The Book of Knowledge

by Doris Grumbach

  But it was also true that their young hearts fibrillated with pleasure at the hopelessness of their cause. Captives of love, they enjoyed their profound discomfort.

  The Hellmans shook hands with the camp owners, calling them, as it was customary to do, by their surnames. Mr. and Mrs. Ehrlich were pale, amiable middle-aged people, both rotund and fleshy. They looked very much alike. Their white skin seemed to have been immune to exposure to the camp sun. Mrs. Ehrlich was an inch shorter than Mr. Ehrlich, who was shorter than most men. His bald head, as reflective of light as a clear pond, was almost the color of Mrs. Ehrlich’s round, pink cheeks. To the parents whom they visited in the winter to sign up their children for camp, they both appeared to be well-nourished testimonials to the excellent meals they would offer their charges. Glowing with health, they were visible reassurances to Sophie and Rose, whose main concern was for the nourishment of their children.

  Oscar, the Ehrlichs’ beloved, obese only child, now close to his sixteenth birthday, was never present at these winter calls. Had he been, he would have served as further evidence of the camp’s good food. But he was always left behind in Winter Haven, Florida, to enjoy the warmth of the Ehrlichs’ vacation quarters. Nor was he to be seen beside them now at the Hoboken station as the campers waited for the train to take them to Liberty, their destination, and then by bus on to the camp. If everything proceeded as it had in other years, the fat boy, in his tight black shorts and flower-patterned starched shirt (further proof of maternal attention to every aspect of his pampered existence), would appear at the beginning of July, as if summoned out of the ground by incantation, at the first Saturday-morning religious service, to read the passage from Ecclesiastes:

  To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die …

  Roslyn remembered liking the rich roll and thunder of those verses, even in Oscar’s rough tenor voice. But, like her bunk-mates, she had laughed behind her hands at the fat reader. In her eyes he was both the chosen and the afflicted, an object of her envy and her scorn. Lucky boy: he did not have to play games or write home every other day or share meals at the long mess hall tables. She had pictured him ensconced in the Ehrlichs’ dining room, feeding on delicacies from uncommercial china and being privately served by Grete, the wife of Ib the baker, who kept the cottage in beautiful order. Or so Roslyn had imagined. On the other hand, he was an object of ridicule to the campers. Among themselves they called him Fatto, for Fat Oscar, a portmanteau word they considered very clever.

  ‘Roslyn,’ Mrs. Ehrlich said in her high, coy-little-girl’s voice. She shook hands with the Hellmans and patted Roslyn’s shoulder. She always called campers by their full first names, never descending to the ugly abbreviations so popular at the camp. ‘Roz’: how Roslyn had hated that nickname. Never using it was the only virtue Roslyn could attribute to Mrs. Ehrlich.

  ‘Roslyn,’ she said again, as though to demonstrate to the parents that she knew well who their daughter was and would not, while she was in her charge this summer, confuse her with other girls in her care. She turned away to greet Sophie Lasky and Jean, who had just arrived, breathless and somewhat disheveled.

  ‘We almost missed the ferry,’ Sophie reported to Mrs. Ehrlich and the Hellmans. ‘Our taxi driver took us to the wrong dock.’

  Jean appeared to be on the verge of tears. She avoided her mother’s arm, fearful she would not be on the train on time. Roslyn regarded her with scorn.

  ‘She’s an Aunt Emma, like Lion,’ she thought, believing she was sad to leave her mother.

  ‘Jean,’ said Mrs. Ehrlich, her hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come back. You’ll have a wonderful time. We’ve rebuilt the diving board.’

  Before Jean could express her pleasure at this, Mrs. Ehrlich turned and began to usher those near her toward the train. They all moved obediently at her direction. Rose whispered to Roslyn:

  ‘Did you remember to pack … the things?’

  Roslyn knew what her mother meant. She nodded, finding it hard to disguise her contempt for her mother’s reticence. Never could Rose bring herself to say ‘sanitary belt’ or ‘Kotex,’ accessories she had introduced to her daughter some time ago, warning her that her ‘period,’ as she called it, might arrive at any moment. Roslyn knew what to expect: cramps, headache, irritable disposition, a passion for cleaning (this she found very hard to believe), and blood issuing from a part of her anatomy she had hitherto believed would produce only pee.

