An Unevenness of Blessings

During That Vivid, unresolved summer in 1941 before the United States entered the War, I took a job as counselor in a coeducational summer camp near Jackson, Michigan; in fact, near Grass Lake, Michigan; in fact, even closer to Napoleon, Michigan. It was a summer of busy high skies and tireless sun, with times of dust and times of ardent dog-days heat, and the flower of feeling opening. I was moved by green and weather, and, even more, by the fact that I knew I was being moved.

I had a friend, I had a girl. I had cash in my pocket. I wrote poetry. Not yet out of high school and too young for the defense plants, I filled in a gap as assistant professor of tennis and journalism. Under the gaudy honorific title of "Uncle," I had power and dominion over a crew of squirmy spoiled boys.

Of course, not much cash and awful poetry--and that girl!--and my backhand at tennis!--and those rich kids with their suitcases full of Kleenex!... Well, but I really did have a friend, a long lazy loony confident fellow named Phil, totally unlike me. I was merely lazy and loony but not very long. Together we got the good out of violations of camp laws, rules, regulations, standard procedures, clearly marked signs, mature advice and codes accepted by all decent folks in the summer-camp business, and so flagrantly much good that on the day when we boarded the bus back to town, the owner of the camp, a physical-education supervisor in winter life, put one plump hand on each of our hard heads and murmured, "Forgive them, Lord, (continued on page 138)Unevenness of Blessings(continued from page 113) they know not what they do."

I knew, of course, what I had tried to do. But I left Camp Doanbrook in the same poignant condition with which I had entered--an embattled innocent in matters of love. My chronic condition, an absence of excess, a deficiency of sin--in short, the presence of a lack--was complicated by the fact that my friend Phil had become and expert with spectacular gifts of persuasion; he knew how to skinny-dip at night and to stroll intimately in the woods and to row stalwartly across Big Wolf Lake for a frozen Milky Way; and Kate, the girl whose teeth he rotted with candy, was a bouncy and bounceable happy creature who assented to all his suggestions and only entered analysis after she had received her master's in sociology (sosh) midway in the Cold War. Then it turned out that she had done the wrong thing with my friend, but the wrong thing only retrospectively, in a manner of speaking that made him out to be sibling and father and protest against sibling and father, none of which he intended to be when he strutted in boxer shorts or borrowed my raincoat for a conversation under the pine. In other ways, Herr Doktor, it was the right thing.

But not me. I could do neither wrong nor right thing, it seemed. The girl I tried to outdistance at swimming, who then outdistanced me all summer in every other way, then said to go away even closer, then outdistanced me again, liked to have suntan lotion rubbed onto her arms and legs; I rubbed. She liked Mars bars when I bought Milky Ways, Milky Ways when I offered her Mars bars. She liked to talk about art, music, life; I found difficulty in classifying all these topics.

"Are you sure of yourself?" Sandra asked. "Because I think that's important, don't you?"

I did. Oh, I did.

"Do you feel secure?" she asked. "Because I think a man should always feel secure."

I wanted to feel secure and to try to feel even more secure. But she always stopped me. "Secure" is not the same as "fresh," she explained with cheerful pedantry. In the English language, these are different matters. My grip on the language was almost as unsure as my grip on Sandra, and when I gripped my confidence, I found myself with a handful of air and fingers. And the nails in my palms while Sandra instructed me.

"Because I like a man to be sure of himself, Dan--that's even better than good-looking or a swell dancer. Would you like to put this goo on my back?"

She said "back," but meant more. She said "goo," and meant goo. There I crouched on my knees on the outer raft, breathless after swimming, rubbing suntan lotion, discussing Sibelius and Thomas Wolfe, growing more and more unsure of my certain self. "You don't like the Ruby Yacht anymore, Dan? Ooh, that feels nice. A little more up there. There. You don't like the Fitzgerald translation from the original Persian anymore, Dan?"

"Nope." I was surly and covered with greasy greaseless cream. "All nonsense. Exaggerated. A symptom of 19th Century British imperialism."

