Not a Happy Camper

by Mindy Schneider

  “Wow,” said Autumn Evening. “It’s like a midi. Cool.”

  “Yeah, and it won’t get wet on the bottom, like mine,” added Hallie, envy in her eyes.

  “You know what you need?” Dana said. “You need me to blow-dry your hair straight.”

  “Me with straight hair?”

  “You don’t like the idea?”

  “Well, yeah, but I didn’t think it was possible. Me with straight hair is like a world where dogs have thumbs and can open kitchen cabinets.”

  Betty shot an odd look my way. “My brother doesn’t have thumbs and he can open kitchen cabinets.”

  “That’s interesting,” Autumn Evening noted. “If he comes to camp next summer, Saul can make that an event in Kin & Hurra.”

  Later, heading down the steps, Hallie leaned in and whispered, “You look great. Too bad you don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “What about Philip?” I asked. “He likes me.”

  “It doesn’t count if you don’t like him back and everyone knows you don’t.”

  Well, everyone was wrong. I was wrong. And tonight I was going to prove it.

  With the tables and benches back inside the dining hall, we sat crowded together, elbow to elbow, all spruced up, except for the Wolverines, who were slovenly by comparison.

  “What’s the matter with you boys?” Saul wanted to know. “Is this some form of protest? The ’60s are over. Where are your nice clothes?”

  “They burned in the fire!” a lone Wolverine shouted.

  For a moment, Saul was caught off-guard, but then regained his composure. “That’s no excuse,” he said. “You should look nice tonight. We’re having steak.”

  “Freight train of steak must’ve crashed,” someone muttered.

  “Woo-woo!” someone else added.

  “No,” chimed in Bobby Gurvitz. “It’s ‘Moo-moo!’”

  I just hoped it wouldn’t be chateaubriand. I had too many issues with that cut of meat.

  As usual, Maddy had abandoned our bunk shortly after our arrival on Boys’ Side, but she did show up towards the end of the meal. For the first time all summer, Maddy and Jacques entered a room together. Immediately, the Junior Counselor girls paddled their hands against the table and made a dedication: “Quiet, please! Dedicated to the dining room: ‘Maddy Rattner, Maddy Rattner, take some good advice from me...’” But they were too late. Jacques and Maddy kissed in public for the first time, displaying their affection and the sparkly engagement ring on Maddy’s finger.

  After the meal came the entertainment. The Chipmunks’ counselor, Stuart Goldstein, had declared the theme of the Banquet “Poetry in Motion,” which was Stuart’s excuse to get up and read his favorite poem, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. After that, Betty read her favorite, the suicide-themed Resumé by Dorothy Parker. And then it was my turn. I was on the program, too.

  Word had leaked out that I’d been writing satirical poetry since I was twelve. Tonight, I would make my public debut. I had two reasons to be nervous. First, I’d spilled a tiny drop of gravy on my sleeve and even if no one in the audience noticed it, my mother surely would when I got home, and, more significantly, what if no one laughed at my poem when they were supposed to? And even if they did, there was still that thing again about everyone looking at me, and not just noticing the gravy on my sleeve. Standing on a chair in the middle of the dining hall, at least half the camp would see me in profile. My nose again. That cursed nose.

  What if I fall off the chair before I finish and that’s the only thing people ever remember about me? Years will go by and campers and counselors will still be telling the tale: ‘Remember that girl in the purple dress who fell off the chair at the Banquet Social?’ But if I did fall off, I could still make the most of it, I told myself. I could fall on my face and break my nose and then the surgery would be covered by insurance and it wouldn’t cost my parents two thousand dollars and I could have it done now instead of waiting until I was sixteen.

  In my mother’s last letter she’d told me she found out which doctor did Marlo Thomas’s nose. My classmate Kathy Shein had gone to him when we were playing volleyball in gym class and a girl on the other team spiked the ball into her face. That was the doctor my mother wanted for me, the doctor who gave That Girl that nose. I wished I were in gym class right now, getting hit in the face with a volleyball. But I was here. At camp. About to recite my poem.