  Roslyn understood all this. What Rose had failed to explain to her was exactly why it all would happen. She was able to go as far as to inform her that the need for the equipment and the abrupt arrival of blood were a sign of being grown up, a woman in fact. This was a surprise to Roslyn. Ever since the children’s librarian at the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library had sent her upstairs to use the adult-book shelves when she was ten, Roslyn had believed she was grown up. It seemed to her extremely silly to have to bleed from her bottom onto a pad every month in order to be recognized as mature.

  Now that she thought about it, she remembered that her mother had connected it all to having babies. But Rose had failed to establish a connection between their arrival and what she predicted was about to happen to Roslyn. Too often for her comfort, after Roslyn was twelve, her mother would ask how she was feeling, if she had noticed any sign of ‘it.’ She told her daughter that ‘it’ had come early to her, when she was just past eleven. She could not understand Roslyn’s tardiness.

  The ‘things’ did not frighten Roslyn: it was the vocabulary. Once, unthinkingly, Rose had called it ‘the curse.’

  ‘Why do you call it that?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I don’t usually. But some people do. You’ll hear that word used.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just a word they use, I guess.’

  Roslyn thought it must be more than that. Something was about to happen to her, like all the other terrible events she now anticipated. Curse: the word added a new, ominous tone to the equipment she had in her trunk. But she had thought about it for some time this spring and had worked out a solution that now satisfied her.

  She did not tell her mother: it mattered not at all what people called it, or what it was, or what things one should wear when it happened. Because it was not going to happen to her. She had devised a clever stratagem to prevent it. At the first sight of a drop of blood in her panties, she planned to exercise the full power of the muscles in her thighs and buttocks. They were to be kept firmly locked against any further bloody display. So buttressed, she would never need the things. The power of the curse would never come upon her. She would not allow it.

  ‘I have everything, yes,’ Roslyn assured her mother.

  She kissed her goodbye. She saw her unhappy cousin being pushed up the iron steps of the train by Aunt Sophie, and thought:

  ‘She’s lucky. She’s too little to get the curse.’

  Roslyn envied her. She decided to let Jean in on her scheme when it came time for her to be similarly threatened, maybe next winter.

  She kissed her father and climbed onto the train after Jean. On an impulse, unusual to her, she took Jean’s hand as they walked down the aisle. She felt oddly protective, almost motherly.

  ‘Poor ignorant baby,’ she thought. ‘I’ll save her. I’ll tell her exactly how to do it.’

  On the dusty, creaking Erie Railroad train, traveling slowly through the flatlands of New Jersey, Fritzie made her six bunkies sit together ‘to get acquainted,’ and to learn the words of the camp song:

  O Camp Clear Lake, to you we sing your praises.

  Camp Clear Lake, we’ll show that none can faze us.

  We’re out to prove your fame,

  We’ll tell the world your name …

  Roslyn had learned the song two years ago. She had never been able to figure out what ‘faze’ meant, and she had forgotten to look it up when she got back home. Two of her
new bunkies were very pretty, quiet, identical twins named Muriel and Ruth Something: Roslyn didn’t hear their last name. She knew she would never know which was which. Fritzie too seemed puzzled.

  ‘I can’t tell you apart,’ she said when she introduced them to the others. Roslyn pondered the curious expression ‘tell you apart.’ What did ‘tell’ mean, actually? And why did they need to be told who was who? It was all very foolish, she thought. She approved of Ruth’s name, noting how difficult it would be to extract a nickname from it. Muriel might not be so lucky. She might be called Murry, or some such dumb thing. Hazeline, the swimming instructor, was called Hozzle, Fritzie had been baptized Frances. And then there was Muggs, who had once been Margaret.

  Nicknames were supposed to give an impression of closeness, of family, a false one, Roslyn thought. They were all strangers to each other. These silly tags were meant to suggest comfortable, clannish ties, happy personal relations. It was all a joke. Even the group they belonged to this year, the intermediates, had almost at once been cozily reduced to being called mediates.

