Not a Happy Camper Page 4

  Maddy got the hint.

  As it turned out, Boys’ Headquarters had its own private stall and she led me in. She was still inside, in the back room with Jacques, when I came out again so I took a seat on the porch and waited. He must have been a heavy sleeper. I waited for at least twenty minutes.

  “Good morning,” I said to Jacques, when the two finally appeared.

  “Mais oui,” he replied, with a sly grin.

  Jacques let me ring the bell to wake up Boys’ Side. A few minutes later, Autumn Evening strolled over from the Foxes’ bunk and Dana emerged, alone, from the Giant Teepee at the far end of the softball field, over by the flagpole.

  On the ride back, amidst a truckload of waffles, we learned that Dana had met up in the night with Aaron Klafter.

  “We went into the teepee to look at the stars,” she told us.

  “Really? You can see through the top?” I asked. “It looks all closed up.”

  Dana paused. “Nothing happened, okay?” she insisted.

  It didn’t matter to me. All that mattered to me was that she wasn’t interested in Kenny and that I had one less obstacle to deal with in this, the summer I was going to get a boyfriend. And not just a boyfriend, the boyfriend. The one I wanted. The one I had to have.

  It was Kenny Uber or bust.

  “There were five, five constipated men

  In the Bible, in the Bible

  There were five, five constipated men

  In the Five Books of Moses

  The first, first constipated man

  Was Cain, he wasn’t Abel...”

  3

  MY MOTHER’S MOTHER, GUSSIE BARUCH, DROPPED OUT OF SCHOOL AT the end of sixth grade and went to work in a factory. There, her older, worldlier co-workers introduced her to Chinese food—the official nosh of the assimilated Jew—and it was the beginning of the end of keeping kosher. Within a few years, Gussie met my grandfather, Max Leventhal. Max’s mother did not approve of the under-educated factory girl; she attempted to break them up by first moving the Leventhals from Brooklyn to The Bronx, then drinking a bottle of iodine in protest. The iodine did not kill her, nor did it deter young romance. Max and Gussie were married in 1924.

  Gussie promised her new mother-in-law that she would keep a kosher home and she did. But on Sundays, while my grandfather read the paper, she told him that she was taking their two daughters (my mother and my aunt) “downtown to see the relatives.” This was code for “I am taking them out of the house to eat non-kosher Chinese food.” My grandfather would smile, “Send the family my regards,” and turn the page.

  Gussie had it easy. After my own parents married in 1957, there would be no more visits to the relatives downtown. My father was the son of Eastern European immigrants, a man who would have fit right in at a 17th century shtetl, adamant about sticking to the Old World dietary laws. This meant we kept two separate sets of dishes in the house, one for dairy foods and one for meat. We did not eat meat and milk together. We did not eat pork or shellfish. Ever.

  These rules were difficult to explain to my friends, particularly the matter of vegetable shortening versus lard. I couldn’t eat Hostess cupcakes, but Drake’s were okay. I couldn’t have Oreos, but I could gorge on Hydrox. Pepperoni pizza at birthday parties posed multiple layers of nightmares, as did sampling the food we made in Home Ec class. To this day, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to eat Jell-O.

  So Camp Kin-A-Hurra was on the list of acceptable summer camps because, in our kitchen that winter evening, Saul Rattner smiled widely and assured my father, “We are strictly kosher!”

  If only my father had known the truth.

  While the camp did own two separate sets of dishes, the Girls’ Side kitchen staff found the bone china dishes designated for meat too hard to clean. They decided to go with the plastic dairy set full-time and I decided not to tell my father.

  Of course, I felt bad about the deception. Jewish guilt is a very real thing. I grew up with a lot of pride in my heritage, wanting to embrace it, to celebrate its history. But the way my father insisted we observe every minor holiday we couldn’t even pronounce and stick to every obscure rule (“No ripping toilet paper on Saturdays!”) made it tedious and time-consuming and I came to resent it. Which made me feel guilty. It was with this familiar feeling of trepidation that I approached the first Friday night at camp. Sundown marks the beginning of Shabbos, the Sabbath.

