“Why buy something new when this works perfectly fine?”
The eternal question.
Ron came out of the house with a hard-shell rolling suitcase.
“What in the world is that?” I asked.
“Mom’s stuff,” he said, handing it to my dad.
“Why is she bringing luggage camping?! Where’s the backpack we got her last year?”
Ron shrugged. “I don’t know. She said this was more durable.”
“No one brings a freaking suitcase camping.”
“Well, I guess we do,” he said as he went back inside for more stuff.
I was only a baby when our family immigrated to LA from Seoul. Ron was three. It seemed like those three years were pivotal in our hardwiring or something. All our lives he had never been as baffled or frustrated as I’d been with our parents. He’d never gotten in trouble for sneaking out to a party. When he was in high school, Ron and his weirdo friends spent weekends watching Tom Cruise movies and playing music in the garage. He had absolutely no desire to go on snowboarding trips up to Big Bear or to a school dance.
Watching my sturdy father wrestle with my mom’s suitcase made me feel a melancholy deep in my soul. This camping trip was the highlight of his year. My dad worked long, tedious hours as an insurance broker and he never took vacation days. It was admirable, I guess, but also annoying. Everyone else takes vacation days, just take yours, Dad! No one was handing out extra credit for killing yourself at work.
We hit the road, pretty much spilling out of the car. I rested on a sleeping bag wedged between my head and the window, willing myself into a coma until we got there.
“Hook me up to the Bluetooth.” Ron jostled me as he leaned forward, popping his head between my parents in the front.
I shook my head. “No. Don’t play that EDM crap.”
“Rude,” he said with a jab into my side. “Why do you care? You’re going to be passed out the entire ride.”
“I won’t if you play that garbáge,” I said, using a French accent.
“Stop speaking French. You sound like a douche.”
“Ron. That wasn’t French. In fact, ‘douche’ is French. God, read a book.”
“Oh, I’m gonna learn French from reading books?”
I was about to kick him in the shin when my dad honked the horn, startling all of us.
“Are you going to be babies on this entire ride?” my dad barked, waving his hand in the air with a quick karate chop. “Shameful. How old are you?”
I closed my eyes. “I’m still a teenager. Ron’s a loser super senior.”
Ron’s head swiveled. “How in the world did you become more of a bitch in London? I didn’t think it was humanly possible.”
My mom smacked his head so fast that her hand was a flesh-colored blur. “Yah!”
He blinked. “I’m too old for this.”
I slept the rest of the drive and woke up only when the car slowed, the tires crunching on unpaved road.
* * *
The campsite was nestled into a national park with a desert landscape. We had caravanned with two other extended families, and unpacking was a chaotic flurry that involved a lot of transactions in the oppressive heat.
“Who has an extra sleeping bag?”
“We have blankets!”
“Okay, we’ll take those.”
I stared at my aunts as they passed a giant floral-print comforter to each other. “Why didn’t you realize you were short a sleeping bag?” I asked, my voice flat.
“We did. But I knew someone would have something extra!” my aunt responded as she walked briskly toward her tent.
“Are you going to stand there with your commentary or actually help?” my uncle barked as he walked by me with a giant cooler.
Why we’d decided to come to the one campground in the state not up in the mountains was beyond me. This was an arid wasteland full of chaparral, spindly pine trees, and craggy boulders. In the summer, everything in Southern California was a desiccated hellscape. I remembered the rolling green hills of the English countryside. How everything was just so happy to be there. Blossoming and unfurling itself to the beauty of its surroundings.
I made a face at my uncle and dragged myself to our tiny tent, where my mom was inside, kneeled over and cleaning the tent floor with a wet rag. Cleaning up once we set up camp was the first activity all the women in my family did. One of my aunts had even brought her cordless vacuum to pass around to everyone.
It annoyed me that they cared about how clean the tents were, but it annoyed me more that only the women cared.
“Mom. It’s going to get dirty in five minutes.”
“So? We mess up our beds every night, does this mean we shouldn’t make our beds?” She blew a strand of hair away from her face as she swept the rag around.
Who could argue with that airtight logic?
I squinted into the tent. “We’re going to be squished in here. I can sleep in the car.”
“The car?” My mom looked at me as if I had suggested killing a human being for dinner. “Don’t be cray-jee.”
So many things were cray-jee to my mom. Shaving my legs for the first time. Borrowing clothes from my friends. Sleeping with the fan on. Cray-jee.
But there was no way I was spending the weekend sleeping in that tiny thing with my entire family, their proximity suffocating me, minute by minute, snore by snore.
* * *
After everyone unpacked, Ron discovered a little body of water near the campsite. Excited, we took off our dusty shoes and waded in. It was barely a pond, but it was cool and in one of the few shaded areas of the campgrounds.
The moms sat in their hodgepodge collection of folding chairs in the shade. Our family had brought an old pink beach chair that usually sat rusting in the garage. The sight of that chair agitated me. Why didn’t we just get camping chairs? And why did we have only one chair? It was always a free-for-all scramble in the evening, when everyone wanted to sit in an actual chair. Most of us ended up balancing our asses on pointy rocks or perched on the edge of a cooler. If I tried to take a chair, my mom would throw me a dirty look so that I would give it up to an aunt or uncle.
She looked happy in her giant sun hat, her trim ankles crossed as she fanned herself with a paper plate. I rarely got to see her relaxed. I could count the number of actual vacations we’d been on as a family with one hand. And even then, she was always bouncing from one task to another, never actually able to enjoy the moment.