The first evening at dinner we were introduced to the concept of what was called the “No, thank you serving,” an elaborately tendered yet invisible portion of whatever food it was we did not want to eat. I tried not to gag as the dishes were collected at the end of the meal and the leftovers scraped at the long table where we sat on benches. I didn’t see Jacqueline during those first twenty-four hours or so, busy as we were discovering the lay of the land, the nature of our individual tasks (sweeping the cabin, setting tables in the lodge, removing branches from trails). When we finally reunited, the very sight of me caused first her lower lip to tremble, then her eyes to fill, her body to shake, and finally she gave herself over to a weeping fit beyond all understanding. In me she saw the possibility of succor; in her I feared the weight of responsibility. This was my first major escape and what happened became the prototype of most of my other escapes: flight always included a ball and chain, a sense of responsibility, of a task left unfinished.
When Jacqueline was little, the summer sun tented on her face in the form of freckles. A jangling collection of kneecaps and elbows, she often appeared airborne. Sometimes for a lark she would pretend to be Helen Keller, clenching her eyes shut and poking her ears closed with her fingers. She’s always been gentle, given to whimsy. One time during elocution when we had to recite the phrase “the horns of elfland, faintly blowing” as if we ourselves were faintly blowing horns, she concluded by saying, “toot, toot,” and so she earned Mrs. Guild’s most imperious look of complete, nearly fatal, dismissal.
When someone once asked Jacqueline, “If I had no head and no arms and no legs, could I still go to second grade?” she said sure, and I remember berating her for not being more realistic.
It may have been the overwhelming realism of camp life, the absence of any pretense of elegance, that violated her sensibilities: the plop of the basic food groups on the plates at meals, the communal cheer, the ghastly stink of the outhouse.
Some of what repelled Jacqueline about Camp Sandy Brook also repelled me: the fluid boundaries between people and their bodies in a camp setting, the damp, fetid shower room. What I liked, which was simply lost on her, was the militaristic overlay, the predictability, the rigid schedule from reveille to taps, the precise and equitable division of labor, the songs and traditions and s’mores. I enjoyed visiting the Trading Post during strictly allotted times to buy stamps and postcards. I ended all my letters, “Happy Hunting Grounds.” During craft time I easily convinced myself that baskets made from Popsicle sticks were something special. The false and exaggerated rivalries between cabins seemed to me real and true and urgent. I wanted ours to win the talent show and the scavenger hunts and all those endless cabin inspections. Tone-deaf, I nonetheless sang with gusto at campfires the plaintive, “Peace, I ask of thee, oh river,” and the old standby:
Make new friends,
But keep the old.
One is silver,
And the other gold.
At camp, I became, well, famous. So great was my enthusiasm, so fulsome and nonstop my tributes to the fresh air and the scouting spirit, that when a lady from the local newspaper came to camp to do a feature story, she interviewed me as well as four other equally vocal campers. To this poor reporter, who, as a woman, was probably not allowed to cover real news (I still vainly search for her byline to this day: Enid Schwartzwald, where are you?), I chatted about the thrill of bag lunches on hikes and the opportunity to make new friends from other cultures, meaning two towns over. I praised the food, which on the day of her visit, according to her own account, consisted of “light scrambled eggs mixed with bacon, bread and butter, peanut butter, lettuce salad, tapioca pudding and milk.”
The more confidence and celebrity I gained, the more homesick Jacqueline got, unable to eat eggs and pudding, or to sleep, moping continually. She was delivered, tearful, to me several times a day by her counselors. My spirits sagged when I saw her approach, a thin, pitiful, almost eight-year-old girl with teeth even bigger than mine, racked by sobs.
