Summer Camp

It was the hottest summer on record when they decided to send you away. You stood, clutching your backpack, your face streaked red by a delicate balance of tears, heat and defiance, pouting and sweating at six in the morning. A rather embarrassing departure, you thought. You bawling. Your mom waving your forgotten swimsuit behind the departing bus. You cried that day, and into your soggy transplanted pillow for four days afterwards. Then one day, you stopped. Your bare feet met pine needle floors. Your arms pulled you above them, into the canopies of maple, oak, places where you could look down and realize you had discovered freedom, hours from sidewalks and streets and cities. And you decided you never wanted to leave.

You were sent home at twenty-two, a reluctant heap deposited in a downtown apartment in a city that was certain to collapse from boredom. It was the second hottest summer on record; ten days topped 100 in a row. The first thing you remember was suffocating in your car. Sharp waves of heat halted your breath as you groped for the a/c, which propelled equally hellish air at your face. You soon learned of the magic of air conditioning, that it required a secret potion called freon which was so damaging to the environment that places charged about three times as much as it was worth. You also learned that this was three times as much as you had.

So you began walking to work. This task was unbearable. The hard concrete buckled your knees as you dragged yourself across the baked city. Shoes were stiff and awkward on feet callused from years of barefootedness; your hair sulked in the heavy, dirty air. The skin you lived in was not your own. It was white and bloated under thick polyester shrouds; strangled in laces and snaps and hooks-and-eyes you wrestled with every hot morning.

Even within the walls of cool plastic air, life was no better. It was one of those nine-to-fivers that generated daily hopelessness. You had some title like Human Resources Associate. Shiny orange foreheads dolloped with frosted blonde puffs peered over the cubicle walls at your attire. They clicked their hot pink nails on the water cooler when they talked about your makeup-free face, long straight hair. Who does she think she is? They asked. Your knees bounced anxiously under the desk, begging for long hikes, lake swimming and some escape from this perpetual beauty pageant. Sometimes, at night, you cried.

Nylons weren’t required at your job, but rather suggested, a given. A victory for the women who would augment their tans with a layer of Sunkissed Beige stretched around their puckered thighs. Your pantyhose were always soaked after your walk, so when you got to work you would kick your legs up against the wall in the bathroom under the hot air dryer. The streaked plastic soon lifted from your skin. But you never could seem to dry the gummy web between your legs. Sweat pooled in that cotton crotch all day. The word moist, hot and deep and dirty, echoed through each mindless task you faked at your desk.

It happened one day when you were walking to work. Second National Bank reported 99 at 8am, a lie, you knew, a broken thermometer or something. But it did feel like 99. Anyway, it was hot. You were about two blocks from work and suddenly the glare from the Taco Bell window slipped perfectly into the window of the phone booth, the alignment of the fluorescent green proclamation of 39-cent burritos and the Southwestern Bell logo blinding you as you rounded the corner. And that was the moment. You remember, you were standing on the corner of Locust and some other street; there’s a newsstand there, and a Starbucks on the far corner, with a bar along the outside window, and everyone there saw you do it.

Using the house key was a good choice, in retrospect. The beveled edge slit the slick skin easily on your shin, so when you ripped it apart, the gash traveled up your knee and down your ankle. You thought about making another cut at your thigh and just tearing the whole leg off, but then it seemed much easier to pull from the waist down. You hiked up your baby-blue piquet skirt right there and stepped out of your synthetic shackles.

A little breeze spun down the street. Its silky realness tickled your newfound legs. Goosebumps, real ones, unrestrained by the tight netting. You had peeled ounces from your body, but you felt the very weight of the proverbial world itself lifted from your shoulders. You did a little skip as you left the scene, a very early-forties musical type thing. On the sidewalk, the shriveled evil lay, deflated, slain, defeated.

