Not a Happy Camper (9 page)

“Look at the mess ya made,” was his lone comment. George had other “errands” to attend to (code for shooting at rats in the dump) and ordered Dana off the truck.

“But I'm not even wearing any shoes,” she complained.

George pointed into the Skowhegan hole.

“Might find some in there.”

Forced to walk a mile down the side of the highway, destroying the cozy feet part of her evening wear, Dana found a pay phone at a Flying A gas station. Not having any change with her, she called the camp's Main Office (one of the dilapidated cottages adjacent to Saul's grand house) collect.

“So sorry,” the woman from Yorkshire, England who'd been hoodwinked into working in the office all summer replied. “We mustn't accept collect calls.”

Dana's first three attempts failed. On her fourth try, she said, “This is Dana Bleckman's mother” and the call went through. Fifteen minutes later, Aaron picked her up in the Valiant and drove her down to The Point.

Their entrance prompted a Dedication. The Dedication is a means of mass communication across a dining hall, what smoke signals were to the Indians, what semaphore was to the Navy, what the Internet is to nerds. Upon sighting the new couple, everyone
spontaneously paddled their hands on the tables, then shouted in unison, “Quiet, please, dedicated to Dana Bleckman,” and then began to sing to the tune of
My Darling Clementine
:

“Dana Bleckman, Dana Bleckman
Take some good advice from me.
Don't let Aaron, Aaron Klafter
Get an inch above your knee.

He will tell you that he loves you
And he'll fill your heart with joy.
Then he'll leave you broken-hearted
With a bouncing baby boy.”

Dana tried to blush, but I suspect she was pleased to be serenaded. Aaron was embarrassed for real and left (and later, at Maddy's suggestion, packed up and moved back to Boys' Side, though he was still welcome to visit on a regular basis).

Meanwhile, the attention focused on Dana didn't end there. She was next called upon to sing one of her songs from the play and did a reprise of
My Favorite Things
. Autumn Evening, Borscha Belyavsky and eventually everyone who'd sung the night before got a chance to belt out tunes in front of The Point's big stone fireplace. This had happened a week earlier with the cast of
The Me Nobody Knows
and before that, girls who'd sung in shows in previous summers were also put on the spot. At Kin-A-Hurra, accomplishments were celebrated over and over again, year after year. Only Betty Gilbert (who'd somehow landed the role of the Baroness) and I were left out.

Just as things were winding down, Head Counselor Wendy Katz announced that we'd been invited to a day of inter-camp games with Camp Morningside, an all-girls facility in the nearby town of Waterville. The mention of Camp Morningside brought snickers
from the old-timers. I imagined there was some deep-seated rivalry. Wendy came over to my bunk's table and asked if any of us played softball.

Why did it have to be softball? I was panic-stricken, but not in the way I was about singing. I wasn't afraid I wouldn't be good enough, far worse—I was probably too good. This had been my downfall back home. While I had once been fairly popular among my classmates in Springfield, things had changed recently, especially regarding the boys. New Jersey was the first state to recognize Title IX, the ruling that allowed girls to play in the boys' baseball leagues. I wasn't the very best player in girls' softball, but I was among the top few and assumed my peers would all make the switch over to baseball. As it turned out, I was the only one, an accidental trailblazer.

There was a rule in the baseball league that every kid on the team had to play a minimum of one inning on the field and have one turn at bat. And that was all I ever got—the minimum. With barely any playing time, I never had a chance to excel, but it did change my status from Smart Likeable Girl With An Unfortunate Nose to what felt like Official Town Pariah. I didn't want the same thing to happen here. I kept my hand down.

“Mindy, don't you play some sport or something?” Autumn Evening called out.

“Kind of.”

“Softball?” Wendy half asked, half begged.

I didn't want the boys to know I was a jock. I didn't want Kenny to know I was a jock. But Morningside was a girls' camp. I figured I was safe.

“Well. Yeah.”

“Great! You'll be the captain. Thanks for volunteering.”

“Captain. Cool.” Autumn Evening patted me on the back.

