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- [00:08]
Meg Wolitzer
On this Selected Shorts, Edie Falco reads a unique coming of age story that's set at everyone's favorite place, summer camp.
- [00:15]
Libby (Narrator of Camp Emmeline story)
The water was freezing, smelled like bullfrogs. I stripped down to my underwear and T shirt, waded in, closed my eyes, went under, patting the muck at the bottom for sharp rocks and twigs.
- [00:28]
Meg Wolitzer
I'm Meg Wolitzer. Stick around. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. We're calling this show Lost and Found. Yes, I know what this concept suggests. Single gloves, kids, action figures that turn up in your shoes, and the missing keys to the garage that resulted in that argument. When we think about Lost and Found, we usually think of all the material objects we've misplaced. We don't tend to think of family, but when you consider the way a family might drift apart and reconnect, it just might represent one of the most acute manifestations of Lost and Found. And on this program, two very different stories confront this idea. In the first story, parents differ about how to raise a lively daughter. In the second, the loss of a loved one reshapes an entire family. And this show has a special feature. I managed to infiltrate a lively, long standing book club that read one of our stories.
- [01:41]
Rita Wolf
Anyone in a book group would say one of the fantastic things about it is you read things that you would
- [01:47]
Meg Wolitzer
never have read before, so be sure to stick around for that conversation. Our first story, Light, is by Leslie Neka Arima, prize winning author of the short story collection what It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. She's also a contributor to the selected shorts anthology Small Odysseys. There's a challenging harshness to Arima's writing, and we hear it in this tale in which a family is separated both geographically and emotionally. Light is performed by Crystal Dickinson. Her Broadway credits include Claiborne park and on television. You've seen her on the Good Wife and the Shy, among other shows. And here she is with Light by Leslie Neka Arima.
- [02:37]
Crystal Dickinson (Narrator of Light story)
Light When Annabel Uguara sent his girl out into the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him, hollowed out, relieved of her better parts. Before this, they are living in Patakot, in a bungalow in the old Ogbonda layout. The girl's mother is in America, reading for a master's in business administration. She has been there for almost three years, in which her 11 year old bud of a girl has blossomed. Annabel Lee and the girl have survived much in her absence, including a stampede at the market that separated them for hours, shoppers fleeing a commotion that turned out to be two warring market women who'd had just about enough of each other's tomatoes. They survived a sex talk birthed by a careless joke an uncle had made at a wedding about the bride and taking a cup of palm wine to her husband and leaving with a cup of well, and the girl had questions he might as well answer before she asked someone who could take it as an invitation to demonstrate. They survived the crime scene of the girl's first period, where she proved to be as heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering that this would happen every month. Three long years have passed. Now the girl is 14 and there is a boy and he is why Enabeli is currently seated on a narrow bench meant for children in what passes for the lobby of the headmaster's office, a narrow hall painted a blaring glossy white meant to discourage the trailing of dirty child fingers. But let's be serious. The girl is in trouble for sending the boy a note, and it is not the first time Annabeli has seen the boy, and even after putting himself in the shoes of a 14 year old girl, doesn't see the appeal. The boy is a little on the short side. The boy has one ear that is significantly larger than the other. It's noticeable, one can see the difference. Whoever cuts the boy's hair often misses a spot so that it sticks up in uneven tufts. The only thing that saves the boy from Annabel Lee is that he seems as confused about the girl's attention as everyone else. The headmaster calls Inebele in and hands him the note. This one reads, boki, I love you. I will give you many sons. And it takes everything Inebele has not to guffaw. Where does the girl get all this? Not from her mother, whose personality and humor are of a quieter sort of and not from him, who would be perfectly content sitting by a river watching the water swirl by. He promises to chastise the girl, assures the headmaster that it will not happen again. It happens again two more times before the girl learns to pass notes better. And he should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed. The girl's mother attempts to correct the girl, but much is lost in translation over the wires, and her long absence has diluted much of the influence a mother should have. It is one of the things Annabeli and his wife disagree on, this training up of the girl, and it widened the schism between them. The first month wife and mother had gone to the States, the family called and spoke to each other several times a day. The mother and and girl would have their time full of tears and I miss you, and the husband and wife would have their time full of tears and I miss yous as well, but of other things too, like My body misses you and all I need is 30 minutes max and when are you coming home? She'd return the first holiday Christmas. Annabel Lee memorized her scent and the feel of her hair. He'd often find himself staring at her. They slept very little, making up for lost time. When her return to the States was fraught with delays and visa issues, they made their first big mistake, deciding that she should not risk traveling back to Nigeria again for the duration of her studies. There was some noise made about how the girl should accompany her mother. She had barely left her side the whole visit, but Annabeli vetoed it, and his wife relented. They knew that of the two of them she might be able to soldier on without her daughter, but Annabeli would shrivel like a parched plant. So the girl stayed with him and they learned to survive. But for one relationship to thrive, the other must not, and Annabel Lee saw this dwindling in the conversations the girl had with her mother via Skype. They were friendly conversations, filled with exchanging of news and the updating of situations, but there was a whiff of distance, as though the girl was talking to a favorite aunt whom she loved like very much but would not say tell about a boy. At 14, the girl is almost a woman but still a girl, and her mother is trying to prepare her for the world. Stop laughing so loud, dear. How is it that I can hear you chewing all the way over here in America? What do you mean? Daddy made you breakfast. You are old enough to be cooking. Distance between mother and daughter widens till the girl doesn't enjoy talking to her mother anymore, begins to see it as a chore. And speaking of chores, father and daughter share them, each somewhat inept, each too intimidated by their sullen house girl to order her around. She spends most of the day watching Africa magic, mopping the same patch of tile till