Did That Go Through the Three Doors? (Two Doors and a Window, Part 4)
“Two Doors and a Window” is a series of essays that I wrote in 2020.
When Meryl married my stepfather, Sid, I was nine years old. I had been going to day camp — the one my father was head counselor of — every summer since I could remember. But the summer I nine I was put on a bus, my new trunk full of polyester shorts, books, stationery, stamps, and candy in the luggage hold, and sent to sleepaway camp in the Catskills for two months.
My mother cried and waved as the bus pulled away. I settled in to read Judy Blume. But I would have been crying, too, had I known what awaited me. I was a bullied kid in school. Things were no different at camp. Thinking about it now, it’s no surprise: I was bookish and scrawny with no hand-eye coordination, and if you think it’s fucked up to send a nine-year-old away for two months, think about the psyches of the girls in my bunk, the ones who were in their second or third summers. Not to mention that they all knew each other already. Cruel shenanigans ensued: Maxi pads with red nail polish on my pillow, tube tops pulled down in public. I did have some good times that summer. I played Anita in West Side Story — probably just as fucked up for a nine-year-old as two months away from home under the not-so-watchful eye of stoned teenagers — and made a couple of friends. But when Visiting Day came around, I had already written a dozen teary letters begging to be taken home. Halfway through the summer, I was ready so see my mommy.
Visiting Day technically started at breakfast. Parents were supposed to park down the hill, come up to the front lawn, and either eat in the mess hall first or take their kids off-campus right away for the rest of the day. Many parents showed up before then, though. Almost as soon as reveille blew on the loudspeaker, kids and pre-teens, boys and girls were running screaming across the lawn into the arms of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers.
Breakfast came. Breakfast went. Parents scooped up my friends and my bullies and the boy I had a crush on. Lunch approached. I was the only kid without parents visiting. My father would come up to see the play in a few weeks. My mother was supposed to be there for Visiting Day.
At some point even the counselors gave up (you’ve seen summer camp horror movies, you know how they are) and I wandered down the hill to sit on the open gate that led to the road up to camp. The parking lot was around a bend in the road, just beyond my view. I sat and I cried and sat and cried. In. In my memory it was early afternoon and I sat there alone for hours, but for all I know it wasn’t even noon yet. Regardless, that’s where I was and what I was doing when my mother and stepfather appeared, walking around that bend in the road. My mother saw me, she saw me crying and she took off running. It was 1981 and she was 43 and newly remarried, clad in tight designer jeans and high-heeled Candies sandals. She got halfway to me, twisted her ankle, and hit the ground.
Sid and I got her up the hill to campus, where some counselors helped us get her to the infirmary. Her jeans were ripped and her knee was bloody and her ankle was sprained. And she was crying, too. She didn’t know Visiting Day started so early, didn’t know that kids got picked up before breakfast. I wasn’t angry, I was happy to see her, happy that she’d shown up at all.
Years later she would retell this story and make casual mention of Sid telling her they didn’t need to get there before lunch. He is easily cast as the villain here but that summer day, I was just happy to see her.
Meryl and I would have drifted apart in my teens under any circumstances, with the evil that hormones wreak on even the mildest of kids. But Sid really catalyzed the whole thing. She used to instruct me to live by “the three doors,” encouraging me to check if my thoughts could pass through each of them before I uttered them aloud: Is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary? At some point in my teens I told her I preferred two doors and window. So yeah, I was always going to be a smartass, at least. But first came summers away; then when I was a tween, Sid decided I should sit with my mother before dinner and tell her all about my day so I wouldn’t annoy him with my hyperactive chatter during the meal; when I was a teenager that turned into an edict that I not speak at the dinner table at all, and he started jokingly offering to “wash my back” every time I said I was going to take a shower; and when I was home from college one winter break, fresh from Women’s Studies 101, I stormed out of the house when I overheard Sid tell my mother, “Stop being such a woman about it.” He never gave me a ride anywhere, never gave me five bucks, never shared his pistachios with me. He kept claiming me on his tax returns until I was 21, making it impossible for me to pay in-state college tuition.
And so I am still angry with her, for choosing Sid over me so many times. I am angry because she rejected my burgeoning identity. She didn’t understand what I was trying to do and therefore didn’t respect it: When I mailed Meryl and Sid a copy of the first music magazine to have my byline on the cover, Sid’s assessment was that the piece was “very Stefanie”; Meryl’s was that she wished it were Time magazine. And I am angry at myself because, not only did I never get to know her as an adult, but I have retained this resentful view of her as a kept woman who put her shitty husband first. He died two years before she did. In between his own bouts of cancer, he made amends with many people for his various bad behaviors. But he never felt the need to do so with me.