"And another thing I want to have a good long talk with you about is politics, Dan. And also you're not full of self-confidence. You're not really proud of being you. Don't get that oil on my latex suit, it stains. You don't radiate energy all the time like a healthy boy; oh, I don't mean that, excuse it, Dan, I mean like a young man should."

But she would not cooperate joyously, energetically, libidinously, as a girl always did, excuse it, a young lady eventually does in the novels I liked in those days. Sometimes I felt as if I had had enough of tennis counseling or mimeograph labors, children making pie beds and children who needed help with letters home to their parents. ("P. S. And mommy lissten, I like my councilor very much please bring him a dozen pair of socks size 12 Shelley's father already brought him a sweater.") I wanted to take Sandra away from all this. At least for an hour or two.

Instead, we watched a duck go squawk, pulled by the leg straight down into the swampy depths of the lake. "Ooh, listen that squawk," said Sandra.

"Snapping turtle, it's the battle of life," I said, "the survival of the fittest." I had bought secondhand books about the story of secondhand philosophy, the secondhand romance of art, and the mystery of heredity, explained by a man with chromosomes. A writer with a name like Hendrik Willem Van Loon (witty comments on eternity) had to be a terrific authority, though a name like Amram Scheinfeld (dark ecstasies about gene clusters) ranked pretty high in my psyche, too. "Nature," I announced, "provides a balance of nature in order to--"

"Ooh, I bet those sharp teeth," said Sandra.

"It's all in the jaws. Listen to me, Sandra. It's not teeth, it's the powerful jaw muscles--"

She squirmed away. "I'll listen to you," she remarked, "with your powerful jaw muscles, if you'll first get your greasy hands off."

They were greasy, of course, from oiling her packed little body against sunburn. And she had asked me to oil. And now that I had done my work, I had been enticed to play lubriciously. But like some decoy duck, she swam in circles until I grabbed with my snapper's snout; then she derisively let me yank her down to my destruction. No, perhaps she did not destroy, but she certainly unraveled.

"I knew this fellow once," said ducky Sandra, "he wasn't a bit secure. A boy should try to be secure." Blissfully, drowsily, she stretched out beneath the sun with her eyes closed, not caring how I looked at her. Her arms were fine, round, ambered by summer; there was a delicate lightening shade into her breasts where they sheltered each other, cradled by latex; her eyelids fluttered to get just a glimpse of me, which was all she required. She said: "This fellow was kind of grabby, but insecure? Oh, honestly. You know, Dan, you sort of remind me of him"--propping herself up on an elbow, examining me through eyes whose intentions were veiled by a thick brush of lash. "Only he was taller." Flopping back down to brown the other side.

I tell the world frankly: Sandra was no joy to me. I wept at night, alone, because the German armies were in Paris.

On Sundays, when the parents drove up from Detroit, Toledo and Cleveland, we dressed the children in their ceremonial white shorts and white T-shirts with the camp insignia stamped across narrow or pubescent bosoms; we dabbed calamine lotion on bites and then stuffed bananas down throats at breakfast. The kids were supposed to weigh in heavy for their bout with parents. (Now, in 1965, so much later in history, even the children eat slimming foods.) Jokester Phil, my pal, exercised his entire repertory of shoveling, cramming, tamping and gagging gestures, and said to Davie Snyder, "Swallow, you crud, or I'll tell your mother what you did when you lost the International After-Hours Strip Poker Tournament."

"Oh, please, Uncle Phil!"

Phil elaborately relented. "Ok, you're a nice crud. Listen, you have one more banana, hey, and mum's the word."

With gratitude Davie found space to tuck away another few tropical ounces in his endless whorls of childish gut. Phil hoped thereby to store up a little credit with the head counselor in case Aunt Kate, junior counselor for Girls Group Two, the Brownies, was absent at bed check.

By noon the beastlings had all been shined up and we counselors were ready for parental discussion of heat rash, wax in ears, nervous stomach, and how much progress their heir to a chain of drugstores was making in crafts. "Not very (continued on page 212)Unevenness of Blessings(continued from page 138) superlative in crafts, I'm afraid, but wonderful in arts-and, Mrs. Snyder. Shows remarkable talent."

