Not a Happy Camper

by Mindy Schneider

  Philip cringed. “Shhh. Shhh. There’s nothing unethical.”

  “He’s the guy?”

  “Shhhhhh!!!”

  “Shouldn’t that be ‘chhh’? As in choo-choo, choo-choo, choo-choo, choo-choo. Woo-woo! Oh no! Look out!”

  Philip folded his arms as I mimed a phone call. “Hello? Mr. Selig? Dinner is served.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Go back to Girls’ Side. I’ll never tell you anything again.”

  “What? No wait-”

  But Philip grunted and walked away, leaving me feeling like I was the one standing around in my underwear.

  The four of us arrived back at Girls’ Side in time to find Bunk Four’s counselor, Cari Lorberfeld, running naked down the aisle between our beds. Her campers had hidden all of her bras and had sworn not to return them unless she streaked through every bunk. As she bounced past us and down the front steps, she nearly gave my mother two black eyes; my parents had arrived.

  Seeing my parents standing next to the Schwartzes was like looking at a timeline from Mrs. Knoller’s Humanities class. My own father still wore 1950s cuffed wool pants and white t-shirts that made him look like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and my mother saw no reason to get rid of her mid-‘60s plaid elastic-waist pull-ons, the ones she thought were what to wear when she wanted to “look nice.” (My parents would continue to wear these clothes, falling more and more out of sync until the end of the century, when they would suddenly be perceived as “retro” and draw compliments.)

  My mother stifled a laugh as my father pulled me aside and said, “Don’t ever let me catch you running around naked like that girl.” Cari Lorberfeld was at least a double-D. Really, it wasn’t very likely.

  My parents then watched in horror as the Schwartzes presented Autumn Evening with a laundry bag full of candy. Maddy assured them she’d monitor our intake, but we knew she wouldn’t. For the first time in my life, there was junk food to spare. They also handed Autumn Evening a new blow dryer and a twenty-dollar bill. “We’ll give you some money later,” my father quietly told me.

  My parents didn’t believe in lavishing my brothers and me with gifts, except at Hanukkah. Hanukkah was different. A lot of people probably think Jewish kids grow up envying their non-Jewish friends who have Santa Claus, but I didn’t have to because my brothers and I had Mr. Sweeney. A clean-shaven, middle-aged man from New Jersey, Mr. Sweeney occasionally played in my father’s Wednesday night poker game and had some sort of job in the toy industry. Every year, he’d invite my parents to his warehouse for a special deal, just for us. Growing up, though, my brothers and I thought he gave out toys to all the Jewish kids, odd since we knew he was Irish Catholic, and my mother taught us revised versions of the holiday classics, titles like It’s Beginning to Look a lot like Hanukkah and Mr. Sweeney’s Comin’ to Town.

  It was always around Thanksgiving that we’d drive over to Two Guys, the discount department store in Union, New Jersey, to scour the toy aisles, showing my parents what we wanted. A couple of weeks later, Mrs. Fairbanks, a crotchety old neighborhood babysitter who wore snow pants year round, would come over on that magical night when my mother and father would visit Mr. Sweeney’s warehouse. Inevitably, they would discover his inventory was entirely different from that of Two Guys and would toss aside our lists and stock up on whatever he had. As a result, we always got loads of toys for Hanukkah, just never what we wanted, thus creating the unique situation of growing up simultaneously both spoiled and deprived.

  I remember one year when I wanted a Midge doll. She had short, reddish hair—kind of like counselor Gita Isak—and I thought she’d be good for my Barbie and Skipper dolls to hang out with. They’d had her at Two Guys, but not at Mr. Sweeney’s, so instead my parents got me a Barbie With Growing Hair. I was practically in tears.

  “I can’t have TWO dolls named Barbie,” I tried to explain. “I needed a Midge!”

  “You can call her ‘Midge’,” my mother suggested.

  “I can’t call her ‘Midge’ when her name is ‘Barbie’!”

  My mother just didn’t get it.

  “When I was your age,” my father broke in, “I didn’t have any toys. All I had was a jar of old nickels. And I played with them in the hallway because our apartment was so small.”