it gleams. And when she isn't pretending to clean the house girl talks to the girl in whispers, and Annabel isn't concerned because they're in the house and how much trouble could they get into? Talk is just talk. This is what he tells his wife, but his wife is horrified and worried that the girl is learning all the wrong ways to be in the world, and she badgers and badgers till Inebele sends the house girl back to her village. The girl becomes sullen with her mother after this and waits with arms crossed for the Skype calls to end, and the mother becomes more nitpicky, troubled that her daughter cannot see that she is trying to ease her passage. What is this the girl is wearing? The girl should be sitting with her legs crossed at the ankles. Why is this girl's hair scattered like that? When was the last time she had a relaxer? Annabeli shrugs at the hair question and his wife sighs, then says she's calling her sister. Annebele balks at this. His wife's sister is a terrifyingly competent woman with three polished, obedient sons and the wherewithal to take on another child. She's been trying to get her hands on the girl for years. In a fit of spite and panic, Annabel Lee buys a box of Relax and does the girl's hair himself, massaging the cream into her scalp like lotion, and the smell of it makes both of their eyes water. When they wash it out, half of the girl's hair comes out with it, feathery clumps that swirl into the drain like fuzzy fish. His wife's sister doesn't say a word about the processed mess or about the scab forming on the girl's forehead, but she brings the girl back. Her hair is shorn close to her scalp, and she turns her head this way and that way, preening, and they all, even her mother, agree that her skull has quite the lovely shape, and yes, she looks beautiful, but then her mother ruins it by adding that she can't wait till it grows out so she can look like a proper girl again. This starts another argument between husband and wife, mild at first, but then it peppers, and there's this thing that distance does where it subtracts warmth and context and history, and each finds that they're arguing with a stranger. The girl stops talking to her mother, and for a week his wife pleads with him to soften her, and he agrees, but he enjoys having the girl like this, as angry with her mother as he is, and so he does nothing. It doesn't matter. The girl holds a grudge as well as she holds water in her fist, and soon she's chattering away, but the space between mother and daughter has widened to hold something cautious, an elephant of mistrust and awkwardness. The girl feels it, doesn't want it, and in a bid to close the distance, confesses to her mother about the boy. She strings his virtues out like Christmas lights. He's shorter than her so he has to obey her. He's finally learning how to kiss well, and her mother silences her by saying sadly that she didn't think she raised that kind of girl. This is the first time the girl becomes aware that the world requires something other than what she is. It dampens her for a few days that worry Annabelle, and then she returns, but there's a little less light to her, and when his wife says that she has been offered a job in the States, management at a small investment firm, Annabel Lee says nothing. They promised each other at the beginning of all this that when she got her degree she would come back and find a snazzy job as a returnee where she would be overcompensated for her foreign papers. Later, even knowing what it will do to him, she will request that he send the girl to America, where her mothering hand will be steadier. He will fight her. He will use vicious words he didn't know he had in him, as though a part of him knows that his daughter will never be this girl again. But before all this, before the elders are called in, before even his own father sides with his wife and his only unexpected ally is his wife's sister, before he bows to the pressure of three generations on his back, before he sobs publicly in the Mutalla Mohammed airport, cries that shake his body and draw concern and offers of water from passersby, before he spends his evenings in the girl's room sitting with the other things she left behind, counting down the time difference till they can Skype, before she returns from school and appears on his screen more subdued than he's ever seen her, before he tries to animate her with stories of the lovelorn boy who keeps asking after her, before she looks off screen, though for coaching, and responds, daddy, please don't talk to me that way, before she grows cautious under the mothering of a woman who loves but cannot comprehend her, before she quiets in a country that rewards her brand of boldness and her black of body with an incredulous fascination that makes her put it away before all that. She is 11 and Annabel and the girl sit on the steps to the house watching people walk by their ramshackle gate. They are playing as ego and whenever the girl makes a good move she crows in a very unlighty like way and yells in your face. And he laughs every time. He does not yet wonder where she gets this streak of fire. He only knows that it keeps the wolves of the world at bay and he must never let it die out.
- [16:42]
Meg Wolitzer
That was Crystal Dickinson's Reading of Light by Leslie Neca Arima. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Arima beautifully captures not only the anxiety of single parenthood, but the ambivalence toward the opportunity offered by the West. This father is afraid that his daughter will, like his wife, be lost to him by becoming someone he doesn't know. Sometimes raising a kid, there's a back and forth of responsibility that takes place between the parents and a lot of unhappiness about that tug of war. But truly the unspoken deal in families is that all parents essentially only get to borrow their children for a number of years and then finally they have to return them so that the children can live their own lives. You find your children only to worry about losing them. But in the end, maybe the Lost and found that involves parents and children and is more like the slot outside a library where you slip in the books when you're done and soon enough someone else gets to borrow them. When we return, a first love and we hear from a lively book club. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You're listening to Selected Shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back. This is Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. On today's show, we're talking about Things Lost and Things Found. Our second work, Camp Emmeline, is by Taryn Bowe, who's published in Epoch and Joyland, among other journals. This story was selected for Best American short stories 2023 by guest editor Min Jin Lee. Camp Emmeline has a vibrant narrative voice that is at once emotionally gauche and perceptive. It's a rite of passage story, and it's made tougher by a loss. But its resilient heroine, Pretty, literally learns to paddle her own canoe. Reading Camp Emmeline is the incomparable Edie Falco. She's an actress with a rich portfolio of iconic roles on television series such as such as the Sopranos and Nurse Jackie, and on Broadway in plays including the House of Blue Leaves. And Stay tuned after the reading for highlights from a book club discussion of the story.
