Not a Happy Camper Read online

  It would have been nice to have clothes that flattered my appearance, but my brothers and I grew up wearing hand-me-downs from Victor and Judy Horowitz. They apparently dressed like characters from the Sally, Dick and Jane books. My parents had met Victor and Judy’s parents in 1957 when both couples were honeymooning at a hotel in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire (from which my mother stole the hangers).

  One time in geometry class, as I turned my protractor to measure an angle, Billy Robertson, a bully who sat by the Rand McNally map of the world, called out, “Hey, look at that kid’s pants!”

  Billy pointed to a boy passing by in the hallway, dressed in corduroys too short at the bottom and too wide at the waist. The class burst out laughing and I joined in.

  “Yeah, imagine what the rest of his family must look like,” I said.

  The boy out in the hall was my brother Jay.

  At around age ten, when it became obvious that I was growing at a faster rate than Judy Horowitz, my mother bought me jeans at the local store, Rynette’s, but always from the clearance rack. Tonight in Bunk Two, I pored over my Rynette’s rejects, checking to see what the two other newcomers were doing. Betty Gilbert was anal-retentive, but the term we used back then was “weird.” Obsessed with keeping the contents of her cubbyholes tidy, Betty was determined to hate camp. She fumed about the weather, about the bunks and about the food, and she marked off the days, prison-style, with a black felt tip pen on the wall above her bed. Betty put on an Oxford button-down shirt and gym shorts and picked up the book she was reading, Sybil, so she could sit in a corner and ignore everyone once we got to Boys’ Side. Betty Gilbert was the girl with no personality reading the book about the girl with sixteen. We hoped one might rub off.

  Hallie Susser, on the other hand, was trying as hard as I was. Hallie was tempted to wear the flouncy sky-blue polyester ball gown she was supposed to save for the Banquet Social in August.

  “Should I wear this?” she asked me, holding it up.

  “Well,” I said, “you might get it dirty and then you couldn’t wear it again at the end of the summer. Cuz, y’know, I wouldn’t send it out to the camp laundry.”

  Instead, Hallie and I took a cue from our counselor, a college girl, and wore flannel shirts, jeans and clogs. We were as ready as we were going to be.

  Most camps cart kids around in yellow school buses, but the ever-enterprising Saul Rattner employed a more cost-effective system. Kin-A-Hurra owned a fleet of old broken-down vehicles and the six of us traveled to Boys’ Side via the 1962 Plymouth Valiant. The light blue rust-encrusted car featured a steering wheel and a series of gaping holes with wires poking out from the remains of the dashboard. The vinyl top was shredded; Autumn Evening called it a moon roof. Saul had purchased this car for eighty dollars at a bankruptcy auction.

  The Valiant had no brakes, not to mention shock absorbers, and the ride down the dirt road, back out to US Route 2, was a bumpy one. When we reached the stone pillars and the wooden sign at the entrance which read “Camp Kin-A-Hurra for Girls”, we turned left and drove two hundred feet down the highway. Another left took us into “Camp Kin-A-Hurra for Boys” and onto an even longer dirt road. We drove by a bunch of ramshackle cottages that did not look like bunks. Kids who did not look like campers were running around and playing. Adults who did not look like counselors were barbecuing and drinking beer and shooting us nasty looks as we drove past.

  The explanation was simple. Due to a zoning glitch, a five hundred foot section of the only road leading to Boys’ Side was not camp property. People from town owned the houses along this stretch of the lake known as the Public Beach. Though Camp KinA-Hurra was a private camp, the locals came and went constantly, summering right in the middle of it.

  The longer I sat in that car, the more I worried this might be my third boyfriend-less summer in a row. I had reached five feet tall by the time I was ten and now, three years later, I towered over the boys at five-four (unaware back then that this would be my final adult height). I was not a beanpole, however. I weighed one hundred-twenty pounds (unaware this would not be my final adult weight). My one consolation was that my size and height drew attention away from the braces Dr. Gottlieb had chained to my teeth that year, and away from the nose I’d inherited from my mother’s father.

