Summer Camp Memories: July-August 1970 (xiv)

For a few weeks, Harriet and I were like one person. But near the end of the second week, we had our first disagreement. Mayer had decided to transfer Harriet’s brother to another camp group of less higher-functioning boys, in the cabin next to my group’s cabin. I was against the transfer because I felt that unless Harriet’s brother could learn how to ignore the provocative teasing of the higher functioning boys in our group, so that they couldn’t provoke him so easily into a tantrum, he would continue to be easily victimized by his “normal” peers after the summer was over. Mayer, however, felt that Harriet’s brother was less likely to be teased and provoked into more tantrums if he was transferred into the group of lower-functioning boys.

In the group of lower-functioning boys, however, Harriet’s brother was still teased and he, himself, began to tease some of the lower-functioning boys in cruel ways. When I mentioned to Harriet that her brother wasn’t only the innocent victim of other boys’ teasing of him, but also sometimes was the instigator of the fights he still kept getting into, even in his new lower-functioning group, Harriet gave me a disapproving look.

Yet even before our first disagreement, Harriet had begun to suddenly pull back emotionally from me. It began after the night we made love to each other in the back seat of her car in the camp parking lot.

She had suggested that I join her in the back seat. And, once there, she suddenly closed her eyes and started to bombard me with erotic kisses, wrap her arms and legs around me and excite me quickly, especially by the rapid ways she was moving her hips in a variety of circular motions. In our previous lovemaking, I was the one taking the initiative, while she responded in a tender way. But in the back seat of her car, Harriet had suddenly now become the more sexually aggressive one; and the wild way she let go produced vibrations and static electricity sounding and feeling waves, with each series of rapid and deep rotations of her hips.

Afterwards, as we walked back to our cabins, I was ready to follow Harriet anywhere on the globe and felt that my only ambition in life now was to just be Harriet’s lover.

But by the next night, Harriet began to retreat emotionally from me and seemed to be having second thoughts about how close she wanted to be with me. When I mentioned that now that I had met her, I would have to start reconsidering my original plans for the Fall, she seemed to pull back even more, as if her intention had only been to have a summer affair with me. And after we walked further into the forest and had our disagreement about whether or not her brother was always the innocent victim of the teasing of others, Harriet no longer wanted to get together after work or on our day off.

“I’m busy tomorrow. And I have other plans for my day off. I’ll let you know when I want to get together with you again,” she said quietly after I kissed her goodnight.

“Oh,” I replied with disappointment in my voice, before we walked out of the forest and back towards our respective cabins.

After Harriet suddenly pulled back from me emotionally and stopped spending her evenings and days off at the camp with me, I began to spend some time in the evening after hours on the porch in front of my group’s cabin, talking with a co-counselor in the cabin to my right. He was a pre-med science student who seemed to be planning to go into medicine primarily because being a physician paid well. When I asked him why he thought Harriet had pulled away from me so suddenly, he answered: “She probably became scared about how close you became so quickly and was afraid she would become emotionally vulnerable, if she didn’t step back from you quickly.”

I wasn’t sure whether his explanation for Harriet’s sudden distancing of herself from me was a totally accurate explanation. But I did feel that it contained some truth in it.