I asked if she still spoke to any of her Wenonah friends. No, she said, but that didn’t mean she’d ever stop loving them—they were sisters.
So I wanted camp, too. I didn’t want to leave home. I loved my loft bed and my hairless cat and the small desk my father had installed for me in what used to be the closet where he kept his sci-fi paperbacks. I loved our mint-green elevator and our Malaysian takeout and August in New York, the way the only breeze came from the subway rushing past. But I also wanted friendships, fresh starts with people who had never seen me wet myself during Wiffle ball or hit my father outside the deli. I wanted memories so powerful they made you cry. And by God, I wanted green shorts.
I spent three summers at Fernwood Cove Camp for Girls.
Fernwood Cove was the sister camp of Fernwood, a long-standing institution that Wenonah had regularly opposed in sports. Fernwood Cove was for four-weekers, girls too scared to spend eight weeks away from home. Or too spoiled to live without electricity. Or too slutty to live without boys. I had decided eight weeks was too much for me when my cousin, a Fernwood girl, described the ritualistic beheading of a weakling’s stuffed animal. “I mean, you just don’t bring a toy to camp,” she said, like it was obvious.
I started at Fernwood Cove when I was thirteen. I had just finished a successful seventh-grade year in which I had enjoyed not one but two popular boyfriends and gotten my hair highlighted by a licensed beautician named Beata. This rare winning streak was only slightly dampened by the short bangs I had cut myself in order to prepare for my audition as Drew Barrymore’s little sister in the Penny Marshall film Riding in Cars with Boys. (The role went to someone else after I told Ms. Marshall I could not smile on command. “That’s called acting,” she growled.)
So it was with a rare sense of hope and anticipation that I boarded the bus in Boston that would take me to Fernwood Cove. On the three-hour drive I got to know my seatmate, a girl named Lydia Green Hamburger, who told me, within three minutes of meeting me, that she knew Lindsay Lohan. Lydia was different from me—she talked animatedly about school dances and lacrosse and the mall—and yet we got along handsomely. This is what camp is all about! I thought. Meeting other, slightly different kinds of white girls!
But the moment we pulled into the dusty driveway and I saw the tetherball waiting, the fear set in.
If my behavior that first summer at camp was the only evidence a psychiatrist had to go on, they would have diagnosed me as a fast-cycling bipolar. My emotions vacillated wildly, from joy to despair to disdain of my fellow campers. One minute I was passionately engaged with my new friend Katie, and the next I was convinced she had the IQ of a lima bean. One minute I was reveling in the moment, not thinking about my family at all, and the next, walking from the rock wall to the drama tent, I would be hit with a wave of homesickness so severe I was sure I would die right then and there. My parents seemed impossibly far away—dead, for all I knew. That sense became harder to shake, and as the summer progressed my homesickness only grew more intense, which was the exact opposite of what my father had promised me would happen.
The only thing that distracted me fully was being allowed to present a play I had written about a woman with thirteen cats who was searching for an understanding mate. On the strength of this work, my drama counselor Rita-Lynn cast me as the star of a play she’d written about “primal coyote women” for her thesis at Yale drama school. I was thrilled until I learned I would have to drop a potato from between my legs and grunt, “Uh, what a good poop.” How could they ask a serious actor to deliver such an absurd phrase!?
But when the line got a laugh at dress rehearsal, I decided it was genius.
I was in hell. I was in heaven. I was at camp.
There were ten of us, living in a three-hundred-square-foot bunk, going through puberty at lightning speed. It was too much hormonal action for any one room, and the result was a frenzied, emotionally volatile space that smelled like a Bath and Body Works.
Just because there weren’t boys at camp doesn’t mean there wasn’t romance. We had socials—two per summer, just like my mother did at Wenonah—and we prepared, laying our outfits out a week in advance, trading sandy tubes of lip gloss and glow-in-the-dark barrettes.