TREYF (10 page)

The afternoon before I leave, my mother packs my lunch in a brown paper bag as directed by the camp's ten-point list of
instructions. She wants to make me the usual water-packed tuna with mayonnaise on untoasted diet white that she sends me to school with almost every day; I want Underwood Deviled Ham.

“Where did you hear of such a thing?” Gaga asks, looking up from her ironing.

“On television,” I say.

“You don't even know what deviled ham
is
,” my mother says, sighing.

“Neither do you,” Gaga answers her, folding my camp shorts. “Come to think of it,” she murmurs, “neither do I.”

But because no Jewish mother or grandmother has ever said no to a food request made by her child, Gaga shuts off the iron, grabs her purse, and marches down Austin Street to the Associated grocery store. She returns ten minutes later, with a kosher pumpernickel raisin loaf and a single paper-wrapped can of Underwood Deviled Ham, which she places on the kitchen counter. My mother peels back the paper, pops open the can, and sniffs it the way she did my father's Spam; she makes a scrunched, dramatic face, spoons the entire can out onto the bread, spreads it with a butter knife, slaps the other piece of bread over it, and wraps it in tinfoil. It sits in the fridge overnight where the meat congeals into salty, porky spackle.

The next morning, the Feinblatts, my parents, and Gaga stand smiling and waving while Candy and I, wearing our uniforms, climb aboard the camp bus, and bid baby camp goodbye forever. The bus driver's transistor radio, hanging off the rearview mirror, blasts
Maggie May
while we near the resort town of Dingmans Ferry; we open our identical brown paper sacks, spread small
napkins on our laps, and extract our sandwiches—Candy, her sturdy and predictable peanut butter and jelly; me, my Underwood Deviled Ham on pumpernickel raisin—and take simultaneous petite bites. When she is done, Candy meticulously pats the corners of her mouth with her napkin before rolling her bag up and awaiting the arrival of the garbage counselor to come marching up the aisle; when I am done, I pat the corners of my mouth with my napkin, roll up my bag, and am instantly and violently ill.

•   •   •

Y
ears later, when I'm a teenager, my parents separately tell me about their first summer alone, while I was busily ensconced in the Camp Towanda dining room, standing at attention in my camp clothes for mealtime prayers, and filing into the camp social hall for Shabbos services. My mother got shingles the minute I climbed onto the camp bus. She tells me that after she recovered, she and my father attended a Friday night fondue party where my father was handed a tightly rolled joint, and fearing certain arrest by one of the cops of the 112th Precinct down the street from The Marseilles, he got up and flushed it down the toilet.

My father remembers that the fondue pots that suddenly appeared on every coffee table in The Brussels and The Marseilles that summer—white-on-brown Dansk saucepans that hovered over a small can of jellied Sterno; sets of long, two-pronged forks meant to skewer hunks of meat or bread to be dunked into bubbling Gruyère—were purchased not for cheese, but for keys.

He says that Pammy, the divorced hippie neighbor from The Brussels, who, after seeing
Billy Jack
, strolled around The Champs-Élysées Promenade dressed in a soft goatskin poncho the color of caramel and strings of love beads, her long braid in a suede sheath, had the first “fondue” party shortly after camp began. All the neighbors, their kids away, gathered at one apartment; upon arriving at said apartment, the men dumped their house keys into the fondue pot, which would be sitting on the coffee table. Every woman in the room, assuming they were playing, picked up a fondue fork. Every woman, when it was her turn, stirred the pot and fished out a set of keys. “The man belonging to the keys,” my father explains to me, “gets serviced by the woman.”

He says it like it's normal, like he's relaying instructions for building a bookcase: place Part A into Part B. I imagine horses at a stud farm.

“What do you mean,
serviced
?” I say.

“You know—” he says. “They
shtup
.”

