Dream Catcher: A Memoir (41 page)

Before the beginning of school—oh, manna from heaven!—my mother let me go shopping for clothes. I don’t know why she finally stopped insisting on my wearing drab, English-schoolgirl, itchy-caterpillar-like tweeds and felts and woolens. I emerged from a store in Hanover that day with a beautiful, soft, blue, fluffy, acrylic knit mini-dress that I wore with white windowpane stockings
¹
and a garter belt that wasn’t from the store where we always bought my sensible white Carter’s Spanky Pants, a name that always caused me to cringe, as if underwear shopping wasn’t devastating enough.
²

I also bought a paisley mini-dress with orange patterns on a yellow background, colors previously illegal in my closet, and a navy blue dress that had horizontal stripes of yellow and red. The coolest thing about the latter dress, other than the colors, was that, at the bottom where the hem was, some extra material was rolled up and stitched, forming a slightly padded inch-and-a-half-thick ring around the bottom of the dress. Sort of like a Hula-Hoop sewn into a dress.
Very
“mod.”

I was allowed to buy a pair of normal shoes, shoes like the other girls wore, for the first time in my life. My mother was sure they would
ruin
my feet. There is nothing wrong with my feet, but I had had to wear orthopedic-looking lace-up oxfords, “sensible shoes,” every day since I learned to walk, even to birthday parties where the other little girls wore patent leather Mary Janes. We bought a pair of size 9 (I was a size 8
¹
/
₂
, but the extra half size was so my toes wouldn’t be ruined the very
mo
ment I put them on), navy leather Mary Janes that were blessed with a heel of about an eighteenth of an inch. That made them
real
pumps! Heaven on earth! Heels. I also had a blue raincoat, a “slicker” to Beatles fans in the know, with a big zipper up the front and a bold yellow band about a foot wide around the middle. What a marvelous thing, for once in your life, to feel you look great instead of dreadful. I know most of the world has to worry about having enough clothes to cover body parts and keep warm. But, oh, what a lovely thing to feel pretty; it was the first time in my life.
³
“I could have danced all night”—and not ruined my toes.

When we got home, my mother let me take my old dresses from the closet and put them in a bag for “the poor children.” This time, however, “the poor children” were no longer siblings of classmates with real faces and real embarrassment at the situation; they were a distant concept. Into the giveaway bag went my three old dresses, like evil, ugly stepsisters. In went the tight maroon-and-cream-plaid wool jumper worn for two years over a choice of cream or maroon turtleneck, with
white bobby socks, and sensible shoes. In went the navy wool jumper with the contrasting navy-and-white-plaid skirt that always hung at a queer angle and itched; and in went the most hated of all, a dog-doody-brown jumper, made of hatting felt so stiff that it bent into me like cardboard when I sat down. Boy, did I hate that dress. I could have hung it in effigy and burned it as they did the stuffed “enemy” at the Dartmouth College bonfires the night before a game. Or dumped it into the harbor like the Boston Tea Party we’d been reading about in our history book at school, “no taxation without representation.” Freedom.

Once again, a dollar surreptitiously spent at the Newberry five-and-dime in Windsor, home of my gold-tone
“R”
pendant, provided me with contraband accessories and solid cachet among classmates: a pair of screw-back earrings that had great big “pearl” balls that dangled deliciously from two-inch gold chains, and a tube of white lipstick. I smuggled these beauties into school. Where once it was just Viola and me who went straight to the girls’ room to do our forbidden uncurling and unbraiding, now there were legions of us in the girls’ room before school applying make-up, rolling up miles of skirts at the waist to the desired mini length, some even having a smoke in the stall. The air was thick with excitement.

Each seventh grader was assigned his or her own private locker on the first day of school. I loved this, that the first order of business was to give you a secret place to put things. The little slip of paper with my combination written on it was as magical to me as my secret, moonlit worlds of fairies and wood sprites had been years ago. It was a key to my own world, away from my parents. Inside the locker, there was a hook for my coat, a bottom shelf for boots, and top shelves for books, notebooks, brush and comb, lunch bag, or purse of money for lunch in the cafeteria. It also served as a mailbox for friends who might wish to leave a note on your locker or push it in via the vent slats. Once in a while there were locker inspections, but I never took them personally; they were more for one’s own protection against some gross guys who left their gym socks or ham sandwich in there, stinking up the hall for weeks on end. Drugs had not made it into the junior high school at that time, so it wasn’t like a police search. We heard rumors of “hippies” smoking pot, but it was smoke curling on the far horizon, distant, scenic and cozy, not near and threatening.

We switched classes every period, sharing the halls with the entire junior and senior high school. I made my way down corridors, surfing the wave of moving students, on that thrilling edge between mastery and danger. We passed seniors, on the top floor where the halls were carpeted, sitting on the floor by their lockers, taking up space with confidence, hanging out, stitching up a hem, talking till the bell rang over the intercom and the corridors became deserted and only those with hall passes, stopped and inspected at roving checkpoints by hall monitors, could proceed. Having been raised on a wholesome diet of World War II espionage movies, this system of passes and checkpoints and forbidden territory did not escape my eye. On lone forays to the girls’ room, hall pass in hand, I gathered intelligence regarding patterns of enemy movement. I was scarcely aware I was doing it. By the third week of school, I had the system down. My chance came at the end of the month when I needed to be absent for a whole day, for a reason I forget, probably dental, and in order to be excused, I had to collect all of my teachers’ signatures on a form. I copied each signature before turning in the form to the office. Now I just had to get a pass someone was dumb enough to fill out in pencil. Having spent my entire life picking my way through a veritable minefield at home, between my mother’s explosions and my father’s narrow path, school was a field day to negotiate. With my dad I pretended I was still the girl who doesn’t “understand the Parisians, thinking love’s so miraculous and grand, oh, they speak about it, won’t live without it, oh, I don’t understand the Parisians”
(Gigi).
At school, however,
je suis une boulevardière.

