"No she"s not-"
But we were out of time: Robin and her mother were on the front porch. I could hear Robin asking, "What"s her sister"s name again?"
"Rachel?" Mrs. Fife offered.
Without uttering a sound, my mother ordered me to get the h.e.l.l over by her side and wipe the scowl off my face. She opened the front door with a gracious sweep and a welcoming smile. Robin cried, "Surprise!" and threw herself against me. I said blandly, "Hi, Robin." And to her mother, as she crossed our threshold, "Thanks for arranging this, Mrs. Fife."
My mother served coffee in her bone china cups, and chocolate-covered cherries on a two-tiered candy dish, even though Mrs. Fife had declined with a flutter of her hand. They agreed to call each other Audrey and Sissy and to do this again soon with Eddie and Donald. After a half-hour, Mrs. Fife said she"d be on her way: Her college roommate lived in Lincoln, and they were planning a wicked weekend without the hubbies-shopping, a matinee at the Shubert, and dinner out.
"A musical?" I asked.
"Yes!" said Mrs. Fife, amazed as always by such extraordinary intuition. "West Side Story, though not the Broadway cast."
"Can I see your room?" asked Robin.
"I"m leaving in a minute, so give me a kiss if you"re running upstairs."
There was no upstairs. We lived in a ranch house, but neither my mother nor I corrected her.
I asked-for no reason beyond what my family had begun to call my one-track mind-"Are you going back to the Inn this year?"
Mrs. Fife murmured, "We"re not sure yet."
I knew that couldn"t be true: The newsletter announced on every page that guests returning for the summer of "65 must notify the Berrys, as was their standard policy, on January first.
"Are you?" Robin asked.
My mother said, "It"s awfully hard for my husband to get away in the summer."
"Of course," said Mrs. Fife gaily. "Your husband is in the produce business. He must wait all year long for summer so he can sell native fruit."
"You don"t think you"ll be there this summer?" Robin persisted.
"Robin," said her mother. "You know how far in advance they fill the rooms, don"t you?"
"I bet if you called the Berrys up, or wrote them a letter ..."
My mother"s eyes showed that she understood quite clearly what Bunk Eleven had been like, how long seven additional nights of double occupancy at the Inn had felt, and why she"d be making this weekend up to me.
I pointed out to Robin that Mrs. Berry didn"t like to bend any rules, especially where I was concerned. Remember?
Sissy Fife translated with an indulgent smile, "Ingrid Berry can be something of an iron hand in a velvet glove."
Her own gloves went on, signaling the end of that unpleasantness. Kisses and handshakes all around, and she was gone.
Robin didn"t grasp that we had exhausted the topic of the Inn at Lake Devine. "I had much more fun last summer with Natalie in my room," she told my mother, "and this year they"re getting a color TV."
I said, "I can"t go there this summer, Robin. Okay? Your father has the summer off, but not everybody"s father is a teacher. It"s my father"s busiest season, and we all help him out."
"You do?" said Robin. "You work?"
"That"s right," I said. "I wipe the fuzz off peaches when a customer wants nectarines."
Before Robin could express amazement over that piece of science, my mother silenced me. "It"s very nice of you to want Natalie along, but it"s probably not going to happen in the foreseeable future," she said, holding out the dish of dark chocolate cherries to Robin, who hesitated.
I bit into one and showed her how it worked: See, a whole cherry inside, runny but delicious. I said, "You"ve had cherry pie, right? And you liked that."
She took a dainty bite, then another, chewing unhappily, as if she"d been instructed to clean her plate while at the Marx house, no matter how exotic the offering.
"Have another," I said after her pained last swallow. "The pits won"t hurt you."
My mother said, "Maybe Robin doesn"t want to spoil her appet.i.te, Natalie. Why don"t you show her your room now."
And to me, in Yiddish, "Enough."
Part Two.
EIGHT.
