Vignettes, 2008

The family that pulls in next to us has a nice new RV. There is an older man driving it, a woman about his age sitting beside him, and a dark-haired child peering through the windshield. As they attempt to angle into the very tight camping spot, the door on the side flies open and a trim middle aged woman jumps out. She has hair that is a pretty shade of deep auburn, either gloriously natural or expensively painted on.

She stands beside the RV, grimly directing the complicated parking. We offer to move our own car, since our tent takes up barely a camp space, but the offer is politely refused. We turn back to our meal preparation.

Minutes later, the door once again bursts open and the dark-haired boy comes out, followed by a girl. Both children are young, no more than nine or ten. They have dark eyes and slight frames and better clothing than I can buy for my children. The boy wears glasses and orange Crocs, the girl is dressed in hot pink and drags a worn My Little Pony beach towel.

The children stand for a moment, observing the State park with serious faces. The older woman emerges from the vehicle, shooing them off to play. The boy wants to know if he can go anywhere. His mother begins outlining specific places, but the grandmother has answered already,

"You can go anywhere in the park you want, as long as you can still see the camper."

I smile, for practicality always appeals to me.

The auburn-haired woman is busy about the camper- setting up rugs, emptying trash, pulling plates out of a red bin. The boy wanders back to the camper and whines that he is bored and there is nothing to do. I cannot hear his mother's response, but he drags his feet off in a different direction, being teased mercilessly by his little sister.

We are asked by our neighbors where the water is, and Michael answers that he doesn't know either. A nearby camper hears our plight and points it out- the spigot just happens to be in her space, so she has people walking by all of the time. Michael and I head out to explore the waterfalls, forgetting the faces around us. When we return much later, the campground has filled to capacity and people are bundling into warmer clothes and applying liberal amounts of DEET.

The campers near the water spigot break out beer and marshmallows, and their conversation gets rowdy. I try desperately hard not to notice the comings and goings of the people next to us, but the campsites are so close together, they may as well be in my living room. The grandfather of the dark-haired children putters with a wood fire and the children trail in and out of the RV. Throughout the evening I do not see the auburn-haired woman touch her children or smile, not once. She is like person living within the shell of herself. When I get up to find the bathroom, I try to smile at her but she studiously avoids my gaze.

As I walk back from the bathrooms, I see an older man sitting near his campfire. He is very heavy and is occupied with alternately poking the campfire and eating a hamburger. There are a few women nearby him, speaking of the various minutiae of campgrounds and travel. He responds when spoken to but otherwise ignores them. By the few movements he makes, I can see that he is in physical pain, and I pity him. There is a black cane propped against his oversize folding chair, and their RV is in a handicap accessible spot.

I curl up again in my own folding campchair, retrieve my mystery novel, and drape my fingers casually through those of my husband. He smiles at me through a week's worth of beard and whispers that he loves me. I echo the sentiment, although both of us have exchanged these few words so many times that we are bound to never forget. Comfortable, fed, and warm, I turn to my Hamish MacBeth novel, and lose myself in the delightfully prosaic formula fiction of M.C. Beaton.

Dusk falls softly over the campground, bringing a slightly more sober tone to the striped beach blankets and varying tent colors. The children beside us disappear into the camper, and within moments I hear familiar Pixar sounds. Movies inside the RV- roughing it American style.

I am about to turn away again to my book when I hear the swish of water. The auburn-haired woman has filled a bucket and is washing her childrens' Crocs. Overpriced garish colored shoes that are made to be abused, they are being washed in a bucket in a campground at dusk. She performs her chore with neither relish nor distaste- she just does in order to do. Wiping a sponge inside each little ugly hole, her hands are almost independent of her body. I have noticed already the absence of a wedding ring or a husband, and I wonder if this characteristic is a result of singleness or the reason for it.

Some time later, when darkness has blanketed the campground and voices are dying off into the night, a wonderful smell assails my nostrils. I sniff around and find that my other neighbor, the heavy man with the cane, is roasting a keilbasa on a stick. He is speaking to another man, voice garrulous with stories of his travels. He has a difficult time adjusting his body to hold the spit for long, and an equally heavy woman comes out of the camper to help him. After some time the voices trail off and the man is left to munch on his keilbasa.

I retire to my comfortable air mattress, snuggling deeply into Michael's chest. He smells of hardwood smoke and pine trees and sweat, and I am asleep before I even center my head on my pillow. Past midnight my bladder wakes me up. I fight it for a while, but the silly little thing always wins, so I drag my weary body out of the tent and bob my flashlight over the campground while picking my way around pine trees. The only people that I can hear are two loud, drunken women, discussing movies and alcohol. But my flashlight picks out a silent figure hunched over a smoldering campfire. It is the heavy man, still awake. He stares into the campfire, his keilbasa spit empty and clean beside the fire. I mumble an apology for crossing his campsite so often, and he shrugs it off with a small grunt. I wonder if his body is too painful for him to even sleep properly. I deliberately do not shine the flashlight near my other neighbors, and sleep comes quickly again once I am in the tent.

