“In photographs from my childhood I am often sporting wide, toothy smiles. Guileless grins. It seems I was—despite the complications of divorce, alcoholism, and mental illness in my family—a happy kid. But by my teens I began to develop a sort of tight-lipped, toothless grin. I could feel myself consciously pulling my upper lip tight against my teeth, my tongue poking at the back of my fake, discolored front tooth.
When I attended summer camp in the early 1980s, there was no long journey north from some hot city. No slow drive down a narrow dirt road through a tunnel of tall pines. No tearful goodbye as my parents dropped me off with a duffle bag of jeans and T-shirts, swim trunks and a towel, then drove away. I was a local kid, a poor year-rounder in Maine. “Summer camp” meant my small town’s daily parks-and-rec program on the grounds of my elementary school, which was across the street from the dilapidated house my unstable mother rented with her alcoholic boyfriend. For me, there was only waking to an empty house, making myself breakfast, then crossing the road.”
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