- [19:25]
Libby (Narrator of Camp Emmeline story)
Camp Emeline Lake chandelier was midnight blue, vibrating with motorboats and pontoons, snapping turtles and beavers ringed by towering pines and rocky hills. The water shimmered back. The sky stretched out. The clouds sometimes dwarfed the trees. When the settlement money came in, my dad handed me a hundred dollar bill. I was supposed to use it for something special. Special, he said. The last three years had been chock full of slick lawyers, collection calls, outstanding medical bills triggering fresh parental breakdowns. By the time we arrived at the camp on the lake, I'd already spent my windfall on 12 bottles of Busch Light. Mr. Morosi sold to underage kids, but he jacked up the price. My brother Eli had spent his settlement money on an acoustic guitar he'd never played. It's hard to know what to do with death cash. Our younger sister, Emeline had suffered from spina bifida. She needed a shunt in her head so her brain didn't swell. If her doctors had diagnosed her clogged shunt problem, she would have been 11. But since they missed it, she died two months before her eighth birthday. My parents had spent the last three years waging war against Shriners Hospital for Children in Springfield. A lifetime of court dates later, we were $2 million richer. The owners of a camp on a lake my parents intended to transform into a summer haven for sick kids when we arrived that May, having sold our home in Agawam, seven of the camp's 10 cabins were infested with forest mice. A downed tree had ripped a hole through the mess hall's roof. Nothing about the camp was wheelchair friendly. The girls bathhouse sat on a raised concrete platform accessed by rickety stairs. The cabin doors were narrow. There were only slim spaces to maneuver between wobbly bunks. The path to the swimming beach was riddled with roots and rocks. Poison ivy was rampant. Even weeks before the hottest, longest days of summer, the mosquitoes were scrappy and out for blood. That first night my dad drove the van back into Meredith to buy flashlights and batteries. My mom sat in an army cot in the corner of the cabin, flicking pistachio shells into a bowl. She was someone I no longer knew, either a juggernaut of ferocious energy or a defeated sunken ship. I missed the in betweens, giggling, singing Joni Mitchell, licking batter from wooden spoons. I made my mom sadder. I think I was the daughter who'd survived. But look what I was doing with my life. Months before, a friend had snitched to a teacher that I'd jerk off any loser for 25 bucks. Principal had called my mom. I'd gotten suspended. My mom couldn't look at me for more than three seconds without turning her face. I left the cabin, walked into the cool blue night. A giant lawn sloped down to an athletic field flanked by basketball rims, a fenced in tennis court teeming with weeds. Beyond the court, pines rose, blocking my view of the pebbled beach. The lake was a black slash on the horizon. Without campers, the camp was a ghost town. I could hear loons wailing. I'm here, they seemed to say. But where are you? The next morning Eli and I set off to case the property. In the woods I found a rotted rowboat, a three legged bench, a torn screen door. Under a mound of balled up plastic, Eli found a creepy marionette dangling from a bush, an unstrung tennis rack at a pair of wooden stilts. We dragged our finds down to the swim beach and threw them on top of the heaped up brush and snapped off tree limbs we planned to burn later that night. Branches in the water needed to be dredged out. The water was freezing, smelled like bullfrogs. I stripped down to my underwear and T shirt, waded in, closed my eyes, went under, patting the muck at the bottom for sharp rocks and twigs. I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, and for a second as I crouched low, I couldn't stop shuddering with the certainty that when I resurfaced, nothing and nobody I cared about would be there. When I emerged, Eli was talking to a guy who looked like he'd stepped off a Nature Channel documentary about leaving civilization to run wild in the woods with bears. His hair was chin length. His beard was speckled with flakes of leaves. I wondered when he'd last glanced in a mirror or washed his clothes. He said he was the camp's sole employee, part of the package my parents had purchased. That's my place. He pointed to a small shack leaning over the narrow path that wound back to the mess hall. I grabbed my pants and sweatshirt from a rock and pulled them over my sopping underwear and shirt. So you're like a hermit, I said. More like a landscaper, he said. Can you buy us beer? No car? No car wasn't a problem, I said. Eli can take you in our dad's van. That evening, three of us drank at the beach as crickets shrieked and a new moon rose. None of us talked. Eli had doused our foraged branches with gasoline. I had dropped the match to ignite the blaze. Now we sat balanced atop logs as the fire tore at the air and drove off the insects zigzagging around us. I stared at the fire's edges, trying to see things that weren't there. Before we'd come to the lake, I'd had this dumb idea that it would be easier to spot signs sent by Emmeline in nature. In the wild there were more messengers. Moths, dragonflies, pockets of cool air, blankets of mist. Off in the distance I heard a woodpecker drilling into a tree. I didn't think Emmeline would send a woodpecker. I was waiting for something brilliant. After a while, I went for my third beer. Isn't it weird, I said, for a grown man to come with a camp? Like an indentured servant, Lawn Boy cracked open a new can. So who's Emmaline? He asked. Her name was already painted on the large green sign at the end of the road. Our father's first act of improvement. Our dead sister, eli said. I said, now your turn. Tell us your story. Your real story. Come on, Libs, eli said. It's late. Where are your people? What did you do to them? I said, it was great to be drunk, say whatever I wanted to not give a shit about who I hurt. Lawn Boy sunk into his seat. Eli got up, grabbed an empty, filled it with lake water, and dumped it on the fire. He patted my shoulder. In my mind, the