Getting Over Jack Wagner (4 page)

He referred to the albums like close friends—Janis, Carly, Bruce—similar to Mrs. Devine and her hanging plants. We waited at the table while he paged through them, considering each one, then carefully slipped one out of its jacket. He placed it gingerly on the turntable, pulling on his beard. Both Hannah's parents had signature hair—Mr. Devine a wild gray puff sprouting from his chin, Mrs. Devine an explosive mop of brown corkscrews—the combined genetic effect of which was Hannah's orange curls. Between their plants and albums and prayers and hair, I had a suspicion that the Devines were “hippies”—a word I'd heard Nanny utter in the same hushed, fearful breath as “cancer” and “Chaka Khan.”

Only after needle touched vinyl could the family dinner truly begin. Hannah's two brothers ate mountains of shellfish, cracking backs and sucking bones and dunking crab legs in butter like balls into hoops. They teased Hannah and me relentlessly, stepping on our toes, stealing our food, and pulling our hair, all of which I enjoyed immensely (naturally I had crushes on both of them). Mr. and Mrs. Devine never got angry about the noise or the mess. After dinner, they curled up together among the wine and wicker, singing along to staticky Cat or Van.

During ORSFC meetings, however, the sunporch was official business only. Hannah, Katie, Cecilia, and I sat in a cross-legged circle, armed with Fruit Roll-Ups and stacks of music mags. ORSFC protocol was this: each of us adopted one rock star who was exclusively ours to fall in love with. We fell in love with John Waite. We fell in love with George Michael. We fell in love with every member of Human League, Duran Duran, and Cutting Crew. Some of these are the same stars I catch these days on VH1's
Where Are They Now?
But back then, if one began losing popularity, we simply replaced him with another, like the members of Menudo when they got too old.

The allotment of crushes happened pretty peaceably. Cecilia liked the guys with the nice smiles, the Howard Joneses and the Andrew Ridgeleys, the ones who looked the least like burglars. Her crushes were usually brief, halfhearted. (She did manage a two-week commitment to Huey, of the News.) Katie went for the more rebellious, the Van Halens and Princes, the ones who sang risqué lyrics about hot sex and Corvettes. Even then, Hannah saw the men as studies in human behavior, examining Rick Springfield's leap from tube to song with the curiosity of a social historian. I, of course, remained faithful to Jack.

The motivation behind our having separate crushes was more economical than emotional. Basically, it allowed us to rip apart our mags and divvy up the pix among us, which bought more rocker for our dollar. The pix were glossy 8 1/2 x 11s, seductive shots of rock stars with oily, half-bared chests, rock stars reclining against Mustangs or pine trees, rock stars sitting in their kitchens or bedrooms in “Just Like the Boy Next Door!” montages. We didn't just read for the pictures, though. We read for the articles, too. The mini-bios. The up-close-and-personals. The could-you-be-the-girl-he's-looking-for's? In answer to the all-important question “Does (insert rock star here) have a special someone?” the answer was invariably, encouragingly, “Not yet!”

Most of our ORSFC meeting time was spent trading bits of insider info about various rock stars: hidden quirks, ideal girlfriends, random likes and dislikes. A pet kitten. A passion for cornflakes. A red Saab. Endless amounts of smooth-spun, prepackaged, third-person details that had us convinced we knew these men inside and out.

“New business!” I would announce, stomping my foot in lieu of a gavel. “Hannah?”

“He always eats all his vegetables,” Hannah loyally reported, reading from an up-close-and-personal.

“Awwww,” supplied Cecilia. She was good at making these kinds of sounds. She had two rabbits.

“Avocados are his favorite,” Hannah added. Even then, she was a vegetarian at heart. “Sometimes he eats avocado sandwiches.”

“Grody to the max!” Katie sang, knowing she'd scored points for talking Valley.

“Listen to this,” I jumped in. “Looking for a girl who is honest, likes to take long walks, curl up by the fire”—I chomped my Roll-Up, skipping over “ride horses” and “be spontaneous,” and concluded—“a girl who will take the time to get to know the real him.”

Another “awwww” from Cecilia.