Nobody noticed anything for about two weeks, except your elation. You: Spreadsheets, splendid! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to put numbers in little tiny boxes! Filing? Fantastic! I absolutely cannot restrain myself from reciting the alphabet an infinite amount of times to find out where your documents fit in! 8:30? I’ll be there! You couldn’t keep me away from one of those delightful meetings!

The woman who brought the mail asked you if you were in love. And you were. With that top-secret, under-your-desk meeting of one thigh with the other.

Whoever snitched must have failed to mention how productive you had been since your little rebellion. You were called before the Manager of Human Resource Associates at 5:00 on a Friday. When he asked you why you thought he wanted to speak to you, you said you didn’t know. Then he said, in this office, we have guidelines.

Guidelines for everything, he said. For writing letters. For conducting interviews. For placing phone calls. Am I right?

Yes, you said. You certainly did think they had a lot of guidelines.

One guideline that I think is particularly important is how we present ourselves, he said. Do you think that is an important guideline?

Yes, sir, you said.

We don’t make guidelines simply for the sake of making guidelines. There are specific reasons for guidelines. And there are reasons that we should follow these guidelines. Can you give me a reason why you shouldn’t follow guidelines?

You had no reason, no.

The way we choose to dress in this office is one of these guidelines, he said. Since you have no reason for not following that specific guideline, I can only assume that you will follow that specific guideline. Can I make that assumption?

You assured him he was more than welcome to make that assumption.

Very well, then. I also assume that we have resolved the issue.

One question, you asked. Am I here because I’m not wearing nylons under my skirt?

In my experience, he said, and due to the professional nature of our work, I have found it both beneficial and imperative for women to have some type of protective covering on their legs.

Protective covering.

Yes, ma’am, he said. I’m sure the other ladies in the office will concur with my opinion.

But perhaps, you suggested, nylons may not be the only alternative for protecting the legs.

Perhaps not.

There may be other alternatives, you said

As long as the alternatives are protecting the legs, he said.

Protecting them, you said.

Yes, he said.

Okay.

You were fired soon after, but not until your leg hair had grown half an inch. It really was beautiful; the spiky prickles gave way to tiny soft blonde curls that sparkled beneath your sundresses, another newfound delight. You defended your method of leg protection to the Manager of Human Resource Associates, then to the Vice President of Human Resource Management, who was visibly disturbed that you chose to tell him of your most recent penchant for neglecting undergarments altogether. You probably could have filed a lawsuit, some kind of discrimination against follicle freedom. You could have started a movement. Championed the battle to free women’s genitals in the workplace. But as you, dressed in your finest flowered cotton tank, sans-brassiere, emptied drawer after drawer into the tall metal trash can with a triumphant thwang, your co-workers gathered about in that race-you-to-the-water-cooler horror, you realized you might have a fairly difficult time recruiting your band of rebels in a place like this.

You found a job as a director of a camping program about three weeks and one more eighth of an inch later. After that, leg hair simply stops growing. You realized this one day when you didn’t recall seeing any men walking about with shaggy locks skimming their athletic socks. These realizations came more frequently now, like the day you realized you could leave almost everything you owned in the front lobby of a home that was never destined to become one. Or like when you got in your car to drive away, how you realized you never needed air-conditioning, just better-conditioned air. One day you sat on a rock in the middle of a field and realized had you not escaped when you did, you might quite feasibly have died.

Sometimes, on the hottest days of your new summers (a significant 20 degrees lower than some you had been subjected to) you do think about that office. Sometimes, you think about guidelines. Sometimes, you think about alternatives. But mostly, you think about control top panties. Those women had been in the bathrooms, too, rubbing paper towels up and down their thighs, sopping up the slippery leather in the toes of their pumps. And that is where they would stay, trapped in their clothes and their cars, struggling for comfort where none could be afforded. September brought loafers, tweed pants, perhaps, a light cotton sweater. But then it would be winter, and again they would not be safe. Not when guidelines dictated skirts in below-freezing temperatures, and high-heels in six inches of snow.