by Peter Seth
“OK!” I said, pointing him to another place. “Then go over there and go in those trees!”
“That’s gross! Someone will see.”
“Long Island Bus Number Two!” called Harriet’s bullhorn. “First call for Long Island Bus Number Two!! Blue tags only!”
“Then go in your pants!” I roared at the kid. I had no more time for kids and turned away from him to go find Rachel.
And there she was, looking for me! Our eyes met at the same time, and she rushed straight to me. She was rain-soaked and beautiful, blinking away the tears and raindrops from her eyes.
“I’ve been crying all morning! I’m all cried out!” she said, laughing and crying as she fell into my arms. We kissed deeply. I heard some woo-hoos from somewhere, but I didn’t care. And I don’t think Rachel did either.
“Bus Number One for Westchester! Red tags only!” went the bullhorn call. “Bus Number One for Westchester!” It started to rain harder.
Rachel broke for air. “You promised to keep the summer from ending.”
“No!” I tried to cheer her. “This will be better! I’ll call you tonight, and I’ll see you in three days! We’re going to do everything right.”
“I believe you,” she said passionately, trying her hardest to show me that she agreed.
“Second call for Long Island Bus Number One!”
“Oh, no!” she said, “That’s me, and I’m a bus monitor! Oh, God, I knew this would happen. I gotta go!”
“That’s OK,” I said. “We can do this!”
She started to drift away from me. “Promise you’ll love me forever,” she said. “No matter what happens.”
She kissed me once more with perfect lips, then pushed away from me.
“I promise!” I said, waving goodbye with a hand that seemed to belong to someone else as she turned and ran away.
And then she was gone, disappeared into the crowd. Just like that. Really gone. Our perfect summer ended, right then and there. And in some ways, I might just as well have ended my life, right then and there.
Then it hit me: “No matter what happens.” Why did she say that? What did she mean? Was she already fatalistically kissing us goodbye? I wanted to run after her and ask her what she meant, and to take it back, but that was impossible. I had to go back and make sure that all the Doggies got onto their rightful buses.
And they did. At least, when I got back to the Bunk 9 line, no one was there, so I presumed that they all got onto their buses. I guess even the Very Fat Doggy found his way back from the bathroom and onto a bus.
The first bus in line pulled away . . . and then the second and the third. Those of us left behind stood and waved. I couldn’t figure out which bus was Rachel’s, so I waved at them all. They were all the same: silver and smelly and gone.
Esther from the Main Office, the little old grey owl, came up and stood next to me, waving a green-and-white Mooncliff pennant as the last bus finally left.
“Another summer,” she chirped. “Shot to hell.” Which made me laugh, coming out of the mouth of this tiny old lady. And because she might have been right.
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For the rest of the day, Dale worked us hard, us being the dozen or so counselors who stayed back to work Close-Down. Fortunately the rain soon stopped and the sun came out, making things slightly easier. But we traded rain for humidity, so the work was still quite strenuous. We started doing the reverse of all the jobs we did during Orientation: collecting, hauling, and storing the mattresses and bedsprings; rolling up and storing the tennis nets; taking all the boats and floats out of the lake and putting them into dry dock; etc. Of course, we didn’t do all those things on the first day; it was a full three days of heavy labor, and we earned every penny we got.
By the end of that first day, the only thing I could think of was getting to the pay phone outside the Main Office by 8:00 p.m. to call Rachel, just as I had promised. On our first night apart, I refused to be late for our first phone call.
And I wasn’t. I was exhausted and muscle sore, but I wasn’t late. Dale gave us time after a back-breaking afternoon of hauling, scraping, sanding, and painting all the rowboats and canoes for a late swim in the perfectly placid, empty lake. The lake – in fact, the whole camp – was somewhat weird, empty of people. It felt haunted and somehow just wrong.
