Dream Catcher: A Memoir (48 page)

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
, my mother and I set off for school. I stared out the car window forgetting to blink. Hours passed, and the mountains just got higher and higher, the villages fewer and farther between. All I felt was a leaden dread. My bridges were burnt, even my house in Cornish was closed up for the year. While I was away at ski camp, my mother had packed up the essentials from the Red house and moved
to a partially furnished, rented house in Norwich. Matthew would now be within walking distance of his school, and she could easily commute to attend classes at Dartmouth to finish the degree she had broken off years ago to marry my father. It all made sense, but I felt really strange about it. Mom’s stuff was in her bedroom, Matthew’s stuff was in his room next to hers, and I recognized some of the living room furniture. They would be living there. My stuff—desk, bed, toys, posters, all colors of Dannon yogurt tops glued to my bedroom door next to the Keep Out sign, Day-Glo daisies; everything but my clothes and skis—remained in our house in Cornish, where my mother, brother, and I would return for summers only. On other vacations from school, I was to stay in the guest room on the ground floor of the house in Norwich. I could choose which of the two double beds down there to sleep in. The good thing was that I had my own bathroom and phone extension downstairs. The not-so-good thing was that it felt like a motel.

As we drove, I thought of a story I’d read about young women in the eighteenth century, transported by ship to Australia, who packed whatever belongings they were able and said good-bye to home, family, and country forever. The map of the world I held in my own mind was, perhaps not unlike theirs, quite flat. You fell off the edge if you sailed too far, but not before encountering strange and terrible serpents and sea monsters. Life, for me, lay east of Cornish, in London or Venice, or in warm southern places like Florida and Barbados. We were heading in the wrong direction. Toward desolate places. Toward Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My! It was deeply, deeply humiliating to me that the words I formed in my mind were “I want my mommy.”

We lurched along the narrow highway that threads between massive, towering cliffs that plunge down into bottomless, black glacial lakes. This landscape was a favorite subject among the school of American Romantic painters who wanted to evoke the feeling of sublime awe, verging on vertigo, in the face of the dramatic forces of nature. I am aware it is supposed to be staggeringly beautiful.

My mother broke the silence of hours and said, with the best British schoolgirl good cheer that she could muster, “Well,
here
we are.” A small sign on the highway was all that marked the school’s presence. We turned off the highway and drove down a dirt road past the school barn
and vast manure pile, past fields of “organically grown” vegetables the brochure had promised—or threatened—depending on one’s point of view. We arrived finally at a dead end where stood the school’s main building, which housed several dormitory wings, classrooms, dining room, basement art studio, and offices. We were greeted through our car window by kids with maps who directed us to the proper dormitory, or “houses” as they were called.

I had been assigned to Glass House, which was about a three-minute walk from the main building. Some of the older “Rugged, Resourceful, and Resilient” boys were in dormitories as much as a mile away, which made for quite a hike on winter mornings before dawn when, if you spit, it froze before it hit the ground—technically at about forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit—and made a cracking noise as it shattered. I learned that the beautiful dorms I’d seen in the brochures were the new Hill Houses. These had been well designed for housing institutionalized groups of children, not families, and had nice large bathrooms with multiple small sinks, and a living room rather like a ski lodge in layout with many couches and chairs around a big fireplace. Upstairs, off a wide, sunny, skylighted corridor, were rows of carpeted double bedrooms in bright colors with cozy built-ins and a picture window between the beds.

My dormitory was an old house built for a family, now being used to board eight children in four small rooms at the top of a narrow staircase. Being called Glass House, it was, in this place down the rabbit hole, quite the reverse—dark and gloomy. Herbert and Kit, the headmaster and headmistress, lived in an apartment on the ground floor of Glass House. I never saw it. A large, unmarried woman who taught riding and math had a plain room at the top of the stairs. She helped my mother and me bring my trunk and bedding up to the room. I carried my precious portable record player, which I had refused to leave home without;
The White Album
had just been released,
need
we say more? My roommate had not arrived yet, so I chose the bed nearest the window, a mistake I would not have made had I known that the policy in Glass House, as in Cornish I might add, was to turn off the heat at night. A pox upon several thousand years of Stoic thought from ancient Greece to Gordonston that equates cold and moral fiber!

