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day in the sun, visiting with friends.
    I could tell she had started to relax when she began talking about the young men she had liked in college before settling on my father. It took a week or two of her watching other couples on the beach (“Look at that niceness.”) before she started in on how she should have married Godfrey Durr, Matt Chambers, or Tom Farrell instead of my father. It was hard to tell if she meant it as a joke.
    I went topless until I went to camp. In every picture I have from Avon, I am only wearing bathing suit bottoms. Sometimes I wore suspenders—but no top. Why didn’t my mother get me a top, too? I don’t know. No one ever said anything, though, and I never felt like a centerfold-in-training as I ran around the beach, digging holes and poking my nose into other people’s business.
    One of my favorite days in Avon was when the lifeguards pulled someone out of the water and I found myself standing right next to them. People formed a circle around us as they watched, and I loved having a ringside seat for the drama. The next summer a friend of my sister’s cut her foot on a piece of glass, and a lifeguard carried her away. That was also an exciting day for me. So were the days when the jellyfish invaded the beach and swimmers limped out of the water in tears to the lifeguard station.
    The lifeguards made a big impression on me. At home, I hugged any man I saw wearing a uniform. “Don’t ask,” my mother explained to friends and neighbors who wondered why. “She just does that.”
    Then one summer Garry went to a Boy Scout camp instead of going with us to Avon. We knew he would get sick or injured, and he did. He got poison ivy. But he survived. He sent letters every day. He was doing fine. In addition to clean underwear, he had taken four hundred gallons of calamine lotion. The next year my sister went to camp. Now both of them were sending letters. I was deeply envious. They were having a good time while I was left with my mother and Nanny, whose old lady friends would ask me to play canasta with them.
    “We need a fourth. Can Penny stay home from the beach and play cards?”
    I was good, too. I was only eight, but I could meld like a seventy-year-old.
    The next year it was my turn to go away. I went to Camp Odetah in rural Connecticut. On the first day I was placed in the extra milk line, given two chocolate milks every meal, and told to play. I never wanted to go back home.
    Dear Mom & Dad,
Having a great time. How’s everyone? Send me a salami.
    Love,
Penny
    After one summer there, I switched to Camp Geneva, the same camp my mother had gone to as a teenager. My sister was there, too, and my brother was on the boys’ side, Camp Onibar. My mother wrote one letter each week and sent a copy to all three of us. Ronny always complained that she got the third carbon every time. “Here, take mine,” I said. I didn’t care whether I heard from her all summer. Family? What family? This was my escape.
    Geneva was a kosher camp for rich Jewish kids. We, of course, were neither. We got in because my mother’s best friend, my fake aunt Blanche (she and my uncle Leo were my godparents) was a Rabino, and they owned the camp.
    I arrived with strep throat and spent the first week of camp in the infirmary, where I found out that I was allergic to penicillin. That was fun. Once recovered, I threw myself into the activities. Geneva was a paradise of green fields carved out of a thick Pocono forest, with social hall, bunks, tennis courts, a lake, a baseball diamond, golf, and an archery range on the edge of an apple orchard. It also emphasized singing and dancing.
    After a morning reveille, we lined up around the flagpole and put our hands over our hearts as the stars and stripes were raised. After breakfast, we sang songs—a primary activity—cleaned our bunks, and then received our first activity for the day: basketball, softball, swimming, volleyball, archery, baton twirling, or golf, which I never