Davie's mother was delighted. "Artistic?" she asked. "Is he good with his hands?"

Phil showed me a choked, chortling, warning face: Don't tell what Davie does with his hands during rest period. Mr. Snyder, master of many white-coated pharmacists, intercepted our ritual lurch of suppressed laughter. This intuition, passed from Phil to me, probably cost us a box of mints or a carton of chewing gum from the Snyder warehouse. Artistic insights, emotional sensitivity and having a steady pal like telepathic Phil won't make you rich, but they can keep the old acne from its proper feeding. All right, so Papa Snyder was suspicious. I would eat apples instead of mints, and I hoped the Detroit river flooded all his candies into one gluey mass fit only to be hashed up for Halloween giving.

After dinner, Phil directed a program of skits, which is the camp version of classical tragedy, and then we parted the speeding guests from their progeny with many a wave, tear and smiling, lip-read curse.

Six dozen socks and a sweater. Phil got an electric razor. Hell, wasn't my chin as hairy as his? (Answer: Not quite.) And my hormones even hairier? (Answer: Impossible to ascertain.) Why should he have all the luck with girls and parents?

Here comes cranky Dan with his complicated complaint:

Why the devil should my girl demand programmatic assertions that life is really good, and then barely let me cop a feel, while Phil's girl didn't care if he exhibited a spot of world-historical neurotic indifference--and yet they made out fine together. (This is a statement, not a question.) There was and is no justice in love. Girls who ask Are You Happy? should be forced to be happy, like it or not.

The mother who made me promise to hold a wet finger at night near her sonnyboy's head, in order to test for winds invading the channels and by passes of the inner ear, gave me socks that would have broken my big toe, except that my big toe was tough. I was insulted; the rest of me was less tough than my big toe. She should have remembered me with larger feet. Therefore, I went to bed nights without wetting my finger to guard against drafts. I should get chapped fingers for a family whose socks didn't fit me? Anyway, I needed all my fingers for poking around the universe and writing poetry. Resolutely I gave up my resentment, which had me imagining an amputated digit, due to horrible chapping, and there I lay in a tent with sneakers and no socks on, thinking about solemn, silly, perfection-hungry Sandra. She had smudged dark eyes, a ponytail and a way of smiling. Lovely Sandra. Poor me.

Faced by all this trouble, my few prickles of beard peeked out, looked around, decided against venturing into the ungrateful world, and then just burrowed back into my skin for safety. Said my hormones: "Hurry up, please, it's time!" (T. S. Eliot.) Said my retracted soul: "Closing up early today." (Bartender, Anon.) No razor, no socks, no girl, no truth but words, words, words ("They have a plentiful lack of wit"). Ow, ouch, I summed up 100my life, I hurt. (Sandra used the phrase "hurtie feelings.")

I hurt!

I stared into the murky night and wondered if someday I might feel better.

Expert Phil, my coach, admitted that Sandra would be a tough nut to crack, even for him. But, of course, between pals and for the sake of perfect honesty, he would never think of her that way in a thousand cruddy years--that Sandra, sure, she reads books and all--but still, that Phyllis Bazelon, the Group One counselor, she looked as if she were getting tired of writing to that crud in the merchant marine. And she was really stacked. So? So? So I still liked Sandra better. Expert advice (an elbow in the ribs) could do nothing for me. Poor sick Dan, who couldn't be educated.

Self-pity is an effort to make up by loving oneself for all the love one does not receive from Sandra, Linda, Sherry or Betti-Jean. Anxiety is a crisis of the fear of loss of love. Back it all comes, back, back to perjured love. I knew the dangers of being a sensitive poetry-writing chap. Sophistication, I figured at 17, was one of my strong points, just as stupidity was my weak point. However, I could avoid some of the pitfalls, I decided, still heavily thinking, as I led one of my light-kidneyed boys out in his sleep to do his duty in the field. (Enuresis was very popular that summer.)

"But I don't have to, Uncle Dan," he mumbled.

