“Yeah, me, too,” I said, and snuffed mine out.
“Okay, stupid idea,” Philip admitted. “Let me try another one. Can I kiss you?”
He’d asked first. I never expected this. I had no idea what to say. I mean, the answer was yes, but could I say it?
“Um...”
Just then, Stacie Hofheimer, wearing the pants I’d broken in for her on Katahdin, grabbed me by the shoulders and implored breathlessly, “Mrs. Rosen, when you see your grandson, tell him not to be a haberdasher,” then ran off.
“Do you know what she was talking about?” Philip asked?
I did. I knew exactly what she meant. It was a line from one of my favorite movies. Philip and I looked around the corner and saw a whole group of Junior Counselor girls who’d formed a crowd at the base of a tall evergreen tree. One of them pointed toward the top. “Life is up there,” the group’s leader shouted. “And life always matters very much.”
“The Poseidon Adventure?” Philip said. “I loved that movie!”
“Me, too. I’ve seen it three times.”
(That’s where my ten dollars of Bat Mitzvah money went.)
“J’ever read the book?” Philip asked. “In the book, the kid dies.”
“I know exactly the part where I’d die,” I told him. “It’s where they have to swim underwater to the engine room. Y’know, where Gene Hackman goes first, but gets stuck on some metal and only Shelley Winters can save him?”
“Of course. And look, I think that’s the part the girls are up to.
Sure enough, sixteen-year-old Ellen Wasserman, the Junior Counselor who’d gotten impetigo first, was playing the Shelley Winters role.
“I guess I’m not the champion of the Women’s Swimming Association anymore,” she gasped.
I was so jealous, and not just because she got the good part. I was jealous of all these girls and their ability to burst into this impromptu performance inspired by a hurricane. Watching these girls joyously running around in the rain, I started to worry about a lot of things: that I would never be that clever, that I would never have such close friends, that I would never know how to have that much fun.
Between the Legacies and the Losers, I had thought I was one of the latter, but now I worried that I was my own group, only not a group at all, that I was, in fact, unique, the squarest of pegs, forever on the outside looking in. I’d spent much of this summer watching other people having a good time and now I feared I would never be more than an observer, doomed to living my life in the third person singular. Philip was still waiting to kiss me. I had to do this; it was now or never.
The movie and the kiss were cut short by a gunshot. It came from the rifle of Mr. Thornton, who lived across the street and ran the only other general store in town. On the borderline of Skowhegan and Hinckley, Thornton’s was the store with the pornographic matchbook covers (“Strike here, baby”) that all of the boys coveted. Fed up with the endless rain, Mr. Thornton was not about to spend another night cooped up in his little cottage with the white picket fence counting the droplets dripping down the gutters.
Unable to come up with a better diversion, he’d stepped outside, thanks to his right to bear arms, to see if he could hit the swinging “Skowhegan Junior High” sign. The fact that people were around was of no consequence. When the second shot grazed the sign and ricocheted off the tree, the few remaining Poseidon passengers abandoned ship and ran inside the gym. I ducked down in the wet grass to see if he’d nail it on the next shot.
“Mindy! Are you crazy? What are you doing?”
Philip was peering out from a nearby doorway, motioning for me to come back inside. A couple more shots rang out and then we heard a different sound.
“I think he’s reloading,” Philip called out.
“Are you sure?”
“Not really,” he yelled. “What do I know about guns?”
Good enough. I ran for the doorway, slipping on the wet grass and inadvertently falling into Philip’s arms, which might have been a good damsel in distress tactic for someone else, but I outweighed him by at least twenty pounds. I would never have planned this move.
We were lying on the floor together, in the threshold.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m kind of wet.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Then I’m fine.”
Philip lifted his head and put his lips on mine which, having never done this before, I had to assume was the beginning part of a kiss. I closed my eyes only to realize I had a desperate need to know if Philip’s eyes were closed, too, so I opened mine to look. His were wide open. We were staring at each other, eye-to-eye, nose to giant nose, less than an inch apart.