“That's nothing,” Katie said, and stood up on her wicker chair. Katie was known for stunts like this. With elaborate care, she took a picture of George Michael and licked it up and down, whispering, “Wake me up before you go-go.”

Needless to say, Katie Brennan would never be without a prom date. In high school, in the gym locker room, she would fascinate and terrify us with stories of boys climbing in her bedroom window, and offer as proof the purplish hickeys spotting her neck like some kind of rare disease.

Katie withdrew her tongue, dropped back into her seat and collapsed into giggles while the three of us laughed or squirmed or both. Then we looked to Cecilia.

“Ummm…” she stalled, scanning her article, twisting the tip of one braid around her finger. “He has a sister…and her name's…ummm…Roberta?”

I suspect Cecilia Kim just wasn't cut out for following trends. She was starting to go a little bit fashion-haywire, once brandishing not one but two sparkly gloves during the
Thriller
era. Years later, she would startle the junior high school with a psychotic combination of neon scrunchies and leg warmers. I'm not saying we all weren't out on fashion limbs in the '80s, but Cecilia seemed to misfire a little more than average, like a person who learned slang from a textbook. Eventually she'd give up on trends altogether, burrow away in the honors track, and resurface years later as our valedictorian to deliver a speech entitled “Facing the Future: Life Without a Net.”

 

My father left that August. He did it while my sister and I were away for a month at an all-girls overnight camp. I've since wondered if my mother sensed Lou was preparing to leave, and sent us away to spare us the pain. To protect our innocence. To prevent emotional scarring. Not that it worked. My memories of Camp Mohawk now seem like a bad joke, a trick, an elaborately loud, colorfully bad musical staged to distract me from what was really going on in my life.

Looking back, it's the stress and rigor of it all that seems most ironic. At the time, surviving Camp Mohawk was a matter of life and death: the greatest physical and mental challenge I would ever endure. Just the basics of daily living required speed and strength and fortitude. Cramming pizza bagels in your mouth before they were gone, getting showers before they were cold, swimming fast, running fast, rowing fast, holding your own in late-night sex talks and never, ever falling asleep early to guard against being TPed. I don't think I completed an REM cycle once in twenty-eight days. I lay in my cot, Jack Wagner swelling in my ears, alert and awake to the point of pain, hoping Victoria Moore wouldn't choose that night for one of her notorious one-acts.

Victoria—a.k.a. Big Vicki—had been a “Hawker” since she was six and already wore a D-cup. It was obvious to me, if no one else, that there was a connection between overnight camp and premature development. For Vicki, the chest was a source of pride. She was bigger than any other campers, bigger than our counselors, bigger than our camp directors. Some nights, if we were lucky, she'd aim a flashlight at herself and make a shadow of her torso on the bunk wall, chest flopping and bouncing like a deranged shadow puppet.

Hannah didn't get as rattled as I did by showering, racing, or Big Vicki. She was a camper straight out of the brochure: the freckled face you pay to see grinning above promises like
Learn Sportsmanship!
and
Make Friends for Life!
In reality, Hannah wasn't great at any sport or art or craft, but she did them all with gusto. She scurried fearlessly along the ropes course. She patiently knotted daisies into chains. When a bat got loose in our bunk and the counselor on duty screamed “Kill it! Smush it!” Hannah calmly trapped it under a plastic shower caddy and set it free.

Even Hannah's enthusiasm couldn't convince me to like Camp Mohawk. This wasn't necessarily Mohawk's fault; I just wasn't all-girls camp material. I despised team sports. I preferred walking to running. I'd always been suspicious of marshmallows (what
are
they, exactly?). I missed boys and TV. I was painfully aware of the fact that Jack Wagner could have a hit single and I would have no idea. Perhaps it was only fitting that the single part of Mohawk to pique my interest was Dave: head swim instructor/rock star.

Dave was the son of the Camp Directors: Flo, and a man who went by the name of Buzzy. Flo and Buzzy looked approximately alike: short, round, and pudgy, with matching visors and peeling noses. Somehow, they had managed to produce a son who was blond, tan, and rock hard, with hair that hung a little long and curled at the back of his neck like something dangerously pubic. Dave wore a tangle of rope and bead around his neck, nestling in the hollow of his brown throat. In general he, like me, exuded utter disinterest in and disdain for all things Mohawk, which only reinforced my growing conviction that we were totally in synch.