trees began to fall like dominoes. When I tried to stand, my knees gave out. The second time I tried, Lawn Boy grabbed my elbow. The three of us staggered up the path to the cabins. I thought I might vomit, but instead I crashed into Lawn Boy's chest. You heard about our money, I said. Didn't you? You are here to rob us. Hey, now, whoa. He held me away. Don't ruin a nice night. What was nice about it? Your beer was shitty. I want my money back. I'll take her, eli said. Eli slung an arm around my shoulder. He helped me up the hill. At the bathhouse, he steered me into the girls section, where he cupped his hands beneath a faucet and caught a small pool of water for me to drink in. The morning mist rose off the lake. My headache required five aspirin. It was June 1st. We had less than a month to get the grounds ready before the first campers arrived. Saws whirred constantly. Lawn Boy rode a mower over the great lawn and across the fields. Eli raked bags of clay over the tennis court tamping the clay with his feet so it settled flat. I swept the cabins, checked the mattresses for mice and fleas. My mom spent long hours with the insurance broker in Meredith, figuring out how to cover our asses against people like us who like to sue. My dad planted something of Emmeline's in every cabin, the Red rabbit stuffy she had rubbed, furless, a nubby yellow blanket now no more than a tangle of fuzz and string. Eli and I joked that the cabins might be mucked up with pine needles and squirrel shit, but at least each one had a freaky shrine to a small dead girl. Let's get that in the brochure, I said in my mother's taskmaster voice. Front and center, eli said. At night I heard my parents tossing one of them, tiptoeing to the common area cot that served as a bed or a couch, depending on the hour. I walked out of our cabin to the hill that overlooked the lake. The moon was small, but the lake reflected it back, bigger and brighter. I looked for the slant of Lawn Boy's roof hidden beneath layers of tree cover. I wanted to ask him if he'd ever made himself into a monster to survive a monstrous thing. What was the worst thing he'd ever seen, the worst thing he'd ever done? Had he ever held another person while they were dying? Come out, I thought. Please come out. I stared at the trees overhanging his shed. Didn't work. All the wanting in the world couldn't make someone materialize. My parents mobilized a ragtag army of locals to get Camp Emmeline into tip top shape. Angus, the cook who lived in the double wide down the road, stocked the cabinets with carbs and condiments. Ursula, head of housekeeping, bleached the shower curtains, unclogged the drains. Mr. Orlov, the stiff, stuffy private school teacher who summered next door, interviewed high school and college students, students for junior and senior counselor positions. Soon Reed Tupperman moved into Cabin F. He was a rising junior at the All Boys Catholic Prep School in Center Harbor. A diabetic golfer, he was a real life role model for chronically sick kids. One morning I found him slashing away at the raised roots that mangled the path to the water. His shirt hung on a nearby branch. His skin was damp. Tiny insects flecked his shoulders. I'm Libby, I said. He reminded me of the B List boys I'd messed around with in Agawam. Unexceptionally athletic, marginally cute boys desperate enough for physical contact with a girl their age. They were cool with a little shove here, a bite there, a flash of rage and roughness or no interaction at all. A floppy body on a couch, depending on the night. I told Reid Tupperman about our nightly shindigs at the beach. If you give the long guy money, he'll buy you beer. No added cost. A mosquito landed on his neck when he swatted at the wrong side. I said, no, no there. He brushed the tips of my fingers against his slick and sun baked skin. I waited for him to say something about Emmeline. Every night our camp family, as my parents called them, gathered before plates of swollen spaghetti or shaken baked chicken while my dad said Emmeline's name in a brief pair for strength to install the newt bodak, or for guidance to find a crackerjack camp nurse. Sometimes he wept as if we weren't among strangers and I wanted to crawl into my food and die. There's another one. I pointed to a mosquito on Reed's temple. He smushed it against his scalp, leaving behind a bubble of blood. That night the four of us, Eli, Lawn Boy, myself, and Reed drank on the beach beside the fire. Smoke spilled over us, seeping into our hair and clothes. Eli picked a bug bite on his chin. I told him, stop picking it, to let it be. I'd found a letter from Peter Traylor, Agawam's varsity soccer goalie, under his pillow that day. It said, I'm not a cocksucker like you. Let's burn it, I'd said about the letter. Now it was already gone. I wish I'd said more. I wish I'd said I knew who he was and it was fine. I would chew up and spit out the heart of anyone who gave him shit about it. Lawn Boy drank with his head tipped back, his eyes in the trees. Reid asked if we were always this quiet and boring. Pretty much, eli said. Reid took another slug of beer and stood unzipping his pants, pushing them down to his ankles. He wore what looked like swim trunks underneath shiny fabric with aquamarine dolphins. When he turned away towards the trees, fuzzy blond hairs glistened along one of his calves. The other leg was plastic. Reed's natural leg, the flesh one, was covered by the most ludicrous tattoo I had ever seen. Two huge brown eyes, a snout, that dumb fawn Bambi. What the fuck? Eli asked. Got ink to make a girl smile, reed said. Ask me where she is now. He pulled his pants back up and buttoned them. You guessed it, geniuses. Not with me. Lawn Boy laughed For the first time since I'd met him, Eli got up and threw another log on the fire. I stood and made my way out to the boat dock. The dock was narrow and aluminum. It gleamed on the lake like a silver tee. At the end I sat and slipped out of my sandals, dipped my toes into the water. Lawn Boy walked out on the dock and sat about a foot away from me. He smelled of beer and wood smoke. Next time you get wasted and want to take advantage of some cute boy, he