I had no nostalgia for Camp Minnehaha, no active curiosity about my fellow Hiawathans, until a mimeographed invitation arrived for our tenth bunk reunion. Suddenly I found the idea irresistible, mythical, the before and after with a flourish: Julia Child bringing the finished product out of the oven-voila-seconds after the raw demo went in. I couldn"t not go; couldn"t not see what kind of adults had sprung from the cheerful and the cranky, the swift and the slow, the pretty and the homely we had been at fourteen.
Every December without fail, the Fifes had sent a card and we had reciprocated-Hanukkah greetings from them with their Lung a.s.sociation stamps, and Christmas/New Year"s tidings from us-with hopes expressed annually for visits and good health. I had let my friendship with Robin fade to nothing, recognizing that if it weren"t for the artificial bonds formed through my Gentile ambitions, we never would have shared a room or exchanged a word.
The reunion invitation came to Irving Circle, with PLEASE FORWARD stamped on the envelope. In my case, it was hardly necessary. I visited Newton faithfully from eight trolley stops away, often spending the night, usually speaking to both parents daily.
After four years in the country at UMa.s.s, two friends and I had rented rooms in an MIT fraternity that had lost its charter and had become something like a boardinghouse. In another century, it had been a narrow, elegant bowfront house on Commonwealth Avenue with a magnolia tree on either side of the stoop. I prepared meals gratis for my housemates, turning their weekly grocery dollars into crocks of soups and giant ca.s.seroles. I got better and more adventurous with cheap ingredients: gigantic packages of chicken backs and necks; beef from shinbones; lamb shanks; day-old bread, bruised fruit, turbot fillets flash-frozen in Iceland. By midyear, as my housemates were taking national boards and writing theses, I announced to my friends-and admitted to myself-that I had found my calling.
I paid my cooking-school tuition from my wages as an a.s.sistant to the artist who designed Star Market"s circular. BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE, under a six-pack of ginger ale; 10/LB., below a cabbage; GOOD THRU 11/9/73, in the corner of a coupon, were my contributions. I had the right idea-that I belonged around large quant.i.ties of food-and for a while it seemed a drafting table in a supermarket"s corporate office was a step in the right direction.
Within weeks, I found myself lingering at the deli counter where I picked up my lunch. There was nothing creative going on there, but I envied the short-order cook his quirky sandwich-making, knife-wielding mannerisms. He caught me watching, and teased me into confessing my restaurant dreams. It"s a profession, he said, not a trade. This was his day job. Nights he worked at the Cafe Budapest, where the mayor ate, he told me; where Red Auerbach and John Havlicek ate, and actresses from the Wilbur. And picture this, kiddo, as long as you"re considering rewarding careers: Their pastry chef? A college graduate who trained in Paris? She could bring tears to people"s eyes with her desserts.
"Chips?" he asked as he bagged my turkey sandwich. He leaned closer and confided, "Restaurants are going to be the double features of tomorrow. By that I mean people will consider a beautiful meal and a bottle of wine all they need for an evening"s entertainment." He winked.
"I"ll remember that," I said.
It took thirty weeks of training at the unaccredited Ecole les Trois Etoiles in Newton Centre, working alongside housewives who wanted to master the art of pate brise and take the occasional catering job with their husbands" firms. With my executive-chef dreams, I was something of a novelty and a teacher"s pet. I completed ten weeks, signed up for ten more, took ten more again. The head of the school, M. Tardieu, was an imperious Alsatian, who would grab my rolling pin or my cleaver and finish what I had not so skillfully begun. Because he knew I was looking for a career instead of a hobby, and because he had five daughters of his own, he turned his exasperation into resolve. He called me his "valedictorian" in one reference letter-I"d stuck around long enough to be the best knife handler and saucier-and that word above his unreadable signature was enough to get me my first job.
