I Don't Have a Happy Place Read online

  “Yes, it’s me and I’m stuck in a box.”

  “Heh?” he was shouting. “What?”

  This guy was useless and, if we’re being honest, pretty irritating. I cut him free.

  Wrapping the coiled cord around my wrist like a bracelet, I made one final call.

  “Operator,” announced a young, pleasant-guy voice.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hello.”

  I then affected my best Miss Piggy voice, briefly mad at myself for not having thought of opening with this impression. “My phone is not working properly. Might you be a love and try the number just to see if it rings?”

  I knew he was smiling in his operator office, I could just tell. I’d never gotten a male operator before. I wondered if he wore a blazer and what kind of chair they gave him and if he had a stack of Playboys on the toilet tank where he worked. The operator call is a prank caller’s last resort because an operator can see your number and probably could call the police—or your mother—but Ace once told me they had to call you back, by law, if you asked them to.

  “Okay,” he said. “I will try you back.”

  “Thank you, Kermie.”

  I hung up and waited. Seconds later, it rang.

  “Kermit the Frog here,” I said.

  “Okay, kid.”

  “Okay, Operator.”

  He hung up. I remained on the line until the silence was broken by a series of annoying beeps.

  4:28 p.m.

  My new plan was to lie quietly and settle into despondency. Dragging my pillow onto the floor, I noticed the top of Shaun Cassidy’s head. Kicking the magazine out from under the bed revealed the rest of his face, along with his pals Scott Baio, Leif Garrett, and Willie Aames. Their heads had been enlarged and placed in a quadrant, like a giant game of tic-tac-toe. Tiger Beat was chock-full of secret facts (Andy Gibb’s middle name was Roy), not to mention beautiful posters of Parker Stevenson to tape onto your walls. I’d recently read the issue cover to cover, but upon another perusal I laid eyes on something I’d missed. It was at the bottom of the page.

  WIN A DATE WITH GREG!

  The Greg in question was starring on a new TV series, B.J. and the Bear, about a freelance trucker (B.J.) and his chimpanzee best friend (Bear). Together, they’d travel the country’s highways getting into hijinks while trying to avoid the rascally law enforcer, Sheriff Lobo.

  Now, my fantasy-date dance card was already full with Fonzie and Bobby Vinton. However, the song “Convoy” had recently taught me some trucker lingo (yeah, breaker one-nine, this here’s the rubber duck), and CB radios seemed neat—plus I didn’t really have anything else to do, so I cut out the contest form. I should note here, I was not much of a winner. There were no yellow horse ribbons tacked onto my bulletin board, no trophy cups engraved with my name. Ace always got to the Spooky Speedster prize in the FrankenBerry box first. And I’d taken no shortage of dodgeballs to the head in gym. But there was something about Greg Evigan’s feathered hair and halfhearted smile that added up. I was about to be a winner.

  I spent a good deal of time debating which ink from my Bic 4-Color pen to use. Settling on red, I called up those dazzling letters Brandi used for her signature, knowing it was that kind of penmanship that Greg Evigan would spark to. We were asked to write one line about ourselves: I like badminton and spy novels, kittens and kissing. I then crossed out kissing and put in CB radios instead. I debated a SWAK on the back of the envelope, but decided on a kiss instead, using the Tangee lipstick I’d lifted from my nana’s bathroom last Yom Kippur. Just to put it over the top, I spritzed the envelope with a little Love’s Baby Soft.

  I would get my father to mail the contest form. He never questioned what we handed over, probably assuming it was one of those letters I was supposed to be writing to Penina Hamburger, the adopted mail-order Israeli orphan pen pal my mother’d sent away for. I knew he’d take it, along with the stack of envelopes my mother gave him, mindlessly sticking it into the brown leather purse he’d started carrying.

  The potential outfit panic for my impending date set in right away. I was confident that the rust-colored crochet necktie my mother thought was cute just didn’t seem cocktail-waitressy enough for my date. And what would we chat about? I didn’t know a thing about badminton or spy novels. I needed some talking points, hobbies. I needed to be interesting.

