Summer camp. Her name’s Valerie. She’s going with someone for about six weeks, breaks up, smiles at him a couple of times while they’re in a group and other kids are talking, so he thinks he has a chance. She’s short, blond, pretty, a great all-around athlete, doesn’t talk much, he’s pretty shy himself. He and his bunkmates sneak out of their cabin after taps and go to her cabin. He sits at the end of her bed and looks away to his friends mostly, most sitting on other girls’ beds, she mostly looking at her friends lying in their beds, then when his bunkmates think it’s time to sneak back, he moves a little closer, bends over and kisses her. “Would you like to sit together at the movie tomorrow night?” he says. “If they let us.” Next night when the lights in the social hall go out for the movie, he sneaks over to her, she makes room on the bench and they hold hands and for a while he has his arm around her and she leans her head on his shoulder. They dance at the next social almost only with each other, at the lake when all the seniors have an evening cookout they toast marshmallows and roast franks and potatoes and snuggle under a blanket he brought down and kiss a few times under it, kiss at the farewell social when someone shuts all the lights off for about fifteen seconds and yells “All the couples on the dance floor, kiss,” and last day at camp he goes to her cabin, she’s dressed for the city, has stockings and flat shoes on, the stockings are too big or she’s not wearing them right, so her legs look funny, her dress is heavy and looks as if it’s for the winter, they walk a little ways while holding hands, he looks around, no one’s looking, and he kisses her and asks if he can have her phone number in the city, he’ll call in the next few weeks and come out to Williamsburg where she lives. She says “I’d love for you to, but don’t call on the sabbath; that’s when we don’t answer the phone.” He sees her at the bus station in New York a few hours later; she’s with her parents, he’s with his mother and brother, and he waves to her. “Who’s that?” his mother says. “His girlfriend,” his brother says. “Last two weeks of camp they were always together. His first girlfriend and he’s already getting married.” “That true?” his mother says. “You’re too young. Wait a couple more years.” He worries about calling her. What will they do in Williamsburg? What will they talk about a whole afternoon with none of their friends around? Will he have enough money for a date? Suppose she wants to go to a movie in one of the fancier downtown Brooklyn theaters and maybe take a cab there or back and then sandwiches and sodas after in a place he can’t afford? The cab he’ll say no to because he likes going by subway or trolley or whatever they have out there, but he doubts he can say no to the rest. Was she as pretty as he remembers? She looked silly in her city clothes that last day and she might even be in dressier clothes and high heels when he sees her. And he doesn’t have any good clothes. His brother’s are too big unless he rolls up the sleeves of the shirt and doesn’t button the top button and makes the tie with a fat knot, but the rest he doesn’t have any of his own, not even shoes where the leather isn’t cracked. He gets an after-school job, saves up enough in a month to buy a sport jacket and for a date, tries his brother’s pants on and finds he can wear them if he pulls them up very high and belts it tight but also uses suspenders, calls her, she says she thought he’d call sooner, he says he wanted to but was very busy with school and work. “Oh, I suppose I could have called you, but I was told by everyone not to. If he wants to call, he will, and if he doesn’t, he won’t, they all said.” “Who told you that?” and she says “Friends, one who’s been dating someone for a long time, and my mother.” “You spoke to your mother about me?” “Only that I met this nice Jewish boy at camp, one who wasn’t religious or anything but was smart and polite and he may come see me.” He says that’s what he called about, if it’s still all right, and she says she’d love to and gets her father to give him subway directions. The father gets on and says “So where you live, kid? If it’s all the way out in the Bronx, it’s too far to come here, no matter how wonderful my wonderful daughter is.” When she gets back on he says “I don’t think your father likes me,” and she says “Don’t be silly, he has no opinion of you, see you Sunday.” He worries about it all week. She’s too sweet. She’ll say sweet things all the time and how happy she is he came to see her and like that and it’ll be the dullest afternoon of his life. It might get very warm that day and the clothes he has to wear are flannel and heavy wool and he’ll be burning up all the time. He’ll be too shy to say anything, and she could be too shy also, and he doesn’t want to meet her folks, have to sit with them awhile before he and Valerie can go out. She lives too far away. Maybe that most of all. Suppose he gets to like her, what then? He’ll have to go to Williamsburg every time. In the spring it won’t be so bad, since they can go to Coney Island and Rockaway from there, but now he’ll be missing seeing his friends in the city one day every weekend, and if he has to go back and forth twice in one day if he wants her to be with his friends there, half the time of the date will be spent on the train. He wants to call it off but doesn’t know how to. Maybe he could just not show up, then send a letter as an excuse, that he got sick, too sick to call, with laryngitis and bronchitis plus some other throat and chest problems. But then she’ll think why didn’t he get someone like one of his parents to call for him if he couldn’t talk himself? and if they both go back to the same camp next summer as CITs or camper-waiters, everyone there will think he was a liar and rat. Maybe his brother could call for him and say he’s very sick. But his brother says that wouldn’t be the right thing for either of them to do. “If you want to break the date, call her and