said, try him. He gestured back to Read. I kicked at the water. You're not a cute boy. You're like a middle aged man. I'm 24, he said. A firecracker whistled across the lake. He jumped five inches. I said I was a bitch the other night. Is that an apology? Maybe, he said. When life gives you lemons, you get to be an asshole. Is that how it goes? I asked. Who knows how it goes? He said. I turned to Lawn Boy. Sometimes he looked lost, but other times, in a certain darkness, I sensed he could see through all my bullshit to the truest part of me. The next night the mist sank low. Rain pelted the pines above us, and Reid stood and yelled, who's swimming? Eli went after him. They both plunged in. It was good to see my brother letting loose. Within seconds his hands were on Reed's shoulders, pushing him under. Strange night, Lawn Boy said to me, wiping moisture from his cheek. You going in? I asked. Nah. He wanted to take out a canoe. I followed him to the boat rack, where we slid a canoe off the shelf. We carried it down to the water. I sat in the front and Lawn Boy settled in the back and pushed off. I was such a bad paddler my strokes made it harder for him to steer, so we agreed to take turns somewhere in the dark middle of the lake where we could hear the loons wailing. Lawn Boy said, everything okay with your parents? I said, probably not. It's like we're all ghosts and she's the one who's still here. Yeah, he said, as if he'd already drawn the same conclusion. I heard a fish leap out of the water. I tried to spot it. Moving flashes of silver, shimmers of green. I waited for Lawn Boy to tell me something, to explain why he was here on a canoe at a camp on a lake in the middle of nowhere. I didn't think he was a landscaper when we'd arrived. Nothing about the camp's ground seemed cared for or maintained. Maybe he'd simply needed a place to stay. Stop to rest, to figure out where to go and how to get there. This didn't sound so strange to me. I asked about his family. A half sister, he said. I told him about Emmeline, how something was always wrong with her. If it wasn't her allergies, it was her stomach. If it wasn't her stomach, it was her joints. Sometimes her lungs or vision petered out. She got horrible headaches, saw things that weren't real. I always crawled into bed when she was frightened. I still don't know how to sleep without her warmth. Are you still there? I asked him. Still here, he said. His oar dipped into the water and the boat slid backward. Do you know where we are? I asked. Somewhere off Hawk's Nest Beach, I said. That's good. We haven't drifted into Canada. The canoe nudged something wooden along the lake's west edge. The trees grew slant wise, their trunks emerging from the gold brown water like the hulls of sunken ships. I said, my parents filed this crazy lawsuit. There was a bump on her head that got infected. She showed it to me and I felt it and then forgot it. The next day she was in the icu. Maybe they should have sued me for, like, negligence or manslaughter or whatever the fuck. I don't think so, he said. You live long enough, you learn that for every person that's ever died there's a story about how they didn't have to. All the people I've lost, he said. Someone should have been able to save couldn't. Pills, then. Other stuff. Nothing to do but watch and wait. I stared at my fingers coiled around the oars grip. It felt like we were entering a new body of water, an atmosphere of horrible truths. I wanted to reach back and pat his knee, but I didn't want to tip us. I didn't know how to flip a boat upright if we capsized and needed to turn it over to get back in. I haven't figured out how to make myself strong again, I said. He said, me neither. It wasn't long before I heard splashing and my brother's laugh. Up ahead. Eli sprinted down the metal dock and cannonballed into the lake. Lawn Boy had steered us back to shore. How long had we been out there? I didn't know. It was like we'd never left. If only I'd known no one was missing us, I would have stayed gone longer. Shortly after our night in the canoe, Lawn Boy came down with a migraine that lasted several days. On the first day he drove the mower into a tree. My mother ordered him to rest. I checked on him hourly, trying not to be too obvious. A single window offered a glimpse into his shed, passing. I stalled there, watching the outline of his sleeping body until his chest rose and fell, until his shoulders twitched. On the third day I lifted the handle and opened his door. His shed smelled like a barn, trapped creature, heat and no fresh air. A belt hung from a nail, and I found a gray towel tossed over a chair and used it to dab his forehead. For a while I sat on the hard floor beside his pillow, counting his breaths, staring at his things, his watch with its broken minute hand, a stick of deodorant, a metal spoon. Once he cried out, and I pressed my fingers to his whiskers, damp with sweat. I wondered if he was here to raid the infirmary for drugs once the sick kids came. Well, good for him. None of this took away from the fact that he had made me feel less alone, that he had seen my ugliness and wasn't repulsed by it. I didn't want to leave him. I wanted to crawl into his bed and cling on tight. But the campers were coming in five days. I had things to do that night. Lawn Boy didn't come to the fire. I mentioned a sore throat, said good night. Early hit the path back up the hill. Soon I was on the part of the trail that was too far from the beach to catch the boathouse lights, too far from the mess hall to catch the glow of the orange lamps. A pale streak flashed through the brush in front of me. I rushed to follow it as it sliced between trees. It stopped at the private beach, where a tree stretched over the lake's edge, shielding the shore from public view. At first I didn't recognize my mother naked except for a towel wrapped over her breasts. Her hair ran over her shoulders. She wandered out to the water. She had a beautiful back, straight and proud, without scars or birthmarks. I'd forgotten this. When she crouched down, the water wet the ends of her hair. I longed to go to her, swim to her in only the skin I was born in. But there was