by Dawn Drzal
What I was not prepared for was homesickness. I had spent every summer since I was three years old at my grandparents’ house in Avalon, but I hadn’t realized how different it was to be away from family. About a week into the eight-week session, lying in my bunk just after lights out, I was assailed by a violent spasm of longing for my bedroom and for my parents, followed by nauseating dread at the thought of spending an entire night lying in the dark among strangers. A sob escaped my throat before I could muffle my face in the pillow, and my weeping was embarrassingly audible in the silence broken only by crickets. One by one my bunkmates piled on my bed, patting my back and asking what was wrong, but their unexpected sympathy made me cry harder. Soon I was gasping and hiccoughing and began to panic because I couldn’t catch my breath. The counselor on night duty had just turned on the light and asked if I wanted to go to the infirmary when the heavy thud of boots shook the porch. Even hyperventilating, I registered Rusty filling the doorframe. A lanky and taciturn Vietnam vet who was never without his shotgun, Rusty was an odd choice for camp security. No one had ever seen his eyes because he invariably wore aviator sunglasses, even at night, just as he always wore a headband around his frizzy, shoulder-length red hair and an unbuttoned denim shirt, sleeves hacked off at the shoulder. He lived somewhere in the woods, instead of in the camp buildings with everyone else, although we never pinpointed exactly where. He would simply appear—like now.
He banged the butt of the gun on the floor and everyone stopped talking mid-syllable. The only sound was the weird, gasping, hiccoughing sobs that kept coming from my throat. He turned his dark glasses on me and growled, “What’s going on here?” Immediately the babble of voices started up again, trying to explain that I was homesick and couldn’t stop crying. At some point my bunkmates had scrambled off the bed and formed a protective half-circle in front of me. He walked through them as if they weren’t there and grasped the iron rail at the foot of my bed, lifting it over his head so that I tumbled toward the wall. I was so shocked that I stopped crying. Then he dropped the bedframe back onto the floor and walked out, telling us over his shoulder to turn off the light. I suppose it was the equivalent of slapping a hysteric across the face. In any case, it cured me, not only of the hysteria but also of the homesickness, which never troubled me again. Rusty was a good example of Rockhill’s policy of radical tolerance, which took a person who might have been a serial killer in another context and made him just another member of the community.
Actually, it probably wasn’t having my bed dropped on the floor that cured me of my homesickness. It was the kindness of my bunkmates, who had tried to comfort me, had stood up to Rusty for me, had even put their bodies between him and me. They had seen me weak, and instead of trying to take advantage, they had tried to help. I had never experienced anything like it.
I don’t know why I was so deficient at reading social cues. Perhaps it was that I was an only child, or that I had always been a year younger than my classmates because of the public school system’s dunderheaded policy of having children skip kindergarten. In elementary school, I had tried to gain some social status by becoming a bully, but I was terrible at it, and no one is more disliked than a failed bully. But now, following Carolyn’s lead, my bunkmates had decided to educate me rather than ostracize me for my unacceptable behavior. When, for example, I got up in the middle of a pinochle game and wandered away because I was bored, they would say, “Come back here. You can’t just leave a game like that,” instead of rolling their eyes and never asking me to play again. When I corrected someone’s grammar or pronunciation, Carolyn would tell me in no uncertain terms, “No one likes a know-it-all.” When I made fun of Lisa for her habit of showering with her clothes on, Carolyn’s more tactful sidekick Michelle would take me aside and softly tell me that Lisa had her reasons for being modest. So I started to recognize the exchange of looks that would accompany one of my many faux pas and preempt the correction by asking what I had done. Gradually, my rough edges were smoothed away. Sometimes I felt as if I were a visiting Martian mastering the baffling customs of the Earthlings, but there is nothing like living with the locals for learning a foreign language.
