"Marx," she repeated.

"Like Groucho."

Mrs. Berry laughed politely. The Fifes chuckled wholeheartedly.

"I love his show," said Mrs. Berry. "He can be so ... irreverent."

"Did you get a television?" asked Robin.

Mrs. Berry wagged her finger in the manner of a school princ.i.p.al who had no rapport with children. "With all there is to do here, young lady, would you want to stay in your room and watch television?" Ugh, I thought; she's horrible on all counts. She looked to the Fifes for ratification; they continued to smile proudly and vacantly.

"The boys beat you to it," Mrs. Berry announced to the adults.

Mr. and Mrs. Fife exchanged more looks of pride and disbelief. "When did they get here?" Mr. Fife asked.

Mrs. Berry said, "Close to an hour ago, before check-in time. They changed into their suits and flew down to the water."

"They must have flown up the interstate," chuckled Mr. Fife, the slowest male driver Connecticut had ever licensed.

"Let's get into our suits, too," said Robin.

I said, Great, I couldn't wait to jump in.

"Girls, girls," said her father with mock sternness. "Luggage! We're old enough to carry our own bags. Robin?" He led us back down the white-pebbled path to the car, where he ceremoniously handed Robin an undersize piece of luggage and me a canvas beach tote. There was something deliberately good-fatherish and annoying about the way he did it: two hands on each bag, estimating its heft with a thoughtful frown before pa.s.sing it on. I could see what was ahead: a week of Mr. Fife's scientific teaching and fathering methods, ratcheted up a few notches for me.

I soon figured out that the brothers, Jeff and Donald Junior/Chip, were the reason Mr. and Mrs. Fife took such pains to be Perfect Public Parents. Their sons were a walking c.o.c.kfight. They were horrible together and dullards apart, partners in a kind of boy play I hadn't seen in my all-girl life on Irving Circle. In the name of horseplay, they strangled each other in wrestling holds, and couldn't walk within swinging distance of each other without grabbing and twisting whatever limb swung free. They found this fun, giving it or taking it. In the lake they'd race, thrashing and grunting, with the loser then attempting to drown the winner. Separately, each could be civilized; but together, they were a two-man litter of puppies, nipping and yelping and rolling around on each other's food.

When I brought up the subject one night-How can you stand them? Why do they have to crack every knuckle separately? Why don't your parents do something?-Robin said her parents yelled at Jeff and Chip at home, and made them shake hands and go off to their separate rooms and cool down. But here, her parents needed a vacation. They dumped the two boys in one room, figuring they'd kill each other or get it out of their systems.

I said, "They can't get it out of their systems. It's hormones."

"It is?"

"It's teenage-boy hormones. Why do you think they're always wrestling and rolling around on top of each other?"

Robin, wide-eyed, shook her head.

I told her it was like girls getting our periods: Boys got hormones. I asked her again: Why didn't her parents say something? It looked to me that her brothers didn't get yelled at or punished, no matter how much they horsed around and got the lifeguard angry.

"They're showing off for the people on the dock and for you," she stated calmly.

"For me?" I asked.

"That's what Mrs. Berry said."

I asked her when Mrs. Berry had offered this opinion.

"When you were swimming out to the raft and I stayed on the dock. She said to me, 'I guess your brothers are showing off for your little friend.' They were doing cannonb.a.l.l.s from the raft trying to hit you."

"And what did you say?"

"I didn't say anything. I was shivering. And she was just walking down the dock to tell Nelson something." Nelson Berry, the oldest of the three Berry children, was the exasperated lifeguard caught between wanting to banish the Fife boys from the waterfront and needing to maintain good guest relations. Robin and I liked him.

I said, "Mrs. Berry doesn't like me because I'm Jewish."

"How does she know you're Jewish?"

"She just knows."

"What's 'Jewish' again?" Robin asked.

"Jewish means you go to temple instead of church."

"Oh," said Robin.

"You know lots of Jewish people."

"I do?"

"Janet in our bunk was Jewish. And Melody."

"The counselor Melody?"

"Yup. And you know famous Jewish people," I said: Sammy Davis, Jr. Lorne Green. Marilyn Monroe's husband. Ed Sullivan's wife.

"I think my senator was Jewish," she said.

I couldn't resist the opportunity, Robin being as much of a blank slate as she was. I said, "We're G.o.d's chosen people, so Mrs. Berry has no right not to like Jews. Especially now. The law says you have to like everybody equally if you own a hotel."

She asked me if I thought Nelson went to church or to temple. I explained patiently that religion ran in families; there was no way Nelson Berry went to temple.

"Good," said Robin. "I mean, I'm glad he's the same thing I am."

I asked her if she had seen The Diary of Anne Frank, with Millie Perkins, the model, because that explained what happened when things got out of hand.

She said she'd heard of Millie Perkins, but not Anne Frank.

I shut off the lamp between our two beds. After a minute, I whispered, "Robin?"

"What?" she asked groggily.

I said, "Don't say anything to your parents about Mrs. Berry not liking me because I'm Jewish. People hate it when you think that, and she'd say it wasn't true."

"Okay," said Robin.

