“Oh, yes!” Elizabeth said in answer. “I think I can stand this very well.”
We decided that Camp Overlook must have been built for munchkins, because there were two facing rows of small cabins, twelve in all, odd numbers on one side of camp, even on the other. Each was crammed with four bunk beds but no facilities—just two small dressers with drawers, some shelves, and eight coat hooks. We’d read that it was owned by a church, which donated the camp to the county’s social services for three weeks each summer to provide summer camp for poor kids. It was run on a shoestring, and none of us expected more than the basics. The basics were all we got.
Each cabin had either one counselor and seven campers or two assistant counselors and six campers. Each cabin was to choose a name for itself. Our girls chose the Coyotes, which should have told us something right there.
The first hurdle we faced was the sleeping arrangements. Mary, we discovered, did all the talking for her sister. “Josie can’t sleep on the top,” she announced. “She has to sleep on the bottom.”
“Okay,” I said. “Mary will sleep on the top bunk of this bed, and Josephine will sleep on the bottom.”
Mary surveyed the sloping roof of the cabin with a wary eye. “I can’t sleep on the top either because of spiders,” she said, which just about cooked the top bunk for anyone else, and Gwen and I knew where we’d be sleeping.
But seven-year-old Ruby was our salvation. “Yeah, but if you sleep on the bottom bunk, there’s bears!” she said knowingly.
“And snakes!” said Estelle.
Now everybody wanted a top bunk.
We decided at last that Gwen and I, Josephine, and Kim would all have lower beds. Mary would sleep above her sister; Ruby would sleep above me; Estelle would sleep above Kim; and Latisha would sleep above Gwen. That settled, we assigned drawers and shelf space for our belongings, and the last order of business was to confiscate every piece of candy, bag of chips, or box of cookies in or out of sight. Each child had been instructed not to bring food or anything that would attract wildlife, but as pockets and bags were inspected out fell Snickers bars, cheese twists, animal crackers, and pretzels.
Each child solemnly turned in her supply, all but Josephine, who had two Hershey’s Kisses squeezed tightly in her tiny fist.
“She doesn’t want to let go,” said Mary, reporting the obvious.
We explained about mice and rats and raccoons and squirrels, and how we would keep all our treasures in this big metal box that came with each cabin, but Josephine’s fist remained closed.
“She likes Hershey’s Kisses,” said Mary.
We knew this was going to be a contest of wills, and while it was important that we show who was in control, we didn’t want a major scene over two Hershey’s Kisses.
“Tell you what,” said Gwen. “I’m going to close my eyes and hold out my hand, and when I count to three, Josephine will drop one of the kisses in my hand. Okay?”
The other girls gathered around to watch this strange proceeding. Josephine stared at Gwen out of her small, narrow face.
Gwen closed her eyes and held out her hands. “One… two… three,” she said.
Plop. It was like magic.
“Thank you,” said Gwen. “We’ll just put this in the box, and you can have it after lunch. Now I’ll close my eyes again and count to three, and you give me the other one. One… two… three.”
Nothing happened.
“She doesn’t want to do it,” said Mary.
“You can have them both after lunch,” said Gwen.
Josephine shook her head. The Hershey’s Kiss, what was left of it, was beginning to melt in the warmth of Josie’s hand, and chocolate oozed out from between her fingers.
I snuggled up close to Josephine on the bottom bunk and put my arm around her. “How about if I trade you a real, live kiss for that ooey, gooey chocolate in your hand?” I said. “Okay?”
Josephine just looked at me. I leaned over, took her face in my hands, and gave her a big fat kiss on the cheek, grinning at her. I got the chocolate, and we all set off for lunch in the dining hall. Following along behind the girls, Gwen and I gave each other a high five.
Pamela and Elizabeth were just going ahead of us with their groups when we got there, and as we went through the door I heard Pamela say, “Oh, my gosh! They’re gorgeous!”
