Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  Sleepy from their long days in the sun and logy with trying to digest the midweek meatloaf, talk in the cabin would turn speculative, the boys opining in turn as to what sort of cookie they’d be willing to eat despite its provenance. None, was the first choice, Oreo the second.

  But it was all just talk, Nathan suspected. A hot ticket to the oldest established, permanent floating, crap game of all time. By the end of his first month at camp, Nathan could just about distinguish bird shit from bullshit. The first dropped out of a clear blue sky, and the second was all around, although you could only smell it when you stepped in it. He was growing up, a disordered innocent no more. The word cookie gave him a hard-on, even when it was innocently meant, so that snack time was mortifying and the rest of the day swung between the dual poles of shame and arousal, his penis the dowel on which he hung.

  At the end of the summer, Molly Leibowitz began going out with an older boy named Max Binder. The two could be observed walking out beyond the shelter of the cabins and sports fields, to the forbidden no man’s land between the counsellor’s quarters and the woods where no kids were allowed, where bears roamed free and baseball rules prevailed. He’d never stood a chance with her, Nathan figured, and Binder was a good guy. Nathan was probably too young to have a serious girlfriend, anyway, and besides the cabin #3 boys would have ragged him mercilessly.

  It hurt, though, at first. Max and Molly would stroll by, holding hands, and Nathan would force himself to notice the girl’s awkward gait, her skinny legs. What had he seen in her? These rationalizations ought not to have worked and no one was more surprised than he was when they did. His father was a great one for boasting of his mind-over-matter capabilities and Nathan, it turned out, had inherited his father’s ability to assert his mind over what had once mattered to him. He didn’t know then, and certainly wouldn’t have cared, that he was exposing himself to certain contagion, to a habit of fatal indifference.

  But it would take him years to realize that love was the thing that had licked him, not because some other guy had made off with his girl but because, in the end, he’d decided that he’d never wanted her in the first place. As a result he’d grown into the habit of not wanting anything very much. Certainly nothing that he would have to fight for or anything he was in any danger of losing. In years to come he would finally understand that he had given up the possibility of love, however unrequited, however unlikely, for a Walter Mitty dream of Capture the Flag. Sure, love was the thing that had licked him, but not in the way the song meant, although the outcome was pretty much the same. Either way you looked at it, Nathan was just another victim.

  “Lord, how you’ve grown, Nate,” his mother exclaimed when his parents picked him up at the bus depot. Unaccountably, Nathan burst into tears. He wanted to go home but he had lost his compass. Home wasn’t his childhood bedroom anymore but nor was it the row of spunky bunk beds that comprised cabin #3, domain of the lost boys. Embarrassed, his father hustled the snivelling boy into the back of the family station wagon. “Let’s get you home, big guy.”

  Now, finally an adult, his childish knack for dissembling perfected, Nathan could pretend to enjoy the grand illusion of his various childish bereavements. For better or worse, Nathan the Camp Director had come home.

  “Whatever home means,” he said to Riva.

  “It’s where you live,” Riva helpfully explained. “It doesn’t mean anything. Meaning is a construct, anyway. Look at maple-glazed donuts. I mean, hello, bacon?”

  Did she mean to flaunt convention or was she merely referring to the inconstancy of pastry trends? In any case, Riva was taking the Mickey and taking it better than Nathan could, which he resented.

  It was difficult to know where Riva stood on most things. She was a scrappy labour lawyer, pugnacious and devoted to her clients. She thought of herself as a cultural anarchist, she told Nathan, occupying her free time by planning marches and raising funds, arranging petitions and sit-ins and vigils. The trouble was she had a disastrously ticklish funny bone and a talent for malarkey. Sometimes she put aside her high-minded pursuits and engaged in other kinds of interventions, writing fake letters to newspaper advice columnists or phoning in to radio talk shows and pretending to be a transgender teen named Ziggy. She said outrageous things and made outrageous claims but she just might have been who she said she was, was her ploy.