  Greg Evigan was an actor on television, and who knew how long that gig would last, so best to have his next project on hand. The red Trapper Keeper on my desk was stuffed with lined loose-leaf, which I smoothed out and then stared at for a while. I would author a play. It would be a two-character vehicle. The boy character would be the star of a very popular TV show whose car breaks down outside a girl’s house. The girl would be lonely and sad and unattractive and bored. She was twenty-eight and a shut-in with glasses and a neck brace and had nothing to do after school.

  I started writing dialogue but everything sounded dumb. Each attempt resulted in a crumpled ball of paper. I needed inspiration. Walking into my parents’ room, I opened a few drawers, but nothing spoke to me. In Ace’s room, I sat at his desk, smelled the rubber band that held his hockey cards together. I took the briefcase out, just to hear the clicks one more time. When I saw those girls staring up at me again, the Lite-Brite pegs in my brain lit up.

  MITCH: Hi. My car broke down, as you can see. I was wondering if I could come in the house to use your telephone.

  ROXANNE (looking for car, pushes up glasses and adjusts neck brace): Are you crazy? I can’t let you in my house. I don’t know you.

  MITCH: Don’t you know who I am?

  ROXANNE: Are you Ted Bundy?

  MITCH: Don’t be crazy.

  ROXANNE: Wait. My glasses are smudgy. I can’t see that well.

  MITCH: I can help you clean them.

  ROXANNE: I guess you can come in and screw me with your pee-nus.

  MITCH: Right on. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?

  ROXANNE (taking off her glasses and neck brace): I like badminton and kittens. But I hate rude people.

  MITCH: I am not rude. I have a penis.

  ROXANNE: All right. Let’s screw.

  I should note here that I had a friend whose father was a world-class pervert and, in his nightstand, on any given day, lived a bag of dried apricots and a stack of literature we could never bring ourselves to look at. But at the top of the pile was always a Screw magazine. Her older brother told us what it meant. And although I never actually leafed through one of them, they still managed to inspire what I imagined could very well become my new smash hit: Win a Screw with Mitch!

  5:03 p.m.

  My play was shaping up nicely but missing one thing: actors. If you had written a dirty play and needed some actors to try out some of the smuttier dialogue, who would you call? Exactly. Barbie. I mean, who better to talk about screwing, right? But here is just another way Phil Donahue bankrupted my childhood (see tenet 4).

  I did own one big doll, Mrs. Beasley, the same one Buffy toted around on Family Affair. She wore a dowdy turquoise dress with yellow pin dots, and square plastic glasses, and she had a string at her waist that, when pulled, made her utter creepy sayings like, “Gracious me, you are getting to be a big girl.” There is no way Mrs. Beasley could pull off the role of Roxanne. Even if you yanked that string as hard as you could, she would never agree to a screw with Mitch.

  Rifling around my closet, I found an old shoebox. Inside lived the tiny loopholes my mother found in the Phil Donahue doctrine, when she couldn’t take one more minute of my crusade. Enter the Sunshine Family: Steve, Stephanie, and Baby Sweets. I could guarantee that the calico dress–wearing, frizzy-haired Stephanie and turtleneck-clad Steve never screwed. Baby Sweets most probably came from the stork, even though Where Did I Come From? begged to differ. But they were the only actors I could get and this play needed work. Stripping
the puritans, rehearsals began.

  5:07 p.m.

  I tried. Really I did. But those two just couldn’t handle the material. I ripped their limbs off in frustration, decapitated them, then placed all the pieces back into the shoebox, along with the pages of Win a Screw with Mitch!, closed it up, and wrote Ted Bundy was here on the box top. To the back of the closet they went, laid to rest until decades later, when my parents would sell the house and hire someone to host a garage sale for them. To hell with B.J. and the Bear. I don’t even know why I bothered. Shutting my closet door, I skulked back to the den and watched the end of The Merv Griffin Show until I heard my father’s car in the garage.

  Epilogue

  I spent the rest of my latchkey days alone, just watching TV. Grandpa Solly never returned after that first day, and I insisted on my mother buying me a fire extinguisher for when the house spontaneously combusted. Shortly after turning fifteen, I adopted a bald black Cabbage Patch Kid named Cedric Imala and set up an Easy-Bake Oven on my dresser. Sure, I was too old for those things, but Nana had slipped me a little extra Hanukah money and told me to spend it any way I saw fit.

