Homesick
Last week’s blog was titled “Home, sick,” and today I have removed the comma and the space between words.
She gets—literally—off the boat, the ship as big as a hotel or a village, that has taken her from Rome to New York City. The boat trip on the Leonardo da Vinci was intended by her father as compensation to his wife and daughter for leaving the city and the life they loved. On the ship, suspended over blue water, they seem to move up in class and backward in time. There is a picture, taken by the ship’s photographer, of the family working its may through a reception line at a formal dinner. Her mother wears an embroidered silk skirt; her father, bronzed and debonair, a shirt and tie; she her specially made blue “dotted swiss” dress with a matching slip. Although we do not see them in the photo, she is also likely carrying gloves and a purse—probably her straw purse shaped like a strawberry (there was one shaped like a pear, but it was definitely second best) and her white leather gloves with embroidered rosebuds. This is the person out of time and place who crossed the Atlantic in 1969, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, for which she was not dressed. When, as an adult, she came again upon the dotted swiss outfit, wrapped— presumably by her mother—in layers of tissue paper, she thought for a minute it was a doll’s dress. She had been planning to give it to a friend’s eight-year-old daughter, but, as she held its gauzy layers to the light, she realized this was absurd. Even if the style would not have looked ridiculous, the contours of the dress bore no relation to the well-fed muscular bodies of American girls in the late 1990s. At ten, she had probably been the size of the average modern American five- year-old. A doll.
By the time the family landed, the little girl who was not a doll, not really, knew that she would probably be attending the United Nations International School in the fall. UNIS had been recommended to her parents by one of the celebrities who mingled with the middle-class families in the restaurants and dance floors of the Da Vinci. George C. Scott’s, I believe already ex-, wife was traveling with her children who were enrolled in the school. The children, Matt and Devon, seemed to the little girl to be the epitome of sophistication. They sipped from their mother’s long glasses of colored drinks; they were not embarrassed to watch couples move in locked embraces across the dance floor; they were, at least they seemed, very tall. Luckily, they also seemed to like playing pick-up sticks and jacks, made more challenging by the sloping decks.
The girl also knew that there were more immediate plans for her; she was to go to something called “summer camp” in the Adirondack mountains, where the daughters of a family friend had gone for years. The parents would find an apartment, set up a home to which the girl could return at the end of August in time for her new school.
It is hard to remember the feelings—and there were many of them—of the girl at camp. There is an archive; there are letters. Made of stiff card stock, they are on stationary that requires no envelope. They are folded like billets doux, like the menus of Sir George Scharf, about whom the girl-turned woman will spend seventeen years cowriting a book. She still, apparently, loves stationary and things that fold. The stationary is mostly pink—the girl’s favorite color--but it is a vaguely psychedelic pink, cohabiting with swirls of lime green and orange. It is the pink of the summer of love, not the little-girl-pink that the little girl has accepted without question as her favorite.
The problem with the letters as an archive, is that the girl is lying in them. Perhaps lying is too strong a word; she has adopted a persona that allows her not to write the words “I am miserable,” or “please come get me.” The woman turned self-archivist recognizes the voice right away: it is a voice compounded of ideas and sentences from turn-of-the century school stories by Enid Blyton and from from the Girls Own Annual school stories by Enid Blyton and others in which the new girl undergoes a series of trials trials and learns to fit in by keeping a Stiff Upper Lip and by following the unwritten rules of those whom we would now call mean girls. These stories, which the girl read voraciously, were written in the in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, in and about England. They do not seem on the face of it a good model for a summer camp in 1969 in upstate New York, where less than 75 miles away, people are gathering at Yagur’s farm for the Woodstock festival that will in the United States forever be associated with that year, that month, and with a generation to which the girl technically belongs.
The echoes of Woodstock in a camp where no radios are allowed and where there is no electricity and thus no music except the voices of the campers and a recalcitrant piano, are faint indeed. But Woodstock is, in fact, present. The girl feels that presence most when she gets dressed every morning. Despite the fact that she and her mother poured over a list the camp sent of required/recommended clothing, nothing she has in her brand new trunk is anything like what the other girls are wearing. Her required four pairs of shorts are made out of the stretchy material known then under the brand name “Danskin.” They each come with a matching shirt. They are “outfits.” The other girls wear denim shorts that the hippest of them have actually cut off from their jeans. They wear tie-dyed t-shirts or white blouses knotted casually above their midriffs. The list specified a “rain jacket or poncho.” She has raincoat, long and belted. Her socks (6 pairs), are knee socks; they will not be fashionable again outside of schoolgirl porn until the movie Clueless comes out in 1995. Her tentmates’ socks are invisible in their moccasins, except for brightly colored puffs that peek above the heels of their shoes. Even the name tapes required to be sewn int all clothing, including the socks, are wrong: hers say “Helena Ross Michie.” Her tentmates howl with laughter: “did you think they would be stolen by the other Helena Michie?” they ask. They repeat her names, alternating mispronunciations of the first and last; they cannot seem to make up their mind which is funnier.Their names are “Patty” and “Mary” and “Laura.” Many of them are sisters, who share their clothes—and their last names. All of the girl’s sisters—and there are six of them, with names like “Astrid” and “Eve” are imaginary.
