Dream Catcher: A Memoir (35 page)

It was the same with riding. My mother drove me at least an hour to a stable for riding lessons each week one summer. I managed, technically, to lose my virginity on the pommel of a western saddle when the damn horse stopped short on the upswing of a trot. That ended as I refused to “get back up on the horse” again. But I did like to go and watch—from a safe distance—the Morgan horse show that my dad used to take me to when it came to a field near Windsor several times a summer. We sat up on the hillside above the ring and ate hot dogs with mustard and watched the horses. They were a sight to behold, deep chestnut bodies gleaming in the sunshine, green fields, wonderful warm smells of hay and manure, leather and sweat.

Although my parents had widely differing ideas about summer camp, the tide of their dreams proved irresistible. My mother told me stories of her happy summers spent at Camp Wyonagonic. She showed me a photograph of a group of girls in swimming costumes lined up the way they do in group photos, a row of little kids on the bottom, the bigger girls standing behind them.
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There was little Claire, looking directly into the camera with serious, wide eyes, tummy sticking out
nicely, hair beautifully cut at her chin, parted on the side and held back by a ribbon band. She pointed out various other girls: “There’s Princess Margaret and Lady so-and-so.”

I was to go to Camp Billings in Vermont, and I can assure you that no princess of any sort had ever set foot on the shores of that lake. Nevertheless, we went shopping for camp as though I were one of the young ladies in my mother’s old photograph. They sent a list of required clothing, which my mother taped to the inside of my new trunk. I loved that trunk, with its orderly, private compartments all smelling of cedarwood. My clothes were to be camp colors, navy blue and white, with name tags that said “Peggy Salinger” sewn in. Even in the underpants. I had seven new white underpants, three pairs of white socks and four of blue socks rolled into tidy bundles, five blue shorts, five white shirts with short sleeves, buttons down the front, and a Peter Pan collar, one blue pullover, one white button-down sweater, one pair of sneakers, one bathing suit, and for Sundays, one pleated navy blue skirt and one pair of saddle shoes. My mother placed these into my trunk in neat rows and bundles. I had my own toiletry kit with my own bottle of shampoo, soap, a toothbrush still in its case, and an unsqueezed, perfect tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste was still yucky old Crest that smelled bathroomy instead of the cinnamon-smelling Colgate that my friend Becky got to use. I had asked for the Colgate because it seemed within the realm of possibility, unlike what I really wanted, which was the new fizzy stuff called McCleens that made my tongue go numb when Viola let me taste some. It was really cool and totally out of the question. With the English, there is something at best suspect, at worst French and immoral, about things that taste too good or are too comfortable; plain pudding not fancy pastries, cold rooms with lots of fresh air at night instead of fluffy warmth. It was sensible Crest for me. I probably had slippers, but they are overshadowed by the memory of great plush, fuzzy things, in Kool-Aid pinks and pastels of a forbidden palette, that the other girls in my cabin wore on their feet.

When I arrived at camp, I was shocked by the appearance of my cabin. All those bunk beds stacked against every free bit of wall space. It was dark and dirty and not at all like my beautiful trunk. It was far too much like the photograph I had seen of concentration camp barracks, the prisoners stacked up in bunks. I was afraid one might peer down at
me as the skeletal man in striped pajamas peered down at the photographer below. I chose an upper bunk so no one could look down at me with those eyes, although my cabinmates were nine-to-eleven-year-old well-fed girls.

The latrine was dark and filthy and it stank. I don’t think I had a bowel movement for a week. I didn’t go into the moldy showers either. Blue uniforms notwithstanding, this was not a camp where they inspected you or your bunk for cleanliness, the way Mr. Happy, head of Seymour’s camp, bounced a quarter on each boy’s bunk to make sure it was made tight, to army regulation. Our counselors barely let the cabin door hit them at night as they ran off to meet boys and go drinking. When I overheard two of them talking about it, I thought they meant sodas, which were no longer allowed in our refrigerator at home, and that sounded really sexy and exciting to me, sneaking off to drink Sprite in the woods with boys at night.

