by Meg Wolitzer
Jordan was off at computer camp in the Berkshires. She imagined him lying on his back in a bunk at night, falling asleep to the gentle, clicking chorus of computer terminal keyboards, more comforting to him than any insects would ever be. All around the camp, bunks glowed green or amber from the computer screens that lit the darkness like night-lights. And sometimes, around a campfire, the head counselor would tell stories about the ghost of the mysterious Computer Hacker, who returned to the camp every summer, wielding an axe.
Erica wanted Jordan’s address. She wanted to write to him, to tell him she missed him. The letter would read like a deep confession, she knew, and yet she wanted to do it. But she couldn’t remember the name of the camp, and in a fit of courage, Erica called Jordan’s home telephone number; someone there would give her the address. The phone rang three times and then Jordan’s mother answered. A nerve jumped in Erica’s eyelid.
“Dr. Strang, this is Erica Engels,” she said. “I’m Jordan’s friend?” She said it like a question, giving his mother room to respond, “No, you’re not.”
But his mother seemed pleased. “Of course,” she said. “How have you been, Erica? I thought Jordan told me you were off to Ghana for the summer.”
“Rwanda,” said Erica. “But I’m back. There was a coup and I was sent home.”
Jordan’s mother laughed once, sharply, then paused. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. Her voice righted itself, became professional. “What can I do for you?”
Erica asked for Jordan’s address, and Dr. Strang seemed delighted. “That’s lovely of you, wanting to write him,” she said. “I know he’ll appreciate that.” There was another pause. “You know,” she said, “a thought just occurred to me. My husband and I are going to visit Jordan at Moccasin Hill on Saturday; it’s Parents Weekend. Would you like to come with us? It’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive and we’re just going up for the day. I’m sure Jordan would love it.”
Without thinking, Erica agreed.
On Saturday morning at seven, she showed up at the Strangs’ apartment building. Dottie had been thrilled about the trip, so happy that Erica was actually doing something with a boy. Dottie was more excited about it than Erica, who was beginning to dread the whole thing. Erica sat in the back of the Strangs’ brown Mercedes, flanked on either side by large, bulky items. Jordan’s parents had packed a picnic hamper, and had also brought Jordan a few boxes of books he had requested. In addition, they had brought along some lawn furniture, and Erica couldn’t see out of either window.
Jordan’s father said almost nothing, a stance that Erica had come to expect from fathers. Fathers were the ones who did the driving; that was how she thought of them. She remembered her own father at the wheel of the paneled station wagon, and the way she had observed the shape of his head as she sat behind him. In the summer he always drove with his left hand hanging out the window, and this was the only part of his pale body that ever tanned. The Engels’ car wasn’t air-conditioned, and on the hottest days, inching along the Long Island Expressway, Erica and Opal would make faces at people in other cars that did have air conditioning.
“Jesus,” she remembered hearing her father say to her mother. “It’s bumper-to-bumper traffic.” For years, Erica thought that the phrase was “bumpita-bumpa traffic,” because of the way the cars nudged up against each other. She could picture her father in the driver’s seat better than anyplace else; when she thought of him now, which she rarely did, it was in a short-sleeved shirt in summer, his right hand palming the steering wheel, his left hand tapping the roof of the car, drumming out a tense little rhythm on hot metal.
It had been a long time since Erica had been around anybody’s father for more than a few minutes. She had forgotten the dynamic, the way you were supposed to act, but soon it came back to her: shy deference, with underpinnings of respect and fear. But the father of a boyfriend was a new dynamic, one she had no grasp of. She wondered if this man, whose features she could not see now, this man whom she could identify only from the back of his head, which was shaped like a garden spade, knew that she was sleeping with his son. It seemed likely. Probably Jordan’s father had come home one night in winter and found the plaster reproductive organs on his wife’s desk, and had figured everything out. Would he approve of Jordan sleeping with a fat girl? Or would he be disgraced by it, taking his son aside and telling him he could do better? She wondered why it mattered what this man thought; he was just a cipher, after all, just a back of a head, and two hands grasping a steering wheel. He asked her no questions, seemed to possess no curiosity.
