Some of my camp memories actually belong to my mother. Certain images, though vivid to me, are from stories she told me in bed. For example, I never roasted dough on a stick and then filled the hole left by the stick with butter and jam. That was her. I never caught two female counselors kissing on the archery range, pressed against a target, one’s hand down the other’s shorts. When the boys came to Wenonah for a social they canoed across the lake, arriving at dusk like an enemy tribe, storming the shore in tiny blazers. And although the boys showed up at our camp in a bunch of church vans, I can still see them tying up their boats and spilling over the hill ready to pillage us.
Sometimes I will find myself telling one of these stories to a group: the time I saw two lesbians in action. The best snack to make over a fire. It takes me a second to realize that I am lying. My best memories, the ones I hold dearest from my time at Fernwood Cove, aren’t mine at all. They belong to someone else. My stories are terrible. No one will be as excited to hear about me hiding in the bathroom to take my OCD medication. The time I stayed home from a field trip with a fake migraine isn’t a nostalgic crowd pleaser. Diarrhea in a canyon during a lengthy hike isn’t right for every audience. I can’t remember any of the songs.
In keeping with my life at home in New York, my “true friends” at camp were adult staff members.
The counselors were a diverse group, utterly suitable for an early season of The Real World. Girls with belly-button rings and ankle tattoos. Mormon guys in wifebeaters who listened to gangster rap. Even the fat ones had hard, tan legs. They seemed completely under one another’s spells, seduced by their own youth and beauty. This became clear when, from the window of my top bunk, I saw their wide white asses cavorting on the dock past midnight when they were supposed to be guarding our lives.
The first summer I lusted after a college student named Buddhu Bengay, who was from Western Mass and wore rope sandals like Jesus Christ himself. He had acne scarring and monstrous big toes but the way he talked reminded me of Matthew Perry, so dry that even regular words seemed funny. We only spoke a few times, though during a kitchen raid he did once pick me up and carry me back to my bunk. I beat his chest, stunned that he was touching me. He smelled like deodorant, the real kind, not the organic stuff my father wore.
“No way, young lady,” he said as he deposited me on the porch of Bunk Kingfisher. My legs shook, like I was stepping onto land for the first time in weeks.
I also flirted with an attraction to Rocco, my Australian “bunk uncle,” who claimed to be having a fling with Diana Ross’s daughter, the improbably named Chudney. Though the male counselors were not allowed to enter our bunks without at least two female counselors present, Rocco would often sit outside the screen door and talk to us as the sun went down after dinner. He called me Dunny, which, he explained, was Aussie slang for “toilet.”
But I found my truest love during my second summer, and his name was Johnny. Johnny McDuff. He was blond, from South Carolina, and just shy of twenty-two. He dressed in Dickies and Morrissey t-shirts and Wayfarers. He played guitar, songs he’d written himself with titles like “Oogie Boogie Girl” and “Angel Watchin’ over Me,” walked into the dining room late, with the easy swagger of a first-born child. People said he had a crush on Kelsey the crafts counselor, but I didn’t believe it. She wore a hemp anklet. She lay out to tan. She was common.
Johnny accompanied us on a number of field trips. It was under his watchful eye that we rode bumper cars, saw I Know What You Did Last Summer, camped in a trailer park where I heard a man scream “I’m fuckin’ done witchu” to his wife and speed off into the darkness on his motorcycle. We went whitewater rafting with a guide named Bear who taught me the term “AMFYOYO” (an acronym for “adios motherfucker, you’re on your own”). And we drove four hours to a forty-foot cliff with the intention of jumping off of it.
On the way there, I decided I was going to jump first. It was a silent decision. My skills as a camper were undeveloped to say the least. I remained afraid of the dark. I won an award for “worst bed maker.” I had gotten across the ropes course exactly once, with help. Sometimes Karen and Jojo played a game where they pushed me to the ground then timed how long it took me to get up before pushing me down again. Jumping first, before the rest of my bunkmates, would be a strong move to the basket, a way to reverse my position as the weakest and whiniest member of Kingfisher. As the other girls hemmed and hawed and pretended to be scared, I would step to the edge and dive effortlessly into the water, slicing the surface with my hands slightly cupped—just like our diving instructor had taught us.
As we neared the site in the van, I couldn’t contain myself. “I’m jumping the second we get there,” I announced.
“Yeah, right,” Jojo said.
As the other girls set up their towels and adjusted their Speedo two-pieces, I approached the edge of the cliff. Holy fucking shit, it was high. The kind of height that makes your insides turn to jelly.
“It’s a long way down, isn’t it?” There was Johnny, right behind me. He was pink and sunburned in little blue shorts. He looked like a World War II soldier on furlough.
“I’m cold,” I said. “I want to wait a second.”