The exception to my anti-Mohawk rule was the Saturday night bonfires. Each week, the entire camp gathered in a giant circle on the soccer field to eat s'mores and sing folk. The song list was carefully chosen to evoke premature nostalgia, a sadness that would mount over the weeks and come to a crazed, crying head in the last few days of camp. “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” “You've Got a Friend.” “Desperado” (for the mood, not the lyrics). The singing was led by none other than Dave, who played a mean six-string. When he sang he closed his eyes and, occasionally, bit his lip.

Though most of my Rest Hours were spent scribbling madly in my diary about Dave, chances were slim he would have been able to pick me out of a lineup. It was difficult to single yourself out at a camp where everyone moved in herds and wore regulation orange T-shirts. It wasn't until the last week—Day 23, to be exact—at Bunk Cherokee's daily swim lesson, that I saw my chance.

“Listen up,” Dave said, with no emotion in his voice whatsoever. He was wearing his signature black shades, so it was impossible to tell if he was looking at us, through us, or was even awake. “Today we're doing lifesaving.”

This was the final phase of our month-long swim course, the culmination of three weeks of doggy-paddling and freestyling and listless dead man's floating (a sport for which I'd discovered I had real talent).

Then Dave yawned the magic words: “I need a volunteer to play the drowning victim.”

Let me be clear: under normal circumstances, the word “volunteer” would have sent me running in the opposite direction, especially if it meant being on flat-chested, half-naked display in front of all my fellow Cherokees. But I knew this was a golden opportunity. I was pretty sure even fake drowning would involve some sort of fear and concern. Definitely, there would be physical contact.

Casually, I offered my services: “Me! Dave! Over here! Pick me!”

“Fine.” He jerked a blond thumb in my general direction. “You.”

Within seconds, I found myself plunged into the deep end of the Mohawk pool while the rest of the Cherokees ringed the edge to watch. I looked to Dave for instruction.

“Act like you're drowning,” Dave said.

For several minutes, I splashed and flailed to the best of my ability, even croaked “Help! Help!” a few times for added effect. I was working on rolling my eyes back into my head when I saw the end of the metal lifesaving pole heading swiftly in my direction. I grabbed onto it with both hands, then went limp, flopping from the end as Dave towed me in toward shore. When I felt the lip of the pool collide with my elbow, I opened my eyes and there it was: Dave's tan, gorgeous face mere inches away from mine.

“I'm counting to three,” Dave said, taking my hands in his. “Then I'm dunking you.”

“Okay” was barely out of my mouth before I was choking down a mouthful of chlorine, and found myself heaved onto the side of the pool where I lay dramatically coughing and spluttering. It was no act this time, but my bunk couldn't tell. They gave me a polite dribbling of applause.

 

After twenty-eight days, I was ambivalent about leaving camp. I was ambivalent about going home. The only thing I felt with any conviction was exhausted. Aside from the occasional Rest Hour or strategic trip to the infirmary during
General Hospital,
life in the woods had a relentless quality of motion: getting from sport to sport, meal to meal, one end of the sack race to the other. With all this activity, my parents rarely crossed my mind. Overnight camp was a small life, an island of a life, something like being away at college. The western hemisphere could have been on fire and we'd go on rotating the work wheel and eating marshmallows off sticks.

I received a total of three notes from my mother (none of which I answered) written on “A Note from Linda” stationery. Each felt like a mini-scolding, a tidy list of thinly veiled reprimands like
Are you eating? Are you sleeping?
and
Are you cleaning your ears?,
punctuated with a
P.S. Be good.

From my father, I received just one. It was written on the back of a yellow sales receipt from Rydal Auto Service. The letter, for him, was oddly sentimental. He wrote about how hot it was getting, then segued artfully into how old I was getting, how “life is short” and I shouldn't “mess around.” That's all I remember. I read it twice, thought it was weird, threw it away and rushed off to claim my share of pizza bagels. Now, of course, I wish I'd kept it. Now, of course, it seems prophetic. I was holding the evidence of my father's preparation to leave us: a receipt for a new muffler and parting advice to his daughter. The last of the loose ends.