The Book of Knowledge (19 page)

Jerry Keating: ‘Hello, girls. What'll you have?'

Tori (with a strong tone of satire as she imitated Jerry's choice of noun): ‘Beers for all. Right, girls?'

Hozzle: ‘Right for me.' The others nodded.

Fritzie: ‘Yep, I'm feeling very free and rich tonight.'

Tori: ‘But are you old enough to drink here, girlie?'

Fritzie: ‘You bet your life I am. Old enough to do anything. And I can't wait.'

Hozzle and Tori laughed. Rae and Will said nothing. A circle of gloom seemed to surround them. They all drank deeply of their beers. Aware of their troubled friends, the others fell silent, their gaiety extinguished by their friends' moroseness.

Rae reached into her blouse pocket for a pack of Murads and handed it to Tori. She took one and passed the pack. Will lit everyone's cigarette and sank back on her stool to stare ahead at the row of bottles reflected in the mirror, on which was mounted a
DRINK DR PEPPER
sign.

Fritzie decided to try again. She took a drink of her beer and looked at Rae:

‘Everything went okay tonight, I thought.'

At last Rae smiled. ‘I agree. Thank you.'

Hoping to draw Will into a better humor, Fritzie said:

‘I was glad to hear that everyone seemed to know the words of the camp song. It only took eight weeks.'

Tori (singing): ‘Clear Lake, to you we sing our praises …'

Will said nothing. She stared at the Dr Pepper sign as though she had complied with its instruction and was awaiting further word. The tubes that formed its frame contained a bubbling colored liquid which seemed to interest her more than the talk.

Conversation moved from generalities to the particulars of the day behind them. Everyone ordered another beer. Rae, determined to hide the truth, told them that all the trunks were packed, and all of them had been searched. Nothing had been found.

Hozzle: ‘Who searched the counselors' trunks?'

Rae: ‘Muggs.'

Hozzle (who had lost twelve dollars to the thief): ‘Ah. And who searched
hers?
'

Rae (laughing): ‘Some of the missing stuff is from the arts and crafts bungalow. She must be sick of looking at all those things. As for the money, I have a suspicion, somehow, that she
has
money. A dollar here, two there, would hardly make any difference to her. But if you think I should, I will.'

Hozzle (grumpily): ‘Twelve dollars is more than one or two here and there.'

Rae: ‘Okay, I will' Fritzie looked at Rae but was silent.

They ordered another beer and drank in silence. Rae paid for them. There was a small protest from Tori, but Rae waved it off.

‘You've all been a great help to me, all summer. I'm grateful. My pleasure.'

Will looked at her, still saying nothing.

Fritzie: ‘Speaking of paying, when do we get our checks?'

Rae: ‘At the station tomorrow afternoon.'

Fritzie: ‘Do they think we'd take off tomorrow or something if we got paid on the last day?'

Rae (shaking her head): ‘It's the way they've always done it.'

Tori decided it was time for a new subject: ‘I heard on the radio this morning they're not going to make Pierce Arrow cars anymore. The company's going out of business.'

Fritzie: ‘Damn. That's too bad. I always thought that was a great car. And I adore the swell-looking guy in their ads.'

Rae: ‘It's the kind of car I always wanted. In place of my junky Plymouth that's always breaking down. What about you, Willie?'

Will: ‘Makes no difference to me. Anything's better than not having a car at all.'

Rae thought of the years she and Will had shared the old Plymouth. Rae owned it and did most of the driving, because, they agreed, she was the better driver. She wanted to say to her: ‘Take the car, love. I'll get another.' But she knew she could not afford it, not at the beginning of the semester. She was silent.

Jerry Keating: ‘How about one for the road, girls? On me.'

Rae said: ‘Not for me, thanks.' The others said yes and thanked him.

Aware of what the approaching academic year meant to their friends, Tori, Hozzle, and Fritzie made no reference to any future beyond the next day. Fritzie felt the fire of her high spirits at the thought of seeing Joe (maybe tomorrow—who knows?) dampened by Will's depression.

