Not a Happy Camper

by Mindy Schneider

  My bunkmates, counselor and I rode across the lake on the Ferry, a large Huck Finn-esque motorized raft the camp maintenance man had built on a lark, to see if it really would float. The feeling that came over me whenever I arrived at Boys’ Side was that this was the Real Camp, and that Girls’ Side was just some aberration tacked onto the other end of the lake. Girls’ Side was hilly, with its randomly numbered bunks secluded among trees, and seemingly empty since we tended to stay indoors. Boys’ Side was flat and wide open and its bunks, displaying carved plaques with their picturesque names, were lined up in rows. And there was always activity going on, no matter how hard it rained. Saul Rattner rarely visited the girls. Seeing him on our side was like seeing Sammy Davis, Jr. on All in the Family. You expected the words “Special Guest Star” to flash in front of him. Big social events were held on Boys’ Side. Co-ed Saturday morning services were held on Boys’ Side. Saul and his wife ate only on Boys’ Side. Even though Boys’ Side was a pigsty.

  The Boys’ dining hall was nothing like The Point. While our building was beautiful, cozy and surprisingly well maintained, the boys’ dining hall was a massive aging wreck. While the girls dined at clean, varnished tables set upon gleaming wood floors, the boys sat at old picnic tables on an uneven, beat-up, rotting floor, painted gray with spatters of red, blue and yellow, as if the primary colors might hide the termite damage and filth. The tables were long and narrow and crowded together and, strangest of all, the boys didn’t seem to care.

  The youngest bunk, the Pioneers, prided themselves on being assigned the most heavily sloped corner of the room. Their counselor, Bobby Gurvitz, had shown them a neat trick: if you held a saltshaker at the high end of the table and let go, you could send it all the way down to the other end without pushing it. This game became known as “Pass the Salt,” but worked just as well with other condiments, hard-boiled eggs and a small lightweight camper named Teddy Marcus.

  The kitchen wasn’t in much better shape. I’d learned in my seventh grade Humanities class all about the Early American peddlers, men who traveled by covered wagon across the prairies, selling their household wares. Walter’s pots and pans looked like they’d come from a frontier settler’s homestead yard sale. In some ways this was quaint. You knew these old kettles had seen a lot of good home cooking, if not here then somewhere else. The long, wide preparation tables had their charm as well. Girls’ Side had only one small aluminum table, but Walter worked on a thick maple base. The wood gave you the feeling that it was homey and sturdy, if not also filled with bacteria festering since the turn of the century. The only perfectly spotless thing in the kitchen was Walter himself. A round-bellied 65–year-old black man from Panama, Walter was dressed in a crisp white chef’s uniform topped off with a favorite old fishing hat. This was the man who made the world’s best Jewish bread.

  “Hurry along there boys, before that nasty cereal sticks to my bowls,” Walter warned the waiters. The kitchen staff was running late, still cleaning up from breakfast. It wasn’t their fault. They were working short-handed; a waiter had been fired just the night before when he was caught urinating into a pitcher of bug juice he was planning to serve to Saul.

  Walter saw us come in.

  “I don’t understand you kids. I make you nice, hot eggs for breakfast and all you want is Frosted Flakes.”

  “The eggs are hot when he makes them?” I whispered.

  Maddy nudged me. Walter didn’t hear.

  “Come in, come on in, girls,” Walter urged us. “Welcome to my beautiful kitchen.”

  Walter Henderson had spent thirty-plus years cooking for maximum-security prisoners in upstate New York. Now he was retired and cooking in paradise. We watched as he assembled the ingredients on the long wooden table: vast amounts of eggs, sugar, flour, water, yeast, margarine and honey. I’d never thought about what went into a challah, just that it came out of a plastic bag.

  “You care to join us, young lady?” Walter asked Betty Gilbert who was standing in a corner, clutching her current reading material, Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, and working hard to maintain her appearance of hating camp.

  “I’m busy,” she said, but from the way she was peering over the top of her book, I knew she wanted to be included.

  “Suit yourself,” Walter continued, “but before we start, who knows why we make the challah?”

