“We did,” the team’s captain said, “So I guess you have to. We can take it.”
“No, I want them to feel good and prideful about their camp and waiters and want to come back next summer. I’ll put it in words that won’t make it sound as bad as it was. That the opposing team — I won’t even give out its name — had the home-field advantage and a cheering squad of girls to pump it up. I know; I know. I shouldn’t be taking it so hard. Only a game, and so on, but I don’t like to lose. Okay, somebody’s got to. And even the great Babe himself struck out a thousand and one times in between belting Gargantuan home runs.”
He thought of the girl a lot afterwards, at least the first few years. And then once every third month or so, maybe, or even less: twice a year, right up till the time he met his wife. She was the only person this happened to with him. It wasn’t that she was the only girl he ever had a crush on. But for some reason her face and expressions and blond hair and way she wore it and even what she had on that day — the khaki shorts and a maroon T-shirt with her camp’s name on it and leather sandals — stuck in his mind. Well, maybe the same images, once they got there, just repeated themselves over and over. He thinks that’s how it usually goes.
His wife, who was eleven years younger than he, was several months pregnant with their first child when he told her about the girl. He’d kept it to himself that long — they’d been together for close to four years — because he thought she might find it a bit peculiar, his recalling for thirty years a girl he never met or talked or wrote to and who only gave him a couple of weak hand claps for having hit a triple and knocking in two runs and tying the score of an inter-camp softball game. And who didn’t smile at him once and never looked his way again in the less than two hours she sat in the stands, at least so far as he saw. What prompted him to finally mention her was a nine-by-twelve-inch framed photo of his wife in the living room of her parents’ apartment. The photo was taken the summer before she started college, which she did when she was sixteen and a few months. She looked in the photo so much like he remembered the girl looked at around the same age. Long blond hair, shape of her face, round cheeks, sort of almond-shaped eyes. The photo was always there, so lots of the times he saw it he thought of the girl. And one afternoon, as they were walking from her parents’ building to the bus stop on Broadway to get to their apartment uptown, he said “You feel okay?” and she said “Sure, why wouldn’t I?”
“We could take a cab if this is too much of a trudge for you,” and she said “It’s good exercise. And I don’t walk enough, which I should.”
“You know the photograph of you with your first cat that’s always on the side table to the right of your parents’ couch?”
“I look a little dumpy in it, don’t I. At least my skin’s clear, which it wasn’t always then, and Matilda looks so pretty and slim. I’d just brushed her.”
“You look beautiful in it. According to the photographs your folks have around the place, you were a beautiful baby and a beautiful toddler and a beautiful adolescent and teenager and now you’re an exceptionally beautiful woman in every way.”
“What are you getting at?” she said.
“I have to be getting at something? All right; I am. I never told you something. And what I’m about to say is going to be okay. Sometimes when I look at that photo I’m reminded of a very pretty girl I once saw at her summer camp when I was sixteen and she was around the same age. She was very mature looking. Didn’t act like the other girls she was with. Nothing loud or exaggerated about her. Quiet; self-contained, or so it seemed. Maybe she was even older than I. Maybe by a year. I never thought of that before. That sure would have stopped anything from happening, if it had ever come to that. Because I never met her — never even approached her, though I wanted to — but I also never forgot her. She looked like you in that photo. The blond hair. Long and light and combed back. The face; shape of it. Even the eyes.”
“So she also had my color eyes? They’re fairly unusual, though maybe not for a Jewish blond.”
“That’s true. Her camp was Jewish, like mine. But I never got close enough to her to see what color they were. I was talking about their shape. Even her long graceful neck — you know, swan-like, was like yours, and her cheeks. What I’m saying is I have no idea why I never forgot that face and what I described about it and the one glance and little smile she gave me — no, she didn’t smile. Not to me, anyway. She did clap at me — a little clap, twice, very fast, from the bleachers she was sitting in with these other girls while she was watching a softball game between the camper waiters of my camp in New Jersey and hers in Pennsylvania. I’d just hit a triple — a three-base hit — that I could have stretched into a home run if the camp director of my camp, who was coaching at third base, hadn’t stopped me. I guess, being fair-minded, she was saying ‘good show’ or something. But you’re not really interested. And I’m getting the details of that day all mixed up. And why am I telling you it? Maybe telling you is wrong.”
“Why? It’s all right. I like hearing about you when you were young. And telling me this could be you saying she set the standard for the type of woman you were physically attracted to later on.”
“It wasn’t just physical,” he said. “It was her expressions too. She seemed smart and sweet and poised and serene. Like you are today and probably were at her age. Sixteen; seventeen. And I’d think the standard must already have been set if I was that immediately attracted to her, which never happened like that with a girl before. Though you could be right. I’m not saying you’re not. Maybe it did all start with her.”
“Then let’s say it’s possible she confirmed, or reinforced, the type of woman you were attracted to from when you were even younger than sixteen, but in a big way. You liked blondes. From what you’ve previously told me of your love life, you always have, though that didn’t keep you from also liking brunettes. Would I be wrong in saying that most of the women you’ve fallen for in your adult life have been blondes?”
“About half; yes.”
“Was she built like me too? You know, from what you can make out from that photograph and the one in my high school twentieth-year reunion book I’ve shown you, where I’m on the field hockey team.”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “The body of a young woman wasn’t as important to me then as the body of an older woman became to me later on. If she had been a lot overweight, that would have been different. But she was lithe; trim. I remember her legs. She was wearing shorts. And a T-shirt, but I remember nothing about her breasts. I wanted to meet her. I thought of ways I could, but never got the chance. She left before the game was over. We lost, by the way. I even fantasized about going over to her during the game when my team was up. Or after the game, in the short time I’d have before the whole team had to get back on this old army truck to return to our camp. And introducing myself and somehow saying, without turning her off, that I had been looking at her and don’t have much time to talk and could I write her at her camp and possibly continue the correspondence after the camp season was over? We’d been told that most of the campers and staff in her camp — she was a C.I.T.—”
“What’s that again?” she said.
“Counselor in training. Almost everyone there was supposed to come from Philadelphia or somewhere in Pennsylvania.”
“What did you think would come from your letters to each other, if she had agreed to write you? If she lived in Pennsylvania and you were both sixteen—”
“I’d visit her,” he said. “Take a bus or train. It’s not that far away, Philadelphia, if that is where she lived. Pittsburgh would have been out. But for her, if it was Philadelphia or a place in Pennsylvania a lot easier to get to than Pittsburgh, to become my girlfriend. And maybe the next summer she’d be a C.I.T. again, or junior counselor, would be more like it, at the same camp, and I’d be a waiter again at mine. It’s possible, I might have thought, when I was thinking this girl and I would exchange letters and I’d go to Philadelphia or such to see her and maybe she could come once to New York, that we could coordinate our days off the next summer. That’s how far and fast I let my imagination take me. Or I’d try to be one of the two guest waiters at my camp, which was really what I was shooting for. You made a lot more money that way — no salary but much better tips — waiting on the visiting parents, and more days off.”