by Mallory Horncastle
Upon arrival at the Retreat, the girls race up to the Sleeping Porch to claim their beds for the week, hurling pillowcases full of swimsuits and drug-store foundation atop their marked territory.
Twin bunk beds line the Sleeping Porch, each with perfect hospital corners and a unique quilt folded at the bottom. Many girls sleep on top of the thin waffle blanket, choosing a late rising over the mundane chore of making up their bed.
The floors are painted white, an unintended offering to the muddy, sticky feet of the
Retreaters. Between every couple of bunks there is a small table with an assortment of worn loved children’s books: Miss Piggle Wiggle, Little House on the Prairie, The Boxcar Children. Below the tables are baskets of printed photos, hundreds to each one. The photos show Retreaters from over the years. Look and see how the Sleeping Porch has eroded. Look and see how the old is brushed over by the new, rusty nails poking out under fresh coats of paint. Look and see what bodies have been here before you, their initials etched into the underside of the wood.
One mirror per bunk. One dresser holding a dozen Baptist-approved DVDs. One wheezing AC unit tucked behind a lucky bottom bunk. Underneath each bunk bed there is a plastic drawer. This is where the Retreaters put their belongings. All personal items must be hidden, sans the Retreat-branded towels, two per girl.
In the morning, the girls wake– somehow. There are no alarm clocks.
Today it is 99℉ outside; the humidity is 87% making the temperature feel like 109℉.
Today breakfast begins at 9:00 AM. The Retreat follows rules, numbers.
Hardly noticeable under the edge of a sky blue and green quilt, one girl remains in her bunk. Grace has overslept– but it is not her fault! High in the corner of the room the noises of the girls and wilderness float above Grace, granting her the coziness that only comes with hiding in a crowded room. If she had, for instance, chosen the lower bunk bed towards the center of the room then certainly the noises traveling back and forth, no corner to cozy themselves in, would have woken her. But as it was, Grace chose the far top bunk bed and therefore was late to Pancake Morning.
Pancake Morning is a very big deal. The first breakfast of the week. A group of senior Retreaters have been chosen to cook the meal– an honor they carry well. The pancakes served: Blueberry, Strawberry, Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Chip Strawberry, Birthday Cake, Banana, Banana Chocolate Chip, Mint Chocolate Chip, and Mystery.
Breakfast is held in the Eating Porch. Everything at the Retreat is the something porch or cottage or nook. One long table and two shorter ones fill out the Eating Porch. At the long table there are no chairs, only benches. There is never enough space on the Eating Porch and there is never any discussion of splitting the Retreaters up into different areas during meal times.
When Grace enters the Eating Porch the Breakfast Crew is finishing singing their pancake ditty sung to the tune of “Baby” by Justin Bieber: Pancakes, Pancakes, Pancakes, Ohhhhh.
Grace picks at her left eyebrow. At one of the smaller tables towards the back of the porch Grace spies Bailey. A counselor at the Retreat, Bailey is twenty-three and beautiful.
Grace walks over to the table and takes the seat next to Bailey, noticing that Bailey has opted for a bowl of Raisin Bran over pancakes. Grace eyes the space for cereal boxes but does not see any. She wonders how Bailey acquired the cereal. Milky raisins huddle together at the top of Bailey’s paper bowl.
“Pancake?” Bailey asks absentmindedly, lifting a tray.
Grace is sitting on her hands. “Sure, a plain one is fine.”
She stares at Bailey and wonders if she will be as effortlessly beautiful as Bailey when she is twenty-three. An oversized t-shirt thrown over athletic shorts on her thin frame, Bailey’s uncomplicated coolness shocks and excites Grace. Bailey hates herself because of the way her body changed over the last year and stirs her Raisin Bran.
The four remaining seats at the table are filled by gullible Betty, veteran Retreater Ellen, solemn Jules, and cordial Anna Kate.
“I’d live in Narnia and my best friend would be Kylie Jenner,” Anna Kate says.
“I don’t know, I feel like Khloé would be more fun,” Ellen says, reaching for the syrup.
“Grace, if you could live anywhere and have anyone be your best friend– what would you choose?”
Grace would rather focus on Bailey and her raisins. Shifting in her seat, she looks to Bailey for a semblance of approval or disapproval. No signal is sent. Grace has one week without a cellphone– a death sentence at twelve-years-old– and only the other girls for company, no trusted outlet for gossip in the safety of home friends. She takes a paper cup of orange juice from a circulating tray and sips. Betty is intolerant of the silence and chirps in.
“Okay, if it was like a desert island thing then it’d be different. I’d pick someone who is like strong and smart or something. Maybe John Cena,” Betty says.