The worst outburst occurred after we had gone to church on Sunday. For some reason, our home-base Catholic church was chosen by the camp as the one to attend. I floated in, wearing my Scout uniform, happy in my green and yellow anonymity. Jacqueline made what was for her the fatal error of scanning the congregation for familiar faces. Our mother! Her best friend Eileen! Christina and Maureen! (And what of our grandmother? Was she still sick, was she still alive?) You couldn’t talk in church, and when we filed out, there was no lingering. Later, Jacqueline would describe the feeling as nightmarish, liked being trapped on a screen inside a silent movie. Back at camp, the counselors encouraged her to give in to her tears, not necessarily the wisest strategy, in that she soon became hysterical. The more she carried on, the more she guaranteed that she would be brought to me, a quivering cargo.
I pretended to drip with sympathy.
“Poor little thing,” I cooed, but as soon as the counselors left, certain that my nurturing manner was just the tonic for her sinking morale, I seized her by the shoulders and read her the riot act:
“Shape up, pip-squeak.”
Rage filled my lungs, knotted my throat, clenched my hands. She was not human but flotsam, out to cramp my Camp Sandy Brook style. Couldn’t she see how busy I was, I demanded, arms akimbo, eyes glaring, as I gestured toward my orange crate with its stack of projects demanding my attention: a half-decorated beanie, an unfinished spatter painting, a wool octopus still in need of several limbs.
A practitioner of tough love before it had been invented, I gave her the stern dose of home she needed.
“You’re entering that talent show tonight whether you like it or not.”
She heaved her frail shoulders up and down, but at least she stopped crying.
“But,” she whimpered, “I have nothing to wear.”
“Yes you do,” I said. “You brought a bathing suit, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“You can be … a beauty queen. Just wear your bathing suit and the shoes you brought for church and walk on stage and turn to the judges and say,” and here I did my best imitation of Mae West, gleaned from old movies on TV, “‘Come up and see me sometime.’”
She gave me a baleful look.
“Let me hear you try.”
Jacqueline was nearly skeletal as a child and acted frightened of taking more than her share of anything, including oxygen. Out of her skinny self came the unlikely words, “Come up and see me sometime.”
And then, just to show me she was really trying, she added this extra touch: “Sonny boy.”
“Hey, that’s great, that’s really great. I’m jealous.”
“Really?” she said, brightening considerably.
“Really. If you keep this up, I’ll let you borrow my skort.” The skort was a combination skirt and shorts, a peculiar hybrid garment that enjoyed fifteen minutes of popularity that summer. “Now, come on. Chin up. You’ll be one cute cookie tonight.”
The minute I could see that she had calmed, I kicked her out of my cabin and sent her back to the Bluebird Division. “I’m sorry,” I said, affecting an air of busy distraction, “but now I have to double-sheet my friend Louise Vlash’s bunk”—how I loved that name, Louise Vlash!—“and then I want to finish making my homemade braided belt.”
When at last she shuffled her way across the stage that night, raising her head to utter her big lines, the audience clapped and stamped its pleasure, an overreaction that thrilled her.
On the last day of camp, my cabin mates and I exchanged addresses and written expressions of good luck. I possessed at the time an Autograph Hound, a stuffed animal covered with a light canvas fabric suitable for writing on. Mine was in the shape of a dachshund. My cabin mates signed it, claiming that we were the best campers and this was the best summer ever. We urged each other to write letters, and someone wrote on my hound what I considered the unspeakably clever exhortation “D-liver, D-letter, D-sooner, D-better.”
Back home the aimlessness of summer kicked back in. Sometimes I sabotaged my sisters’ diaries by writing fake entries, but in time even that lost its luster. We practiced setting our hair in pin curls and with orange juice cans, and we tried to start a fan club for Tab Hunter. I was big on memorizing commercials: “One out of every ten Americans is mentally ill” and “Save now for the college of your choice” and “Crest has been proven to be an effective decay prevention dentifrice when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.”
In late August our grandmother died, and I tried not to contemplate her absence any more than I did the absence of my father. This was out of what I now think of as a protective mechanism: loss, dwelled upon, can expand and strangle. But her image returned to me at unexpected times, as when I smelled her favorite food, lamb chops, cooking, or when I heard certain strains of music by Chopin, with its discreet merriment.
