BY LILY RABINOFF-GOLDMAN
ON THE FIFTH day of camp, once I’d memorized my bunkmates’ names and hometowns and written four letters home, our counselors, Lisa and Nancy, called a bunk meeting. We girls pulled beach towels from our cubbies and made a circle on the unpainted bunk floor. “We’re going to play a game,” Lisa said.
This was the summer I was eleven, the year my sister first got sick, and after begging my parents for months, I had been sent to sleep away camp for the first time. The camp was just east of the Berkshire Mountains, a Jewish oasis in central Massachusetts. Every morning we prayed before breakfast, and in the afternoons, after swimming in the lake and before going to electives in the art building or the radio hut, we broke up into groups according to our knowledge of Hebrew, and spent an hour playing vocabulary games with Israeli emissaries. We walked along dusty camp roads in flip-flops and denim shorts, holding hands with our bunkmates or counselors, singing folk songs in Hebrew and pop songs in English. Maple and oak trees stood guard around the white bunks listening to us sing, but if you walked out past the dining hall into the woods, the world was completely silent.
I was assigned to bunk seven along with nine other girls, most of whom knew each other from the previous summer; a few had been at camp since they were eight or nine. Lisa and Nancy, who were responsible for us, were college students with long, curly hair. They were both glamorous and unquestionably adult, though I preferred Nancy to Lisa; she seemed more bookish.
Artwork: Brian Cooper
“The game is called ‘roses and thorns,’” Lisa said. She was chewing a piece of green gum, which peeked and poked out of the corner of her mouth as she spoke. “Each of you will say a ‘rose’ – something good that happened during the week, and a ‘thorn,’ something that you didn’t like. Okay?”
I panicked. What could I say? How truthful were we supposed to be? At eleven, I no longer wore the cloak of childhood shyness that had defined me at seven and eight, but neither was I an easy, sociable kid, used to making friends quickly. For five days I had walked through activities and meals observing my bunkmates and their friends with awe and fear. How could they laugh and smile and speak so freely with people they hardly knew? And now I was supposed to evaluate my week in front of them? Would I admit to how much I missed my mother and how the food in the dining hall made me feel sure at every meal that my guts were rotting out? Should I mention that just yesterday I had managed to go almost a whole day without worrying about my sister or that the highlight of my week was the moment in which Danielle Rosenthal, the most popular girl in bunk six had held my hand on the way to swimming and asked me where I was from? It all seemed so shamefully honest. Nervous, I twiddled with my ponytail.
Luckily, Lisa went first–her rose was getting to meet us girls, and her thorn was that she missed her boyfriend, who was still in Maryland for the summer. She passed the game on to my friend Ariella Gross, who was sitting to her right.
Ariella was in my class at school; she was the one who told me about camp, and she was the one to whom I clung tightly during the frightening first days of introductions, ice-breakers, and late-night, lights-out conversations. She had been to camp for two years already, and spent every lunch hour at school talking about how her friends from
camp were her best friends ever, and how I had to get my parents to let me go. I nagged my parents for weeks until, looking at each other sideways over the dinner table one night, they agreed.
In the days before they dropped me off in front of my bunk, I was thrilled to be away from home for a month. That January, my sister Carly had turned fifteen and in the past months, she had brought chaos to our house; I was plagued by the constant threat of seeing her smoking behind buildings with strangers, and of waking up long after midnight to find her in my bed, smelling dangerous, wanting to tell me about the boy who made her feel so good that she might run away with him. In spite of all this, I cried into my mother’s shirt for a few minutes after she had unpacked the station wagon. “Isabella Rose Lipson. You are a big girl. Go have fun. And don’t worry; you have Ariella here,” she said.
With few exceptions, Ariella had, in fact, been an excellent guide. Before we even left, she made sure that I packed enough pretty skirts and dresses for Shabbat, which, she explained, was something like a cross between a fashion show and a weekly attempt at spiritual bliss. Then, when we arrived, she introduced me to her friends from the previous summers as her “best friend from home,” which guaranteed me a nice smile, and she warned that I shouldn’t bring a bathing cap to the lake or I’d look like an idiot. The only thing I didn’t like was that Ariella spent an inordinate amount of time with one of our bunkmates, Rachel Adler, who, when she paid me any attention at all, was more likely to point out a stain in my
T-shirt or a bug bite on my cheek than to ask what music I liked or if I was enjoying camp so far.
“Can I have two roses?” Ariella asked. Lisa nodded and smiled. Everyone smiled at Ariella–she was tiny and sweet. “Okay, then my first rose is that my friend Izzie came to camp with me this summer.” Everyone looked at me and I blushed and grinned. “My second rose is that it’s so fun to see all my friends from last summer and to meet new people, too!”
“Do you have a thorn?” Lisa asked.
“Oh!” Ariella looked surprised and everyone laughed. “No,” she said. “I love camp! It’s your turn,” she added, gesturing towards Rachel Adler, who was sitting to her right. The back of my neck prickled. Rachel Adler set me on edge.
Rachel sat up, wriggled her hips on her towel, and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Well, my thorn is that even though I love being in the same bunk as my best friends,” Rachel listed the names of all the girls in the bunk except me and the other new girl, Jill, “my other best friends, Danielle and Sam, are in bunk six.” My heart sank, though no one else seemed to notice or even blink. “And my rose is,” Rachel began to giggle. “My rose is a secret that some of you know,” she said, but she didn’t elaborate.
I wanted so much to know Rachel’s secret. Even though she had just left me out of her thorn, even though I had a walnut of bitter dislike for her lodged in my throat already, it was clear to me that secrets were camp’s most valuable currency, and whatever nugget she had was worth hard social cash. The girls in my bunk spent hours each night discussing who had a crush on which boy from bunk twenty-one and imploring everyone else not to tell. Rachel was the most popular girl in our bunk, and in not knowing her secret, I would be left out of the market…
To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 22.1-Winter/Spring 2010.
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LILY RABINOFF-GOLDMAN is an educator living in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and finishing her MFA in Fiction Writing at UMass Boston. She also holds degrees from Brown University and Bank Street College of Education. “Cubbyholes” is her first published short story.
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