I can see Marion Feinblatt, shaking her head, not
getting
it; she probably tells Pammy that it's Shabbos, but beyond that, the fondue
simply cannot contain beef—
she and Eugene can do chocolate or fruit or bread, but they can't mix their cheese and their meat—and declines the invitation. Richard and Laura Steinman attend, as does George Hoffmann, whose wife and boys have already left for Denmark. Velma and Buck have sent Darleen off to a camp for physically disabled children, and they arrive, Buck in snug powder blue Sansabelt trousers and Velma in a filmy
peasant blouse because the weather is so warm. I can hear Neil Sedaka singing
Love Will Keep Us Together
on the stereo in the background, and they all sit around the coffee table—some on the floor, some on the couch, some pull chairs over from the dining room—and when the keys are dumped into the fondue pot, Velma, who hates sex anyway and has been dragged to the party by her husband who accuses her of being antisocial, excuses herself and walks out to the terrace, where she chain-smokes Parliament menthols while Buck's keys are deftly and immediately fished out by Pammy, who has been trawling the pot with a royal blue–handled fork. They disappear into the bedroom to catcalls and whistles and shouts for more hors d'oeuvre from the kitchen. Pammy has made a special treat for the occasion, stuffing pitted Medjool dates with a tender, raw almond and wrapping them in single strips of bacon. They bake until the meat sizzles and crisps and drips thick, smoky, unctuous fat into the toothsome fruit and onto the sweet, young nut.

“These are Devils on Horseback,” Pammy tells everyone with a wink when she sets them down on the coffee table. “Help yourself to more.”

“Did you ever play?” I ask my father.

“Of course we didn't,” he answers gruffly, annoyed that I would even dare to imply that my parents might have been anything but onlookers, too cool to care.

That first summer, Candy and I and two hundred other campers closed our eyes in peaceful prayer before every meal, as sets of keys were fondue-forked by polyester-clad parents we knew from the school bus stop and the dry cleaners. We stood at
attention in a brown-paneled dining hall in rural Pennsylvania around fifty tables laden with meat meals or dairy meals, for devotions in Hebrew followed by English, led by Uncle Sam and Aunt Lynne or the Anglican British counselors they hired to care for us every summer. From the youngest camper of five to the oldest camp worker of seventy, Jewish children and British counselors alike, we bowed our heads and spoke words thousands of years old.

Baruch atah Adonay, Eloheinu Melech Ha'Olam Hamotzi lechem min haaretz.

Blessed art thou, oh Lord, thy God, who bringeth forth bread from the earth. Amen.

Pammy brought cookie sheets of hot bacon-wrapped stuffed dates out to the twitchy, nervous guests in her living room; one hundred miles away, we lit Shabbos candles in the camp dining room. We finished our London broil dinners and moved silently into the social hall on chilly nights, and to our campfire ring when it was warm enough to sit outside under the stars, just downwind from the kitchen's exhaust fan, which blew gusts of beef fat into the air around us.

Long, narrow fondue forks hunted and scraped for keys and coupled neighbors who recognized each other from parent-teacher conferences and school plays disappeared into bedrooms while the sun set around us in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, and a kind-eyed, soft-spoken older man we called Uncle
Sid, who acted as our resident rabbi, led us in the prayer that would stay with me forever and that now, forty years later, I will whisper to myself on a bitter Friday night in New England while I am walking the dogs, the snow crunching under my boots. I say it to myself as a balm, as a way to still myself, my mantra.

Dear God, as the sun hangs in the western sky and the hills cast lengthened shadows, a spell of quiet comes over our little world. There is a calmness on our lake and the heavens are reflected in the water. The rustling of the branches in the trees is hushed and a stillness settles over camp and in our hearts. Thy Sabbath has come. We cease our many activities so that we can think of those things that make worthwhile our coming together in play, in sport, and in comradeship. Open our hearts so that we may allow Thy Goodness to enter.

Eight weeks away.

I learn sleepaway-camp Hebrew by rote; I sing the songs and say the prayers like I understand every word. When we pray in English, we ask together, two hundred of us at once, in a drone that wraps itself around me like a blanket, which steadies my mind and turns off the anxiety spigot:

How can we know God? Where can we find him? He is as close to us as the birds and the trees, and He is as far away as the hills in the sky. He causes the winds to blow and the rains to fall, and speaks to us in the
music we hear and sing. That is how we know our God—through the goodness that passes before us. He is in our acts of kindness; he is in our joys.

I sit next to Candy on a splintering white-painted bench in the campfire ring and gaze up to the vast sapphire sky and breathe in peace.
He is in our acts of kindness; he is in our joys
, I repeat to myself. I believe that, finally, I have somehow found what Candy has found, without Miss Kranowitz and studying the Haftorah.