My mother hung up my two dresses, knowing I might not get
around to it for months, and said something encouraging about the closets. That done, we walked back to the car. She waved good-bye, or at least she must have. I just remember standing there, immobile, staring dumbly at the rear of our car as it drove away, the dust rising from the road. Some timeless time passed, and I turned and walked down a path past the root-cellar shed beside the main building.

It was then that the world lurched terribly and I became unmoored. I tried to move my body toward an opening, a doorway into the main building. The sliding, flowing water I was becoming roared in my ears as I neared the edge of the falls. Into the long corridor, I flowed and tumbled past dozens of little open lockers, cubbyholes with no doors, no safe places to hide. I had heard that one had my name on it for my galoshes with name tapes inside, barn jacket with name in the collar, standard issue caught and exposed on a hook. Undulating unlockable lockers; I was sliding down the wall, blinding sunlight streaming in the corridor windows, the air thick bands of swirling haze.

A Cheshire cat’s teeth appeared, smiling in the long corridor. My size. It said, “Hi, I’m Holly. What’s your name?”

Peggy. Peggy. Peggy. The word made the leaden trek up from my lungs across my tongue, and finally, finding an opening in my mouth, it escaped: “Peggy. I . . . I hate this.”

The smile grew wider and said, “Yeah, this place
really
sucks. I should know, I’ve been here since I was ten.” And she rolled her eyes. Then, perhaps reading my mind, or perhaps because those Cheshire eyes spotted the movement of my body seeping out from under my clothes and running down the edge of the hall toward the drain, she said, “Come on, I’ll show you a good place to hide.”

My Cheshire friend has adopted strays of all sorts over the years. I’ve seen her befriend cats abandoned in Manhattan alleys, feral and filthy, who suddenly find themselves on her kitchen floor, lolling belly up for her to scratch, and answering to names like Mayhem, Chaos, and Fiorucci. She would spend her teens prowling backstages and backseats of limos in search of rock-and-roll tomcats. At twenty, she was the only person to show up for the first day of class at Columbia Law School dressed in a leopard-print spandex bodysuit and thigh boots. At thirty, as her law practice with a major record company skyrocketed, members of heavy metal bands with names like Faster Pussycat and the Scorpions
shed their spikes and sat around her kitchen table raving about her lasagna.

When Holly befriends you, it’s for life. You know you’ll always have a place you can show up and call home. We recently toasted our fortieth birthdays with champagne and chocolate in her
warm
Jacuzzi in Beverly Hills. She swore, upon leaving Cross Mountain, that she’d never again be cold, hungry, or forced to play dodgeball. And I can testify that she hasn’t a single pair of sensible shoes darkening her many closets. “This sure beats the chimney,” she said with her big grin as we clinked champagne glasses.

The chimney was our sanctuary that long year at Cross Mountain. She shared her treasured secret hiding place with me not five minutes after we met, leading me down the corridor and into the library. Around the corner was an old fireplace, not in use, with cushions beckoning where logs had been. It was supposed to be a cozy place to read. What she had discovered was that if you crawled in and shinnied up the chimney, some sainted bricklayer in his mercy had left a ridge about three feet up where, if you leaned your back against the opposite wall, you could just about stand. On cold days, Holly and I would spend two illegal hours perched inside that chimney when we were supposed to be participating in “out-time” activities, which neither hail nor snow nor sleet nor rain excused.
²

As we talked, there in the chimney, my body gradually started to flow back into its form. By the time we heard the dinner bell, it had set firmly enough to survive the jiggling and jostling corridor full of kids headed for the dining hall. Holly showed me how to read the assigned seating chart posted there. We ate in “families” of six. One teacher sat at the head of the table, one child server at the other end, whose job it was that week to bring the dishes served family-style from the kitchen to the table, and then to clear. In between were four other children, two on each side. At the table, as in most of the dormitories, the children were mixed in age and sex, again to mirror a family. Families rotated weekly.

My roommate spotted me after dinner. This wasn’t hard, as I was
the only new girl in the graduating class that year. We walked back to Glass House together. I could tell right away that she wasn’t one of the “cool” kids; she had some wacky album called
The Shacklefords Sing,
but she was tremendously warm and kind, and I knew, even then, that I was lucky to have her as a roommate.

