Not a Happy Camper (26 page)

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”

A
UTUMN
E
VENING HELD UP TWO OUTFITS
. “W
HICH 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.

“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.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said, and snuffed mine out.

“Okay, stupid idea,” Philip admitted. “Let me try another one. Can I kiss you?”

He'd asked first. I never expected this. I had no idea what to say. I mean, the answer was yes, but could I say it?

“Um...”

Just then, Stacie Hofheimer, wearing the pants I'd broken in for her on Katahdin, grabbed me by the shoulders and implored breathlessly, “Mrs. Rosen, when you see your grandson, tell him not to be a haberdasher,” then ran off.

“Do you know what she was talking about?” Philip asked?

I did. I knew exactly what she meant. It was a line from one of my favorite movies. Philip and I looked around the corner and saw a whole group of Junior Counselor girls who'd formed a crowd at the base of a tall evergreen tree. One of them pointed toward the top. “Life is up there,” the group's leader shouted. “And life always matters very much.”

“
The Poseidon Adventure
?” Philip said. “I loved that movie!”

“Me, too. I've seen it three times.”

(That's where my ten dollars of Bat Mitzvah money went.)

“J'ever read the book?” Philip asked. “In the book, the kid dies.”

“I know exactly the part where I'd die,” I told him. “It's where they have to swim underwater to the engine room. Y'know, where Gene Hackman goes first, but gets stuck on some metal and only Shelley Winters can save him?”

“Of course. And look, I think that's the part the girls are up to.

Sure enough, sixteen-year-old Ellen Wasserman, the Junior Counselor who'd gotten impetigo first, was playing the Shelley Winters role.

“I guess I'm not the champion of the Women's Swimming Association anymore,” she gasped.

I was so jealous, and not just because she got the good part. I was jealous of all these girls and their ability to burst into this impromptu performance inspired by a hurricane. Watching these girls joyously running around in the rain, I started to worry about a lot of things: that I would never be that clever, that I would never have such close friends, that I would never know how to have that much fun.