by Lena Dunham
Sometimes I will find myself telling one of these stories to a group: the time I saw two lesbians in action. The best snack to make over a fire. It takes me a second to realize that I am lying. My best memories, the ones I hold dearest from my time at Fernwood Cove, aren’t mine at all. They belong to someone else. My stories are terrible. No one will be as excited to hear about me hiding in the bathroom to take my OCD medication. The time I stayed home from a field trip with a fake migraine isn’t a nostalgic crowd pleaser. Diarrhea in a canyon during a lengthy hike isn’t right for every audience. I can’t remember any of the songs.
In keeping with my life at home in New York, my “true friends” at camp were adult staff members.
The counselors were a diverse group, utterly suitable for an early season of The Real World. Girls with belly-button rings and ankle tattoos. Mormon guys in wifebeaters who listened to gangster rap. Even the fat ones had hard, tan legs. They seemed completely under one another’s spells, seduced by their own youth and beauty. This became clear when, from the window of my top bunk, I saw their wide white asses cavorting on the dock past midnight when they were supposed to be guarding our lives.
The first summer I lusted after a college student named Buddhu Bengay, who was from Western Mass and wore rope sandals like Jesus Christ himself. He had acne scarring and monstrous big toes but the way he talked reminded me of Matthew Perry, so dry that even regular words seemed funny. We only spoke a few times, though during a kitchen raid he did once pick me up and carry me back to my bunk. I beat his chest, stunned that he was touching me. He smelled like deodorant, the real kind, not the organic stuff my father wore.
“No way, young lady,” he said as he deposited me on the porch of Bunk Kingfisher. My legs shook, like I was stepping onto land for the first time in weeks.
I also flirted with an attraction to Rocco, my Australian “bunk uncle,” who claimed to be having a fling with Diana Ross’s daughter, the improbably named Chudney. Though the male counselors were not allowed to enter our bunks without at least two female counselors present, Rocco would often sit outside the screen door and talk to us as the sun went down after dinner. He called me Dunny, which, he explained, was Aussie slang for “toilet.”
But I found my truest love during my second summer, and his name was Johnny. Johnny McDuff. He was blond, from South Carolina, and just shy of twenty-two. He dressed in Dickies and Morrissey t-shirts and Wayfarers. He played guitar, songs he’d written himself with titles like “Oogie Boogie Girl” and “Angel Watchin’ over Me,” walked into the dining room late, with the easy swagger of a first-born child. People said he had a crush on Kelsey the crafts counselor, but I didn’t believe it. She wore a hemp anklet. She lay out to tan. She was common.
Johnny accompanied us on a number of field trips. It was under his watchful eye that we rode bumper cars, saw I Know What You Did Last Summer, camped in a trailer park where I heard a man scream “I’m fuckin’ done witchu” to his wife and speed off into the darkness on his motorcycle. We went whitewater rafting with a guide named Bear who taught me the term “AMFYOYO” (an acronym for “adios motherfucker, you’re on your own”). And we drove four hours to a forty-foot cliff with the intention of jumping off of it.
On the way there, I decided I was going to jump first. It was a silent decision. My skills as a camper were undeveloped to say the least. I remained afraid of the dark. I won an award for “worst bed maker.” I had gotten across the ropes course exactly once, with help. Sometimes Karen and Jojo played a game where they pushed me to the ground then timed how long it took me to get up before pushing me down again. Jumping first, before the rest of my bunkmates, would be a strong move to the basket, a way to reverse my position as the weakest and whiniest member of Kingfisher. As the other girls hemmed and hawed and pretended to be scared, I would step to the edge and dive effortlessly into the water, slicing the surface with my hands slightly cupped—just like our diving instructor had taught us.
As we neared the site in the van, I couldn’t contain myself. “I’m jumping the second we get there,” I announced.
“Yeah, right,” Jojo said.
As the other girls set up their towels and adjusted their Speedo two-pieces, I approached the edge of the cliff. Holy fucking shit, it was high. The kind of height that makes your insides turn to jelly.