The Beatles provided the soundtrack for the summer, beginning with the mornings. Our usual reveille was the rooster’s crow from the start of “Good Morning Good Morning,” broadcast at earsplitting volume over the PA system. The first time I heard it I was on my feet, heart pounding, before I knew I was awake. Then I heard Irv’s reassuring voice crooning, “Rise and shine, campers, it’s a beautiful Rockhill morning!” On those Rockhill mornings that were less than beautiful, he would add, “Longs and longs,” which we would throw on before brushing our teeth and stumbling to the dining hall. Only because it was breakfast would we refrain from the exasperating chant we used at other meals, complete with fork and plate-rattling hand gestures: Food (fists bang on table) Waiter (thumbs) Waiter (index and middle fingers) Waiter (pinkies), FOOD (fists) Waiter (thumbs) Waiter (index and middle)! That was one of the ways in which Rockhill was just like any other camp. Within days I learned to melt half a stick of butter into my bowl of oatmeal before stirring in several spoonfuls of sugar. Part of the fun of leaving home is picking up other people’s bad habits.
The first Saturday, though, I was in for a shock. There was a hum of anticipation and no oatmeal. Instead, the center of the table was already loaded with piles of bagels, squares of cream cheese, plates of shiny tomato and sliced red onion, and platters of something orange and slightly slimy looking that everyone lunged for at once.
“It’s nova!”
“No, it’s not. It’s lox.”
“We always have nova at home.”
“I don’t care. Pass me that!”
“You pig! Leave me some.”
Everyone forked a square or two onto her plate—where it sat looking very unappetizing and smelling vaguely fishy—until each girl collected the other ingredients she needed before assembling, with an air of practiced concentration, an open-faced sandwich to her particular specifications. I watched as they chose a specific type of bagel, spread it—or didn’t—with cream cheese, and added—or didn’t—tomato and onion, ignoring my questions until each of them had taken a large mouthful and smiled with satisfaction. Then they were willing to talk.
“What is that?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“That,” I said, pointing.
Completely dumfounded, their eyes followed my finger. Any doubts they’d had that I was a Martian were now confirmed.
“You’ve never seen lox before?” Carolyn demanded.
When I admitted I hadn’t, voices chimed in again.
“It’s salmon.”
“We have it every Saturday. It’s a tradition.”
“You know, for Shabbat. After temple.”
They had me again.
“You mean like Sunday breakfast after church?” I asked.
There was a silence until someone nodded slowly. Then they resumed their argument about which was better, lox or the thing they called nova. By then, there was nothing left on the platter, so someone held out her bagel for me to try. Probably Michelle. She was the only one nice enough to do something like that. I took a bite. Improbably, it was delicious. The thin layer of orange lox fused with the tangy cream cheese, its richness offset by a dense, chewy bagel of a variety now nearly extinct. I didn’t like the squish of the tomato, though, which undermined the creamy texture (and visually clashed with the pinkish orange lox). As for the raw onion, I already knew I hated it and made sure to bite around it. So I had my own formula ready for next week when I dove into the fray with the rest of them. The only choice left was whether to assemble it on a poppy or a sesame bagel.
Now I know that what was served was old-fashioned belly lox, which is not smoked but instead cured in brine. The “nova” some of them claimed to prefer was the far less salty Nova Scotia smoked salmon. But along with some alte kackers (I picked up a lot of Yiddish at cam
p), I retain a fondness for the real thing. It may have been salty, but its bracing brininess seemed an appropriate introduction to this new world.