In the small hours of the morning I am once again awakened. Cursing the iced tea from the evening before, I struggle out of the tent and make my way once more through the campground to the bathrooms. It is gray outside, barely light. The heavy man is gone, but the campfire still pulsates a bit of red on the edges of the embers. An empty Hillcrest Farms sausage package flutters gently on the picnic table. I wonder vaguely when he finally moved his tired frame off to bed.

Beside my tent, on the picnic table outside the camper, stands a single blue plastic wineglass, also empty. I do not know if it belonged to the auburn-haired woman or one of her parents, but it looks awfully lonely outside all by itself. I shiver a bit in the early morning mist, and crawl back inside beside my snoring husband.

Frank the Trailer Park Guy

When I was ten years old our family purchased a 28 foot RV with scratchy red curtains and we headed west. Winding up in Tucson, AZ, we settled on a pleasant little place called Town & Country Mobile Estates, out on Benson Highway on the south end of town. We were the only RV in the trailer park, to the best of my memory, but that's the way the Roncari family rolled.

I remember stopping by a few RV parks on our way out there, and most of them were too expensive for long-term stay. I guess my dad was either too poor or too dumb to just rent an apartment or a house for the duration of our stay there. So we somehow hit on the idea of a trailer park- it had all the hookups, a nice little driveway, and even some sort of scraggly tree in the tiny yard.

Best of all, it had plenty of other kids to play with, something we'd never had out on the forty acres in rural Tustin. I remember that the park was split in two sections- the 'family' side, and the old people side. Dad found a lot that he liked better on the old people side, but Frank, the property manager, was adamant that we stay on the family side because we were, after all, a family. With three kids. I still don't know how my dad thinks he can get away with crap like this. Megalomania, I suppose.

I remember being very grateful to Frank at that point in my life. You see, I had never had many friends, and on the family side of the trailer park I saw many friendly faces peering out from various windows. Frank stayed and chatted with us for a while, and I developed an uncanny liking for the guy. He was big- tall and heavy, with massive arms and long, flowing blond hair. In fact, he had the prettiest hair that I had ever seen on a man. Although we had spent half a year in Quartzite, northern Arizona, southern Tucson was new to us then. The sunlight, which never really goes away until August, glinted off Frank's hair and made it look like gold.

After Frank and my dad got all of the hookups done (requiring a couple of trips to the hardware store for various water and septic adapters) Frank bustled off in his little golf cart and my dad and mom were giggling about something. I didn't have much time to stick around being curious, because there were already several children hanging around outside my door. I suppose I must have been the freak- the kid whose family moved into the park in a giant recreational vehicle instead of a regular single wide like everyone else- but I never lacked for friends in those few months.

Frank came by a few days later to see how we were settling in. His hair was different that day- more curly, more blond- and something else was different about him this time. His nails were long and- well, pretty. They were a soft, shimmering shell pink. I was in awe. I had never seen a man with pink nails. He didn't have rough, cracked cuticles like my dad had, no chips on the ends like mine, not short and utilitarian like my moms... just soft, shiny, pretty.

My ten-year old mind didn't really take in what was the situation at the time. I had been raised pretty sheltered. Sure, by that fall we had participated in three seasons of the Michigan Renaissance Faire, so I'd seen a good portion of blue spiked hair and excessive cleavage; but I had never, ever seen a man with pink nails.

Frank chatted a bit with my parents and walkeda round the side of the camper to check a connection of something. My mom and dad exchanged looks, and my dad giggled again. I had no idea, honestly, what they found so funny about Frank.

Life went on- my dad opened his first mall kiosk- a little pewter and silver sales booth in the food court of the El Con mall. That is where I fell in love with horchata- the creamy white rice drink from Mexico, and tacquitos. I attended most of my fifth grade year at Gallegos Elementary school and learned a few Spanish words. Frank stopped by every now and then- to collect rent, let us know of some announcement about the park, or gently chide us kids for riding our bikes through the 'old people' side of the park (there's a strict no-kids policy on that side, except for Christmas caroling). Every time he stopped by his hair was magnificent and his nails were gorgeous.

There was a pool in the center of the trailer park, but I do not ever remember being allowed to go there. My parents were very anti-fun in those days, but I had a feeling also that we were not encouraged to hang out around Frank all that much. It took me another five years before I figured out just what kind of a person that he was, and we were long gone by then. He was always, always a very kind man, almost too chatty. I think now, looking back, that he was lonely. Whatever he was- transgender, transvestite, or just gay- it was still the 80s and things like that were not mainstream yet.

I do think it was kind of appropriate, in some strange way, that the crazy family from the backwoods of Michigan, living in the RV, wound up in a park run by the man that was also somewhat of a societal freak. But at the time I didn't know that we were freaks, and I didn't know that Frank was weird in any way.

I just thought he had pretty nails.
And I've never gotten mine to grow out that nice.