“It’s a long way down, isn’t it?” There was Johnny, right behind me. He was pink and sunburned in little blue shorts. He looked like a World War II soldier on furlough.
“I’m cold,” I said. “I want to wait a second.”
“It’s not gonna get any easier,” he said.
“I know. I might not go at all,” I told him, starting back toward the other girls. I was ready to be mocked. I didn’t care, just as long as I was far away from that cliff. It goes against nature to hurl yourself off a giant rock into a pool of murky water.
“I tell you what, I’ll go with you.”
Nearly fifteen years later, my body goes wild just writing this. I looked at Johnny.
“Really?”
He nodded. “Hell, yeah.”
“Count,” I said.
“Okay.” He nodded, stepping past me, a little closer to the edge. “I’m going to start now. Ready? One … two …”
And we jumped. It wasn’t the clean dive I had pictured. I panicked and wriggled in the air like a new kitten, trying to claw my way back up again. Before I could process the sensation of falling I had hit the water, hard and at the wrong angle. The cold soothed the hurt soothed the fear. Johnny landed a moment later and when we surfaced, me sputtering and coughing, yanking my bathing suit out of my butt crack, he nodded a relaxed congratulations, flipping his yellow hair out of his eyes.
Later that afternoon, when we stopped for some roadside ice cream, he asked to taste my flavor, bubblegum. He wrapped his tongue around my cone—in my memory it’s an impossibly thick, red tongue—and my insides felt even weirder than they had during the jump. I knew he was sending me a secret signal. We could play along, we could have fun with the group, but we were too much for this place.
That night in my bunk, I imagined shedding my clothes, approaching Johnny, and letting him put his hands all over my body. Maybe we would meet outside, in a tent, down the path in the woods. I was practical enough to imagine that he would bring the condom.
Our last summer, as privileged seniors, we took a bunk trip to New Hampshire to hike, camp, and see a movie. The trip was chaperoned by Rita-Lynn, Cheryl, and Rocco, and it was impossible to tell who had a crush on who in the threesome. As fifteen-year-old campers, we vaguely resembled adults, and the vibe of the trip was distinctly collegial, the counselors addressing us like knowing peers. They barely had to assert their authority and we amused ourselves, gossiping in the back of the van, journaling and singing Britney Spears songs at the top of our lungs.
On the last night of the trip it rained and, using a camp credit card, our counselors checked us into a motel. We all gathered in Rita-Lynn’s room to play cards and eat peanut butter and jelly and I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, Rocco opening a beer. And another. And another. He passed one to Rita. One to Cheryl. Took a swig of his own.
I got up and motioned to Rita to join me in the bathroom. “Can I talk to you a minute?” I asked.
“What’s up?” she asked. “Need a tampon?”
“No. I wanted to say that I’m not really comfortable having the only adults who are with us drinking alcohol.”
She looked at me blankly.
“Several people in my family have issues with alcohol abuse so it brings up a lot for me,” I tried.
“Dude.” She looked down at her Tevas. It was unclear whether she was frustrated or guilty. “I really thought you’d be cool.”
On the last night of camp we all wore white and the seniors sent candles out into the lake on tiny rafts and sang “I Will Remember You” by Sarah McLachlan. Everyone sobbed and clutched at one another, making promises to write, to never forget.
I cried, too, wishing the whole thing could have been different, that I could have been different. I stared at my candle until my eyes crossed and it disappeared into the dark.
Recently, I awoke from a camp dream so vivid it haunted me the whole next day. I was back at Fernwood Cove, and I had one last summer to make it count. Our bunk was still intact, and so was my hymen. I wasn’t focused on any guy, or on writing home. We were all there, all us girls, and we loved one another dearly.
In this dream I had long, long hair, full of feathers and beads, and I was naked on the dock. My body was longer, more limber, more like my mother’s. I dove backward into the water, landing perfectly without disturbing the surface.