As I was soon to discover, an even more time-honored way of learning a language than living with the locals and sampling their cuisine is having a native boyfriend. Technically, I’d had my first kiss with a camper named Stuey on the night of the first big campfire. The kiss was not the highlight of the evening—all I remember is the awkwardness of having to hunch because I was taller than he was. The full-color movie memory I retain of that night, complete with smells and sensations, is of swaying as a body with my bunkmates, arms entwined, as we sang “In My Life” and feeling the glorious warmth, after so many years of baffled yearning, of belonging. Stuey was not, obviously, the boyfriend. That came out of the blue one afternoon during rest period, when an emissary arrived on our porch from the boys’ side with a message that one of the CITs liked me. Counselors-in-training were neither fish nor fowl, so they tended to socialize almost exclusively with each other. While they were permitted to fraternize with campers, they didn’t usually want to. The male CITs were mostly waiters, as this one was. His name was Jeff, he was fifteen, and he was a dead ringer for the young Elliott Gould. Although I looked older, I was only twelve; I was new to camp and a bit awkward. Which is to say he was completely out of my league. Nevertheless, he inexplicably and openly sought me out at every opportunity. He came by and hung out on our porch during free periods (no boys in the bunks was one of the camp’s few rules). He crowded onto my towel at the group swim and saved me a seat at the outdoor movie. One day he came by the bunk during rest period and asked me to come for a walk. Sitting half hidden by the enormous oak that unofficially separated the boys’ camp from the girls’, I had my first real kiss, the one where he looked into my eyes and buried his hands in my hair before everything around us dissolved and disappeared. So began my lifelong love affair with Jewish men, which encompassed almost every one of my serious boyfriends and both husbands. It only occurred to me later, after reading Portnoy’s Complaint, that one explanation for Jeff’s interest in me might have been that I was the only non-Jewish girl at camp.
Our relationship caused a major stir because it contravened the natural order. My bunkmates were puzzled and more than a little jealous, but it was the female CITs who were seriously angry. There was a scarcity of age-appropriate males for them, and they were not at all pleased that a new camper had skimmed off such an attractive one. They didn’t understand how he could prefer me to them, and frankly I agreed. I, too, would have chosen Sue, with her delicate aquiline nose and porcelain Madonna’s face surrounded by a corona of frizzy golden hair. Or brazen, foul-mouthed Cindy in her bikini top, hipbones jutting out over her cutoff jeans. Or green-eyed, slightly zaftig Wendy, who came closest to embodying the warm and accepting spirit of Rockhill. She exhibited an easy naturalness with boys that I’d never encountered before, an assumption of equality based on shared values and background, as if they belonged to one big family. Watching her interactions with them was the first time I ever thought of boys as human beings rather than the “opposite sex,” the enemy.
It was here, I discovered, that the great divide lay between Catholics and Jews, and I had been raised on the wrong side of it. Jewish boys and girls genuinely seemed to like and respect each other. At least for the non-religious Jews I was getting to know, sex was not disputed territory, so all relationships were not defined by it. Catholics, on the other hand, were so busy wrangling over sex—boys wanting it; girls pretending not to and either agreeing or refusing to grant it—that they had no energy left over for anything else. At Rockhill, even the accepted phrase for sexual adventures—“going out to the fields”—although purely descriptive, sounded Elysian to me. There was none of the sniggering and demeaning gossip I was used to about which girls did and which didn’t. I hadn’t even been aware of the atmosphere of hostility and constant wariness I lived in until I encountered an environment where it was absent, but it goes a long way toward explaining why I have always preferred Jewish men.
Not surprisingly, this basic difference in outlook between the two religions is reflected in the structure of their institutions. Catholic schools, for example, are founded on the basic principle that, having been born with Original Sin, children are bound to get into trouble if left to their own devices. When I transferred from public junior high into Nazareth Academy, it felt like going to reform school, except that I was being punished for a transgression I hadn’t yet committed. Catholicism is, after all, a religion that punishes you for thought crimes (as Jesus said, thinking it is as bad as doing it). Rockhill proceeded from exactly the opposite premise. According to Irv and Tyler’s philosophy, an amalgam of secular Judaism and sixties liberalism, anything you did was all right unless and until someone told you it was wrong. Camp wasn’t anarchy, exactly. You had to be somewhere at every given moment of the day, it just didn’t matter where. When I first arrived, I felt something was lacking and blamed it on the unconstrained schedule, but then I realized that the only thing missing was the presumption that I must be up to no good.