Betty, Grace thinks, may be the dumbest person at the Retreat. She finds satisfaction in the thought and makes a mental note to check back in after meeting more people to see if she is correct in her assessment.
“I would live in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and my best friend would be Mrs. Frizzle from Magic School Bus.” Grace scans the table attempting to gauge all microscopic responses. A smile from Anna Kate. A nod from Jules. Nothing from Betty. Well done, Grace thinks.
A platter is passed around the table housing mounds of chocolate chip pancakes, poorly prepared with the majority undercooked or burnt. Grace takes stock of a single coil of brunette hair cooked into one of the pancakes on the tray passing before her. She eyes Ally, a tall curly-headed brunette and the head of the Breakfast crew. Grace recalls Ally causing a scene the day prior by refusing to put her suitcase underneath the bus.“I have stuff in there I may need on the drive up,” she had whined. The only thing Grace saw Ally pull from her suitcase for the entirety of the journey was a small pouch of peach tea Crystal Lite which she tipped into her reusable water bottle and did not shake up before consuming.
Ally blithely saunters around the hall passing pancakes with confidence. Grace wonders why Ally doesn’t braid her hair. Or maybe the Retreat should be providing hairnets. For $2,600 per week, they could damn well afford it.
In late June, Grace came home to dinner on the table. This was unusual. Cheesy Chicken and Biscuits. Chicken shredded from a Kroger rotisserie, frozen peas and carrots, dollops of biscuit dough, low-fat cheddar. Grace’s mother, Lana, lifted the recipe from a Weight Watchers magazine years ago, the actual magazine long lost to time.
The kitchen table was set for four: Grace, her mother, her sister Georgia, and someone Grace had never seen in her life. Georgia, already at the table, made no acknowledgment of Grace’s entrance into the kitchen. Georgia is two years older than Grace; she is calm and grounded and many things Grace wishes she were. Across from the sisters sat their mother Lana, paranoid and blonde. Her hair was down, a departure from her usual ponytail-through-a-baseball-hat style.
Grace noticed her mother’s nails were painted a pale blue. A deep feeling of pity washed over Grace. Her mother was trying.
Next to Lana sat a woman Connie in her mid-forties with mousy brown thinning hair. “I’m Connie,” said Connie, her eyes remaining on Lana.
“Grace.”
Lana smiled at the interaction like it was the second coming. Dinner ensued. Connie and Lana knew each other from Hot Yoga, don’t you remember girls? They bonded quickly over a shared love of child’s pose and gossiping about the teacher’s divorce. It was messy, don’t you remember honey? Nothing like our divorces, no. It seemed to Grace that the thing her mother and Connie most shared was a lack of accountability about their respective marriages and a vehement duty not to search for it.
Connie leaned in and Grace knew she was about to soliloquize. Six months prior, Connie fell in love. He was her trainer. God he was handsome, those eyes. He was her trainer for three years before she realized she was in love with him. The fact arrived to her like a gift from above. Because really, she told them, her husband Chris had been “emotionally checked out,” and she did not even realize how terrible her marriage was until one day during a session her trainer Steven asked her what she thought about the new Iron Man movie. Chris hated Robert Downey Jr. and Connie loved him and Steven asked her about Iron Man and it was over. Connie and
Chris were divorced within two months; Connie and Steven were broken up within four.
Connie finished her story and Grace observed her mother’s response.
“Yes, of course you had to end the marriage, isn’t that right Georgia? Yes, it is absurd the ways in which men can emotionally deprive you, don’t have to tell you about that with your father, do I Grace?”
How a person could blind themself with enough effort and tolerance for shame, Grace thought. When Lana told her story to Connie, Grace and Georgia entered a trance, the story was overplayed to them. Grace observed Connie drop her jaw at the correct moment, squeezed her mother’s hand at the right time, and inch the corners of her mouth down into a soft frown near the end. Both Lana and Connie were reading their lines well.
Georgia excused herself from the table an hour and half into the meal. Strawberries with Splenda were served for dessert and that was her final straw. An acute familiar envy bubbled in Grace at the reminder of her sister’s sole inheritance of their mother’s ability to not care. At Georgia’s exit, Lana plastered a soft smile on her face. Her lipstick was cracking and pilling into tiny burgundy clumps on her chin. She took a nibble of one strawberry and brought up a recent
breakup of a pop singer and a football player. God, now that was messy. Connie added she heard the football player stole the singer’s Tiffany clip-on nose ring before he moved out. A strawberry fell from Lana’s mouth. Grace thought in the end it did make sense for her mother and this woman to be friends.