‘Why don't we have a midwinter reunion in Hagerstown, maybe around Christmas?' Tori said in a halfhearted attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

Fritzie: ‘Swell.' Privately she doubted she would be there. She and Joe had talked about skiing in Vermont.

Will: ‘I'll try to come,' knowing nothing in this world would keep her away if Rae was going to be there.

Tori stood up and said she ought to get to bed early, because tomorrow …

They all looked at their watches. Rae put fifty cents down under her glass for Keating's tip.

He thanked her and said: ‘So long, girls. See you next summer. Don't take any wooden nickels.'

‘We won't,' said Fritzie dutifully.

At the door they called back, almost in unison: ‘Goodbye, Jerry.'

‘Bye. Erin go Bragh,' he said to their backs. As he wiped the bar he shook his head at his wasted allegiance.

The ride back to camp, always before part of the final celebration, turned into a dirge. Separation sadness affected them all, making them aware of their approaching loneliness, of the end to the short, comforting comradeship of the summer. Even cheerful Fritzie felt low and threatened. Squeezed in between hefty Hozzle and Tori in the glum darkness of the car, she wondered whether Joe had met someone during his summer out West, where he had worked on a dude ranch. Sinking lower, she decided he probably had.

‘I will have to get to know some new guys on campus, now that he has probably ridden off into the Western sunset with a cowgirl in Montana.'

She felt tears on her cheeks and closed her eyes, filled with sudden affection for the unfaithful Joe.

A heavy, late-summer rain fell as the camp awakened to Friday, going-home day. Reveille was late because Ellie, the bugler, had been up ‘until all hours,' as she put it, rehashing Wednesday's extraordinary events and the minor excitements of the banquet. She had overslept, and so had everyone else.

The rain darkened the sky. The campers in their olive-green raincoats sloshed unhappily through puddles to the Mess Hall almost an hour late for breakfast. There was no point in raising the flag for the half-day, so they went directly to their benches inside. Most of them were silently celebrating the thought of going home; only a few, like Jean, felt depressed about their return.

The counselors were in foul humors. There were no fresh-baked muffins. The cook had made cocoa but by now it was cool, the coffee weak, the milk stale-tasting. The campers asked for buns and were told there were none. They all ate day-old bread and jam, cold cereal, and hard-boiled eggs. Unbroken gloom sat among the breakfasters. Only Grete, running back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, had risen to a good day, her fantasies suddenly transformed into sunny reality. Helping the cook to boil more eggs, she smiled secretly into the rising steam.

Roslyn had always liked rainy days. For one thing, she didn't have to play games or go swimming. But today the rain matched her bad mood. She had awakened with a worse stomach ache and gone to the bathroom. There it was, blood in the bowl, blood on the paper, blood between her legs and all over her pajama bottoms.

She had been caught unawares. It had come too fast for her to rally her planned defense. Depressed by her failure, she stuffed toilet paper between her legs and walked carefully to her packed trunk to find the ‘things' her mother had made her bring. She was prepared, but defeated.

After breakfast she sat glumly on the bottom step of the bungalow, her bare feet in the mud, avoiding as long as possible the cleaning-up efforts of her bunkmates going on behind her. Red salamanders were out in large numbers, scooting through puddles and paddling with their miniature webbed feet in the muddy alleys between the bungalows.

Roslyn stretched out her hand in readiness. She was one of the camp's best catchers of small amphibians. She captured one now, holding the small, wet body close to her face. She watched as it raised its thin, diamond-shaped head to look at her, she thought, as if it knew it was a prisoner of her curiosity and was equally curious about her.

She considered how she would describe the little amphibian in science class this winter. ‘This salamander, the Catskill Mountains kind, has little black eyes, set way back in its head, which is shaped like a pen point. Its arms'—if that's what they're called on a salamander—‘have five fingers'—called what?—‘one of which is a small thumb like ours. But on its legs'—called what?—‘there are only four fingers.

‘I don't know why there should be different kinds, but there are. My mother told me they are green in Florida. But in the Catskills where I had to spend my summer vacation they are bright red with spots of brown on their backs, especially after a rain. Then they change. The brown spots get bigger and spread out until they cover the red and the salamanders are brown everywhere and you can't tell them apart from the mud they like so much. Some people call them chameleons because they change color so fast. That may not be the right name for this kind of salamander.'