I got up to the Main Office well before 8:00. I could see the clock on the wall through the window. The rest of the guys had gone into Bailey’s after eating dinner in a corner of the big, mostly empty Mess Hall, but I begged off. I suppose I could have called her from Bailey’s pay phone, but that would have been noisy and I might have missed 8:00. Besides, I didn’t want to go to Bailey’s without her.
I dialed Rachel’s home number, reading carefully from the piece of pink stationery she had written it on, even though I had already memorized it. I practiced what I was going say if her mother answered, how bright and happy I’d sound. I’d say, “Hello, is Rachel there?” But I wished that Rachel herself would answer; I hoped that she’d be waiting by the phone for my call. I cleared my throat and went over in my mind the things I wanted to say before I realized that no one was answering. I let the phone ring eighteen times, I think, when I stopped counting the rings. Then I hung up.
OK, she wasn’t home. Her mother – or her father – probably took her out to dinner. On her first night back, that made sense. In the wake of their divorce, I hoped that at least one of them would be nice to her.
So I waited there for a while. I’d give her/them some time to get back from their dinner; it was still on the early side. I could wait. I had waited eighteen-plus years for Rachel, a few more minutes wouldn’t kill me.
I called four more times until almost 10:00 when I figured it had gotten too late to call. I know that if the phone rang in my parents’ house after 10:00, they would think that it was some kind of emergency. (“Who died?” I can just hear my mother saying.) So after thinking it back and forth – what would Rachel want me to do? – I gave up and went back to my bunk. It was cold by then. Nothing to do but go back and crash, and rest up for tomorrow: hauling mattresses and counting days.
I thought about trying her number again early the next morning, after a super early breakfast in the Mess Hall. But I couldn’t call the Princes’ house at 8:00 in the morning anymore than I could have called at 10:00 the night before. I wanted to make a good first impression on her mother, no matter how lunatic or hard to please she might be. Every action I was going to take would be designed to make things better for Rachel and me.
Dale worked us all day, taking down the beds, removing and storing the window screens, and after that, clearing out a meadow near the campsite on the far side of the lake. As a “treat,” Dale had a couple of the few remaining workers in the kitchen bring us a picnic lunch in a motorboat. (It was really so we could keep working straight through the afternoon, without going back to the Mess Hall for lunch.) But what I really wanted was a phone. By the end of an afternoon of clearing brush in the sun, I was half agreeing with Rachel – To hell with the money.
They ferried us back across the lake in the late afternoon in two boats. We were all pretty tired and sunburned.
“Well,” muttered Big Alby as we stepped out onto the boating dock, “Stanley is sure getting his last nickel’s worth of sweat out of us.”
Nobody disputed him.
Like clockwork, I was up at the pay phone by the Main Office just before 8:00. Dale had taken pity on us and sent someone into town for some six-packs.
“This is only because Stanley and Jerry aren’t around,” Dale told us, sucking back a Rolling Rock on the front porch of the Mess Hall where the beers were in a big blue plastic tub of ice. “But you guys are earning it.”
“One more day,” he said. “Then, back to reality.”
I admit that I was a little beer-buzzed when I dialed Rachel’s number, lea
ning against the outside wall of the Main Office. I still had the pink paper folded tightly in my pocket, but I already had the number in my brain. Tonight, I was ready to let it ring forever.
Instead, before the first ring ended, someone picked up.
“Hello?” she answered. It was Rachel.
“Thank God!” I said.
“You don’t believe in God,” she replied.
“I know, but if I did, I would be thanking Him now.”
She laughed, “Oh. Wait a second!”
There was about a minute of silence. I didn’t know if Rachel covered the phone with her hand or put me on hold, but there was no sound for a long time. Then –
“You have no idea how much I’ve missed you,” she exhaled with relief.
“Yes, I do,” I shot back. “I called you all last night and –”
“Oh, I am so sorry, baby!” she said. “My mother dragged me out to dinner with Herrrrb.” The scornful way she said his name almost made me laugh, but I didn’t.