  For all the years of Hebrew School among us, no one knew the answer.

  “Maybe you do?” I proposed.

  Walter let out a sigh. “You kids should know this. Making challah is a mitzvah. Who knows what ‘mitzvah’ means?”

  I knew that one. “It’s a good deed.”

  “Yes. And who knows about the twelve tribes of Israel?”

  Hallie took a shot. “Um, there were these tribes. Twelve of them. In Israel...”

  “Walter, why don’t you tell us?” Maddy suggested.

  “All-righty then. Eleven of the twelve tribes were farmers, raising their own food. But the twelfth tribe, the Levis, took care of the temple.”

  “Far out,” said Autumn Evening, “and then they invented pants.”

  “In appreciation,” Walter continued, “the other tribes would bring them donations of bread. Challah is the name for the act of separating the piece of bread given to the Levis. It’s why we break off a piece when we make the blessing on Friday night and pass it around the table. Sharing is a mitzvah. God’s commandment that we make challah is His way of reminding us to share.”

  “Walter!” Dana shouted out, “we wouldn’t care if it was pagan food of the devil. It’s the best thing you make. Now show us how!”

  Under the master chef’s guidance, we mixed and poured and stirred for half an hour. Well, all of us except Betty Gilbert.

  I suspected Betty’s aloofness was really a defense, a desire to avoid being ridiculed. I didn’t know what she was afraid of specifically, but it was a feeling with which I was well acquainted and the reason I had skipped Arlene Stein’s Bat Mitzvah party a month earlier. Instead of the usual clunky dancing to a fake rock band at some catering hall, Arlene’s parents rented out the pool at the YWHA. Picturing myself in a bathing suit in front of thirteen-year-old boys and thirteen-year-old girls, I declined the invitation, opting to stay home and polish off a Sara Lee cake left over from my mother’s Cultural Affairs Committee meeting.

  After the ingredients were mixed and folded, Walter said we were ready to knead the dough.

  “So Mindy, you gonna go see Philip while we’re here?” Dana asked.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I insisted.

  “Ooh, look how hard she’s denying it,” chided Hallie. “That’s a sure sign. So Dana, you gonna go see Aaron?”

  Dana smiled. “Um... duh!”

  As the boy talk escalated, my bunkmates and I got a little carried away, pounding and punching the malleable bread into submission.

  “That’s enough, girls! That’s enough!” Walter shouted, stopping us before we destroyed it. Next, the dough was placed into a warm oven to double in size. This would take an hour and a half. Time to kill.

  I knew Kenny would be playing basketball and Philip would not be, so I ran oh-so-casually as fast as I could to the court, plunking myself down on the sidelines.

  “Hi! Whatcha doin’ here?” Philip asked.

  He was standing right next to me. I hadn’t anticipated this scenario. Like water trapped in a hotpot, I could feel my insides about to boil. I was mad at Philip, convinced in my own mind that he’d gone around after the softball game telling people he was my boyfriend. It would make me appear unavailable for Kenny, which meant Kenny would never realize I was interested in him, which meant I would only dream about him more.

  “Just came out to watch the game,” I said, blasé.

  “Kinda dull,” he informed me. “Wanna go do something else?”

  “Can’t. My bunk’s helping Walter bake tonight’s challah. Well, he’s letting us pretend to be helping. It’s pretty cool. But I hav
e to stay around the dining hall.”

  “Ever been upstairs? I could show you.”

  “Upstairs? Above the dining hall?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  This was one place I was really curious about. I’d heard stories how those rooms were the worst place on Boys’ Side to live.

  “It’s, like, the most disgusting place,” Philip said cheerily.

  “Why would I want to see that?”

  “Because,” he explained, “it’ll make your bunk look so much better when you go back.”

  I tried to hide my interest, but Philip was pulling me by the arm, away from the game. I hoped Kenny didn’t see him touching me. Or maybe I hoped he did.

  We didn’t enter the dining hall from the kitchen side; we went in through the opposite end, via the covered porch, a popular spot for sitting and watching the entire waterfront structure submerge in a heavy downpour.