"Listen, you have to, Sheldon."

"No, honest, I don't."

I made encouraging waterfall sounds. No luck. A fountain's hiss, a whispering whistle. A drip. A bubble. My entire repertory of magical liquid persuasion. Silence from Sheldon. He stumbled. In slow motion, he crumpled like a melting snowboy against my leg.

"Wake up!" I shook him. "Go now. Make!" We were shivering outside in the tall grass. I never led Sheldon all the way across the field to the lavatory, but reserved a nearby patch of weeds for him. Despite his ministrations, it grew untrammeled; it bore its burden of Sheldon with vegetable tact and fortitude, and came to flower in a crown of milky seeds. A-chew! I said, suffering from hay fever, and even in his sleep the brat smiled dimly, blast him. He knew I had my mind, that modified whorl of sinus, on other matters.

"But Uncle Dan, I already did."

Still draped in slumber, he headed back, pushed and shoved and guided and destroyed by my mystic power after a dozen delicate tortures which I had studied while standing up in a little bookstore on East Ninth Street in Cleveland. At his bed I discovered that Sheldon had spoken the truth: "I did already, Uncle Dan." He knew; he had. Was it not Rousseau who argued that children, in their primal innocence, always know? And mustn't we return at last to that unalloyed wisdom? And put Sheldon's sheets out on the line in the morning?

Sandra drowned me in chargin while Sheldon merely drowned me.

What I then thought during that cricket-anointed night, however, while the lacewings hollered and the night sparrows chirped, and somewhere a duck squawked and a train went Hooey! Hooey! was that now I would fool Sandra good. She thought she had my number, and indeed she did; but I would change the number, overnight. No longer would I be one of those sensitive poetic chaps. No, I resolved, disgustedly kicking myself into my cot near the door of the tent, pulling the sheet over my head despite the heat, crippling my ears with two well-aimed blows, but leaving the mosquito nimble and intact; no! Groaning, swearing, blaming and desiring. I would not be one of those sensitive poets who tell a girl how brittle, sly, superficial she is, and I can't live without you. No. I would tell Sandra she was sly, but not brittle and superficial, and I would say: "Oh I'll the if you don't..."

Now to poetry. In that tossed midnight hour of rage I composed a poem forever lost to the light. It explained (patiently, logically) to the world of Sheldons and Phils and Kates and Snyders and head counselors and other adults that there were truths of which they did not dare dream, but I dreamed, curse them all. I was in tune with nature, blast it. (Patience; logic.) I was beside myself, singing in the wilderness, and ah, wilderness were enough enow, as I recall. (And rationality, too.)

With shining face, I gazed into the darkness and confidently gave that buzzing mosquito one more blow that my ear would not soon forget. Then at last I slept, while the insomniac mosquito chanted its solemn music for dining pleasure. When it alighted to eat, I was lost in crooked sleep, kidding myself, compensatory Dan. Buzz, buzz, whine and buzz.

The next morning my life cycle, like the mosquito's, went into a new phase. I nibbled at Sandra's ear. I yearned for blood, buzzed, got waved away. I tried and tried. Sandra suggested I not give up. I promised to try again.

"You need practice, Dan. It was called courtship in the old days. You know, I think you're getting a little taller, like this fellow I know back in the city. He's not too much taller than you, and he's a neat dancer, not like you, but you're still growing. And you could learn not to be such a stoop--up on your toes! Up! And you know much more about life, I think. You're a regular philosopher. You're really revealing a great deal to me, Dan."

"You want to talk things over tonight, Sandra?"--the sly philosopher.

"I think I can arrange it. I'm not going to wash my hair, it'll just get dirty again. Yes."

Yes.

When not on duty with our counselees, Sandra and I used to talk things over in various hidden spots at night--while swimming in the moonlight and shivering from cold, while lying on the grass at the place where the camp flagpole was impaled (me shivering with futile desire), and in the cornfield where I tried to drag her amid the rustling sheaves (she shivered with anger and anticipatory suspicion). Or maybe she shivered with plans, or merely wondered when I was going to figure out how to pry open the lid over a nice, careful, complex, suburban girl.