  Just before the entrance to Boys’ Side, we passed a larger, beautiful wood shingle home, perfectly situated on the edge of the lake. Maddy slowed down as we drove by.

  “This is my dream house,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to live here.”

  “Maybe someday the owner will sell it to you,” I offered.

  “Maybe,” Maddy smiled. “It’s Saul’s.”

  Kin-A-Hurra’s Boys’ Side was older, larger and more spread out than ours. The first building we came upon was the Social Hall, a big square block from the early 1900s with a high-pitched roof and a stage at one end. That’s where we met the Foxes.

  At your first school dance—or your first Bar Mitzvah party—there is usually music and there is awkwardness. We didn’t have any music. My bunkmates and I entered slowly, in a tight, giggly, nail-biting cluster. The eight Foxes, already inside, moved away, as if we were the plague or some evil apparition. They stopped only when their backs were literally up against the wall and then they stood there, wordlessly staring at us.

  Only Autumn Evening was immediately comfortable and only because she didn’t care. (“I’ve had boyfriends in all of my past lives,” she’d explained earlier. “Frankly, I’m a little burnt out by men.”)

  Breaking free from the group, she announced, “Hello, Foxes! This is us. This is it. We’re all you get this summer.”

  I wished I’d brought a book so I could join Betty Gilbert, who quickly found a spot backstage in which to hide.

  Maddy and the boys’ counselor stood by the door, trying not to laugh at us as they motioned to our two groups to move closer together. After ten minutes of this agony, Maddy announced, “We’ll see you guys a little later,” and the two counselors left.

  At Autumn Evening’s suggestion, we all sat down in a circle. Dana struck up a conversation with the boy next to her which made me think, That’s what I need to do. Talk to the boy next to me. Just chat like it’s nothing. Like I’m an interesting person. Like I know I’m an interesting person. Like I’m doing him a favor talking to him. Hhmmm. How does witty banter go?

  No need, though. The boy on my right looked past me and addressed Autumn Evening, interrupting her conversation with Philip Selig, a short, scrawny kid in a Mets baseball cap, the kind of boy I was trying not to notice.

  The Fox I couldn’t take my eyes off was Kenny Uber, seated across the circle. He was cute with wavy light brown hair and a rugged look about him, like he shopped at the Army-Navy store because he actually used the stuff. I pictured him fishing and hunting and conquering the land, the drawing on the far right of Darwin’s Dream Jew chart. He was perfect.

  “Let’s hold a séance,” Autumn Evening proposed.

  “Who would we conjure up?” one of the boys wanted to know.

  The votes were equally split among Bluebeard the Pirate, Harry Houdini and the guy who invented gum. Unable to reach a compromise, we decided instead to hold a levitation, gathering around a person, saying a bunch of mystical-sounding mumbo-jumbo and lifting them high in the air.

  Dana was chosen and lay down on the floor as ten of us crouched around her and placed our index and middle fingers under her body. I was directly across from Kenny, but he wasn’t looking at me. I wanted to say hello or at least say something, but there was no time. Someone hit the lights. In the near pitch-blackness, Autumn Evening began the incantation. We went around the circle and repeated her words.

  “She looks sick.”

  “She looks sick.”

  “She looks sick.”

  All of us solemnly repeated the words, like a mantra.

  “She IS sick.”

  “She IS sick.”

  “She IS sick”

 
; And so forth.

  After three more rounds of false observations, Autumn Evening whispered, “Let’s lift her.”

  Dana’s body rose in the air to our gasps of surprise and delight.

  “It’s really working!” Hallie shouted out.

  “Shhh, you’ll break the spell,” Autumn Evening admonished.

  “Oh, c’mon,” said the skinny boy in the Mets cap. “There’s ten of us. That’s forty fingers holding up, like, what, ninety pounds?”

  Dana herself appeared to be in a trance for several moments until she shouted out, “Put me down, I need to pee!”

  We practically dropped her as the counselors returned, turning the lights back on and announcing it was time to leave. In an instant, the mood and the tension were broken, which was okay by me. I was pretty sure I’d made a good first impression on the boys. I hadn’t done anything memorably stupid.