Pammy had disappointed my parents by marrying Danny O"Connor, of Jolson Terrace, one of the boys we"d chased off our street a dozen years before. He"d gone to Immaculate Conception through eighth, then switched to Newton South, where he and Pammy had gone steady for their entire junior and senior years. My parents were privately heartbroken, even though they"d never forbidden us to date boys outside the fold. Danny was no genius, just a polite young man with a head for agribusiness. At sixteen he had made deals with neighbors for whole seasons" worth of mowing, raking, and shoveling. After high school, Pammy had gone to UMa.s.s, and Danny, though planning to make landscaping his life"s work, had gone to Framingham State. He dropped out with no regrets when his June birthday came in at 366 in the Selective Service lottery.
My parents had not raised us to be observant Jews, with our High Holidays-only attendance at the Reform temple, and our fuzzy observation of a Hanukkah-Christmas hybrid. Still, Pammy surprised my parents one April night, not calling first from Amherst, but arriving home at suppertime with an announcement. She and Danny, who was at that very moment two streets away breaking the same news to his parents, were engaged. Not "thinking of getting married" but formally engaged, with an .85-carat perfect diamond held by five p.r.o.ngs that Danny had had on layaway since his soph.o.m.ore year. He could have chosen something bigger for the same price, Pammy told us proudly, her fingernails freshly lacquered in hospital-white, but Danny had chosen the better gem over the grander one.
She saved for last what would become the central embarra.s.sment of the match-that she had agreed to be married in a Catholic church by a priest. Otherwise, she explained, their marriage wouldn"t be recognized by Rome or by G.o.d, which not only mattered a great deal to Danny"s parents, grandparents, and one great-grandmother, but had everything to do with where he spent eternity.
That made sense, didn"t it? Pammy demanded. Danny"s parents were religious and we were not. She was just going to sign a piece of paper that said she"d raise her children Catholic-no big deal. Danny could take them to church. She"d still be Jewish.
The big deal was that all the Jews we"d heard of who married outside our religion picked people who were lukewarm about their own. Affianced young men and women from other denominations converted. There were Hebrew lessons, circ.u.mcisions, ritual baths. My parents saw it all around them-the hotel weddings, the justices of the peace, the judges, the Unitarian ministers uniting Jews and halfhearted Christians in ceremonies that didn"t mention G.o.d. Even if the outsider stopped short of full conversion, he or she embraced Judaism, joining discussion groups at the temple, presiding at seders, topping bagels with lox.
Not Pammy and Danny. They were married in a Gothic cathedral of a Catholic church on Beacon Street, on a Sat.u.r.day, by a pre-Vatican II holdout of a priest, with most of the not-very-religious Jewish relatives boycotting both ceremony and reception. Those who did come didn"t mix. Danny"s relatives, to a person, took communion. At the reception, college friends and cousins initiated a big loud hora, elevating the new Mr. and Mrs. Daniel O"Connor, Jr., in chairs while the O"Connor kin clapped and cheered the way only goyim and Hasidim do in the face of such extremes of religion and folk dancing.
My grandparents refused to go. The Cohens, we lied, were now living year-round in West Palm Beach. The Marxes-well, you understand: Sat.u.r.day is the Jewish people"s Sabbath.
The no-shows failed to send presents. My mother, ignoring the one-year grace period allowed by Emily Post for wedding gifts, called the laggards and gave them a piece of her mind: Danny O"Connor was a good boy. Pamela could have done a lot worse. His love for her was written all over his freckled face, and always had been. Maybe he wasn"t a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, but he had a serious and quiet way about him, and his draft number was the highest in the land. He wasn"t afraid of work-he"d been putting money in the bank from the moment he could push a lawn mower.
Give us some credit. Do you think we would have gone along with this for all these years if Danny O"Connor was-what?-some Irish hooligan? The wedding you missed to make some point that was none of your d.a.m.n business had been a beautiful affair, and Pamela the most gorgeous bride.
