by Lena Dunham
“Well,” he says, “I’m sure your feelings about that will continue to evolve as you get older. As you see more death around you and things happen to your body. But I hope you always feel that way.”
I know he loves talking about death. It just takes him a second to get warmed up.
“You know,” he says. “It just can’t be a bad thing. Because it’s everything.”
We talk about enlightened beings, what it would mean to transcend the human plane. “I want to be enlightened, but it also sounds boring,” I tell him. “So much of what I love—gossip and furniture and food and the Internet—are really here, on earth.” Then I say something that would probably make the Buddha roll over in his grave: “I think I could be enlightened, but I’m not in the mood yet. I just want to work the death thing out.”
We crest a hill in the wet dark and see, before us, a string of cars, lit up red, at a standstill as far as the eye can see. We are hours from home. “Holy shit,” he says. “That is fucking insane. Is this even real?”
* * *
1 Doris Reynolds Jewett died peacefully on December 10, 2013, having very recently drunk a martini.
1. We are all afraid of cancer. From what I understand it’s a threat that is always just looming inside your body, but isn’t a problem until it is. It could be living anywhere from your liver to that adorable signature mole on your hip, and it could either kill you or spark a memoir. I’m not scared enough to do any 10K walks, but I’m pretty scared.
2. I think a lot about chronic fatigue syndrome. Its symptoms sound awful, like a flu that will never ever end, that drains you and makes you an exhausting burden on your family and friends until you finally are just an idea of a person. (I am sure medical authorities and sufferers alike will love this description.) It gets worse: some doctors think it’s a mental health issue and its sufferers are delusional depressives. Other people suspect it’s linked to mono, which I once had so badly that I was too tired to crumple my face when I cried. Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes.
3. I’m concerned that if I ate differently, more vegetables or less toast with butter and salt, I’d feel this insane burst of energy I can only begin to imagine. That a better, stronger, more productive me exists if I would take proper steps to change my life. Even when presented with evidence of my own productivity I think that the people accusing me of being productive don’t know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes. A connected fear is that if I lost twenty pounds I’d realize I’ve been going through life with a backpack of fat strapped to me and I’d be able to do cartwheels and things. That being said, a homeopathic doctor once told me that we need butter to “lubricate our synapses” and the reason the divorce rate in Hollywood is so high is because everyone is underlubricated.
4. Related: I am scared about what my cell phone is doing to my brain. And yet I have never used an earbud for more than half a day. The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.
5. Tonsil stones. Do you know about tonsil stones? Well, let me ask you this: Have you ever coughed up a small white rock that, upon further inspection, smelled like the worst corners of the New York sewer system? If so, I’m sure you were shocked this came from your own body and you flushed it away and hoped never to think of it again. That was a tonsil stone. They form in the crypts of your tonsils, where food and dead skin and various detritus collect and ferment, creating the most disgusting thing your body is capable of producing (and that’s saying a lot). In addition to their unseemliness, they are also a source of infection and discomfort. I myself have the occasional stone and asked my doctor to inspect my tonsils, which he described as “teeming balls of disease.” And yet, when I asked about removing them, he seemed unconcerned. He said I would have to rest for two weeks and would lose at least fifteen pounds, which is not the way to deter me. How, I ask, can it be even remotely okay to have this happening in one’s throat? Will other people sense it and, in an apocalyptic situation, leave me behind to choke on my stones and die?
6. I live in fear of tinnitus. A constant ringing in my ear that will drive me mad, that will keep me awake and interrupt my conversations and even when it’s cured I’ll still hear its malevolent harmony. If I lie very still at night I can fully imagine it, a sound like a bug being boiled to death.
7. I am very scared of lamp dust. I have a serious problem with dust coming out of my lamps. Everything I put under my lamps is, within minutes, covered in a thick layer of dust. In related news, my left nostril is never not clogged, and once the ear, nose, and throat doctor sucked all the mucus out of my sinuses with a tiny vacuum and for three hours I felt a 45 percent spike in my quality of life until it refilled again.
8. I’m afraid of adrenal fatigue. This is related to chronic fatigue but not the same. Western doctors don’t believe in adrenal fatigue, but if you have a job and are a human, then any holistic doctor will tell you that you have adrenal fatigue. It is essentially a dangerous exhaustion that comes from ambition and modern life. I have it so bad. Please read about it on the Internet—you do, too.
9. The surface of my tongue is insane. It looks like a cartoon of the moon. It just can’t be right.
10. I’m afraid that I am infertile. My uterus does tilt to the right, which could mean it’s an inhospitable environment for a child who wants a straight-down-the-line kind of uterus. And so I will adopt, but I won’t have the sort of beautiful, genetics-defying love story that People magazine chronicles. The kid will have undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. He will hate me, and he will nail our dog to a board.
MY MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER attended “green-and- white” camp. That was their shorthand for a respectable summer home for privileged Jewish girls whose parents were away on cruises, where the uniform consisted of crisp green shorts and a collared white shirt.
