Dream Catcher: A Memoir (25 page)

The distance from the center of town can be measured, I’m sorry to say, in teeth per capita. Rural poverty is not remotely picturesque. It’s hungry, cold, and it smells. In school, we didn’t make complex distinctions between parents’ occupations or things like houses and cars and TVs: it was to the bone; who has B.O. (body odor) and who doesn’t. In the city where I live today, poverty seems more to do with
thing
s; in the country, it had to do with human bodies. The Courdelaine kids all had “wicked B.O.” and their bony elbows and knees stuck out of their clothes akimbo like a scarecrow’s. My mother once found one of the Courdelaine kids, Ralph, sitting on the playground after school, crying. His front tooth had been knocked out by accident on the playground. It wasn’t a baby tooth since, even though he was in the same grade as we were, he was retarded, and so had stayed back a lot. She picked up the tooth, wrapped it in a wet Kleenex as she was taught in first aid, and volunteered to drive him to the dentist. The principal said okay, so off they went. Ralph was smiling.

Mom came home white in the face. She said that when she walked into the dentist’s office with Ralph, carrying the carefully wrapped tooth, she was greeted by the front-office nurse, who asked her, “Why’ja bother? All them Courdelaines lose their teeth anyways.” The nurse told her to go on home.

P
LAINFIELD
S
CHOOL WAS A FOUR-ROOM
schoolhouse about the width of a double-wide trailer, which served eight grades, two grades per room plus the retarded kids in the basement, of which there was a high proportion. I believe there were three retarded children in my little class of twelve alone. On the first day of school, Mrs. Corette, who taught the first and second graders in one room, was standing outside to greet us.
She was wearing a pink-striped seersucker dress with two huge green frogs appliquéd on the pockets. I loved her instantly. She started the day, every day, singing, “Good morning to you, good morning to you,” as she pointed to each one of us in turn, so no one ever felt left out, “We’re all in our places with sunshiny faces, oh, this is the way to start our new day.” It was, indeed, a most pleasant way to start our new day. Next, we stood, faced the flag, put our hands over our hearts, and said the Pledge of Allegiance. During the pledge, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts would get to do this neat-looking two-finger salute instead of putting their hand over their heart. After the pledge, we sang patriotic songs: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Home, Home on the Range,” “America the Beautiful,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Over Hill Over Dale,” as we march the dusty trail and those caissons go rolling along. Then we took our seats for prayers. We recited Our Father and afterward sang a children’s prayer that went:

Father we thank thee for the night

and for the pleasant morning light;

for rest and food and loving care,

and all that makes our day so fair.

Help us to do the things we should

to be to others kind and good;

in all we do at work or at play

to grow more loving every day.

Amen.

The prayer was lovely. More than lovely, it was a lifeline for me as I repeated my prayers in the dark of my room at night, stiff with fear, a talisman against the dark side of our inverted forest, a Grimm’s world in which goblins, ghosts, and other unnatural creatures and disembodied terrors existed just as surely as did the good fairies and their gossamer wings, just as surely as I saw, time and again, my parents’ eyes cloud with hatred, rage, and terror as they looked at each other. Worse still was when my mother looked my way. Although she complained that pleasing my father was a constantly moving target, to me, it was my mother who was the changeling. What was funny on Monday got you slapped on Tuesday. There was no winning, no staying ahead of that
game, because, as I figured out years later, the whole point of the game was to punish you for being a bad girl, so that she could be the good one.

As I look back on this time, I was becoming more a creature of the forest or a fairy tale, of dreams and nightmares, than a visible, embodied, human little girl. Being seen, being noticed, just
being,
was not safe. While I would learn to build secret compartments in my mind to hide thoughts and feelings unacceptable to my father, with my mother the only solution was a full-company strategic withdrawal. I gave up the front line of my body and retreated behind an icy, numbing moat and cold stone battlements in order to survive to fight another day. I still have no memory, tactile or otherwise, of my mother’s hands coming closer than about a foot from my body, neither for blows nor caresses. It is as if my memory were stopped at the drawbridge and all instances of bodily contact chopped off by the fortress guards before allowing the rest to pass. The events surrounding such scenes, however, are fully alive. I can look down at my body and see what I’m wearing, smell things around me, hear what is being said, feel the blood rushing to my face and the shame in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that I have to go to the bathroom right now, that I’m going to mess my pants; that terrible, inexorable, hypnotized feeling of “Come here!” and your limbs feel stuck in molasses as in a dream where something horrible is chasing you and you try to run but can’t. And then it’s blank, hacked off, and nothing exists until the aftermath, when memory resumes.

