Not a Happy Camper (11 page)

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 have 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, Philip 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.

“It's like a museum,” Philip marveled. “The Kin-A-Hurra archives.”

There were old application forms and receipts from the days when eight weeks cost $350. And then there was a box marked “Evaluations 1949.”

“What is there to evaluate?” I asked. “Everything is broken. You think maybe twenty-five years ago this place was beautiful and organized and they cared about keeping it that way?”

Philip pulled out a sheet and read: “Herbert is very selfish. He insists on being first in the shower every day and grabs for extra desserts at meals.”

I glanced at the page. “What kind of evaluations are these?”

Philip read another: “Melvin is a tattletale and must learn to respect others' feelings.” And then: “Sidney is a wonderful camper. It's a pleasure being his counselor. He gets along with everyone and doesn't have to be reminded to make his bed with hospital corners.”

I figured it out. “The counselors evaluated the campers?”

“These guys would all be in their thirties or forties by now,” Philip calculated. “Wonder how they'd feel if they knew their counselors wrote about them. Wonder what our counselors would write about us.”

“Philip likes to break into closets and read old papers,” I offered.

“I'm not exactly alone here,” he said defensively.

“Yeah, I'm guilty, too,” I said. “So let's do my bunk: ‘Autumn Evening is very creative. She tie-dyed sheets at the Arts & Crafts shack and hung them from the rafters around her bed, turning it into her own private little swinging pad. And she burns a lot of incense and thinks no one knows it's to cover up the smell of cigarettes.'”