But this, no present-not a candy dish, not an egg cup, not a, a, a Whitman"s Sampler-was too hard to hold her tongue over. How did they think it looked to the O"Connors, whose relatives attended regardless, and put on a smile even if they weren"t thrilled that Danny was marrying outside his faith?
And don"t send one now. We don"t want it. It"s too late. Pammy doesn"t know I"m calling; Pammy doesn"t need your present. But someone had to tell you-you broke her heart.
My mother would slip the receiver into its cradle and cross off another name. Having just finished pinning medals to the chest of her new son-in-law for the benefit of Aunt Lee or Uncle Myron or a distant cousin"s widow, she"d growl to me, the unattached daughter in the next room, "Don"t you do this to me, ever."
The Green Ridge Turkey Farm and Restaurant on the Daniel Webster Highway in Nashua, New Hampshire, was the original site of the reunion, but after I"d mailed my check, Donna Paquette called to say it had been changed to her house in West Roxbury. A scarce seven women did not justify the renting of a function room, so Donna had offered her finished bas.e.m.e.nt on the Orange Line. I should bring a sleeping bag, a side dish, and any snapshots I had from 1964. Directions by car, bus, and T to follow.
I asked who would be there, and she rattled off names as if ten years had not pa.s.sed since the last roll call-Robin, among them.
"Great!" I heard myself saying. I was increasingly curious. The lines handwritten at the bottom of the Fife holiday cards had mentioned Miss Porter"s and, later, Connecticut College, which led me to believe that Robin had outgrown her childhood simplemindedness. A reunion would give me a perfect view of a new, educated, possibly even bright Robin. She"d carry on equally with all of her old bunkmates; she"d have many of us to sing with, to squeeze her sleeping bag between, to smother with her grateful attentions. Or maybe none of that. Maybe she"d changed in the ten years I hadn"t been looking and was neither silly nor excitable nor still humming to fill in every gap.
"Graduated with honors from UMa.s.s (Amherst) in "72 with a B.S. in biology. I am living in Boston and training to be an executive chef" is all that I sent Tookie Boutselis, a third-grade teacher and our bunk historian. On her own initiative, and on her school"s mimeograph machine, she produced a pictureless yearbook, which she mailed to us a week before the party as a consolation prize. The party had been indefinitely postponed due to a lack of interest in the scaled-down bas.e.m.e.nt sleepover. ("Thanks just the same to Donna and her family and to those of you who offered potluck contributions.") From Tookie"s double-sided ditto sheet I learned that Callie Kochanek, the bunk beauty, was already divorced from someone named J.B. Her full-page report was both intimate and sketchy in a way that made me feel I had missed several installments: "If anyone had ever told me that I could have loved anyone as much as I had loved J.B., I would have said it was impossible. The year in Georgia was tough. J.B. shipped out in February, and for the next six months I cried, wrote letters to him, and watched soap operas. Maybe I should have moved back in with my parents while J.B. was "in-country," but I had made friends with the other wives who were in the same boat. Finally, I went to work. I met Dean my first day at First Co-operative, and the rest, as they say, is history."
Callie claimed the most column inches, and I had the fewest. In between were the two-paragraph autobiographies from the remaining bunkmates: a nurse on an oncology floor (Joanne), a secretary at Hanscom Field (Carol), a salt.w.a.ter taffy concessionaire (Linda), a graduate student in speech pathology (Donna), and an a.s.sistant manager at Pappagallo on Newbury Street (Robin).
I found the last item startling, not so much occupationally as geographically, for it meant that ten blocks down Comm Ave and two blocks over to Newbury, stood, at that very moment, the real-life, adult Robin Fife. I called my mother immediately and said, "Guess where Robin Fife works."
"Robin Fife?"
"Yes, Robin. From camp. The Fifes."
"Where?"
"Like, ten minutes away. At Pappagallo."
"What happened to college?"
I said presumably she had just graduated.