no going back. This was something no one told you. In a family you didn't lose one person. You lost one person and everyone changed. My mother went under. Ripples radiated from the spot where her head had been. I wanted to touch that spot, submerge my fingers. Maybe the water carried her electricity. Maybe in this small way we could still connect. I couldn't bear for her to see my spying. I dug my fingernails into a tree. When my mother resurfaced, her hair glistened in the moonlight. I wondered if she was waiting for a sign from Emmeline, too. On the night the counselors arrived, Angus the cook served a banquet of chicken patties felt like an invasion. All through the meal I looked at Lawn Boy, noticing the way his beard and face changed shape in response to small talk. He didn't join in. Halfway through, he got up and disappeared. When he came back, he whispered, libs, I got you Kahlua for our last bonfire. Around nine, it began to pour. Plan B was the boathouse. There we gathered as rain lashed the trees. We were all sopping wet. I dug through the plastic Quick Mart bags until I found the four pack of pre mixed Kahlua cocktails Lawn Boy had bought me. Reid unearthed a funnel from a backpack and showed Eli how to raise the cone part high to make the beer gush down his throat. We talked about people we knew who'd gotten their stomachs pumped in high school. Lawn Boy walked to the sliding door. It was open and you could edge right up to a wall of falling water, break in with your nose while the rest of you stayed dry. I reached up and touched Lawn Boy's chin. After dinner he'd shaved his whiskers, I said, so soft. You're drunk, he said. Not quite. Your eyes are bloodshot. I admitted I'd cried a bit on the way over. I was happy and afraid of happiness ending. He said he wished it weren't raining. He'd take me out on the lake. We could go anyway. We could, he said. But we didn't. I took his hand and looked again at his raised, raw cheeks. Do you want to go somewhere else? I asked. When I glanced back over my shoulder, Reed was kneeling on the floor with the hose of the funnel in his mouth while Eli poured beer into the funnel's opening. And leave these monkeys? Lawn Boy said. I counted aloud, and when I hit three, I leapt through the wall of water. In seconds I was drenched, but he was behind me. A few minutes later we spilled into his shed. We sat on the floor. He reached under his pillow, pulled out a bottle, and passed it to me. At some point I leaned against him and he looped an arm around my shoulder. I curled into his chest. You still awake? I asked after a while, and he said, still awake. I shifted closer because the floor was hard and I was uncomfortable. The rhythm of the rain on the roof slowed down. He wrapped his arms around me tighter. We were still soaked, and when I started to shiver, he Grabbed a blanket off his bed, and he spread it around us. It smelled like hay. His chin rested against the top of my head. Listen, he said. It stopped. I did. And it had. The rain. One of the loons wailed. I waited for another to call back. That's why they cried like that, I'd read. To find a mate. Or sometimes, if their calls were short and clipped, to locate family, to check if they were out there, still alive. The bed was beside us, and I wondered why we weren't on it, why we had chosen the hard floor. I put my hand on his chest, where I could feel his heartbeat. And then, because I couldn't help it, I moved my hand under his T shirt, over his sunken belly and the ridges of his ribs. I don't know how long we touched for. At one point, our cheeks pressed together and my nose grazed his ear. But we didn't kiss and we kept our clothes on. I said his name, his real name, and he said, shh, shh. You don't have to say anything. We can just sit here a while longer. A few minutes later, a knock rattled the door from the other side. Eli shouted, we're taking out the motorboat. Come on. Don't crash. I yelled. Be safe. Eli shouted back. You be safe too. Soon Eli was gone. I waited for lawn boy to lift me up to his bed, cover me with his body. I thought of telling him I'd had experiences, lots of them, even though thinking of them now, the shallowness, the numbness, made me feel sick. He patted my head, and when he was done, his hand touched my face and I thought I might cry. But also I felt stronger than before. I'd come here, to this ghost camp, to his little shed. God, Libs, he said, I don't want to hurt you. You're young and I've already hurt a lot of people. I mean, I have a daughter. I've never even seen her. I am just barely hanging on. Me too. No, listen. You're going to make it. Your brother adores you. You're going to find out how to be strong again. I promise. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to walk you back to your cabin and I'm going to say goodnight and walk away. I watched his back, even more beautiful than my mother's. He didn't try to lift his shoulders or straighten his spine. He didn't try to pretend. For the benefit of other people, he was all healed. I stayed on the steps of our cabin until Eli got back from the boat, soaked and shivering. I found him a towel. He said I would never believe what they'd seen. A pair of electric eels in fresh fucking water, he said. Neon green. He asked if Lawn Boy had been gentle with me, and I said yes. Then he went inside and I went back to dreaming. Maybe someday something would happen between us. Maybe I'd beat his daughter. Maybe we'd fall asleep and wake up brand new. People could recover from things, couldn't they? Didn't they? When the sky began to brighten, I drifted off for a couple more hours, but it wasn't long before cars began to clog the great lawn. Minivans with lifts for wheelchairs, big and bulky SUVs. I showered and dressed and went to the top of the hill, where Reed sat at a table with a clipboard, checking folks in. Eli hopped from vehicle to vehicle, helping families haul trunks to the cabins where their kids would stay. My dad, dressed in a reflector vest, stood at the top of the hill, directing traffic. I looked everywhere for Lawn Boy, along the periphery where he often whacked weeds, on the mess hall steps where he lingered, drinking coffee.