  The little group sang the camp song through three times until Fritzie was sure they could enunciate all the words of the five choruses. Muriel and Ruth were slower to learn them, but they managed the refrain, which they sang in high, sweet voices, satisfying Fritzie. Jo, Aggie, Loo, and Roslyn, who had all been to the camp before, grew restless. Deciding to show their scorn of counselor authority, they strayed away from the song fest, Roslyn leading the retreat toward the bathroom. The twins were left seated with Fritzie, ignorant as yet of the methods of camper disobedience.

  Roslyn considered Jo a giggly, silly girl whose only clear sign of intelligence was that she shared Roslyn’s dislike of team sports. Jo’s preference was for arts and crafts, an activity Roslyn regarded as evidence of mental weakness. Two years ago the work they had been given to do was tedious and the end products, to Roslyn’s way of thinking, entirely useless: snakeskin belts, braided leather lanyards suited only for referees’ whistles.

  Now Roslyn looked at Jo, her imagination suddenly at work. She decided Jo was destined to study art in college, maybe crafts if they taught such a thing, and then teach old people in retirement homes to make Christmas-tree ornaments and crochet covers for the backs of chairs. She had watched her own grandmother in the Bronx Home for the Jewish Aged make pleated paper lampshades under the instruction of a lady with a foolish laugh like Jo’s. Later she’d get married, maybe to a businessman who ‘traveled.’ They would live beyond the pale, somewhere in New Jersey.

  Aggie, an unsubstantial girl with few defining characteristics of her own, aped Jo in everything. Two years ago, for this reason, she had been nicknamed Shadow, an unfortunate, descriptive appellation she would be destined to carry with her (Roslyn imagined) until she was taken away from her college dormitory room, wrapped in a white sheet, to some place for loonies, from which she would never emerge. Roslyn could foresee no other future for her.

  Loo (Roslyn could not remember what her given name was: Lucille maybe?) was the tallest mediate camper. As a junior she had been expert at basketball and playing the backcourt in tennis. But she was so gangly and overgrown that she must hate her body, Roslyn thought. In midsummer two years ago she had refused to talk to any boy when their brother camp, Algonquin, paid its annual visit. Roslyn now envisaged Loo, grown up and married to a college basketball star perhaps, living a very healthy, exercise-filled life as the wife of a coach. Probably in North Dakota.

  Roslyn’s habit, in the pretenses Caleb had taught her to construct last summer, was to assign everyone she thought unworthy to a purgatorial exile in the worst places she could think of. Such locations increased in frightfulness in direct proportion to their distance from Manhattan.

  And Roslyn herself: tall, bony, black-haired, called Roz by those she most despised, this summer destined to be the arrogant, rebellious, fantasizing leader of whatever mutinous act she suggested to the mediates in her bunk, what of her? Her seditious spirit will try to unite the disparate and, to her, wan and characterless bunkies. At the positive, dogmatic, self-assured age of fourteen (the needy and uncertain creature living beneath her arrogant surface being well hidden), she will tell herself that the others are spineless, their minds mirrors, not knives like hers.

  Early in that summer of 1930, head counselor Rae (Rae, one of those whose name could not be truncated), who remembered Roslyn’s behavior in the past, told her she had to be out of doors more. This summer she had to play hockey whether she wanted to or not. She was not to lie on her bed during the day reading the old newspapers her mother had mailed to her. Roslyn did everything she could think of to get out of such physical efforts, including trying to enlist her bunkmates in her mutinies. Even tennis no longer interested her. That old, flabby racket …

  ‘Do you really want to play hockey in this heat?’ she asked her bunkmates in the morning while they were occupied in sweeping under their cots, returning their neatly folded, half-worn uniforms to their trunks, and ‘picking up,’ as it was called, in their personal area. Roslyn lay stretched on her unmade bed, a little island of indifference amid her scattered belongings.