After a few weeks, I was learning the ropes and fitting in nicely. I figured out what chores to sign up for that kept me inside: table setting, hall sweeping, and various other main-building janitorial tasks that did not involve a dawn hike to the barn. Classes went smoothly and I was making friends easily. The friendliness and generosity of the children there still astounds me. We “little women” of the eighth grade spent part of each day, informally, as surrogate mommies to the little girls, the eight- and nine-year-olds who needed hugs so badly that we forgot we did, too. We’d sit up at night patting the head of a crying, homesick little child who had awakened with nightmares, or hug a proud little one in the hallway who had just learned how to ride and wanted to tell someone. The most amazing thing, to me, was the almost total absence of the usual teasing and petty meanness among my classmates that one often sees with children of that age. In an entire year, I witnessed only three instances of unkindness on the part of my classmates. Each involved name-calling about a physical characteristic of a person. Some boy called my roommate “Scabby,” a cruel reference to a mild skin disorder she had, perhaps eczema of some sort. I threatened to put his head through the wall if he ever said that to her again. The second instance involved a girl from Africa who had a large bosom, immense to we silly white children, who was called on occasion by her last name “Wagner-Boobs”; and lastly, a mean name, “Chaz the Spaz,” referring to one boy’s jerky gait—I don’t know if it was a neurological twitch or a nervous one. I don’t mean to minimize the pain caused these children in any way; nevertheless, it’s extraordinary that in living with about eighty fourth through eighth graders twenty-four hours a day for a year that there was so little teasing among the children. They were, I think, a remarkably nice bunch of kids. Certainly they were to me anyway, without exception.

The other odd thing, very much in contrast to my earlier schooling, is that Cross Mountain was a remarkably unsexy place. Perhaps it was the incest taboo created by both co-ed housing and the fact of being thrown together as a substitute family, I don’t know. The few kids who
paired off were more like the middle-age WASP couples in Orvis catalogues: linking arms and walking sedately down the path, perhaps a peck on the cheek good-night if they’d been going together for a year or two, tossing the occasional snowball as the only sign of flirting. Unlike Hanover Junior High, where most couples formed and dissolved monthly, and there was lots of dancing and making out, and talking about dances and making out, at Cross Mountain, the closest that my friends and I (the fast kids who snuck out of our windows on moonlit nights to go night walking) came to making out was what we called swapping smoke. The kid who had the cigarette would offer the person he or she “liked” a sort of mouth-to-mouth exchange of smoke: as the smoker breathed out into your mouth, lips touching, you breathed in. It was pretty great. But if anyone had gotten on base that year, I would have known about it, trust me.

And the way we talked about whom we liked was very, very different from the previous year’s talk or indeed from the following teenage years of talk. It wasn’t about how far you went or wanted to go, or who was rumored to have gone with whom. It was much more like the social chat about husbands and children I engage in, at forty, with play-group moms. “How’s Will, I hear he scored two goals in soccer today. Do you think you’ll be able to go to the same school next year?” And so on. Odd.
³

Things were going pretty smoothly until one evening, I returned to my room and something just didn’t feel right. Something was wrong, I smelled it in the air. My eyes scanned the room taking light-speed inventory. I looked over at my bedside table and my eyes came to rest on a small Swiss wooden box, about the size of my hand, that my father had given me. It was light blue with pretty hand-painted flowers on it. It had
a tiny key that fit a keyhole to open the lid. It had been closed when I left in the morning. Now the lid was slightly askew, and upon closer inspection, I saw that the hinges were broken and the tiny keyhole looked as though some ham-fisted person had taken a large screwdriver to it. The paint was even scraped off in several places. Nothing was missing because nothing had been in it. I turned toward the closet and found our clothes disheveled, some half off their hooks, and my sleeping bag was out of its case and unrolled. I sat down on my bed and picked up my pillow I’d brought from home, to hug it to me. Not only had the liner been unzipped, but the foam rubber had been ripped open, leaving little shreds of torn foam scattered across my sheet. The roll of Life Savers I’d hidden inside the pillow was gone.