That was the real sin of it, thought Alice. The way she had ruined her looks.
The sound of footsteps caught her ear. Heavy, plodding ones: Barbara.
She’d be heading to the kitchen. Her favorite place, of late. Alice grimaced.
Yesterday, Alice had asked the new cook—whose name she couldn’t remember—to stop feeding Barbara so often. To make excuses if she had to. But Barbara could be very manipulative, Alice knew, and she had little faith in the cook’s ability to handle her.
She made her way to the threshold of the kitchen, and paused there, trying to be quiet.
There was Barbara, of course, regarding the contents of the pantry, her back to the room. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and Alice noticed with a sort of disgust that her once-insubstantial bottom was round now, and her legs were the legs of a woman. Behind Barbara, the cook caught Alice’s eye. Raised her hands, as if helpless.
Alice didn’t enjoy assessing her daughter’s body in this way. She understood conceptually that it was uncharitable; and yet she also believed that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction. This was the method her own mother had used upon her. She hadn’t liked it at the time, but now she understood it.
“Barbara,” said Alice, and her daughter jumped, and then turned, a loaf of bread tucked under her arm. Just for a moment, Alice felt tender toward her. She had always been skittish, ever since she was a toddler—the only baby on earth who didn’t like playing peekaboo or hide-and-seek, who cried when she was startled, even in fun.
“Dinner’s at half past seven,” said Alice.
Levelly, Barbara put the loaf down on the countertop and began sawing.
“Did you hear me?” said Alice.
Barbara nodded. Reached for the butter. Spread it over the bread. Kept her head lowered. A half inch of blond was visible now at her part; the rest of her hair was still that terrible dull black. Her face, at least, was pretty. No bad dye job could change that.
The cook looked on uselessly. She was a tiny little thing, perhaps twenty-five, married, judging by the plain ring on her finger.
Alice sighed. There was no point in saying anything—not today. Not when Barbara would be away for the whole rest of the summer. What harm, after all, in letting her indulge in one more helping of bread and butter and jam.
“I spoke to T.J. just now,” said Alice, and finally the girl looked up. There was the version of Barbara she loved, at last. Some sign of animation in her face and eyes.
“And?” said Barbara.
“She says you can start camp tomorrow.”
Triumph. Barbara looked down quickly, but Alice could see that she was working to keep her mouth straight, stopping a smile.
“I’ll have someone pack for you,” said Alice.
It was good, thought Alice. This would be good. To have a break from each other. Things would get better this way.
Tracy
June 1975
This, Tracy learned, was Camp Emerson:
Three buildings formed its northernmost edge, closest to the main house up the hill. One was the commissary, where they ate their meals; the next a building called the Great Hall, which contained a nurse’s office, two small rooms that could be used for activities on rainy days, and a large community room that was mainly used for dances and performances that required a stage. The third building in this small cluster was the Director’s Cabin. The only campers who had ever seen inside it were those who had gotten into trouble of one kind or another.
South of these buildings lay the rest of the campground. Near the lake at the eastern edge were a small beach and a boathouse. A long building called Staff Quarters sat at the southern border of the grounds—this was where kitchen workers and other seasonal staff resided. To the north of it were fourteen cabins—seven for boys, seven for girls—in two lines on opposite sides of a creek that could be crossed by small bridges here and there. Every one of these cabins was named after an Adirondack tree or flower.
Tracy’s cabin, Balsam, was lit inside by warm yellow bulbs that hung, uncovered, from the ceiling. At night, these same lightbulbs summoned an army of insects through the tattered screens in the cabin’s windows.
The cabin was furnished with eight twin beds, four and four against opposite sides. Small wooden trunks sat at the foot of each bed. The cabin’s walls were made of unfinished wood, and so too was its ceiling, inscribed with names and dates and inscrutable references by generation after generation of campers.
Most surprisingly, against one wall of the cabin was a fireplace. Tracy was told, later that summer, that the cabins originally had been used year-round by friends of earlier generations of Van Laars on short hunting trips; but since the founding of Camp Emerson, the fireplaces had gone unused, except by bats that occasionally colonized the chimneys and then had to be relocated.
• • •
That first day, after the mothers—and Donna Romano—had disappeared, the counselor and counselor-in-training sat the campers in a circle to begin icebreaking exercises.
It was during these exercises that it became clear to Tracy that all the other girls in her cabin had known each other for years. They tossed catchphrases and gestures back and forth as if playing ball, buckling with laughter from time to time for reasons she couldn’t discern. Inside jokes, Tracy thought—a term that terrorized her with its implication that anyone who didn’t understand them was, by definition, an outsider.
The other revelation that came out of these exercises was that there was a definite hierarchy among Tracy’s cabinmates.
At the top, of course, were Louise and Annabel, the counselor and the CIT. Both were beautiful in different ways: Louise, at twenty-three, seemed to be a woman already. She was short, much shorter than Tracy, with long dark hair and dark eyebrows and the bearing of an athlete. She was also—a word Tracy had learned earlier that year—stacked. Annabel was seventeen, tall, willowy, fair, a ballet dancer who moved with all the assurance of someone whose family had never had to worry about paying a bill. Tracy loved them both immediately. She had the weird desire to miniaturize them, to take them out and play with them like dolls.
Next came Balsam’s campers, who ranged in status from the two Melissas—the clear rulers, wiry blond gymnasts from Manhattan’s Upper East Side—to a girl named Kim, who had the habit of speaking, at length, on topics no one else seemed to care about.
Last in the line came Tracy, whose size, she believed, was already drawing stares from the others. Upon being asked to introduce herself, she found that her voice had been completely taken from her. A slow resignation settled in: this was what her summer would be like. She’d keep to herself. She’d speak to no one. She’d go unnoticed, hiding behind books whenever possible. Staying out of it. Blending in.
She unpacked the last of her belongings. From her toiletry kit she removed the new glasses she had been prescribed that year; these she placed at the back of the single drawer she’d been assigned. It would be better, she thought, not to see anything too clearly this summer.
Suddenly she was blinking hard. To cry now would be catastrophic—and yet the disappointment of it all weighed heavily on her shoulders. Because there was always a part of her—despite her understanding, cultivated over years of such disappointments, of where she would fall in any social hierarchy—there was always a part of her that hoped that this time would be different. That some graceful, lissome boy or girl would have the patience and acuity to pick Tracy out of a crowd, take notice of one of the positive qualities that she infrequently allowed herself to number: her sense of humor, or her drawing ability, or her singing voice, or her loyalty, her devotion to anyone who showed her even a modicum of interest.
Tugging her ill-fitting uniform shirt down over her ill-fitting uniform shorts, Tracy exhaled, releasing entirely the hope she had had for the summer.
• • •
At the opening campfire that night, Tracy looked on as a series of strange songs and rituals were performed at the bottom of a natural amphitheater, a little hill that led down to a patch of grassless land. On the hill, large split logs had been set up as rough benches, with an aisle down the center. The dark lake was just visible beyond.
A certain energy was appreciable in the air: it was the energy of teenage hormones, of sidelong glances, a taking note of who had changed over the past year, and in what ways. It wasn’t just the campers, but the counselors, too. All over, they were sidling toward one another, whispering in each other’s ears, making gestures Tracy could not understand. Each one of them, she would learn, was a celebrity in his or her way; campers strove earnestly to learn facts about them, about their home lives and romantic prospects and heartbreaks; these facts were then traded eagerly as whispers in the dark.
