TREYF (9 page)

Whatever she's serving
, my mother had said as we climbed out of the car,
I don't want it
.

I remember this while I stare at the brain on the plate.

Of course.

She knew.

My mother knew.

She knew that we would all sit down to lunch, and on this delicate Austrian china that was dragged over on the boat from Czernowitz with her mother's Shabbos candlesticks, my grandmother would feed us whole boiled brains the day after my parents have taken me to see
Young Frankenstein
at The Ziegfeld, where there were brains in glass jars and a man with a moving hunchback and bulging eyes.

“The baby doesn't eat brains yet,” my father says, walking into the kitchen with my grandfather.

Yet.

My father's hands leave invisible contrails of the bacon we had for breakfast as he grabs the plate out from under my stare and carries it to the drain board, where it sits like another guest for the rest of our visit. My grandmother curls up her lip in irritation at her youngest grandchild's bad manners, obviously learned at home. She produces bowls of chicken soup, followed by cold balik fish covered in a thin layer of tan gelatin, powdered hot cocoa poured over kosher marshmallows, and thimble-sized shot glasses of Schnapps.

My mother is sound asleep in the front seat when my father and I emerge through the lobby doors and down to the sidewalk; her full pack of Virginia Slims has been smoked and the butts are smoldering in the ashtray next to her. The car battery is dead.

D
epending on how you spell it,
Machanayim
means two different things: spelled without a “y,” it's the name of a group of early-twentieth-century Russian Jewish Zionist refuseniks—Jews not permitted by Russian law to emigrate to Israel—who gathered together in darkened basements and alleys to study the Torah under threat of certain death. Spelled with a “y,” it is the name of a type of Hebraic dodgeball, the goal of which is to pummel members of the opposing team until they relent. Unlike regular dodgeball, when you get struck with the ball in Machanayim, you're not out: you're simply conscripted to the other side, where you're pelted by your own former teammates.

Created by a rabbinate who thought they made a pun, Machanayim-the-Torah-scholars and Machanaim-the-athletes were pasted together to become the name of an ultra-Orthodox socialist sleepaway camp for the athletic progeny of Brooklyn
Jewish immigrants. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Jewish children were sent off in droves to a remote part of the Catskills to learn how to play baseball like Hank Greenberg—known to his fans as The Hebrew Hammer—to be assaulted with dodgeballs, and to be fed the same foods that they ate at home. Instead of s'mores, children at Camp Machanaim ate schmaltz on rye bread while singing songs around the roaring campfire that licked the star-spangled borscht belt sky.

My grandparents sent my father to Camp Machanaim for the first time when he was nine; away from the noise and bustle of Brooklyn and my grandfather's violent rages, he was finally free and at peace, and he learned to love the lush country as an oasis that gave him space to breathe and think. The boyish mischief that made his father apoplectic with fury and resulted in the beatings that inevitably followed at home were met at camp with little more than an extra half hour of sweeping in preparation for his bunk's daily inspection; the mundane naughtiness of a small child was just that, and nothing more. And so my father grew to love his summers at Camp Machanaim, and he longed for them during the cold, harsh winters that fell in between. So obsessed with his experience that the very name Camp Machanaim showed up like a regular dinner guest at our apartment in The Marseilles, peppering my parents' infrequent television-laced conversation over the strains of
Beat the Clock
and
Tony Orlando and Dawn
.

“Way back, when I was at Camp Machanaim—” my father would begin.

When I was at Camp Machanaim . . . What I ate at Camp
Machanaim . . . I learned to swim at Camp Machanaim . . . The girl I kissed at Camp Machanaim . . . I learned to be an adult at Camp Machanaim . . .
My father's face softened and he beamed when he told me the stories of his bucolic summers away, and I loved listening to them while my mother sat on the other side of the table, pushing her food around in circles and rolling her eyes.

“Well, you're not
at
Camp Machanaim anymore, are you?” my mother would say, cutting him off.

•   •   •

A
few weeks after Christmas break—after Gaga had taken me to see the Baby Jesus lying in his manger at St. Patrick's Cathedral; after Neil Taub's big brother got his head stuck in the cherry red football helmet that my father had given him for Hanukah, wrapping it in blue and silver paper and sticking it underneath his Catholic mother's green aluminum Christmas tree—Candy and I were on the bus heading back to school when she announced that Eugene and Marion had decided that it was time for her to grow up and go to sleepaway camp every summer, beginning with that one.

