I Don't Have a Happy Place Read online

  We all took seats at the table. Most of the parents had left by that point, but my mother stood behind me, dark glasses in position, looking like my bodyguard. Some kids are naturally attractive, have an ease about them that others gravitate toward. I sat in my chair looking straight ahead, wooden, just like my mother. We were the dream team of people repellent. The teacher nodded at my mother, which was code for It’s time to leave your kid here with me in this French mental institution. Understanding it was time to go, my mother scanned the room for someone to pair me up with so she could leave without my having some sort of emotional breakdown, or worse, having one of her own.

  Already sitting next to me was a little redheaded girl, all freckles and good posture. My mother crouched down in between us. “Hello,” she said, in her signature baby voice. “What’s your name?”

  The small girl looked at my mother, possibly through my mother, and ignored her. I immediately knew her angelic little Peppermint Patty face was a big ruse.

  “Name?” My mother tried again in a tougher tone this time, staring at the kid until she finally, in a standoffish voice, answered, “Anne.”

  My mother gave me an isn’t-this-fabulous look and stood up tall again. She hugged me from behind, my arms hanging to my knees as she gripped. To her, she’d made contact, broken the ice for me, and was now free to leave the building. I could hear her heels click and echo down the long hallway, leaving me alone with Anne, who spoke only French, and certainly not to me. I stared at the washing machine, counting down the seconds until I could line up at the door and receive my sour ball—hopefully, not the lime one.

  I spent the first few weeks alone. Not (only) because I didn’t speak the language, but because I had no clue how to make a friend. I’d come home after school every day and eat from the box of Fruity Pebbles I’d hidden in my closet, trying to come up with a plan so I didn’t have to spend the rest of my days at the wooden washing machine alone. How did people do it? How did they make friends? The next morning, as I moped around the classroom, it finally hit me: find the kid who looks as miserable and uncomfortable as I do.

  Gerald Wiener was round and short and a dead ringer, at six, for Walter Matthau. He often complained of back pain and spent half the week barfing in the classroom sink. His face was in a perpetual squint, making him look like a human whine. Not even his nana would call that kid happy. This was my guy.

  At nap time, I’d place my sleeping mat next to his and we’d look up Madame Larousse’s skirt as she paced along the row of foamy floor covers. Gerald started coming to my ballet recitals, even though he reminded us at all times that the lights gave him a headache. He was quiet, and often nauseous, but shared with me his hatred for kindergarten at the French institution, and confided that he, too, would rather have been at home watching The Flintstones. When it was time to go home, we’d line up for sour balls together, our heads hung equally low, defeated by the day. We’d roll our eyes instead of saying goodbye, knowing there was no way out of returning to that shit hole the following morning. But at least we had each other.

  • • •

  I took my crackerjack friend-making skills, along with my Yes & Know pads, to the second summer camp I attended—this time in Middlebury, Vermont. I was now eight years old. This camp had dark-green cabins with white trim, and the boys’ lodgings were behind the tennis courts. Although this place was much larger, as if the American camp had eaten the Canadian one, it might just as well have been the same place. Canoes, flagpoles, bug juice, beautiful senior girls named Randy and Donna with long hair and suede clogs, and days full of scheduled activities. We captured the flag in the morning, moving on to lanyard making, and then archery before lunch. Rest hours were spent playing jacks and trading stationery, or quietly devouring Archie comics instead of writing letters home.

  The Canadian girls shared their Laura Secord lollipops; the Americans gave away small handfuls of the sour-apple gum we couldn’t get in our towns. As summer came to a close, color war broke out, splitting the camp in two, testing mettle, seeing who could win more games or sing songs louder or, in the end, have the most spirit. When it was over, there was much sitting by the lake, usually with something burning in effigy on the water, as campers sang the last of their songs, drooping, because the best time of their lives was ending. How could they leave? Who would understand what they’d just experienced when they returned home and unzipped their duffels, which now contained everlasting memories that their mothers would just throw into the washing machine, as if it were that easy.