“If you need any extra gloves,” Wendy added, “we can borrow them from the boys.”

“Because they won't be there, right?” I asked with confidence.

“Of course not,” she said. “They'll be busy playing with Morningwood. That's the boys' camp next door. They're playing basketball, I think.”

And we'd all be riding there together in the Green Truck.

Softball suited me for a couple of reasons. My father had grown up playing baseball in vacant lots in Jersey City and though my brothers inherited his passion for the sport, I was the one who inherited his ability. Unlike faster-paced sports, a softball game plays out like a drama, capable of unfolding slowly and taking many twists and turns. A team certain to lose can always make an amazing comeback and triumph in the end. Yogi Berra was right: “It ain't over ‘til it's over”, a sentiment I hoped applied to more than just ballgames. And while there is room for individual glory in a game, it's unusual for any one person to be totally blamed for a loss. I like a sport where you don't get blamed.

After retrieving our bats from the Junior Counselors' bunks (where they were keeping them for protection from the prowlers), I assembled a team that was not expected to win. My goal was to have everyone know which hand to wear the glove on so we might not be completely humiliated. The fourteen and fifteen-year-old girls would be playing volleyball against Morningside, just as they had the year before, but I was informed there was no rivalry between the two camps. “We always lose,” Mindy Plotke told me. “That's why we're always invited back.”

Out on the open road, aboard the Green Truck, most of the girls stood by the sides, sticking their heads through the slats and mooing at passing motorists. Our manly counterparts, however, sat hunched together in the center, with Kenny leading a discussion of their team's strategy. Not too many top players in the NBA are Jewish, but it isn't for lack of interest in the sport. While the goals for the summer varied by age group on Girls' Side, every boy in camp shared one common interest: to do nothing but play basketball. On rainy days, while we were inside shuffling cards, reading comics and endlessly blow-drying our hair, the boys were outside in their bathing suits, dribbling and shooting in and around the puddles.

“Kenny, you really think we can win?” Chip Fink asked.

“This'll be the biggest slaughter of all time,” his captain assured him. “Like—like—”

“Like in the '68–'69 season when the Knicks beat the Pistons 135–87?” Philip offered.

“Sure,” Kenny said, sharing a high-five with Chip. “Just like Mr. Peabody over here says.”

As our truck lurched through Morningside/Morningwood's fancy wrought iron gates, the mooing ceased as the Kin-A-Hurra girls burst into song. To the tune of
Auld Lang Syne,
they announced:

“We're here because we're here because we're here
because we're here/We're here because we're here
because we're here because we're here.”

I, meanwhile, was astounded by the camp's Tara-like splendor. Manicured lawns, neatly planted rows of trees, even the sun was out. It looked like—the camp in the photos Saul had shown us in our kitchen!

But there was something wrong with this perfect picture. The girls were all dressed identically in stiff blue cotton uniforms that
snapped down the side, like something from a bad parochial school gym class, and the boys were in what resembled prisonissue shirts and shorts. Now I knew why our older girls dressed the way they had. That morning, the doomed volleyball players spent much time pairing up striped shirts, polka-dot shorts and argyle socks in an effort to create the most garish outfits possible. Following that, they painted freckles on their faces and braided their hair over wire hangers, pulling it out to the sides, Pippi Longstocking-style. Facing imminent defeat, they mocked their opponents' dress code, choosing to score points for cleverness if not returns over the net. There was something else I noticed: none of the Morningside/Morningwood campers looked happy. I wouldn't have imagined it was possible, but this place appealed to me even less than pristine, perfect Camp Cicada.

The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Kin-A-Hurra Nine this day. The gum-snapping captain of the Morningside team greeted us by saying, “We're gonna kill ya,” to which I replied, “I'm sure you will.” And while it is customary for the visiting team to bat first, the bossy girls of Morningside insisted on being up so we took the field.

“Sue, Sue, she's our man—if she can't do it, Margaret can!”

Morningside cheered in an attempt to psych us out, but mostly we commented on how there weren't any good gender-specific girls' cheers and maybe we should write some on the way home in the truck.