The following day we had general orientation, which meant sitting in the dining hall and listening to the head of the camp tell us about the camp’s facilities and rules. Basically, the facilities consisted of the lake and a few boats; the rules, dock safety. On rainy days we would do crafts in the dining hall. I had expected horses and was torn between relief at not having to ride, and disappointment at not being able to just hang around them.
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At Camp Billings, we seemed to spend most of our time in the dining hall at picnic tables singing what I now know to be “Christian” songs, led by the camp director. “Oh, Noah, he built him, he built him an ark-y ark-y; Noah, he built him, he built him an ark-y ark-y; made it out of hick’ry bark-y bark-y; children of the Lord. The animals they came in, they came in by twoseys twoseys; animals they came in, they came in by twoseys twoseys; el-le-phants and kangarooseys-rooseys; children of the Lord.” There were hand signals and gestures to go with the various songs such as “Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again,” which I can still do to this day. The things that stay with us!

We may have been singing about the Lord, but to me, that first meal in the dining hall was as though I’d entered Sodom and Gomorrah. I stared, openmouthed in disbelief, at what they allowed you to do if you didn’t like the food. Instead of eating what was served, you could take a slice of white bread, the wonderful spongy kind I was never allowed at home, and you could spread it with softened butter, which I knew to be
crawling
with germs when left unrefrigerated for more than a few minutes, and sprinkle or douse it, as the case might be, it didn’t seem to matter, with sugar straight from a big pourer, just like the ones at the diner in Windsor. And then you’d eat this sugar sandwich open-faced so there’d be room for several. I just couldn’t believe it. When I tried one, it was like chewing sand, but I thoroughly enjoyed the wickedness of it all. Years later when I read a story about a Jew eating pork for the first time and imagining his father turning over in his grave, I could feel that gritty sugar sandwich in my mouth.

What I didn’t enjoy was how the girls in my cabin decided to amuse themselves at quiet time and before bed. They told ghost stories. Seymour, of course, is immune to that sort of thing, but I was scared to death. I put my fingers in my ears and hummed quietly to myself in my bunk to block out the sound. My trunk began to get disheveled; I couldn’t make neat rows and sock bundles the way my mother did. The dirty laundry and the clean got all mixed together.

The trouble started on the third day of camp. Barbara B., age eleven going on thirty, sat on the floor rolling her blond hair in curlers. We thought this was the height of sophistication. Most of us had never even had our hair curled by our mothers, let alone knew how to do it ourselves. She had all kinds of stuff in her toiletry case—perfume, curlers, face cream. We sat on our bunks in quiet fascination. Suddenly Barbara looked up and said sharply, “Who stole my shampoo? Someone has used two inches of it.” She held up the bottle and made two inches with her nail-polished forefinger and thumb for our inspection. Over the next day or two, other things started disappearing, mostly Barbara’s things. She began telling the other girls that I was the thief. Why she chose me, I’ll never know. A decree was issued, by her blond self, that none of the girls in the cabin should speak to me. After a day of being shunned, I was approached by Barbara on the path up to the cabin and she pulled me aside. “I’ll tell the other girls to talk to you again if you’ll help me raid the store.”

The store was a shack by the dock that sold combs and toothpaste and candy for about an hour or so a day. I considered stealing to be unimaginably wicked, something rough men were sent to jail for over in Windsor. In Plainfield School, a kid stealing was unheard of. First of all, there wasn’t anything much to steal, but I think it was more the ferocious respect for private property in that part of the country that made it so unthinkable. An adult could be shot on sight for trespassing, a child bullwhipped for it. I wasn’t incensed; I was scared. But I was more scared of Barbara than of stealing, so I agreed. That night we snuck out and crept over to the shack. She jimmied the lock like a pro, climbed in, and we grabbed handfuls of lollipops and gum and Fritos. We brought the loot back to the cabin and had a big pig-out. Barbara was the hero. In the midst of midnight festivities, one of the girls forgot the ban and spoke to me. Barbara lifted a perfectly polished, mauve fingernail to her lips and said, “Shhhhh!”