We talked about symphonic swing, about poetry with and without rhyme, about the advantages of photographic memory and perfect pitch. On one particular August evening she did let me coax her into the cornfield. We necked. There was a strange hot wind above us, and below the moving tassels of corn, a still, buggy, expectant coolness. A grammatical progression that is much clearer to me today then occurred: I necked, we necked, she petted. She trembled. What did it all mean? they ask about the mystery of life in novels, and I asked in real life: What does it mean? She clutched and swarmed against me in that cornfield; she pressed, flailed, made squeaking noises; a hot swarming fury of girl said yes-yes-yes to a question she was asking herself and bit me hard on the mouth because I didn't have sense enough to do the asking--Will you, Sandra?

Abruptly she flung me away and scrambled from her knees to her feet and began walking. She would not speak to me all the way back to camp. She would not say good night. She turned scowling toward the girls' cabins, her damp hair still hanging over her face (remember Veronica Lake?).

"Good night, Sandra. Hey, good night?"

No answer. My mouth swelling, my heart in turmoil, I went to bed, confused and ignorant. I learned the obvious truth only later: Girls resemble boys in certain respects. It's not all suing for what you want. Girls want it, too; girls want!

"Hey, Sandra! Good night!"

No reply, just those sad dragging feet in sneakers.

I didn't know. Perhaps even Sandra didn't know enough. We didn't know the truth about desire all two together. Go away now, bedraggled Sandra's body was implying, and come back when you know something that can make me both earnest and hilarious.

Sandra, I wondered in my sleep under lumped-up Army blankets. Sandra, Sandy, Someone, I sighed; and meant the latter especially, draftily calling spirits of girl out of the vasty deep. The evening, embedded in varieties of corn, jabbed my cob, was being worked by my fantasy of what might happen in some perfect Platonic cornfield. You would think that I must have been forced to recognize the truth, that Sandra and I had made a kind of love together, but on my word of honor--in fact, on my word of dishonor--I had kept my stupidity intact. It was not how I had planned love; ergo, I did not admit it to myself. I was fated to mournfulness; it was not to be; or if it came to be, buffeted by my grieving imagination, it was not to have been was.

The next day Sandra occasionally glanced at my broken lip, grinned wildly, turned away with a look of great intelligence and said nothing. When I tried to smile, my lip smarted and I didn't really feel like smiling anyway. Sandra was more in tune than she let on. Her suburban gabble and chatter was an attempt to jam the radiating broadcasts of her underground sense. Dimly realizing this, I nursed my wounded mouth and did nothing to make Sandra live up to herself.

Then followed the sadness of end of summer, abrupt nostalgia of the uncommitted, withering dry leaves and scattering hopes. The counselors suffered together through a brutal hot spell. We packed up our kids, knowing that the most untenable brat would have to wait longest for his unwilling parents to come after him. A few more evenings I hung double-mindedly over Sandra, malcontent to apply her lotions and unguents, my intentions stagnant with fear. Joey's parents finally arrived; the hot spell continued beyond the possible; a day of foreboding, heavy sky, leaden air, shrill clatter of angry insects and hammer of woodpecker. We badly needed that storm which breaks the thrall of summer just when we know that the seasons have finally been stopped on their rounds.

I closed the car door on Joey, our last camper, and waved goodbye. "A nice boy, he made real progress." I told his parents, "if only he'd learn how to use a handkerchief and stop kicking other children in the head."

"He's so double-jointed," said his fond mommy.

"How was he in interpersonal group relations?" demanded his father, who was a high school principal.

"You heard Uncle Dan," said Joey's mother, who had not been to college.

"He said he gained four pounds and learned how to kick over his head."

I figured that they had already decided on the socks for me anyway, so I added, "Interpersonally, he has a lot to learn." In fact, interpersonally, Joey stank. "I suggest you give him some professional help." I was thinking: Drown him, push him off a cliff, draw him and quarter him professionally.

