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    Camp Paradox: A memoir of stolen innocence
    Camp Paradox: A memoir of stolen innocence
    Camp Paradox: A memoir of stolen innocence
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Camp Paradox: A memoir of stolen innocence

    By Barbara Graham

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    About this ebook

    This haunting yet wry coming-of-age memoir set at an all-girls summer camp fast-forwards decades into the future as Barbara Graham grapples with the knowledge that the “love affair” she believed she’d shared with her female camp counselor in the 1960s fits every definition of sexual abuse. The book will appeal to anyone who has experienced a betrayal of trust or conflated love and abuse. Barbara Graham’s latest book, Eye of My Heart: 27 Writers Reveal the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of Being a Grandmother, was a New York Times best seller. Her essays have appeared in many magazines, including Glamour, More, National Geographic Traveler, O the Oprah Magazine, Psychotherapy Networker, Self, Time, Utne Reader, and Vogue and have been collected in numerous anthologies. She has written for Web sites hosted by AARP, Beliefnet, Grandparents.com, Huffington Post, and NPR, among others, and is a columnist for PurpleClover.com. Barbara’s plays have been published by Dramatists’ Play Service and produced off-Broadway and at theaters around the country. This is a short e-book published by Shebooks--high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women. For more information, visit http://shebooks.net.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShebooks
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781940838250
    Camp Paradox: A memoir of stolen innocence
    Author

    Barbara Graham

    Barbara Graham is an essayist, playwright, and author who has written for Time; O, The Oprah Magazine; Glamour; More; National Geographic Traveler; and Vogue. She is a columnist for Grandparents.com and has two granddaughters.

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      Book preview

      Camp Paradox - Barbara Graham

      Author

      One

      Even now, at night when I close my eyes, I can sometimes still hear her. Footsteps crunching on the gravel path, growing louder as she nears the cabin. There’s a pause as she inhales and exhales one last drag on her Salem before crushing it out in the dirt. The screen door whines as she teases it open. Then she tiptoes across the rough wood floor to my bed, and on clear nights her body casts a shadow over mine in the moonlight.

      It was the summer before the Beatles, before Kennedy got assassinated, before sex. I mean, other people had had it obviously, just nobody I knew.

      I was 14. She was 28.

      I’d never heard the L-word before. None of us had--well, except maybe Ls, but they kept it pretty much to themselves in those days, for obvious reasons.

      I’d never heard any of the other words either: Sexual abuse. Molested. Incest. Pedophile.

      I’d heard of rape, but I had no idea the term applied to me. Actually, it took me about thirty years to figure out the rape part--and that it never had a thing to do with whether or not I was a lesbian, or the fact that she was.

      I knew what we were doing must be somehow wrong, but I never blamed it on her. The problem was the crushing small-mindedness of society, which is how she explained it. And I couldn’t afford to see it any other way without having a breakdown. That would come later.

      Nobody else called it rape or sexual abuse, either. How could they, since it took place in the dead of night when everyone else in the cabin was soundly sleeping?

      It happened at an all-girls camp high up in the Adirondack mountains on a freezing lake we shared with fish. For eight weeks every summer I escaped the anger and disappointment that shrouded my family home like a permanent fog.

      Camp Paradox felt like my true home. Before my first summer there at age twelve, I never dreamed that a quirky, possibly crazy, individual such as myself could find a place among the rich alpha girls from Manhattan, Westchester, and the snooty Five Towns of Long Island. But, miraculously, at camp everyone was, if not equal, then accepted. All for one and one for all--even the dorks, and every cabin had at least one. Ours was Francie. She was awkward, sweet, and impressively lacking in any athletic or artistic gifts. The minute you met her, you just knew she was roadkill at school. But we loved Francie. Ditto Margie, the spoiled brat from Hempstead; Robin, our perfect fairy-tale princess, who at twelve was prettier, richer, and more poised than we would ever be; and Arlene, the shy, self-effacing daughter of a cosmetics magnate. We even loved the jockette Janies and Susans who outcanoed, outswam, and outserved us on the tennis court. That’s because as soon as the bus pulled through the camp gate, our checkered histories were forgotten. Everyone was granted a clean slate. We could become someone new, someone freed from the labels our families and friends slapped on us back home: in or out, overly sensitive or mean, fast, plump, skinny, smart, retarded, or, worst of all, average and, therefore, invisible.

      Then there were the counselors, the bronzed muscular goddesses we worshipped and adored. We all had our crushes. Like the war between the Blue and the Gray teams or frenching the sheets of the new girl, falling in love with the counselors was a camp custom. They were so cool, so smooth and knowing, the way they laughed and smoked and teased us--not like any women we’d ever known, especially our mothers.

      Carrie, the head of Waterfront, was the queen, with her short-cropped blond hair and blue eyes, her perfect body and pretty face--usually topped by a man’s straw hat cocked at a rakish angle. We just about swooned whenever she sauntered by. She seemed so sure of herself. We loved her. We wanted to be her. There’s a photograph of me down by the water, sitting on a bench in my Bermuda shorts with Carrie’s straw hat on my head, set at the same jaunty angle, trying to look cool, just like her. Though no one ever admitted it, competition for the part of counselor’s pet was more brutal than anything that ever took place on the tennis courts or in the freezing waters of the lake.

      We were mad, hungry, juicy, flirtatious girls who could barely contain the energy coursing around in our bodies. It felt as natural to fall in love with Carrie or the other counselors as it did to lust after Rob, the heartthrob stablemeister. Or, in my case, Paul Newman, whose Manhattan apartment building I’d spent the previous winter staking

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