  “It’s really nice to watch sunsets from here,” Philip said.

  “Oh, yeah?” I answered. “Well, maybe if it ever stops raining we’ll see one.”

  Once inside, we climbed up a set of creaky old stairs, the kind with a little closet built underneath that seems so perfect for storing winter clothes until you come back a year later and find them devoured by moths and/or destroyed by nesting rats. At the top of the steps, we heard a strange noise. It sounded vaguely human, like moaning. If I believed in ghosts, I’d have believed I was hearing one then. Someone—or something—was in terrible pain. I pulled back and turned to Philip, then sucked in air, ready to scream. “Shhh!” he said and moved closer. I looked at him like he was nuts. Something terrible was going on in that room.

  He motioned for me to be quiet and follow him. Scrawny little Philip was very brave. As we tiptoed onto the landing, we could tell where the noise was coming from. It was a room at the end of the hallway, where a woman was moaning in pain. The door was closed. The moans grew louder.

  “Should we call someone for help?” I was really nervous now.

  “Sounds like she’s doing okay,” Philip assured me.

  A moment later, the moans climaxed with a shriek and then stopped abruptly. Is she dead? I wondered. Would I be blamed somehow and, more importantly, would this result in being grounded and losing privileges? The door swung open and Julie Printz, the counselor who ran the girls’ waterfront on sunny days and therefore had plenty of free time, stepped out, looking a little disheveled, but hardly in agony.

  Not only was she not in pain, she was kind of glowing. Her expression quickly turned to embarrassment when she saw us. As Julie ran down the creaky stairs, I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, “Tie those laces before you trip and break your teeth.” A few seconds later, the waiter who had played piano for The Sound of Music emerged. He didn’t look the least bit embarrassed.

  “All yours!” he shouted, as he ran by the two of us.

  “Thanks!” Philip called back, grinning, as he watched the waiter bound down the steps after Julie.

  I was utterly confused and then it hit me: Was this sex? This? This was sex? What the hell was wrong with people? How could this be? I’d never heard these sounds before and my family slept with all the bedroom doors open. All I’d ever heard was my father snoring and I had three brothers. How did my parents do it? Why would my parents do it? Would my parents do this? Did my parents do this? This? Sex? God. Yech.

  I decided Philip was not the one to ask. He walked into the newly vacated room. “All ours,” he said. I didn’t move. “C’mon, don’tcha want to see what’s in here?” I did. A lone light bulb dangled from the ceiling and what was left of the pale green paint on the walls (which we’d find out ten years later was loaded with lead) was peeling in large chunks. This place had all the style and wit of a police interrogation room, but it also had a mirror and a cot and I guess, ultimately, that was all that mattered to Julie and the waiter.

  “This was what you wanted to show me?” I asked.

  “I guess,” came the reply. “Wanna get out of here?”

  I did, quickly returning to the hallway.

  After peeking into a few more rooms, including the ones the Wolverines were crammed into, Philip and I concluded that the first room was, tragically, the nicest and we dubbed it “The Hanky Panky Suite.” We were laughing, but I was nervous, afraid Philip might want me to go back in there with him and close the door like the waiter and Julie.

  “I think I have to get back now,” I said.

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. I just have a feeling.”

  “’kay,” Philip said. “I’ll go with you.”

  Which was fine with me as long as it wasn’t into that room.

  An hour and a half had passed and Philip accompanied me to the kitchen just as Autumn Evening, Betty and Hallie returned from a film festival in the boys’ social hall where they were screening old Three Stooges shorts (less popular ones from the Joe Besser years) which Saul had acquired from a movie theater that went out of business.

  “Mindy with a boyfriend. Never thought I’d see that,” Betty commented. “Guess you’re not who I thought you were.”

  Which was possibly the nicest thing anyone ever said about me, so I got defensive. “Shut up, he’s not—I mean-”

  Philip looked hurt, but I pretended not to notice as Dana walked in with the Adonis, Aaron Klafter, and announced he’d be joining us in bread baking.