Fifth grade began with the creation of relief maps of the United States with a concoction of salt and baking soda and water, and camp soon faded from conscious memory. If you ask Christina or Maureen what they remember about our going away, they both say, “You were always going away and getting to do everything first. It just blended together.” Jacqueline maintains to this day that if camp was not the most traumatizing episode of her life, it was one of them.
Fifth grade was the last year that I remember playing, in that fierce way in which children’s play is its own work, almost a full-time calling.
In some ways, we raised ourselves, policing and admonishing each other as we dashed about in our unarchitected Keds, chomping on Bazooka, wielding what power we could due to superior strength or age. In a manner that is hard to imagine today, when our lives have too much asphalt to envision that much prairie, we roamed the outdoors, building forts, finding treasures like an old-tire swing deep in the woods, returning home at exactly six when the Congregational Church pealed its bells. We moved about in packs, tow-headed, cowlicked, sticky-fingered proof of American prosperity.
We foraged in neighbors’ gardens for tomatoes and radishes and cukes in season, picking them from patches without permission, wiping the dirt on our shirts, entering their strange, sweet, tart, juicy kingdoms. In the fall we gathered hickory nuts and cracked their shells with the heels of our shoes. In the spring we dipped our fingers into the buckets collecting sap from maples. In June we sucked the juice from rhubarb.
In an occasional flurry of civic duty, we put on plays in the Town Hall, the plot of which never varied, thanks to Shauna and Sharlene Brooks, who were born the exact same day as Prince Charles: “The Trouble with Twins.” The proceeds went to the Red Cross, which was either our favorite charity or the only one we’d ever heard of. We played King of the Mountain on the huge piles of dirt that accompanied the constant construction projects of the fifties.
Not all our fun was pristine. When houses on the common became empty, we would break into them, moving as silently and weightlessly as we could through the shadowed rooms, enjoying the felon’s deepest thrill of floating above and beyond the rules. We smoked pilfered cigarettes, whose real allure was not the corruption of our lungs so much as the joy of playing with matches. We made crank calls: “Is your refrigerator running? You better catch it.” We tried to get little boys to pee in front of us. We played in the cow pond several fields beyond the one in the back of our house, harvesting frogs for potential dissection. For sport, we chased cows with apples, hoping to ruin their milk, and we spat in the sap buckets of a mean neighbor.
We tormented Jimmy Parker, a one-eyed man who lived in someone’s shed, who dressed with odd formality each day in a suit, often festooned with a weed in the lapel, his best effort at a carnation. He roamed the town with a burlap sack in which he placed the grass he liked to pick while singing, “Here she comes, Miss America.” Jimmy Parker would be in a field by himself, picking through the blades, deep in conversation with an invisible companion. “Jiiimmmmmmyyyy,” we would shout and then hide, so that when he stood up from his labors we would be outside the range of his one good eye. He would turn around in a befuddled lunge. Just as he cocked his grizzled chin toward the source of the sound and moved toward it, another child, equally hidden, would shout his name, so that we forced him into a dizzying circle until finally we would get bored and run off. Why did we taunt Jimmy? Were we, as the nuns told us, driven to wrongdoing because we bore the mantle of original sin? Were we repaying the adults in our lives who abandoned us to our own resources, trusting too much in the blinkered somnolence of a small town? Or was our aggression merely fear in a different guise?
When people died in the fifties, their deaths were not usually discussed, but they did die, even the children. There was slim, blond Catherine, who had a wasting disease and who could be seen on Saturday afternoons making her confession, surely a negligible enterprise given what must have been her overall purity, accepting penance like the rest of us; and Terry, the boy from up the street who dressed up like a pilgrim and held Christina’s hand on stage all during one Thanksgiving pageant, stricken with leukemia, gone by the time of the pageant the following year. There was the Polish boy, run over on his bike by a truck while the family was on vacation: it was a matter of him or his sister, everyone said. She was on one side of the road, he was on the other, and the truck had to turn. One or the other. Something about this story held a particular terror for me. Children folded into the surf at crowded beaches, they got polio, and they climbed inside abandoned iceboxes and shut the door.