They described camp, which they attended for eight weeks every summer from ages six to seventeen, as a sort of utopia for little girls. Nestled deep in the woods of southern Maine, you roasted marshmallows and traded secrets and learned to use a bow and arrow. Even my mother, a teenager so sullen and ornery that she refused to eat dinner with her family, came alive at camp. At home she was angry, disgusted by her father’s vaudeville sense of humor and her mother’s careful attention to social mores. She hated her blond sisters’ attempts to fit in socially and her maid for needing money badly enough to leave her own family. But at camp she had a bunk of sisters, girls who understood her, girls who she waited all through the freezing, lonely winter to see. At camp she was able to express an enthusiasm and passion she never let her family witness. And when the summer ended, she was heartbroken.
When I was little I would lie in bed, drifting off as my mother told me tales: of color wars, canoe trips, and pranks galore. Of the camp mother, who roughly shampooed your head once a week and set your hair in curlers. Of undying friendship, a world where youth ruled and boys could not disturb the idyll. In my mind her camp stories have mingled irrevocably with the plot of The Parent Trap, lending my image of her long-ago summers a Technicolor flair.
When I was ten, we took a road trip to Maine to visit family friends and made a stop at the now-abandoned Camp Wenonah. From the passenger side I could see empty cabins, a tennis court with the net slumping toward the ground. My mother sprang out of the car with the same manic excitement that she must have felt every summer when her parents dropped her off. She’s been five-foot-ten since she was thirteen or fourteen, and I could just picture that same lanky body bounding out of bed in time for the morning salute and flag raising.
Now, nearing fifty and wearing the kind of straw hat that makes me want to kill myself, she walked us over a grassy hill to reveal a gray lake vista, forgotten wooden boats knocking against the shore. On this exact spot, she told us, was
where they held the outdoor mixers with neighboring boys camp Skylamar. Over there, she thought, was the arts-and-crafts cabin, now just a husk of its former self. And suddenly, she was crying. I’d never seen her cry before and I stared, unsure of my next move.
“Stop looking at me,” she snapped. “I’m not a science experiment.”
I asked if she still spoke to any of her Wenonah friends. No, she said, but that didn’t mean she’d ever stop loving them—they were sisters.
So I wanted camp, too. I didn’t want to leave home. I loved my loft bed and my hairless cat and the small desk my father had installed for me in what used to be the closet where he kept his sci-fi paperbacks. I loved our mint-green elevator and our Malaysian takeout and August in New York, the way the only breeze came from the subway rushing past. But I also wanted friendships, fresh starts with people who had never seen me wet myself during Wiffle ball or hit my father outside the deli. I wanted memories so powerful they made you cry. And by God, I wanted green shorts.
I spent three summers at Fernwood Cove Camp for Girls.
Fernwood Cove was the sister camp of Fernwood, a long-standing institution that Wenonah had regularly opposed in sports. Fernwood Cove was for four-weekers, girls too scared to spend eight weeks away from home. Or too spoiled to live without electricity. Or too slutty to live without boys. I had decided eight weeks was too much for me when my cousin, a Fernwood girl, described the ritualistic beheading of a weakling’s stuffed animal. “I mean, you just don’t bring a toy to camp,” she said, like it was obvious.
I started at Fernwood Cove when I was thirteen. I had just finished a successful seventh-grade year in which I had enjoyed not one but two popular boyfriends and gotten my hair highlighted by a licensed beautician named Beata. This rare winning streak was only slightly dampened by the short bangs I had cut myself in order to prepare for my audition as Drew Barrymore’s little sister in the Penny Marshall film Riding in Cars with Boys. (The role went to someone else after I told Ms. Marshall I could not smile on command. “That’s called acting,” she growled.)
So it was with a rare sense of hope and anticipation that I boarded the bus in Boston that would take me to Fernwood Cove. On the three-hour drive I got to know my seatmate, a girl named Lydia Green Hamburger, who told me, within three minutes of meeting me, that she knew Lindsay Lohan. Lydia was different from me—she talked animatedly about school dances and lacrosse and the mall—and yet we got along handsomely. This is what camp is all about! I thought. Meeting other, slightly different kinds of white girls!
But the moment we pulled into the dusty driveway and I saw the tetherball waiting, the fear set in.
If my behavior that first summer at camp was the only evidence a psychiatrist had to go on, they would have diagnosed me as a fast-cycling bipolar. My emotions vacillated wildly, from joy to despair to disdain of my fellow campers. One minute I was passionately engaged with my new friend Katie, and the next I was convinced she had the IQ of a lima bean. One minute I was reveling in the moment, not thinking about my family at all, and the next, walking from the rock wall to the drama tent, I would be hit with a wave of homesickness so severe I was sure I would die right then and there. My parents seemed impossibly far away—dead, for all I knew. That sense became harder to shake, and as the summer progressed my homesickness only grew more intense, which was the exact opposite of what my father had promised me would happen.
The only thing that distracted me fully was being allowed to present a play I had written about a woman with thirteen cats who was searching for an understanding mate. On the strength of this work, my drama counselor Rita-Lynn cast me as the star of a play she’d written about “primal coyote women” for her thesis at Yale drama school. I was thrilled until I learned I would have to drop a potato from between my legs and grunt, “Uh, what a good poop.” How could they ask a serious actor to deliver such an absurd phrase!?
