Marty’s taking my suitcases, sleeping bag and camping gear out to the car. My mother is envisioning me in an apartment overlooking the Seine. My split ends and curls are gone, and my braces have been cut off with metal shears. I wear a beret and contact lenses. In spring afternoons, I am inspired and sit in the Tuileries reading Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir.
My mother and Marty drive me to Camp Hillel. Apparently this is an occasion necessitating the Rolls Royce. The weight of museums, revolution, democracy, ballet and existentialism ride in the back seat. As we enter Camp Hillel, counselors hold signs with ARROWS pointing to the dust and gravel pit designated as the camp parking lot. They salute as we pass. When our parents are gone the parking lot will return to its usual name. Sex Gully.
Marty slowly maneuvers the Rolls between Mercedes Benz sedans, Jaguars, Bentleys and SUVs parked at criminally dangerous angles. He steers with calculated deliberation like he’s navigating a ship into a shallow inlet.
The parking lot is notorious. Fender benders and collisions are constant. Even small scratches require imported paint and take months to repair. There have been so many accidents, Dr. White includes a legally binding document promising not to sue in the Camp Hillel application package. You must absolve Camp Hillel in advance before entering the property.
Dislodged campers drag bedrolls and backpacks across gravel. Cameras slip off wrists and canteens fall from their shoulders. Fathers lean out windows exchanging business cards.
My mother hands me my purse which I’d dropped. “Monet,” she whispers while I search for my assigned cot. “Degas and Camus.” She continues naming famous French artists until a counselor asks her to leave.
I unpack my white Sabbath shorts and blouses. Chelsea Horowitz is taking German because her father is a Freudian psychoanalyst. I find a drawer for my jeans and rock band T-shirts. Jennifer Rothstein is pre-enrolled in Chinese because it’s the most important language of the 21st century. Her parents are both cardiologists. Anything less than Chinese is a deliberate refusal to recognize reality. It’s obtuse, like refusing treatment for a preventative valve or artery procedure.
I put my toothbrush and tampons in a basket in the bathroom. There are 3 toilets and 2 of them are broken. Tiffany Gottlieb already has an Italian tutor. Her parents own a designer in Milan and a villa at Lake Como. They want her to appreciate opera, order from a menu with style, and not embarrass them.
Bunk 7 is named Golda Meir. It has torn screens on the windows and 2 showers marked Out of Order. The floor is cement. Somehow, I’d forgotten this. I place my pool thongs, tennis shoes and white Sabbath sandals under my cot. I inspect my mattress. Coils, orange with rust, unravel in multiples like fingers forced to repeat piano scales. They might be laminated worms and I suspect infection.
I cover my cot with an over-sized lavender sheet that belonged to my grandmother. Lilac trees bloom in 44 horizontal rows. It’s been washed thousands of times and the cotton is softer than silk. It feels like skin. But it fails to stop the metal spokes that scratch my sunburn and mosquito bites.
Becky Fine is pre-enrolled in Russian due to her family heritage and the novels of Tolstoy. She has an appreciation for the Cyrillic alphabet that curls like waves in the Black Sea. Everyone’s fallback is Latin.
Brooke Bernstein is committed to a Greek and Japanese double language program. She’s sharing her cigarette with the rest of language-declared Bunk 7. I don’t join them.
“What are you taking?” Chelsea Horowitz demands. “Canadian?”
I stare at her, flabbergasted. Chelsea Horowitz has dyed her hair platinum blond and it looks like a metal helmet glued to her skull. Stray pieces like starched straw jut out like errant stalks from defective seeds.
Chelsea Horowitz has a stress-induced amnesia. She’s apparently forgotten last summer in Bunk 6, Esther, when she had mourning black dreadlocks and we were best friends. When she dropped her sleeping bag in the creek on our overnight, I gave her my extra blanket. We stayed up until dawn, shivering, and watching the stars make their singular circular transit.
After dinner we walked past the stables and into the Eucalyptus grove reeking of cough drops and confided secrets. Sometimes we held hands. Chelsea Horowitz swore me to eternal silence and told me the ethics committee had suspended her father. It was a harsh punishment for an unfortunate but essentially trivial episode with a bipolar Russian ballerina. Her mother had totally overreacted, and filed for divorce and bought an apartment in Haifa. She gave me her birthday opal ring. We wanted to become blood sisters, officially, but the cafeteria only gave us one plastic knife that broke immediately.
As soon as I wake up I go to the Health Center. Nurse Kaufman is a holocaust survivor. You could sever a major artery and she wouldn’t give you a tourniquet. I loiter near the scale and jars of tongue depressors. Then I show her my abraded shoulder blades.
“This is a kibbutz, not the Four Seasons,” Nurse Kaufman says. She gives me a band-aid, reluctantly. She’s compromising against her better judgment and wants me to know I owe her.
In Bunk 8, Delilah, the Goldberg twins are in an experimental central European immersion program. They began in Hungary with blue-domed public hot baths and Klezmer recordings. They spent a night in a village of gypsies and interviewed them with video cameras. Each summer, they’ll visit a different concentration camp and add another language.
I return to the Health Office. Nurse Kaufman glances at my puncture wounds. When she determines it’s not stigmata, she loses interest. Golda Meir has dysfunctional screens and a division of mosquitoes has bitten me. I count 31 separate violations of my flesh. A spider walked across my back in 9 distinct bites. Nurse Kaufman dispenses 2 aspirin and a paper cup of tap water. She watches me swallow. She permits eye contact for the first time and writes a note on my chart.
Bunk 7 is sharing vacation photographs. Tiffany Gottlieb wears a gold thong bikini, holds a beer, and waves from a boat on Lake Como. Chelsea Horowitz yells, “Yo, Canada,” as I pass.
Chelsea Horowitz has been encouraged to say whatever comes into her mind because it could contain analytically significant material. Still, sometime someone’s going to knock her front teeth out. I edge onto my cot. Soiled coils snap apart and jab my knee.
It’s lights out, including flashlights and matches. I leave Golda Meir barefoot. I’m breathing rapidly in uneven bursts. I need to stand outside in the dark and quietly count the occasional meteor streaking silver and exploding like a 747.
The sky surprises me. It’s a sheeted haze of monochrome gray like layers of smoke. In fact, it is smoke. The junior and senior counselors from UCLA and Stanford are lying on their backs in Sex Gully, chain smoking, passing joints, and pretending they’re in the Israeli army.
I’m late for breakfast. My eyes feel like barbed wire is implanted in 2 horizontal lines like train tracks or stitches. My mouth tastes metallic as if my braces are leaking. It’s lead poisoning. The Atlanta Center for Disease Control should be informed. They’ll want samples and a quarantine.
Nurse Kaufman lights a cigarette. The Health Center is the size of a walk-in closet. A real medical emergency is for Medevac. Red Cross choppers fly over camp 2 or 3 times a day, staying in practice in case Dr. White presses the buzzer he wears next to his Rolex. Hypochondriacal disorders are for our own psychiatrists.