Katherine and Michael’s summer separation

The summer separation divides Katherine and Michael between a New Hampshire camp and a North Carolina job just as they finish high school. What begins as a decision imposed on Katherine by her parents becomes a separation they must both face: she believes their love can withstand the distance, while the summer and the life changes around it expose how uncertain a promise of forever can be.

Causes and the decision

The prospect of being apart grows out of a disagreement about what Katherine’s relationship with Michael means. At breakfast, her father says he thinks she would be happier if she were not tied down to one boy. Katherine answers that she is not unhappy; she misses Michael. Her mother then asks what will happen the following year, when the two are going to be apart. Katherine does not share with her parents her conviction that this is not simply an old-fashioned high-school attachment, but real love. The coming summer makes their question immediate.

Katherine’s parents arrange for her to work at Jamie’s camp in New Hampshire as an assistant tennis counselor. When Katherine objects, her mother says she dislikes her attitude, and Katherine, fighting tears, accuses her parents of trying to maneuver her away from Michael. Her father denies that the job has anything to do with him; her mother describes it as a change of scenery. Katherine counters that she is already going to Denver and that she and Michael have only until September. Her father says the camp lasts only seven weeks, but Katherine experiences that span as enormous because it takes up a substantial part of the time she and Michael have left together.

The argument is also about Katherine’s authority over her own plans. Her father has already told the camp director that she will take the job, before she has agreed. When she says she is eighteen and has made up her mind to refuse, he tells her she has no choice. Her mother recalls that Katherine had said the previous summer that she would love to be a counselor at Jamie’s camp, but that earlier enthusiasm does not alter her present refusal. The job is therefore not a freely chosen adventure: it is a family decision enforced at the moment Katherine wants to claim independence.

The separation becomes mutual

Katherine tells Michael about the camp when they are together. She explains that she had said no, but her parents are making her go; she hopes he may be able to drive up once or twice because she expects to get some time off. She also anticipates that he may tell her she should have asserted herself. Her uncertainty about how to explain the situation is sharpened by the fact that her parents have made the decision for her, but she still tries to imagine ways they might see each other.

Michael answers that he, too, has a summer job, in North Carolina. His uncle has offered him work at a lumber yard, with good pay and no expenses, and he will stay with his relatives. He has known about the offer for roughly three weeks without telling Katherine. He says he had hoped that another possibility, a good job nearer home, might turn up, and that he did not want to face the summer without her. He also says Artie knew he planned to tell her that night. Katherine objects that he should not have waited and that keeping it from her was not honest; Michael acknowledges that he may have been wrong and apologizes.

His news changes the separation from a hardship arranged by Katherine’s parents into a shared circumstance. Neither teenager will spend the summer near home, and neither has secured a plan that keeps them together. They take comfort in the thought that being separated will not change what they have, and Katherine kisses Michael, reminding him that all of June is still theirs. The moment joins reassurance to an approaching deadline: the summer is not yet underway, but both already measure their remaining time.

June before departure

The narrative places the separation at a threshold in the school year. June is described as the month many seniors anticipate, marking the end of one life and the beginning of another; Katherine admits that she, too, is caught up in that mood. The transition is not only a change of address for the summer. Graduation, work, and the prospect of a different life are arriving together, while Katherine and Michael are trying to preserve the relationship they have built through high school.

In the days before leaving, Katherine cuts her afternoon classes and Michael picks her up after lunch. With his parents away at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, they spend the rest of the day in his bed. They have no trouble with Ralph this time, a detail that relieves both of them; Katherine had privately wondered whether the earlier difficulty might have been her fault. They do not attend either prom, although they had discussed going with Erica and Artie. Artie’s parents have told Michael that Artie will not be home for graduation and have asked him to send short, cheerful notes without expecting replies. Their absent friend is another reminder that the end of school brings separations beyond their own.

Katherine’s graduation is moved indoors at the last minute because a tremendous thunderstorm begins at 4:30 and continues intermittently for hours. The indoor ceremony allows each senior only two tickets, so Michael waits at home with Jamie and Katherine’s grandparents and does not see her in her cap and gown. The family holds a party with sandwiches, fresh fruit, and a large chocolate graduation cake. The following morning, Katherine and Michael drive to Long Beach Island, taking turns on the two-hour trip from Westfield, New Jersey, to Erica’s house at Loveladies Harbor.

At the beach, they pose on surfboards until they use up a roll of film. That night, other young people they have met drop by; one girl brings a guitar and sings. Some of the group smoke marijuana, which Katherine declines, while Michael drinks some beer without drinking enough to become sick. After the visitors leave and Erica goes to bed, Katherine and Michael take a sleeping bag onto the beach and make love. They wake at dawn and watch the sun rise together. The intimacy gives their last days together a sense of closeness, but it cannot cancel the departure already set in motion.

Camp and the meaning of distance

Four days later, Katherine and Jamie leave for camp. In a letter dated Wednesday, June 26, Katherine tells Michael that the bus journey went badly: the air-conditioning failed after an hour, leaving the passengers sweltering, and a child became sick in the aisle, forcing a stop while the staff cleaned up. Katherine notes the irony that she is now considered staff. Her first account of camp thus begins not with a polished adventure but with uncomfortable travel and the practical duties of the job her parents arranged.

The separation also belongs to the larger passage out of senior year. Katherine’s parents had looked ahead to the following year as a reason not to remain tied to one boy; Katherine had answered by insisting that her present feelings were real. The summer makes distance concrete before either of them has entered the next stage of life. Their attempts to protect the relationship—imagining visits, keeping June for themselves, and affirming that separation will not change anything—stand beside the fact that their plans now take them in different directions.

Later, when Katherine looks back on Michael and their relationship, she says she will never regret loving him or what they shared. She allows that things might have turned out differently if they had been ten years older, but recognizes that she is not ready for forever. That later perspective does not make the summer separation the sole cause of their eventual parting; it gives the earlier division a broader resonance. The seven weeks mark not simply time away from each other, but a point at which the language of lasting love meets the uncertainty of growing up.