The few places where school and home rubbed up against each other were the hardest to negotiate. I’m sure I’m not the only girl on the edge of adolescence whose father “went mental” about something every couple of weeks. My wearing mod stockings made him nuts. He wouldn’t say it to me directly, but when he’d pick me up from school as he did on occasion, he’d survey my schoolmates waiting for buses or rides and decry the “joiners, followers, and sheep” all wearing “the uniform of fashionable nonconformity.” One afternoon he lost it completely. I had drawn a small peace symbol on my leg with a pen in study hall. “Oh, my God!” he cried out, and put his hands over his eyes as if he had seen something so awful he couldn’t bear to look. Then he stuck out his finger, jabbing in the general direction of my leg. “What . . . the
hell . . . is
that?”
he said slowly, flatly, spitting out the words with contempt. Man, my stomach went crazy. “Nothing. I don’t know. What?” I thought he was going to hit me.
“Christ
almighty. Do you have any idea what would happen if we pulled out of Vietnam? A bloodbath,” he yelled. “That’s what would happen, the Communists would come in and there’d be a bloodbath. You don’t know them, you don’t know what they’re capable of.” I licked my finger and tried to rub it off. Duck and cover.

I didn’t disagree with him; I knew next to nothing about the war in Vietnam except the flat way Chet Huntley or David Brinkley read the daily body count on the evening news. There was something much scarier, much more real and ominous, about those cold statistics, for me anyway, than seeing the Gulf War “up close and personal” on CNN. Sort of the way black-and-white photographs often seem more lifelike than color ones. I get the shivers writing about it. I kind of understand, now, why seeing your daughter wearing a peace symbol could feel like seeing a swastika, an attack on everything you and your army buddies had fought and died for. But then it just scared the hell out of me. I had
no idea
what I’d done.

It seemed that everything I did in terms of dress or style (which is all the peace symbol meant to me at the time; it was my mother who was starting to get involved seriously in the antiwar movement) that celebrated my fitting in at school provoked outbursts of rage from my father. Traitor: I was becoming
like
other people, people other than him. Sometimes these scenes would then be followed by his profuse, desperate pleading for forgiveness, as if I were his wife or something, which was even worse than the yelling somehow, it made me feel
really
icky and uncomfortable.

It was becoming increasingly tricky for me to stay in his good graces. Once in a fight I was having with my dad, he accused me of not caring about him or my brother or anyone in the family, just my friends. I countered, “Well,
you
don’t even
have
any friends.” He replied, as he has done on several occasions, that he didn’t have the same
need
for friends as I seemed to have, implying, of course, that it was a weakness on my part.

What I didn’t have the words for at the time, but only felt somewhere in my bones, was that to fit into my father’s family, to be his perfect
Phoebe, would have meant turning, like Daphne, into a tree.
⁴
I realize now why I saved all the notes my friends and I passed to each other in school that year and recall the “underground foliage”—the secrets of who likes whom, the hidden kisses, bodies meeting bodies beneath crepe-paper decorations at dances—with such affection, when so many other mementos fell by the wayside as time went by in move after move. To my dad, I’m sure our concerns, if I’d been so foolish as to let him know, would have seemed contemptibly shallow. I, however, treasure this time when I joined the dance of life, splashed and cavorted in the shallows, albeit hidden from my family, rather than sitting on the island cliff contemplating my navel. Just as I believe his Glass characters are cheated out of the joys of childhood reading by their focus on adult books and concerns, so, too, I feel they are cheated out of the joys and sorrows of inhabiting the mind and body and world of an eleven-year-old. To everything there is a season, and my turn had finally come to act my own age.

A
T
H
ANOVER
J
UNIOR
H
IGH
, for the first time ever, I fit in. I don’t remember how I got to know everybody. It seemed to just happen. I was placed in the 7–1A track where the most popular kids were. Cliques are probably easier to write about if you’re on the outside. When you’re in one, at that age, you don’t really know what everyone else is doing; you’re just not aware. We were the cool group, the boulevardiers, the A-minus underachievers who wrote secret notes to each other about who liked whom and planned parties in study hall.

The smartest kids were in 7–1 and they were different; they actually studied. They even
talked
about schoolwork. Tracking is a tricky thing, attempting to group together kids who are alike. I’m sure it reinforced and perpetuated the established economic order—the kids with B.O.
were in 7–4 and took home ec and industrial arts, and so on; but at the time, it reflected the order so well that it didn’t seem like an agent of it, it seemed objective and true. Like with like.

For a couple of kids, the tracks were a less than perfect fit. Gail, for instance, was part of our group socially, but took some classes with the dumb kids. I remember in sixth grade she couldn’t hear syllables the way the rest of us could. Was
girl
one syllable or
gir-ul,
two syllables? She was really smart and beautifully expressive, but just didn’t get certain things; her papers had lots of red
x
’s all over them. Now there’s a term for her difficulty, learning disabilities, but then it was a mystery. Gail actually knew Joan Baez. She called her Joanie and knew the correct pronunciation of her name—“Bize” rather than “Bye-ez,” as the rest of us mistakenly did. So cool.

The other friend I had who didn’t quite fit the track was Anna, who took some 7–1 classes. She was far more mature, both physically and mentally, than the rest of us were. She actually needed a bra, a garment we all wore but most of us only aspired to filling. She seemed to be able to handle homework and hormones simultaneously with humor and grace. Anna seemed to float comfortably between boundaries; she was smart and fun and cool at the same time. I’d be fascinated to know how life went for her. She used to report in on the 7–1 kids and give me a glimpse at how the tribe on the other side of the island lived: