Summer loving.
Being the child of two teachers who were both active and easily bored meant it was unlikely that I would ever have a summer where I didn’t do anything. I’ve never known the lazy summers with vacations and playing in the front yard, running through sprinklers and riding bikes around. That’s what we did in the spring, in June, before school ended, before camp started. For eight years of my life, I was a camp baby. I attended sleepaway camp for free while my parents worked, as head counselors or the waterfront director, supervising squadrons of counselors who always seemed so much older than my innocent years.
I was precocious; there weren’t many redheaded campers with long wavy hair that knew your name and could speak intelligently with most others. Between my parents working there and being among the youngest campers to sleep in a bunk, there were few people who didn’t know who I was. It never occurred to me that the camp wasn’t mine; I walked around as though I owned it, the lacrosse field on the hill between the woods and the arts and craft cabin the ground of my childhood imprinted. The camp has since replaced a portion of the lacrosse field with a pool, and the arts and crafts cabin became a bunk, relocated to a newer building at the base of the hill.
It was that camp where I had my heart broken for the first time. I think we all go through a point in our lives where our childhood friends betray us, where the imaginary games and the shared stories and the hours of false competitions like ice skating and dancing in the space between all our beds become obsolete. Where we once made the rounds of bat mitzvahs, joining together on the stand to sing along and dance behind the DJ, forsworn in our vows to always be friends are memories that a certain song will recall but won’t be repeated. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve left my camp, after watching my bunkmates, some of whom I had shared summers with since the very beginning, slowly dissolve. We started at three, grew to seven, jumped to thirteen, before rounding out to a perfect ten. Ten girls, who only lived for the summer, to sing “Won’t you light my candle?” on the top of our lungs during rest hour, to take turns straightening each other’s hair before the big dance, to gossip about who kissed who behind the canteen.
The bonds of friendship shifted; each summer I found myself with a new bunkmate. After a while, I just stayed with the same one because I used up so little space, there was more room for all her clothes. Even back then I was low maintenance; I didn’t mind taking the last shower even though reveille had already started, for I knew I could be in and out, shampooed, conditioned, soaped, and dressed in under two minutes. To this day, I still have difficulty taking long showers after being so carefully cultivated at camp.
What I never expected though was to watch those friendships shift, from a web of ten girls who were all equally close, who lived and breathed camp and each other, to smaller groups, to the beginning of cliques which I had known but never fully experienced. What had once been a consistent group dynamic dissolved into smaller, more fragile microcosms of what had been. I had always marched to the beat of my own song, as equally happy to read a book on my own during rest hour as I was to socialize and play light as a feather, stiff as a board before lights out. My independence and precociousness garnered me friendships in the older girls, in the counselors who thought I was adorable, and in the younger girls who looked up to me because I would play with them for hours. I had no qualms about disappearing off to practice with the circus for hours, leaving the other girls behind to do whatever it was they were wont to do.
But then one day, the dynamics shifted. I saw six of the girls clinging to each other, pushing the other four of us out. I saw one spending time regularly with the bad girls; the ones you knew were doing things they shouldn’t, but you didn’t know what. It was the first time I had heard of laxatives, and the first summer where third base was regularly reached. I watched two grow more and more resentful of the other six, sticking to themselves and casting nasty glances. I watched all of it, but never participated, for even as a kid, I had enough drama going on at home to want to get involved with it socially. I figured we were a bunk, we would still come together when it came time to stand up and declare who we were and take over the camp as we always did, for we had been there the longest, children of camp employees, spoiled to oblivion. No matter what happened, we would always be there for one another, like we always had been for the last seven years.
It backfired. I came back to the cabin one day to see eight faces, streaming with tears, red in anger, huffy, disenchanted, used. I watched one of the girls, who was the newest addition to our group, who I shared a bunk space with look at me and say, “You’re not part of this.” Indeed, my group leader came out and told me I’d be best going somewhere else, as this was a bunk problem that they all needed to solve. I had just turned fourteen, had just left Brooklyn for good, and my bunk life was the only stable presence I still had. My parents were divorced, my lifestyle had changed, I had just left the only dance school I had ever known, and now I was being told I was no longer part of the group.
I count that day as the day I made my first adult decision, at fourteen. When I realized how damaged the bonds of friendship had become, how I had somehow been removed from the equation as though I were an unnecessary period after the sum had been added, I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t watch the people I had felt closest to, most stable with destroy my memories of a camp I had loved, that I can still breathe in the warm summer air, up in the mountains, the firecrackers over the lake on the fourth of July, the waterslide and the floating docks I got tossed off of, the ceramic chess sets I made for my grandfathers, the basketball curved under my fingers as I sent it to meet its netted hoop, the color wars I would never be Captain for, the boys I would never kiss behind the canteen, the counselor I would never become there, years of traditions at my fingertips. With only a week left before the end of the summer, before some of my favorite traditions of lazy Sunday and long days at the lake, the sunset that would render me immovable in my tracks as we made our way to the gym for evening activity, I left.
I don’t remember the drive home. I don’t remember if my father picked me up, or if I went home with my soon-to-be stepdad, or if I got a ride from someone else who was going down to Long Island where I would have probably stayed with my father for a few days. I don’t remember anything that happened after leaving the gym during color war sing practice and saying goodbye to tearful campers, who had impacted me so deeply, I knew I would never be the same. I heard their pleas to stay, but I was resolute in my decision. I don’t remember anything that happened between those last moments and starting high school, several weeks apart.
Years later, I still wonder. What would have happened had I stayed? Would I recall loving so deeply the air, the grounds, the sky, the mountains, the lake with its strange fish brushing my feet, the trapeze rough beneath my hands, the dining hall where the chef snuck me my favorite cornbread muffins, the girls who I loved and have now lost? Facebook tells me where they are, and I’ve even seen a few of them here and there. But after having been so deeply connected and torn apart of my own choosing, it’s strange to watch the bonds of my childhood exist where I no longer am.
A scent of barbecue in the air can easily bring me back to Tuesday night barbecues, where we sat in red chairs and chattered on and on about whatever it is young girls do.
There are no more red chairs. I just cling to hope that somewhere, my old bunks hold my name scrawled on the walls, tangled with the girls whom I shared my childhood with, commemorating something we’ve all moved beyond. Time is both immovable and fluid, but memories are not.
A field of memories, each contained in a single blade of grass would tell my story, of how I learned what friendship was, and when I made my first major decision to break ties. Of when my hearing aid surrendered to the pounding rainstorm that came without warning and left me with a waterlogged ear that would take three days to replace. Of the mornings we’d wake and find our counselors exchanged for one of the male counselors, delighting us and also slightly terrifying us because it was a boy! In our bunk!
Yet I still feel as though if I were to return, walking down the red dirt path down to the base of the hill, the same sunset would greet me, its colors softly nuzzling one another as it broke into the most unlikely shields of the rainbow, the blades of grass rising up to meet me, cushioning me with the memories of a life lived long ago.
14 comments March 27, 2008