  Stuart Goldstein announced me. “Mindy Schneider will recite Camping Out, based on her experience earlier this summer at Katahdin.”

  I climbed up on the chair without falling off and, in that same loud voice that had won me the lead in my second grade class play, I began: “‘Oh, I love to go a-camping in the great outdoors, where air is fresh and life is so real...’”

  At the end of the first stanza, I got a laugh. Much closer to calm and confident, I recited the rest of the poem and when I finished, I jumped off the chair to what felt like wild applause. And no one seemed to notice the gravy on my sleeve or that I took poetic license, turning the overnight into a six-day trip and mentioning foods like baked beans, which we would have killed to have had in place of peanut butter and peach nectar. Yes, I thought to myself, I think I did okay.

  Such was my triumph that four years later when I applied to thirteen colleges (two I was interested in and eleven safety schools), I attached a copy of the poem along with the required essay. Such was my triumph that when I went back to my bunk’s table and sat down, I was aware of a feeling that was at once both familiar and foreign, as if I were suddenly transported back to General Swim at Camp Cicada, only this time I wasn’t stuck in the Minnow section. I was with the Perch and the Sharks, not winning any races, just in the water. Swimming in the deep water, not afraid I might sink.

  The waiters served dessert, a pinkish sheet cake.

  “What’re those spots all over it?” Betty asked.

  “I think they’re raisins,” said Dana, poking at one. “Or dead flies. Autumn Evening, you know any of these guys?”

  When the Banquet was over and it was time to sing grace, Saul decided to keep us in the dining hall a little longer, waiting for the rain to let up a bit before we made a dash for the Social Hall. Wendy Katz started up her own dedication and got us singing Leaving on a Jet Plane, the song that always came at the end of camp.

  It was not okay for boys to cry, but many of the girls, especially the older ones, openly sobbed. I wanted to sob too, though for a different reason than my peers. I would not be leaving on a jet plane. It would be years before I’d go anywhere on a jet plane. I would be leaving in the back seat of a station wagon because my family never had money for fancy transportation. We never had money for fancy anything.

  It might have helped if my parents had explained the reason for their frugality, but it wasn’t revealed until years later. I have a master’s degree, Jay has a master’s and a Ph.D., and Mark and David each went to law school. All told, the four of us amassed some thirty-two years of higher education at private universities and upon graduation not one of us owed a penny. That was where the money went. But as kids, we just thought we were poor.

  “I liked your poem,” I heard someone behind me say.

  It was Philip again. Good old Philip.

  “Thanks.”

  “Um... so you’re going to the Social, right?” he asked.

  Saul was standing in the middle of the dining hall, calling for silence. He’d stepped out to take a phone call and learned that the rain was not expected to let up any time soon. Rather, it was likely to develop into a hurricane, one that might wash away all of camp. We still had thirty-six hours left, but we would not be spending them here. We were fleeing to higher ground. I turned to

  Philip to answer his question, as to whether I’d be attending the Social: “I’m thinking I’ll skip it this year.”

  to the tune of

  Rise and Shine

  “The Lord said to Saul

  There’s gonna be a flood-y flood-y

 
; Lord said to Saul

  There’s gonna be a flood-y flood-y

  Get those children

  Out of the muddy muddy

  Suckers of Camp Kin-A-Hurra

  So rise and shine

  And give Saul your money, honey

  Rise and shine

  And give Saul your money, honey

  Rise and shine and

  Give Saul your money, honey

  Suckers of Camp Kin-A-Hurra

  So Saul, he built them

  He built them a bunk-y bunk-y

  Saul, he built them

  He built them a bunk-y bunk-y

  Made it out of

  Junky junky junky

  Suckers of Camp Kin-A-Hurra”

  16

  AUTUMN EVENING HELD UP TWO OUTFITS. “WHICH PAJAMA ENSEMBLE should I wear?” she inquired. The boys had seen us in our nice clothes; now we had to determine what they’d see us in next. Autumn Evening decided to go with the man-tailored silk jacket and lounge pants. “It’s all about style, dahling,” she told us, glamorously pretending to smoke an incense stick, while I placed my purple velvet party frock back on its hanger, relieved not to be playing dress-up any more. If Philip was going to like me, he was going to like me in gray sweats and a rain poncho.