  How had the boy who’d once fallen in love with delicate, aristocratic Molly Leibowitz taken up with such a provocateur, Nathan sometimes wondered. An anarchist!

  It was an unanswerable question. In the intervening years, between the boy who’d bunked in cabin #3 and the man now whitewashing its lurid walls, grudges had accrued. All the dopey, bashful, terminally grumpy impulses of Nathan’s psychic cavern of inner dwarves had come to the fore. He had become a man of resentment. Even the twinge of arousal he still experienced from the word cookie, with its snack-associated memories, irked him.

  “Gunnars says boat’s coming at six sharp,” said Newman hopefully.

  “Nice move, McFly,” Nathan said. He had long ago acquainted himself with the movie, which like everything else in life, had not lived up to the buzz. Whatever Principal Strickland said and however Doc Brown grandstanded, some things just didn’t add up. You couldn’t accomplish an impossible task merely by putting your mind to it, history was not going to change, and, most importantly, you couldn’t go home again, whether home was thirty years in the past or three hours in the future where Newman was evidently projecting himself. It was clear that the young man wanted to be on that boat and off that island. Eight weeks was plenty. Eight weeks was four weeks too long and another two weeks even longer than that. Eight weeks of tossing kids off the dock and applying sunscreen to grimy napes and escorting boys to the outbuildings late at night when the buddy system was no longer viable. Eight weeks of hearing his name rhymed with Pooh-man.

  Nathan got where Newman was coming from. God knows he’d been there himself. But there was still something he wanted to do. It was the last thing he set his mind to every year before packing out. Before clicking off the island’s imaginary light switch and nailing down its shutters. Something he had to accomplish in order to feel the past flooding in like water in a basement, the old house awash in muddy runoff, sloshy with memory. Back in the city, Nathan lived in a sixth-floor apartment building largely occupied by students. Technically he was a student too, since he’d not yet submitted his dissertation on “Tragic Nostalgia” to the film studies department at the university where he laboured as a sessional instructor during term. The apartment building had a basement, of course, but it was the bailiwick of the janitor and, frankly, none of Nathan’s damn business.

  When Hunter and Newman left to wash up, cabin #3 filled with the voices that visited Nathan only when he was alone. They were the voices of campers past, the ever-young, ever-loved lost boys who had once pelted down these pathways and swung from their bunk beds and decorated the walls with their ardent, derisive vernacular. The voices spoke singly and in chorus, their words recognizable but their music plaintive and ungainly, like the poorly executed cover of a beloved song.

  Nathan listened closely to the rough boys’ voices and heard what he always heard: We’re never gonna die! We’re never gonna die! We’re never ever gonna die! This was the secret that all the kids shared: they were going to live forever. They were so young that their entitlement, their longing, their fury for life had not yet coincided with their mortality. It was sad because it was truthful without being true, which was pretty much the definition, Nathan reckoned, of tragic nostalgia.

  The voices eventually separated out so that Nathan could take attendance. Danny Rubin, leader of men, was there, and his best friend, Michael Shayowitz. Harry Naiman and Michael Segal were present and accounted for, also Leo Friedlander, Bernie Rubin, and Blaine Richardson. Last, possibly least, was that hobbledehoy, Nathan Miller, quieter than the others, subdued. There they were, the
eight boys of cabin #3, their gaping hearts and cracked voices. Their unkissed lips and luckless spasms and sticky fingers. That long ago summer was the cupboard in which they would spend the rest of their lives rummaging, searching for their younger selves amid the soiled winter jackets and mismatched gloves that nobody had gotten around to discarding.

  Molly, sweet Molly, where did you go? Now that she was gone, grown up, married with children of her own, she had become mortal (Nathan had heard that she was seriously ill, dying). Now that mind over matter had become only mind, an automatic tic, now that nothing mattered that much, Nathan was able to dip his toes in the lovely shallow goo of nostalgic regret.