Toward the end of the summer, the counselors chose a line or two from a Beatles song to describe each of us and painted them on a board—what was it with those boards? I only remember two of them, mine and Michelle’s. Inevitably, hers was “Michelle, our belle, we love you we love you we love you. That’s all we want to say.” Her name felt like more than just a neat coincidence since it was impossible not to love her; we all did. She was soft-spoken, tallish, with straight brown hair to her hips; thin but full-breasted, with big brown doe eyes, a shy smile, and a gawky long-limbed grace that suddenly coalesced one day during Color War, when we saw her run. She had an older sister named Sherry, a CIT, who was as brash and self-assured as Michelle was self-effacing. Their faces were similar, but Sherry was shorter and sturdier. It had been a long race, and everyone but Michelle had dropped out of sight. Cheering spectators lined the course, marveling in disbelief at the astonishing effortlessness of her running. She was leaping, hardly touching the ground. In my memory she is barefoot, and that may be true. As she approached the finish line, the cheers rose to a roar—and then I spied Sherry, a short-legged engine huffing up from behind, sneakers kicking up a cloud of red dust, sweat streaming off her face, teeth gritted with effort. The only other time I have ever seen a face so intent on winning has been on television, in slow motion, on the face of a champion athlete. Sherry was gaining on Michelle, who glanced back over her shoulder seeming puzzled that anyone could get so worked up over a race. I don’t know whether she slowed down purposely, but she didn’t speed up, and Sherry came from behind and burst across the finish line half a step ahead of her, doubled over, her face a deep crimson. Michelle, who had not even broken a sweat, went over and hugged her with a serene smile.
Sherry always seemed to be in a hurry to pack as much into her life as she could. When she was killed in a car crash a year later, I remember wondering whether it was a good thing she did or if that sense of impatience contributed in some way to her death. Now I realize that most of us are incautious and even reckless at sixteen, and we don’t pay for it with our lives.
The other lyrics I remember from the boards are, of course, those that pertained to me. Group opinion regarding myself was nothing like so unanimously warm, and the lines chosen from “Across the Universe” suggested that it would be folly to try to contain the words that spilled endlessly from my mouth. I remember asking Gerri, our counselor, whether that was a good or bad thing. She gave me a long, appraising look and said nothing. It’s obvious the counselors were trying to find a polite way of telling me that I was what my grandmother called a chatterbox. I only shut up during those eight weeks when I was sleeping, because it was the first time I had ever met people who were willing to listen to me. Clearly my education in responding to social cues was not yet complete. Yet a seed was planted in that moment that you could have a flaw, many flaws, and be loved in spit
e of them—that they were part of the package of who you were, not (as I had been raised to believe) grounds for the death penalty.
When I went back to school in the fall—Jeff’s heavy gold signet ring on a thin chain bouncing off my collarbone like a talisman to remind me that it wasn’t all a dream—I had the peculiar experience of not being recognized by many of my classmates. I hadn’t changed physically at all—I hadn’t lost weight or altered my hair. The transformation was completely internal: I wasn’t “that girl” anymore, the pariah everyone shunned and feared being associated with. My old nemesis made fun of the ring around my neck, but I could tell it was out of envy—not of the ring itself, which she probably did think looked a little silly, but of the power shift it represented. Her poison couldn’t touch me anymore. Not surprisingly, my relationship with Jeff did not survive in the atmosphere of the real world. The difference in age and maturity was too great, and after a few months he gently told me it wasn’t going to work. Even though I was devastated, the immunity held.
Once I had a teenage son of my own, I was tempted to find out what became of that lovely man-boy. Thinking back on him gave me the vertiginous lurch of pentimento—the overlay of one reality with another. How could he be at once older and more experienced than I and yet younger than my own child? This mind-bending paradox can never be resolved within the limitations of chronological time. When I located him on the Internet, I experienced viscerally the truth of Isak Dinesen’s admonition: “The Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.” In 1998, the year my son was born, his first-born son died of leukemia in his arms. Could he have taken any joy in his life if he had known his beautiful boy would die before reaching his third birthday? Could I have taken any joy in him if I had known what would befall him twenty-five years later? The next time I am champing at the bit to know what will happen next, I will try to remember what a gift it is that the future lies hidden beyond the curve.
