Not a Happy Camper (18 page)

“Do you know which bunk she's in?” Autumn Evening's dad asked.

“Same as me. Bunk Two. On the other side of the lake.”

Autumn Evening's mom turned to him. “See, I told you. The sign said ‘Camp Kin-A-Hurra
for boys
.' Honestly, you'd think we'd never been here before.”

“I thought it was an old sign,” Mr. Schwartz said in defense. “From before they had girls.”

Mrs. Schwartz sighed. “No sense of direction whatsoever.”

He was just like my dad. If my dad was a character out of
Yellow Submarine
.

“Can't you just drive around the lake?” I suggested.

Autumn Evening's mom explained that they didn't have a car. They'd come by bus. Specifically, a tour bus. Friends of theirs, a folk rock band from New York, were playing a gig in Bangor, so they'd hitched a ride and gotten off at the gate, in order to just drop by. I tried picturing my parents on a tour bus, my mother hygienically covering the seats with toilet paper and my father, whose knowledge of pop music ended around the time Jimmy Durante released
Inka Dinka Doo
, off to see America and “just dropping by.” It would never happen.

And at my old sleepaway camp, it never could happen. In my parents' day, city kids were sent off to camp in an attempt to save them from the scourge of the polio epidemic and outsiders' access
was limited. No other children could enter and there was just one day all summer set aside for parents. Long after Jonas Salk came up with his vaccine (and yet another reason for kids to scream in the doctor's office, then be rewarded with lollypops), most camps still held tight to the old rules.

And at wretched Camp Cicada, Visiting Day had been even more meticulously controlled than every other day of the summer. On that fateful morning, the Camp Cicada counselors drilled us on what to wear, how to behave, and to mention to our parents repeatedly that we were having loads and loads of fun. The kitchen staff provided box lunches to eat outdoors in a festive picnic style, then, after a rest period during which our parents watched us write them letters, we showed off our skills in various overly supervised athletic events. It was as if we were in a play entitled “This is What Camp is Like” and the parents thought we were having a grand old time.

Camp Kin-A-Hurra was a little bit different. With campers and counselors from around the world and no real scheduled activities, Saul encouraged parents to visit whenever they chose. By force of habit, most showed up smack dab in the middle. I was expecting my own parents, once again driving/screaming their way up from New Jersey, to arrive some time before lunch.

“Man, I'm starving. Got anything in that purse?” Mr. Schwartz asked his wife.

Mrs. Schwartz reached into her jeans bag and offered me and her husband Baby Ruth bars. “But if you don't like chocolate,” she explained to me, “I've got Red Vines, Abba-Zabbas, Bit O' Honey...”

Mrs. Schwartz's entire pants bag was full of junk food. Forget about the folk rock tour bus. It was more likely she'd arrived in a giant, floating Dubble-Bubble, the Glinda in my sucrose-coated Oz.

It's the norm for parents to bring candy on Visiting Day. At Camp Cicada the other parents brought shopping bags, even cartons, brimming with goodies and handed over the treats as my mother passed me an open bag of generic Doritos she'd grabbed from a kitchen cabinet on her way to the car. I prayed the nasty girls in my bunk would share with me but that no one would ask me to share with them. And I felt guilty for being angry with my parents for not bringing me more. After all, I was always complaining about my weight. I shouldn't have been eating candy anyway.

The tricky part was, at Camp Cicada it was forbidden to keep food in the bunks. The girls' Head Counselor threatened that any uneaten treats would be confiscated after the parents left, at the evening bunk inspection. Consequently, campers scrambled to hide their stashes in pillowcases, rolled-up socks, Tampax boxes—anywhere the Head Counselor might not look. Everyone was well rehearsed, as the search and seizure procedure wasn't reserved just for Visiting Day. The Camp Cicada staff regularly checked the contents of incoming mail, insisting packages be opened in front of them and they took away anything edible. The camp owner claimed the food was returned to the senders, but everyone knew what really happened: the counselors ate it that night.

At Kin-A-Hurra, no one cared if there was food in the bunks as long as everyone shared it. Over on Girls' Side we were tidy enough to keep our treats stored in trunks. Boys' Side, however, was more like Super Bowl Sunday every day, with bags of chips and cookies scattered across the floor, an open invitation to rodents and vermin. Whenever we dropped by Boys' Side at night, my bunkmate Betty wore a big floppy hat, convinced that if she took it off the bats circling the salamis hanging from the rafters would land on her head and nest in her hair.

All of these images went through my mind as I stared into my bunkmate's mother's bag.

“A Baby Ruth would be great,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Never know when the munchies might hit,” she responded as she handed me two. Another morning jog undone.

“I'm waiting for my counselor,” I explained. “We ride back on the truck. There's room if you want to ride with us.”

“Sure,” said Mrs. Schwartz. “We can dig it.”

I tried to imagine my parents cruising down the dirt road on the Food and Garbage Truck and had a flashback to my fourth grade spelling bee, when I won by correctly sounding out “preposterous.”

By the time Maddy finally emerged from Jacques's office, the truck had already left so we decided to stay on Boys' Side for flag-raising and breakfast. Not anticipating early morning visitors, one of the boys' counselors had declared this day The First Annual Underwear Line-Up. Ninety-eight campers and counselors arrived at the flagpole in their tighty whites, surprised to find two representatives from Girls' Side and a set of parents in attendance. It crossed my mind that the boys might think these cool people were my parents and a false sense of pride washed over me until Mr. Schwartz, in a show of solidarity, dropped his own torn jeans. The flags were raised one above the other—American, Canadian and Israeli—and we sang
O, Canada
, because that was where they were in the rotation of anthems.

Feeling a need to hide out, I went into the kitchen and ate with Walter the chef. His pancakes were an entirely different experience when served hot. Now I could understand why Hugh “Huge” Sheveloff was on the famous See Food (“I see food, I eat it”) Diet.

“Walter, these are great,” I told him. “I wish we could have these every day.”

“You just might, my dear,” he informed me. “I think Saul must've gotten a fine price on a trainload of flour.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing, darlin',” Walter said.

Whenever adults say “Oh, nothing,” you know it's something. I peeked out into the dining hall and waved the Fruit of the Loom clad Philip into the pantry. I figured he'd know the scoop and, as usual, he didn't disappoint. “You know how it's part of the mystery of Walter that he'll never tell you what the next meal might be?” Philip asked me.

“No,” I said. “I never really thought about it. Sometimes when I'm looking at it, I still can't tell what it is.”

“Yeah, there's a reason for that,” Philip explained. “Walter keeps an inventory, he knows what he wants to buy, what he needs, but Saul insists on doing all the shopping. See, he has this connection in the insurance industry. This guy who insures freight trains and the stuff that's in them...”

“What does that have to do with us?”

“Sometimes trains crash,” Philip said confidentially.

“So what does that mean?” I asked. “What are you saying?”

What he was saying was that a significant percentage of our meals came from perishable and undeliverable foodstuffs recovered from train wrecks.

“You're making this up!” I shouted.

“Quiet! No one's supposed to know.”

“Okay, so let me get this,” I said. “There's a big train wreck and Saul gets a call and he's all excited that people might have been killed because now he can get their soup and salad?”

“That's not exactly what happens,” Philip insisted.

“And if supplies are running low and there aren't any wrecks, does he tie some woman to the railroad tracks, like in those old Thomas Edison movies, just to make it happen?”

“See, now you're exaggerating,” Philip said, getting all flustered.

“Because it's just stupid. Insurance is for cars and if your house burns down. And—wait—didn't you tell me your father sells insurance?”

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?”