The Splenda had begun to burn into the berries like an acid and the gathering seemed to be nearing its end. Grace imagined the solace of her room; time moved like a sloth as it always did with her mother.
“I said, wouldn’t that be a fun thing for you this summer?” Lana looked at Grace expectantly. Grace held her expression blank as she realized she had lost track of the conversation.
“The Retreat… the one Connie’s sister works at, she has been telling us, honestly Grace.” Near the end of her sentence Lana’s voice dropped, eyes cutting to Connie. Grace was reminded of when Georgia nearly won first place at a Cross Country match the year prior. Lana hadn’t attended the game; Georgia returned home with her second place trophy and Lana sighed and murmured truly Georgia.
Connie’s sister, Grace now heard, was the co-director of a summer Retreat program. At a lake house in Mississippi, the program boasted a cozy week long adventure for kids in middle and high school. Singing, dancing, cooking meals, time on the lake, doesn’t that sound fun? Grace bristled at the use of ‘kids’.
“So it’s a camp?” Grace said.
Connie set her face in a patient accommodating way. “It’s a Retreat.”
The plan was set before the strawberries were off the table. Lana would have a week to herself in July, can you believe the Retreat for your age is the same week as Georgia’s soccer camp? As Connie hoisted her tote over her shoulder Grace burned; with fear, with indignation, with envy for Georgia’s quick escape, the fire so blazing and spitting it could only be tended and survived by a 12-year-old girl.
Connie, Grace thinks now on the Eating Porch, had neglected to share a few key descriptors of the Retreat. The fact that the Retreat was a branch of a children’s therapy center back in town and that it was without question a Christian program. Grace wonders if Lana knew this and then quickly files the thought away with the other questions about her mother she would rather not dissect.
Across the table from her, Betty and Ellen are discussing the mechanics of making a ‘good mystery pancake’. Ellen was on Pancake Breakfast Crew the year before and apparently had done a much better job of the whole thing. Last year’s mystery flavor: potato chips & Kit-Kats. The key was to make it unexpected, shocking even but not inedible. Today’s mystery pancakes do not pass Ellen’s sight test and so none of the mystery pancakes at Grace’s table have been touched.
“It’s toothpaste,” says Betty poking at one of the mystery pancakes with a fork.
Ellen looks at Betty like she has never seen a true fool before today. “Yeah… duh. But it’s also something else maybe.” Ellen lifts one of the pancakes off of the tray eyeing it closely. The pancake is a grayish blue color and in the shape of a drunken rhombus. Grace notices that the pancake does in fact hold flecks of blue similar to the ones present in the Retreat-provided toothpaste.
Ellen and Betty seem to find no end to the levels of analysis they can put a pancake through. Anna Kate in between bites is reading a nonfiction work by C.S. Lewis. Grace knows the book and recalls its thesis: how Lewis was a wretched worthless rat until he prayed. Jules is telling Bailey about her brother’s overdose seven months prior. If Grace closes her eyes and really listens she can hear all sorts of things she believes should never be said aloud.
At the tops of the walls on the Eating Porch there are words painted, lyrics Grace assumes to a hymn.
This is my Father’s world
And to my listening ears
All nature sings and round me rings
The glory of His face
Grace is struck by the thought that her mother would love this song. She can picture Lana taking the words and warping their soft gentle shape into an ironic recently-divorced women’s anthem. Grace, let me tell you it really is a f-a-t-h-e-r-‘-s world. It is ringing all around me, can you believe it? His face, his world, my ears always listening? Honestly Grace- are you listening?
Ellen gags. Something mysterious is in her throat that should not be there. Two counselors from the larger table rush over. Ellen cannot speak and is gripping the table with both hands coughing violently in a clear attempt at expulsion. The Breakfast Crew does not look up from their conversation about the biblical differences between Sanctification and Salvation. The two counselors kneel on either side of Ellen unsure and untrained on how to help in any way that is not emotional. Bailey reaches to open Ellen’s mouth and Grace watches closely, unable to look away.
A sliver of something appears in Ellen’s mouth. Bailey’s hands move into Ellen’s mouth to locate and remove it. She begins to pull at the sliver and it reveals more of itself. Ellen’s breathing has calmed. More sliver appears. It is a single, long strand of floss.
Honestly, Grace, have you ever heard of such a thing? Grace smiles wryly as she watches the counselors crowd around Ellen. Honestly, truly, really?
Mallory Horncastle is a fiction writer with a keen focus on exploring the intersection of inherited religion and girlhood. A graduate of New York University, Mallory grew up in the American South and now resides in Los Angeles, CA. You can find her online at www.malloryhorncastlewrites.com