  The ‘80s breezed in with its shoulder pads and Aussie Mega hairspray. The styles were changing yet again and it was all the rage to look as if you lived on Knots Landing—this intrigued my mother. She started upturning shirt collars and shellacking her hair into a helmet that could withstand damaging winds. She ditched the ties but kept the slacks. Eventually, Phil Donahue became background noise as she outlined her lips with magenta liner, filling in the rest with bubble gum–pink lipstick.

  I still came home to an empty house after school but, sometimes, I’d bring a boy with me. We’d retire to my Duran Duran–postered room and he’d wait patiently as I pressed my nose up to the plastic window, watching my cake rise halfheartedly as it baked by light bulb. Later, we’d listen to Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” and dry hump on the shag rug. Occasionally I’d make eye contact with Cedric Imala and think, Fuck you, Phil Donahue. Fuck you.

  Eight Weeks

  • • • • • •

  We had name tags sewn into our underwear, rations of Fun Dip and Wacky Packs ready for barter. Oversized white envelopes were dispatched months in advance, sending us to doctors for shots and signatures assuring the authorities we weren’t bedwetters or asthmatics or prone to epileptic fits. While snow still piled on the roof, my mother tacked the clothing checklist onto the fridge with a sheep magnet that claimed EWES NOT FAT, EWES FLUFFY!, and still we scrambled last minute for the requisite four pairs of shorts, three bathing suits, and one rain poncho. I knew other kids, whose duffel bags and cardboard trunks aired out on lawns around the neighborhood, were bubbling like soda inside a shaken can. But as I sat on my bed, bangs hacked and crooked, I hoped that I’d contract the plague—or at the very least get hit by a truck—anything, really, so that I didn’t have to get on that bus to summer camp.

  I was five years old the first time I stood in the maze of sleepaway camp buses looming in the parking lot of Blue Bonnets Raceway. In its 1950s heyday, my father told me, the horse track boasted a million-dollar clubhouse for “big shots.” I liked to imagine the short mustachioed man from Monopoly with his wife (a much taller broad, with her long neck wrapped in a beady-eyed fox stole) on a night out, away from the fast dealings and headaches of Marvin Gardens. But by the late ‘70s, the track had long since lost its luster. Now the only thoroughbreds parading around its parking lot had long curly brown hair, wore satin dolphin shorts, and answered to the names Elissa and Elana and Elyse.

  Summer camps were invented in the hopes of bringing nature and outdoor pursuits to kids living in the dingy conditions of industrialized cities, the earliest Fresh Air Fund spots. By the 1920s, hundreds of summer camps had sprouted on the American landscape. I’m sure Canada adopted the idea, copying its cousin a year or two after the fact. It took us longer to get everything up north. If the camps I went to were considered Jewish camps, I had no clue. Yes, we wore white to dinner on Friday evenings and there was challah bread on the table, but it didn’t occur to us that camp was religious any more than it occurred to us that the stop-motion Davey and Goliath show we all watched on Sunday mornings had a lick to do with Christianity. We just liked the way the dog sounded when he said “Daaaaavey.”

  Camp is a time to connect. In its wooded magical glory, one could make lifelong pals while sleeping in tinderboxes, surrounded by the Magic Marker graffiti of ghosts of campers past. It is a place where character takes shape. There is positive transformation and blossoming and good old-fashioned fun. In the 1970s, summer camps were still affordable and kids were sent in droves for a myriad of reasons. For those who struggled during the school year, camp could be a time for reinvention. It was fully possible to be a math nerd in the fall and a color war champion in the hotter months. For some, camp was a safe place to take on authority, others felt free enough to explore their sexuality on the baseball field or over by Canoeing. Of course, there were your garden-variety well-adjusted kids, the ones who were equally successful at home and away.

  And then there was that kid. You know who I mean. The underdog who gets on the bus weeping and shy and scared but, against all odds, learns to rise to occasions and come out of her shell, making the best of everything, and by the end of the eight weeks picks up awards and plaques and skills and lifelong friends and lessons for the storybooks. Aww, don’t you like that kid the best? Who doesn’t love a kid who overcomes obstacles because she tries harder than anyone and it actually pays off? Me. I can’t stand that fucking kid. Not to worry, this isn’t a story about that kid.

