Not a Happy Camper (20 page)

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.”

“This?” we moaned.

No one in the group was particularly excited. I think we all had the same impression of what antique stores sold: big old Victorian furniture, smelly rugs and unidentifiable brass knick-knacks. To our surprise and delight, Frank's Fine Antiques contained nothing fine, nothing antique and no one named Frank. A stubble-cheeked old buzzard named Buzz sat in a rickety bentwood rocker amidst his store-ful of absolute junk. There was no organization to the items, no taste, no sense of history and nothing of real value. It was fabulous.

Most of my bunkmates rifled through boxes of used toys.

“Battling Tops! I used to have this,” Dana called out. “And electric football. My brother had that. You'd plug it in and the players just shook. Didn't make any sense.”

Hallie found her favorite board game, Mystery Date, and Maddy found a plastic wind-up chicken which pooped out eggs.
Betty found her niche in the used book section with a worn copy of Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar.
Autumn Evening clutched an old black top hat she'd found and communed with its original owner.

“Ah, he was a very important and distinguished man,” she said. “Maybe even a president.”

I began to doubt Autumn Evening's psychic powers. “I think a lot regular people used to own those,” I told her. “My mother's father had one. He wore it to his wedding.”

“Really!” she said, excitedly. “Could you imagine what it's worth today? If only you still had it!”

As a matter of fact, we did. But how could I tell someone whose opinion mattered to me that my parents were hoarders, that the contents of our house resembled this store, and that my father had all of his clothes from his entire life which he kept in his closet in chronological order, starting with a pair of corduroy riding pants passed down from his eldest brother?

“So Dad,” I once asked, “in the 1920s, poor boys went horseback riding in Jersey City?”

“No,” he replied. “We went out to the country. We went to Newark.”

Next to the pants hung his U.S. Navy peacoat, pressed against the 1950s garb, adjacent to the starched white shirts from the ‘60s and then the polyester era took over. When I questioned my father as to why he kept all this stuff, he said, “Someday my children will be famous and they'll need my clothes for the Schneider Museum.”

Not too much pressure on us...

Dana and Autumn Evening came up with the real find: a pair of World War I Army helmets, marked down to a dollar each, and I saw something I simply had to have. It was a little glass car, not fragile or dainty, but thick and sturdy with highly visible seams. I
had no idea why I was drawn to it. It cost three dollars and fifty cents plus tax. If I bought it, it would use up almost all of the money I had left. I was angry I'd seen it because, if I hadn't, I would never have known what I was missing. It seemed like I was always wanting things I knew I'd be better off without.

As I handed Buzz the money, I felt a sense of satisfaction along with an instant case of buyer's remorse. Hallie noticed the nametag on the inside of my wallet.

“How'd your mom sew that on?” she inquired.

“This one's an iron-on,” I explained, as we stepped away from the register. “My mother's got ways to label everything.”

“Mine's like that, too,” Hallie said. “Last year, when I went to Camp Wunzaponna, I stepped in a gopher hole and sprained my ankle, but my mom thought it was a great summer cuz I came home with all my socks.”

“Don't tell my mother,” I said. “She'll want to trade us.”

Something in a display cabinet caught Hallie's eye. “Hey, Other Mindy, look at this. It's a spoon ring.”

A spoon ring is exactly what it sounds like, a ring made from the bent stem of a spoon. In a market saturated with P.O.W. bracelets, it was the hot new piece of jewelry for 1974.

Like me, Hallie was from a nerdy family. We were not the hip chicks who hung out at the mall and knew where to buy all the best stuff at all the best prices. She had happened upon this spoon ring by chance and the purchase was now or never. She asked Buzz if she could walk around with it and mull it over.

“Whaddaya think?” she asked, showing it to me.

“I think it's great. I wish I'd seen it first.”

My greed and materialism always got the best of me.

“Shoot. It's five dollars,” Hallie noted. “Wish I'd brought more money.”

