Not a Happy Camper

by Mindy Schneider

  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.

  Hannah Moss, our catcher, was only seven years old and short for her age. She could barely hold up the bat.

  I pulled her aside and asked, “Can you stand like this?” and demonstrated crouching down so that my knees were in my armpits as I held the bat over my head. “The strike zone is between your knees and your armpits.”

  “But if I stand like that,” she said, “there is no strike zone.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hannah was a very smart seven-year-old who giggled as she crouched by the side of home plate. Four pitches in a row sailed over her head, the umpire called them balls, and she walked to first base.

  “Other Mindy, she’s our man—if she can’t do it... we’re gonna lose!”

  Like Casey of Mudville, my teammates’ hopes rested with me. If I could hit a homerun, we would win. I watched the first pitch come toward me. It looked pretty good. I thought about swinging and then I had another thought: Kenny is watching. If I hit a homerun, he’ll know the truth about me, that I’m probably a better athlete than he is. It was like that moment at the end of Annie Get Your Gun when Ms. Oakley had to decide whether or not to best her beau, Frank Butler, in a shooting match. But I didn’t know what decision she’d made. When I saw the play at Camp Cicada, it ended before they got to that part.

  “C’mon! You can do it! Other Mindy! Other Mindy!”

  The shouts weren’t deafening, but all in all, pretty loud. I didn’t swing. Strike one.

  “Time!” Autumn Evening brought the game to a halt, jumping up off the bench and running over to me.

  I stepped out of the batter’s box to see what she wanted. “What is it?” I asked. “You don’t even know anything about softball.”

  “I saw this old movie once,” she explained. “There was a guy who pointed to the outfield and then hit the ball there. He looked like Oliver Hardy. Only without the moustache.”

  “I think you mean Babe Ruth,” I told her. “He played for the Yankees.”

  “He’s a real guy?”

  “He was. He’s dead now.”

  “Would you like me to get in touch with him?”

  “Um, maybe later. We’re in the middle of a game. Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “Yeah. Hit the ball like Babe Ruth. I know you’re kind of shy, so you don’t have to point first. Just hit it really far so we can win this silly thing and you can be the hero. Or heroine. No, that sounds like drugs. Be the hero. I mean, unless you’re afraid or something.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Well, you’re not one to jump into the spotlight. You’re always hanging back, like you’re thinking about doing something, but then you don’t. What are you so afraid of?”

  What was I so afraid of? I was afraid of screwing up, of letting people down. That’s why I couldn’t tell my parents how upset I was when we pulled into camp that first day. If I’d told them I was disappointed, then they’d have been disappointed too, like the time I showed my father an A I got on a book report and he said, “How come not an A+?” Grades were really important in my family. We were all supposed to be geniuses even though only Jay was really that smart. Still, we were expected to get A’s all the time, except in penmanship, because that didn’t reflect how smart you were and also because both of my parents had really bad handwriting, to the point where no one could read our grocery list so we always wound up buying the wrong stuff at the market, and somehow I’d get blamed for that, too.

  It was as if, no matter how hard I tried, nothing I did was ever good enough. And if nothing I did was ever good enough, then maybe it was best not to try. Maybe it was best just to stand around and watch other people do things, watch other people live. What was I so afraid of? I was afraid of everything, which is why, sometimes, it was easiest to do nothing.

  “Earth to Mindy,” Autumn Evening broke in. “Are you even listening? Lookit, this isn’t like singing—which by the way you’re fine at—or straightening your hair. You can do this.”

  I knew she was right. And I wanted to be popular and I wanted to save the day, but was this the way? Was it worth winning a dumb old softball game if I risked losing Kenny before I’d even gotten him? As the first girl to play baseball in Springfield, New Jersey, I’d found out what it was like to have kids and their parents swear at me and accuse me of destroying the Great American Game. I was certain I would never have a boyfriend at home. Camp was my only chance.

  As I stepped back into the batter’s box, I glanced over at the crowd from Kin-A-Hurra. Everyone was cheering me on. Everyone. I realized I couldn’t let them down. I couldn’t let myself down. If I was going to get a boyfriend this summer, it was going to be because of who I really was, a lefty who could hit the ball to right field, the position where the other team always puts the weakest player.

  The next pitch was good and I turned my body toward first base as I swung, delivering a strong line drive. It went over the infielders’ heads and onto the grass where, like the girls from my hometown softball league, the right fielder watched it go through her legs. When I crossed home plate, the victory was ours. The Kin-A-Hurra contingent raced onto the field wher
e Hannah and I nearly had our eyes gouged out by the wired braids of a dozen shrieking Pippi Longstockings.

  On the truck ride home, we stopped at a place suspiciously named Dairy Kween and Kenny came over to me and told me how wonderful I was.

  “You’re amazing,” he said. I thought this might be the best day of my life until he added, “you should’ve been a guy!”

  Another boy felt differently. He pushed Kenny out of the way, proclaiming, “I’m glad you’re not.”

  “Mindy Schneider, Mindy Schneider, take some good advice from me...” shouted one of the older girls.

  And with that, my fate was sealed. I was being sung about in public. There was no stopping it now. I had my first boyfriend. Philip Selig.

  Just what I was afraid of.

  to the tune of

  Pomp and Circumstance

  “Greasy French fries, unscrambled eggs

  Soggy toast and sour milk

  Walking turkey legs

  Shredded cardboard and Ill-Bran

  Fish that never swam

  Vinegar and STP

  Peanut putty and jam

  Live, watery bug juice

  Hot dogs that bark

  Hamburgers made of Alpo

  Jell-O that shines in the dark

  Doughnuts used for anchors

  Olympic shot-put pancakes

  These are the meals they serve us

  Just like mother makes”

  6

  I HAD SO COMPLETELY DEVOTED MY LIFE TO TRYING IN VAIN TO GET A boyfriend and then dealing with defeat, it never crossed my mind what I’d do if I did actually get one. Especially if it was the wrong one.

  I’d been successfully ignoring and avoiding Philip for days, choosing to remain on Girls’ Side, hiding out in other bunks. I improved my jacks game, learning three new fancies, while being tutored on the intricacies of numbing one’s eyebrows with an ice cube before tweezing. Life was temporarily edifying and effortless and it made me wonder if there were any kosher all-girls camps, and if so, perhaps it would be best if I signed up for one the next summer. My self-imposed exile from Boys’ Side ended on a Friday morning, when chef Walter Henderson invited my bunk to help him make the challah for that evening. This was a rare honor, not to be passed up.