  Up until the 1960s, summer camps operated like little private countries with official camp uniforms in official colors. Most of this went out the window by the end of the Cultural Revolution and by the mid-70s Kin-A-Hurra had developed its own unofficial daily uniform. If you were cool, you wore a t-shirt (really cool if it featured the Coca-Cola logo in Hebrew) and denim painter’s pants or overalls. To complete the outfit, you wore a red or blue bandana tied to the hammer loop on the thigh. Luckily, I had plenty of painter’s pants. They were not a big seller in Springfield, New Jersey and had been on sale in every color at Rynette’s. On Friday nights, when we were expected to wear white to welcome the Sabbath, I pulled on and zipped up my white discount painter’s pants.

  Boys’ Side and Girls’ Side held separate services on Friday nights. Ours were in my favorite building, The Point, and the waitresses dressed it up for the occasion, draping bed sheets over the tables to simulate tablecloths. By each place setting sat an overripe piece of cantaloupe and a Xeroxed booklet containing the evening’s prayers. Because there was no rabbi, head counselor Wendy Katz was in charge. She asked us to turn to page one. Then she asked us to stand and then be seated. And then we turned to page twelve. The service was short and sweet and to the point. And best of all, there was no sermon.

  We concluded the service by singing the blessing over the candles, which were already lit, and the blessing over the wine, which was really grape bug juice. And then came the blessing over the bread. Based on my Kin-A-Hurra experience so far, my expectations were nil when this first sliver was handed to me, which made it all the more spectacular when I bit in. On Friday nights it is a Jewish tradition to eat challah, braided egg bread, and this was the real thing, made fresh by Walter Henderson, the chef across the lake who’d been employed by the New York State prison system for over thirty years. After three decades of serving up bread and water, he’d certainly mastered the bread part. It was soft and sweet, manna from Boys’ Side that would arrive once a week, and nothing like the loaf my mother picked up each Friday at ShopRite.

  After the dishes were cleared away, old mimeographed songbooks were passed out. While it was nice to have the faded purple ink words in front of us, most of us already knew these songs, some of which were in Hebrew and others in English. Though the camper population was quite diverse, coming from twenty-three different states and five foreign countries (apparently Saul duped Jewish families ‘round the globe), our religion, our shared ancestry, bound us together. Well, that and the fact that we were all stranded in this dump for the summer. I mouthed the words silently, so as not to ruin things, and enjoyed the concert.

  The next morning, Saturday, services would be co-ed and held over on Boys’ Side. I expected this to be my next chance to see Kenny—but to my delight, he showed up in our bunk that night, at three AM.

  The creaky screen door woke me as he entered.

  “Kenny?”

  I thought I was dreaming.

  “Hi,” he grunted, peering around in the dim light. “Which bed is Dana’s?”

  “Dana? Why would you want to see her?”

  “Never mind. I found her.”

  Kenny kicked the foot of her bed, “accidentally” waking her up.

  “Oh, hi,” she yawned in his face.

  “Nice pajamas,” he whispered.

  “Shut up,” Dana laughed as she sat up, pulled out her ponytail holder and fluffed her hair. “Hey,” she suggested in a sudden burst of genius, “wanna walk me back to Boys’ Side so I can go see Aaron?”

  “Aaron?” Kenny gulped.

  “Yeah, c
’mon, it’ll be nice. We’ll walk around the lake.”

  Kenny was looking at the floor. “I guess,” he said quietly.

  “Hey, I’m awake, too,” I whispered.

  They turned to me.

  “You want to come with us?” Dana asked.

  “Sure!”

  I grabbed some clothes and raced to the bathroom to throw them on, unable to make out the muffled exchange between Dana and Kenny. When I returned a minute later, the three of us slipped out of the bunk.

  Except for the fact that he was standing next to the woman he loved, I had Kenny all to myself.

  He turned to Dana. “You know, if Aaron’s asleep-”

  “Of course he’ll be asleep,” I interrupted. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “If Aaron’s asleep,” Kenny continued, ignoring me, “you can hang out with me, Dana.”