“So,” Candy said to me, setting her Partridge Family lunchbox down on her tightly clenched knees, and tossing her long blond braid over her shoulder, “are you going to keep going to that baby camp?”

Baby camp
referred to the day camp that Candy and I had attended every summer since we were six years old. A green and white school bus showed up at 7:30 every morning at the top of The Champs-Élysées Promenade and onto it we climbed: Stuey
Steinman, Neil, Candy, and I, dressed in white uniforms. We would arrive in prim Roslyn, Long Island, the bus dumping us out onto thick green Protestant lawns like a pile of gravel, for a day of sack races, kickball, swimming lessons in an overly chlorinated pool; the sort of arts and crafts that involved Popsicle sticks fashioned into jewelry boxes dripping with glue, which the youngest camper, at four, tried to eat; and a daily lunch consisting of the same mushy boiled food service hot dog served on a bleached white bun, a pint of lukewarm milk, and a lightly bruised apple. We returned to The Champs-Élysées Promenade just before dinner, to mothers who had spent their days sipping too much Soave Bolla out of waxed Dixie Cups while floating around the Fontainebleau swimming pool on their inflatable chaises, dragging their sun-tanned hands through the cool water; we came home exhausted, filthy, often bleeding, and reeking of the vomit that chronically carsick Stuey Steinman spewed forth every day without fail, on both legs of the trip.

Pressed and ironed Candy Feinblatt had had enough.

Candy's cleanliness was the stuff of legend around The Marseilles; her powder blue bedroom was spotless and dusted to a high sheen. Beneath her simple, sturdy wooden bed lay an outsized, imitation antique Oriental rug that Eugene and Marion had found on sale at Macy's, and which gave the space the feel of a bedroom in a high-ceilinged Upper West Side classic six. Candy's Hebrew schoolbooks sat in a place of honor, on her dresser, next to her great-grandmother's monogrammed sterling silver vanity set. Tucked into her dresser mirror was a photo of Bobby Sherman she'd sent away for from
Tiger Beat
magazine, signed:

To Candy, The neatest girl I know! Love, Bobby xxoo

“He said I was neat!” she cooed excitedly when the photo arrived, clutching it to her tiny chest.

“How would he even know?” I asked, looking around her immaculate room.

“Being tidy pleases God,” Candy told me once, when she came over to play at my house. She walked into my room, stopped dead in the doorway, scanned my three-shades-of-pink lair, and gasped. Yesterday's clothes over my desk chair. Piles of books on every surface. A classical guitar propped up against my Radio Shack record player, on top of which teetered a short stack of forty-fives, ranging from The Archies'
Sugar, Sugar
to Olivia Newton-John's
I Honestly Love You
, which I played over my headphones every night after my parents went to sleep, swooning at the doe-eyed singer's message, which I was certain was meant specifically for me. A year earlier, my mother's maid, Mary, who cleaned for us once a week from the time I was an infant, stole a baby camp picture of me and had it blown up to a poster so huge that the resolution bitmapped my face and eyes and made me look like a giant thumbprint with hair. It was Scotch-taped to the wall above my flowered headboard; it peeled at the edges, its tape yellowing and caked with dog fur.

Candy stared.

Being tidy pleases God
, Candy had said, and I longed to please God, to please anyone. Leaving baby camp would be the place for me to start.

“
I'm
going to Camp Towanda,” Candy whispered to me that morning on the school bus, as though she was dangling membership to Skull and Bones in front of me.

In just a few months—if my parents agreed—Candy and I would be leaving behind vomiting Stuey, Popsicle-stick boxes, and undercooked hot dogs, and looking to our future as tidy, devout young Jewish women who were clearly mature enough to begin the separation from our parents. For their part, our parents would have an entire eight weeks of glorious freedom—freedom, I supposed, to do whatever sorts of things parents suddenly unencumbered from the neediness of their sticky, whiny children might do in the throbbing 1970s.

That night, I waited until we were all at the dinner table to make my announcement. Gaga was parceling out flaccid spears of canned asparagus and paprika-dusted portions of fillet of sole wrapped around fake crab, which the local fish market had recently begun carrying under a sign declaring it FANCY AND KOSHER, when I decided to make my move.

