Everything is Copy

Alyssa Ettinger

Word Count 804

Claire and I arrived at the same summer camp in July 1977. We were both wearing the same shirt, the kind you’d find in a novelty store or Army/Navy: you’d choose the tee, pick out the letters of your first name to personalize it, and the store would iron it on. These shirts were controversial fashion: parents feared strangers would learn your name and abduct you in a van. But wearing them in a safe environment like camp? Safe, and trendy.

Claire and I shared a bunk bed, and I had the top. Tucked into our sleeping bags after lights out, she shared stories about her mother, a Brit, and their whirlwind lives in Manhattan: Her mother’s boyfriend was Bernie Taupin, and they lived in a building with a doorman. Her father did something famous in publishing.

Once our bunkmates fell asleep, Clare and I would keep talking more privately. She talked about the night an intruder assaulted her mom, and how in the bedroom, they have two Trimline phones, one black and one white. I talked about living in New Jersey and feeling different. I shared that after kindergarten, my parents had sent me to another camp — one my family owned— for three summers in a row. I'd been the youngest camper, terribly lonely, and begged every year not to be forced to return. I lasted three summers. My grandmother was so embarrassed, she told people I'd gone to Europe.

Claire left at the end of July, but I stayed for the August session. We exchanged a few letters that month, but once she was gone, there were new girls in her place, and four more weeks of productions and secrets and boys and swimming. Sunburns till our noses peeled. Singing at campfires. And then summer was over. A commercial bus brought us back to New York City, dropping us in front of Meyers Garage. We all wrote in each other’s autograph books, promising phone calls and visits.

Over that next year, Claire and I saw each other a few times. My mom drove me into the city to her apartment, and the two of us, now twelve, made baby lamb chops for dinner chased down with Cokes. We slept on her loft bed, which Taupin had built for her. Other evenings we went to late movies or went out to visit her friends, where five of us, male and female, ended up sleeping in a boy’s large bed. His name was Liam.

Fast forward 30 years, I saw Claire’s name in large print in a magazine: She’d written a best-selling memoir. I ran out to buy a copy and read it straight through. The prose was gorgeous and riveting, but it spoke of a childhood filled with parental neglect, drugs, and physical abuse. The elegant, “classy” mother who bought us those baby lamb chops was also, apparently, a monster. All those city weekends looked very different from this point of view.

Stunned, I emailed her publisher and soon had a response from Claire in my inbox. “Dear Alyssa,” it began, “How long I’ve wanted to write that phrase.” Her memories of our friendship were strong. We caught up in manic emails back and forth that day and decided to have lunch when she was in town for her book tour.

And we did, meeting at a local Greek restaurant; I felt something was off from the get-go. She seemed shy or guarded, and I didn’t want to bring up the big elephant, her insane mother, so I did what I always did: began a sardonic commentary of my life. I was oversharing, overeager, assuming that since Claire had confessed all of her secrets in her book, both the scary and intimate, there would be a familiarity between us. In talking about my life and my camp memories, I reminded her that I’d once told her my most painful truth. She nodded, remembering, and gave me a crooked smile. That lunch was the last time I saw her.

News of her next book came from my mother. “The book is about friends,” my mom said, “Her friends. Women friends. Each chapter is about a different friend from her life. There’s a chapter about you.” Me? I’d spent a mere month with Claire on a renovated chicken farm in South Jersey.

My experience at my grandparent’s camp when I was so miserable at five years old was front and center of that chapter. My words were not hers to share. Claire said she wrote about me because I was a respite from her insanity. Yet, if I was once a buoy in her choppy seas, I can’t see how it would be acceptable to share the story that’s had me in therapy since grade school.

Alyssa is a writer, editor, and ceramicist, and has spent half her career behind a screen and the other half covered in porcelain. Please don't ask her to choose which is the better fit. This is the second piece of memoir she's submitted since her undergrad days. She lives in Brooklyn, NYC, with her cat Prudence.