Where or When by Anita Shreve Page A

other at camp, he and Siân corresponded. He wonders if she might still have those old letters—hers to him, he knows, were lost when his parents’ basement was flooded and everything that had been stored there for him was destroyed. He doesn’t now know why the correspondence ended; he suspects it began to seem more and more hopeless as the months wore on. He had thought and planned endlessly, he remembers, to find a way to see her again, and these adolescent schemes now seem comical and sad to him. However was a fourteen-year-old boy to make his way across three states to see his girlfriend? At that age, one was a prisoner of one’s parents. He certainly had no car, did not even know anyone with a car except for people his parents’ age, none of whom was likely to drive him to Springfield, Massachusetts, from Bristol, Rhode Island. If only he and Siân had met at sixteen, when seeing her again, seeing her continuously over the years, might have been possible.
    He turns up the volume. He loves this one: “That’s My Desire.” He waits each time for the falsetto at the end, sometimes tries to imitate it himself. He remembers as vividly as if it were yesterday the agony of that final and irrevocable separation, the anticipation of that separation all that last morning of camp and, indeed, even the entire day before. If one week at camp were the experiential equivalent of a lifetime together, then the last day and a half has to have taken on, in the savoring of each minute, the totality of years.
    He woke that last morning with a strange feeling in his stomach, a mixture of dread and guilt and deep sexual excitement. (Odd how clearly he can remember this—more clearly, it seems to him, than more recent events, from college or from seminary, or even from the early years of his marriage.) He’d had a counselor (what was his name?) who played 45s on a turntable in the boys’ dorm. Johnny Mathis at night to soothe the overheated psyches of adolescent boys; The Silhouettes and The Shirelles in the morning to wake them up. “Get a Job” was on that morning. He’d woken after a restless night, a night full of wild dreams and schemes, as if he were a prisoner of war planning their escape—his and Siân’s. He imagined hiding in the woods until all the parents had left, and then he and Siân would get on a bus. He had no idea where the bus might take them—he hadn’t been able quite to make that work, and that was the point at which he’d begun to panic: Where could they go? What would they do for money? How long could they hide out from their parents or from the police? He smiles now to think of that boy of his frantic and desperate imaginings.
    He met her that morning in the dining hall. They’d sat at the same table all week. She was next to him, the bracelet on her wrist. She didn’t speak. He remembers that she was wearing Bermuda shorts and a white blouse, a sleeveless blouse. Neither of them could eat. She’d pushed her eggs around; he hadn’t even been able to do that. He’d sat with his fork in his hand, unable to speak to her in front of the others, unable to move. He wanted to touch the bracelet on her wrist, touch the hairs on her arm. To his right, on the other side of him, was his counselor (what
was
his name?), a big guy with a crew cut and a short-sleeved dress shirt that showed his muscles. They’d had to wear white shirts, he remembers that. He also remembers that his counselor had seemed unreasonably happy that morning, and Charles (Cal then) had formed an instant and lasting hatred for the man.
    (It strikes him suddenly, as he engages the cruise control in his car, that the counselor was probably only a kid, a college kid then, someone he’d now think of as a child, and that at this point in time the man has to be in his early fifties at least.)
    There was a blue plaid tablecloth on the table, heavy white