Dream Catcher: A Memoir (49 page)

My roommate came in and saw the look on my face. She froze. “Peggy, what’s wrong?”

“We’ve been robbed,” I said in a flat voice. I rose and showed her our closet and things.

“We’ve been searched,” she said, correcting me matter-of-factly. “They come in and search your room to make sure you haven’t hidden any candy. You can usually expect one after each holiday, but you never know exactly when they’ll come.”

“But they
broke
my stuff.”

She lifted her hands, shrugged sadly, and let them drop at her sides. There was nothing else to say.

The following day I was summoned to the first of many “sessions” with the headmistress, Kit Watson, who as a child “collected younger children and played school, made markets, and ran shows.” Boy was she ever still running the show with the children she’d “collected.” Holly accompanied me as far as the corridor leading to Kit’s office in the main building. “Good luck. I’ll wait for you in the chimney.” The next part of the story is extremely hard to write. My fingers feel like lead as I try to type. I have a hot-water bottle on my stomach. Yesterday I shut down, gave up trying to write about this and took two Ativan (a sedative in the benzodiazepine “family”), and walked slowly around the pond near my condo. Today my body smells like poison as I sweat out the Ativan and fear and toxins. I wonder if you can take a laptop computer into a sweat lodge.

I walked down the corridor and knocked on her door. A voice said,
“Come in.” She pointed to a chair in front of her desk and said,
“Sit
down.” Kit didn’t need to say much to be frightening. She had a large, leonine head, no-nonsense, short gray hair swept off her square forehead, small eyes, and a strong jaw that, when she spoke, revealed extraordinarily massive teeth, which she tended to bite together, resoundingly, in an unconscious twitch, almost as if she had to clamp them together to keep them from leaping out of her mouth and tearing into her victim. She had the roll of Life Savers that I’d hidden in my pillow sitting on her desk. She never once mentioned them.

Holly had told me what her opening parry would be. Kit, as if on cue, said, “I could tell right away, Peggy, that you were going to be one of our problem children.” Long silence. “You don’t fit in here, do you.” Silence. “You know, Peggy, none of the other children really like you. They
want
to like you, they really do, but your behavior and your attitude must change before they can.”

I foolishly mumbled, “I have plenty of friends.”

“No . . . no . . . they’re just in
tim
idated by you. They don’t really like you. I know, because they’ve come to me and told me so.” I shut up, but she could tell I wasn’t falling for it. I wasn’t shaking and sobbing and half out of my mind; “melting” was what she and her daughter Katherine called it when they “broke through a child’s defenses.”

“We want to
help
you but you have to
let
us. You have to tell us what you’ve done.”

I sat there stone-faced staring over her left ear. Something about the intonation of her patter did not allow the usual escape: split off and wait till it’s over. Even now I can sleep through construction going on outside my window, jackhammers and all, but if a television or radio is on just softly enough to hear bits and pieces of sentences, enough to arouse the mind’s automatic problem-solving curiosity, I’m sunk. My mom came at me like a jackhammer. My father like a guillotine. This woman whispered, crooned her fury like the pillow talk of a rapist. She fingered the telephone cord slowly as I sat there immobile, then
slam!
she brought the big black phone crashing down on her desktop. She held me in her gaze, leaned across her desk so I could feel the heat of her breath, and spat out ever so quietly, “You
viper.
You snake in the grass.” She snapped her teeth together spasmodically, in loud punctuation. “You know why your parents sent you to me. Don’t you? . . . I
said,
don’t you.”
Teeth snap shut.
“They
failed to flush you out, you snake, but I will.”

These are not words you forget. Mind you, this was a time before drugs entered grammar schools, at least this one: we’re talking about a few pieces of candy for personal use, not pushing heroin to children. What shocked and terrified me was not that she said weird and mean things, nor even the intensity of her fury; I was sort of used to that from home. What was so deeply disturbing and creepy is that she could express such fury and seemingly remain calm and in control of herself. Truth be told, she scared the absolute hell out of me.

