Dream Catcher: A Memoir (38 page)

I was up in a classmate’s attic when we discovered, under an old trunk, a secret book of knowledge. We were hoping to find old dress-up clothes. What we found was her older brother’s secret stash of
Playboy
magazines. We gazed, glazed with desire, at the perfect mounds of breasts and buttocks. The Playmates in the early sixties were like Barbie, no sprouting pubic hairs; in fact, no pubis at all, and big, luscious ice-cream-sundae boobs. The gap between those girls and us was unspannable. Even in our wildest, bravest imaginations we couldn’t make the leap; we felt ourselves a separate species. We decided we must be lezzies. We weren’t quite sure what they were or did, but we knew they were girls who were sexually attracted to girls instead of boys, and I, at least, was
very
worried about this. I surely desired and thought about Miss March’s boobs and couldn’t imagine thinking
Herbie’s or Henry’s “thing” I’d seen in third grade was anything other than completely gross, and the idea of their actually sticking one in me and peeing like the stuck dogs on the playground was beyond the outer limits of gross. Plus the way animals screamed and my mother bled on Kotexes she kept in a bucket under the sink, and how she had to have stitches after my brother was born and sit on a rubber doughnut, I knew it was not only totally gross but hurt and tore you up. A lezzie in the first degree.

Another source of unclothed secrets was the
National Geographic
magazine. But the breasts we saw in those pictures were pendulous and neutral as cows’ udders. I didn’t mind having those issues around the house until one day I found an issue
right on our own coffee table
that had a photograph of a bare-breasted, barely pubescent native girl. One of us! I could barely stand I was so dizzy thinking my parents might have seen the magazine before I got to it and had seen what she, I, we, looked like. Keep it our secret, don’t let them see or they’ll know what’s hidden under my shirt and in my underpants. I was paralyzed with panic, my face so hot with shame I couldn’t think. I grabbed the magazine and ran for the door. Outside I didn’t stop running until I was deep in the woods. I dug a hole and buried the evidence.

At the same time that I was desperately trying to duck and cover up, my mother’s sexuality was beginning to emerge from beneath a long winter of convent schools, ignorance, and abuse. That’s not how I would have described it then, though; for me, that spring, she became an animal. The sex I saw or heard in nature was a teeming swirl of madness and violence. During mating season, horrid sounds and screechings emerged from the woods. I’d seen my dog Joey have a madness come over him, and he disappeared for several days, returning to sit on the couch and lick his sore, swollen “red thing,” as my brother and I called it. Blood lust and lust were inseparable in my mind.
²

M
Y MOTHER, BROTHER, AND
I came down with a vomiting flu and fever in the January thaw. My father came over to give us some homeopathic medicine. My mother was in bed. I was in the doorway when she sat up and pointed a finger dramatically at my father and yelled, “You’re
poi
soning the children. . . . I cannot stand it a minute longer. I am going to my mother’s.” My brother and I—“poisoned” or not—were not invited to join her.

I found out later that year that she hadn’t gone to her mother’s, but instead had had a romantic rendezvous with a boyfriend in California. An ex-boyfriend of hers just happened to spy them at some restaurant there. The little sneak told my father, who, in turn, told me. I kept it to myself for about a year and then sprang it on my mother, a little act of false “glimpse” terrorism, at an opportune time: “Oh, by the way, I know where you were last year when you said you were at your mother’s in New York.” I told her where she was, and with whom, but refused to say how I knew.

I could pretend to be all-seeing and all-knowing, but when my mother’s eyes clouded with passion, hatred, anger, fear, and desire, what was truly terrifying was the realization that she couldn’t see me at all. I looked in her eyes and saw no person, no solid ground beneath the blue. She was like some force of nature let loose, a dam breaking, a fire in the wind, a twister. She struck close to home that spring, tearing a rent, a wide swath, in the social fabric of Cornish.

