TREYF by Elissa Altman Page B

of
Beat the Clock
and
Tony Orlando and Dawn
.
    â€œWay back, when I was at Camp Machanaim—” my father would begin.
    When I was at Camp Machanaim . . . What I ate at CampMachanaim . . . 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.
    â€œWell, you’re not
at
Camp Machanaim anymore, are you?” my mother would say, cutting him off.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    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.
    â€œSo,” 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: StueySteinman, 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
    â€œHe said I was neat!” she cooed excitedly when the photo arrived, clutching it to her tiny chest.
    â€œHow would he even know?” I asked, looking around her immaculate room.
    â€œBeing 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