Dream Catcher: A Memoir (42 page)

Dear Peggy,

What goes on at your house, I’ve called 4 times but all I get is a busy signal zzzt-zzzt-zzzt. Does Rachel want us to feel sorry for her or something.

Man that kid (Van Orden?) that was outside of the classroom (Miss Berks) well, when everyone was talking to us about that detention he kept on rubbing shoulders with me. GROSS!!!!!! He is supposed to be a real sex maniac.

You know Martha and Judy and their group? [7–1] Well, they don’t ‘dare’ say the word sex. They treat it like it was a swear word, you know they say (when they do) S-E-X. Shhhh!! Oh dear me.

Love,

Anna

The blending of the Norwich kids with the Hanover kids was a bit bumpy. Loyalties were strained as sixth-grade alliances were regrouped. My best friend Rachel McAndrew, with whom I spent summers in Maine and many a weekend overnight, was now my classmate in 7–1A. Rachel’s two best friends in sixth grade (
in
school that is; we were best friends outside school) went on to 7–1. I was jealous of her attention to them; she was jealous of my new friendship with Anna, and of my Norwich friends. As the year progressed, though, our group in 7–1A was seriously occupied in working out the question of “who likes whom” between boys and girls, while simultaneously still working out questions of “like with like” between friends of the same sex.

Most of our work, and by that I mean the business of sorting out who likes whom, was accomplished in study hall where secret communiqués were passed back and forth. Study hall was held in a huge room on the new, carpeted second floor, with desks divided into three blocks of neat rows. Off to the side of the room by the windows was a big dictionary on a stand. It had the strategic advantage of being the farthest point from the study hall proctor’s desk, and it served as our mailbox. You and a friend would decide on a password and place the note you’d written at that page in the dictionary, and then your friend would go up and get the note instead of risking passing it and getting caught. No one ever stole a note meant for someone else, that just wasn’t the system. On Mondays, Rachel and I would pick a new word for the week:

Peggy,

I just went to the dictionary and looked under
unisexual
—having to do with one sex.

Castrate
—to remove male glands.

Luv
—they didn’t have anything.
Cheap
.

That’s my favorite word.

Bye Rachel!!!

P.S. Is your knee getting better? It looks like it. Bye.

I would grow nearly six inches that year, and my knees were having trouble keeping up. It was great for the hemlines though! What was decent at the beginning of the year became
decent
—our slang for
cool/great—by January. I found myself “in with the in crowd,” the Dave Stone group, quite early on in the year. I had heard about Dave before meeting him because his father, Dr. Stone, delivered me and had been my pediatrician ever since. On my last checkup, to enter seventh grade, he’d told me I’d be in the same class as his son David. I wasn’t impressed so much as curious: Who was that nice Dr. Stone’s boy, and would I be able to ask him what happened to his dad’s leg? (He had a wooden one, my mom told me when I asked her why he walked that way.) The first weeks were a bit confusing:

Dear Rachel,

I think I am going to get out of the group. Dave and the others were friends with me yesterday and now they don’t even know I’m alive.

Then I started getting to know Will, one of the boys in the group, and we helped each other solve a number of mysteries. First we had to figure out whether we “liked” each other. That solved, we went on to form a real partnership. What a treasure to have a member of the opposite sex you can talk to and trade secrets with. Otherwise it’s like Holden, all trial and error and mystery. By the way, an historical note is necessary here I think—when we talk about “sex” in notes, we meant making out, K.I.S.S.I.N.G. as the jump rope chant goes. “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes junior in the baby carriage.”

Dear Will,

I am not “thick” I just can’t read your handwriting. You have dropped a million girls on the grounds that they didn’t play with you enough. That means you think more of sex than Love. If you really loved someone you wouldn’t care if they constantly gave you sex. I’ll be good friends with you now. Later it might be different. Much different. But that is the future.—

from Peggy

Peggy—

You are completely right. I never thought of it that way.

Thank you

Will

Dear Peggy

Who is around? I am lost. I want to just be good freinds with you
[OK]
and Joan. I much rather just like you as a freind than a girlfreind.
[I feel the same way]
Cause you are better that way. I don’t like to go places in the school because I would rather be in a study hall.
[You
like
study hall?]

Bye

Will

P.S. Who should I like?

Will,

You like Joan don’t you?
[Just as a freind she is better that way]
If not there is nobody who wants to go with you. When I asked you over I did because it would be fun
that’s all
.
[I know]
When we made-out I did just because I like you a lot. Not because I love you.
[Same.]

Hi Peggy

I agree with you. Lets do it. I like you a lot too! But not someone to love aussi.

I do know most boys better than you. And you probably know most girls better. I like Linda N. but I am afraid its hopeless. Who do you think I should like. Or who needs and likes me. Please tell me.

Write

Will

Will,

Try Rachel. I asked her what she thought of you and if she wants to go with you. She said, “I don’t know him anymore. But I don’t know mabey.” That’s what she said.

Write back Peggy

The notes I saved record that the first school dance of the year was the occasion of much excitement, intrigue, and blundering. Can you believe this guy?

Peggy this is poor (ron) speaking if someone you liked asked you to go to the dance before DAVE might you go?

ronnie

Peggy

I’m sorry about saying “When was the last time you washed your hair?” Don’t tell rachel that I said I’m sorry. She would just make fun. If I asked you to go to the dance [might] you go? I couldn’t ask rachel because of what I said to her in study hall.

ronnie

Luckily for me, Dave came through with flying colors.

