I would have explored this option in my first weeks at Paley, but it would only have meant going home. My grandmother Caroline stayed in Europe or at Sea Island or in the homes of friends all over the country most of that first year, and when I came home on weekends it seemed to be a big house I had never known, where two women, a young and not so young, went about their intimate and intricate female business that had no place for me in it. Lavonda left after I went away to school, and Nellie, infirm and diminished by my father’s absence, retired. In her place we had Juanita, young, just finishing high school, pretty, poised, and viperishly mean, at least to me. She did not like my sister, either, I realized at once, but she dimpled prettily at Lily and wore her outgrown clothes with a model’s grace. Juanita adored my mother.
By the end of my third year at Paley I was silent, sullen, mistrustful, thin to the point of boniness, and so self-isolated that being around large groups of people was almost tantamount to drowning.
In the summer after my third year, when I was twelve, two things happened. My grandmother’s lameness worsened dramatically and she moved in with us, bringing her big old Mercedes and her chauffeur, Detritus, with her. (“Don’t ask,” my grandmother said.)
And I went, for the first time, to camp.
CHAPTER 5
Why on earth here?” my mother fumed to her friend Polly Thornton, not long after Grandmother Caroline settled in on the third floor. “She could have had all the help in the world in her own house. She could have gone into an assisted-living place. There’s one in Buckhead that looks like Versailles. She could have bought herself a wonderful condo. What does she want in my house?”
“Well, technically, it always was my house, you know, dear!” my grandmother called pleasantly from the screened porch, where she was reading on the chaise lounge. “You remember that we gave it to Finch for his lifetime. After that, of course, it would have come to you and the girls anyway. But I knew you had this whole floor, and I wanted to be nearer to my family. I don’t have that much left of it, you know.”
“We could easily have come to Atlanta, Mama C.,” my mother called back sweetly, grimacing at Polly.
“I was tired of all that Buckhead business, Crystal, and you would not have been happy there. I know you think you would, but believe me, it’s really very enervating.”
“I just mean it was a shame to sell that beautiful house,” my mother said, a badly contrived lilt in her voice.
“Well, look at it this way. The sale of that beautiful house will put Thayer through college and then some. I know she was thinking about Vassar, or some place in the East. That’s not cheap.”
“I never heard her say a word about Vassar,” my mother snapped. “Georgia State is just fine for her. I can’t imagine how I’m going to get Lily through Agnes Scott.”
“You’re hardly poverty stricken, darling,” my grandmother purred. “And she’s talked to me about the East. Perhaps you just didn’t hear her.”
“I hear my daughter,” my mother said icily, and from the porch I heard my grandmother laugh softly. I was hiding behind the thick velvet drapes that could be drawn to shelter the living room from the rest of the house. It was the best place in the house for spying.
“The hell you do,” I whispered to myself, stung. I could not remember a time my mother had really heard what I was saying, although to her credit, I did not say much to her. It seemed, in that submerged and lightless year, simply too much trouble to talk to her, or almost anyone else.
I could talk to my grandmother, though. I don’t remember if I always could or if it began that year, but I could and did chatter to her as easily as I had prattled to Lavonda when I was much smaller. I think it was my grandmother’s eyes. Those golden-amber eyes, my father’s eyes and mine, too, though not as striking on me, seemed to swallow my tumbled words like a honey pot might honey. They widened, or crinkled, and sometimes even filmed slightly with tears, but they received my words and, somehow, all of me. I idolized her. It was the way I should have felt about my mother, I knew, and I often felt a bit guilty about it. My mother knew it, too. It did not stop me from haunting my grandmother Caroline like a small, fierce spirit.
“You are going to drive her crazy,” my mother said at the beginning of summer. “She doesn’t want a twelve-year-old sticking to her like a burr all the time.”
“Yes, she does,” I said, my temper veering up crazily as it had been doing all that strange year. “You’re just mad because she never talks to you.”
It was the start of a real vendetta, and though I knew I could have ended it by apologizing, I refused to do so. I must have seemed to my mother that year a malevolent changeling. Sometimes even I did not know where all the anger was coming from. Lily was in her last summer session at Agnes Scott in Atlanta, and I was undeniably a bad substitute for her.
“You know what?” my grandmother said at the dinner table one evening, when the vendetta flared over the vichyssoise she had taught Juanita to make. “I think you might enjoy going to camp. I always did, and so did your father. He went to Edgewood.”
“I won’t go to Edgewood!” I cried, remembering that it was from there that my father had soared away from me. “I will never go there!”
“No, of course not. But you might like Sherwood Forest, in the North Carolina mountains. I loved it when I was your age. It’s on a beautiful lake, and there are little log cabins all around it where the girls sleep, and swimming and archery and horseback riding and singing and stories around the campfire at night, and the food is really good, for camp food. You’ll make friends you’ll have all your life. I know I did. My treat, of course.”
The image of an endless blue lake and the flight of an arrow arching from its bow bloomed in my mind, followed by one of regimented ranks of older and prettier girls in spotless shorts and blouses glaring at me down perfect noses.