“That’s OK,” I said. “I just wish I had known that –”
“I didn’t know they were going to take me out!” she said. “You think I wanted to go out with them? I was dying when it was eight o’clock, and I knew you were calling.”
“I was calling!” I assured her.
“I knew you were,” she said. “I felt you. You know that.”
We talked a while longer – fortunately, I’d remembered to bring a pocketful of coins. She told me how difficult her mother was being, and how she hadn’t even seen her father but was dreading it. I gave her continuous sympathy, trying to pick up her spirits and look on the bright side of things. I hated to hear her sound upset and edgy.
“I don’t know when she’s watching me, or when she’s not watching me,” Rachel whispered. “But I’m trying to make the best of it, like you said, and not get into fights with her. And I’m trying to set up the dinner, so she can meet you so we can go out. I can’t wait to get some wheels so I can get out of here. But I have to handle things very carefully.”
“You will,” I assured her.
Finally she said, “I have to go. She’s nagging me to get off the phone.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “I should go too.”
“You don’t want to talk to me anymore?” she asked.
“No,” I laughed, “I was just saying that because you had to go. I could talk to you forever.”
She laughed a little and said, “Good answer.”
“But really,” I lowered my voice, trying to sound seductive. “I wish we could do more than talk.”
“Stop that!” she giggled. “Wait till you get home.”
“I can’t wait,” I said. “One more day. Two more days! I’ll be home, day after tomorrow. Then we’ll be in The Zone again.”
“The Zone . . .” she repeated with that musical thrill in her voice. “But call me tomorrow night,” she continued. “Please.”
“At eight?” I asked.
“Eight o’clock. I’ll be here,” she said. “Waiting. I promise.”
Her voice sounded warm and reassuring, so that when I hung up the phone, I stood there under the floodlight, surrounded by the cold night, thinking, OK! This isn’t so bad. I can get through another day easily because tomorrow night I’ll be talking to Rachel. And I’ll be one day closer to her.
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I got through the next day, moving the rowboats and canoes into dry dock, now that the paint had dried, but when I called Rachel’s home at 8:00 that night, there was no answer. Nothing but the now-familiar sound of the phone ringing and ringing and ringing in my ear.
“This seems to be a pattern,” I said out loud to no one as I hung up the pay phone outside the Main Office. On this last night of Close-Down, everybody had gone into Bailey’s one last time. Now I wish I had gone with them.
I called every ten minutes for the next hour and then gave up. But I did the right thing, trying that long. That is what mattered: doing the right thing, not necessarily the result.
I made one last call to my home, telling my parents when I’d be there the next day. Probably in the afternoon, but I was dependent on Sal, the waterfront head, who was driving me home. (I was lucky; he had a big enough truck, an El Camino, so that he could take all my stuff.) My mother was embarrassingly overjoyed to hear that I was coming home tomorrow and promised me a big “welcome home” dinner out.
“Anything you want,” she said. “Fried clams at Howard Johnson’s. Anything!”
I said that I’d think about it and hung up. I stood there and listened to the crickets in the dark. I watched the moths hit against the floodlight over the door of the Main Office and thought about all that I had waiting for me at home. The good and the very good.
I was too restless to go back to my bunk – I was mostly packed anyway – so I walked around the Moon-shak one last time. It was fairly dark, but there were a few lampposts around the campus, and the sky was moon bright, so I could see where I was going. I made one long, slow circuit of the campus. I walked by the Rec Hall, all dark except for a floodlight over the big rear door. That’s where I first talked to Rachel after the square dancing. I remember that she was a little suspicious of me; she was suspicious of every boy, I think. But I’d made a good-enough impression. It was in the basement of the Rec Hall, by the Snack Shak, where I first saw her, so pretty and mysterious across the room. Marcus said that she would tease me to death. Maybe she did.