The next morning when I awoke, I found a piece of paper folded on my blanket. The message said “I don’t think that you took anything, but please don’t tell anyone I told you so. Marilyn.” A thin, dark girl with birdlike features smiled at me from her perch on the top bunk that stood at right angles to mine. I silently mouthed, “Thanks.” A secret friend.
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That evening, Barbara decided we should hold a séance and try to levitate a girl who lay in the center of a circle. I dug down inside my sleeping bag and prayed: “I will fear no evil for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” I was spooked out of my wits. I wrote to my father and told him what was happening there. He didn’t come and get me. Instead, he wrote to thank me for the “terrific” letter I’d written and asked my permission to send it to Bill [Shawn]. Not knowing that he’d just published “Hapworth,” a letter from a boy at camp, I didn’t understand at all. I had the feeling that he must have mistaken another letter for mine.

It seems odd to me now, though it didn’t at the time, that my father was never shocked by anything. It was as if my life were something he was reading in a novel or watching at the movies. “Don’t be so silly, Peggy, they’re not real, they’re actors.”
Maya.

L
ATE ONE NIGHT, FROM MY
cabin window, I saw a red light hovering on the horizon. I watched it moving slowly, growing gradually larger. Then, time jumped; not the way time passes when you’re asleep and some internal clock keeps a record, but the way, under anesthesia, the electricity goes out, time stops, and the clock needs resetting. I came to and sat upright in my bed and looked out of the window into the moonlight. Hundreds of small dinner plate–size disks were moving slowly, perfectly spaced, like fat snowflakes on a windless night. I felt a quiet, snowfall-watching reverie; not fear, not curiosity. Then, in a blink of an eye, they were gone. The large red light nearby got smaller and smaller as it slowly joined the stars at the horizon. I swore to myself that I’d remember, remember, remember. I rehearsed it over and over again and then fell asleep. In the morning when I awakened, I asked Marilyn, secretly of course, if she’d seen the UFOs last night. She shook her head; no, she hadn’t, and she whispered, “Wake me up if you see them again. Promise?”

Sunday evening, the campers put on a talent show in the dining hall. I’m in awe of people who can get up and put on a show, making up their own lines as they go along, confident that they will be well received. The thought of doing something like that myself is unspeakably impossible and embarrassing, like those endless dreams where you have to go to the bathroom but there is no door to the bathroom, or the toilet you’re sitting on is in the middle of a crowded room. The older campers put on funny make-up and did funny things and swirled around me like a circus gone out of control. People laughed in groups and said clever things in group skits, and I couldn’t even get a toehold into the glass wall that separated me from them. I sat at one of the picnic tables, shoulders hunched over, in stark contrast to Buddy and Seymour’s talented performance of a soft-shoe routine showcased for the campers and the adult guests in “Hapworth,” trying to make my weird, unclever, untalented, unpopular self invisible.

I awoke the next day feeling strange. The nurse said I had a temperature of 101. For some crazy reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, they still made me go on the mountain hike scheduled for the day’s activity. My father wrote about another absurd expedition inflicted on children at camp. Seymour Glass is seven years old and in the infirmary recuperating and writing a letter home. He writes:

After breakfast every Midget and Intermediate in the entire camp was obliged to go strawberrying. . . . We drove miles and miles to where the strawberry patches were in a little, ramshackle, old-fashioned, maddening cart, quite fake, drawn by two horses where at least four were required.

The wheel of this cart had a big piece of iron sticking out of it that penetrated several inches into Seymour’s leg. He was brought back to the camp infirmary by Mr. Happy, the camp director, on his motorcycle. Seymour reported that he bled all over Mr. Happy’s new motorcycle. This situation had “several fleeting, humorous moments. . . . Fortunately, I find that if a situation is funny or risible enough, I tend to bleed less profusely. . . . [He threatened to sue Mr. Happy] in the event that I lost my ridiculous leg from infection, loss of blood, or gangrene.”