  I must have heard the jar of nickels story a million times, yet never once thought to ask my father why he didn’t just take his container of coins and use it to go buy some toys.

  That same year, my older brother got an elaborate board game called Mousetrap, but it never worked right because we ate some of the pieces.

  “So where’re you taking me to spend this?” Autumn Evening asked her parents, holding up the twenty. There was only one place. The Schwartzes offered us a day on the town, the town being Skowhegan. The plan was to use the Good Tan Van, which we’d borrowed to get back to Girls’ Side.

  “Ready to see Skowhegan?” Maddy asked my parents.

  “I thought we came to see the camp,” my mother answered. “Aren’t there activities planned? What do you usually do?”

  “Usually it rains,” Betty Gilbert informed her from behind a worn copy of Go Ask Alice.

  “And when it doesn’t,” added Dana, “we leave.”

  “That’s Visiting Day?” my father questioned.

  “Dad,” I tried to explain, “it’s not Visiting Day. It’s just a day. And you’re visiting.”

  “Maybe you could meet us later for lunch,” Mrs. Schwartz suggested. “What was that place with the bread? Flo’s?”

  Flo’s Café, two miles down the road from camp, was noted for its fresh baked goods and recently-paroled clientele.

  “We’ll see,” said my father. Which I knew meant “no.”

  As the van pulled away, my parents asked, “So how’s it going? What’s new?”

  Why oh why do parents ask these questions? It is the unwritten code of adolescence never to say, “We sit around the bunk all day, doing next to nothing except wallowing in self-pity which you dismiss as ‘growing pains’ and obsessing about boys across the lake.” I wasn’t going to tell them about the prowlers and I had only briefly mentioned the Wolverines’ fire in a letter home, prompting my mother to send me my one and only package of the summer, a pair of flame-retardant pajamas that must have been on sale at Rynette’s.

  “We played softball against another camp,” I told them. “I hit a homerun and we won.”

  “So do you like this camp better than the old one?” my mother asked.

  This was a question I could answer honestly. “Yes. And I like my counselor a lot, too.”

  “Dr. Silver did her nose,” my mother said.

  “What?”

  “She had a nose job.” My mother just knew it. “Dr. Silver on Madison Avenue. He gives everyone that same little upturned nose. Makes ‘em all look like shiksas. You’ll go to someone else. Yours will look real. I’m getting some names.”

  “Have you passed your deepwater test?” my father asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s usually raining.”

  “It’s not raining today,” he pointed out.

  And that is how I finally managed to swim the twenty laps, with my parents standing on the dock, yelling at me to lift my arms higher, kick my feet harder and breathe, breathe, breathe with the Bell & Howell movie camera clacking away.

  As I climbed out of the lake and reached for my towel, lifeguard Julie Printz congratulated me. “If the sun ever comes out again, you’re a deepwater swimmer.”

  “And doesn’t Judy Horowitz’s old bathing suit look good on you?” my mother added. Judy was tall and thin and almost as busty as Cari Lorberfeld. It would have fit me better if I’d been wearing it upside down and backwards.

  Months later, when we screened the event in the den, my mother got annoyed when she realized I hadn’t brought that ratty old pink towel home from camp. I tried to explain that it was among those the townies had stolen off the clothesline. “That towel belonged to my gr
andmother, Celia,” she said through gritted teeth. You’d think they’d gotten away with a priceless family heirloom.

  “Go get changed and we’ll get some lunch,” my father said.

  “Are we going to Skowhegan to meet the others?” I asked.

  “I thought we’d eat here,” he said. “Like we did when we dropped you off. Saul took care of us.”

  “You know that he charges those meals to Mindy’s canteen account, right?” Julie asked.

  “What?” my mother nearly shrieked.

  “Any time you eat here,” Julie informed them, “Saul subtracts five dollars a person from the canteen money you gave the office.”

  We met up with my bunkmates and the Schwartzes at the legendary Flo’s, which had once been Eb & Flo’s until Eb ran away with a local high school girl, leaving Flo to run it on her own. She didn’t have time to write up receipts or ring up bills.