Most of my strategic retreats were largely reflexive; however, I executed one key maneuver fully conscious of what I was doing. I learned how to cry soundlessly, without tears, silent as the stones of the Wailing Wall. I remember the instant I did it. I was in the room I shared with my little brother. I’d been brought in there to be punished. The door was shut and it began. I didn’t feel, or remember feeling, “the four hundred blows.” I knew I was being spanked only because I heard my brother’s terrified screams coming from the hallway on the other side of the door, and his little fists pounding against it. In a split second, I realized that it must be my cries that were terrifying him. I was the one who explained stuff to him and he believed me, the one who picked up his bottle and teddy over and over when he threw them out of bed at night and no one big came.

She tore open the door he was pounding, and the next thing I knew, he was off the floor dangling by one skinny arm and spinning in the air
because she was hitting him so fast. I vowed that never, ever again would I make so much as a peep.

I would soon discover an additional payoff from my newfound skill, this one not just for my brother, but for me as well. Although, at first, my total lack of reaction infuriated her, her rage seemed to burn itself out faster, like a fire with no oxygen, as it were, no drama and noise to fan the flames.

A
T HOME
, D
ADDY WAS UNUSUALLY
busy that fall, or perhaps I was just getting old enough to quantify his absences somewhat. My mother, too, had something with which to occupy herself. We were going to renovate and expand the house, and an architect had made a perfect little dollhouse for her out of graph paper, with movable walls and little pieces of paper furniture. The house would have a separate bedroom for each of us, and an underground passageway to the planned-for garage. Upstairs, above the garage, Daddy would have a little apartment of his own with a bathroom and a tiny kitchen.

While Mama was busy playing with her paper house, I’d sneak up to the open loft above the living room and play a game I’d invented. I swore my brother to secrecy and deputized him as my assistant. Then I began operating. First, I made incisions in my dolls and beloved stuffed animals. Then I’d begin to spank each one, methodically at first, then wildly. My brother joined in, and after an orgy of spanking, we hurled them, one by one, over the balcony to the floor below. After some time, my mother discovered the incisions in my menagerie, and after I explained that I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up and needed to practice, she stitched up the dolls and stuffed animals, without punishing me. I was thrilled with the scars; they looked very swashbuckling. She forbade any more operations, but my brother and I kept up the secret doll-spanking sessions, hurling them over the balcony. The scissors disappeared for good after my mother discovered that Maxer and Pearly, our two cats, had clumps of fur missing.

T
HE GAMES WE PLAYED AT
school could not have been more unlike the ones I played, hidden away, at home. Our teacher, Mrs. Corette, taught
us wonderful games. The first day of school, we all joined hands in a ring and sang, “Bluebird, bluebird, through my window,” as one “bird” began to weave in and out of the circle of children. Then we’d sing, “Take a little girl and tap her on the shoulder,” and the “bird” would tap another child on the shoulder. The tapped child took the bluebird’s hand and together they’d weave in and out of the circle tapping others at the correct moment in the song, until there was a line of children holding hands where the circle had been. Finally, we would re-form a circle holding hands. The older kids taught us rougher games like Red Rover Red Rover send Peggy right over.

I didn’t have B.O., but I said my words queer, like “tomaahto” and “trousers,” which was almost as bad. And I came across another distinction that mattered, something most people would call politics, but which ran deeper than that: it had the fervor of religion. At recess, the eighth-grade girls culled me from the pack, and when the playground monitor turned her back to cuff some boy on the ear, the girls linked arms, formed a long gauntlet, and began kicking me, like some pack of feral Rockettes. This happened a lot. The first sentence I ever wrote was a note to Barbara, the worst of the big girls. “YOU ARE A RAT.” When I walked into the girls’ room to use the toilet, there she was, showing my note to the rest of the pack and laughing.

One day, when I was on the teeter-totter with a boy in my class, his sister Corleen, an eighth grader, came over. Because she was alone for once, I saw my chance. I worked up my courage and asked, “Corleen, why do the big girls hate me?”

“Promise you won’t tell them I told you?”

“Cross my heart,” I said, gesturing.

“Well, I’m not sure exactly, but I think it’s because your father is a Communist.”

I had no idea what a Communist was, but I was relieved, somehow, to know there was a reason. I don’t know if it’s universally preferable to know
why
you’re being beaten, even if the reason is wrong. I suspect so. In my case, the reason was dead wrong. My father was probably the most un-Communist, anti-Communist of any of them. He detests Communism. But he also detested McCarthy and that whole un-American idiocy of which New Hampshire in the fifties and early sixties was in thrall.
Communist
meant anyone who looked different, spoke different,
and boy, did it mean anyone who was a Jew or had even visited New York City. Communists were why each classroom walked single file down to the basement, where we knelt against the dank green wall and covered our heads with our arms until a teacher blew the all-clear whistle. These “duck and cover” civil defense drills were to prepare us in the event that Communists dropped the bomb on Plainfield. Unlike any other assembly, there was no giggling or fooling around. We were scared, quiet, and in deadly earnest. Weekly we knelt, covered our heads, and silently contemplated our mortality.