Friday after dinner was All-Camp-Circle. Camp director Eva wept as she introduced the Independence Day speaker, a guy with dreadlocks and a soft voice. She didn’t seem at all embarrassed about crying in public.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Carrie.
“Nothing. Eva feels things strongly.”
The speaker described how his father came to America from Jamaica looking for farm work but ended up on death row in Texas, framed for the murder of a cop. After the father was executed, his sons—the speaker and his twin brother—traveled all around the country trying to convince people to abolish the death penalty. The speaker quoted a line from Gandhi: “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind,” then he turned the quote into a song he taught us, with a reggae beat but a mournful harmony.
As we sang it over and over in a round, my throat ached with sadness. Maybe my parents had liked coming to camp and being depressed all the time, but it wasn’t my idea of fun. After our voices faded into the evening quiet, I walked with Crystal and Emma and Carrie to the dining hall for the weekly square dance. I wished I were home with Rachel. She always made me feel better when I felt gloomy.
“I guess,” I said. “That was so sad.”
Carrie put her arm around my shoulders. “Which is exactly why we do square dancing after All-Camp-Circle.”
“The campfire programs make us think about important stuff,” Crystal added. “So then we dance and everyone feels better.”
Emma laughed. “Yeah. That way campers don’t have nightmares and interrupt their counselor’s evening off duty.”
“Nothing disturbs my beauty sleep,” Sharon said.
I still didn’t like her.
I knew about square dancing from when it was too stormy to go outside for school recess. But square dancing at Loon Lake was nothing like that. The caller was Zander, a skinny staff guy with white hair and skin so pale his veins showed blue.
“Most camps do folk dancing or contra dancing.” Zander introduced us new campers to the weekly dance. “But in square dancing, the eight people in each square have to work together to make the figures come out right. It’s socialist dancing,” he said, leaning his long face to the side.
The campers groaned in unison.
“He says that every year,” Emma said.
“Anyone can be partners in Loon Lake squares,” Zander said. “We don’t say ladies or gents here. We say skirts and pants. So grab a costume from the costume box on the table at the back of the room and pick your partner. Pants on the left, skirts on the right.”
It made me laugh to watch the Tenner boys dash for wrap-around flowered skirts and curtsy to their girl partners in overalls. Emma rolled her eyes at Poose, who stuffed herself into a low-cut peasant blouse that was too tight and flirted with the pimply boys from Malcolm X bunk. I stayed in my cut-offs, but Emma pulled a lavender tutu over her tie-dyed shorts and stood on my right side. That made her my partner, the skirt. To my left, Carrie wore an orange paisley skirt rolled up at the waist and a cowboy hat.
“I’m your corner, partner,” Carrie drawled as she bowed to me, then laughed. “Mighty hard to keep this stuff straight.”
I did feel better when we started dancing. I concentrated hard on square through and shoot the star and wheel and deal, and slowly the images of the sad Jamaican guy and the long death row corridor of prison cells colored gray with loneliness started to fade. But when we rested between dances, fanning our red and sweating faces with folded paper fans, the final words of the song spiraled around and around in my ears. An eye for an eye until we all are blind.
The next day, the five of us argued about the campfire program as we walked back from the lake, towels slung around our shoulders. Emma and Poose agreed with the speaker, that the death penalty was wrong. Carrie said sometimes it was justified. I just kicked at last year’s leaves, already fractured into small brown pieces, covering the dirt path like a skin disease. I wasn’t sure what I thought.
“What about a guy who rapes and murders a little girl?” Carrie asked.
“And what about the Nazis?” I added. “Didn’t they deserve the death penalty?”
“Don’t you know anything?” Sharon made a nasty face at me. “Most people on death row aren’t Hitler.”
“Most of them are poor and black,” Emma said. “And they can’t get a good lawyer or a fair trial. Anyone who’s not white and rich is screwed in the courts.”
“There goes Emma again,” Carrie said with a laugh. “Race you back.” She took off down the dirt trail with Poose and Sharon close behind.
I stayed back with Emma. “But if someone kills a person, shouldn’t they pay for the crime?” I asked.
“Sure, they should pay for it, in prison. But if killing is wrong, why is it right for the government to do it?” Emma asked with a triumphant tone.
I sucked in a deep breath of the spicy forest air, tasting the tangy flavor on my tongue. I wished I had a smart answer for Emma. A gust of wind turned the leaves over with flashes of silver and I grabbed a branch. “My dad says when the leaves expose their bare bottoms like this, they’re flirting with the wind.”