  “How much do I owe ya?” the regular customer shouted out.

  Flo totaled it up in her head and shouted back, “’Bout three dollahs, Earl. Just leave it in the registah.”

  And he did, along with a big tip on the table.

  Walking in as the local man walked out were a serious-looking couple, a man and a woman, overdressed for the occasion, as this was not a court appearance.

  “Who are they?” Mrs. Schwartz asked.

  A more normal-looking kid walked in behind them. It was Kenny. The Ubers were here. Kenny looked at Dana and Autumn Evening and then he looked at his parents and turned crimson before looking away.

  “What are they, Feds?” Autumn Evening’s father muttered.

  “Dad! Shhh!” Autumn Evening pleaded.

  Despite my bunkmate’s shushing her parents, I ascertained that Kenny’s family was loaded, his parents set for life without ever working another day, that they both worked anyway in high pressure jobs in Manhattan and that they lived in a mansion in Westchester County with horse stables and someone else who scooped up the poop. Even though they reminded me of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, as pictured on the Wanted! poster my brother tacked up on his bedroom door, I was significantly impressed.

  When we finished our meal, Flo almost handed Mr. Schwartz the check, then placed it in front of my father instead. I waited nervously to see if he would offer to pay half or just for our family. Thankfully, after looking over the bill and checking the math in his head, my father split the tab with Mr. Schwartz and even bought a loaf of bread for the road.

  By late afternoon, camp was full of parents, including Hallie’s, with her dad in wrinkle-proof Sansa-belt slacks and her mom in mini-check culottes. They brought her a box of Mallomars and a new hairbrush. Dana’s parents owned a cracker factory and they placed sample bags of their new Cheesy-O’s on every pillow on every bed on Girls’ Side. Betty Gilbert was having a wonderful time with her father, catching frogs in a muddy bog, until someone spoiled their fun by asking what they were doing standing knee-deep in an open cesspool. All of the parents stayed across the highway at the Oak Pond Motel, most of them choosing it because it was close by, and in my parents’ case because of the Triple-A discount.

  Saul stunned everyone by offering the girls’ parents a free buffet dinner.

  “That’s nice of him,” my mother said.

  “Mom,” I explained, “we have this every week. It’s leftovers. He calls it a ‘buffet’. We call it a ‘barf-et’.”

  It was interesting watching the adults’ expressions change as they bit into boiled hot dogs and washed them down with green bug juice. For dessert there was a frosted sheet cake, “From the year gimmel,” my mother said, tossing it out after one bite. For once I was glad the food was so bad; it prompted my father to hand over a five-dollar bill, spending money for O’Boyle’s.

  Borscha Belyavsky’s mother turned out to be a classical violinist who’d soloed with the New York Philharmonic. That evening, she gave a free concert in the Girls’ Social Hall and my mother fixed our perpetually troublesome toilet, getting it to stop running.

  “This place seems so unsupervised, so disorganized,” I heard her say to Mrs. Bleckman, as my mother submerged her hand—diamond ring and all—into our toilet tank. “How many years have you been sending your daughter here?”

  “Five,” Mrs. Bleckman told her. “And it is a pit, but Dana likes it. And frankly,” she said, lowering her voice, “I just want her out of the house. That’s my vacation.”

  The night the last of the parents left, it felt good to get our bunk back to ourselves.

  “Oh my God,” screamed Hallie. “My mother’s culottes. I’m so ashamed. I keep begging her to throw those away.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Dana. “My parents turned Girls’ Side into one big Cheesy O’s commercial.”

  “I liked your parents,” I told her.

  “You can have them,” groaned Dana. “It’s so embarrassing.”

  It had never crossed my mind before. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

  “And what about the Ubers?” said Hallie. “Did you see them at the restaurant? They’re like the Cleavers turned evil.”

  This was the point at which Autumn Evening burst into tears.

  “What?” said Dana. “It’s not like you’re gonna marry him and they’re going to be your in-laws.”

  “I know that,” she sobbed. “He broke up with me today. He thinks he’s going on the Allagash and he says he can’t be tied down. What the hell is that? I don’t even like him. Talk about embarrassing. God, I’ll be so glad when camp is over.”

