On the other end of the spectrum from Rhonda was Ginger. At almost six feet tall, she possessed the statuesque glamour of a 1940s movie star, although her teeth were slightly crooked and her nose was large. It seemed her features needed to be big to accommodate her outsized personality. She told Sherri in her husky voice that she’d recently quit her job at nearby Lakelawn Resort, where she’d dressed like an Indian princess and wore a heavy suede beaded and fringed costume. “All the people from Chicago think this is the North Woods. If I have to dress up to work, I may as well dress like a Bunny so I won’t sweat so much.”

Like Sherri, the women mostly came from small towns and unincorporated townships like Honey Lake and Barneveld. Maryellen said she was from “The five O’s” and clarified that this meant Oconomowoc. Gwen was from Milwaukee. She was one of the only black people Sherri had ever met, and from what Sherri could tell, she was the only black Bunny working at the resort. Aside from a few Hispanic families, there had been no minorities in East Troy; the only black children Sherri had seen attended one of the Girl Scout, Salvation Army, or YMCA camps on the area lakes. It was like a one-way exchange program, where city kids were expected to visit East Troy to learn how to swim, ride horses, and build a campfire, but country kids were never encouraged to learn how to do anything useful downtown. The city loomed in their imaginations as shadowy and dangerous, especially after the televised riots that sprang up after the 1977 New York City electrical blackout, when Sherri had heard a few local people complain about the “n” word, a word Sherri had said aloud only once, when she was four years old after she’d heard someone say it outside the tavern. She didn’t know what it meant, but her mother did, and she promptly washed Sherri’s mouth out with Lava soap and admonished her to never, ever say it again.

Sherri thought racism was limited mostly to extremists like Bob Dwyer, a regular at Giles, who’d joined posse comitatus and believed the postal service was involved in a conspiracy with the IRS. He’d tried to get Sherri’s mother fired from the church after claiming she was Jewish because of her curly hair. Sherri was ashamed she even knew people like Bob. She wanted to convince Gwen that she wasn’t racist without coming across the way Rhonda did when Gwen said she was saving for college. “Oh, good for you!” she’d said in an overly congratulatory tone, and Gwen shot her a look that made Rhonda seem even smaller than she already was.