•   •   •

B
rown as a raisin from the constant sun, thin and muscular from being in perpetual motion for two months, I step off the camp bus in the odiferous Bay Terrace Shopping Center parking lot, cars on the Cross Island Parkway roaring along a few blocks away.

The night I came home, I stood on our screened-in terrace, facing The Brussels and The Champs-Élysées Promenade. My father slipped Binky's collar on and met Buck downstairs to walk the dogs while my mother disappeared into the bedroom. School would be starting in two weeks.

He is in our acts of kindness; he is in our joys.

The late summer air was sweet and dank—a steaming blend of honeysuckle and cement and garbage piled up behind the building near the garage.

What do you want me to make for your return?
Gaga had written to me, before I came home.
I'll make it for you, special.

Despite the heat, Gaga made me Hungarian goulash and served it to me in an earthenware bowl like I was the Queen of Sheba herself. She reached over my shoulder and ladled it out of a large brown-and-white wooden-handled saucepot I'd never seen before its underside stamped with the name
Dansk
.

“Welcome home, Elissala,” she said tenderly. “Now, honey,
ess
.”

M
agnificent, outspoken Sylvia Gerson, my father's only sibling and older than him by five years, remained unconvinced.

Camp, she was certain, would keep me a child forever, and shackle me to an unacceptably long adolescence that would, in turn, keep me from the one thing that every young woman needed to focus in on like a laser: marriage.

When she learned that my parents were continuing to send me to Towanda deep into my teens, she turned into a dog with a bone. It didn't matter that I had, thanks to the fastidious Candy Feinblatt, discovered the importance of prayer during my summers away, and partook of a seasonal kosher lifestyle despite the presence of treyf in my life everywhere else I turned.

“But where will it
lead
? You're wasting time and you're wasting money,” Aunt Sylvia warned my father, days before he and
my mother packed the car for visiting day. Sleepaway camp, according to Aunt Sylvia, was frivolous at best: expensive, shallow, and, in her estimation, enabling children to grow up without any kind of responsibility or sense of obligation to their future. It was fine, she said, for children to spend summer at camp for a season or two at most; then, they should be expected to partake in more serious cultural pursuits leading to social advancement and, ultimately, conjugal bliss. Her own children had each attended sleepaway camp for a few years before I was born, but the bulk of their summers were spent at the Woodstock, New York, family compound, which was built by Sylvia's architect husband, Lee, and his architect father, in the late 1940s as a way to get their children out of the city during one of the worst polio epidemics ever recorded.

There, beneath the shady elms of the legendary artists' colony, where Will and Ariel Durant wrote their eleven-volume
The Story of Civilization
, Aunt Sylvia and her husband's family spent their summers in cultivated bliss: they read, they knitted, they needlepointed, they played duplicate bridge, they did the
New York Times
crossword puzzle in ink, and, having been denied admittance to the then-restricted Woodstock Golf Club, they joined the Kingston Country Club just a few miles away. Sylvia was a consummate hostess, and her summertime cocktail parties were the stuff of delicious legend: there were games on the lush lawn between the compound's three houses, homemade blueberry pies, her mother-in-law's famous kosher potato knishes made with Nyafat, and extravagant, French-style towers of prawns presented on a three-tiered silver brasserie-style platter. A sliver of pork in
any form never touched her lips or entered the confines of her home, but prawns, boiled gently and served with wedges of lemon and cocktail sauce, were Sylvia's gateway drug, and a nice big
fuck you
to the Woodstock Golf Club and its boatload of so-called liberals, and just about as far as she could get from the schmaltz-laden two-bedroom apartment in Coney Island where she had grown up sharing a room with my father.

But camp?
Absolutely not.

