Bending Gender

“Hey, are you a boy or a girl?” the gap-toothed freckle-faced kid asked, his eyebrows raised, his face uncertain.

The question made sense. I was a flat-chested nine year-old with thick unkempt shoulder-length hair, chipped front teeth, and a band-aid on my chin. I wore beat-up cutoffs, grungy old sneakers and soda-stained T-shirts. I rough and tumbled around, all day, every day, mostly with my brother and his pals. I could have been either, or both.

“I’m a girl,” I replied, matter-of-factly, spitting on the ground in the direction of the Alfred E. Neuman lookalike. MAD Magazine had recently replaced Little House on the Prairie as my favorite bedtime reading.

He registered, then carried on pulling the petals off the little dandelion he’d yanked from the dirt a minute earlier.

I’d been assigned to pull weeds in the playground area; hundreds had sprouted after all the rain. The kid had been playing tetherball by himself. I asked him to help, Tom Sawyer-like, saying I’d play tetherball with him if he did. He agreed. I gave him one of my work gloves and a small trowel so he wouldn’t have any excuses. We crawled and scooted along, crablike, hand-pulling small weeds from the damp soil, and uprooting stubborn dandelions with a little garden tool that had a V-shaped notch, just like my front teeth. It wasn’t as hard as other work Dad made us do, like digging ditches, chainsawing trees, collecting garbage, or cleaning out ash and beer can-filled campfire rings. Weeding was just tedious, and patience was not then - and never would be - my strong suit. Convincing campers - especially boys - to help with chores, however, came as easily to me as getting our dog Sassy to come for dinner by standing outside and banging on her metal bowl. She’d race home from wherever she’d been roaming. Selective hearing, we’d say, as she lived up to her name and was becoming resistant to orders, kinda like me.

The MAD Magazine kid, about my age, would be camping with us for a full week, on his family’s summer vacation. He uprooted another dandelion, stripped it, then resumed digging with the trowel.

“Yo, do you live in a trailer?” he asked, with a Philly accent.

“No. We used to live in that Winnie,” I answered, pointing to the 24-foot Chieftan parked on a nearby site. “Now we live in our house over there,” as I pointed the other way, toward the nearly finished split-level, a short distance uphill from our KOA building.

“What’s it like to live in an RV?” asked little Alfred E.

“Fun sometimes. Crowded sometimes, especially when all five of us plus the dog were there. I usually slept in my sleeping bag, in the small bunk above the driver’s seat, as far away from everyone else as I could get without sleeping under the stars, which I did sometimes when it wasn’t raining.”

He thought that sounded cool, and asked if he could see the Winnie, saying he’d never been inside one.

“Maybe. I’ll have to get the key, and it may be rented for the weekend,” I said.

Later, with the playground weeded and raked clean, and after a few one-sided tetherball games where the kid kept getting his arm tangled in the rope, we went to the Winnie. I unlocked the door, tugged open the screen door, and we stepped up and into the dark camper. It looked and smelled exactly like it did when we lived in it: drab olive green and harvest gold cushions, pillows and curtains; tan paneling and cabinets with cheap hardware; stuffy air, scents of Lysol and Windex wafting our way. It had been closed up and totally cleaned out, devoid of our family’s clothes, food, sleeping bags and pillows. Any renters needed to provide their own mess kits and bedding, because we needed the Winnie’s pots and pans, utensils, and dishes for the kitchen at our house. Mom didn’t have room for dishes when she drove east for the move — the car overflowed with her precious suburban houseplants. Our real kitchen things and everything else we owned wouldn’t arrive for a few more days. Besides, campers could buy everything they needed for cooking and eating at our store.

“Do the lights work?” he asked, and before I could answer, he’d flipped on the dingy bulb over the sink, casting a dim shadow on everything. He crawled up into the bunk, knocking his head on the ceiling. I laughed at his rookie mistake, having done the same thing a dozen times. He said the space felt like a coffin, then climbed down, rubbing his skull.

“Yo, the bathroom has a shower!” he exclaimed as he peeked inside the small compartment at the back of the Winnie.

His pop-up trailer had no shower, only a tiny metal sink and a plastic toilet. He said his family took hot showers at KOAs, and that was one of the reasons they picked our place to stay for the week, because state park bathrooms had only cold water.

While he kept poking around in the Winnie, I explained how my brother and I (and occasionally our sister) helped Mom clean those all-important bathrooms. The Men’s Room closed from 11-12 p.m., Ladies from 12-1 p.m., as regular as the day, every day. We hung a little chain with a “Closed” sign to block the entry. Sometimes campers who tried to enter got mad, even though we told them about the cleaning hours when they checked in. Mom tried to hold the line, asking if they could return when we finished, so we could stay on time, but she’d let them in if it seemed like an emergency.

I told him how just the other day, we were cleaning the Ladies’ Room and some lady with a crying little boy begged us to let them in. We did, and the kid peed. I think she did, too, probably out of relief. In the Ladies’ Room, we had just one hour to scrub six toilets, four sinks and three showers, wipe the mirrors, fill the TP and paper towel holders, empty the garbage cans, and sweep and mop the floors. The Men’s room was a mirror image, minus two toilets and the sanitary napkin machine, and plus three urinals, which I’d never seen before we built the KOA.

I continued on, telling the kid how sometimes I’d be cleaning the Men’s Room, and men and boys would just step over or under the “Closed” chain and come in and use the urinals anyway. If they saw me, I guess they just didn’t care.

He looked at me, his brow furrowed, trying to decide what he would do in that situation.

Returning his gaze, I said, “Maybe like you, they can’t tell if I’m a boy or a girl. They probably think I’m a boy. I guess it doesn’t matter to them if they really gotta go. And it definitely doesn’t matter to me. All I really want to is finish the Men’s Room by noon so we can clean the Ladies’ Room on time.”

We stepped out of the Winnie and into the brilliant sunlight. I told Alfred E. that if he ever needed to go so bad that he couldn’t hold it from 11-12, it would be ok if he just ignored the sign and went on in. I wouldn’t care.

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