My father pulled into the driveway and strode over to the house. “Where’s your mother? I have to talk to her. Claire?” he called in the strained voice he always used with her. His throat literally closed up and he got hoarse, it was such a huge strain for him to speak to her. He went into the house and met her on the landing. My brother and I took our first-row, front-balcony seats on the stairs. “Claire, Mary Jones just called me in tears. She said that Joe is leaving her and wants to marry you. Is that true?”

My parents never once sent us out of the room nor said to us that they had to discuss something in private. My father—far more than my mother, who took great pains at times to tell us that Daddy was a good father—aired every accusation, ugly feeling, name-calling, every bit of his and my mother’s dirty linen, in broad daylight. For a person so devoted to a cult of privacy surrounding himself and his work, he had less of an appropriate sense of privacy, what one should and should not say before an audience of children, than any other adult I’ve ever met. Behind the curtain of virtue is a private table reserved for a party of one.

As my father demanded to know whether what Mary had said was true, I watched my mother’s face intently. What I saw shocked me. I assumed she was guilty but I expected a defense, an outraged denial, a protested innocence. Instead, what I saw was a frightening, silly little smile. She was flushed, but it didn’t look as if from shame or embarrassment; she looked like an excited little girl. My father may as well have asked her, on her way home from school, “So what’s this I hear about little Joey Jones dipping your braids in the inkwell, is it true?” When she spoke, I could tell she was lying, but it was the way a child under five lies, looking at the cookies on her lap and telling you the doggie must have dropped them there. In a child, it can be naively sweet; in an adult, it is almost indescribably enraging. It made me want to beat her head in just to wipe that creepy, silly giggle off her goddam face, and to smash her teeth down her throat if she didn’t start talking like a grown woman instead of in that little voicy-poo. I sat on my hands, as I often did throughout my childhood and teens, scared they’d go for her throat and never stop. I really mean that: the self-control involved in not strangling her often left me limp with exhaustion. She told my father that she just couldn’t understand
what
could have made Joe fall in love with her, silly man, and
of course
she would never think of marrying him.

I knew that part was true, that she wouldn’t think of marrying him. The huge unfairness of it all nearly crushed me. Joe was a guy with short legs and a tight little behind that scooted around the bases really fast when we played softball together. He was no match for my mother at all, and I sat there on the stairs thinking, Pick on someone your own size, you bully. Of course she “did it” with him, I thought, but the silly man fell in love with her, and she was only playing with him, the way our cat Pearly toyed with a chipmunk stupid enough to
get into her clutches. It wasn’t fair. Most of all it wasn’t fair to Mary or the kids.

Joe moved to California. I was certain that Mary would never let us play with her kids at their house again. But Mary went out of her way to show us it wasn’t our fault, and that what had happened was something that concerned grown-ups. I don’t think she said it exactly, but I felt it. It made me crazy though to see how much the kids missed their father, how disrupted their lives were, and how little it registered with my mother. She seemed almost retarded in her total lack of a sense of responsibility or even basic understanding of the consequences of her actions. Like a child who hides her head under the blanket and thinks no one can see her, my mother began to tell us in a giggly voice that she had a “meeting” to go to. I knew; I saw the sex look that erased the personal landscape of her face.

My father called her a “pathological liar.” He put it in moral terms, so now I had a word for “it,” at least. I could express moral outrage at her sins. He gave me a language to vent my rage so I didn’t have to sit on my hands quite so often. One evening, I confronted her in the kitchen and lectured her about her behavior, which by now included having some of her boyfriends stay the night. I didn’t care for myself so much, I told her, it was my brother I was concerned about. It wasn’t good for a young boy to see her being a “slut.” She tried to slap me across the face, but I ducked and left the room.

