I was eleven years old and spending my second summer at Camp Golden Arrow in Georges Mills, New Hampshire. I had become close to two girls, Sarah Clift, and Molly Laird. Unlike most of the kids at camp, Sarah and Molly lived in Massachusetts, and therefore, we held some hope of seeing each other after camp ended for the summer. Apparently, Molly left after the first camp session, and was writing to me at camp from the family vacation that occupied the second half of her summer. What is most remarkable to me about this letter, at first glance, is what I don’t remember. For instance, I don’t remember calling Molly “Mobbie,” although that’s how she signed the letter.
How about that stationery? Standard fare for girls my age in the 70s. Probably always. What is it about little girls that makes them like drawings of little animals doing stuff, like writing letters? Its like a law of nature that every little must go through a phase of craving insipidly cute crap. Some of them never grow out of it, and thus Walmart manages to sell A LOT of Winnie the Pooh and Looney Tunes clothing in adult sizes. Fortunately, I did grow out of it. I even tried unsuccessfully to get my daughters never to grow into it. I dressed them in a lot of black and bought them realistic looking stuffede jungle animals. Unsuccessful. Some laws of nature just ain’t for fighting.
I’m sure I was desperately jealous of this stationery, once upon a time. Or maybe I had some. I seem to remember some kind of stationery swapping in my cute rabbit and mouse years. And why does every cute animal stationery or other drawing have mushrooms in it? In addition to not being cute, mushrooms are generally poisonous. But they crop up in every cute animal drawing, looking like so many gnome penises.
Back to Molly’s letter. I don't remember Matt Morse and his droolworthiness, but I'll take Molly's word for it. Barri was a girl who played the male lead to my female lead in the 1978 CGA production of HMS Pinafore - my character’s name was Josephine (I think). I remember Harold. I remember my costume, I remember my friend Karla playing Buttercup, and I don't remember much else. I can remember snippets of two songs but that’s about it.
I do remember doing everything with Sarah and Molly for a lot of my time at camp that year. Sarah and Molly and I made up a song for a talent night at camp, to the tune of Eleanor Rigby, which we replaced with the name “Gina Ciavolino,” a counselor at camp. I didn’t get what the Beatles song meant then. I just pictured a formaldehyde jar with a preserved head in it next to someone’s front door. We also made up new lyrics to Yesterday, that I remember a little better, about being sent to camp for being a nuisance at home:
Why I had to go, I don’t know, Mom wouldn’t say.
I did something wrong (“That’s the sixth time you’ve stepped on the cat!”)
Now I’m stuck, at CGA-a-a-a.
Sarah used to say she could come up with a song for anyting we could say. For example, commenting on the temperature of the lake water would win you a rendition of “Cold As Ice.” Sarah was stumped only by Molly’s statement that she hated sawdust, which she said she claimed not to have said just to stymie Sarah, but I knew that was the real reason she said it. Because Sarah was one of htose kids who always knew so many things we didn’t, and every once in awhile, it felt right to find something she couldn’t do.
Months after we got home, Molly and I were invited to Sarah's birthday party. Sarah was two grades ahead of me, and one grade ahead of Molly, but Molly and I were from the suburbs. Sarah was a city girl, a true seventh grade sophisticate. And my mother didn't like her at all, possibly because she told me what rubbers were and told me that I should check around the house because my father probably had some. Anyway, I was excited to go to the party but also scared. These kids were older, and bigger, and Sarah had intimated that the boys in her grade thought about sex a lot, and would think it was great that I was so much shorter than they were, because my face would be that much closer to their crotches. I had no idea whether she was serious, and what I would do if she was.
This is a good place to interrupt my story about Sarah Clift’s birthday party to say that I have a particular penchant for both the backstory and the tangent. So, while I don’t think I will stop, I’ll at least try to raise an alert to the fact that something is a tangent, and not part of the narrative. For example, the following tangent is absolutely essential to understanding the reference in the following paragraph to the middle school girls‘ bathroom at Weeks Junior High. So, first to the tangent, then back to the story.
