1968 to 1969, Maine and Massachusetts

By Helene Leff

The spring that I was 8, trim, fit, overly healthy looking older men and women began coming to our house. Long after the kitchen was retired, I found myself trampling back in, following behind my parents as they led some stranger, in a white or pink polo shirt, pressed neatly against their well-built body, into our breakfast room.

Flipping on the kitchen fluorescents, we entered the dark breakfast room and turned on the dimmer. A golden light warmed the room. The picture windows and skylights brought the black night and trees inside, setting the stage for the preview of nature. I had outgrown day camp and, like my father before me, was going off to “sleep away” through the grace of my grandparents.

This evening, under the glow of the track lights, we pulled up our chairs and faced the wall. The man set up his projector and began flashing slides of buildings and happy campers onto the makeshift screen. As he changed the slide, he gave a commentary about the camp.

“We have an excellent riding program,” he said as he clicked the switcher in his hand. “We have counselors from all over the world who…” click, “speak foreign languages and…” click, “we teach them how to…” click, “and for those who want to learn…” click, “and those who need to….” Click. Click. His voice droned on.

When his display was over, he turned to me and asked if I had any questions. “What do you do with perfect people?” I asked. He gave my parents his broadest, isn’t-she-just-the-sweetest smile, and told me he was sure they would find something for her to do.

So it was decided. I was going to Robindel, a girl’s camp in Maine. They told my mother the colors of the camp were navy and white, and all the girls were supposed to have the same clothes. They gave us the name of a place where we should get them.

I went with my mom to this gigantic fitting room. Inside, the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling, three-way mirrors. In front of each mirror stood a girl with her mother and a no-nonsense gray-haired woman huddled around her, dressed in either khaki or navy. The women kept pulling on and off their bifocals while nimbly wrapping a tape measure between their bony white fingers and the chests of the young girls.

After taking measurements, the women marched into a stock room and pulled out of cardboard boxes five white polo shirts, three pairs of navy shorts, and seven pairs of white athletic socks. Some girls ordered navy blazers and blue sweaters. My mother said we weren’t going to have the camp emblem inscribed on all these shirts; it just wasn’t practical. We left the clothes with the women so they could sew small red nametags into everything.

A few months later we packed the clothes into a steamer trunk along with my toothbrush, toothpaste, a folding cup, canteen, soap dish, bars of Ivory soap, Johnson’s baby shampoo, comic books, flashlight, batteries, an instamatic camera, film, a bag each of “bbbats” and bubble gum, a rain coat, rain boots, stationary, stamps, postcards, sweaters, riding hat, hair brush, rubber bands, barrettes, and underwear.

To get to the camp I took a small plane. When I got off the plane, I was picked up in a station wagon by a masculine looking woman with short, dark hair whose name was Mary. I was sitting in the back seat with a few other girls on the way to the camp when I threw up all over everyone. The airplane ride had made me sick. When we arrived at camp, the first person I went to see was the nurse in the infirmary. On the way there, I tripped over a row of benches and skinned my knees and the palms of my hands.

I was assigned a “big sister” named Mimi. I bought her a big, multi-colored swirling lollipop and a glass piggy bank from a fair. I slept in a bunk with a group of eight girls and one Swedish counselor. In the back bunk was a group of girls with an English counselor. They had all know each other from the year before. They had long, white limbs, faces with perfect features, and were so self-assured. The girls in my bunk were skinny or fat with frizzy hair, small eyes, and runny noses.

Rita was the head counselor. She was a tough, rail-thin figure with tight skin and freckles on her face. She always wore a whistle around her neck and a blue man’s golf jacket with her hands stuck in hard by her side.

Every morning when I woke up I would ask to go to the infirmary. I always had a stomachache. All the nurses knew me. I broke 10 thermometers that summer. They just slipped out of my mouth. I hated going to activities. I wanted to lie in the infirmary and watch color TV.

At 7:30 at night the lights had to be off. This I could not stand, nor could I understand why. No one was even tired. The counselors would stand guard outside our room, in a screened-in porch with benches and a Ping Pong table, to make sure we didn’t escape or turn on the lights. Soon after the lights went out, I would grab my flashlight and comic book and read under the blankets. I spent many evenings on the porch freezing in my pajamas, because they had caught me reading.

I wasn’t even sneaky about breaking the rules. Once I found my Swedish counselor, so soft-spoken and bewildered, sitting on the steps of our cabin crying, because she said I wouldn’t listen to her.

We had to swim in a lake, which I hated. My feet sank into the mush at the bottom of the lake. I wanted to swim in the pool. They thought this was better than the pool.

