Dream Catcher: A Memoir (44 page)

Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.

—quoted by Teddy in
Nine Stories

S
PRING VACATION WAS AROUND
the corner and my dad was taking Matthew and me to England and Scotland for two weeks. I couldn’t wait. I had no idea, at the time, that it would be the last time we’d take a real vacation together as a family. Writing about our last travels together, the twilight of an era, is bittersweet, like an Indian summer, a temporary reprieve, a stay of winter. And like most tales of leaving home, or the end of an era, something is lost, something is gained.

Daddy, Matthew, and I were off to London. Mom drove us to the airport, fifteen minutes away, in Lebanon. The driveway to the airport is easily missed. It’s just past the dump, now called “sanitary” something or other, and the crushed-stone pit. Back then, besides the dump and the gravel pit, there were just miles of open fields growing cattle corn. Now it’s all shopping malls and fast food. I saw my first McDonald’s a few years later, on that stretch of Route 12-A, and watched the sign outside with a kind of hypnotic fascination and disgust—like looking at a car accident—as the numbers mounted: over 7 million sold, over 11 million sold. I imagined all those carcasses stacked in great heaps in the parking lot around the West Lebanon McDonald’s.

The airport was little more than a shack and a runway. Inside the shack was a small, five-stool lunch counter where guys sat and had a sandwich and coffee and watched the plane come in. On the lunch counter, by the cash register, was a wire rack of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and yellow packets of Juicy Fruit gum. Next to that, another wire rack with rolls of Life Savers in two flavors: grown-up toothpaste-tasting peppermint, which my mom, in her never-ending battle against bad breath, bought when she forgot her green, “this-is-
not
-candy” Clorets with real chlorophyl, and the rainbow-colored rolls that kids bought. My system for eating the roll was red, yum; green, yuck, give it to Matthew; orange, so-so; yellow, so-so; and the white mystery flavor I thought was slightly sophisticated, like an acquired taste, not for babies. Matthew made it even better by saying “yuck” and trading the white ones to me for green ones. I liked seeing the packs of gum and the rolls of Life Savers neatly displayed, each in its own rack, a sight that predates another inroad into the disorder of the universe: the alarming confusion of the two, gum and Life Savers, in “yipes, stripes, fruit-striped gum.” When that product made its way to Barto’s store in Plainfield, it smelled good and Life Savery, but once you put it in your mouth, the stick got mushy and almost instantly lost its flavor. You wound up cramming the whole pack in your mouth within minutes and were left with a handful of empty wrappers and a big tasteless glob the color of paintbrush water.

We had a couple of hours to kill before the plane to New York was scheduled to take off. Travel was an event that not only required a ritual rising at dawn but until about 1965, white gloves. I have clear memories of riding in New York taxicabs looking down at my gloved hands. All those ritual designations that one is entering a different place—grandmother’s, the city, church, a ship—were disappearing. When I was young, my experience of place had much more texture to it than now; the world was more like a pieced quilt—here a bit of a favorite summer dress, there my brother’s overalls—than a factory-made blanket, uniform and alike. Although I dislike intensely the distinction clothes and habits make between people—old-money rich, nouveau riche; popular, untouchable; virtuous and slutty; and so on—I do miss the distinction clothes and habits can make between kinds of place. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there is a difference in tone between a special event or
place providing a person with an excuse to wear something nice, and the idea that something nice requires a reciprocal formality on your part, like a thank-you note, or covering your head with a scarf when entering an Italian church.