  He lay down on the stripped mattress of his old bunk bed. Furthest from the door, darkest part of the room. There were two windows in the cabin but he couldn’t see much from where he lay, hardly anything. Once he’d woken in the night and crept, in his boy’s pajamas, to the window. The moon was behind a cloud, and the cloud was behind infinity. The face of God obscured.

  “Boys, boys,” Nathan murmured, but they raged on and on. Zombies, burgers, sex. The lousy food and how there wasn’t enough of it and the various bases of the sexual batting cage. And always and forever: the cookie, the cookie, the cookie.

  He must have fallen asleep because he woke to the sound of the motor boat launching itself at the island. The light outside the window was the syrupy amber that suspends time in its glaze like flies or memory. Nathan sat up and swung his feet over the side of the bed. The boys were silent, long gone. He knelt beside the bed he’d once slept in for two lonely months. Nobody bothered to shift the bunk beds when they whitewashed the walls and the space beneath them was grimy and neglected, with dust bunnies the size of tumbleweed and a dire collection of boxer shorts and socks from years gone by, each one growing its little grey pelt.

  At first he didn’t see it and then he did, the handprint coming into focus as the years fell away, ripped page by page from a calendar in some cornball movie (the kind he secretly loved), its plot advancing through spinning newspaper headlines and a steam train that plowed through the names of various capital cities. “Nathan Plays to Full House!” “Three Cheers for Local Boy!” “‘An Honour,’ says Miller!”

  It was only a blue handprint that some faithful, heartbroken Kilroy had left as a mark of his there-ness. Nathan had discovered it during his first week at camp in circumstances that included an empty-for-once cabin and a homesick kid sobbing his heart out, on his knees. Some nights he would wedge his arm between the bed and the wall, press his hand to the blue handprint. Other nights he’d turn his back on the whole thing: the wall, the darkness, the bogeyman under the bed, his aberrant yearning for a friend.

  When he looked back at his younger self he cringed at the wobbly, hurt boy he’d once been. The hand was part of that messy scramble, that yolky half-formed, unpocketable thing, but it was also entirely itself, a creature apart. By the end of the summer, Nathan’s hand was bigger than the other, and when he pressed his fingers against the blue hand for the last time, he had the strange sensation that it was pushing back. The hand shoving against his palm with the springy, over-inflated feel of a new basketball.

  Over the years the blue hand had shrunk. Or perhaps his own hand had grown. Who could say?

  Hand in hand, Nathan and his younger self lay still. Time passed — a minute? a week? — until Nathan the older, the flesh-and-blood man, the camp director, heard footsteps. Newman and Hunter were hurrying up the path toward him. They were coming to yank him on the bungee cord of his longing, his loopy nostalgia, back to the mainland and his turnstile life and his girlfriend, Riva, whom he maybe loved but who was not a girl to fit conveniently into somebody else’s story.

  Down on the dock, old man Gunnars was waiting by his launch. “You ready to go home, Nate?” he called. His hair was blowing in the wind and he was waving at Nathan with his whole body, impatient to be off.

  Fall

  Nine

  Tree of Life

  The year our sons turned thirteen and became men in the eyes of their people, if not their mothers, was the bar mitzvah year. The previous year our daughters had turned twelve and become women, so we were accustomed to the spin-cycle of emotions that thumped through us like wet laundry as we watched our suddenly tall daughters approach the bimah in their curled or straightened hair, their shiny glossed lips and darkened lashes, and their twitchy new ways of walking.

  Our lovely girls — how they sought to disguise hopefulness with irony, sincerity with irony, curiosity, kindness, and confusion: all with irony. How they pulled down their necklines and hiked up their skirts. Oh girls, girls! And a year later our sons would be called to the Torah, their ungovernable voices cracking between notes, and their Adam’s apples jerking behind the constriction of their tight collars and sloppy, Windsor-knotted dignity. As we watched, we wondered what sudden switch had been thrown to make them surge with those invisible currents of boy voltage and nervous energy. Oh boys, slow down!