On the spur of the moment, Roslyn named the salamander in her hand Emma after Caleb's mother, whom she remembered liking because she was so silent most of the time. She thought about the beach at Far Rockaway, about how she had lectured to the others about lemmings, describing their curious habits. She wished she knew more about whether the little creature in her hand had the same self-destructive instincts. Yes, she remembered something. She had heard that if she held it by its paper-thin tail it would not like it and would abandon it in her hand.

‘Come on in here and sweep under your bed,' Fritzie called. Startled, Roslyn clamped down on Emma, who panicked and moved. Roslyn grabbed again, and looked. All that was left of Emma between her fingers was the flat tail. The salamander had leaped into a puddle without it, and disappeared.

Roslyn looked for blood at the end where it had been attached to the wet slippery body. There was none. A bloodless detachment, she thought. She wished she had been able to manage something like that in the bathroom this morning. She carried the tail into the bungalow, handling it with great care, and laid it on her bare pillow. Fritzie had stripped her cot while she was out catching salamanders.

‘Icky. What is
that?
' said Loo.

‘Emma the salamander's tail. She left it with me as a going-home present.'

‘You're cruel,' said Jo.

‘Yes, you are,' said Aggie.

Muriel, who had been lying on her bare cot, came over to see the tail. She looked as if she was going to cry.

Fritzie put a broom into Roslyn's hand and said:

‘Come on, kids. No time for anything but cleanup if you don't want to miss lunch before we leave.'

‘If lunch is anything like breakfast, that will be okay with me,' Roslyn said. She put the tail, now shriveling, between two pages of her notebook, as if it were a treasured fall leaf, and stuffed the book into her overfull trunk. She doubted she'd need to take notes on the train ride home.

Fritzie folded sheets on Loo's bed, next to Roslyn's. Loo had gone to the bathroom. Roslyn sat on her cot, holding the broom, and whispered to Fritzie:

‘Is it true they're not married?'

‘
What
? Who?'

‘The Ehrlichs.'

‘My God. You are something, Roz. Where did you hear that? Of course it's not true.'

‘I just did. But it is true, isn't it?'

‘No.' Then Fritzie realized Roslyn was grinning at her. She whispered angrily: ‘Don't go blabbing that to everyone.'

‘So it is true,' she thought. ‘My love Fritzie is lying to me. She's not as good as I thought she was.' Roslyn shuddered at this newly revealed flaw in Fritzie's character.

While Fritzie sat down hard on the top of her trunk to get it closed, Roslyn went out on the porch to nurse her disappointment. ‘Maybe that's the way it will be all my life. All my loves will turn out to be imperfect. Everyone will have something that I will come to hate them for. But that's okay: I'll hold on to their weak point so I can feel better when they don't love me back.'

She decided love must be like a salamander with an expendable tail, joined so tenuously that it comes off if you reach out to grab it, and then the rest of it slithers away and disappears into the mud. Or like the lemmings who (probably in despair, she thought now) dive into the sea and drown. These similes, imperfect as they were, made her feel very grown-up. She had become capable of creating figures of speech, a literary practice more adult than copying newspaper plots.

After her trunk had been forced shut and locked, and the dust balls removed from under her bed and swept into the middle of the floor, out the door, and down the front steps to join the muddy path, Roslyn reclaimed her observation post on the steps. It had stopped raining, and a weak, almost fall sun was trying to shine. She saw Fatto walking up the line toward Rae's bungalow, carrying a gym bag.

Fritzie was sweeping the porch behind her. Roslyn saw her look at Fatto and then look away, pretending she hadn't seen him and his bag.

‘Don't worry,' Roslyn said smugly. ‘I already know about him.'

‘My God, Roz. Is there anything that goes on in this camp that you don't know about?'

‘It's my job to know things.'

‘What job?'

‘Writing. I'm a writer.'

‘What have you written, may I ask?'

‘Well, nothing yet. Except in my head. But I'm getting ready.'

‘Well, that's good to know. I'll be more careful around you from now on.'