  After a quick goodnight, my bunkmates and I were all safely jammed back inside the Valiant, clown car-style. Maddy put the key in the ignition, turned it, and—nothing. The engine was dead. Not even a cough or a sputter. We’d have to find another way back across the lake.

  “What about the motorboat?” Autumn Evening suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Maddy said. “There’s a lot of rocks in the lake. It’s dangerous.”

  “Especially when Maddy’s at the wheel,” Dana added.

  “It’s not the wheel,” countered Autumn Evening, who then turned to the rest of us. “She has no idea how to control the speed. It’s kind of exhilarating. You could die at any minute.”

  “Why don’t we walk?” our counselor suggested, mildly insulted, as she popped a fresh Pep-O-Mint Lifesaver into her mouth. She could make those suckers last for hours and I wondered how she resisted biting them.

  We issued a group whine and Maddy left to find us a boat driver. My bunkmates and I sat by the Boys’ Side dock, waiting, when suddenly a vision appeared. He was tall and handsome with curly blond hair, a sixteen-year-old god with a Learner’s Permit. He was Aaron Klafter. He was a new camper. He was from exotic Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  “Says he can drive the boat,” Maddy informed us. “We’ll see.”

  Aaron looked at us, shyly, and then at last he spoke: “Hey.”

  No other words were needed. We climbed aboard. Aaron expertly guided the boat across Lake Wallanatchee, the cold wind whipping through his curly locks. When we arrived at the Girls’ Side dock and got out, I thought about flashing him my best smile, but realized it wouldn’t mean much with all the metal in my mouth. With his help, I gracefully stepped out of the boat. Then, once on my own, I tripped.

  Back at the bunk, we got ready for bed, even though this camp didn’t seem to have any notion of a curfew. We would have stayed up all night talking about Aaron, but Maddy went to sleep early. She’d done this all three nights so far, which struck me as odd. Wasn’t the whole point of being a counselor for the evenings off? For hanging out with the rest of the staff and doing things you couldn’t do when you were thirteen? I wondered if Maddy was unpopular and had no social life. And was that going to happen to me?

  “Hey!”

  It was around two in the morning.

  “Hey, Mindy!”

  Someone was shining a flashlight in my face.

  “We’re going on a raid,” Autumn Evening whispered. “We’re going back to Boys’ Side.”

  I jumped out of bed. A raid! I’d always wanted to go on a raid and here I was.

  Betty was muttering something in her sleep and Hallie wasn’t interested in going, so it was just me, Dana and Autumn Evening. We crossed the lake by canoe and soon discovered why this was not encouraged. Even with the moonlight shining down on Lake Wallanatchee, we couldn’t see the rocks. There were many. In the fifteen minutes it took us to cross, we nearly capsized four times.

  “Anyone in particular you’re interested in?” I dared to ask as we paddled, crashed and paddled some more.

  “Not really,” said Dana, but I could tell there was someone.

  “I just like looking at them when they’re asleep,” Autumn Evening explained. “Gives me an idea what they’ll look like when they’re dead.”

  I looked at Dana. She was looking at Autumn Evening. Autumn Evening was looking at the moon.

  Several hours earlier, meeting the boys at the social hall had been an awkward experience. Roaming into their bunk in the middle of the night was entirely different. Illuminated only by our flashlights, the visit was far more casual, much like the way the boys lived. The Foxes’ bunk was significantly larger than ours, but felt cramped thanks to its state of total disarray. Dirty clothing was piled up and tossed about, mixed in with crushed potato chips and half-eaten Slim Jims still in their wrappers. Even the beds were all out of order, pulled away from the walls and turned at odd angles, not lined up neatly like ours. We’d been at camp for less than a week, but the boys had managed to give their bunk a lived-in look, as if it hadn’t been cleaned in at least a decade. And everyone was too tired to care.

  Still, I was in the company of two girls who knew how to get a guy and I, their student, tried to remain awake and focused. Autumn Evening made the first move. “I’m cold,” she said.

