Elaine Wolf - Camp

“I thought you’d all be dancing,” Nancy said. “But it looks like you’re having a great time together. And that’s what camp’s about: fun and friendship.”

She forgot the third part: secrets. But I didn’t need a reminder about that.

The night of the Saginaw social, I dreamed of a white door. I stand on tiptoe and, with little-girl fingers, grab the old- fashioned glass doorknob. Locked. I push, try again. A whisper. A moan behind the door. Who’s there? I squeeze the knob. Turn harder. Still locked. Locked out. Always the same, this dream that came again and again.

I stirred in my camp bed. In the haze between sleep and awakening, the door filled my mind. I drifted back to sleep, back to a time before Charlie—a time before we had a house, when my parents and I lived in an apartment. My father’s at night school. I try not to bother my mother. She vacuums the living room while I sit in the big chair where Dad reads to me on weekends. In his absence, I trace with my index finger illustrations in The Tall Book of Fairy Tales : Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel. I tell the stories, voice hushed so my mother won’t get angry. She fluffs the cushions on the sofa. “Remember the rules, Amy. Don’t tell your father I had company today.”

The doorbell rings. “It’s our secret,” my mother warns. She sends me to my room, across from my parents’. “And if you come out before I tell you, you’ll be punished.”

I curl up with Puppy, my stuffed animal, and listen for noises. Footsteps in the hallway. Then whispering. The floor creaks by our bedrooms.

I open my book to the picture of a gingerbread house. My father’s squeaky voice plays in my head:

“Stupid goose!” cries the witch when Gretel refuses to poke in the oven to see if it’s hot. So the witch shows her how. Gretel pushes her all the way in, slams the oven door, and runs to save her brother.

I finish the story and squirm, the urge to pee so strong I clamp my legs. My mother will punish me if I leave my room. Yet I have to go so badly that I’ll wet my pants if I wait. And the one time I did that, she got really angry. “Big girls don’t make sissy in their clothes, Amy.”

I sneak out and hear my mother moan. Is someone hurting her? I stand by my parents’ door and listen to my mother whimper, then something that sounds like a slap. “No,” she whispers. “Oh, no. No more.”

Urine runs down my leg. I have to save my mother, chase that bad visitor away. I reach for the glass knob. But then I hear my mother cry out, “Yes. Oh yes!”

Is she hurt or is she happy? If the visitor is hurting her, I have to help. If I don’t, she’ll be mad. She’ll say I should have heard her calling. She’ll say I should know when to break the rules. And if she’s happy, she won’t be angry with me for breaking them.

I stand in a puddle of pee. My mother speaks again as I grab the doorknob. “We can’t keep doing this. What if Lou finds out? Or Helen?”

I put my ear to the door.

“I can’t stop, Sonia,” the visitor says in a voice I recognize. “I need you.”

I unglue myself from the floor and fly into the bathroom.

“Jesus Christ!” I hear Uncle Ed say. Has he stepped in my puddle? I stiffen behind the closed bathroom door. “Could Amy have heard us?”

“Of course not,” my mother answers. “She just waited too long to use the toilet.”

Footsteps—away from me now. I keep my ear to the bathroom door until my mother comes back. She flings a pair of underpants at me. “Well, don’t just stand there, Amy. Clean yourself up.”

Words sit like pebbles in my throat. I’m sorry. I won’t tell.

I put on dry panties as I hear my mother mopping the floor. Disinfectant dizzies me when I step into the hallway.

“Now go to your room for wetting your pants like a baby,” my mother says. “And if you ever tell anyone I had a visitor, you will stay in your room for a day.”

I awoke in my Takawanda bed. The dream turned in my mind. So many details. Too vivid. Too real. And that’s when I knew: It wasn’t a dream, but a memory that had surfaced while I slept.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Uncle Ed and my mother. And my father? “Brothers support each other,” he had told her. A sour taste filled my mouth as I searched the past. Like Hansel, I needed bread crumbs to guide me. How often had Uncle Ed visited? And when had my mother started hating him? Clearly she did now, telling my father she didn’t care what Ed said about anything.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Uncle Ed and Patsy too. How could she sit next to me at breakfast and pretend nothing had happened?

“Why so quiet this morning?” she asked, calling for conversation, which didn’t come. “I guess you gals are still plumb worn out from all that dancin’ ya did.”

A grin crept up Rory’s face as she picked the grapes from her dish of canned fruit salad. “Well now, how would you know about our dancing? Seems to me you weren’t around much last night, Patsy.”

I jerked in my seat. Had Rory forgotten Uncle Ed’s warning about inappropriate behavior, or had her conquest at the social fueled her courage?

Patsy’s spoon hit the table. “Just what are you sayin’, Rory?”

“Seems clear to me.” Rory glared at Patsy as if daring her to stare back. “Yes indeedy. The more I think about it, the more it seems you and old Mr. Becker must have taken off before the boys even got there, ’cause I sure don’t remember seeing either of you around much.” She jabbed Jessica’s shoulder. “Am I right or am I right?”

I lowered my head, afraid to lock eyes with Rory and afraid to meet Patsy’s. If she thought I had snitched, Patsy would tell Uncle Ed. And he would find something awful about me to tell my father. Something much worse than twisting.

“And just where do you think I was?” Patsy asked.

The table stilled.

“We all know where you were,” Rory answered. “Don’t we girls?” I felt Patsy looking at me. What should I do? If I said I didn’t know where Patsy had been, Rory would go crazy. But if I played along with Rory, Patsy would be angry. Fruit salad syrup clogged my throat. I ran for the bathroom.

By that afternoon Rory had already guessed what we’d tried to do. “I keep telling you I’m not stupid, Amy Becker,” she whispered after lunch. “I’m thinking there must’ve been some reason you dragged your aunt outside last night. What I’m thinking is you wanted to get me in trouble.”

Patsy stayed with us all rest hour, playing counselor to the fullest, keeping Rory in check and checking our letters.

I covered the words when Patsy put a hand on my back. I didn’t want her to read my lies—though she certainly had told enough of her own, pretending to be my friend, telling me Uncle Ed’s “a mighty fine man.” Now her touch made me squirm.

“When you gals finish your letters,” Patsy said, squeezing my shoulder, “y’all go on out if you want. But I’ll stay around for a while, in case any o’ you feel like talkin’ or anything.”

My private invitation to chat, I assumed. She probably wanted to make sure Erin and I hadn’t told her secret: Patsy and Uncle Ed, right there in The Lodge with the seniors and Aunt Helen downstairs.