If only I had paid more attention to the soap operas Grandma Gussie watched when she stayed with us. I’d always ignored the TV when her “stories” were on, dismissing them as dull and irrelevant, unaware that I was only a few years away from college dorm life and that whole Luke & Laura thing around which a generation of students would schedule their classes.
I was pretty sure you were supposed to keep your eyes closed, so what was he looking at? I couldn’t bear to know, so I closed mine again. And then the tongue thing happened and suddenly I wasn’t me any more. I was Benjamin Franklin with the key and the kite, jolted by the discovery of electricity. Forget my Bat Mitzvah. This was “The Day”, the day I became a girl with a boyfriend. My feelings of terror gave way to elation. I was making out with a boy. I was in the club at last.
And then, God help me, in the very next instant it all went horribly wrong. Perhaps I wasn’t doing it right. Perhaps he wasn’t doing it right. Because if we were, how come, when I thought about it, I wasn’t enjoying it? Why was this not the amazing romantic thing I’d been conditioned to dream of ever since my first exposure to an animated movie with the princesses in the gowns who pined after frogs and swept floors for evil queens? Why was this even worse than slow dancing, unfulfilling and unpleasant and reminding me of something else, of something repulsive, of that time we visited my parents’ friends in Morristown and their schnauzer, Cleo, licked the inside of my mouth?
I opened my eyes again, to look for the answers. Was this what kissing was? Was this how it was supposed to go? Thirteen and-a-half long years for this? I may as well have been waiting for The Great Pumpkin.
Why is nothing ever what it seems it should be, I wondered, and how much longer do I have to keep this up?
This was what I wanted to know: when will this end? This kiss, this unpleasant moment, this whole hideous adolescence? Will it always be this way? Will I always be this way? Are you there, Judy Blume? It’s me, Mindy. Hello? Is this thing on?
Philip drew back and looked at me with a contented smile. He had no idea we were not in the same moment, the same time and place, maybe not even on the same planet. He stood up and motioned for me to follow him inside, but I waited until he was well ahead, to make it look like we weren’t walking in together.
Back inside the gym, the slow dancing continued. Dana was in Aaron’s arms and he was whispering something in her ear, the kind of thing I would never hear if I couldn’t grow up and handle being close to a boy. I envied their maturity as I made a beeline for the girls’ room, to hide, entering in time to see nursing student Gita Isak remove the stitches from Mindy Plotke’s head with the tweezers from her Swiss army knife.
The hurricane was a washout, never reaching a dangerous level, but there were floodwaters. They came from Dana Bleckman. Aaron had not been whispering sweet nothings; he’d been breaking the news to Dana that he had a girlfriend back home. This was just a summer fling to him, meaningless and now over. “I hate him, I hate him!” Dana wailed. “Oh, God, I love him, how could he do this to me?” I understood her turbulent back and forth emotions only too well, except that mine were all self-inflicted.
Jim Norbert dropped by early the next morning to let us know our camp was safe and no damper than usual. It was time to go back, to pack up our stuff, to attend
one last campfire so we could say our farewells, and then to leave for good.
It occurred to me that we hadn’t seen Saul Rattner since we’d arrived at the junior high. Perhaps he’d gone back and stayed at camp, prepared to face disaster, the way Captain Leslie Nielsen went down with the Poseidon. Or maybe he and the Mrs. had high-tailed it into Bangor, rented a suite at the Hilton and gotten drunk on champagne, paid for with our parents’ hard-earned dollars. In any event, he had not endured the hardships of the night at the gym.
On the van ride back, a couple of Junior Counselor girls started up the theme song from The Poseidon Adventure. Yes, they were right, There’s Got to be a Morning After, but the morning after this one, I’d be heading back to New Jersey.
to the tune of
Did You Ever See a Lassie?
“It vas vinter in the valley green
And the vind blew ‘gainst the vindowpane
And the vomen in the vaudeville
Wrote vilosophy from the vestibule...”