Coming through the door on the other side of the hall were Andy and Craig and a couple more guys. I don’t know if it was because they were brawny and tanned (some of them, anyway) or because we were feeling rather desperate for male company, but they sure looked good to us. One of them had an acne-scarred face, but his smile was warm, he was cute, and his little charges were hanging all over him. If there’s one thing that’s attractive to a girl, it’s a guy who seems to get along well with kids.
“I get the one in the sweatshirt,” Elizabeth murmured.
“There are two in sweatshirts, Liz,” Pamela said. “I want the one in the red shorts.”
“That’s the one I meant!” Elizabeth told her.
“Sorry, he’s taken,” Pamela joked.
As they directed their boys to one of the long wooden tables Craig asked us, “So what name did you pick for yourselves? Andy and I got the Buzzards.”
“Coyotes,” I told him.
“Bunnies,” said Elizabeth.
“Mermaids,” said Pamela.
“Hey, guys,” Andy said to the little boys hanging on his arm. He motioned toward Pamela’s girls. “Meet the Mermaids.”
“Yuck!” said one of his boys, who immediately grabbed a bench at the table, spreading out his arms and legs the length of it. “Don’t let the girls sit here,” he warned his fellow campers, and the game was an instant success: Never let the girls sit at a boys’ table. As though they would have. The Coyotes chose a table as far from the Buzzards as they could get, while the Bunnies and Mermaids all turned their backs on the boys at the next table.
“Welcome, campers!”
The camp director for Camp Overlook was not the woman who had interviewed us back home, but a short curly-haired woman in jeans and a CAMP OVERLOOK T-shirt. Connie Kendrick’s voice was loud for so small a woman, but she absolutely radiated cheerfulness. You had the feeling that if the dining hall were sliding down the mountain, she would still be smiling.
“I am so glad to have you here for three weeks at Camp Overlook!” she said.
“And the very first thing we need to do, before we eat, even, which is the next most important thing we do, is learn the Camp Overlook cheer. And here it is:
‘Clap your hands!
Stamp your feet!
Our Camp Overlook
Can’t be beat!’
“Everybody, now! Say it with me!”
The dining hall resounded with the sound of hands clapping, the wooden floor rocked with the vibration of stamping feet, and all the kids shouted the cheer together.
Then each table assigned a designated runner to go to the kitchen and return with platters of hot dogs, French Fries, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and large squares of chocolate brownies for dessert. The way some kids ate, I wondered if this was the first full meal they’d had that week.
“Here comes five pounds, easy!” Gwen moaned, but we were hungry already, and when we’d polished off a hot dog, we each took a brownie.
After lunch the assistant director, Jack Harrigan, introduced all the full counselors and assistant counselors. I noticed that the guy both Pamela and Elizabeth had their eyes on was Ross Mueller. The cute guy with the acne was Richard Harrigan, Jack’s son. Connie Kendrick went over the camp rules, and then there was a guided tour of the whole place. This gave the assistant counselors a chance to hang back and talk with each other while the kids trooped on ahead of us, following Connie and Jack.
“So where you girls from?” Ross asked Elizabeth as we headed down to the river. He was one of the blondest guys I’d ever seen. His skin was tanned, and this made the hair on his arms and legs, his eyebrows,
even, seem blonder still. Even Pamela’s short hair was not as light as his.
“Silver Spring,” she told him, smiling. “What about you?”
“Philly,” he said.
“You came all the way here from Pennsylvania?” Pamela asked in surprise.
“Yeah. I’m going to major in P. E. Figure ‘assistant counselor’ will look pretty good on a college application.” He grinned at her. “So what brought you here? The scenery? The kids? The food? The river?”
We laughed, because Camp Overlook is to camps in general what Motel 6 is to hotels, what Budget is to rental cars. No frills. Part of the riverfront was sectioned off for swimming. Next to that were a couple of rowboats and, farther on, a bunch of canoes. That was the extent of water sports.
“Not the river, that’s for sure,” Pamela said.
“Not the food,” added Elizabeth.