say you’re very sorry but you have to work at your job that Sunday and that you’ll call her again soon for another date.” “Suppose she says why don’t we make a date now for the next Sunday?” and his brother says ‘Tell her your job’s the kind where it might make you work every weekend for the next month. If your boss doesn’t ask you to do that, which you’ll know in a few days, you’ll call her, and after that you don’t have to call her and she’ll gradually get the message or just not think of you anymore.” Calls, says what his brother told him to, she says “I was really looking forward to it, I had so many interesting things to tell you, but I can understand. My father makes his workers work hard at their jobs too, and it’s also a long trip out here for you.” “The trip’s not it. And it’s not just the job but a ton of schoolwork to do. Reports, a big quiz at the start of the week, and because I’m working weekends, I have to study and do the reports at night.” “You ought to be an Orthodox Jew. Then you wouldn’t have to work and study for school for a whole day. I also have lots of schoolwork to do, but I was going to get it done tonight and tomorrow afternoon so I could have time with you. Well, call if you want to, and if you don’t call or don’t want to, or something, you won’t, I suppose. I think I got that right. It’s what some people told me to say if this ever happened.” “I know. You told me about it last time I called.” “Did I? Then you must think I’m very stupid. Anyway, if you don’t call, I won’t be calling you,” and she hangs up. He feels lousy. He made her sad, disappointed her, he could tell by her voice at the end; she might even have gone out and got special clothes for the date. And she was so nice about it. Didn’t blame him, just accepted it. Maybe he should call her right back and say he just called his boss and told him he can’t work this weekend, or can, but only Saturday. Even if he did call her right back he doesn’t think she’d see him this Sunday or make a date with him anytime soon. Too sad and disappointed. He doesn’t really know what she’d do if he called now, but it was probably the best thing not going out there, and she’ll get over it soon. At least it was final. He thinks of her a few times after that the next few weeks, and a couple of times that he should call her. He doesn’t know any other girls to go out with and she was so pretty and sweet and nice and, because she said she got such good grades in school, smart too, but doesn’t. Next June he crosses the East River by subway on his way to his aunt and cousins in Coney Island and says to his brother “That’s where Valerie, the girl I met last summer, lives; Williamsburg.” He thinks this is Williamsburg because he sees a lot of religious Jews in long beards and black clothes below the elevated station when they’re pulling in and also when her father gave him directions he said “You ever come out to Brooklyn before? If you did and same way by train, Williamsburg station’s the first one over the bridge.” She’s not at camp that summer and next June when he’s going to his aunt and cousins in Coney Island he looks for her in the street from the train windows, looks in the tenement windows the train passes in case by chance she’s in one. If he does see her in the street he’ll say to his brother “Go on without me; I’ll meet up with you there later,” and get off the train before the doors close and run down to say hello to her. Or if she’s in one of the windows, then off the train at the next stop and run or subway back to find her, or call her from a phone booth in Williamsburg. He remembers her last name and street; he could get her phone number. And the coincidence of seeing her from the train and surprise of just running up to her or calling her from a nearby booth would make up for any bad feelings she still might have for him after almost two years, or could. He thinks of her every time after that when he’s going to Coney Island by subway that way, but for some reason never when he’s coming back. Then when he’s around thirty the woman he’s living with says she heard of a good cheap dermatologist in Williamsburg who could take care of her skin problem for half the cost of her Manhattan doctor. Would he go out there with her, since she doesn’t know what kind of neighborhood it is? He doesn’t think of Valerie then but does when they get off the train and look around for the doctor’s street. “I once knew a girl here when I was fourteen or fifteen. Valerie Bubky. I wonder if she’s still living here.” “Hardly likely,” the woman says. “She’s probably married with children and long moved out, and her folks also, for look at this dump. I think we should forget the doctor, get back on the subway before we’re robbed, and call him when we get home that we’re canceling the appointment and that he should probably move away from here also before he gets killed. Why do people always talk about Williamsburg as if it’s someplace special? It’s a bleak shithole.” They go back to the subway and during the ride home he wonders what would have happened if he’d gone on that date with her. He bets he would have seen her the next Sunday also, that they would have started to talk more, liked each other’s company a lot and without needing other kids their age always around. And that Sunday with her would have been his first date. He forgets who his first date actually was. He might have seen her for a year, maybe years. Though her family was orthodox and she said she was too, he might have got her to let him pet her, in a few years to even make love with her. She could have been the first woman he had sex with, since he doubts he would have gone with his friends to prostitutes if he was dating her. He could have continued to see her in college, maybe even married her, had children with her. He could still be with her. She was so pretty and attentive and sweet, always with a smile when she saw him in camp, always glad to see him, and affectionate, a good kisser, and funny sometimes, he remembers — tickli