It was Jordan’s mother who wanted to talk. She kept pivoting around at intervals during the trip. “Jordan tells me that your mother is Dottie Engels,” she finally said. “I was so impressed; I’ve always enjoyed your mother’s work. Humor is extremely important to everyone’s well-being.” Then she pivoted forward again, finished for the moment.
Erica turned back to the book she had brought along, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. She had read it before, and it was one of her current favorites. She liked it up until the end, when the girl gets well and leaves the mental hospital, no longer needing to retreat to the secret land of Yr. Erica wished that the book had ended with the girl staying forever in her little universe, a place as magnificent and cordoned-off as the unicorn’s garden in those tapestries at the Cloisters.
Jordan’s mother interrupted her reading again. “Erica,” she said. “I just had an idea. This may be way out of line, but do you think your mother might be available to speak at a medical convention sometime? I know she’s a star, but we’d love to have someone like her, and I know that it pays handsomely.”
“I don’t know,” said Erica. “She’s very busy. You could call her manager. He handles all of that.” She instinctively felt protective of her mother, which surprised her. Why shouldn’t Dottie Engels address a group of physicians? Why was she above all that? Let her stand up there and make her usual fat jokes, and get all those physicians to laugh until they choked. But Erica knew that her mother would never accept an engagement like that; Ross Needler was very particular about where he allowed her to work. Every fall, Dottie was approached by a variety of companies that wanted her to perform at their annual industrial shows. The fees were impressive, but she still said no. When performers started doing the Tekwell Breakfast Show at the Dorset Hotel, then you knew that something was wrong, that some erosion had already begun, and the career was usually unsalvageable from that point on.
Dr. Strang faced forward again, and the rest of the ride was spent in silence. When they reached Moccasin Hill in Lenox, Massachusetts, Erica straightened her hopelessly creased clothing and strained to see out the front window. They drove through a log archway, following a line of other cars. At the side of the dirt road, a counselor dressed in white was waving everybody on. Erica felt a sudden anxiety at the thought of seeing Jordan. As the car reached the parking field, she squinted to see if she could pick Jordan out of the group of campers who milled around with hands in pockets, waiting to be claimed. Finally she saw him. He was not alone, a fact that surprised her. He was in the center of a group of boys, slouching against a parked car in the sun. His hair was very long; it now fell nearly to his shoulders.
When he recognized his parents’ car, Jordan lifted a hand up in hesitant salute. He walked toward them, and the Strangs opened their car doors simultaneously, leaving Erica in the backseat. She watched as Jordan allowed himself to be loosely embraced by first his mother and then his father. Erica would be trapped here until someone unloaded a few lawn chairs or the giant picnic hamper. Finally they remembered her; through the glass, Erica watched his mother turn and point to where Erica sat. Jordan tilted his head and peered inside. He looked shocked to see her there. Surely they had told him she was coming; why did he seem so surprised?
But it turned out that they hadn’t told him; they had left it as a surprise, which
Erica knew was a misguided gesture. Jordan did not think of Erica as someone to look forward to, to be delighted by. He stared at her through the glass, and made no move to open the door and release her. Finally his mother said something that Erica couldn’t hear, and Jordan reached out and opened the door. Silently he lifted a few lawn chairs from the seat, allowing her to pass. Erica slid across the leather seat and stood up, facing him.
“What are you doing here?” was all he asked.
“Your mother invited me,” Erica said. “I thought she’d told you.”
“No,” Jordan said. “Nobody told me. I only got two tickets to the computer demonstration this afternoon. I guess I’ll have to try to get another.”
He looked different to her, somehow. It wasn’t just that his hair was longer and his skin patched with light freckles. He held himself differently—straighter, she thought, as though he had been given posture lessons at Moccasin Hill.