  I knew that no matter how many sad sack letters I sent home begging for someone to spring me from this camp, unless I contracted the mumps I was there for the duration. Girls were already sharing their Bay City Rollers T-shirts and having the prescribed fun. It was time to find my rotten apple.

  Amy Schecter was short and spunky with a giant supply of sour-apple gum. And while she was sporty like a lot of the Americans and I gravitated toward rest hour and doing the plays, Amy seemed pissed off all the time, and that was as good an invitation as any. My attitude was worse than hers, but Amy kept up all right. We’d sit on her top bunk while the rest of the girls played jacks, sneering at their squeals of delight when they’d won a game or danced with a boy at a social. Often we’d be warned by our counselors in meetings on the porch or the baseball field to improve our behavior or attitude or else. Amy listened more than I did, worried about jeopardizing her sporty status. Eventually I found myself in my first meeting with the camp director.

  “How is your summer going?” Uncle Howie asked.

  “I dunno. It’s okay, I guess.”

  “Mmmhhh. Are you enjoying your cabin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the activities are okay? The food not too bad?”

  “Yeah, it’s all okay.”

  “I see you are enjoying yourself in the play,” he said.

  “Yeah, I like it all right.” I scratched at the mosquito bites on my leg, looking out the postage stamp–sized window in the office. Distant screams came from near the flagpole.

  “I’ve been getting some complaints,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “From your counselors.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I guess.”

  “Listen, people are complaining about you. And I don’t think you want this happening. I’d separate you and Amy if I could, but we’re halfway through the season and there’s just no room to start moving cabins. And, frankly, it’s not fair to the rest of the kids. I have half a mind to send you home, but you are an asset to the theater. And so I will keep you here. For now. But if you continue with this behavior, I will yank you from the play. You will no longer be in Mary Poppins if you don’t shape up. Next step after that is sending you home. Understand?”

  I understood. Secretly, I was thrilled because I’d never been almost kicked out of anything. I finished up that summer without getting sent home early. I did the play and drank the bug juice. I remained a pain in the ass, but mostly in my head, because I realized that being kicked out wasn’t any better than being kept in. This was who I was shaping up to be, and I followed myself wherever I went.

  • • •

  Camp Manitou Wabing was nestled into a thousand acres of the great forests of Muskoka, Ontario. Originally founded in 1959 as an arts center, it was snapped up the following year by a father-son duo with the vision of building a specialized summer camp for older children, with a focus on arts and sports. The summer I turned ten, I would not be returning to the wilds of Vermont but back once again to my Canadian roots by attending what was now called a specialty camp. “Top of the line,” my father would say. He didn’t usually weigh in on these decisions but if something was fancy, he made himself heard.

  Manitou had remnants of the usual su
mmer camp landscape—rustic cabins and a lake delineated by a string of buoys and dotted with Sunfish—but the newer buildings were state of the art: tennis courts and theaters, radio stations and gymnastics tents. They imported handsome Brits to head soccer camp. There were horses in their equestrian centers, and a series of kilns in the airy, timber-framed pottery studio. Daily schedules were different at Manitou as well. At a regular camp, your bunk had a predetermined activity timetable and you meandered from softball to sailing with the rest of your group. Here, you made an agenda, receiving your own printout complete with a major, a minor, and a handful of other classes in between—like college, but with waterskiing.

  This camp was a bonanza for parents. You could see it in their well-rested faces on visiting day, where they had the opportunity to stay at the lush inn and spa attached to the camp. They could report back to their friends at home how outrageous the place was, and how great the focus on activities and instruction was for the kids. Manitou Wabing was not your father’s tetherball court. It was ahead of its time and we were lucky to be part of it. That’s what my parents told me.