  Our cabin was a small wooden structure, painted white with dark green trim. It sat in a neat row of identical cabins on one side of a line of trees, the boys’ bunkhouses mirroring the setup on the other side of the divide. Eight Shaker-style pegs outside the screen door held our rain ponchos, and the wooden porch was smooth enough for jacks. The dining hall’s and rec hall’s white-and-green exteriors mimicked the cabins’, these larger buildings flanking the small lake at opposite ends, like parentheses.

  Save for a go-cart track, it was pretty standard camp stuff. Activities ranged from softball to sailing to archery, and once a week we had a special activity called Coke Dips, which all campers lived for. While we slept, cans of Cott soda were thrown into the shallow and deep ends of the lake. As the sun rose, a voice would burst through the PA system calling “the Dip,” causing mass hysteria as everyone scrambled out of their cabins, beelining toward the lake. If you were lucky enough to catch yourself a can, you gave it to your counselor, who brought it to the kitchen staff. At lunch that day, you were allowed to drink the entire can, instead of the bug juice that gurgled in those bubbling drink contraptions they also had at the mall.

  There were five kids in my cabin that year. It was unprecedented to have such young kids sleeping away at camp for the entire eight weeks, so a special cabin was carved out just for us. We were made camp mascots just by virtue of being small. But even with all the special attention, a lot of us cried ourselves to sleep while clutching stuffed Snoopys, thinking of home.

  For just about everyone, Camp Hiawatha was an oasis, perfection on earth. Today, way over thirty years later, many of those campers still refer to their tenure there as the best days of their lives. My memory for details of that time is tangled; I vaguely recall being in the chorus of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and a male swim instructor named Leslie pointing out a can of grape soda for my retrieval on a Coke Dip. What I remember more was traveling in a small pack of campers, being led to sporty activities I already found challenging. I wasn’t homesick, because I didn’t feel any more at ease back there. Being part of a pack, encouraged to participate, all that fun—I think I just felt lost.

  “This is great,” my father said, eating fried chicken out of a cardboard box on visiting day, his golden Capricorn necklace pendant catching the sun and memories of his own days at camp. “Ma
n, you guys are lucky.”

  Maybe I was just too young to appreciate it, so my parents continued sending me off, just to make sure.

  • • •

  I started kindergarten the fall just after my first trip to sleepaway camp. It was a French school, housed in a large brick building that loomed over a busy residential street in Montreal. The brochure was on top of a mail stack in the kitchen and its cover featured what I believed to be a mental institution for smiling girls dressed in dark navy uniforms. Those tunics are what sold my mother. She believed in the idea of uniforms, convinced our future relationship would never be in jeopardy if we took fighting about what to wear out of the equation.

  My mother brought me to school the first day, holding my hand as we crossed the threshold. The teacher stood en garde by the door, her brown wool pencil skirt static-clinging to nude panty hose. Twenty-eight kids seized the classroom dressed in kind: gray pants and white shirts for the boys, navy pleated tunics with white shirts underneath for us. I could hear kids speaking French and learned at once that no English was spoken in the classroom, which made my stomach hurt because no French was spoken in my home.

  The classroom was set up with a series of tables along one side, facing a line of windows. Under the patches of light the windows let in was a domestic-style setup: a play kitchen with a fridge and oven and fake food and a small wooden washer and dryer and play ironing board with a pile of teeny rumpled clothes. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. My mother’s eyes were concealed behind the prescription sunglasses she’d neglected to replace with appropriate indoor eyewear. Sometimes I’d feel proud of her wearing dark glasses inside, like she was a rock star, but on the first day of French school, the kids were staring at her and I wanted her to be like everyone else. Although I couldn’t see her eyes, her craned neck suggested she was checking out the small tub of hard candies sequestered on a high shelf near the door, and I’d soon figure out that on good-behavior days, Madame Larousse would give us each a sour ball to eat on the way home. If you sucked them dutifully, small shards would form and cut your tongue. I liked that part best.