Not a Happy Camper (23 page)

The only way back was on foot. Wet and dirty and yet, at last, relieved. As I played back the Kenny debacle in my mind, a stinging sensation went through me, but not one of realization; it was a literal, real live stinging sensation. I was surrounded by a swarm of bees, but these were not the usual friendly bees we passed through every Saturday morning on the way to Boys' Side. I was in a different place now, one I'd never given much consideration before, and I was standing on a beehive that must have fallen from a tree.

“Yow!” I screamed as I smacked at the assailants and tried to run, but they were faster than I was.

“Stand still!” I heard someone yell.

A girl about my age was standing on the front steps of one of the cottages along the Public Beach.

“Stand still and they'll go away.”

I did as I was told and within a minute the bees were gone. Perhaps down the road to visit their cousins.

“Did you get stung?” the girl asked.

“I think just one on my arm,” I told her.

“Wanna come in and put some baking soda on it? Won't hurt as much.”

I knew the rules about talking to strangers. I wasn't sure if a townie my age along the Public Beach counted.

“I'm kind of dirty,” I said. “Muddy.”

“You could stand in the doorway,” she said.

This seemed safe enough and gave me opportunity to glance around inside the home. I'd assumed that all hicks were stupid or crazy and that they lived in substandard housing filled with items
stolen from our clotheslines. This house, however, was pleasant and cozy with lots of gingham fabrics. A whole lot nicer than our accommodations and this girl was a whole lot nicer than Kenny. I guess there were a lot of things I'd failed to notice so far that summer, a lot of things that were right in front of my nose.

I thanked her for the wet paper towels and baking soda without asking her name or giving her mine.

“See ya!” she called out, as I headed back down the steps.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “See ya.”

We could have been friends now, or at least friendly, but we both knew it never would have lasted.

What would last was my dislike of Kenny. I saw him now for what he was and, finally, I saw Philip for what he was, too: a nice boy who liked me, who, come to think of it, I liked back. There was only one week left of camp. Could Philip ever forgive me?

I managed to sneak back onto Girls' Side unseen, where I showered and dressed and planned my next move: when I saw him the next day, I would ask Philip to the Banquet Social. Nothing was going to get in my way.

Little did I know war was about to break out.

to
the tune of the Dr. Pepper
I'm a Pepper, You're a Pepper
jingle

“I go to Kin-A-Hurra and I'm proud
I'm part of a very special crowd
And if you look around these days
There seems to be a very special craze
Oh! I am special, he is special,
She is special, we are special
Wouldn't you like to be special, too?
Be special, come to Kin-A-Hurra,
Be special, come to Kin-A-Hurra . . .”

S
UNDAY NIGHTS WERE SLOW AT CAMP, A GOOD NIGHT TO SIT ON YOUR
bed and listen to the rain, the rain that I hoped was washing the last of the horse manure off of the pants I'd hung on the line.

“Mail call!” Maddy announced, entering the bunk with a stack of letters and a package.

“But it's Sunday,” Betty pointed out, referencing a calendar and her forty-nine black marks on the wall. “There's no mail on Sunday.”

“There is if the office forgot to drop it off yesterday,” Maddy said, handing the package to Dana, who immediately tore it open.

“Yes! Thank you, Mom!” Dana announced. “Make-up for the Banquet Social!”

Make-up? We were supposed to wear make-up to the Banquet Social? I couldn't go the way I looked? I didn't have any make-up. I didn't even know how to wear make-up. The only time I ever wore it was in second grade when a girl in another class moved to Connecticut a week before their play. I got asked to take over her role as the queen in
The Chinese Sleeping Beauty
and their teacher, Mrs. Schumann, needed to make my eyes look slanty. Forget asking Philip. I'd have to stay back in the bunk. Maybe in the closet, hunched down by the shoes.

“Letter for you, Mindy,” Maddy said, passing me a lime green envelope sealed with colored wax and Wacky Pack stickers. It was
from Shelly Landau, a classmate of mine since fourth grade. It's not that we were good friends or spent time at each other's houses after school, but when you are away, you need to get mail. I'd heard that Shelly was good at writing back, so we'd swapped addresses. Shelly was spending the summer at Camp Marvin Berman in the Catskill Mountains. Camp Marvin Berman was a fat camp. According to her letter, she'd lost sixteen pounds so far. By my calculation, this meant that Shelly, who was exactly my height, now weighed less than I did. And was probably wearing make-up.

Most of the letter was about Color War. A staple of camps across the nation, Color War is the summer camp equivalent of the Olympics, in which campers and staff split into two teams and face off in a series of sporting events. The ultimate challenge to one's athletic prowess and sense of competition, Color War can last anywhere from three days to more than a week. The name is a throwback to the old days, when every camp had two official colors and campers wore one or the other to represent their teams. Apart from awful places like Morningside/Morningwood, hardly anyone wore their camp colors any more except when it came time for Color War.

Though the event generally took place somewhere in the second half of the summer, the tradition was to keep the official start date hush hush from everyone except the staff members in charge, who temporarily became Generals and Lieutenants. For the rest of us, it was as if Color War was some sort of Pearl Harbor-like surprise attack and you had to break from your usual routine to answer the call to arms. Shelly wrote to me that Marvin Berman, owner and director of Camp Marvin Berman, spent a lot of money on an elaborate “breakout” scenario, hiring a pilot with a small plane to fly overhead and drop multi-colored leaflets, detailing who was on what team and in which events each camper would compete.