I took my place on the pitcher's mound as Morningside's Sue took a few practice swings. On a real team, the kind where you have a chance in hell, I am a first baseman, but today I had to pitch since I was the only one who could lob the ball anywhere near the plate. The first pitch I threw was a strike. And then two more. Sue, no doubt as shocked as I was, didn't move her bat
and struck out. My teammates cheered me as the Morningside girls razzed their player and she slunk back to the bench to hang her head in shame.

The second Morningside batter, the menacing Margaret, spat on her hands and then rubbed them together, glaring at me as she tightened her grip on the bat. I threw another perfectly good pitch and she hit it straight at Dana who was playing second base. In a defensive move meant to preserve her teeth and singing voice, Dana stuck her glove in front of her face. The ball landed in it and stayed there. Second out. Our team went wild and suddenly a remarkable transformation began to take place: we started to care. The third batter tapped the ball back to me and I jogged it over to the bag for the last out. Based on the squeals of delight emanating from my teammates, you'd have thought we'd won the whole game, not just the right to bat.

Several members of my team made contact with the ball, one even got to first base. We didn't score any runs, but the mere fact that the game remained tied 0–0 after the first inning was nothing short of miraculous. I've always resented teams that huddle and pray before a game, as if they assume God has time for amateur athletics and that if He did, He'd care who won. But today, you had to admit, God was on our side. The Morningside girls were thrown by our lucky breaks and it affected their game. They bobbled the ball in the field and criticized each other while we continually congratulated one another just for trying. By the middle of the fourth inning, we were down by only a run with one more turn at bat.

And then the umpire called “Lunch!” In the middle of the game. I thought it was very polite that they were offering to feed us, but as it turned out, that wasn't the plan. Like everyone else at this camp, the kitchen staff at Morningside kept a very tight schedule and we had to interrupt our game for the host team to
go eat. The kids from Kin-A-Hurra were expected to wait outside on the field.

“You know,” observed Dana, “I think we could actually win this game. How weird would that be? I never win anything.”

“You never win?” I asked, stunned.

“I wish I could play softball like you,” she said.

“Yeah, me too,” added Autumn Evening, who had obviously not played ball in any former life.

“Yeah, well, what do you think they're eating in there?” I asked. “Caviar and steak tartare?”

“Or maybe the bodies of the last camp they played,” Dana offered.

Which might have been tastier than what we were having for lunch.

This was a Thursday and on Thursdays the Kin-A-Hurra kitchen staff had a break from the end of breakfast until it was time to prepare dinner. For them, it was the closest thing to a day off. For the rest of us it was Sandwich Day, which meant dried-out peanut butter and runny jelly slapped onto white bread about to sprout penicillin. To wash it down, there were industrial-size cans of peach nectar and for dessert, there'd be grapes. Bushels and bushels of grapes. Saul must've known someone in the grape business. We made the sandwiches every week, but we never ate them. When it came time for lunch we'd head for O'Boyle's, a lonely little general store, conveniently located across the highway from us. Luckily, I'd been saving up money all year: dimes from my grandmother when I visited her on Sundays, the eight dollars I got from my aunt and uncle for Hanukkah, most of my thirty-five cent weekly allowance and the two dollars my mother paid me one time for helping her weed a flower bed. O'Boyle's ended up with the bulk of my fortune, but today we were stranded in Waterville and most of us simply chose to go hungry.

“You're still here?”

That was the greeting we got from one of our opponents when they returned to the field after lunch.

“We were hoping you'd leave.”

Not only had we stuck around, the older Kin-A-Hurra girls and all of the boys, having finished their games, arrived to watch us. Including Kenny.

“Bet we massacred you little faggots,” one of the Morningside girls called out.

“What're you talking about?” Kenny yelled back. “We whipped your asses!”

It was true. While the Kin-A-Hurra volleyball team had triumphed in wardrobe only, all of that practice in the rain paid off for the boys and the Kin-A-Hurra team beat Morningwood handily. Now the Morningside girls were playing for honor and revenge.