The only object that looks and feels exactly right is the steamer trunk that holds all the clothes. Instinct told her to avoid her mother’s elaborate first choice and to go with something plain. When the lid is shut on the Danskin and the red straw sandals made in Italy, her possessions look like anyone else’s. Perhaps this is why the Fizzy incident is so traumatizing.
“Fizzies, ”for those who are too old or to young to have experienced them, were part of a class of treats theoretically meant as drink mixes but eaten as candy. There were also Pixie sticks—drink powder sold in colored straws that you would pour undiluted into your mouth. Most popular of all was Tang, eaten straight from the jar with wet fingers, but this was unavailable at the camp store and thus contraband. Although over time she learned to like them a little, these treats initially were, for the girl trying to fit in, literally hard to swallow. She particularly hated Fizzies which were big and flat and would lie like stones on her tongue until they would unpredictably begin to burp themselves into life.
One day one of her tentmates complained that some of her Fizzies were missing. She and her friends looked high and low for them, calling in the counselor when they failed to appear. One girl—the one of whom the little girl was most afraid—claimed to have a sudden idea. “I bet it’s Helena,” she said, “she’s always pretending not to like candy.” The counselor made the girl open the trunk and rifled through her clothing.. Under the embarrassingly plain underwear (no lace, no flowers) were three packets of Fizzies.
The older woman can reach across the gulf of time and space to feel what the little girl felt, although she cannot tell you whether it was anger or fear, or some mixture of the two. She does not need the letters that, in any case, do not mention this incident, for evidence of that feeling: the archive persists in the women’s body, in her reactions to perceived injustice, in her inability to this day to read fiction or watch movies where someone is framed.
Apparently, “framed” is a word the little girl knew, in the way one pulls out a word or a phrase in a foreign language during an emergency. She left the girls crowded round the trunk, she left the tent, she left behind the codes she had learned from school stories. She walked all the way to the director’s cottage—a place no camper was allowed to visit. “I have been framed,” she announced, “on a Fizzy charge.” Then she burst into tears. The woman, the self-archivist, remembers very little about what happened after that. She does not remember, even if Miss Yunck was especially kind. Perhaps the Fizzy incident was a turning point; perhaps the other girls retaliated for telling tales. Something must have happened —at some point—because at the end of the month the girl cried when she left camp.
There is a word for what the girl was feeling for much of that summer month of 1969, a word to which the woman reading the letters has easy recourse—“homesickness.” The girl might have used the word if pressed, but no one pressed her. She would not have spoken the word out loud to her tentmates, would not have committed it to paper where it would have broken the fragile contract of her communications with her family, but it was a word mentioned fleetingly, if unsympathetically, in those school stories upon which she depended for her understanding of what was happening to her and who she should be. The word would have been familiar.
For what—or for where—was the girl homesick? Was it for Rome? For the ship that took her from it? For her family for whom she must have felt some anger at sending her away? For the promised room in the new apartment, which her mother was, according to the archive, having painted “ribbon pink”? For her grandfather, who unbeknownst to her was first dying and then dead while she sat alone in her tent reading school stories, and whose sickness can only be read between the lines of her parents’ letters—and then only by the adult woman turned archivist? Was she homesick not so much for a place as for a time—a time before the “sixties” which after all had just started in 1969? For the time of her childhood which ended in the accelerated temporalities of that American decade? It took several years before the girl felt at home in the new times and excited by them. By 1972 she was mourning the sixties. But for the summer of ’69 she was finally more at home with Miss Yunck, the camp director who had herself been a camper at Mesacosa in the 1920s and a counselor in the 1930s when to be a camper, an outdoorswoman, was a revolutionary act. She would have read—and perhaps lived—the school stories that framed the girl’s understanding of what it meant to be at camp, away form home, homesick.