  At ten years old, I knew full well that athletics and I were not compatible. The only interest I had was theater, so I made that my major. The director of the camp wanted each camper to fill their schedule with multiple activities to broaden their horizons and use all the facilities, but I had no interest in broadening anything. I wanted to be in plays, then lie on my bed and exude a general toxicity that would take up most of my time, leaving fewer hours for archery or basketball clinics. To this day, I am not sure how I finagled this deal, but somehow I managed to major in theater and minor in pottery and do absolutely nothing in between. So, it was settled—I would spend my summer shuttered inside the theater like veal, exiting the building every once in a while to throw a pot or ruin something for others.

  There were eight of us in cabin G5, not including our big-bosomed counselor, Jordana. Five of the girls knew one another from previous summers and were instantly glued together, like one giant Camp Beverly Hills sweatshirt, already on the move and out the door to ogle the head of Canoeing, leaving me to seek out Barbara Stack from Michigan, a girl with a tangle of red hair that required much maintenance. I watched her unpack her Prell and Body on Tap and Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific, lining her products up along the ledge of her cubby.

  “This place is a dump,” she said, taking out a collection of combs and the same hair picks my dad had, throwing them onto her bottom bunk. Barbara Stack had grit and troublesome hair and you could smell the bad attitude seeping out of her pale skin. I was ready to sign up to be her friend until I discovered that she was a gymnastics major, which was a focused program that would leave me without her in the cabin quite a bit to be miserable alone. Things were looking down.

  There was one other misfit in bunk G5—Pam Sacks. A theater tech major, minoring in softball, Pam looked older than the rest of us, like she just needed a place to crash in between stage-managing gigs. We didn’t talk much as she unpacked her duffel and I pretended to be deep into my Jughead’s Double Digest as she folded her clothes. I noticed all the black attire she had, which was a requirement if you did theater tech, and a pile of red Adidas shorts. The last article of clothing pulled from her bag caught my eye, not only because it wasn’t another black T-shirt but because it was the grooviest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

  This was no regular sweatshirt. This was a perfectly worn-in, dark-gray number, with the image of an upright alligator sporting a T-shirt with a little man motif on the chest, right above where his alligator nipple would be. The creature was smiling, not menacing in the least, pleased with himself for wearing clothes.

  The Lacoste trend was a few years away from hitting Canada but all the Americans wore those coveted alligator shirts. I was not a thief by trade but I wanted that sweatshirt. I needed it. Probably couldn’t go on if it wasn’t mine.

  To date, all I’d ever stolen was a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from this weird store located in the basement of an apartment building near my school bus stop. The gum was piled in an old-fashioned barrel, a ton of it. Thousands of neatly wrapped pieces just waiting, thousands of bad jokes, thousands of pink rectangles with a faint dusting of white powder, thousands of bubbles to blow. The way they set the stuff up, they were practically begging you to steal it. The sweatshirt was also begging.

  I spent days strategizing on how to pilfer that sweatshirt. If I took it during the first week of camp, she’d know it was gone. I could wait until the last day, when she wouldn’t notice until she dumped the contents of her navy duffel onto her laundry room floor. But what if she wore it the last day? Then what? I needed a better plan.

  I had been cast in The Children’s Hour as Mary Tilford, an angry girl in the 1930s who runs away from a boarding school to the safety of her grandmother’s house. In order not to be sent back to the school, Mary makes up a story that her teachers were lesbians, which ends up ruining everybody’s lives. I enjoyed playing the evil parts. But even more, I actually enjoyed spending the long, hot camp days in the theater rehearsing. When rehearsals were over, I’d hide in the back of the theater, skipping the other activities I hadn’t signed up for. Pam Sacks was doing props on the show, so I monitored her every move. As she organized the schoolbooks and desks, I imagined ways of stealing that sweatshirt.

  Three weeks into camp, our bunk was walking to lunch when I came down with a sham stomachache. The counselor wanted to send me to the infirmary but I begged for a nap instead. Saying yes to my request was easier than dealing with me, so she acquiesced. I promised that if I woke from the nap and still felt bad I would get myself over to the nurse, which was right across from the theater, where I was scheduled to be anyway. I sat on my bottom bunk, alternately staring into Pam Sacks’s cubby and looking out the window at least three hundred times, just to make sure no one was lurking. When ready, I removed the sweatshirt from her cubby, stuffing it into my army green duffel bag under a few embarrassing sweaters my mother had insisted I bring. I shoved the whole thing back under my bed, then ran to lunch, although I couldn’t eat due to jangled nerves. I wondered if there were many Jewish criminals.