  Taking only our sleeping bags, pillows, a change of underwear and secret stashes of food (and my toothbrush—always my toothbrush), we bade farewell to our camp in record time via every available vehicle. “If the rest of our stuff gets washed away,” I asked Maddy, “do you think Saul could write me a note for my mother? Otherwise she’ll think I lost everything.” I considered bringing along my clarinet. Not to play it, just to keep it dry.

  The boys had taken the Green Truck, leaving us only the Good Tan Van and the Valiant, so our counselors crammed girls into their old clunker cars and the kitchen staff rode on the Food and Garbage Truck. Saul let a couple of special campers ride along in his Jeep. Our destination: the Skowhegan Junior High gym.

  The boys had already arrived and laid out their sleeping bags on the far side of the basketball court. The girls were about to unroll theirs as well, when it was announced that the Social would go on as planned. Jacques had dragged along a ham radio in order to spend the night monitoring weather reports, but Wendy had grabbed an old phonograph and a handful of records. Thanks to her, we’d be dancing the night away to The Jackson Five, The Spinners and Jefferson Airplane.

  All of the cool kids, the go-with-the-flow types you knew would be successful adults, took to the floor. Girls were dancing with girls and even some boys joined in. Others on the sidelines (literally, since we were on a basketball court) clapped and swayed to the music. I’d been aware of two basic kinds of kids at Kin-A-Hurra. The first were the Legacies, mostly children of former campers. Rich kids destined to lead relatively easy and productive lives, they seemed to possess no insecurities or feel a need to judge and belittle the other group. And then there was the other group, the Losers, the paste-eaters Saul conned into coming to this place in spite of their unbridled self-doubt and absolute lack of social skills. This was who our camp was: Legacies and Losers, but put us all together in one room in our pajamas and we kind of looked the same.

  “Um, wanna dance?” Philip asked as Michael Jackson’s I Want You Back blared from the mono speaker.

  Something totally unexpected happened as I struggled to remember the Horse. It’s not that I suddenly became Ginger Rogers; it was something far better: Philip couldn’t dance at all. Arms and legs flailing every which way, I had to duck a couple of times not to get hit. And the best part was, he didn’t seem to care. When the song ended, someone changed the record, putting on a 45 of Diana Ross’s Touch Me in the Morning.

  Philip looked at me and shrugged. “You wanna?”

  Now I knew why I had learned the Box Step. Standing at least four inches taller than Philip, I bent my knees and hunched down as much as I could without looking like I suffered from an early onset of osteoporosis, and placed my hands over his shoulders. He placed his hands on my waist, though not too tightly, as if he was nervous or something. And then we were doing it. Dancing. Slow dancing and touching. It was so effortless, so easy and, to my disappointment, so totally boring. We stepped back and across and up and across and back and across again, until my knees hurt and my back itched, right in that spot in the middle that’s so hard to reach. Philip sensed something wasn’t right.

  “Should we go outside?”

  “Isn’t there a hurricane?”

  But if I’d said no, we’d have had to stay inside and dance some more and I was getting a charley horse in my right leg.

  Philip took my hand and I hoped he wouldn’t notice that I bit my nails, a bad habit I intended to give up when I got to high school. Philip’s hand was kind of sweaty and clammy. He looked at me funny and then I thought he was going to try to kiss me again. A real kiss this time, not a fake dying from carbon monoxide-induced kiss. The kind where we’d both knowingly participate.