She reminded me that the Fifes had sent me a graduation card the year before, and it looked as if we had failed to reciprocate.
"I wouldn"t worry about it."
"You should walk over and say h.e.l.lo. Maybe you and she can go to the reunion together."
I told her that event had been canceled.
"I wondered about that," she said. "Who"d want to go to a pajama party at your age?"
Clearly not enough of us, I answered. I was heading downtown now for a few errands, then on to school.
"I want a report," she said.
I answered sharply that I was busy day and night for the next few days and couldn"t promise any such thing. Who knew if I"d even have time to drop by the shoe store.
"You were always funny about her," my mother noted, a sigh of a sentence that faded to good-bye.
Twenty minutes later I was at Pappagallo, staring at a window full of the flattest flats, adorned with the floppiest botanically accurate leather blossoms ever st.i.tched by man or machine. Little gloves of shoes in hot-pink, kelly-green, lemon-yellow for feet that would never know the hazards of falling food or dripping b.u.t.ter. I walked inside in a big-footed pique. Who wore these stupid ballet slippers, their slivers of leather functioning as both sole and heel? I hadn"t thought to change from my wrinkled coral overalls and faded chartreuse T-shirt into something more Newbury Streetish. And worse than anything in sight-my white-and-brown saddle shoes with soles like thick bologna.
I headed for the one display of brown and brick loafers. A saleswoman, not Robin, was handing an aqua shoe and a shoehorn to a middle-age customer in a chino safari outfit-to my mind suggesting that Pappagallo didn"t expect its employees to cradle a stranger"s sweaty feet.
From behind me I heard footsteps, then the beginning of a saleswoman"s offer of help, then softly, as if the speaker were testing a hunch-"Natalie?"
I turned, then faked a look of awestruck rapture. "Rob-in?"
She didn"t hurl herself at me the way she would have ten years before but, in the same incredulous and charitable way she had whispered my name, stepped forward and hugged me for a long time.
I was stunned by my own response, a sudden wash of affection at the sight of her, now a tanned woman with yellow Alice in Wonderland-beribboned hair, and miniature door knockers for earrings. "I can"t believe it," we said together, then repeated from arm"s length. "I can"t believe it"s you."
I asked how she had recognized me, and she laughed.
I laughed, too, quite sure she meant only that I"d been this tall and this unadorned at camp. I said I wouldn"t have recognized her. Well maybe, after close examination, I could see her younger self in there. She looked like Chip now, the taller, leaner brother. She was dressed in a navy chino miniskirt, a starched man-tailored shirt with fine green stripes, a gold bangle, the kind that opened and closed mechanically for a tight fit around thin wrists. Even in the flattest shoes in the universe, she was taller than my five-feet-eight.
And I, who used to have the height and the upper hand, who had enjoyed a joke in her company as long as it was at her expense, cried, "I"m such a mess! If I had known I was going to see anyone, I"d have changed."
"Don"t be ridiculous," she said. "You look wonderful."
"I"m on my way to school-"
"Where do you go?" she asked, looking pleased enough to put a card of congratulations in the afternoon mail.
"You won"t believe it," I began, "but I"m studying to be a chef."
She p.r.o.nounced it-me-wonderful. A chef!
I said, "I was a biology major-"
"And cooking is a kind of science, right?"
She was, no question, what my mother would describe as darling. I explained my ten-year plan ... to learn every station-did she know that term?-to work my way up, and to specialize in regional American cuisine, which was starting to be recognized by food writers and even by Europeans, and to one day own my own restaurant: Natalie"s.
Robin was too distracted by her own delight to congratulate me. She called to her fellow saleswoman, a dark-haired, blue-eyed colleen of a pretty preppie, "Betsy-this is Natalie! We went to summer camp together." Betsy smiled, as did her customer, who was now holding a swatch of fuchsia fabric to a cobalt-blue shoe.
"I love those together," Robin first a.s.sured the customer.