It was a world where clothing could signify not what time it is, but rather, what
kind
of time it is. Gazing down at my white-gloved hands in a New York taxi, I slipped into a quiet reverie; someone knew where and when the cab would arrive, but for now, the packing, the hurrying, the carrying, the “doing” time was over and there was a respite, a “being” time to sit and just be, a little girl gazing at white gloves in a taxicab. In middle age, my white liturgist’s robe usually signifies
what
time it is: it’s time for church. I busily serve people wine and bread at the Communion rail, half-consciously worrying if the bread will run out, or if the music will finish before everyone is served and you’re left with an awkward silence in which all the personal bodily sounds of swallowing and creaking are projected publicly in the splendid acoustics of our fine church, or whether I’ll spill the wine on one of the tiny old ladies kneeling—it’s a bit tricky to offer the cup so close to the rail, and God forbid they should wear a wide-brimmed hat and you can’t even see where their mouth is, which doubles the leap of faith in the offering. But once in a while, there comes a time when the work of the Mass ceases, the priest or guest speaker is giving a sermon or delivering a long liturgy, and I sit on the liturgist’s bench and gaze down at my robed hands, not quite mine, smelling the hempy smell of cloth and dust. I’m a child lying on my back in a barn among the roped bales of hay, looking up at the dust dancing in shafts of sunlight streaming in through knotholes and eaves. Barn swallows darting like miracles in the air. A cloud passes between the sun and the stained-glass windows that slowly blink like the eyes of a cat in the sunshine. Sounds of language wash over me, sounds that fall on my soul like a gentle rain on dry roots. It is not time to react to language, to agree or disagree. It’s a different kind of time, a time to lay me down in green pastures and beside still waters, a time to restore my soul.

A
MAN IN A UNIFORM
announced that the plane was ready for boarding. We went out the door of the shack onto the tarmac. A waist-high chain-link
fence stood between us and the runway. We watched the men push a great staircase on wheels up to the plane’s door, high off the ground, and then someone opened the little gate in the fence, which most of us could have stepped over, and welcomed us aboard. I climbed the stairs and went inside the airplane. The aisle sloped sharply upward and I automatically reached for the seat-backs to help me propel myself up to the front. My brother and I looked into the open cockpit. The captain chatted with my brother and showed him stuff. Once we were all seated, the captain started to rev up the propellers, which seemed to come on one by one, at least that’s what it sounded like. The stewardess talked to us in a friendly way and checked our seat belts and we were off. Later she gave us soda with roundish ice cubes in it and a “snack”—a word not permitted in our house. Daddy was disgusted that my brother and I had each eaten our whole roll of Life Savers. He said, “Can’t you just eat one or two and put the rest in your pocket to save for later?” “No” remained unsaid.

Someone told me that the pink blanket we could see over the island of Manhattan was smog. I still find it frightening. I told myself to try not to breathe too much when we landed. La Guardia was a blur as we disembarked (the bastard word
deplane
was not yet invented), collected our luggage, and made our way to the taxi that took us into the city for an overnight stay. My father had something to do in the city before we went to England I guess, I don’t remember.

I was twelve, my brother eight, my father forty-nine. The Plaza had fallen out of favor with my father, and carrousel horses had fallen out of favor with me. We stayed across Fifth Avenue at the Sherry Netherland. I was nearly beside myself when the maid, all aflutter, told me the Beatles had just vacated our room. I was madly in love with Paul McCartney. (Oh, middle age, I just had to look up how to spell McCartney!) I spent
hours
looking for strands of hair or other such treasures—alas, to no avail. My little brother humored me and looked, too; that is, when he could tear himself away from the window where he was counting taxicabs. He kept coming up to me, helpfully, with lint.

I was soon to have a second chance to be near my beloved Paul in England, center of the universe. We took a Checker cab to JFK International Airport. It “cost a fortune,” my father said.

I would see St. Mark’s in Venice a few years later and hear Monteverdi vespers sung by a four-part choir from its balconies, north, south, east, and west, but my first cathedral, and, to date, unsurpassed in heights of wonder and awesome vastness, was the new Trans World Airlines Terminal. What is it about hugeness, vastness that is enclosed and encompassed, that feels the way it does? Here were polished walkways suspended in the air like two arms stretching upward to the heavens. It was like
The Jetsons,
only better. Trees were growing
inside
in containers; I’d never in my wildest imagination thought of an indoor glade. The trees had smooth, jet-black pebbles covering their feet. My father picked one up and caressed the surface with his thumb. He said how marvelous it would be to have some beautiful stones like that at home. He put it back carefully.