- [47:57]
Lisa
Libby.
- [47:58]
Libby (Narrator of Camp Emmeline story)
My mom shouted. Meet Alexis. She loves friendship bracelets. Her favorite camp food is marshmallows. Beside my mother, a four eyed girl squinted in the sun. All these young, expectant faces. Echoes of Emmeline everywhere. My mom looked at me, but she saw someone else, someone I had stopped being ages ago. I ran to his shed, even though I already knew he'd cleaned it out. I lay on his cot and sniffed for his smell. When I found it, my stomach turned. I cried into his mattress and thought of illnesses I could tell the campers I had so they'd stay away. Pink eye. Norovirus. Strep throat. Meningitis. Outside, my mother called my name.
- [48:48]
Crystal Dickinson (Narrator of Light story)
Libby. Get out here.
- [48:51]
Libby (Narrator of Camp Emmeline story)
There were parents and children she needed me to meet. I wanted to hide inside his shed for the rest of the summer. In sedans in Subarus, the campers kept coming.
- [49:14]
Meg Wolitzer
Edie Falco performed Taryn Bow's Camp Emmeline. I'm Meg Wolitzer. When I joined the shorts team, I mentioned that I thought it would be fun if we partnered with a book club, and I got my wish. Rita Wolf is a longtime friend of the series and a regular selected Shorts reader, but she's also a reader of a different stripe. She and her daughter, Angeli, are part of a Mother Daughter book club. They were kind enough to curate a special shorts evening where we discussed several stories that we wanted to share with this new appreciative Group of readers. Camp Emeline was one of them. Here's a bit of our conversation.
- [49:52]
Rita Wolf
I'm a mother in the mother daughter group. One of the moms, Rita Wolf, we've been together for a while now at full strength, we're 10. I am Anjali's mother. Anjali is now in a different time zone, but she is one of the daughters who've known each other since they were five and they're now 27.
- [50:14]
Beth
I'm Beth. My daughter is Rebecca.
- [50:16]
Lisa
I'm Lisa. My daughter is Miranda.
- [50:19]
Miranda
My name is Miranda and I'm zooming in right now because I have a cold.
- [50:23]
Tricia Dorf
My name's Tricia Dorf.
- [50:24]
Claire
I am Claire's mom and my name is Claire. I am the daughter of Trish.
- [50:30]
Rita Wolf
And we made a decision when the girls had gone through middle school together and then all went off to different high schools to stay together as a group. We are all readers. We established that quite early. Anyone in a book would say one of the fantastic things about it is you read things that you would never have read before.
- [50:50]
Beth
I think it's also created lasting friendships across these generations that I don't think we would have necessarily had any other way.
- [50:57]
Meg Wolitzer
I have to say that I'm the mother of sons and I'm really jealous. Mother, daughter, it's a thing.
- [51:01]
Claire
I mean,
- [51:04]
Meg Wolitzer
I'm very, very close to my mother, who's a writer. And if there were book clubs back when I was growing up, we would have 100% been in one. So start the way that you would. I'm just an interloper here.
- [51:13]
Tricia Dorf
I thought this story was actually pretty amazing. For me, it was a story about grief and how people deal with it differently. I thought the author really did a wonderful job of going through the trajectory of this young girl who loses her sister and the effect that that death has on all of the family. You know, it's just not one death. It's a death of almost everyone. They've all been altered by that and they just don't know how to relate. And they all have different ways of doing that.
- [51:43]
Lisa
I thought it was about grief, but I didn't necessarily think it was just about the grief of losing this child. I thought this was a child who had spina bifida, so was sick for a very long time, or at least, you know, struggled. And so I thought the family was coping not just with her death, but with her life as well and all the things that go along with that. When you have other children who get neglected maybe, or who are so Affected and probably have parents who are so busy taking care of the sick one that they're not, you know, as vigilant or as generous with their time. And so this girl was in crisis. And one of the things I really loved about this story was that it told you things without telling you things.
- [52:26]
Meg Wolitzer
Like one in particular.
- [52:28]
Lisa
Oh, you know, the whole. The whole idea that Eli, her brother, was gay, like, that gets revealed to you in a kind of a subtextual way.