ONE DAY AT CAMP there was a field trip for the soccer team, so everyone in my bunk cleared out except me.
Being alone—without the drone of midwestern accents, without the rustle of hair braiding or the slap of shower shoes—was so delicious. I decided to skip my waterskiing class and write letters and nap. And anyway, what was the point? I never even got a real turn. There were too many of us in the class, so mostly we just shivered on the dock in our life jackets, listening to Claire B. cry because her father was turning ninety.
But the few times I did get on skis, I found the experience otherworldly: I flew. Sometimes for mere seconds, but once it was minutes. Three at least. The world sped by: boats and houses and what looked like sketches of pine trees. Until I hit a choppy patch and, inexperienced as I was, wiped out hard. Skis flew, I did splits that weren’t natural to me, and I hit the surface ass first, nostrils second.
I woke up at sunset, hot and itchy, to the sound of my bunkmates returning home high on victory. “We smoked ’em!” Madeleine shouted, hurling her dirty socks into my lower bunk.
“They were slow and faaat,” Emily squealed, stripping down to her sports bra.
“Sooo suu-pair coo-elll,” Phillipine added in broken English, her dumb French face demented with pride.
At bonfire the waterskiing counselor asked me where I’d been. “Everyone else was on the field trip. You would have had the whole hour all to yourself.”
Can you imagine what my life would be like now if that had happened?
A GUIDE TO RUNNING AWAY FOR NINE-YEAR-OLD GIRLS
You want to run away. You want to run away for a lot of reasons, but let’s start with the most immediate: you are mad. At your father, because he’s not taking you seriously when you say you think you’ll lose your mind if you have to spend another night in your bedroom alone, staring at the moon. He thinks you’re having kid problems. He thinks kids have to “get through” their kid problems. He says, “just try and understand that it won’t get worse. The worst that will happen is it will stay the same.” This doesn’t comfort you. Because he doesn’t know there’s something in you—big, explosive, ready to surprise the world in a bad way if you’re not handled right, but ready to be beautiful if someone will just listen.
You are mad at your mother because sometimes she doesn’t pay attention and she says yes to a question that needs a different kind of answer. She is distracted. When she holds your hand it’s too loose and you have to show her how to do it right, how to make a little hammock for your fingers. You are mad at your mother because she’s sitting on the porch in her capri pants, talking on the telephone, telling someone else that you’re having a good summer.
You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise is so thick your scary thoughts can’t get a word in edgewise. But here in the country, there is only space. On the stone bridge by the stream. On the mossy rock at the edge of the yard. Behind the abandoned trailer where Art, the old man with the glass eye, used to live. Space, space, space, and you can scare yourself into thinking your thoughts are more like voices.
Your godparents, also city people, live a mile down the road. She has red hair and cat’s-eye glasses; he is bald and does one voice to impersonate all four Beatles. One day your godfather and you get on your cordless phones and leave the house and see if you can make it to each other before they go static. You see him crest the hill, waving, just as his voice crackles and disintegrates.
Last week your parents had a party. Everyone drove up from the city. Artists, writers, boyfriends, girlfriends, a woman with purple eyebrows, and they parked their cars all across your lawn. Gregory’s brother made wine out of lilacs, and you took three sips, then pretended to be drunk, making a big show out of being unable to walk a straight line, like a drunk person on I Love Lucy. Around ten your parents sent you up to your room and you listened to the party burn down like a cigarette, your little sister breathing beside you, a trusty machine.
The day of the party had been the worst one of the summer. Your parents asked you to do chores that didn’t seem fair, didn’t seem like your problem, so you went to the attic and you threw raw eggs down at the front walk. Your father didn’t even seem angry, just put you to work scrubbing the stone with a kitchen sponge.
The day after the party it was all about cleaning up. And the day after that it was all about doing work. And the day after that was just another day and everyone’s making you sleep in your bed.
So now it’s time to run away.
