Late Stories by Stephen Dixon Page A

could I write her at her camp and possibly continue the correspondence after the camp season was over? We’d been told that most of the campers and staff in her camp—she was a C.I.T.—”
    â€œWhat’s that again?” she said.
    â€œCounselor in training. Almost everyone there was supposed to come from Philadelphia or somewhere in Pennsylvania.”
    â€œWhat did you think would come from your letters to each other, if she had agreed to write you? If she lived in Pennsylvania and you were both sixteen—”
    â€œI’d visit her,” he said. “Take a bus or train. It’s not that far away, Philadelphia, if that is where she lived. Pittsburgh would have been out. But for her, if it was Philadelphia or a place in Pennsylvania a lot easier to get to than Pittsburgh, to become my girlfriend. And maybe the next summer she’d be a C.I.T. again, or junior counselor, would be more like it, at the same camp, and I’d be a waiter again at mine. It’s possible, I might have thought, when I was thinking this girl and I would exchange letters and I’d go to Philadelphia or such to see her and maybe she could come once to New York, that we could coordinate our days off the next summer. That’s how far and fast I let my imagination take me. Or I’d try to be one of the twoguest waiters at my camp, which was really what I was shooting for. You made a lot more money that way—no salary but much better tips—waiting on the visiting parents, and more days off.”
    By now they had reached the bus shelter on Broadway. The bench inside was filled. He said “Should I ask someone to get up so you can sit?”
    â€œI’m fine,” she said. “Standing’s good for me too. So what did you end up doing the next summer?”
    â€œI got a job as a busboy at Grossinger’s. I told them I was eighteen, and being a big kid, they believed me. And I guess they weren’t that choosy for such a job. The summer after that, I was legitimately eighteen and in college, and worked as a waiter and made a bundle.”
    â€œYou never went back to your camp?”
    â€œNo. I guess I went where the money was and where there was more potential for work.”
    â€œSo you didn’t even try to be a guest waiter at your camp?”
    â€œI don’t remember. Probably not. The busboy job came up and I was told if I did well at it there’d be a good chance for a waiter’s job the next summer and also during the Jewish holidays, which was when you really cleaned up.”
    â€œIt seems, then, that you and this girl weren’t meant to get together,” she said. “I mean, if you truly wanted it to happen, you would have gone back to your camp as a guest waiter, if you could get the job—made, I would think, about as much as you would as a busboy at Grossinger’s—and in some way sought out the girl.”
    â€œHow? By just going to her camp and looking for her? Or playing on the softball team again against her camp’s team, if there was going to be a rematch, and hoping she’d be there? I don’t even know if a guest waiter was allowed to play on the camper-waiter’s team.”
    â€œThen by trying to get a job at her camp as a guest waiter, if they had them.”
    â€œI never thought of that,” he said. “And it’s getting a bit farfetched. Because what were the chances of her returning there? Good? Only so-so? I don’t know. And by then she might have had a boyfriend, if she already didn’t when I first saw her. And I’d lost some of my interest in her, which would have been natural, or had become in one year more of a realist. Something. Maybe all those. By the way, what I also never told you is that when I first saw you at the party we met at, but before I went over to introduce myself, I actually thought for a few moments you might be her.”
    â€œBut you never asked me