The next day, at breakfast, Mr. Fife asked me if I wanted to take a little ride with him to the grocery store. He was going to buy a newspaper and would like the company. He also needed-wink-help choosing the penny candy. I waited for him to sweep Robin into the invitation, but she didn't look up from her cereal, the same Sugar Pops every day. I said, "Okay. Sure. If you want me to."

He waited until we had turned onto the paved road, then said, "Natalie, I hope you know that we think very, very highly of the Jewish people."

I was stunned by the subject matter and by Robin's overnight betrayal.

He said, "We live in a state that sent a Jewish man to the U.S. Senate."

"I know. Robin told me."

He said, "I work with several very smart and dedicated teachers of the Jewish faith."

I said, "You do?"

"And you know I love music. I don't have to tell you that. Do you know how many of the world's greatest composers and lyricists are Jewish?"

"Lots?"

"George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn ... I could go on and on."

It was so Mr. Fife-ish, but so earnest and well meaning that my eyes p.r.i.c.kled with tears. I pictured the emergency conference he and Mrs. Fife must have had before breakfast-how would they handle Natalie's religious crisis?

I managed to say, my throat a knot, "I know you're nice to everyone."

"And I wouldn't tolerate anything else. Not in my family. Not in my cla.s.sroom, not in my church, my choir, not anywhere."

"I know," I said.

"I play golf at a club that has several Jewish members. And Mrs. Fife and I have voted for Senator Ribicoff every time he's run for office. He would not get elected in Connecticut if only Jewish people voted for him, would he?"

I said that must be right. What I didn't know how to say was, Haven't you noticed that you've been vacationing at a Christians-only hotel for the past fourteen years?

"Do you promise me you won't worry about this anymore?" he coaxed.

I said I wouldn't worry about it anymore.

"If you ever hear a word that insults you or your religion, then you'll come to me. Promise? Even if it's a month from now? A year?"

It was just the ga.s.sy gust of wind I needed to dry my eyes and restore my skepticism. "Okay," I said. "Thanks." Yeah right, Mr. Fife, my lifelong friend. Father of the stupidest girl at Camp Minnehaha.

"So do we feel better?"

I said I felt much better.

"Maybe a little homesick?"

"Maybe that was it," I said.

"We're your parents this week. And Robin is your sister. And Jeff and Chip are your brothers as long as we're at Lake Devine."

"Thanks," I said, for the twentieth time.

"Can I say one more thing?" He flashed me the coy grin of a leading man about to break into song.

"Sure," I said.

He smiled, waited a beat, then said proudly, "Shalom hah-vay-reem."

Oh, G.o.d-Hebrew. h.e.l.lo, friends. I asked how he knew that.

"It's a round! I had a counselor at music camp when I was about your age who was from Palestine." Then Mr. Fife sang in his most cantorial baritone: "Shalom, chaverim, shalom, chaverim, shalom, shalom ..."

"You come in ... now!" he instructed, chopping the air between us.

And so we sang, round and round in a minor key, all the way to the store and back-"Shalom, chaverim, shalom, chaverim, shalom, shalom"-until the final sixty seconds, when we turned onto the dirt road and had to switch to counting.

SIX.

I could only speculate from Mr. Berry's outward display of good humor that he was, at his core, more Christian than his wife. The term was supplied by Robin, who, quoting some Sunday School lesson, said that Christian meant kind, fair, good ... exactly like Jesus and his disciples-nice like her parents, like Nelson, like Mo, our junior counselor, and Mrs. Abodeely, the camp nutritionist, and, and ...

"Me?"

She thought this over, frowning, her first b.u.mp into the guardrail between temple and church.

"If it means 'nice' or 'fair,' " I argued, "then you must be able to say it about anyone." I didn't really care to win the point I was making. I found that needling her in the brains department relieved the tedium of talking to her-she who couldn't take, make, or get a joke of any kind. Not that it was satisfying, with no audience to play to. By midweek, I was even missing my sister, the queen of disdain, the master of the withering smile.

I said to Robin one chilly morning on the dock, plucking a ruse out of thin air, "You know, in Tuesday Weld's family, all the kids are named for days of the week."

"Really? They are?"

"There's Domingo, which is Spanish for Sunday-her brother-and a sister named Wednesday."

"Really?" Robin said again.

"They call her Wendy for short."

I heard a laugh behind me.

"Good one, Natalie," said Nelson Berry. He walked right between us, his bare feet grazing our towel. At the edge of the dock, he hesitated for a few seconds, took his whistle off, and handed it to me for safekeeping. Feet together, he dove head-first, no tricks, into the shirred surface of the lake. He came up for air halfway to the raft, then switched to the backstroke, eyes conscientiously watching us, the minor guests.

Robin said, "It's good that he can just jump in and doesn't have to get used to the water first. I'd freeze."

I, who had tried for my junior lifesaving certification at camp but had failed all parts of the test involving the rescue and towing of deadweight counselors, said, "That's what a lifeguard does, runs and dives. You're even supposed to do a kind of belly flop so your head stays above the water and you don't take your eyes off the person who's drowning."