My father’s main concern wasn’t its effect on us, he never mentioned that, it was the $5,000 a year he had to pay her for child support. He was outraged that he was paying to “feed her boyfriends.” “You don’t eat and shit in the same place,” he’d often tell me at age ten or so as we drove by the house, referring to my mother having boyfriends there. He complained about the support money constantly. He, too, I realized later in life when I tried to get him to pay for my college education, as it was stipulated in their divorce agreement, had no more sense of being responsible for his actions in the real world than my mother did, except as it concerned his work. Child support, pet food, clothing, tuition—all were part of the great conspiracy to “sponge” off him.

When I was a child, though, he was faultless in my eyes, a bit difficult and downright peculiar sometimes, but morally faultless. My father and I sat judge and jury and found my mother guilty of moral crimes. It’s easier to feel moral outrage than terror. Even though I focused my
attention on the things she did that were wrong, what terrified me was the unidentifiable, unspeakable thing I had no words for, that something was deeply wrong with her. I had a horror of her bodily functions; even her clothing I didn’t want to touch for fear something unclean was catching. My mom had serious cooties.

I had no explanation for the fact that Claire, at one moment, could be my mother who loved me and, in the next instant, as with a sandstorm in the desert, all traces, all recognizable features of her humanity were erased. Sometimes I thought she was possessed; then I decided she was just plain wicked. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and working in a home for abused and abandoned children that I again saw that “not there” frenzied look in someone’s eyes, and that flushed, silly, spooky little smile. I was coaching the girls’ basketball team and doing individual gross motor evaluations of the younger kids. I’d have a child playing, eyes focused, anchored, and present, and the second anything sexy, or bodily, happened—someone mentioned going to the bathroom, or a male teacher that a little girl liked came into the room—it was as if the integrity of that child’s being fell apart; the eyes had a smeared, clouded look, face flushed, and that spooky smile appeared.

The second time I saw that transformation was in my thirties. I was living on the first block of Marlborough Street, one of the “best” blocks of Boston, in a building owned by a retired hooker who still ran a few girls out of the basement apartments off the back alley. I lived there for twelve years and spent many a summer afternoon on the front steps hanging out with the working girls. They were, like our landlady, nearing the end of their careers. One had bought a little house in Tennessee and was planning to move back near her family when she retired. She told me she got into the business because she had fallen in love, when she was young, with the wrong guy, who “turned her out,” and she added, because of these, pointing to her huge bosom. She used to do freebies for a blind guy who came around with his dog. He was sweet and nervous and came in the front entrance, like a gentleman caller, instead of slinking through the back alley like a john. We always greeted him as though he were there to pick her up for a date. The other woman, Vickie, had a father who had started her.

One afternoon I was on the stoop with Marcelle and Vickie. The conversation turned to the woman who lived on the first floor, a society
girl who worked for the Fine Arts Museum. Apparently she had had her new investment-banker boyfriend over the previous night and they were rather noisy in their lovemaking. Marcelle and Vickie were in fits of giggles like two schoolgirls gossiping about it. I would have thought that screwing was about as interesting to an off-duty hooker as nuts and bolts to an assembly-line worker. Over the years, I saw it time and again: they went from forty-something-year-old women chatting about roses (we had a pretty rose garden in front) to fifth graders the minute anything sexual came up. Little girls seemed to coexist with middle-aged women with no integration, no blending of the ages. Now you see her, now you don’t. The Lady Vanishes.

1
. Boys had dinks, wizzers, things, dongs, and so on. Girls’ parts “down there” were a mystery too dark to mention beyond babyhood when they had pee-pees or wee-wees—inseparable from the only function “it” appeared to possess. Another dark thought—now in middle age, I still haven’t escaped those black hairs that mysteriously appear, full grown, in ones and twos, on chin or cheek or nipple’s areola, without warning. A friend of mine, going through a painful separation from her husband, once sat crying on my couch. “Who will tell me when those witchy hairs sprout on my face? I’ll be in an old-age home somewhere, with no husband to ferret them out and pluck them. I’ll be one of those hairy old ladies,” she sobbed.