Feeling guilty and selfish for my own extravagant purchase, I wanted to find a way to help out. I knew what kids at home with no money did; they stole things. Even kids who did have money stole sometimes and then bragged about it. Even Autumn Evening did it.

“We went to Hawaii last December,” my well-traveled bunkmate had told me.

“Hawaii. Wow. You're so lucky,” I said.

“Actually, it wasn't so great. You can't drink at the bar if you're twelve, so I went to the gift shop. There were these little plastic hula dancers with a spring in the middle, to make them kind of wobble up and down.”

“Like the kind you'd put on your dashboard?”

“Is that what you do with them?”

“Yeah. Those are cool.”

“Okay. I stole one.”

I couldn't believe it. “Your parents wouldn't buy it for you?”

“I didn't ask. I just stole it. I just wanted to steal something. Then I think I lost it at the airport.”

Autumn Evening didn't know what it was for or why she had stolen it. It didn't sound that hard to do and at least I had a reason. It would be my first ever attempt at shoplifting.

“Hallie, want me to steal it for you?” I asked.

“You could get arrested!” She was horrified. “You can't do that, it's too risky.”

But that was what the problem had been all summer. I was never willing to take a risk.

“So you wouldn't steal it?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But if you do, I'll wear it.”

Frank's Fine Antiques was located in a barn and there was a second story of trash upstairs in what was once the hayloft. I told Hallie to come up with me and we milled around a bit and made some noise, pretending to be looking over some ancient Listerine bottles.

“These would look really great filled with colored sand,” I said in a loud, obvious voice.

My plan was foolproof. I would take the ring from Hallie and stuff it into the small front watch pocket of my painter's pants, then calmly walk down the steps and out the front door. Buzz wouldn't suspect a thing, as I had already made a purchase. But alas, as I headed toward the staircase, I dropped the ring and it clinked its way down the hayloft steps, landing on the floor at the bottom. I was pretty sure no one had seen it, so I picked up the ring and stuffed it into my pocket, then ran outside as fast as I could with Hallie in tow.

Not two seconds later, Buzz came bolting out and I half-expected him to be toting a rifle, shouting “Git back here, ya varmint!”

“Oh, God, Hallie. He saw me. I'm going to jail.”

“You girls know anything about a spoon ring?” he asked calmly.

“Oh, the spoon ring!” I said, revealing the limited acting range of a dancing ear of corn. “I think I left it upstairs.”

Hallie's face fell as I turned to run past everyone else—certain they knew of my guilt—and back up to the hayloft where I pretended to look around for where I'd “left” it. Fortunately, Buzz waited downstairs, no doubt suspiciously watching the rest of our group. I came back down a moment later, handed him the ring and apologized.

On the way back to camp, it started to rain. Only Dana and Autumn Evening were protected, as their army helmets shed water well. Dana started up a round of
Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer
on the Wall
which Autumn Evening quickly turned into
Schaeffer is the One Beer to Have When You're Having More Than One
, but I didn't have the heart to fake joining in. I walked back in silence, wondering which was worse: that I'd let down Hallie while discovering I had the potential for a life of crime, or that I was awful at doing anything new and out of the ordinary, and therefore my life would never change.

As luck would have it, a group of boys returning from a trip to the bowling alley in Skowhegan spotted us and picked us up in the Green Truck. Maddy thought it might be a good idea to stay on Boys' Side for dinner and stick around for an evening activity. One of the options turned out to be television. TV at camp. That sounded so weird. And what was really weird was that I hadn't missed it at all so far that summer.

A little before nine o'clock, a black and white portable was placed on the edge of the stage in the social hall and a small crowd gathered around. Someone turned on the news.

“Hey, that's a New York guy,” I called out.

“Dan Rather,” Philip said as he walked over toward me. “Richard Nixon is about to resign.”

“Is anything else on?” Hallie asked.

When the answer was “no,” Hallie and almost everyone else left, off to see if Walter had any edible leftovers in the kitchen. I might have left, too, but something about this felt important. I'd slept through the moon landing in 1969 and thought maybe I should stay for this event.

