Dream Catcher: A Memoir (37 page)

1
. This photo, from
Life
magazine, of the young girls was taken at the Mayfair Swimming Club, in London, not at summer camp, I later realized.

2
. As Holden said of Pencey Prep, “They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere
near
the place” (
Catcher,
p. 2).

3
. Truth being stranger than fiction, I asked a dear friend of mine, whom I’d met at Harvard summer chorus, to read a draft of this book. Marilyn suddenly hooted, “Oh my God!
I
went to Camp Billings, too. Last top bunk on the left-hand side as you walk in the cabin.” She remembered a “blond bitch on wheels” who was way bigger than the rest of us. She didn’t remember me in particular, she said, she was mostly focusing, with all her energy, on how to get the hell out of there.

4
. See
Zooey,
p. 144: “I feel like those dismal bastards Seymour’s beloved Chuang-tzu warned everybody against. ‘Beware when the so-called sagely men come limping into sight.’ He sat still, watching the snowflakes swirl. ‘I could happily lie down and die sometimes,’ he said.” See also Seymour’s quotations from sagely men written on his bedroom wall, such as: “ ‘Don’t you want to join us?’ I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffee house that was already almost deserted. ‘No, I don’t,’ I said.”—Kafka

5
. Yes, I know:
bow, stern, starboard,
blah, blah, blah. The only word I wanted to hear was
port.
What is it about amateur sailors that they feel this evangelical mission to inflict their pleasure on the unconverted? If being damp, cramped, and threatened with drowning or decapitation from that swinging boom is your cup of tea, fine. Make mine Michelin’s five stars, thank you very much—I get
very
ill-tempered just thinking about sailing.

However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them.

—The second of the Four Great Vows

recited by Zooey in
Franny and Zooey

B
ACK IN THE CLASSROOM THAT
fall, we fifth graders were suddenly disturbed by an unearthly howling coming from the playground. The whole class jumped up and looked out the window. Two dogs were out on the playground, and they were stuck together. The farm kids were the first to laugh because they knew what they were witnessing. The rest of us soon caught on. Mrs. Spaulding rapped sharply on the window. She turned to us, glaring, and said, “Simmer down, people. People! I said simmer down.” But the slow simmer had begun, bubble by bubble, toward the full heat of puberty, and nothing, not even our principal, Mrs. Spaulding, could stop it.

Our mothers sensed it, the upward-thrusting energy, the great tangle of roots and swollen bulbs pushing beneath the flat white blanket of winter, and they tried to stop it. They pruned us back hard, to keep us tidy and under control. My mother began to braid my hair back so severely it lifted my eyebrows up. At least four bobby pins were jammed into my bangs to keep them off my face. I was swathed in shapeless woolen dresses so ugly and plain that even I noticed and hated them. Viola’s mother had a different strategy toward the same end. Tomboy Viola was sent to school looking like a baby doll in flounces and petticoats
and curls her straight hair was subjected to from the cursed Toni home permanents her mother gave her.

Each morning, after our mothers dropped us off at school, Viola and I headed straight for the basement to perform our morning ritual. Viola held her head under the sink to dampen down the terrible curls while I pulled on her hair and blotted it between paper towels. Then she helped me break through the fifty-odd yards of rubber band wound round my braids, pulled them out, and checked for stray bobby pins.

Each afternoon, there was hell to pay when our mothers saw we’d done it again. “Honest, Ma, it just came out. On the playground, at recess. What do you want me to do,
sit
all recess? Jeesum Crow!” They must have worn their hands out spanking us, but it didn’t stop us. Each morning, curls “revived” by rollers went down the drain, braids and bangs liberated from bondage.

When spring came, the changes that were going on beneath the surface began to reveal themselves in our play and behavior. We girls stopped playing in the woods on our own at recess and began, instead, dancing to 45s we played on the blue, portable record player I brought to school. We practiced the new dances we saw on
American Bandstand;
the Pony and the Swim were added to the Twist. Although we danced in pairs of girls, and the boys played marbles in pairs of boys, here and there a boy and a girl would split off from the group and walk around the playground together, sometimes arm in arm for a few minutes, and then go back to their marbles or dancing. The intermingling of boy and girl was limited to this chaste promenade with your partner two by two, but the point wasn’t
what
you did together, it was the fact that somebody “liked” you. Now, when we played house, girls would show off the little key chain or cereal-box prize, more precious than diamonds, that their “steady” had given them. The girls who had older sisters knew they wouldn’t be allowed to go steady until high school, most of them, so that made it even more exciting. I had always been chosen early as a valuable player for teams of tag and red rover and jump rope, but in this new game, as sides were chosen, no one picked me.