We were not daredevils, and so we were spared the worse fates. One late March day when the sun was struggling to be strong and we welcomed its silent caress, a gang went skating on the cow pond. The ice had a glassy blueness with an extra layer of liquid on top. Underneath it was bumpy and disappointing. It was especially unpleasant if you fell down because you soon felt the water soaking through your cloth parka and your wool leggings. We were sick of winter and wished for the disrobing of spring.
April love can slip right through your fingers
So if she’s the one
Don’t let her run away.
We sang the words of Pat Boone a.k.a. Mr. Dreamboat, after which Jacqueline broke into “I’m just a sweet old-fashioned girl.” We joined hands and spun around, building enough momentum so that the last person on line could be released into a glorious solo spin. We cracked the whip. When it was Jacqueline’s turn to be on the end, the usual cry of joy was canceled by a splash and a yelp. Her seamless glide had ended with a plunge. My sister’s head, swathed in a cap that tied beneath her chin, bobbed up out of the water. Every piece of ice she grabbed broke off.
“Stand!” someone shouted. “Stand! It’s not that deep.”
“No, don’t stand!” someone else shouted. “It might be quicksand.” That was always the rumor we entertained about the cow pond, partly to heighten its drama on summer days when surrounded by buttercups and violets. It had a puniness we found almost prissy.
Her head went under again. We lay down on the wet ice, imitating the rescue scenes we’d seen on films in Health, forming a line. One of the Brooks twins was closest to Jacqueline, and she grabbed her by the arm, helping her to slither onto the surface, with all of us yanking her to the nearby bank. Tearing off our skates as quickly as our fear would permit, we helped Jacqueline with hers and shoved her boots onto her feet. We half carried her back to the barn at the edge of our backyard while someone raced into the house to get her some dry clothes.
We make a pact among ourselves, a vow of silence.
We were used to independence, used to the idea that what we did from three to six on school days and on the weekends and during the summer was our business.
Drowning was the worst thing, but being caught not drowning could very well be next in line.
Chapter Seven
If Anyone Asks
“RAYMOND IS SO LUCKY, IT JUST SLAYS ME,” I SAID TO JACQUELINE JUST before the fall of 1958, when he had what I
came to think of as his Camp Leo luck all over again. I was wearing pedal pushers and pretending to faint from the injustice of it. Raymond was gearing up for yet another adventure. This time he was off to Mount St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Once again, I watched in envy as he packed his trunk.
Raymond was going to the same school our father had attended. He had a formula to follow: football, Holy Cross, medical school. The grown-ups kept saying, “Best thing for him … discipline … structure … male atmosphere … buckle down …”
Throughout his time in elementary school, Raymond’s behavior in the classroom resulted in our mother’s being called to the school for conferences. Raymond fidgeted in his seat too much. He bothered his neighbors. He did not stay on task. Back then she was still trying to fight back. We knew that, because whenever she went to those conferences, she wore a hat.
Raymond’s two years at Mount St. Charles were probably his last sustained good times.
“Dear Mother,” he wrote in a letter filled with cheer and goodwill, “I am glad to hear Uncle Dermot is on his way to Washington. I hope he has a good trip.
I’ll be waiting for the stamps to arrive. They will be welcome.
Why in the world did you get a blackboard? I know my chores well enough by now to tell you what they are: rake the leaves, mow the lawn, shovel the walk, empty the trash, bring up the wood, put the girls’ bikes away et cetera et cetera et cetera and so forth.
I bet Derm brings back a lot of news from Washington.
Give my love to Liz and the girls and Mike.
Another letter dispensed with preliminary chitchat and began with a triumphant roll call:
Religion: 81%
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