"Art lessons!" cried Joey's mother. "I've always said so. And here is a little token of our esteem for your concern with our little man. On behalf of both my husband and myself--"

Argyles, brutally stamped "Seconds."

That night, in the deserted red hall, we held the farewell Counsellors' Record Hop. We were full of grief for our departed youths, all 98 of them, and hoped to finish off the summer with a celebrational blare of Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Harry James, and a brief term of necking after dark, petting after dark, and an analysis of the booty received from grateful parents. Since we knew no famous people, we had a session of sock-dropping. We danced.

"Sandra, will you show me?" I asked her. She knew how to dip and turn in the foxtrot.

"Maybe," she said. "I promised to dance a lot with Bradley."

"Well, you can dance a lot with him," I said with my usual brilliant sardonic emphasis, improved as it always is by jealousy; that is, sapped and bled and shrunken to mere petulance, "but you can also take the time out to--oh, never mind."

"Oh, I'll show you," she promised, relenting. She was a woman, protective and tender. "I'll show you, Dan," she said, "if you won't say one-two, one-two all the time in my ear. It isn't like that, anyway."

I knew that she would prefer sweet somethings to the sour nothing of my effort to become a sweet dancer and a neat date. My cornfield advisor had grown distant. I decided to surprise her with a birthday present in December. Therefore, having already in my mind delighted her with a silver pillbox, I wondered why she had not forgiven me my trespasses as I had forgiven hers. She had a duty to read my mind; our love would be a uniquely binding episode in the history of telepathy.

She danced with Bradley. I danced with Friedel, the dancing teacher, who was also the wife of the head male counselor, Uncle Fred. He was a muscular old man of 28, with smiling sweaty creases circling his neck above the gym shirt and the physical-education specialist's heartiness with younger men. Friedel held me too close, I thought. "Whoops," I said.

"Only my feet," she remarked sweetly.

The storm broke later that night. But unlike stories, where grave events occur when storms break, real life at our camp did not provide any violent alterations. I remember that Phil's Kate, later to be therapized, had the kind of face--gaggly eyes, crinkly nose--that at least once each evening, a yard or so below, crosses its legs so that you see too much thigh. Goddamn, there it goes again, I thought; and in the meantime, the unconscious face went on goofily smiling. She never learned the graceful art of sitting. She had been taken by another desperate art. Sandra knew how to sit, and wore sensible white tennis shorts, and possessed herself fully with a little pout and smile, but Phil got to take Kate for a walk from which she returned hot and mussed and a few leaves sticking to her back and he broadly smiling.

There he went again, goddamn, goddamn, I thought with green enraged flecks of jealousy and red ones of lust making montage in my eyes. Sandra did not judge Kate, because she had been taught to judge not. She merely looked meaningfully from her to me and said, "Little bitch sure likes to show it off, don't she?"

"Sandra, I think they're in love."

"But I'll go for a walk with you, Dan. I shouldn't be too hard on her. After all, she hasn't anything else to offer a fellow."

"Yes, you've read the Rubáiyát, Sandra, and really understand it."

For my meekness, she took my arm and hugged it to hers as we headed past the swings and the Group Three sandboxes, down past the flagpole to the shore. We stood beneath the scudding clouds, watching the moon rush through. Softly she asked if I would like to kiss her goodbye right now, in this poetic moment, because she might be too busy later to give it her full attention. A few drops began to fall. Haggardly I accepted her offer. We parted.

The dancing scene of Harry James, flies, sand, girl counselors in shorts and halters, boy counselors in shorts and T-shirts, Phil's Kate rashly in a skirt, all of them strolling by lake waters, finally came to an end. We packed away the colored lights in storage crates. Already we missed the little monsters. We said goodbye with a sense that we had already parted and that this farewell took place after the end. It rained steadily; it drummed and drummed on the flapping tents; I lay awake all night in a rising autumn chill. The summer season of 1941 was over--the last of its sort for me.

That winter, during the immense private hush that lay encased within the public roar of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sandra yielded to me again and this time I knew it. I had reached the point of making coherent demands. By the next summer I was learning how to use the M-I rifle.