“This is going to be good,” Philip said gleefully. “Unless he's got another secret plan up his ‘expletive deleted', Nixon's toast. Too bad they can't turn the White House over to the Democrats. Republicans are evil. Except Abraham Lincoln, but that was a long time ago and he had to pick something quick when the Whigs went out of business.”

“He didn't pick the Democrats?”

“Are you a Democrat?” Philip asked, as if he didn't know.

Of course I was. Everyone on my block back home was a Democrat. Almost everyone I knew was a Democrat. Jews especially were Democrats and we loved Hubert Horatio Humphrey, loved him like he was Jewish, too. We thought everyone loved him and then in 1968 he lost to Richard Nixon.

“If kids could vote,” my classmates and I lamented, “Hubert Humphrey would have won.”

There was only one non-Jewish family in my neighborhood. The Cartenhausers were Catholic and very wealthy, but I think they were still Democrats because they lived in a house that was way too small for a family with seven kids. I envied them; there was always someone to play with and at least every other month one of them was getting a birthday present.

The difference in our religions had come up only once. I was helping Cathy Cartenhauser put on a play about the Bible in her backyard and she tried to convince me that Jesus was the son of God, but I wasn't buying it. When I got home, I said to my mother, “Someday we'll all be dead and when we get to heaven, they'll find out we were right.” And that's kind of how the Democratic kids felt about the Republican kids, only we didn't have to wait until we were all dead.

“Least we won't have to hear about Watergate anymore,” I said. “I'm so sick of those hearings being on instead of
Match Game
.”

“John Dean, Gordon Liddy. They're all going to jail,” Philip assured me.

“And what about that guy, John Mitchell?” I asked. “The one whose wife wrote
Gone With the Wind
.”

“That's Margaret Mitchell,” Philip corrected me. “John Mitchell's wife is Martha.”

“Oh. Did she write anything?”

“No.”

“Well, then, good-bye to her, too.”

Our soon-to-be-former president was ready to speak. “Good evening,” Richard M. greeted us. “This is the thirty-seventh time I have spoken to you from this office...”

I watched and listened for about ten seconds, then realized this speech was about as interesting to me as the rabbi's sermon on Yom Kippur. I wasn't sure if Philip was bored too, or just so focused he didn't realize his hand was touching mine. I couldn't tell if it was sort of accidentally on purpose and if this was his attempt to try to hold my hand. If I had been a real girlfriend, I would have helped him out and slipped my fingers between his. Instead, I felt I was doing my part just by not pulling away. Strangely though, I didn't mind that we were touching.

As Nixon continued his heartfelt speech, my mind drifted to what I might be watching if I were at home. Probably a Mets game or reruns of my favorite shows. I was sorry I hadn't been around in the days when most TV programs were made in New York. Nowadays, no matter where my beloved sitcoms supposedly took place, I knew that everyone on TV was really living in Hollywood, that perfect piece of real estate where you never had to shovel snow from the driveway.

Now, most of the shows made in Manhattan were news. News and a couple of cheap local programs, like Officer Joe Bolton who introduced
Little Rascals
shorts on channel 11 and a telethonlength Sunday morning kids' show called
Wonderama
which ran on channel 5. One time, a kid from my neighborhood appeared
on
Wonderama
and made it to the finals of the dance contest. He spent the next five years complaining about losing to a girl.

Richard Nixon was still talking, about some guy “who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly...”

I'd completely lost track of what the speech was about, but I noticed a few people around me were teary-eyed as Nixon wished God's grace be with us in all the days ahead. Then, someone turned off the set and we stood and stared at the little circle of light in the middle of the screen as it grew smaller and smaller until it finally vanished.

“Typical politician,” Philip remarked. “Do horrible things, mess up the whole country, and then hire some writer to come up with a touchy-feely speech that makes everyone feel bad for you. The guy's a criminal.”