  “Guys can come?” I asked. “Philip, you want to?”

  Feeling guilty as usual, I had to make it up to him for my previous remark.

  Philip tried to look nonchalant. “Beats watching basketball, I guess.”

  As we headed into the kitchen, Aaron took Dana’s hand. Philip saw it and turned to me, so I put my hands in my pockets.

  Rumor had it that Maddy was off with Jacques, some sort of scheduling crisis she had to help him figure out. For a camp that appeared to have no set schedule, she sure spent a lot of time helping him plan things.

  The rest of us watched as Walter rolled the dough into nine long snake-like strands. Then, grasping three strands at a time, he braided them together perfectly. “I wish you could’ve done my hair like that,” I told him. “That would’ve looked good when I was Frau Schmidt.”

  Once all the loaves were braided, Walter showed us how to paint the bread with egg wash and sprinkle on poppy seeds. This was all a new experience for me, as I was never really exposed much to baking. My mother barely liked to cook and mostly stuck with broiling things. Her repertoire later expanded when the microwave revolutionized the kitchen and she is the only person I know who makes tuna salad in a Cuisinart, which makes it, let me tell you, very smooth.

  Betty Gilbert had returned to the kitchen only to resume peering at us over the top of her book.

  “Could use your help here,” I said, trying to sound annoyed.

  “Oh, all right,” she groaned, putting down the book. “I need a brush.”

  “You can share mine,” I said, and she snatched it away from me.

  Betty acted like the whole thing was a chore, but she didn’t fool anyone. Mitzvah accomplished.

  After the bread was painted and seeded, it was ready to go back into the oven, which meant more free time for my bunkmates and me. Aaron suggested swimming, but for the same reasons I’d skipped Arlene Stein’s Bat Mitzvah party, I did not want to go.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Wanna do something else?” Philip asked.

  “Yes, go do something with Philip,” Dana urged me. “You’ll have fun.”

  I wanted to say no to him, but it had been interesting exploring upstairs and it was uncomfortable standing around in the kitchen once everyone else left.

  “Okay, there is something I want to do,” I said. “I want to know what’s in that closet under the steps.”

  Philip smiled. “Cool.”

  The door was locked, but the wood around it was so rotted it didn’t take much for Philip to pry it off. He-man that he was, Phili
p proudly turned to me and flexed his muscles, but his biceps just sort of flat-lined. We gasped as the door popped open, not so much because we were amazed, but because so much dust flew out into our faces. Philip took off his baseball cap and attempted to wave it away.

  “This is like my grandparents’ store,” I said.

  “Full of old dusty stuff?”

  “Uh-huh. Old cartons, old clothes, an old Singer sewing machine with the foot pedal. Old people...”

  The closet was deep and piled high with boxes. We opened one and found it was filled with blank, yellowing Camp Kin-AHurra official Red Cross swimming cards.

  “When I went to day camp they used to give these out at the end of the summer,” I said. “I was so dumb I didn’t notice they gave me the same Beginner card all four years.”

  “Not much of a swimmer, huh?” he asked.

  I grimaced. “Not really. But I got pretty good with that blue kickboard.”

  At my old sleepaway camp, I’d finally made it to Advanced Beginner, but I never got to Intermediate, due to a mental block about learning how to dive. Something about my fear of going in nose first. Here at Kin-A-Hurra, where it rained every day, they never made us swim. By now I’d be lucky if I could remember how to dog paddle.

  Philip was the kind of geek who kept a ballpoint pen in his back pocket that leaked and left a little circle of ink on the seat of his pants. He grabbed a card and filled it out for me.

  “There,” he said as he handed me the card. “You’ve passed Junior Lifesaving. Congratulations.”

  “Excellent. I’ll put this on my college application.”

  Even though we were joking around, I was oddly aware that I was pleased to have this old document. It felt like I now owned a piece of camp history. I was new here, but this made me feel somehow connected to the past, a part of something bigger, something I wanted to belong to, not to Philip specifically, but to everyone at camp in general. Huddled together on the floor of the closet, we opened a few more boxes and found more old documents.