TANGENT: When I was in sixth grade, in an effort to scare the crap out of us, our teachers tried to “prepare” us for middle school by warning us that if we went into the bathrooms, there might be tough girls in there who would try to make us smoke. Nancy Slotnick and I figured that if that happened to us, we would blow into the cigarette rather than inhale, in order to fool them into thinking we were really smoking by making the cigarette tips light up. Geniuses, we were, no? No one ever asked me to smoke in the girls’ bathroom, so I never had the opportunity to try it out. Thank god. END OF TANGENT.
Anticipating Sarah Clift’s party was like anticipating the middle school girls’ room. I was terrified of what could happen, knew I wasn’t quite up to it, but still harbored some slight fantasy that I would prove myself to be every bit as cool and interesting as I thought Sarah’s friends would be.
I remember Sarah, on her birthday, getting ready before the party and putting on pantyhose (sooo fancy and grown-up), and bemoaning the fact that they didn’t cover a big scrape on her knee (the acrylic cable knit tights I was likely wearing would have). Sarah’s parents were divorced and her dad was throwing the party. We had been getting ready in Sarah’s mother’s apartment. Sarah went to say good-bye to her mother, and maybe to ask for a ride, and her mother started to kind of yell at her. I can remember what she said exactly: “I hope you don’t expect any present from me. I don’t understand why people should be congratulated just for staying alive for another year.” It was awful, and the embarassment poured off of Molly and me as clearly as the hurt registered on Sarah’s face. In retrospect, I suspect it had something to do with being resentful about Sarah’s father throwing the party and thereby getting audience with Sarah on her birthday, but I doubt I knew that then. When we left her mom’s apartment, Sarah asked us not to tell anyone at the party about what had happened with her mom.
Truth be known, I barely remember the party, although I’m pretty sure I was dressed like Heidi, including the two braids twisted up on my head and flowered dress with lace collar, an outfit that saw more than one bar mitzvah in its day and, I believe, was what I wore in my fifth grade school picture. I remember feeling scared and out of place, and clearly too young to be there. We slept over afterward and I just know that lonely dread feeling was in my stomach. Uncomfortable, I wasn’t sure whether the feeling was about wanting to be home or about wanting not to want to be home. That night Sarah taught me about blow jobs by explaining that a boy takes out his schlong, and you blow on it. Thank god I had someone to teach me the ways of the world back then. Oy.
I never saw Sarah again after that, I don’t think. I didn’t drive yet. My mother didn’t like her. It was not a relationship destined to last.
Despite the invitation in her letter, I never did go to Molly's house for the night. Both Molly and Sarah are way up there on the list of people I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch with. I remember years later, when I was living in Cambridge, not far actually from where Sarah’s mother had lived. I was driving through Porter Square and saw Molly standing outside the Porter Square T station. I pulled the car over in the middle of traffic. Molly saw me and walked over. After all those years she knew me right away, just like I knew her on the drive-by. I would probably still know her on sight. I would love the chance to talk to her about that summer, about the party at Sarah’s. I wonder if she remembers it the way I do. I wonder if she remembers the words to the songs we made up. If she could fill in some of the blanks - memories I know I enjoyed then but can’t remember now.
My two oldest daughters are now the ages we were back then. They are not nearly as dorktastic as I was. They would never wear a lace collar or braids woven up on their heads. They seem so much more at home in their own skin and their own personalities than I ever remember feeling. And when I remember Molly and Sarah, I remember us all as awkward, not quite fitting correctly into whatever it was into which one was supposed to fit correctly. But we fit in with each other at that time in our lives. And its the ease we had with each other, if not with much else, that this letter brings to life for me. Without this letter, I would have remembered the awkwardness, the inaccurate sex education, the fear of older kids, the braids, but perhaps would not have preserved in memory so much the ease and the comfort, even with ourselves, borne of how well we knew and loved each other.
I remember your performance of “Gina Ciavolino.” I was 11 years old at the time and had never heard of Eleanor Rigby. I thought you guys had created a really cool, original song. There was a line in your song that mentioned Gina taking jellybeans from a jar. I don't recall you, Molly or Sarah individually, but I remember there were 3 girls, and I think one was blonde. I also remember the HMS Pinafore performance. Hal sang the "Little Buttercup" song.
ReplyDeleteFunny, I was just thinking about your Eleanor Rigby spoof last week, though I don't recall why. Matt Morse lived in my neighborhood in Queens.