Every weekend we had “color war.” They broke the camp into two teams, the navy and the white, and all weekend we screamed and rooted for our team to win some game. Then in the afternoons, we sat in a big hall learning songs to the theme from Romeo and Juliet. Songs about how much we loved Robindel and would never forget our days there. I liked singing, but my throat hurt so much from screaming all day that I could hardly follow the tune.

At the end of the summer, each team competed at a songfest with costumes. Our theme was Eloise at the Plaza. That was a beautiful night, to see the show and hear the voices singing. The other team’s theme was Persephone in Hades.

I wanted them all to leave me alone. I didn’t want to go to activities and be in bed at 7:30. While we were being led off, single file, to our cabins for bed, I would catch a glimpse of the older girls in their evening dresses, standing on the docks under the lights, boarding the ferry to cross the river. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t go and have some fun. “In a few years,” the counselors said, “you’ll be old enough to go to the socials at the boy’s camp.”

There was a fat girl in our bunk named Franny. She wore glasses. Her shirt was always un-tucked and her jacket, half-zippered, fell off her massive body. She lumbered around, wheezing. Franny was an asthmatic. She was excused from all activities whenever she wanted, because of her asthma. I began following Franny around like a shadow on the wall of a big cave.

The counselors hated that I followed Franny around, because I was healthy and young and should be active instead of trailing behind the group with a sick girl. I sat with Franny on the boulders, watching the girls swim. Franny pulled up her sweatshirt zipper, high, to protect her from the cold wind that blew off the lake.

Slowly, I took up a wheeze. I would be walking, and start to wheeze so strongly that I’d have to sit down. This went on for days. The counselors would always be hurrying me along so that I wouldn’t dawdle behind with Franny. Then one day, about halfway through the summer, I came back from some hated activity. No one was in the cabin. My bear costume for the “sing” hung neatly above my bed. I lay down on the floor and began wheezing. When the counselors came in, I was full into an asthma attack. I almost made myself pass out. Lying on my back, with my eyes closed, I heard their voices faraway, above my head.

They called my parents to see if I had asthma. My mother said she didn’t know anything about it. When my parents came up a day early for “Visitor’s Day,” they had to wait until the next day to see me. When they were allowed in, I had no time to sit with them. Instead, we had to go from one activity to the next, showing our parents what we had learned. There I am on a horse with my black velvet-riding hat and then with my red ribbon. There I am playing skeet-ball, all pressed and neat like everybody else in white shirt, navy shorts, white athletic socks, sneakers and pigtails. Only my shirt doesn’t have Robindel written on it.

My parents wouldn’t let me come home. They gently persuaded me to stay on and enjoy the rest of the summer. On Thursday nights, standing on the docks, the light’s beam illuminating their long strands of hair blowing in the breeze, their naked arms drawing their wraps close around their shoulders, pulling up their long dresses, I would watch the older girls step onto the boats. And the lights blinking from across the water, like stars in the black sky, would draw them over the water, gliding them gently to the other side.

The next summer, I went to a co-ed camp where we had “socials” every night. Here I lay underneath the pine trees, pressed up against a young, blond boy, on top of a cool, damp bed of needles. At sunset, we stood in groups by the cabins. The warm evening air blew the flag back and forth as it was lowered to taps.

I rode horses every day, whenever I wanted. I sat for hours watching rehearsals in the theater that was a barn. The Fantasticks was my favorite. I was never the star, but I was in the chorus of George M. Cohans’ Oklahoma. I admired a beautiful girl with long hair, named Gerry. She was a fearless rider and starred in all the shows.

I ran around with the boys up by the archery range. We chased each other past the white and colored bulls-eyes that sat naked on the dried grasses. Sometimes, I jumped on the trampoline, learning flips and “swivel hips.” We picked blackberries on the trail back to the cabins.

When it rained, we ran through “the horseshoe” throwing water balloons at each other and put on bathing suits and slid down the muddy hills.

During “free time,” girls in leopard bikinis laid out across the lawn, their bodies oiled up as they raised their silver reflectors under their faces to catch the rays. As the sun set “the horseshoe” came alive with the buzzing of blow dryers. Inside the cabins everyone was trading clothes, dressing up for the night’s social.

Sometimes it was so cold in the cabin that I would wake up and crawl into a ball and lie on my stomach. One night, we were all awakened when a wild girl named Sandy, with short, black hair and red boils on her skin, got up on top of her bunk bed and started squawking and flapping her arms like a chicken. We watched in terror. She was crazy.

Helene Leff is a writer and graduate of NYU’s masters program in filmmaking. She has written for both the screen and TV; this is her first published story.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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