I was in the J. J. Newberry five-and-dime in Windsor with my father when, like a skinny boy sending away for Super Weight-On drink, I spotted my miracle. There, in the jewelry bin, was a pendant with a big gold initial in the center of a plastic wood-tone circle, suspended
from a foot-long golden chain. It was gorgeous. Daddy didn’t ask me why I bought one with an
R
on it, thank goodness. Perhaps he didn’t notice.

On Monday, I wore it to school hidden under my blouse. When recess came, I told the other girls that I had met the cutest guy over the weekend. He’s from Claremont and his name is Ritchie Davis. It wasn’t long before I was surrounded by girls asking for news of Ritchie who lived all the way over to Claremont that had a movie theater and everything. Ritchie took me to see movies that hadn’t been shown in theaters for some thirty years. I told the girls and even some boys all about
The 39 Steps
and how Ritchie had held hands with me during the scary parts. Then, as I slowly pulled the pendant out from under my blouse, which, given the length of the chain, provided ample, even Hitchcockian, dramatic time, I announced, “We’re going steady.”

A
FEW OF THE GIRLS
skirted the issue for another year or two by moving blithely from dolls to horses. They drew horses, talked about horses, rode horses, curried and stroked and fed and watered horses, and on the playground, pretended to be horses. For the rest of us girls, as well as all of the boys, it seemed, the progression was from a preoccupation with the animal kingdom of toads and caterpillars to the birds and bees of the human world, without the mediating stop at horses.

Our sexual education was confined to observations of animals, unavoidable in the country. Naturally, the farm kids were exposed to the more veterinary specifics of procreation. But for all of us, what humans “did” together when they “did it” was a vast screen of projections, observational misinformation, and the lore passed down as a legacy from the older kids. The chaste, sedate promenade of relations between the sexes on the playground met its doppelgänger in the dirty jokes and stories we told and heard in our efforts to gain entrance to the grown-ups’ big secret.

Oh, what we filled the vacuum of information with! A sump pump of necrophilia, cannibalism, and excreta spewed forth like an uncapped oil well across the playground. One dirty joke was about a guy who is lost and asks to spend the night at a farmer’s house. Sure, says the
farmer, but you have to share a bed with my daughter. Okay, says the weary traveler. At breakfast the next morning the farmer offers the traveler breakfast, but he refuses, saying he’s too full to eat. The following morning the same thing happens. The third morning, the traveler finally admits to the farmer that a curious thing was happening: “I tried to kiss your daughter but I got a mouthful of rice.” The farmer says, “Rice? That’s not rice, those were maggots; my daughter’s been dead for a year.”

Another joke involved a guy eating out a woman. I guess some-body heard the phrase and took it literally—who wouldn’t? This guy is eating out a woman, the joke goes, and he keeps coming across various foods, the more vividly described the better. The punch line is that it somehow turns out that, like an archaeologist, what he was coming across were layers from guys the previous evenings who had had dinner, eaten her out, and vomited into her hole. Nice, huh?

Holden spoke for all of us when he said, “Sex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t.” But Holden, published in 1951, was long gone from my father’s world by the time I was old enough to wonder. He had moved on from Holden’s human confusion to Teddy and the young Seymour’s world of preternatural, omniscient knowledge. Seven-year-old Seymour, for example, writes to his parents about the camp director and his wife, explaining that their marital problems stem from their not having “become one flesh to perfection.” With the help of Desiree Green, an eight-year-old who possesses, he says, an admirably open mind, he could demonstrate the proper technique to them “in a comparative jiffy.”

V
IOLA AND
I
HAD
just finished undoing our hair and she said, hang on a sec, I have to pee. After a minute or so she called out to me from behind the stall door, “Peggy, can you go and get me a Band-Aid from Mrs. Spaulding? There’s blood on my underpants. I think I sat on a piece of glass in the bathtub last night.” She was terrified when it didn’t stop for several days and seemed to keep happening every month or so.

I, too, made a horrifying discovery. I was in the bathtub, and suddenly I saw them. Overnight, two dark hairs had sprouted on my
thing-I-had-no-name-for.
¹
It was like when the snow first melts in the spring and reveals not lush green grass, but mud and a tangled mat of yellowish exposed roots; petrified, white, powdery dog poop from last year; and all manner of things that look as though they crawled out from under a rock. My girlfriends and I watched in fascination and in horror as otherworldly shapes began to push through the surface, like little hairy fiddlehead ferns and mushrooms that, when they first poke through the ground, bear no resemblance to the grand unfurled forms that show themselves to the open air. Damp, earthy, peculiar-smelling things too red and shiny and rounded. One nipple grows inverted, the other one sticks out; no one explains you won’t go through life a freak. We would have died before we let anyone but our best girlfriends see, showing ourselves in secret sessions in haylofts and tree houses, examining each other like lepers for more signs of it spreading.