Aunt Sylvia believed that life for a young Jewish girl of even moderate means was meant to be lived and experienced in a certain methodical and particular manner: there would be dance lessons, drawing lessons, piano lessons, membership to the symphony and the Metropolitan Museum, French lessons, travel to Europe, maybe a teen tour, college at an Ivy, and then, marriage to a Jewish doctor or a dentist or a lawyer. Naturally, there would be babies, a house in the suburbs, and eventually, the country club. Sylvia was a woman with plans and goals and a deep sense of determination, and nothing
ever
dared stand in her way or say no to her. Everything about the universe she created for herself seemed perfect and effortless and safe. Hers was a world of propriety and conformity and security, and the chaos of my childhood household pushed me into her gravitational field like metal to magnet: I longed for her approval and her acceptance, and was naturally drawn to her, even though she terrified the shit out of me.

Sylvia and Lee lived in a tidy brick house abutting the Long Island–Queens border not far from my father's beloved Golden Ghetto. Not quite a ranch, not quite a split, Sylvia and Lee's home was lushly landscaped—there were boxwoods and hydrangeas
and pines tightly planted around the foundation, and fruit trees planted in the backyard, like an English estate. The house was divided in half: up a short flight of thickly carpeted plush steps were the bedrooms—an immense master suite for my aunt and uncle, and two separate bedrooms for their daughters. Uncle Lee didn't believe in bedroom furniture; instead, every room was outfitted with walls of hand-hewn floor-to-ceiling built-in drawers and closets that opened and closed as though they were gliding on silk runners, even in the wettest heat of the hottest summer.

The living and entertaining areas were far on the other side, in a vast, arch-ceilinged living room that was as long as a bowling alley and as wide as a barn. In the spotless modern kitchen, a wall of knotty pine cabinetry sat across from an eat-in breakfast nook, which had a stereo tuner built directly into the wall, so that one could listen to the morning news while eating one's breakfast. There was a marble and onyx Aztec chess set in colors of cream and eggshell that sat, untouched, on a gold silk–draped antique card table at the entrance to the living room. A gleaming walnut baby grand piano stood opposite the chair-railed dining room, its tall mahogany metronome in the shape of an Egyptian obelisk sat on the piano's lid, quietly tocking the minutes and hours away, softly, like a witness, during the many events that Aunt Sylvia hosted.

•   •   •

S
he was—
she is
; she is ninety-seven as I write this—stunning, statuesque, comely, an Ava Gardner look-alike. As a child, I believed that Aunt Sylvia awoke every morning of her life with her
jet-black hair miraculously teased and sprayed and her makeup in place. Uncle Lee, tall, mostly bald barring the narrow strip of gray hair that ran across the back of his head from ear to ear, was never seen in anything less formal than an ironed business shirt, trousers, and leather oxfords. Which is how they appeared when they arrived at Camp Towanda unannounced on a late Friday afternoon just before the camp was beginning to get ready for Shabbos dinner and the outdoor services that followed. One of my English counselors, Sandy, called me down to the head counselor shack, bent down on one knee, held my hands, and told me that some people from home were here to see me. Sandy's eyes filled with tears; the only time family members showed up at camp unannounced and formally dressed was if somebody had died.

“It's going to be
okay
—” she said through her thick Cockney accent, while I stood there, frozen, still in my T-shirt and shorts, filthy from that afternoon's field hockey tournament. “Whatever happens—it'll be
fine
,” she sobbed, reaching forward and hugging me. “Go on now.”

I pulled away and ran up the long road that led to the office and the dining hall, breathing hard as I burst into the small red clapboard building, and let the screen door slam behind me. Uncle Sid's wife, Ruth, looked up from her desk and over to the back porch, unsmiling.

“Your Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee are here to see you—”

My aunt and uncle were sitting on the porch's ancient painted Adirondack chairs, Uncle Lee in his pressed shirt and formal shoes, Aunt Sylvia in a denim outfit with silver studs running up and down the seams of her pants, her hair teased high and
perfect. She was holding an enormous white and blue gift box from Macy's.

“Hello, Elissa. We just decided to take a drive in the country—” She stood up and thrust the box at me. “This, darling, is for you.”

“What's wrong—?” I asked. “What's the matter?”

My parents were on vacation in Europe:
A car accident. They were leaving me. They decided not to come home. They don't want me anymore. They're moving. Without me. I'm going home with Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lee, but not to Forest Hills. Not to Gaga. Not to my parents. Or Darleen or Stuey or Candy or even Inga.

“Nothing's wrong—” Uncle Lee said, smiling. “We just came to see you and to give you a gift. And we'd like to take you out to dinner in town. Someplace nice.”

