Free The Book of Knowledge by Doris Grumbach Page B

She vowed she would never let her parents send her back.
    All that despised summer, full of interludes when she had turned her back on what she did not want to do and gone to lie on her bunk while the other juniors fought for the team banner, Roslyn had never got beyond the first chapters of Dickens. She brought it back home and put it on the shelf. The margins of page twenty-six were dotted with mineral oil in which the angry swirls of her thumbprints were darkly embedded.
    â€˜You’re lucky to be getting out of the hot city,’ her mother said again, as she had two years ago. ‘No polio worries. Think of us sweltering here.’
    Roslyn regarded this as a sign of her mother’s extreme selfishness. She herself had never given the disease, or the heat, a thought. Which was strange, because now she always seemed to dwell on the dark side of things. After the Crash, she had turned into a pessimist whose view of the world was colored by her father’s fall from eminence and her mother’s constant complaints. Now she expected all her plans and hopes to be defeated. At almost fourteen, nothing she wanted to do seemed without its hazards. She lived in dread that no one in the narrow scope of her life would be able to escape catastrophe, including herself. It had already struck down her father and her whining, gloomy mother.
    Well, she thought, perhaps there is one virtue to having to go to camp again. The two months might serve as a hiatus in her expectation of misfortune. Everyone at a summer camp was young and healthy and had a job and seemed to have enough money. The air was fresh and cool, and she, fortunately parentless for those two months, and solitary if she resisted being put on a team, might at least for a time avoid all the nameless disasters that were inevitably part of life in the city.
    On July 6, a warm Sunday, the Hellman family took the ferry to Hoboken. Waiting on the train platform for the counselors, conspicuous in their uniform skirts and monogrammed CCL caps, to assemble those whose names appeared on their clipboards, the Hellmans grew restless.
    â€˜They said eleven o’clock. It’s eleven now,’ Max said to his wife in his new, impatient tone that Roslyn recognized as dating from the October of his failure. These days he did not speak very much, and when he did, it was to express his dissatisfaction with the butcher business, or the demands of his family, or other people’s tardiness.
    Rose could hardly disguise her impatience. She put her hand on Roslyn’s shoulder. Her affection for her daughter had not diminished. But the prospect of two months’ freedom from having to think about her enabled Rose to make a small gesture. She seldom embraced her child any longer or allowed her husband to approach her affectionately. Resentment against what she thought of as the unfair turn of fate had turned her into an emotional recluse.
    Max said: We’ll borrow Sophie’s car and drive up to see you on your birthday.’
    Pleased as she was to hear this—the visit two years ago on her twelfth birthday had meant presents from her bunkmates and Muggs, her counselor, and a cake from the baker to impress her parents, she thought—Roslyn foresaw only disappointment if she were to allow herself to look forward to their visit. She remembered the last one: they had arrived in late afternoon. She had been called to the gate from the volleyball court to greet them.
    Her father had filled the first hour with her by describing minutely the roads he had selected for the trip in the De Soto, the mileage they had consumed, the time the journey had taken from the City to the town of Liberty near the camp, and the stops for nourishment they had made. Then he took his watch from his pocket and inspected it carefully, as if he were studying it for facial flaws. Roslyn knew what that meant. He was ready to go back, now that they had arrived safely and seen that she was in