But when the line got a laugh at dress rehearsal, I decided it was genius.
I was in hell. I was in heaven. I was at camp.
There were ten of us, living in a three-hundred-square-foot bunk, going through puberty at lightning speed. It was too much hormonal action for any one room, and the result was a frenzied, emotionally volatile space that smelled like a Bath and Body Works.
Just because there weren’t boys at camp doesn’t mean there wasn’t romance. We had socials—two per summer, just like my mother did at Wenonah—and we prepared, laying our outfits out a week in advance, trading sandy tubes of lip gloss and glow-in-the-dark barrettes.
My new friend Ashley, a sporty blonde who was dating the heir to the Utz potato chip fortune, lent me a neon tube top and twisted my hair into tiny fashion dreadlocks. As I returned the favor, applying blush to her already rosy cheeks, I noticed something: “You have an eyelash,” I told her, and brushed it away, only to realize the long black hair was actually growing out of her cheek.
We were all in various stages of puberty. Charlotte had full-scale breasts, so big that they hung down, casting a half-moon shadow on her rib cage. Marianna seemed unaware she was growing hair in her armpits, or maybe they didn’t care in Colombia, where she was from. I was flat as a board, hairless too, and fine with it, but I couldn’t stop eying everyone else, staring at their round asses as they dressed, the dusky hairs emerging from their bathing suits. “You are so bicurious!” my counselor Liz shrieked at me when she caught me watching her tits swing as she changed.
My greatest obsession was BO. I smelled it everywhere: in the bathroom, on the wind during kickball, on Emily’s hairbrush, which I borrowed because my old one was growing some kind of mold. I couldn’t imagine a life where that smell, just enough like onions to be truly confusing, came from your own body. Then one afternoon, sitting on my own bed at rest hour, I swore I smelled it. Not too strong, but there, on my t-shirt. A bit of research led me to an area near my right armpit. I got it from hugging Charlotte, I thought. In fact, I was sure of it. I wrote home immediately, explaining the whole dreadful situation. “How do I tell Charlotte without being mean?” I asked.
In a letter back, my father gently explained that BO was hard to transfer and that, just to be safe, I might want to ask for a natural antiperspirant on the next run to Walmart.
The first social of the summer took place at Camp Skylamar, a forty-minute drive from Fernwood Cove, in a barn full of pimply boys in short-sleeved button-downs and boat shoes. *NSYNC and Brandy played on a weak stereo system. The girls danced nervously in a cluster while the boys hung around the edges of the room pounding fruit punch. At some point in the night, I opened the door to the bathroom to find a boy hunched over the toilet, furiously masturbating.
After dusk, I fell into conversation with a fourteen-year-old from New Jersey named Brent. He was handsome, with a baseball hat and a boxer’s flat face. I told him I went to school in Brooklyn and he said he didn’t know where that was because he wasn’t “so good at geometry.” After the longest twenty minutes in history, he asked me if I’d like to come to the back porch with him, which I understood was code for mashing our beaks together like baby birds.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t feel we know each other well enough,” I told him. “But if you want my address, you can have it, and we can see what develops.”
As I left, Emily said she saw him give me the finger behind my back.
All night at Skylamar I’d had this uncanny sense of recognition, like déjà vu but unceasing. I had been there before, knew the contours of the place; the bunks dotted the hill in a familiar way. The cafeteria building welcomed me. And as I lay in bed that night, I realized: this was Wenonah. Skylamar was built on the site where my mother’s camp had once stood.
This was the place that my mother had called home for ten summers, where she had met the women who were still sisters to her today despite the geography and ideologies that divide them. This was where she had played Rhett Butler on the summer stage, been introduced to the joys of instant macaroni and cheese, and
contracted a case of lice that necessitated cutting her hair into a jagged bob. This is where her parents left her when they decided to take a seven-week boat trip around Europe, wearing their finest hats.
After my first summer at Fernwood Cove, it seemed pretty obvious to my parents that I would not return. Despite moments of pleasure, I had sobbed hysterically on every phone call home, wailing, “Please come get me. I’m begging you.” I felt ganged up on by my bunkmates and misunderstood by my counselors. I had developed an “allergy to wood.”
I was a quitter: of play dates, of dance class, of Hebrew school. Nothing in my history indicated I would stick it out. But when December’s enrollment deadline rolled around, I shocked my parents (and myself): “I think I want to give camp another try.”
“Are you sure?” my father asked. “You didn’t seem happy.”
“No, you didn’t,” my mother agreed. “You can do day camp. Or no camp.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I think it’s important.”
Some of my camp memories actually belong to my mother. Certain images, though vivid to me, are from stories she told me in bed. For example, I never roasted dough on a stick and then filled the hole left by the stick with butter and jam. That was her. I never caught two female counselors kissing on the archery range, pressed against a target, one’s hand down the other’s shorts. When the boys came to Wenonah for a social they canoed across the lake, arriving at dusk like an enemy tribe, storming the shore in tiny blazers. And although the boys showed up at our camp in a bunch of church vans, I can still see them tying up their boats and spilling over the hill ready to pillage us.