Summer at camp

Summer at camp is the threshold between Katherine Danziger’s high-school life and an adulthood she is not yet ready to define. The summer begins as a planned separation from Michael Wagner, but camp makes that distance more than a test of devotion: work, new attachments, family loss, and Michael’s unexpected arrival alter what Katherine believes she can promise him.

A summer set in motion by separation

High-school graduation gives the summer its double meaning: an ending and a beginning. Katherine reflects that June is commonly imagined as the close of one life and the start of another, and admits she is caught up in that feeling. Her parents have already voiced concern about her commitment to one boy. Roger Danziger thinks she might be happier untied to Michael, while Diana Danziger asks what will happen when the two are apart the following year. Katherine insists she is not unhappy, only missing him; the question about their future sends her to speak with her guidance counselor.

Graduation itself is disrupted by a tremendous thunderstorm. The ceremony moves indoors at the last minute, and the limit of two tickets per senior means Michael cannot attend. He waits at home with Jamie and Katherine’s grandparents, missing her in her cap and gown. After a family party, Katherine and Michael drive to Long Beach Island, taking turns at the wheel on the trip to Erica Small’s house at Loveladies Harbor. Four days later, Katherine and Jamie leave for camp. The short interval between graduation and departure sets the pattern for the summer: intimacy with Michael is real, but it must give way to a life organized around distance and new obligations.

Work, letters, and an emerging attraction

At camp, Katherine’s days are structured by her responsibilities and the staff schedule. Campers return to their rooms at ten each night; afterward, staff gather in a small, comfortably furnished cottage called the retreat. Katherine often writes letters there. The routine places her among summer companions for long stretches, while her letters keep Michael present in her daily life. Theo, another staff member, watches her as she writes. Katherine notices his light-green eyes, brown hair, and the headband he wears on the courts to keep his hair out of his face; his familiarity becomes part of the close, watchful atmosphere of camp.

A movie outing with Theo and Nan sharpens a feeling Katherine would rather keep at a distance. Theo has a car, so the two women accept his invitation to go into Laconia. He takes the middle seat and jokingly puts an arm around each of them. Katherine understands the gesture as a joke, but later wakes from an unusually vivid dream in which she is with Theo. Ashamed by its intensity, she writes Michael a four-page letter and tries to stay away from Theo, even as she recognizes that something is growing between them.

The attraction also surfaces in public. During a camp activity, Theo offers to demonstrate a new way to dance, draws Katherine close, and holds her as the children cheer. Their bodies meet as they dance; neither speaks, but Katherine feels the moment’s charge. When the record ends, she breaks away and runs to the lake, where she cries over the contradiction she cannot resolve: loving Michael does not prevent her from being attracted to someone else. The next day, Michael’s long letter gives her a way to reaffirm her attachment; she kisses it and shows it to Nan as proof that she is not interested in anyone else. Yet the gesture does not erase the attraction. It records her effort to hold the relationship steady while her feelings shift.

Family, grief, and the camp community

Visiting day brings Katherine’s family into the world she has made at camp. After spending the morning rallying with campers so their parents can see their improved play, she is given the afternoon off. Jamie shows Diana and Roger her oils, watercolors, and weaving. Katherine then plays two sets of tennis with her father and beats him 6–3, 7–5, a result that impresses him. In her room, Diana notices photographs of Michael on the wall and says she is glad Katherine seems to be getting along. Katherine answers that she is managing and shows her mother a shoebox full of Michael’s letters, explaining that they write every day. The room and the letters make the separation visible: the relationship is absent from camp in person but carefully maintained in objects and routine.

That routine is broken by news of her grandfather’s death from another stroke. There will be no funeral; he wanted to be cremated. Although Katherine wants to go home to her grandmother, her grandmother asks her to remain at camp with Jamie. Katherine stays, but her grief pulls her away from the surrounding activity. At the lake, she remembers her grandfather playing horsey with her as a child, reading aloud in different voices, and sharing the family’s meals. She recalls him after his first stroke as small and white, holding out his hand when she visited him in the hospital. His toast to love returns to her as she sits alone. Theo appears nearby, turning the lake into a place where private mourning and the unsettled relationship between them meet.

A few nights later, Nan goes into town, but Theo stays at camp despite having the night off. They sit together on the steps of his cabin. When Theo begins to refer to what happened the other night, Katherine says she would rather not talk about it. Her refusal does not settle the matter; it shows how deliberately she is trying to contain a connection that has become difficult to name.

Michael’s arrival and the limit of forever

The separation changes abruptly when Michael arrives at camp. On a Saturday afternoon, just before activities end, Katherine is called to the office. Theo walks her there, holding her hand and sensing that she is frightened. Foxy tells her she has a visitor, and Michael appears from the bathroom. Katherine and Theo are standing side by side, still holding hands; they drop them immediately. Michael explains that he was worried because Katherine had not answered his letters, so he flew in a few days early to surprise her. His arrival makes the cost of silence and distance tangible, while the handholding he interrupts exposes the complication awaiting him at camp.

The summer’s eventual meaning is not that Katherine never loved Michael. At the relationship’s parting, she thinks she will never be sorry for loving him and will never regret what they shared. She can imagine that things might have worked differently if they were ten years older, but arrives at a more immediate truth: she is not ready for forever. The exchange that follows is restrained; she manages only to say that they will see each other around, and Michael answers in kind. The summer therefore closes not by denying the love that began before graduation, but by separating that love from a promise Katherine can no longer make.

The summer as a passage

Camp gathers several kinds of transition into one season. Katherine leaves high school, takes on a staff role, and learns to live for weeks within a community that operates on its own schedule. Her daily letters to Michael sustain their bond, but the dream of Theo, the dance, and her effort to avoid him show that physical separation cannot preserve a relationship unchanged. Her grandfather’s death adds a loss she must bear while remaining away from home; Michael’s visit then brings the distance into the camp itself. Against the certainty of the word forever, the season offers a more difficult measure of love: Katherine can value what she and Michael had without pretending that she is ready to carry it unchanged into the next stage of her life.