  Here is the beauty of being thirteen in 1974: if you were naïve enough (and I was) it seemed grown up yet somehow safe to get into bed with a boy you didn’t really know. Autumn Evening got an invitation from Chip Fink and crawled in. Kenny Uber untucked his authentic red and black buffalo plaid blanket and motioned to Dana, but she declined.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said.

  Part of me wanted to go along with her, but more of me wanted to stay right there, wishing and hoping I might be Kenny’s second choice.

  “Um, I’m really cold, too,” I said.

  Kenny didn’t seem to hear me. He was too busy watching Dana. I said it again. Louder.

  “Shoulda brought a jacket,” he said, then paused to look at me. “Were you at the social hall tonight?”

  “Well, yeah, I-”

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “You’re teasing, right?” Dana yelled from the doorway, on her way out.

  Kenny sighed and pulled a thin rolled-up blanket from the foot of his cot and handed it to me. Not exactly the response I’d hoped for, but still not a total rejection. I wrapped the blanket around myself, leaned against the side of his bed and tried to engage him in conversation. “So, how many summers have you been coming here?” Kenny snored and rolled over. I was smitten.

  By dawn, I was sore and shivering and in need of a bathroom. When I got up and looked, I couldn’t find one. Philip Selig was also awake and sitting up in his bed.

  “Bull’s-eye!” he almost shouted, as he successfully shot a rubber band off his braces, hitting a sleeping bunkmate in the face.

  “Is there a bathroom somewhere?” I asked.

  “Up in there,” he explained in a loud whisper, pointing through a window to a shack on a slight hill. “The toilets, sinks. Everything.”

  “Everyone shares?” I asked. “All of Boys’ Side? That’s gross.”

  “Think of it as historical,” Philip said, crawling out from under his old wool blankets and reaching for his Mets cap. “Think of it as tradition. Back in the early days here they didn’t have that much plumbing.”

  “Think of how disgusting it must be in there,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is pretty bad,” he admitted. “Especially the toe jam in the showers.”

  “What’s a toe jam?”

  Philip grinned as we stood in the doorway. “You’re such a girl.”

  I left the Foxes’ bunk, walked over to the shower house and up to the door. It smelled like a cesspool, which was not surprising since that was the camp’s plumbing system. I shouted hello. Someone called back. I ran.

  I thought about running through the light drizzle all the way back down the dirt road, along the highway, then down the Girls’ Side road and back to my bunk. After only twenty feet, I ran int
o my counselor.

  “Uhhh... what are you doing here?” I asked.

  Maddy looked at me and squinted. “What are you doing here?” she countered.

  “Um... I asked you first.”

  Incredibly, she accepted that. “I go to bed early every night,” she said, “so I can get up early and jog.”

  Maddy would run to Boys’ Side then meet up with the food truck and get a ride back. She seemed very devoted to keeping off that weight.

  “But Mindy, you’re not really supposed to be out of the bunk at this hour,” my counselor explained.

  “Oh, well,” I said. “I’m new here. I don’t know the rules.”

  Maddy nodded.

  She figured she might as well stop by the Boys’ Headquarters and wake Head Counselor Jacques Weiss. Classically tall, dark and handsome, Jacques was one of many foreigners on staff. Saul had long ago discovered he could get deals on airfare and import European counselors who’d then work for free. Most of them were Christian and most would visit the United States just this once; therefore, eight weeks in the backwoods of Maine with a bunch of American Jews formed the basis of their entire impression of our country.

  Jacques was unique among the foreigners, and not just because he was actually Jewish. At thirty-one years old he was still in school, in Paris, working on an elusive PhD. “A professional student,” my uncle the high school guidance counselor would call him, Jacques kept his summers free to keep coming back to Kin-A-Hurra.

  “Wanna wait for me and ride back on the truck?” Maddy asked.

  “I would, but...” I was growing uncomfortable, so I took a deep breath. “Did you know there’s just this one disgusting bathroom for all of Boys’ Side?”