17
THERE ARE COMPETING THEORIES ON HOW BEST TO PACK A TRUNK. Back at Camp Cicada, in the mountains of New York, there were rules for everything from the moment you arrived to the moment you left. They even had rules for how to pack, enforcing a method of rolling clothing into cylinders and pressing the pieces together side by side. The problem with this system was that my mother had shown me a different way—her way—a complex method of layering, ingenious in its Tupperware-like ability to burp out excess air. If I packed my mother’s way, the inspecting Cicada counselor would have dumped out my trunk and made me start over. If I packed their way, I risked my mother’s wrath upon arriving home. For the last two summers, I’d opted for the wrath. I didn’t have to worry what the Kin-A-Hurra packing rules might be.
“Just shove it all in,” Autumn Evening yelled out. “Jump up and down on it until the stupid thing closes.”
“What if the trunk breaks or my foot goes through the top?” asked Hallie. “It’s only made of cardboard.”
“We’ll tie some rope around it,” Maddy said, packing up the one last flashlight she hadn’t lost. “That’s what I did last year.”
This was the Camp Kin-A-Hurra way of doing things: whatever makes everything fit.
Dana didn’t want to go to Boys’ Side that last evening for the closing campfire, but Maddy and my bunkmates insisted it just wouldn’t be the same without her. There was a lot of concern that she wouldn’t be able to bear seeing Aaron one more time, that she wouldn’t be able to handle the despair and anguish brought on by his betrayal.
No one had any idea that I, too, was terrified of attending the campfire, of having to see Philip, having to avoid him, or worse, having to explain why I hid from him the night before, after our kiss. No one knew there was a good chance that on this last night of camp, we would test the theory of whether someone could literally die of embarrassment.
“Dana, we need you to sing,” Autumn Evening insisted.
“But if you want to stay back,” I offered, “I’d be happy to keep you company.”
Dana sighed, “No, I’ll go.”
A real trooper, she slung her guitar over her shoulder and marched down the front porch steps for one last journey around the lake.
A final surprise was waiting for us when we got to Boys’ Side. On this last night of camp we would be inaugurating a new campfire site. Our few past campfires had been held behind the maintenance shack, in a clearing in the woods, with a view of some old rakes and tractor parts. But this new campfire site was beautiful, a patch of empty land situated on the water’s edge with an unobstructed view across to Girls’ Side. It was the site where the Wolverines’ bunk had stood. Made sense. We already knew stuff could burn here.
The way I saw it, I had two choices for how to spend the evening. I could head straight for the campfire to see if there would be marsh-mallows or anything else with s’more potential, or I could hang towards the back and try to glide unnoticed into the boys’ social hall or the dining hall or anywhere I wouldn’t be spotted until the whole thing was over. I didn’t see Philip so I went with a third choice: first looking for food and then thinking about hiding.
The fire burned against a backdrop of the most perfect sunset we’d seen all summer as Jacques and Wendy announced it was time for the annual awards presentations. “The first award,” Wendy called out, “is for Worst Hiking Accident.” This went to Mindy Plotke who hobbled forward to accept her prize, a gold spray-painted box of Pep cereal. Chip Fink won for Most Mosquito Bites. Biggest Hair was a tie between Ellen Byron and Howard Nemetz, and the Wolverines were announced as Worst Dressed After the Fire. All of these announcements were met with some applause, some razzing and some general ennui. “And now,” said Wendy, “the last award goes to Mindy Schneider.”
I couldn’t tell if my heart stopped or was beating ten times faster. What was I being singled out for? Biggest Nose? Worst Kisser? Most Unimproved Camper?
“This,” Wendy said as she motioned for me to stand, “is just for you. A combined swimming and softball trophy we like to call ‘Best AND Worst Athlete’.”
There was some applause and some razzing and some general ennui as I walked up toward the campfire to accept my prize.
“Thanks a lot,” I sighed with relief, as I accepted my still-wet gold box of old cereal.
This was definitely something I could live with, and at my father’s suggestion, I would later include the “Best” part on my thirteen college applications.
