than her heritage. Aunt Aggie’s clothes were perpetually damp, but strangely she always smelled good, like the same salty pasta sauce that scented her house.
    It occurred to me that seeing Aunt Aggie at Camptown Ladies was the only time I’d seen her with zero humidity on her upper lip. Possibly because at her home her head was always over a simmering pot on the stove (but just as probably, it could have been the facial hair). When Aunt Aggie greeted you at the door, she always had a wet kiss waiting, and I was