“Don’t change the subject.” Emma’s green eyes skewered me. “Didn’t you learn any history in your school? Innocent people get executed all the time. Like Sacco and Vanzetti. They lived in Boston too.”
“I live in western Massachusetts, not Boston. Didn’t you learn geography in your school?” I walked tall, facing straight ahead. Emma was such a know-it-all.
I tripped on a twisty root in the trail and fell hard. The root was gnarled and tortuous like the hard veins in the crook of Esther’s arms. Sclerotic was what the oncology nurse called them. The chemo made her veins thick and dense, like petrified wood. Thinking about chemo made my eyes fill and spill over. I sat in the middle of the path rubbing my knees and trying not to bawl.
“You okay?” Emma asked.
I didn’t mean to tell her. I didn’t mean to say anything about Esther, but I just blurted it out. “My mother has cancer and I’m afraid she’s going to die.”
Emma squatted next to me in the broken leaves. “Is she getting, you know, treatment?”
“She had an operation. Now she gets chemo.”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t stand it if my mom was sick.”
I wiped my eyes. “What am I doing here? I should be home.”
Emma put her arm around me and steered me toward our bunk. “Listen. Tonight, after everyone is asleep, I want to show you something. It’s how come I know about the courts and how crooked they are.” She paused and then added quietly, “It’s about my mother.”
After lights out, Emma and I pretended to sleep. Finally the whispers and giggles around us faded into the moth-wing breathing of a dozen sleeping campers. We slipped out of the bunk and I followed Emma past the organic vegetable gardens, breaking off a few velvet-skinned string beans. We stopped in front of a squat building, tacked like an afterthought behind the camp office.
“This is the archive. It’s supposed to be off-limits to campers, but they never lock the door.” Emma eased the rusty padlock from its perch and creaked open the heavy door, then fumbled along the wall until she found the light switch.
Three walls were crowded with floor-to-ceiling shelves. The fourth was covered with camp photos, labeled with dates in clumsy calligraphy and grouped by decades. A panoramic photo represented each year, the fingernail-sized faces mostly shaded by baseball caps or squinting against the sun. I stepped forward to examine the smaller bunk groupings labeled TENNER BOYS—JOE HILL or CIT GIRLS—ROSA PARKS surrounding each large photograph.
“Maggie used to bring me here a lot, while she looked at old stuff. It was boring and the dust made me sneeze.”
I turned back to Emma. “Who’s Maggie?”
“My mom’s best friend. I call her my aunt. She was camp nurse before Sue. Starting when I was really little, I came to camp with her as a counselor’s brat.” Emma looked right at me then. “My mom was in prison.”
Prison?
“That’s how I know about the court system,” Emma said. “They railroaded my mom and sent her to prison for nine years.”
“What did she do?”
“I’ll show you.” Emma pulled an oversized book off the shelf, releasing a fine shower of dust. “You know Sasha, the Yiddish teacher? She cuts out newspaper articles and pictures about camp and campers and pastes them into albums. This book is 1968 to 1970.”
We perched on stools next to each other, carefully turning the stiff pages spread-eagled on the pine table. A musty smell rose from the paper. Emma read a headline aloud in a mock-pompous television news voice: “DA Considers Attempted Murder Charge in Anti-War Assault Case.”
“That’s what my mom did,” Emma said. “There was this humongous anti-war demonstration about Vietnam. In Detroit. My mom went with her sister and Maggie. These mounted police were beating up protestors and Mom threw apples at them.”
“How can apples hurt anyone?”
“They were hard apples, little green ones. One hit a horse and it freaked and a cop fell off. That’s assault. He was paralyzed or something. Listen to this one: ‘Jewish Radical Cop-Attacker Comes From Union Family.’ See, they didn’t like her because of her background.”
“What happened to her?”
“There was a trial.” Emma leaned her face close to mine. “Mom tried to talk about the war being wrong, but the judge wouldn’t let her. So she went underground.”
“Huh?”
“Into hiding. A few months later, I was born and she hid me with her. But later someone recognized her and she was arrested again. In the second trial they framed her for a bombing she didn’t do and she went to prison.”
“If she didn’t do anything, why did the jury convict her?”
“The FBI lied. My dad said it was to scare other people, so they wouldn’t protest. They went after my mom because she was Jewish and socialist.”
Socialist? Socialists were frowning young men in black and white photos in my social studies book. They wore heavy dark clothes and wanted everyone to be poor.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“My dad took care of me. When I grow up I want to be a people’s lawyer, just like him.” Emma’s voice was soft, but I could hear the pride. “We visited my mom in prison almost every week. I spent summers here, with Maggie.” Emma smiled. “When I was little, I felt closest to my mom at camp. My parents came here as kids. They met here.”
