Elaine Wolf: Camp

“Anna,” the cashier mumbled, head down.

“What did you say?” The edge vanished from my mother’s voice.

“Anna,” the girl repeated, looking up now.

My mother let out a slow breath. “I’m sorry, dear.” I barely recognized my mother’s voice, suddenly so filled with softness I wondered what I had missed. Had my mother met this Anna before?

I recognized her as one of the girls I had seen on line at the Dairy Queen when my father and I took Charlie for a cone. When my brother spotted a dachshund, leashed at the far corner, Charlie’s scream had silenced even the high school boys.

Now I smiled at the Woolworth’s cashier—a thin smile of apology for my brother, my mother, and for simply being there at the five and ten. “Don’t worry, Mom,” I said as I studied the items I’d carry up to camp. “We’ve got a few extra minutes. Charlie’s bus is always late on Fridays.”

“I know that,” she said. Unwilling to admit she forgot the details of his schedule, my mother looked in her change purse as if his program lined it. How could she have failed to remember? My mother mastered schedules the way she mastered cleaning. I used to wonder what went through her mind when she fluffed the pillows on the living room sofa as if company were coming, though rarely anyone came.

The alarm clock rang at six-thirty on the morning I left for camp. My eyes filled with tears as I memorized my room—the Russian nesting dolls on my dresser; Puppy, my oldest stuffed animal; my miniature porcelain dogs on the shelf by my bed.

Before Charlie was born, I had asked for a real dog. But my mother said she had enough to clean without pet hair. “And anyhow, dogs don’t belong in a house,” she announced, her tone ending discussion. “In Germany,” she had said, “no one brought their dogs inside.”

Now I rearranged my china ones, then got dressed in green shorts and a yellow shirt—my outfit for the next eight weeks. Yuck! Looking in the mirror, I saw someone you would pass without notice. Invisible except for that pathetic camp uniform. Not pretty like my mother. Not sexy like the popular girls in school. Just plain Amy Becker, disguised as a teenager whose parents could afford to send her to Maine for two months. How could I possibly be expected to wear this fitted T-shirt that hugged my chest, the Camp Takawanda logo a bull’s-eye on my left breast?

And how would Charlie survive a whole summer without me to run interference between him and our mother? I had never left Charlie for more than a day, when I would sleep over at my friend Danielle’s house. But even that ended when she got angry because I always had to stop what we were doing to call home at Charlie’s bedtime. “Jeez, Ame,” Danielle finally said, “aren’t you ever gonna have your own life? I mean, shoot, your brother’s gotta grow up sometime.”

Danielle didn’t understand why I had to say good night to Charlie. If I didn’t, he wouldn’t go to bed. Yet when I did, I had to remind Danielle that my brother was eight going on four. And I had to explain why I never invited Danielle to sleep over at my house. I couldn’t even ask her to stay for dinner. Charlie, whose body barely took up space, filled the entire house. There was no room for outsiders.

If Danielle didn’t understand that, well then, I’d be fine without her. Like my mother, I see now, I had learned to shut the outer world out, lock the inner world in. Was that how she survived when she left Germany? Growing up, I knew nothing of her life there. “Your mother doesn’t talk about that,” my father warned.

Charlie and I were in his room when my mother called us to breakfast. His carpet prickled my bare legs as I reached over to hand him a triangular wooden block to top the tower we’d built. I hadn’t even left yet and already I despised those skimpy green shorts and Camp Takawanda for Girls.

Charlie gripped the block and looked at me. I pointed to our building. “Come on, buddy. Put it up there.” Charlie didn’t move. “You have to stand to finish this.” His blue eyes glazed when I smiled at him. “You know I’m going away today, don’t you?” I rumpled his soft brown hair. “But you’re gonna visit me in a month. And at the end of the summer, I’ll be right back here with you.”

“Amy! Charlie!” my mother called again from the bottom of the stairway. “I said breakfast is ready.” Her harsh German accent made me flinch, each word a bullet from the back of her throat.

“We’ll be right down,” I answered as I studied my brother. “Come on, Charlie. You put that block on top, and then how ’bout we take a picture?”

Charlie jumped up, flapping his arms as if they were wings.

I pulled the Instamatic, which I had given Charlie for his last birthday, from its place on the third shelf. I’d gotten the idea when a Kodak ad leaped out of Life magazine: a fragile boy, no bigger than my brother, with a camera pressed to his eye and a grin filling his face. Charlie could do that , I thought. In my head, I saw us roaming the neighborhood, snapping away: Mrs. Harris’s flower garden; the Anderson twins on their matching red bikes; even Zeus, the Sparbers’ black Lab that darted down the block every time sixteen-year-old Mike opened the door to let friends in. The week before I bought the camera, Zeus had raced toward Charlie, who screamed until bedtime. Maybe if we caught Zeus on film, I thought, Charlie wouldn’t be scared anymore.

Now on the day I left for camp, I looked through the camera, which my brother never used. I snapped a shot of Charlie standing by our tower of blocks.

“Let’s go, kids!” Dad called. “Mom’s making French toast.”

“Okay, buddy,” I said. “Clean up time. Ready?” Charlie knocked down the blocks, which I stacked on his two lowest shelves. First the large rectangles, then the smaller ones, and finally the squares and triangles. Everything in its place, and a place for every thing.

But why this requirement of perfection—those stupid rules that governed our lives?

A light blue apron, tied with a perfect bow, shielded my mother’s navy dress as she stood by the stove.

“Sure is a hot one already,” my father announced when he came to breakfast. “Think I’ll turn on the living room air conditioner. Maybe a little air’ll get in here.”

“We’ll be gone before it cools off,” my mother answered. Her high heels, the exact shade of her dress, clicked the linoleum as she lay forks on the kitchen table.

I drizzled syrup on Charlie’s French toast. “Don’t let that get on his shirt,” my mother said. “I don’t want to have to change him before we go.”

Why don’t you just tell him to be careful? I almost screamed. Why do you treat him as if he can’t understand? But the last time I talked back, my father followed me right into my room. “She’s so mean!” was all I said before he started in: “I don’t ever want to hear you talk about your mother like that!” His anger made me shudder. “She’s had a really hard life, Amy.” Silence for a moment. Then, his voice gentler, “I wish you could know what she’s been through. Maybe someday you will.”

That morning I left for Takawanda, I didn’t talk back. I simply tucked a napkin into Charlie’s shirt and said, “He won’t get dirty, Mom. We’ve got it under control. Don’t we, buddy?”

Charlie grabbed his fork and twirled it in the syrup.