  “Oh, thanks,” she said. “But I don’t think he’d mind if I woke him up.”

  This wasn’t going the way I’d planned. Kenny was acting like he was interested in Dana even though he knew she liked Aaron. Perhaps he thought he could still win her over, but not if I won him over first.

  “I’m not busy,” I offered.

  Kenny hesitated, which I determined had to do with the temperature. Even though it was early July, the night air was cold and we shivered as we walked down the dirt road and around the lake. Kenny put his arm through Dana’s and picked up the pace. I tried to keep up, found I couldn’t, but failed to see the metaphor.

  I arrived at Boys’ Side ten steps behind them. Dana thanked Kenny, then said goodnight to us and headed off. It was just the two of us now, the moment I’d waited for, the reason I was here. My chance to flirt. If only I knew how.

  “So what do you want to do now?” he asked.

  I wanted to cross my arms and blink my eyes and make him like me. Instead, I just shrugged.

  “Do you sing on Boys’ Side?”

  “What?”

  “Sing. At services. On Girls’ Side, after dinner, everybody sings. It sounds really pretty. I don’t really sing, but—what songs do you like? What are your favorite prayers?”

  “I don’t know,” Kenny muttered, then stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around.

  I needed to regain his attention, to make this sound interesting.

  “I like Dona Dona,” I offered. “Well, I like how it sounds with the harmony and the melody. Do the boys sing it with the harmony and the melody? Actually, if you think about it, it’s pretty sad. I mean, it’s a whole song about a calf about to be killed. I wonder why we sing that.”

  “Uh, I don’t know...”

  “I kind of like Zum Gali Gali, too,” I went on, waving my hands and gesturing, as if this made my story more exciting to hear. “There’s this one girl, Erica, she’s only eight. She’s from Queens. She likes to stand on the table and lead us in it. I also like Hava Nagila, especially when you change the words to ‘Have a banana’ even though I don’t really like bananas. The smell bothers me. So far Friday night is my favorite part of camp. How about you?”

  I’d thought about if for months, what I’d say or do when I was alone with a boy I liked and now, here I was, talking about songs and bananas.

  Kenny looked at me like I’d just stepped off a space ship.

  “I think my counselor might be looking for me,” he said. “I think I have to go back to my bunk. Uh—see you at services, I guess.”

  Kenny turned and walked away, but I clung to his last remark. It was surely an invitation. I’d see him again in a few hours.

  For now, I needed to get back to my bunk, too. Unfortunately, I wasn’t that familiar with the layout of Boys’ Side since I’d seen it only in the dark. I knew where the dock was, behind the dining hall, and I walked down to the beach where I found a canoe with a paddle in it. I pushed off and climbed in and since I didn’t have a lifejacket, prayed I wouldn’t tip the boat over or fall out, as I once again hadn’t passed my deepwater test.

  There was a reason why I was a terrible swimmer. It was all because of my nose. At my former camp and at the Springfield Community Pool, girls were required to wear bathing caps. But if you are a girl with a prominent proboscis, you do not want to put one on. No number of floppy plastic flowers adorning your headgear can detract from the fact that without your hair to hide behind, you are nothing but a giant nose. I hated swimming because I hated bathing caps because I hated my nose. And because of this, I was sure, my crush on Kenny Uber was going to end up with me drowning.

  I paddled slowly at first, feeling for rocks and straining to see if I was heading in the right direction. And then I heard it—Vrroooom! My concentration was broken by a sudden, thundering noise. The motorboat!

  “Hey, lookit! Think I see someone!”

  “Where?”

  They were men’s voices, yelling, and they were heading my way. It flashed across my mind that it might be Jacques Weiss or Saul Rattner, coming to get me for being out of my bunk in the middle of the night. Saul would throw me out of camp and send me home to my parents and my parents would be furious. Even if they let me out of the house, I’d end up spending the rest of the summer at the Springfield Pool with my bathing cap on my head, watching my little brothers, while fat women in muumuus and shower caps hogged the shallow section when they announced it was time for the Ladies’ Daily Dunk.

  I ducked down, so no one would see me as my canoe rocked from side to side in the wake created by their boat.