Dinner in town. Someplace nice.

Sweat rolled down the small of my back and into the damp waistband of my shorts.

I stared up at them; they stared down at me.

Saying no was not an option; no one ever said no to them—not my father, not my mother, and certainly no one who was not yet an adult.
No
—a polite declining, a rejecting, a refusal of any sort—was a defiant betrayal, an act of disloyalty so egregious that it landed errant, boundary-drawing cousins on the outer periphery of the family forever or kicked out wholesale, never to be heard from or talked about again, except in a faint whisper, as though they were dead.
Dinner in town, someplace nice
after a spur-of-the-moment two-hour drive to rural Pennsylvania from Long Island felt final.

•   •   •

I
had only been alone with Sylvia and Lee on one occasion: in 1966, when they strolled out of my parents' Thanksgiving dinner after coffee and pumpkin pie, with my three-year-old self perched on Lee's broad shoulders.

“Want to come home with us, sweetheart, to stay?” Aunt Sylvia whispered to me in our foyer while my parents were in the kitchen, cleaning up. She bent down so that we were eye-to-eye, threw her mink over her shoulders and beamed a broad smile.

I coyly shook my head yes and was instantly scooped up, aloft and barefoot, in my pink Tinker Bell nightgown. Uncle Lee carried me down the hall on his shoulders, where the three of us waited in silence for the elevator to arrive; we stepped in and the door slammed closed behind us.

“Duck your head down, honey,” Uncle Lee said, holding my bare ankles, as we stepped out and into the lobby. The other elevator door rattled open, my father flew down the marble steps that led to the promenade, and grabbed me backwards off Uncle Lee's shoulders from behind. The trip back upstairs to our apartment with my father is a black hole; suddenly, I'm in my bed, my safety railings have been pulled up, and Gaga is kissing me on the head and tucking my sheets around me so tightly that I can't move, like they're four-point restraints.

Years later, at a family gathering in the Midwest—long after the divorce, after Uncle Lee died, after my own father was gone—I will catch Aunt Sylvia watching me work in my cousin's kitchen,
helping prepare dinner for ten of us: roast chickens and steamed broccoli drizzled with garlicky vinaigrette and smashed sweet potatoes. Younger cousins chopping, cooking. Laughter. I am on the inside; safe. She beckons me over to where she's sitting, on the marble fireplace surround overlooking the living room, where half a dozen small children are playing a board game on the floor at her feet. I wipe my greasy, chickeny hands on my apron, and walk over to her.

“What?” I ask, bending down. “Do you want some water?”

I love her, although I've never told her that, nor has she ever told me. I want her to love me back; I still long for her approval the way I did when I was a child, and the safety of her inner circle. I kneel in front of her, genuflecting as though I'm in church.

“No, darling,” she says, unsmiling. She grabs my hand. “But I want you to know something.”

She pauses.

“I wanted you. To have you.”

I stare at her and blink. Her coiffed black halo has gone a softer, warmer brown now that she's in her nineties.

I stand up. I push my hair back off my face with my free hand. She doesn't give up the other one. I struggle to breathe. My knees are fighting to keep me upright; I fight to keep from crawling inside myself, to that familiar place where I can't hear anything or see anything, where the world around me goes black. Time coils back on itself; the decades slam shut. It could be 1966. Or 1974. But it is not; I'm almost fifty now, living my life. Safe.

“I was worried what you'd become in that house,” she says
.

“Did I do okay?” I ask.

“I'm not sure,” she says.

I pull away gently and smile, and go back to the kitchen.

Aunt Sylvia was brilliant, and perfect. Her children were brilliant. The home she shared with Uncle Lee was controlled and neat, and without the chaos that swirled around our Queens lives like a tornado. There was no shouting, no rage, no fondue pots clanging with keys, nothing unexpected. Everything was planned; scripted; completely predictable. Every woman in my father's family, young or old, aspired to be Aunt Sylvia, to be just like her: to throw parties like her, to dress like her, to act like her. To be her.

Except for Gaga and my mother.

A groyser gadilla,
Gaga would say, rolling her eyes.
A big deal.

•   •   •

I
looked over at Ruth, who smiled and stood up from her desk.