- [52:36]
Claire
So subtle. I felt that was on purpose. And like, this is. I think what you kind of said at the beginning, which is like an aspect of grief, is that no one is the same afterwards. And I thought that part where it was very subtle about her brother being gay, and then the part with her mom in the lake. And at that point, you don't even really quite know why she's in the lake, but you can understand that there's, like, this world going on in her head. That is why she's there, and you just can't have access to it. And I felt like those were two moments for the main character where it was like, I am feeling this way, but I can't even touch these people around me. There's a part where she says, in this short story, it's like we're all ghosts, and she's the one who's still here. And it feels that way. Like the characters that are not her family are more realistic and more touchable than the characters who are her family, who kind of float around like ghosts in the story a bit.
- [53:31]
Tricia Dorf
Yeah. I mean, speaking to the point of. You know, how it's so. What you were saying, Lisa, about it, it's just so subtle when she sees the letter from the guy under the pillow and she says, I wish I had said more. Wish I had said I knew who he was. And it was fine. And I was sitting there when I first read it. You know, this is why reading something and reading it over. Sometimes I read that and then kind of let go. And then I went back and I was like. And I have in my notes, bullied, gay.
- [53:58]
Rita Wolf
And.
- [53:58]
Crystal Dickinson (Narrator of Light story)
Yeah, because, you know.
- [54:01]
Meg Wolitzer
But it's so subtle.
- [54:02]
Tricia Dorf
Like, if you were reading this at a certain age, you might not. You might miss that.
- [54:05]
Beth
Well, the sister and the brother are actually giving each other a lot of support in a kind of a sort of a subtle way. Like, it's not really spelled out. The parents have sort of taken on this project almost deserting their remaining children, just assuming that they'll come along for the ride and not really Thinking about their lives in the same way. And so I feel like this brother and sister are helping each other get through this, even though the sister is sort of a mess. I think you have the feeling by the end of the story that she will pull through, that she'll find a way forward after all of this.
- [54:37]
Meg Wolitzer
I do, too, but I'm curious.
- [54:39]
Libby (Narrator of Camp Emmeline story)
Like, we're all.
- [54:40]
Meg Wolitzer
We have a consensus about that, but why? What is it?
- [54:43]
Claire
She meets Lawn Boy, who has no name.
- [54:47]
Libby (Narrator of Camp Emmeline story)
And as she says, she does know
- [54:50]
Claire
his name, but she says she's going to say his name. Doesn't say his name. Yes. And then after she tells him about that part where she's like, I saw this bump and I didn't do anything. She says, like, he'd seen my ugliness and wasn't repulsed by it. And I think in that moment, even though they don't end up together and they probably shouldn't, and that's okay, I think she gets this sense that, like, I am not a monster.
- [55:16]
Miranda
I wanted to say, too, I think that, like, once it became clear that there was a connection between her and Lawn Boy, I was like, oh, my God, like, this 20 something guy is gonna make this even worse. He's gonna hook up with her, and it's gonna be this really, like, I was just. I was kind of on, like, pins and needles the whole time. And then when he didn't do anything with her, even though she presented it to him, like, it would have been very easy, that was, I think, the very hopeful thing to me was that because it could have gone a very different way, and she could have gone a very different route, had, like, an older person, like, taken advantage of how vulnerable she was, and he didn't. And I think there's this sense that, like, moving forward, hopefully she'll just, like, carry a certain, like Beth said, a certain amount of respect and, like, standard for how to be treated.
- [56:00]
Rita Wolf
I really liked all the peripherals around it. My son and my daughter both went to a summer camp, and it was in Maine, as this one is. And I loved all the details of the camp, actually. I loved the setup. And then at the very end, you get the reality of the thing that they'd created. And then the children arrive, and then to me, there was such optimism and such. It felt absolutely like the first day of a summer camp. And, you know, some people have talked about how it's a hopeful ending. It absolutely is, because there's no way that our protagonist is not going to show up for these kids.
- [56:39]
Lisa
You asked about why it was hopeful. I think Rita said it. It ends with a beginning, and it ends with this beginning that feels the way it was written to be a bright beginning.
- [56:51]
Meg Wolitzer
That was an excerpt from a book club discussing Taran Bow's Camp Emmeline Well, I have to say right away that I am a summer camp person, so I was drawn to the premise here. And summer camp has meant so much to me that I even wrote a book about it called the Interestings. And I love that the actual Camp Emmeline only opens at the end of the story. For most of the time it's an idea of a camp and Emmeline herself is an idea of a person because we never get to see her except in the barest of flashbacks. You could say this story is about that intense period of time right before something new is about to start, which is a good way to describe what might eventually happen after a deep loss, and also a good way to describe being a teenager. In the two stories on this show, we hear different aspects of what it is to lose someone and what is returned to us or found in exchange. In the first, not only an actual daughter but but the person she might become seems to disappear and we are left with an emotional cliffhanger. In the second, a missing child is made powerfully present in the lives of those she left behind, and the narrator must create her own sense of self around the hollow in her life. And in both stories we learn that loss is only a stage. What matters is what happens next in lives that have to be reshaped. I've always felt that the act of writing is an optimistic one. Explaining something is a kind of reclaiming. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for joining me for Selected Shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimkin, Vivianne Woodward, and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in Los Angeles, are recorded by Phil Richards. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the Deal, performed by the Deardorf Petersen Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space.