I went by the net-less volleyball courts and the target-less riflery range. It was too dark to walk to the Quarry, but I thought of all our good times there. I walked around to all the places where we talked, all the places where we made love – whether physically or with our words. I heard some laughter from the staff house, behind the kitchen. There were still a few people around, but I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone. I had had enough of other people for a while.
I walked down the long slope to the lake and sat on a circular bench that was built around the trunk of huge oak tree; everything else had been put away. I watched the moonlight shimmer off the rippled surface of the water, recalling how early in the summer I baited my trap for her in the rowboats with Gatsby. Not that I’d needed it, old sport, but I think it might have helped at the time. I would have gotten her anyway. We were fated for each other. I guess you would have to add to that: in both good ways and bad.
All the times we sat together by the lake, dreaming of the future, and now the “future” was upon us. I was ready to go home, more than ready. I had great things waiting for me: a beautiful girl and the beginning of an Ivy League education. Everything I ever wanted, and more. I admit that I was nervous, but I was hopeful, too, trying to think only positive things. I know it sounds corny, but this is exactly what I was feeling. Isn’t that the point of this whole exercise: to be truthful? Do you want me to make up evil and dark thoughts just because of what happened later?
It was getting colder by the open water, and a little spooky. The wind had picked up for no reason, and the surface of the lake flickered with moonlight. The branches of the big tree shuddered, shaking all the leaves like tiny bells. I thought that I heard the rustling of an animal in the bushes directly behind me. I turned quickly to look, but there was nothing to see. It could have been my imagination. Or not. Who knows, it could have been ghosts – ghosts of other Mooncliff lovers, before Rachel and me. Ghosts of lovers from summers past, whose love died in the autumn but somehow came back and lived on here. Winter ghosts. Poe ghosts. Maybe when everyone was gone, they were still around, not having to dodge Jerry and Harriet, or whoever were the Jerrys and Harriets in their day. Now they could spend all the time they wanted being together, unlike Rachel and me. We were always under the threat of someone seeing us, or having to get back to the bunk by such-and-such a time. We were never free. That was the challenge of the future: How would we be together when we
were really, finally “free?”
I zipped my jacket all the way to my throat, turned up my collar, and hustled back to my empty bunk. I wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow would be the end of the greatest summer of my life and the beginning of the greatest fall.
Part II
The Fall
Record of Events #16 - entered Wednesday, 6:36 A.M.
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The first thing I did when I got home from the eight weeks at Camp Moon-shak – after taking my things out of Sal’s El Camino, thanking him, carrying them inside, and kissing my waiting mother on the cheek – was call Rachel. I walked into our house, which wasn’t very big to begin with, and it seemed small and dark, compared to the expanses of the summer. The summer was all about the big outdoors; even the indoors were big. Now there I was, back home, and things felt different. Cramped.
I went directly into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed. Nothing had changed in the kitchen: same table and chairs, same pots and pans, same smell. You would think that with having their only son away for two months my parents might have changed something, but no, everything was exactly the same. By the time I finished turning over these thoughts, I realized that the number had rung several times and nobody was home at Rachel’s. I slowly hung up the phone on the wall in the kitchen: the same phone, on the same wall. I was somewhat disappointed that she wasn’t home, but there was nothing I could do about that for the moment.
The second thing I did when I got home from the Moon-shak was sleep thirteen straight hours. I know that I had all these plans – lists of things to do, stuff to buy, friends to see – that I went over and over in my mind during the long drive back with Sal, but once I got home, all the tiredness of the summer descended into my body. Sleeping in my own bed, in the cocoon of my own dark bedroom upstairs, made me realize that I hadn’t gotten a really good night of sleep all summer. Sleeping in a giant, drafty bunk with a dozen drooling Doggies and Stewie too, with raccoons walking just outside and coyotes howling in the distance, isn’t the way to get a good night’s rest. There were no curtains on the windows, no privacy, no quiet for eight weeks. No wonder I was bone-dead tired.