So delighted was I by this recognition, that I momentarily forgot I was on the lookout for Philip. I plunked myself back down in the midst of my bunk and we cheered on Dana, who was next on the program. Despite her pain, she confidently strode up to the campfire and led us through a bunch of songs, all designed to reduce to tears as many girls as possible. Carole King’s Been to Canaan succeeded. I’d never understood this back at Camp Cicada, teenage girls bawling their eyes out like they’d had the time of their lives and would never see each other again. Camp Cicada and its myriad of rules were oppressive—what was there to miss? And it’s not like they couldn’t get together during the winter. Those horrible girls all lived within fifteen minutes of each in the Five Towns section of Long Island. “See you at camp next summer”? How about, “See you at the mall in Great Neck next Saturday?” But here at KinA-Hurra, with campers and counselors from across the country, from around the world, it truly was possible we were saying goodbye forever.
Following Dana, four of the waiters got up to sing an a capella rendition of Sloop John B as the younger girls were herded toward the parking lot and the older girls stuck around for a few last goodbyes.
“We come on the Sloop John B/My grandfather and me
Around Nassau town we did roam...”
Couples were making out. Mostly they were quiet and romantic and the rest of us tried to look like we were listening to the waiters, but it was a pretty good show and hard not to watch, which is why I didn’t see Philip approaching.
“So you think you’ll come back next summer?” he asked.
“Um, I don’t know.”
I honestly hadn’t thought about it.
Word came that the Green Truck had broken down by Saul’s house, so the rest of us would be returning to Girls’ Side via the Ferry. “Down to the waterfront,” Wendy called out. Wendy wasn’t crying. She still had four more days here, four more days during which she’d help the maintenance staff clean up after us. Now that should’ve made her cry.
Philip walked me down to the dock, never once questioning what had happened the night before. He’d been so patient with me all summer, as if he knew our time would come. This was the moment to kiss him first or let him know it was okay to kiss me. Instead, I shook his hand. He was still looking down at his hand as I stepped onto the Ferry, the waiters carrying on with their serenade:
“Let me go home/Why don’t they let me go home,
yeah, yeah
This is the worst trip I’ve e
ver been on...”
Sailing away from the dock, watching Boys’ Side grow small and distant, I was certain I would forever remember this as the summer I could have had a boyfriend and failed. And yet, as the Ferry carried us across the lake, both away from and into a memory, I could already begin to feel that warm glow of nostalgia.
Dana and I were the last ones still awake that night. “Want to go down to the lake?” she asked. All summer long, Dana had practiced a secret midnight ritual that everyone knew about. She’d go down to the water’s edge, flashlight in hand, and send Morse Code-like signals across the lake to Aaron. Tonight, however, she’d make no attempt, knowing full well there’d be no reply. Instead, we sat down on a rotted bench adjacent to the grimy old aquarium which housed some unfortunate, captured catfish.
“You’re so lucky,” she said, starting to sob.
“Me? Why?”
(I had no idea how to console her, my excuse for keeping the conversation centered on myself.)
“You didn’t need a boyfriend,” she explained. “I mean, you could have had Philip, this cute, great guy who chased you all summer and never gave up, but you never took it seriously. You didn’t waste your whole summer like I did. You were just here to have fun. Wish I could be more like you.”
It would have been rude to ask her to repeat that.
“Something smells fishy to me,” I said.
It was the aquarium.
“We should let them go,” Dana said. “We should scoop out those fish and set them free.”
“You mean touch them?” I asked. “Gross!”
“You just spent eight weeks in the armpit of Maine. Now you’re getting picky? Come on. Stick your hands in. Stop being afraid.”
As we scooped out the fish and tossed them back into the water, I could feel my own heart growing lighter with each little plop plop plop of liberation. Dana was looking out over the water, looking for that beacon of light from Aaron that would not be forthcoming. Only a full moon shone down on the lake, softly illuminating Boys’ Side, as the last embers of the campfire burned themselves out. Everything always looked better from across the lake.
Not a Happy Camper Page 20