“I’m not going to any camp,” I muttered.
My mother looked at me and then at my grandmother, nodding her head up and down. I know now exactly what was going through my mother’s mind: All summer. No money out of my pocket. Atlanta girls. Atlanta girls have Atlanta families, and they’ll be people just like Mother Caroline. They’ll visit us and we’ll visit them. They’ll have sons who will love Lily. They’ll take her to Piedmont Driving Club, and me, too.
“Of course you’re going to camp,” she said. “It’s a lovely idea. Thank your grandmother, Thayer.”
I did not lift my head.
“Your father would have loved for you to go,” my mother said.
I looked up at her slowly, ready for battle once more. But she had played her trump card, and she knew it.
“Yes, he would have,” my grandmother said, smiling at me. “I think it’s just what he would have wanted for you this summer.”
And so, in late June, suitcases crammed with regulation camp wear and my mind reeling with Camp Sherwood Forest rules, I got into the Mercedes with my mother and grandmother, and Detritus nosed the car out of our driveway and toward the Great Smoky Mountains and the rest of my life.
Sherwood Forest isn’t there anymore. It closed in the early 1990s, apparently for lack of nourishment. I only learned that soon after I was married. Three of my friends and I were drinking coffee and talking about our childhoods. When the talk turned to summer camps, I felt a fish flopping in my chest but for a moment could not think why. I had buried camp deep.
“I went to Sherwood Forest in North Carolina, just south of Murphy,” Eloise Costigan said. She was only a few years older than me.
“I loved it. Most of my friends went. I think we must have driven our counselors nuts. Did anybody else go there?”
The other two chimed in with their own camps, neither of them Sherwood Forest.
“What about you, Thayer?” Eloise said.
“I didn’t go to camp,” I said, smiling sunnily, and then a huge, sucking nausea took me and I only made it to the bathroom seconds before I threw up.
“Are you
pregnant?” Eloise said.
“No,” I said, striving for normalcy in a voice that wanted to wobble into tears. “But the eggs tasted funny this morning. I should have tossed them.”
“There’s no egg worse than a bad egg,” Eloise said. “Well, anyway, I really wanted my two girls to go there, but it closed in the late eighties. By then everything was tennis camp or computer camp or Bible camp, or some ‘special’ thing. One of my friends’ kids is going to Indian culture camp in Virginia. ‘Indian’ as in Hindus and saris. I’m glad I got to Sherwood Forest before everything changed. One of the neatest things about it was that there was a boys’ camp right across the lake, Camp Silverlake. The boys came over for campfire two or three times a week with counselors out the kazoo, of course. But it was fun. I met my husband there. I always told him it should have been called Camp Silverback. Some of those kids were way ahead of their time. Lord, Thayer! Are you going to throw up again? You need to go to the doctor.”
“I’m fine,” I said, waving my hand at her. “But I think I’ll go get a Coke. I don’t want to taste egg all day.”
The nausea didn’t quite pass, and I went home early and stretched out on our bed. Flat on my back with a cold, damp cloth on my head, I decided that I might as well think about Camp Sherwood Forest again. Get it sorted out in my mind once and for all. Move past it and go on with my life. Physically I had gone past the summers I spent there, but somehow it seemed to me that when I looked back there was a chasm in my life that had swallowed those years and they simply weren’t available to me.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said to myself. “That’s most of my adolescence.” I had loved Sherwood Forest with all my heart. Not at the very first… predictably, most of the other girls were indeed Atlanta girls and had known one another since birth, and my shyness turned me nearly to stone. Even the few who tried to befriend me were met with what my grandmother Caroline called my ice princess demeanor. But somewhere in that frigid first week I turned out to be, totally to my own surprise, a really good horseback rider. Accomplishment of any kind is much admired among the young. After that the walls began to crumble.
I had never been around horses much. I didn’t have eight-year-old crushes on them, never, as many of my new acquaintances did, knew the names of every Kentucky Derby winner back to the first, never lobbied for a pony. I wasn’t afraid of them. I just didn’t think about them.
But my first time up on one of the campus’s well-groomed and trained horses, I felt as if I had melted into the saddle, was all a piece with the sleek breathing, living flanks my calves and thighs gripped. I tightened my legs. The horse, a small roan mare named Lady, moved off in a smart trot. I tightened more, joy beginning to flower in my chest. Lady broke into a rocking horse canter. I threw back my head and shouted aloud, wordlessly, in ecstasy. Lady picked up her stride. I had sailed with her over the smooth riding trails for perhaps a half mile before the thudding of hooves behind me penetrated my consciousness and I turned my head, hair stinging into my face. Luanne, our equestrian counselor, was coming hard behind me on a pinto, shouting, “Hold on, Thayer! Just hold on! I can get her to stop; just hold on!”
“I don’t want her to stop!” I shouted back, and Lady moved into her full gallop.