We went upstairs to a restaurant where we could look out a floor-to-ceiling window and see planes taking off and landing. Lights began to come on. Spotlights in blues and whites lit up the stage drama before us. We were up past our bedtime, and we knew it, which added to the excitement.

When we boarded the transatlantic jet, I was in for another big surprise. Daddy had booked us in first class. The seats were enormous. He complained unquietly about the cost; it was fabulously expensive, something he’d never do for himself, but he thought it was worth it when traveling with children, “so you guys can stretch out and sleep,” he explained, justifying himself to I’m not sure whom.

Matthew collected things. Some small boys are like little crows. He collected the little salt and pepper containers, the wet-wash, the small, individual-size wrapped bars of soap, and our flight-pack cologne. By the end of our vacation, he had more tiny bottles of cologne and little soaps than any other eight-year-old boy on the planet. As if any eight-year-old boy would ever “freshen up” as invited on the packet. These went right into his shoe boxes and dresser drawers alongside his marbles and Matchbox cars. Matthew wasn’t just a casual collector who tossed his specimens into a drawer and forgot about them. He reveled in his collections. He took them out again and again, and not just to look; he patted them, sorted them, ran his fingers through them. His was a truly sensual pleasure in accumulation. He told me once, when he was in second grade, that he wished he were Richie Rich (a wealthy comic-book
character) so that he could have a room full of gold coins and just roll around in them.

I, on the other hand, wished to feel Paul’s lips on mine as he sang, “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you.” In sixth grade, I cut out of a magazine a large picture of Paul’s face and taped it to a pillow so I could practice kissing him. How far to open my lips troubled me, to find the right distance between the Scylla of closed-mouth child’s kissing and the Charybdis of
gross
tongues. The pillow fell far too short of reality; it was maddeningly frustrating, like when I was little and my friend Rachel and I lay in a field staring up at the stars, willing ourselves to fly. We almost did, we felt ourselves lifting, but just couldn’t quite make it off the ground. So close and yet so far. But every mile our jet traveled across the Atlantic was bringing me closer to that sweet object of my desire. My father had said it might be possible to meet John Lennon through his publisher but he didn’t make any promises. Where there is John, there is Paul . . .

After supper, I put on the eyeshades and slippers that were in my TWA toiletry kit and tried to go to sleep. I’d never slept except in a bed lying down and I tried to lie down in my chair. My brother fit perfectly and was asleep amid the comforting glow from the rows of night-lights, and cozy pools of light shining on private readers. I kept trying to crumple up my legs like those bendy wire tricks that, I’m told, if you fold them just the right way, unlocks the puzzle. Finally, I draped my legs over the armrest into my brother’s seat, which, had he been awake, would have elicited howls of protest and probably a border war. It was safe for now and I fell asleep.

We awoke to washcloths and orange juice and too-bright lighting. The captain said we’d be landing at Heathrow in twenty minutes, where the local time was 7:25
A.M
. My brother collected more things off his breakfast tray. We took off our TWA slippers and put on our shoes again, brushed our teeth with these cool toothbrushes that came in two pieces inside a plastic case, and looked out the window for land. England.

At Heathrow, we walked through miles of corridors. Daddy had a rule that you had to carry your own luggage—not the big stuff that was checked, but whatever you had brought with you—toys, handbags, overnight cases—you were responsible for. It seemed fair and sensible to me and nipped in the bud all that whining about carry me, carry this,
etc. It also made me feel proud to carry my own weight, as it were. At customs, a man with an English accent asked if my father was traveling for business or pleasure, and Daddy answered him succinctly and politely. He often horsed around with people, but having been in the army, he always knew when not to horse around. I never saw him joke around with a stranger—a waitress, someone in line at a checkout counter—who didn’t truly laugh and enjoy the familiarity and the humor. He was a terrific judge about that sort of thing. He never made strangers feel as though the joke were on them, but rather, that they were in on a joke. And you never had to cringe the way most kids do if their father starts to joke around in public. The customs officer stamped our passports, and we were on our way.