  Our children were rosy with excitement or pallid with nerves as they kissed the fringes of their prayer shawls for the first time and allowed their mothers to wrap them in the blinding white silk with its gold embroidery or silver thread. And as we smoothed the prayer shawls around our sons and daughters, we blinked away the tears that doubled our vision for a moment. For the act of tucking and swaddling the shawls reminded us of wrapping our infants in their receiving blankets, and the sound of the years crashing against each other like waves against rock, brought the salt water to our eyes. Every girl and boy was beautiful — not just in the hearts of their parents but in all our eyes. We had known these children since they were born.

  Some of them had been homely babies with an ancestral line in noses, or capacious ears they’d have to try to grow into; some had been creamy little puddings you could eat with a spoon. Some discoursed like philosophers before they could walk and some tottered about on shaky baby-legs for months without blowing a wet syllable from the pucker of their raspberry-shaped mouths. Some were scrawny as plucked chickens and some had dimpled knuckles and pinchable cheeks. Some bubbled like tiny kettles when we nuzzled their palms or pressed our faces into their warm, humming tummies; some turned red as baby-rage when we petted them. Some smiled in their sleep, their lips parted in the eternal Yes please! of language-less dreaming; some puckered their mouths into a perfect O, as if practicing for a lifetime of silent refusal: No! Not now! Go to the dogs!

  “Pixies and thugs!” exclaimed Mrs. Harvey Silverstein, it being her long-held conviction that all babies fall into one or the other camp. But they were our babies, and we loved them all. In truth we knew that Mrs. Silverstein loved them too. She was merely exercising her talent for observation and her librarian’s fondness for organizing the world into efficient categories. The year that our daughters turned twelve was unseasonably cold, prompting us to retreat indoors, to our weather-sealed houses, and from there to burrow even further until we had taken up residence among the upholstered furniture of our memory rooms. The past played forever on these walls, in jerky spasms of colour without words. The only sound was the hum of the projector and our own noisy thoughts.

  There was Leo Friedlander at Rose Epstein’s sixth birthday party, pulling the pigtails of all the pretty girls whose mothers would comfort them, saying, “If he pulls your hair he likes you, darling.”

  “What nonsense!” Leah Silverstein would later exclaim. “Inflicting pain is not a sign of affection. We’re preparing our girls for a lifetime of abuse.”

  “Pshaw,” said Mrs. Harvey Silverstein, which was the closest she ever came to chastising the daughter she loved and disapproved of. Little Leah, the oldest of three sisters, had been a thug baby (the other two were pixies, naturally), and now she was a malcontent, and her mother still couldn’t get over the fact that Leah needed a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

  The invisible projector whirred on, threading our memor
ies through the jerky sprockets of our collective past. There was little Molly Leibowitz at her first piano recital, tripping over the opening chords of “Unforgettable” before suddenly — you guessed it — forgetting everything she’d learned in three years of piano lessons. How she wailed and banged her head down upon the keys. We watched as Harry Naiman and Bernie Rubin and Nathan Miller ran in circles outside the community centre, a litter of puppies chasing a soccer ball, while the dads on the sidelines yelled, “C’mon guys, pass! Pass!”

  In spring the kids were distracted by the yellow dandelions that buttoned down the rumpled green jacket of the field, and in fall they whirled with the wind and the leaves and their own wayward, wind-up impulses. The leaves flipped from green to yellow to red. They were the traffic lights of our disordered longing and we watched, transfixed, as the seasons stopped, then started up again.

  “Oscar? Really?” Leah Silverstein had exclaimed thirteen years ago at her nephew’s bris. We agreed with her but were too polite to comment. Besides, who were we to judge? We had been given the anglicized names of the ancestral dead by our Yiddish-speaking, immigrant parents, but in the intervening years we had shrugged off our past and named our children hopefully, reclaiming the black, fire-scorched inscriptions of an earlier time.