There was a time, when Rachel was a child, when her parents still saw each other. A babysitter would come over and give her dinner and a bath and put her to bed. Her mother never dated anyone else in all that time, and Rachel suspected that maybe Denise had been waiting for him to leave his family and choose them, after all. But by the time Rachel was thirteen, he stopped coming over, and Rachel saw him only out of the house. Denise never told Rachel the particulars about the relationship ending, and Rachel never asked.
Rachel sat on her bed for a few minutes looking at her calculus textbook and began to feel guilty. Denise wasn’t coming after her this time. She got up to go into the kitchen to tell her mother she would eat the other half of the burger. But as she walked through the living room, she saw her mother leaning against the kitchen counter with her face in her hands, quietly sobbing. Denise hated when Rachel cried; she said it was a sign of weakness.
Rachel turned around and tiptoed back into her room, shutting the door behind herself carefully, hoping her mother wouldn’t realize that she’d ever left.
—
It had rained in the morning, but the night was clear and crisp, and Rachel knew there’d be a campfire on the beach. She walked down the trail to the lake with her flashlight. Her sandals squished into the damp ground, picking up mud and wet leaves on the bottoms of their soles as she walked. When she got closer to the water, she could hear someone picking the strings on a guitar and voices talking over the music.
When the trail ended, the ground turning from soil to grass to sand, Rachel clicked off her flashlight and stopped for a moment to look out at the scene: the fire crackling and blazing and the faces of the three counselors glowing with orange light. Everything else surrounding them was dark, and the lake had taken on a sheen of pure blackness that might make someone more superstitious than she wonder what lurked beneath.
Rachel walked toward the group, her usual crew: Fiona, Chad, and Yonatan. Yonatan played the guitar aimlessly and nodded in wordless recognition of Rachel. Fiona moved over on the wooden bench to make room for her friend.
“Where’ve you been?” Fiona asked, more curious than accusatory, though Rachel could often sense an unwarranted jealousy behind such questions.
“Just had to call my mom,” Rachel said. She pointed to Fiona’s beer. “Any more of those?”
Chad, on the other side of Rachel, reached into a cooler next to the bench, pulled out a Heineken, and used an opener on his key chain to open it.
“Bottles today,” Rachel said. “Fancy.”
“Yonatan and I walked into town yesterday,” Chad said. “We splurged.”
She took a long sip. She loved beer. Cheap or expensive, it didn’t matter. What she liked was that wheaty taste, like bread gone bad, the sourness that hit her as fast as a light switch turning on.
Chad grabbed Rachel’s knee. “How’s your mum?” he asked. They had become friends over the past three weeks. They had discovered that they were both children of single mothers and that Rachel would often check in with Denise before joining the rest of the group.
“She’s fine,” Rachel said.
“You’re lucky you can call her just like that. The time difference is too hard here.”
“I guess so.”
“You are,” Chad said. “I miss mine.”
Rachel lifted her bottle, and they clinked. A “cheers” from one child of an absent father to another.
Rachel had been fifteen when she had last been at Camp Marigold. She and Fiona had decided that this summer, the one between their freshman and sophomore years of college, would be the perfect time to go back together. It would probably be the last fun summer they could have, the last time they wouldn’t have to take on career-oriented internships or stay on campus during the summer to do research or take extra classes. At this point, neither of the girls knew what their careers would be, and they were holding on to that uncertainty for as long as they could.
Rachel couldn’t exactly afford such a low-paying job as being a summer camp counselor, but her mother’s waitressing gig had turned into a fairly lucrative second job, and she had encouraged Rachel to go back to Marigold one last time. Because she was still young. Because she’d worked so hard this year at Michigan between her work-study job and her full course load. Because it would make her happy. Denise was funny this way—she insisted she only wanted Rachel to be happy, but Rachel never knew when sacrifices her mother had made for her would be thrown back in her face.
Besides, Denise had reasoned, this was what loans were for. This was why they chose a public school, where the loans wouldn’t be quite so debilitating. Postgraduation, Rachel would have her pick of jobs and pay them back in no time.
When they arrived back at Camp Marigold in Fiona’s Jeep, elements of the place that Rachel hadn’t thought about in years suddenly reintroduced themselves: the welcome sign, posted on a wooden placard at the camp’s entrance, with marigolds painted a chipped orange and the ridiculous slogan (CAMP MARIGOLD: GROW WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED); the crunching of loose gravel underneath the car’s tires; the strong smell of the fresh manure from the horse stables coming through the car’s open windows. Rachel couldn’t deny the immediate comfort and ease that came with the return to a place where it seemed like nothing had changed.
Of course, it was different being there as a nineteen-year-old. They were now the counselors, whose lives they had been only peripherally aware of as campers. The international counselors had always been there, the Australians and the Brits and the Spaniards and the Israelis, but now, as a counselor herself, Rachel learned what they were really like. They were uniformly adventurous types: partyers and drinkers or, at the very least, adrenaline junkies. They came through agencies, which took most of their already low salaries but paid for their plane tickets and gave them their chance to come to summer camp, that fantastically American tradition. For many, like Chad, it was their first time in America. He had come straight from JFK to Lakeville, Connecticut.
“Is New York City like it is in Friends?” Chad now asked Rachel as they sat around the bonfire.
“No one normal in New York would live in an apartment that big,” said Fiona.
“What about Seinfeld?” Chad asked.
“I guess that’s more realistic, yeah,” Rachel said. “I don’t watch it that much.”
“I just love it,” he said. “The humor is so New York.”
“You mean Jewy?” Rachel asked.
Yonatan snickered.
The most Jewy thing about Rachel was her last name, Rivkin, and her bubbe, with whom she ate bagels in her house in Flatbush every other Saturday when she was growing up.
“You should come visit me in Tel Aviv, Rachel,” Yonatan said, still picking at his guitar. “You would love it.”
As Chad asked more questions about “real” life in New York, Yonatan began playing some songs Rachel recognized. He knew every word to “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley, and after a certain point, they stopped talking to listen to him sing in a charming Israeli-cum-Jamaican accent, totally engrossed in the lyrics (“How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”).
When he was finished, they clapped politely. Yonatan seemed embarrassed. He put his guitar down.