“Candy,” I said, poking at my sole, “is going to sleepaway camp this summer. It's called
Tow
—”

I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth when my father leapt up, nearly tripped over the dog, grabbed the kitchen phone, and called Eugene Feinblatt. He dug up a pencil, scribbled down a phone number, and disappeared into the bedroom, leaving my mother and Gaga staring at each other over their plates. Ten minutes later, he was back at the table, glowing with pride as though it had been his idea all along.

“Tomorrow night,” he said, puffed up like a fugu, “the owners of Towanda are coming over to show us a slide presentation so that we can see what their beautiful camp is all about. They have inspection and sports and services on Friday nights, and Olympics at the end of the season, just like at Camp Machanaim.”

“And the food?” Gaga asked suspiciously, while I sat there, silent. “Will she also be fed like she's in the Army?”

“It's
kosher
-
style
,” he answered, “and the head chef comes from Yale. So it's not exactly like she'll starve.”

Gaga folded her arms and glowered.

Kosher-style. Kosher
-anything. I heard
kosher
, and I envisioned the Feinblatt kitchen, the two sets of dishes and the two dishwashers, and Peggy-the-neighbor, who came over to switch everything on during Shabbos. I imagined my father's parents, and the brain on a plate. But at Towanda,
kosher-style
meant that milk would never be served with a meat meal and we'd never see a cheeseburger, a pepperoni pizza, or chicken paprikash, or have bacon with our eggs. Instead, meals at Camp Towanda involved pepper steak, veal patties, fried chicken so remarkable that I would go on to dream about it in the depths of the winter, jars of Bac-Os presented with our omelets, and on Shabbos, London broil with small boiled potatoes and thick mushroom gravy. The closest we got to treyf at camp would be the Slim Jims we would line up to buy from Maryann, the blond, blue-eyed snack bar girl at the local bowling alley, sneaking them back into our bunks by stuffing them down the sides of our tube socks.

The next night, ten minutes into a slide presentation shown by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Nordan of New Rochelle, New York—
teachers during the school year; camp owners during the summer and known to scores of children for decades as their beloved Aunt Lynne and Uncle Sam—my father wrote a check for eight weeks away and stuffed it into Uncle Sam's jacket pocket.

•   •   •

T
he trunk arrives, and then the camp uniforms show up: six brown and gold T-shirts. Six white collared shirts for Friday night services. Six pairs of voluminous, pleated brown shorts. My mother has offset the camp's official clothing list with her own additions: two pairs of denim elephant bell-bottoms from her favorite boutique, hemmed eight inches so they hang over my blue suede Olof Daughters clogs, and three see-through silk voile blouses and a stack of tube tops in every color that are meant to go underneath them instead of my training bra. Gaga spends every day watching
Mike Douglas
and hand-sewing name tapes into balls of socks and piles of underwear and T-shirts and three red, white, and blue Speedo bathing suits with modesty panels. My father and I walk around our local Army-Navy store: we select a heavy-duty, water-resistant lantern, an official camping soapbox, a collapsible plastic drinking cup, bottles of bug spray and calamine lotion, and a capacious navy blue rubberized cotton raincoat designed to be worn over a Marine backpack, which falls somewhere between my knees and ankles.

“Cy,” my mother says when he makes me model it for her, “she's going to Pennsylvania, not Vietnam.”

“She needs to be ready for
anything
,” he answers, rolling up my sleeves.

I begin to wonder whether they are really sending me away for good, rather than just the summer. The clawing anxiety I've experienced for as long as I can remember when I'm about to be left somewhere hits me like a two-by-four, clinging to my back like a damp shirt.

I dream of being stuck at camp, after all the other kids go home at the end of the summer.

I dream of coming off the bus, climbing down the steps, and not having my parents there, waiting to bring me home.

I dream of floating on clouds, high above the earth, of being in limbo, unsure of where I am supposed to be, or live. And then falling backwards, down and down, through the air, out of control, with nothing to grab on to.

And then, she left
.

She left.

But she came back.

It's too late to back out now, even though my stomach aches and groans for days and something bitter and acidic burns from my belly up into my throat, and my father declares my nerves to be natural, a part of the run-up to a first summer away from home. Candy Feinblatt and Camp Towanda are going to turn me into an adult—a muscular, immaculate American Jew who knows how to fold my clothes properly, say Shabbos prayers in Hebrew and actually understand what I'm saying, eat kosher-style food, and please God with the compulsive neatness that daily inspections will require—whether I want to go, or not.