  But it wasn’t over yet and Kenny was free again. If he went on the Allagash trip, however, it would mean he’d be out of camp for ten days and then I’d have ten less days to make him like me—or ten more days to think of a way I could make him like me once he got back...

  Yes, camp was like a tank of gas and now it was a little less than half full. Time to step on it.

  To the tune of

  For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow

  The girls went over to Boys’ Side

  The girls went over to Boys’ Side

  The girls went over to Boys’ Side

  To see what they could see

  11

  THE LAST THING I EXPECTED WAS TO WATCH TV AT CAMP. ODD, because at home I lived for it. We had two television sets in our house, one in the den and one upstairs. The upstairs TV was a portable, in that it was a 25–inch RCA on a big metal cart that could be wheeled around from room to room, albeit with much difficulty and smacking into doorways. It even had a remote control, although we weren’t allowed to use it because, as my mother explained, “If we used it, it might break.”

  Every kid I knew spent evenings in front of the tube, eager to discuss favorite shows the next day at recess. There were three major networks, PBS and a bunch of local stations for reruns and cartoons. Movies of the Week were revered as movies. Specials were special. No one had heard of cable yet and Betamax was still just a gleam in some Japanese person’s eye. The world was bigger and smaller.

  Since we did well in school, my brothers and I were allowed to watch as much TV as we wanted, except for Hogan’s Heroes (shows about funny Nazis were verboten in our home) and Dark Shadows (I have no idea why). I especially loved sitcoms and thought my own family was just like the ones I saw on TV, except we didn’t drink milk at dinner, like the goyim. One night my father was absent from the table when my mother set down the food at 5:45.

  “Where’s Daddy?” asked my baby brother David.

  “He’s not in this episode,” I replied without hesitation.

  My older brother Mark’s eyes widened. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. How did you know?”

  I identified with Rhoda Morgenstern, never daring to aspire to Mary Richards heights, and I wanted everyone on TV to be rich. The Dick Van Dyke Show was my all-time favorite, but some of the episodes referenced money woes and I didn’t want to think that a TV writer had to worry about finances, especially when they lived so modestly in the boring suburbs, like
me, and had only one child to put through college.

  Due to the Kramdens’ dire money situation, I never enjoyed The Honeymooners with Ralph’s endless string of futile get-rich-quick schemes, and at the extreme end, I Love Lucy made me physically ill. Though I can appreciate its genius and have seen every episode numerous times, watching it always made me anxious because despite her best efforts, Lucy never got what she wanted: to be the star in her husband’s show. Ricky Ricardo may have loved her, but Lucy never reached her potential because her husband shattered her dreams. And what if I got married and that happened to me?

  “We’re going for a walk,” Maddy announced as she entered the bunk after lunch. “You girls need some exercise.”

  “But it’s drizzling out,” Betty complained, not that she wouldn’t have complained if it were sunny.

  “Exactly,” Maddy said. “We’re going for a walk before it starts pouring. We’re going into Canaan to go shopping.”

  “Shopping.” The abracadabra of teen-age girls. Suddenly the rain wasn’t sounding so oppressive and my bunkmates and I stuffed our wallets into the back pockets of our painter’s pants, threw on our ponchos and headed down the steps. After a pit stop at O’Boyle’s, where we loaded up on soda and candy, we headed into town, where we’d no doubt purchase more soda and candy. Hallie kept an eye out for flat nose rocks along the side of the road and Dana started up a chorus of California Dreamin’.

  And while I had been dreaming about Kenny day and night, I still hadn’t come up with a plan as to how I’d win him over when he came back from the Allagash. Somehow, when he wasn’t around, just thinking about him felt like enough and I found myself enjoying my bunkmates’ company and doing things like this, this mindless, pointless, endless shopping. But the canoe trip was due back within twenty-four hours and I knew I had to get back on track.

  A couple of miles down the road, just as Betty’s bellyaching became unbearable, we came upon our destination. “We’re here,” Maddy announced. “Frank’s Fine Antiques.”