“The company,” said Gwen, eyeing another assistant counselor, almost as short as Gwen but probably the most muscular guy in the camp. I figured she was going to forget Legs in a hurry.
“Ah, yes! The company!” said Ross, and grinned at Elizabeth this time.
We kidded around all the way to the baseball diamond, but when Connie got to the edge of the field where the woods began, with various paths leading off into the trees, she faced the young campers. “You are never to go on any of these trails without the permission of your counselor, and you are never to go alone. Some of these paths go on for miles, folks. It’s easy to get lost. We’re going to follow one right now, though, to the overlook, for which the camp is named.”
We went to the overlook then, Gwen and I elbowing each other at the way Elizabeth and Pamela were both competing for Ross’s attention. Elizabeth’s voice gets higher when she talks to a guy she likes, while Pamela’s gets more sultry. Sophisticated Pamela acts a little too blasé, as though she could hardly care less, while Elizabeth is all enthusiasm.
“When you become a psychiatrist,” Gwen whispered to me, “they’re your first case study.”
“Psychologist,” I said. “No med school for me.”
The overlook was probably the only—and certainly the most—spectacular thing about Camp Overlook. On a natural promontory, protected by a chest-high stone wall, we could see far out over the valley and the mountains beyond—layer upon layer of gray blue.
One of Andy’s boys tried to climb up on the four-foot wall, and Andy was after him in a second. It wasn’t a sheer drop-off—if he’d fallen, he would have rolled—but it was a lesson to all of us just how alert we had to be.
Maybe it was a good thing that the boys’ cabins were on one side of the clearing and the girls’ on the other, I thought as we went back to camp for quiet time. The way Pamela and Elizabeth were watching Ross, half our girls could have run off before they’d notice.
3
* * *
Around the Campfire
We spent the “quiet hour” not very quiet at all, settling some disputes about whose stuff was taking more shelf space and whose sneakers were smelling up the place.
Gwen and I began to see a pattern: Ruby and Kim were the clingiest. When either of us sat down on the edge of our bunk, one or both of those girls were right beside us, leaning against us, stroking our arms, toying with our hair. Estelle was a troublemaker; Latisha, the oldest, the aloof one. Josephine was used to playing the “baby” role, with Mary, her sister, her appointed nursemaid and caretaker.
Did I know what I was in for? I wondered as I got up to get some Kleenex from my bag, and instantly Ruby and Kim rose up on either side like appendages and moved with me across the floor.
I could have been swimming at Mark Stedmeister’s pool. I could have been going to the movies with Lester or ordering Chinese to eat at home with Dad. But I told myself it was only three weeks out of my life, and it would give Dad and Sylvia a chance to be alone. Besides, Lester would appreciate me all the more when I got back. Maybe.
“I’m tired already,” Gwen confided when the Coyotes settled down at last to trade stick-on tattoos, which most had brought along. Gwen and I simply stretched out on our bunks to rest up for whatever lay ahead. We were too tired to even sit up.
Dinner that night was chicken and noodles and a tossed salad. Josephine wouldn’t eat it.
“She only eats fried chicken,” Mary explained.
“Well, that’s too bad, Josephine, because this is all we’ve got,” I told her. “If you don’t like the chicken, eat the noodles.”
“They look like worms,” said Josephine, which was about the first intelligible thing she’d said since she’d got here, and I wanted to throttle her.
“Eeuw!” said Estelle and Ruby.
“Worms!” said Latisha.
“And they’re absolutely delicious. Eat!” Gwen commanded.
Everyone ate but Josephine.
The afternoon had been exhausting. After quiet time we’d had a relay race, followed by a volleyball game, followed by a swim, but most of the kids claimed the water was too cold. So the dining hall smelled not only of chicken and noodles and disinfectant, but of hot sweaty bodies and stringy hair.
“Okay, campers, listen up!” said Connie when the cherry Jell-O dessert had been served. “At Camp Overlook we take our showers before we go to bed, not when we get up in the morning. The sheets are changed only once a week, and we want to be kind to our bunk mates and not stink up the cabins.”