  At first they all decided they didn’t want to. When their chores were finished, they too lay down and took up whatever reading matter was at hand: the latest Nancy Drew mystery, secreted copies of True Story purloined from their mothers, pieces of Roz’s newspapers, especially the old, yellowed ones she had saved from the winter and brought up in the bottom of her trunk. These pages contained little biographies of families in need at Christmastime in New York City. Passed from hand to hand in the bungalow, they satisfied the girls’ hunger for poignancy at the same time that they affirmed their own security.

  When Fritzie discovered that her bunkies were absent, she stormed up from the hockey field.

  ‘Damm it, you kids get off your beds and get out there. What do you think this, an old people’s home?’

  They all got to their feet, grabbed their hockey sticks, and followed Fritzie out of the bunk. Everyone but Roslyn, who rose slowly, made a show of leaving, and then, when Fritzie was out of sight, turned and lay down again on her bed. Fritzie might miss six of them, but hardly one, she reasoned. And anyway, she’d never come up the line again to look for her. But if she did, okay: it would be nice to have her all to herself, for a few moments at least.

  Rae had had no success with her project for Roslyn. In the Mess Hall at breakfast Roslyn would listen to Rae read aloud the schedule of activities for the day, decide upon her private plan of retreat, and then attend one or two events she liked, either tennis or swimming or, on one of her good days, both. She told Dottie, the dramatics counselor, that she preferred not to be cast in a Saturday-night musical. She wanted nothing to do with playing outfielder on the baseball team, or net player in volleyball, or any other position on any stupid team. Her bunkmates would come back from the hockey field, sweaty and weary, to find her on her cot, disdainful and cool.

  This was the summer when prices on the stock market, after a short rise, plunged to a new low, unemployment reached four million, and the country and the world began a decade of severe depression. It was the summer that The Lone Ranger took over the airways and Greta Garbo appeared in Anna Christie. A musical comedy, Strike Up the Band, made the hit lists on the radio with a song called ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You.’ Max Schmeling, fouled by Jack Sharkey, won the heavyweight title (Max Hellman was there, in Madison Square Garden with his friend the Commissioner) and became an instant hero to Adolf Hitler. Sliced bread first appeared that summer, and the first supermarket opened in Jamaica, Long Island.

  In the newspapers sent to her by her mother, Roslyn immersed herself in such calamities, coincidences, and victories. In this way she was able to escape the mundane details of camp life and enter into the real world of New York City, where she wanted to be.

  Throughout July and well into August she went down to the lake twice a day for the mediates’ scheduled swim. Never once d
id she step on the diving board. She had heard from Loo, who was very poor at water sports and so swam with the juniors, that Jean was now a good diver. So Roslyn occasionally went to the lake to watch her cousin practice her half gainer. She was impressed but not moved to try diving herself. She said she thought there was something simpleminded about shocking one’s intelligence by hitting the water with one’s head from a great height.

  July went by without the promised visit from her parents. They wrote that money was short, that Max was needed at his new business, as he called the butcher store, and that Aunt Sophie could not spare her car. Rose sent a birthday present, a box that turned out to contain three used books: an illustrated edition of Barnaby Rudge, a battered copy of Ben Hur, and an equally worn book called What Every Young Girl Should Know. Roslyn stored the box in the dust under her cot and resolved not to open it again.

  The eight weeks of the summer seemed to pass very slowly for Roslyn. Stoically she endured it all—the standard, polite letters she had to write home every other day as the price of admission into the mess hall at lunchtime, the games she was made to play when she was too slow to have invented excuses, the prattle (as she thought of it) of her bunkmates, her nagging uncertainty about the retarded functioning of her reproductive system.

  She could not wait for August to end, for her exile in woods and meadows to be terminated by the familiar hospitality of paved streets and romantic movie theaters. From her early start as self-confident leader of the little tribe of displaced New Yorkers, she had gradually lost her following, and, what was worse, her confidence in her persuasive powers. Her bunkmates had deserted her, seduced by the more promising rewards, at the end, of medals for being improved campers and good sports.

  In the last few days of the camp year, beginning on the 27th of August, Roslyn, the admirer of a counselor unromantically nicknamed Fritzie, was deprived of what remained of her innocence about herself and, more, about those who lived in her world.