I Don't Have a Happy Place by Kim Korson Read Free Book Online

the back of the closet they went, laid to rest until decades later, when my parents would sell the house and hire someone to host a garage sale for them. To hell with B.J. and the Bear . I don’t even know why I bothered. Shutting my closet door, I skulked back to the den and watched the end of The Merv Griffin Show until I heard my father’s car in the garage.
    Epilogue
    I spent the rest of my latchkey days alone, just watching TV. Grandpa Solly never returned after that first day, and I insisted on my mother buying me a fire extinguisher for when the house spontaneously combusted. Shortly after turning fifteen, I adopted a bald black Cabbage Patch Kid named Cedric Imala and set up an Easy-Bake Oven on my dresser. Sure, I was too old for those things, but Nana had slipped me a little extra Hanukah money and told me to spend it any way I saw fit.
    The ‘80s breezed in with its shoulder pads and Aussie Mega hairspray. The styles were changing yet again and it was all the rage to look as if you lived on Knots Landing —this intrigued my mother. She started upturning shirt collars and shellacking her hair into a helmet that could withstand damaging winds. She ditched the ties but kept the slacks. Eventually, Phil Donahue became background noise as she outlined her lips with magenta liner, filling in the rest with bubble gum–pink lipstick.
    I still came home to an empty house after school but, sometimes, I’d bring a boy with me. We’d retire to my Duran Duran–postered room and he’d wait patiently as I pressed my nose up to the plastic window, watching my cake rise halfheartedly as it baked by light bulb. Later, we’d listen to Styx’s“Mr. Roboto” and dry hump on the shag rug. Occasionally I’d make eye contact with Cedric Imala and think, Fuck you, Phil Donahue . Fuck you .

Eight Weeks
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    W e had name tags sewn into our underwear, rations of Fun Dip and Wacky Packs ready for barter. Oversized white envelopes were dispatched months in advance, sending us to doctors for shots and signatures assuring the authorities we weren’t bedwetters or asthmatics or prone to epileptic fits. While snow still piled on the roof, my mother tacked the clothing checklist onto the fridge with a sheep magnet that claimed EWES NOT FAT, EWES FLUFFY! , and still we scrambled last minute for the requisite four pairs of shorts, three bathing suits, and one rain poncho. I knew other kids, whose duffel bags and cardboard trunks aired out on lawns around the neighborhood, were bubbling like soda inside a shaken can. But as I sat on my bed, bangs hacked and crooked, I hoped that I’d contract the plague—or at the very least get hit by a truck—anything, really, so that I didn’t have to get on that bus to summer camp.
    I was five years old the first time I stood in the maze of sleepaway camp buses looming in the parking lot of Blue Bonnets Raceway. In its 1950s heyday, my father told me, the horse track boasted a million-dollar clubhouse for “big shots.” I likedto imagine the short mustachioed man from Monopoly with his wife (a much taller broad, with her long neck wrapped in a beady-eyed fox stole) on a night out, away from the fast dealings and headaches of Marvin Gardens. But by the late ‘70s, the track had long since lost its luster. Now the only thoroughbreds parading around its parking lot had long curly brown hair, wore satin dolphin shorts, and answered to the names Elissa and Elana and Elyse.
    Summer camps were invented in the hopes of bringing nature and outdoor pursuits to kids living in the dingy conditions of industrialized cities, the earliest Fresh Air Fund spots. By the 1920s, hundreds of summer camps had sprouted on the American landscape. I’m sure Canada adopted the idea, copying its cousin a year or two after the fact. It took us longer to get everything up north. If the camps I went