  I wondered if Kenny would miss me if I left. I hoped so.

  “Nah. Don’t see nobody,” I heard the second man shout as the motorboat zipped away. Close call, but I was undetected. They didn’t sound like Saul or Jacques and I didn’t care who they were as long as I wasn’t in trouble. I made it back to Girls’ Side in what seemed like both an eternity and a matter of seconds, jumped out of the canoe, pulled it ashore, and ran back to my bunk. I tiptoed quietly up the creaky front steps, slipped in through the creaky porch door and slid into my creaky metal army cot.

  Betty Gilbert sat up and looked at me.

  “Going to be late for swim instruction,” she said.

  “But it’s the middle of the night...”

  Betty Gilbert not only talked in her sleep, she also got up and did things. In this case, she went over to her cubbyholes, pulled out a bathing suit and put it on over her clothes. And then she got back into bed and pulled the covers over her head. She was in for a surprise when she woke up the next morning. Meanwhile, a heavy rain began to fall, wiping out all other sounds, and I drifted off as well.

  At breakfast a few hours later, the girls from the oldest bunk, the Junior Counselors who lived up the hill, were not in attendance and no one knew why. It crossed my mind that they might have heard about my adventure and now they were off at some secret meeting, some chic restaurant where sixteen-year-olds go, drinking black coffee, smoking Virginia Slims and laughing behind my back:

  “Did you hear about Mindy?”

  “Went to Boys’ Side last night.”

  “To see Kenny. What a dope!”

  “As if some boy would like her.”

  “As if Kenny would like her!”

  “Can I bum another smoke?”

  Was it narcissistic to think people were talking about how unimportant I was?

  After breakfast, it was time to go to Boys’ Side for services, which now seemed like the last thing I wanted to do. Walking around the lake mid-morning was not the same experience as walking there at night. As we paraded by, the sunburned townies at the Public Beach glared at us, inadvertently calling up the opening scenes from Deliverance. And then there were the bees. One of the cottages was owned by a beekeeper and during the day his little pets were out in full force. A swarm had descended upon the dirt road just a few feet ahead and we stood there, eighty-five of us, frozen. “Just walk slowly,” the man in the head-to-toe protective beekeeper’s uniform told us. “They’re really friendly.”

  I’d had encounters with be
es before. At Camp Cicada I’d managed to accidentally step on a hive while on an overnight in the woods when I was hunting for a marshmallow stick. I figured the eight stings were due punishment, since my plan was to rip a live branch from a tree in order to toast calories I didn’t really need. My counselor said it was no big deal and I should cover the stings with mud. By the next day, my whole leg swelled up. Now, on the road to Boys’ Side, I was facing hundreds, maybe thousands, a solid wall of bees.

  “What’s the matter?” Dana asked.

  “I think I might be allergic,” I explained.

  “Just walk really fast. And close your mouth,” Dana advised.

  “You don’t want to swallow any.”

  She had no idea I had the potential to swell, to look like a hippo or an elephant or one of those balloons from the Macy’s parade. And that certainly wasn’t going to impress any boys.

  The old-timers, experienced with this routine from summers past, led the way. They walked ahead, albeit stiffly and carefully, then motioned to the rest of us. Most of the newcomers tentatively followed, walking a little bit faster, almost running, trying not to scream, as that would have necessitated opening their mouths. Even the youngest girls got up their nerve. I couldn’t be the only chicken. I clenched my fists, held my breath and walked as fast as I could through the bees until I joined the rest of the group. Sure enough, the man in the full-body protection was right—no one got stung. Once we were all well past the bees, we ran. This unpleasant ritual would be repeated weekly for the entire summer.

  We arrived at Boys’ Side about fifteen minutes early. Kenny came bounding up to me.

  “Hi,” he said. “How are you?”

  I was nearly speechless. I couldn’t believe he was talking to me. Maybe he’d come to his senses overnight?

  He asked, “You get back okay last night?”

  Kenny was all but ignoring Dana, who was standing next to me. It was too good to be true. I had to say something. Something clever. Something that had nothing to do with singing or how bananas smelled.