  The sweatshirt lived under my bed for four weeks, undetected. I didn’t have a chance to wear it, lest I be noticed and removed from the premises, but just knowing it was hiding in my duffel pleased me. And then the system began to break down. Tensions were running high as summer was coming to a close and most of the girls were upset to leave their friends or boys they’d started kissing by that secret ditch near Arts and Crafts. There was a lot of spontaneous singing and weeping and hugs but also much bickering. My play was over, my pots thrown, and my bag would soon be repacked with the requisite four pairs of shorts, three bathing suits, one rain poncho. And one far-out terrific fantastic sweatshirt that would undoubtedly change my life forever.

  When Pam Sacks finished her last show (Anything Goes), she finally realized her perfectly worn alligator sweatshirt had gone missing. Well. You’d have thought a child had been stolen, with all the hysterics she burst into. It started small—just some polite asking if anyone had seen it. Nobody had. The next logical step was to ask the counselors. They hadn’t seen it either. The counselors also asked the kids, and still no one had seen it.

  If it were me, at that point I’d have just dropped the whole affair and taken one for the team. Good lord, it was just a stupid sweatshirt. But no, Pam Sacks launched an entire investigation, taking it upon herself to climb up the chain of command. She asked section heads. She asked the boys’ camp. She went to the theater and Gymnastics and the soccer field. She did everything but take an ad out in the goddamn paper. Pam Sacks couldn’t just leave it alone. I mean, it was lost, all right? Stop being such a baby and let the dumb thing go.

  Meanwhile, I used my acting chops to appear normal and casual. I debated asking her if she wanted help trying to find her sweatshirt but since I rarely spoke to her I thought my
sudden attention would make me look like a person of interest. I considered packing my stuff earlier than planned so I could hightail it out of there when the buses pulled in, but Pam Sacks, who’d barely spent any time in the bunk for eight weeks, was now there all the time sounding the alarm about thieves and misconduct and why couldn’t people just do the right thing. How much more of her hysteria could we take?

  The counselors gave G5 a few more chances to come clean, since all of a sudden this was some sort of federal case.

  “Pam is really upset, you guys,” said counselor Jordana and her giant shelf-like accusing bosom. “Please don’t make us check your bags, people.”

  Which is what they did on the very last morning of camp. There was a collective groan around the cabin because we’d spent an hour packing our duffels the night before. Fine, I thought, let them search my bag. We were leaving anyway. And just maybe, if I was lucky, I would get caught and not be allowed to return the following summer. Maybe there would be a small photo of me in camp directors’ offices worldwide, with a typed note at the bottom indicting me as a thief, a visual warning to keep me out of summer camps in general, like those bad-check writers at the A&P.

  When I first stole Pam’s sweatshirt, I’d turned it inside out so it looked like a plain gray sweatshirt, which most kids had, then I’d stuffed it at the very bottom of my tube-shaped duffel. One would have to take everything out to locate it and I’d banked on the sheer laziness of the counselors.

  When it came time to search my bag, I sat on my bottom bunk and hoped for the best. I used my best acting exercises. Pretend you are innocent. Pretend you are breezy. Pretend you don’t care. Mine was the last bag to be searched and I could swear they spent way more time on it than the other girls’. This was outrageous—why were they so convinced it was me? What did I do to make them think I was the boxy sweatshirt thief? In the movies, people in my situation started yelling about how the camp had no right to treat them this way, how this was unacceptable, how they would call their lawyer. My father’s friend Seymour Rosenbloom was a lawyer and I was more than prepared to throw that name out there if I had to. My father always said he was “top of the line.”