I could feel her rev up like an engine between my legs. The forest whipped by, with occasional flying glimpses of blue from the lake, and we ran until I could feel Lady’s muscles begin a fine, delicate trembling and I slowed her, and we turned around and walked back to the stables. On the way back we met two of the mounted counselors who had been pursuing us. After a good scolding for me and a rubdown and water for Lady, one of them said, “I never saw Lady move like that. Why didn’t you tell us you were a rider?”
“I don’t like to brag,” I said sweetly. Whether or not I have ever wanted to admit it, there is more than a little of my mother in me.
That night at the campfire, two of the prettiest and snottiest of the Atlanta girls, both a little older than me, came and sat with me in the circle.
“You’re the best rider I’ve ever seen at Sherwood, and I’ve been coming a long time,” one of them said.
“You looked like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, or something, with your hair flying all over the place,” said the other, who was known to be literary. “You’re pretty anyway, but on that horse you looked really beautiful.”
I ducked my head and mumbled something. That night, brushing my teeth, I examined my face closely. It had not changed; it was the face that had been looking back at me for years.
“What is ‘beautiful’?” I whispered to me, mouth full of foam. “How could I be beautiful? Nobody has ever told me that before.”
And then I remembered a little passage with my mother and grandmother the winter past, when I had come in out of the cold on a January weekend and taken off my cap, shaking my hair free.
“Pretty girl,” my grandmother Caroline said. “You are my pretty, pretty girl.”
“I don’t want her spoiled,” my mother had snapped, and I didn’t pay much attention to my grandmother, anyway. Weren’t grandmothers supposed to say things like that?
Now, though, in the cloudy, underwater camp mirror, something happened to my face. It was as if a light had been turned on behind it and my features seemed to rearrange themselves and slide into a different pattern. I didn’t know if it was beautiful or simply strange, but it was different. That frightened me, and I went to bed and stared longer that night out into the star-pricked blackness visible over the line of evergreens out our windows. Whatever else I was, I was also a maybe-pretty girl who could ride a horse, as Luanne said, like greased lightning.
That one moment and that first summer at Sherwood Forest got me through the next four years at Paley and countless weekends at home. My mother was rarely in a good mood for many of those weekends; Lily had forsworn the Hamilton boys and moved on to Lytton town boys, finally settling on an almost perfectly square high school fullback named Goose Willis. Nothing about him was gooselike; he had practically no neck at all, the little he did rising stubbly from enormous shoulders. He had a handsome face, but I thought he looked like a photo from a movie magazine pasted on a square butter box. It was not, however, Goose’s looks that upset my mother but his lineage. His eminently respectable mother worked as a teller at the Lytton Banking Company and went to our church, but it was widely put about that she had never married Goose’s father, who had disappeared before the unfortunate gosling was even hatched.
“I won’t have it,” my mother said over and over to Lily.
“Then I’ll run away and marry him,” Lily said calmly, and just before my last summer at Sherwood Forest, when I was seventeen and a counselor myself, she did just that. If my mother thought that event was the summer of her discontent, she had another thought coming.
That was the summer I met Nick Abrams.
Sherwood Forest had given me two real ambitions, where before there had been none. The first was related to my love of the stories, myths, and legends I heard about the campfire at night. Added to the delight of the myths my father had read to me in my early childhood, the sense of sheer story became an abiding joy. I knew that somehow I would make it a part of my entire life, though I did not yet know how.
The second was to be a Sherwood Forest counselor. Counselors at Sherwood Forest who oversaw our lives for two short summer months became demigoddesses to me. They were assured, competent, affectionate, and mostly very pretty. Or at least, they were to me. They had a kind of glamour, lent them by their exalted status and the lives they led. I had by that time become a world-class eavesdropper. I listened to them shamelessly when they talked among themselves, in the dining hall at mealtime and at night after they had tucked us into our double-decker bunks and pulled up the heavy, woolen blankets. I would pull my blanket almost completely over my head, breathing in its delicious smell of damp and smoke and pine needles. Even now that smell is nectar to me. My husband teased me a great deal about my favorite sce
nt being that of a wet blanket.
From under that blanket I heard the stories of very special lives: best friends, spend-the-night parties, boyfriends and semi-boyfriends and discarded boyfriends, dates and proms and evening dresses, whispered tittering tales of the backseats of cars and nighttime swimming pools and something mysterious and miraculous called the pill.
I thought that if I could only become a Camp Sherwood Forest counselor, that life would be mine, too. The fact that throughout my early teen years I knew practically no boys except the forbidden students at the Hamilton school meant little to me. If I became a counselor, the boys would appear. They did, after all, at Sherwood Forest: We all knew that the young male counselors from Silverlake across the lake spent many evenings with our own counselors in the recreation hall and often behind it, in the dark and silent woods surrounding the lake. If I was a counselor at Camp Sherwood Forest, there would be no one to tell me, as my mother did, that I was too immature to date and there were no boys of proper lineage in our immediate vicinity. When, the spring after my seventeenth birthday, the camp wrote asking me if I would consider being their counselor in charge of fireside evenings, I had had only four or five dates in my life and those had been an agony of shyness and social ineptitude. I finally figured my mother was right and accepted no more invitations. I got few, anyway.
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