Peggy, after lunch or sometime else, not in class I have to ask and tell you something.

O.K.—D.S.

Peggy,

The thing I wanted to tell you was . . . If someone asks you to the student council dance say you’ve already been invited by someone else
me
.

O.K.?

D.S.

Even more fun than the school dances were the weekend parties each of us, in turn, gave. Rachel had the best house for a party of all of us (except one girl who had an indoor swimming pool, but that was so out of this world it almost didn’t count). The McAndrews had a huge playroom in the finished basement beneath their living room and dining room. It had a TV and a fireplace and a big couch with cushions that you could toss all over the floor and lounge around on and eat popcorn and nobody cared. Rachel had three older brothers and sisters, so by the time it was her turn to have parties, all the battles had been fought. Her parents retired to another part of the house, and the playroom was strictly off-limits to younger brothers and sisters for the evening. The door to the upstairs remained shut, the music loud, and as the evening wore on, the lights virtually off.

Rachel’s party itself is eclipsed in my memory by one of the loveliest moments of my life. It was one of those few moments when time stands still and everything is perfect. Simon and Garfunkel were singing “Sounds of Silence”—“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk
to you again, ’neath a halo of a streetlamp I turned my collar from the cold and damp”—and Dave and I were slow-dancing, the moon shining through the basement window; his cheek touched mine, and we didn’t move apart. I’d never felt anything so soft in my whole life, nor did I again until I held my son for the first time and touched his face as he nursed, just him and me and the quiet of the night.

And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains and echoes in the well of silence.

W
HEN
T
HANKSGIVING CAME ROUND THAT
year, I had a lot for which to be thankful. For a short time, all my stars were lined up in the heavens. Even my mom had done something right in the male department for once. Most of the guys she brought home were young dopes. Like Alex, a college student she dated, who once came into my room all puffed up to give me a charming “father knows best” lecture about being nicer to my poor sweet mother—this from a guy whose voice had barely changed. “You
asshole,”
I said, tired, contemptuous, despairing. “Get the fuck out of my room.”
⁵

I told my dad what Alex had said and that I told him he was an asshole. Daddy laughed and said, “You said that to him, really?” “Yup.” “I’ll bet he was shocked.” I just shrugged my shoulders; I didn’t say it for effect, I was just calling a spade a spade. What I
really
felt was none of Alex’s charming business. What I felt was, who the hell are you to talk to me about anything, especially my mother, you little boy. How
dare
you.

Around Thanksgiving my mother started seeing a man. A real, genuine grown-up, one of only two real, grown-up men I remember her dating. The other, Alan T., is still an important part of my brother’s life and mine. Aside from being a pleasure to know, both when I was a kid and as I grew up, I don’t know what I would have done without Alan at several
crucial junctures of my life where he ran interference for me with the real world, such as the time my divorce lawyer started making passes at me and threatening to raise his bill if I didn’t comply. Alan put me in touch with the “big boys,” an old buddy of his who is a divorce lawyer to the “stars,” who set things right for this small fry in short order. Alan has been there for me in a way my parents never were, bringing to mind the saying “When God closes a door, he opens a window.”

Although Alan has been far more a part of my life, I’ve written about Ray here, because Alan wove in and out of our lives over such a long period of time, it feels as though I’ve always known him. I can’t remember when Alan and my mom started seeing each other; I think they may have met even before she knew my dad, although I do remember being devastated one particular time they broke up because it was just before a promised visit to see my hero, Steve McQueen, the handsomest man in the world as he sat on that motorcycle in
The Great Escape,
on the set of Alan’s movie
The Thomas Crown Affair,
or maybe it was
Bullitt,
I forget. Alan would have taken me along regardless, but my mother nixed it, something about Faye Dunaway and how could he.
⁶

When I met Ray, I could tell instantly that he, like Alan, wasn’t trying to be nice to me to get in good with my mom. Kids can smell that a mile away. And it stinks, let me tell you. Ray was widowed, I think, though I’m not sure, and his son lived with him. He loved his son, and even though Skip was a senior in high school—a time when boys don’t tend to be exactly demonstrative about their attachment to their parents—you could tell Skip loved his dad, too. Ray told me that Skip wasn’t always called Skip. Up until sixth grade he was called Billy. One day he came home from school and said, “Dad, I want to be called Skip,” and that was that. Ray didn’t seem to notice the fierce armor I wore. He’d give me a bear hug just as if I were a kid or something. And he
never
spent the night at our house. If he ever did, it would be because they were married, not shacking up and all that gross stuff. Even when he took us all camping together, I never once had to worry about what
my brother might be exposed to or worry about them “doing it.” I never even gave it a thought. He took such nice care of my brother, I felt as if I could almost relax and take a vacation myself.

My brother and I talked about that camping trip recently. We both were surprised how strongly the images of that weekend stuck in our mind. “The red ball,” he said, “do you remember I lost my red ball on the lake in the wind and Skip rowed across the lake to get it for me?” I don’t just remember, it’s etched indelibly in my mind. The sky is a surreal gray, the lake gray and choppy, the trees gray before snowfall, the only bit of color a red, red ball blowing across the top of the water. My brother is crying, and Skip, without a word, pulls the boat down to the water. We jump in and Matthew stops crying. Skip rows across the lake like the wind, and I reach out my hand into the tossing reeds by the shore at the other side of the lake and catch hold of the ball. When we get back to shore, Ray has built a fire in the cabin and it’s cozy and warm and almost time for supper.