“Well, come on,” he said, and he turned around and led them to where they were supposed to go. Erica and the Strangs followed behind meekly, carting furniture and food.
They spent lunchtime on a blanket in a clearing in the woods. All around them, boys sat on blankets with parents. A few of the boys were talking with animation, but most of them were hugging their knees and looking off at some point in the distance, or studiously picking at scabs. Mothers unloaded Thermoses and plastic drums of food. Erica seemed to be the only “girlfriend” among the crowd; here and there were other girls, but they definitely seemed to be the boys’ sisters. It was easy to recognize sisters: They showed just as little interest as their uninterested brothers, staring off at their own imaginary oases, or leafing through Seventeen. Only Erica sat close to Jordan, trying to make him talk to her.
“So why did you leave Rwanda?” he finally asked.
She told him the story of her trip, and he asked one or two questions. Everyone began to relax; Jordan’s mother passed around a platter of barbecued chicken, and they all ate.
It was much later in the afternoon that Erica went alone with Jordan to his bunk. His parents had insisted that Erica and Jordan have some time to themselves, even though Jordan didn’t particularly seem to want it. So while the Drs. Strang watched a skit in the field house about the Age of Computers, Erica followed Jordan up a narrow path to a wooden box on stilts in which he lived with seven other boys. No one else was there now; the room was dark and neat and smelled of calamine.
“This is it,” he said, gesturing around him. On a shelf by the bed, Erica noticed several small trophies. She picked one up and examined it. “First Place in Freestyle Swim Meet,” it read. Erica stared at him.
“Is this yours?” she asked, and Jordan nodded. All of the trophies on the shelf were his; he had won competitions in swimming, archery, and tennis. Jordan, one of the least athletically inclined boys at Headley, had somehow changed during the course of the summer. She could not get over it.
The screen door swung open then, and two boys walked in. They resembled Jordan, Erica saw, although they were smaller than he was, and their hair was not nearly as long. One of them kept scratching at a dotted line of mosquito bites along his bare arm.
“How are you doing, man?” Jordan asked.
“Pretty good, Jordo,” the other boy said. “You get any good shit from your folks?”
Jordan shrugged. “I doubt it,” he said. “The usual.”
“Whatever,” said the first boy.
Erica stood by the shelf, still grasping Jordan’s archery trophy in her hand. She felt as though she had been caught in some illicit act, as though her hand were curled around his penis. She put the trophy back down on the shelf with the others.
“We’ve got to go,” the first boy said. Jordan still hadn’t introduced Erica to them, but neither boy seemed particularly curious; perhaps she was wearing a cloak of invisibility. The two boys dropped a couple of care packages from home onto their own beds, and turned around and left, the thin door shuddering shut behind them.
Jordo; they had called him Jordo. Most likely Jordan had been hoping for a nickname like this his entire life. He had found his niche in the world: a computer camp, of all places, where everyone who was an untouchable during the school year could gather and try out the vocabulary of the cool. Stammering, paper-thin boys could slap each other five and call each other “my man,” without having the whole thing be viewed as hilarious. In this safe, pine-shrouded place, for eight measly weeks, these boys could rise up and join forces. And somehow Jordan, perhaps because he was the tallest, or because he was the one who had brought drugs from home, or perhaps simply because they had drawn straws, was their leader. Jordan was in charge here; Erica could sense it. She had held one of his trophies in her hand, she had seen him lean against a car like James Dean. And when it had come time for him to introduce Erica to his henchmen, he had been ashamed. He had pretended she didn’t exist, that she was a sister, a cousin, an apparition who had somehow blown into Jordan’s territory, and the boys had gone along with it.
She looked at him and knew that whatever she said now would be infused with desperation. “Can we lie down?” she asked.
Jordan glanced around the room. “I don’t know,” he said. “Someone might come in.” He stood there considering.
“No one will come in,” Erica said, and finally he climbed with her into the bottom of his bunk bed, but his eyes were still surveying the room. His body had become stronger, she realized when he took off his T-shirt. His chest seemed mapped off into separate sections, and the divided muscle was hard under her palms.
After five minutes Jordan steadied his hands on her shoulders and pushed himself up. “Erica,” he said, “you shouldn’t have come.”
“I know,” she said.
Jordan looked beyond her, out the screenless window. “I’ve got to get back,” he said. “I want to catch the end of the skit.” He sat up swiftly. She watched as he pulled his T-shirt on, forcing his head through the hole, eyes squinted with effort like a baby being born. Erica sat up too, and her head slammed against the upper bunk.
They walked in silence back down the hill toward the field house. As usual, he walked a few feet ahead of her. She could have sat down on the path, and he probably would have kept walking, not realizing she wasn’t right behind him until he was miles beyond her. Jordan had changed. He was more distant than ever: he, who had always been a given, the one constant in her life. This whole summer had been unbearable; first the disappointment of the Junior Peace Corps, and now this.
It was in that moment, stumbling down the incline, that Erica decided she would attempt suicide. She came about this decision dispassionately; the idea seemed right, a snug fit.
“I have to go to the bathroom!” she called down to Jordan, who was almost at the bottom of the trail. “I’m going back to your bunk for a minute!”
He stood with his hands on his hips. “All right!” he said. “If you really have to. Can you find your way back alone?” He probably thought it was some menstrual thing that he did not fully understand.
“Yes!” Erica called, and Jordan disappeared into the woods at the bottom. Erica returned to the empty bunk, and this time she began looking around with purpose. Each bed was neatly made; these outcast boys couldn’t throw off every uncool habit in one summer. Disarray would come with time, until one day their rooms at home would look as though someone had broken in. Only the record collections would remain perfectly neat. If someone’s mother happened to put an album out of alphabetical order during cleaning, the son would scream at her until she wept.
Erica knew nothing about the lives of boys, except what she had learned from Jordan. But there was no way for her to have known much, really; even when her father had been living with the family, he had been more of a shadow puppet than anything else. His maleness was always well-protected from both her and Opal. Neither of them h
ad ever seen him without his shirt on. Erica remembered that when Opal was very young, she did not know that men had nipples. She had assumed that their chests were flat, unbroken planes, like tabletops.
Now everything that came into Erica’s field of vision was exclusively male. She felt like a divining rod as she walked about the room. She picked up the yellow cannister of Desenex on the windowsill. “For Relief of Jock Itch,” it read. Jock Itch; this term embarrassed her, although she did not really understand it. It was genital, she knew, and male, and cryptic. On the shelf next to the upper bunk was a selection of what she perceived as male reading material: two science-fiction novels by Robert Heinlein, a computer manual, and a stack of Mad magazines. Thrown across the back of a chair in the corner was a pair of red bathing trunks, hung inside-out, exposing a little wet twist of elastic sewn inside.
Erica sat down on Jordan’s bed. She noticed a shoe box on the floor beneath the shelf, and she picked it up and opened it. It was filled with various items: Band-Aids, shaving supplies, an asthma inhaler, and a bottle of St. Joseph’s baby aspirin. This man, this Jordo, who tried new, untested drugs manufactured by college freshmen, still took baby aspirin when he had a headache. Erica picked up the bottle. This was the best she could find, but it would have to do. She opened the lid, which took her several minutes and made her resort to using her teeth, because it was child-proof, and then she extracted the ball of cotton and shook out a generous handful of tablets into her hand. She would take them, she decided, when she got back into the Strangs’ car, and she would travel down to New York City, and by the time they got home she would have died. Erica dropped the aspirin into the pocket of her shirt, replaced the bottle in the shoe box, and went to join Jordan and his family. She felt oddly excited as she walked back down the path.