All the kids laughed and pointed at each other.
“So here’s the plan,” Connie continued. “After dinner you are to shower, then put on your pj’s. Did everyone bring pajamas as the instructions told you to do? And then I want you—softly, silently, like deer in the moonlight—to follow your counselors to the campfire.” Her voice got very low. “I want you to come so quietly that, just like deer, no one will hear you coming. The others will turn around and there you are, just like that.”
At first there was a lot of hooting and snickering at even the word “pajamas,” because pajamas are too much like underwear, and all you have to say to this crowd is “underpants,” and they practically roll on the floor in laughter. But the “silently, like deer in the moonlight” phrase made them pause, and we noticed that they were quiet already, just leaving the dining hall.
Because the showers could hold only so many girls at once, two cabins were to go at a time, and when our girls were through, we were to knock on the doors of the next two cabins till everyone had a turn. Later, after the kids were clean and back in the cabins, the counselors got to shower, half of them at a time, while the others took charge.
Once inside the wooden walls of the shower house, though, our little campers hesitated, their towels wrapped tightly around them.
“C’mon, before the water gets cold,” I called, testing it with one hand. I didn’t want to tell them it was barely warm to begin with. “Last one in is a rotten egg!” I couldn’t help smiling to myself, because I could remember when Elizabeth and Pamela and I used that line, only then we said, “Last one in is a virgin” and felt so sophisticated!
The younger girls gave in first—Ruby, then Josephine, and finally Kim. But the older girls hung back. We noticed the same reluctance from the girls in Elizabeth’s cabin. We tried to be casual about it and sat down on a bench at one end. Tommie Lohman, Elizabeth’s cabin mate, was a tall thin girl with light brown hair and very long legs. She had an easy, languid way about her that gave the impression she was in no hurry to see what the next day or month or year would bring.
At last all the Coyotes and Bunnies were standing in a line under the showers, hitting the soap dispensers with the palms of their hands and lathering up, eyeing each other furtively while they scrubbed.
Gwen and Elizabeth and I were listening to Tommie’s funny account of all the things she’d forgotten to bring, when suddenly Latisha yelled, “She’s lookin’ at me!” and pointed to a girl in Elizabeth’s cabin.
“Tend to your own bathing, Marcie,” Elizabeth told the freckled girl.
But a moment later Latisha complained, “Now she’s lookin’ at me back there!”
“Latisha, your body’s no different from anyone else’s, so cool it,” Gwen said.
“What if the boys come in?” asked Estelle warily.
“The boys have their own showers on the other side of camp,” I told her.
“But what if they peek?” asked Ruby.
“Then we’ll dunk their heads in the toilet,” said Gwen, and the girls screeched with laughter.
At some point Josephine got Ruby’s washcloth by mistake, and when they traded back again, Estelle jeered to Josie, “Ha-ha! Now you got nigger water on you!”
“Estelle!” I said, surprised, and the other girls covered their mouths in shock. They all turned to see what we would do.
“You watch your mouth, girl,” Latisha warned Estelle, her eyes menacing.
Choose your battles, our counselor’s handbook had said. Some issues are worth addressing immediately, and some can be saved for later. I decided not to make a big issue of it on our first night here in camp.
“I hope I won’t hear that word again, Estelle,” I told her. Gwen said nothing, and I knew she was waiting for the right time and place too.
When the girls were clean and back in the cabin, we counselors bathed alone, in record time. By then there was no hot water at all, and I was grateful for my flannel pajamas. It’s cold in the mountains! Then, when the path to the showers had grown quiet, we heard a soft bell announcing the campfire. We all put on our sneakers and jackets and—just as Connie said—like deer coming out to cross the meadow in the moonlight, we walked silently out in the field, where logs had been placed in ever widening circles, and there was the smell of smoke in the air.
I had thought that this would be the highlight of the day. I had thought that these city kids, some of whom had never even heard a cricket chirp, would really go for the brightness of the stars, the sound of frogs and hoot owls and katydids.