Not a Happy Camper (28 page)

Authors: Mindy Schneider

“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 ever 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.

“So, you think Philip's cute?” I ventured to ask.

“Kind of cute,” she said. “And like, he'll keep getting cuter. What? You don't think so?”

I didn't know what I thought anymore.

“Well, he's not like Aaron or Kenny,” I said.

“Blech, be glad,” Dana answered.

“What, you mean like he has inner beauty stuff or something?”

“No!” Dana laughed as she reached for one more fish. “I'm not trying to be deep. I just think he's kind of cute, in a goofy kind of cute way. Oh, forget it, if you can't even tell.”

But actually, I'd probably known that about him all along; I'd just needed to hear it from someone like Dana, from someone who didn't have to say it.

The tank was now empty.

“I'm gonna miss those fish,” I said.

“Please,” Dana snorted. “They'll be here next year, just as big and smelly as ever.”

And so would Philip. And if my parents could afford it, I'd be back, too.

Everyone was in a big rush the next morning. Everyone had to be at the airport in Bangor by six AM. Everyone but me. Hallie found an entire Hefty bag of clean laundry we'd forgotten to sort and we hurriedly divvied it up and stuffed the clothing into our duffel bags. One piece remained unclaimed. It was the world's largest pair of underpants and they didn't have a nametag.

“Oh, those are mine!” Autumn Evening called out. “I was quite obese in the 1760s.”

“No way, I found them first,” said Hallie.

A tug of war resulted in them both climbing in.

“Get out of my underpants!” Dana shouted, already recovering from her loss and running over. “Two is company and three's a crowd!” she shouted gleefully as she stepped in.

“Are you making fun of my big panties?” asked our counselor, grabbing hold of the waistband.

“Oh, for God's sake,” said boring Betty Gilbert as she made her fifty-sixth (and last) black mark on the wall. “Those are mine!” and she climbed in.

Everyone was inside them now and only I was left.

“Come on, there's room,” said Hallie, waving me over.

“We need you in the left leg,” added Autumn Evening.

“C'mon!”

“Let's go!”

“I've got a plane to catch!”

“Hurry!”

Arms wrapped around each other for balance, the monster in the underpants ambled towards me. There was no escaping. I had to try. Trembling, I stepped in, knowing that fabric could stretch only so far. “Let's walk to the door,” Dana suggested. “On the count of three. One, two...”

We'd taken only one step when, of course, the underpants ripped and we all landed on the floor in one big laughing heap.

But right before that happened, for just a second there, I fit in.

“'til stars no longer gleam
Until our youth has become a dream”

Finish here

I
GREW UP IN A FAMILY THAT WAS SO STRICT AND HAD SO MANY RULES
it made life crazy. Then I went to a place that had no rules at all and somehow it made perfect sense.

Camp Kin-A-Hurra doesn't exist any more. Something to do with the Board of Health. Maddy and Jacques bought Saul's house with the intention of coming up every summer, but after one season without campers, it just wasn't the same. Only Jim Norbert remained on the property with his wife, Hendrika Devenpeck, one of Saul's unpaid foreign counselors in the summer of '76, who found Jim and the camp and all things American just dandy. As a wedding gift, skinflint Saul gave them two full acres of land perched atop a hill where Jim built a house forever overlooking “A Place to Watch.” Thankfully, the rest of camp was not bought up by a developer and turned into a mall. Instead, it was given to the state of Maine and designated a park. Most of the buildings had to be torn down, though. Even The Point is gone.

But in the spring of 1997, a reunion was held for anyone and everyone who had ever spent a summer at Camp Kin-A-Hurra. There was speculation for months over who'd show up, who'd married whom and what everyone had become. Mindy Plotke and counselor Bobby Gurvitz were the only married camp couple from my era, having gotten together years later when they ran into each
other at a Weight Watchers meeting in Manhattan. Everyone else had gone their own separate ways. Dana Bleckman became a high school music teacher, Hallie Susser a Municipal Court judge. Betty Gilbert returned to camp for eight more summers before becoming a professional fundraiser. Her newest charity, The Saul Rattner Memorial Fund, helps send kids to camp. Autumn Evening Schwartz lives year âround in a former summer bungalow colony. As far as the local board of education knows, her three young children are being home-schooled, but really, they're just sort of unschooled. Kenny Uber lost his money in a pyramid scheme; Philip Selig is a plastic surgeon.

I ended up with someone who never went to camp. Like me, most reunion attendees left their spouses at home, knowing full well they just wouldn't get it, this thing we once belonged to, this cult we can never leave.

Altogether, over five hundred former campers, counselors and staff members gathered at Lake Wally one last time, representing thirty-one states, eleven foreign countries, every year of the camp and the feeling that we'd all been in on something.

Acknowledgments

S
URE, IT'S MY NAME UNDER THE TITLE, BUT REALLY, IT TOOK A VILLAGE
to write this book.

I am indebted to the following people for stepping into the Wayback Machine with me to share camp anecdotes and/or photographs: Donna Rosenthal, Mitzi Saul, Susan Cohen Butler, Wayne Charness, Miriam Wagenberg Flatow, Stuart Alexander, Jonathan Bauer, Marci Auerbach, Gail Rubman Goldstein, Lisa Heyman, Cari Lorberfeld, Lisa Freedman, Michelle Schaffer, Jeffrey Berger, Bonnie Klaus Guttenplan, Shaily Steiner Hamenahem and Kinereth Gensler. Thank you for helping me remember and for having made it worth remembering.

It's good to have friends who can read and write. The following people answered questions, provided advice and, in several cases, slogged through various and sundry drafts. (Sorry about the sundry ones, and) thank you to: Gita Isak, Kathy McCullough, Sue Thornton, Billy Robertson, Meg Hughes, Lynn and Peter Bernhardt, Susan and Howard Nemetz, Nancy Mansfield, Ellen Byron, Ellen Wasserman Goldstein, Kate Shein and Garrett Soden, Greg Fitzgerald and Stacie and Marc Moss.

Additional thanks to Leeza Taylor, Bob Leventhal and Glen Herskowitz for their patience and help with scanning, cropping
and editing the photos, and to my brother Jay for all that tedious Internet research.

As if it wasn't enough to make my friends read the early drafts, I also consulted several professional editors along the way. Thank you to Tristine Rainer, Michael Levin and Susan Leon for helping me understand what it was I was writing and how to write it.

Thank you, Carol Fitzgerald, for not reporting my incompetence to Personnel that summer I temped in your office at
Mademoiselle
, and thank you for going on to create Bookreporter.com and for mentioning my manuscript to Dan Lazar at Writers House.

Thank you, Dan, for reading my book and offering to represent me at record speed and then sending it along to the perfect editor.

Thank you Lauren Wein, my editor at Grove/Atlantic, for hating camp and loving my book and making this really happen.

Thank you to my family for allowing me to use our real names and to my mother, Marylin, and my late father, Zachary, who, in spite of our seemingly impoverished circumstances, always scraped together the money to send me to camp. Sorry, Mom, the publisher wouldn't go for putting your name on the cover instead of mine even though everyone knows I couldn't have done this without you.