“That’s so neat,” I said. “My parents met here too.”
“Cool.” Emma turned back to the album. “Look, here’s the very first story: ‘Sisters Arrested for Injury to Officer.’”
I studied the large black and white photograph under the headline. Two young women with pale oval faces and frizzy hair were caught with their arms flung out, fingers extended, as if they had just thrown something. Emma’s finger pointed to the woman on the left. “That’s my mom, Rosa.”
But I stared at the other woman, the one on the right whose eyes were closed. The air in the room went all stale and dead and so heavy my lungs couldn’t suck it in.
“What’s wrong?” Emma asked.
“I don’t understand.” I pointed. “That looks like my mother.”
Emma stared at me. “That’s impossible. That’s Esther Levin, my mom’s sister. She’s the person who finked on my mom and sent her to prison.”
“Esther Levin Green.” I pictured the gold letters on the diploma Jake framed when Esther graduated college. It hung on the wall over my mother’s desk in the alcove off the kitchen. A smoldering started deep inside my throat and spread like a fiery sunburn over my neck and face. Know-it-all Emma was dead wrong about this. There was no way that Esther could have a sister and never visit her or talk on the phone. That would be like me never seeing Oliver again. He was totally annoying now and I hated that he finished my sentences, but when he was little he loved to cuddle and twirl my curls around his finger as he sucked his thumb. He was my brother.
“My mother doesn’t have a sister,” I said. “I would know. She would’ve told me.”
Emma looked at me, then at the photograph, then back at me. Like she was trying to see if I resembled my mother. Or maybe if I was somehow responsible.
“What did you mean,” I asked, “that Esther finked on her sister?”
“Esther made a deal. She testified against my mom and sent her to prison.” Emma spoke like they were cuss words. “So she could avoid prison and could take care of her baby.” She jabbed her finger in my face. “That must be you.”
Right then, everything in the world divided in half, ripped right down the middle into two different universes, like Superman and Bizarro in the musty comics Jake lugged along on camping trips. In Emma’s half, people were socialists and anarchists. They attacked policemen and went to prison. In my world, people were regular and their kids hung out with their friends and had fun. How could we be in the same family?
A moth bumped its frantic dance against the window.
Emma wouldn’t stop talking. “My grandparents—well, I guess our grandparents—had to sell their Detroit shoe store to pay the fines.”
I covered my ears with my hands so I wouldn’t have to hear her lies. My grandmother lived in Detroit and collected porcelain cocker spaniels. We visited her every year at Passover. She had promised to leave me her china doggies in her will. Would she leave half to Emma? How come my grandmother never mentioned Emma, or Rosa?
“No.” I crossed my arms and frowned at Emma. “I don’t believe any of this.”
So Emma repeated the whole story again, about cops beating people and throwing apples and the horse rearing up and the cop falling down. Except this time she told it with two sisters, Rosa and Esther. This time it was worse because I knew what was coming, and her sentences punched holes in my lungs, up one side and down the other.
Finally, she finished and the room was quiet except for the dull lament of a lone cricket. I thought about how before chemo, Esther’s dark hair coiled down the back of her denim jumper, caught with a thick blue rubber band from the grocery store broccoli. I tried to picture my mother standing on a dusty city street throwing things at policemen.
“No way,” I whispered when I had breath again.
Emma touched the two faces on the photograph. First Rosa, then Esther. “They look so much alike. Except that you can’t tell how red Rosa’s hair is. Just like yours. Is Esther’s hair red?”
“Brown,” I said. “Like yours.”
“Your mom got off easy. She never spent a single day in prison.”
The Superman and Bizarro worlds came crashing together and that was just as impossible. I pushed off the stool and walked to the wall of photographs, turning away from Emma.
“I’m going back to the bunk. I don’t want to hear any more. I love my mom.”
“I know,” Emma said softly. “I love mine too.” She slid off her stool too and joined me at the wall. She pointed to the 1958 group photo, where four teenagers stood slightly apart from the crowd. The two boys leaned against the white oak tree at the edge of the field, their tanned arms around two frizzy-haired girls. “They’re all together here. Rosa and Allen. Jake and Esther.”
Jake and Esther. My parents. I turned away from the photo and looked down at the burning in my right fist. I rubbed at the row of curved marks my fingernails had gouged in the soft part of my palm. I squeezed my lips together thin and tight, and pointed at her face, like she did to me, before.
“I don’t believe a word of this,” I said. “You made this stuff up.”