  Unlike the girls in that Judy Blume book, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., I had never practiced kissing on my pillow or anywhere else for that matter, though I had tried to research the topic. My father never had much time for pleasure reading, but this didn’t stop him from joining numerous book clubs and buying dozens of cut-rate volumes a year. One of his purchases was a set of four thin books called The Life Cycle Library for Young People. Sometimes I’d sneak into the study at the back of our house and read the chapters about dating. Mostly the books had tips for boys, offering pointers like “before asking a girl out, consult your wallet,” but nothing about what to do the first time you kissed and where anything was supposed to go.

  I’d tried to talk to my mother about dating, but somehow the conversations were more about her than about me. She’d always go back to the time when she was twelve and Boris Kazikoff got fresh in the middle of Going My Way. But all I knew was that she didn’t kiss him.

  So when exactly was her first time? How did she know? How does anyone know and why didn’t she tell me? Was it her way of saying that kissing wasn’t for me, would never be for me, and if so, why not? And how come two Jewish kids in Brooklyn went to see a movie about a priest? Why couldn’t I ask and have answers to the questions that mattered?

  We were standing in the doorway. It looked like Philip was about to say something or do something. Nothing my mother ever told me popped into my head. My father had certainly never broached the subject either, never given me advice. Well, he’d given me advice, but not anything pertinent.

  One time when I was four years old, we walked over to the high school and watched a football game through the fence. When my father found out that admission was free after the first half, he took me in and I got my first glimpse of a marching band and those girls with the amazing pom-poms. Watching me watching them intently, my father leaned over and warned, “Don’t ever be a cheerleader.” I grew up thinking those girls were evil. Eventually, when I was like thirty-five, I asked him why he’d said that to me, expecting the answer to contain the wisdom of the ages. He thought about it a moment, then remarked, “I said that? Huh. I have no idea.” I can only assume he was seeking to protect me, to keep me focused on academic pursuits, to save me from becoming just a sex symbol. Not to worry.

  Philip showed me a pack of Marlboros hidden in his front pants pocket. “You smoke?”

  I remembered the answer Hymie the Robot on Get Smart gave: “Only when I’m on fire.”

  Philip laughed. “I love that episode.”

  We had most certainly grown up watching all of the same shows.

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “I’ll have one. I’ve always liked the smell of cigarettes.”

  Philip was surprised. “Yeah? A lot of people don’t.”

  “Well,” I explained, “I like how they smell before they’re lit. Sometimes at Hebrew School we’d go into the girls’ room and take them apart and smell them.”

  He looked at me like that was a peculiar remark.<
br />
  “I guess it was just something to do,” I said.

  “You want to do that now?” he asked. “Just stand here and shred them?”

  That would have been my preference, but I had to say no.

  Philip pulled a book of matches from another pocket and struck one against the cover. Nothing happened. Embarrassed, he tried a second match and it lit. In an attempt to look suave, he cupped his hand over the light and held it up for me. I placed my cigarette into it. It didn’t catch.

  “You have to put the cigarette in your mouth and suck it in,” he informed me.

  “Suck it in,” I questioned, “is that like inhaling?”

  I hadn’t realized this action was essential and knew my parents would never have approved. Having both quit cold turkey in 1968 (although my mother immediately got hooked on Trident gum), my parents were staunch anti-smokers now and had warned me about how hard it was to break this terrible habit once you’d inhaled. I knew that with one puff I’d be doomed to a nasty addiction I couldn’t possibly afford on my meager allowance. Even so, I did as Philip told me. The cigarette lit for a second and then went out.

  “You have to inhale harder,” he said, “like this” and demonstrated.

  Philip took a good long drag and I watched as his eyes opened wide and he launched into a coughing fit. A really long and drawn out coughing fit. The kind Rhonda Shafter, our ancient theater director, probably had when she was his age. I should have run in and summoned help since it looked like Philip was about to die, but if his parents were anything like mine, he wouldn’t have wanted them to find out what he’d done, so I gave it a little more time. After another long minute, he stopped coughing, switched to gasping, and then, finally, caught his breath.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. Then, with suspicion, “Have you ever smoked before?”

  “Of course I have,” he insisted. “That’s why I coughed so much. I need to cut down.”