First, you have to pack a bag. It’s probably best to use a mini backpack, so as not to weigh yourself down. You need to be able to move. You can use the baby-blue one you bought so you could feel more like Cher Horowitz in Clueless. But then you insisted on wearing it during dodgeball on the first day of school, and you became the fourth grade’s most hunted target. Nice one, weirdo.
In terms of packing, all you need is clean underwear and a loaf of bread.
If you were running away from your city house, it’d be easy. You’d just go to the lobby and sit underneath the row of mailboxes. Remember when your hairless cat took the elevator down all on his own and hid inside the slot where Victor Carnuccio’s packages go? That was so funny.
If you were scared in the lobby, watching lower Broadway pass, you wouldn’t need to be. Your mother would come down soon enough and cotton to your demands.
But you’re at your country house so it’s a little bit harder. A good place to hide might be: out back, behind Art’s trailer. You could also go around the side of the old church, but it smells damp and is at least a quarter of a mile farther, and you hate walking.
A nice person to bring with you, should you want a companion, would be your neighbor Joseph Cranbrook. He is a good kid, even though he acts crazy sometimes. (Like when he ripped your screen door off the hinges because you wouldn’t come out to play with him. Your dad talked to him like he was an adult who had made a mistake, which is how he always talks to kids and which is part of why you are running away.) Joseph may be chubby and sloppy now, his face always covered in barbecue sauce and his only virtues being that he owns a dinghy and had the idea to dress as a gorilla in suspenders for Halloween, but be forewarned that, ten years from now, he will still be short, but he will also be ripped, and he will join the air force as an outlet for his rage and you will run into him on Crosby Street your freshman year of college and he will be the first person you give a blow job to. You won’t finish, just administer one horrified lick, and he won’t talk to you again. He will turn out to be “engaged” to a girl name Ellie who is a good foot taller than he and lives in South Carolina. Something called Facebook will be invented where you can learn all of this.
When you run away, the point is not to escape. You aren’t actually trying to disappear. You just want to attract your mother. The great fantasy is that she’s somewhere, watching, like the mother in Runaway Bunny who becomes the tree, then becomes the lake, then becomes the moon. Your mother becomes the mini backpack and becomes the loaf of bread and becomes the bed with the Devon Sawa poster above it where you go to sulk after it’s all over. She knows. She knows.
And eventually she comes and you get the kind of attention you’ve been aski
ng for when you hang around watching her talk on the cordless and flip through the J. Crew catalog circling things with a ballpoint pen. She says she understands, that once when she was your age she hid in a garbage can for an hour, but no one came for her except her father’s dental nurse.
Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you’re secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand. You ride your sister’s tricycle back and forth on the porch, loving the sound it makes as it scrapes the lead paint from the floor. Your parents don’t believe you that it’s lead paint so you ask them to drive you to the hardware store, where you purchase a small kit to test it with. The kit contains a small tube, like a lipstick, with a spongy white tip that you drag across the area you suspect of being toxic. Then you wait, and if there’s lead in the paint the white will turn bright red. The test results come up negative, just gray from the dirt of the porch floor, and you are disappointed.
A GUIDE TO RUNNING AWAY FOR TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD WOMEN
None of your neighbors know you, so none of them would care. They are all over eighty-five, and they don’t have HBO. You could hurl yourself down the garbage chute and be found six days later, bleeding out into a pile of adult diapers, and it wouldn’t elicit more than a “Huh?” followed by a co-op meeting on how to handle disposing of the body.
If you don’t call your parents for a day, they assume you’re busy at work, helping a friend recover from a minor medical procedure, or fucking your boyfriend for seventeen hours straight. An hour squatting behind a religious structure won’t cut it anymore when it comes to getting their attention.
Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called How to Disappear and Never Be Found? You’re sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply to his work, but it raised the distinct possibility that there is something very upsetting that people you love could do instead of dying. You already knew your father was morbid but assumed he was as happy as he was constitutionally capable of being, and that was some comfort. That this suggests otherwise is something you would rather not focus on.