When I was eleven and went off to Camp Cicada, I was under the impression that the goal of camp was to provide a perfect world, a land of fulfillment, the kind of place that would make the rest of your life pale by comparison. Camp Cicada did not meet my expectations, but I did like Color War. The one disappointing thing Saul told me when he came to our house was, “We don't stress competition. You'll make lifelong friendships. And maybe a potholder or two.” He said his camp didn't have Color War. And I believed him, until that Monday morning.

No leaflet-filled plane flew overhead, but we did see two male counselors, one dressed in a blue sweat suit, the other in a red one (our unofficial official colors), take off on water skis from the Girls' Side dock and head across the lake toward the boys' dining hall.

“Color War!” several girls called out.

“I don't understand,” I said to Dana. “Saul told me we don't have Color War.”

“You haven't caught on yet?” she asked.

The tales of non-existent fruit carts and paneled, heated bunks should have been a clue. Saul Rattner was a man with a plan, a plan to sell you on his camp no matter what it took. When Saul met a prospective camper and his or her family, he'd look the kid over and try to figure out what they wanted and then tell them he had it. Or in my case, didn't have it. Spotting a chunky girl who bit her nails, Saul assumed I was worthless on the playing field, just another potato sack of mediocrity to toss aboard his “cartload of Mindys,” and not a girl who, in actuality, had won the coveted President's Physical Fitness Award in gym class and now possessed a framed certificate stamped with a replica of Richard Nixon's signature.

“So he was lying?” I asked Dana.

Not exactly. Just as the sweat-suited boys' counselors reached their shore, our three waitresses ran out of the kitchen, banging pots and pans together and screaming. When they turned around, we saw that they were naked under their white aprons and had words written in red and blue magic markers across their rear ends. Standing cheek to cheek, their three tushies spelled out “Kin And Hurra”, and so began a day-and-a-half event Saul called Kin & Hurra. Not exactly Color War, not exactly
not
Color War.

Campers buzzed with excitement as Wendy Katz stood up to read off the team rosters and I thanked God I wasn't a waitress and didn't have to run around like that. I was on the Kin team, red shirts for us, which was fine since Judy Horowitz had handed down a few. Some girls, wearing the wrong colors, dove under the tables and traded with each other as we broke into two groups, on opposite sides of the dining room, to practice team cheers. The two favorites were “Win Kin!” and “Nothing rhymes with Hurra, hey!” and then we were trucked over to Boys' Side—the center of the universe—to let the games begin.

I crossed my fingers that I'd be on Philip's team. It'd be fate. We'd win this thing together. Jumping off the back of the truck, I looked around for the boy I should have been dating. There he was—in a blue shirt with a blue bandana tied to his blue denim shorts.

“Good thing your Mets cap matches,” I called out and waved.

“Nothing rhymes with Hurra, hey!” he shouted at me and turned away.

Philip was now my enemy.

Ordinarily, Color War is heavy on sporting events, both on the field and in the water. Strengths in running, swimming and boating are widely celebrated. The Kin & Hurra version was a little bit different. Here, the emphasis was on concocting events in which everyone could compete.

Upper camp, those twelve and over, started with events on land while the lower camp went down to the waterfront. Betty Gilbert, chosen to be our captain, which had to be a mistake, was wild with power.

“You can win the girls' softball throw, right?” she asked me. “Right? Right? Tell me you can do it! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”

I liked her better when she was reading.

As Betty annoyingly screeched “Win Kin!” I threw the ball twice as far as any of the other girls. Following that, I helped my team to victory in newcomb, a game that's a lot like volleyball except that you're allowed to catch it, and then we ran some co-ed relay races around the benches down by the Torah tree.

For those who couldn't run faster, jump higher, hit the ball harder or otherwise fulfill the Wonder Bread promise, there were separate events. I sat on the sidelines watching some of these campers peel the shells off hard-boiled eggs, points awarded for style and speed. Following this contest, equally spastic brainiacs reassembled the shells via mathematical calculations, in these, the days before computer camp.

Before the next round of competition, there was lunch, which all two hundred-or-so of us ate together in the boys' dining hall, as if things were normal and we weren't divided. As if we would all be friends again once the battle was over. As if you could turn it on and off. As if Color War wasn't really important, just an academic exercise, some grand opera parody of what life would be like at some other camp.

After the meal, we split into our teams again. We had only a few hours to put together Creativity Night, to be held on Girls' Side in our beautiful and greatly underused social hall, located in the woods atop a steep hill. The event turned out to be little more than an excuse to make up skits ridiculing Saul. “Our team,” General Lars Snorth announced, “the Kin team, will make a show called
‘Rattner Boulevard.' Okay, so what is it?” People jumped in with ideas about stores that sold cesspool deodorizers, carbon monoxide detectors and a lifetime supply of rain ponchos. There was a traffic light on the boulevard that never worked so all of the cars and people continually crashed into each other and the injured were taken to the hospital via the Food and Garbage Truck. I was assigned a role as one of the talking birds in Rattner's Pet Shop. When customers entered, we shouted out “Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!”

Remarkably, in spite of all of the day's events, Creativity Night ended with both teams in a dead heat. Tomorrow, we'd be starting out fresh. Kins and Hurras alike, we rose as one group to sing
Taps
before the boys climbed into the Green Truck for the ride back to their side of the lake. Those with significant others, regardless of team affiliation, made brief detours for a goodnight kiss before boarding.

As we stood watching the truck pull away into the darkness, I wasn't thinking about Philip. I had a bigger concern.
If only it would rain...
Because unless I lost fifteen pounds in my sleep, I was going to be a big-nosed blob in a bathing suit dog paddling my way through the next day's waterfront races.

I was so desperate to be excused from the waterfront events that I ate a banana the next morning for breakfast. It didn't succeed in making me violently ill, as I'd hoped, but General Gita Isak knew something was wrong.