Tears began to roll silently down my cheeks. She stared at me for a while and then said, “I can’t stand the sight of you any longer. You may go.” As I stood up, she said, teeth smiling, “We’ll have another little chat soon, I promise you.”

I was shaking all over, so much so that my legs didn’t hold me against the chimney wall very well. After these sessions, Holly and I joked to save our lives, to reweave the shreds of pride that Kit had ripped apart. No one had made me cry since I was five years old. I was one tough cookie and took pride in it. But each and every session, some tears, no matter how hard I tried to hold on to them, tumbled out. Holly would wait for me outside Kit’s office and stitch me up with jokes and laughter. “Hey, good job, you really gave her a run for her money that time. Level-one record, two hours and fifteen minutes!” And she’d do an imitation of Kit’s opening incision: “You ‘prob’ kids. We know you have a problem and we’d
really
like to help [chomp], but you have to tell us [chomp] what you’ve done.”

Over time, Kit went through her repertoire. She tried to use the technique that worked so well on Holly and a lot of the other kids. Telling me that the kids secretly disliked me, and that I had no friend but Kit and so on. But I was solidly put-together on that subject. I knew who my friends were. She always won tears, she wouldn’t let you out of her office until she did, but she hadn’t “melted” me. You knew the longer you held out, though, the longer you’d be in her presence, the longer it would go on. She never let you go until you confessed to something, sobbing and shaking. You could see the victory in her eyes and you were turned loose. For now.

It took months of her “sessions,” as she called them, to find my Achilles’ heel. It was the first time I saw her eyes smiling. I know now
that if you accuse a child on the cusp of adolescence of being a sexual pervert and of harboring homosexuality in her heart of hearts, chances are pretty darn good you’ll hit paydirt. Back then, though, I thought she must have some evil psychic ability to read my mind. It must have shown somewhere, somehow, that in fifth and sixth grades I gazed at Miss March. I’d even played “lezzies” with other girls my age, at the pond; we’d go under the raft and lift up our bathing suit tops and “show” what we had. One time a really fast girl, who was up visiting friends for the summer between fifth and sixth grade, suggested we all strip naked, and she pretended one of the others was a slave and pretended to cut off her breast and shake salt on the “wound,” and she even bit her lightly on the vagina. I was entranced and repulsed and couldn’t stop thinking about it for a long time afterward. Especially at night. Many boyfriends and much heterosexual “making out” later, I still secretly worried that I might be a lezzie.

Once Kit narrowed in on that one, I was writhing. She forced me to type a letter to my mother on her typewriter in her office, that she had written out in longhand. It took several hours since I didn’t know how to type, and every time I made a mistake, I had to start over again. In the letter, I had to confess that I was a pervert and a lesbian as well as being crazy and paranoid. No one was out to get me, she often said: “We just wanted to
help
you, but you won’t let us.”

I’m surprised that my mother didn’t immediately recognize the letter for what it was, a forced confession composed by someone else. I had
never
willingly told my mother the time of day. Claire was about the last person on earth to whom I’d volunteer such hugely personal information involving secret fears and sexuality. My guess is that she was so starved for any communication from my monosyllabic and generally sullen thirteen-year-old lips that she was invested in believing it was a confidence voluntarily given. Who knows. But to her great credit, she responded clearly and effectively to the absurdity of the letter.

[1969]

Dear Peggy,

Thanks for your beautifully type written letter.

I was very upset to hear that you & Dougal & Brion [boys]
were lesbians—I’m not sure that I am logically quite up to working it out, though, but, I am sure you
all
should be deeply concerned—(especially Dougal & Brion—do
their
mother’s know? Should we all get together to discuss it? Can you demonstrate?)

As for the rest EVERYONE appears weird to someone else somewhere and through a breakdown in, or lack of possibility for, communication and understanding between them, appears to be doing very strange things. Don’t let it get to you.

Craziness arises from things being blocked not from self-expression. It comes from not being able to face reality nor express one’s worries. If there is a pressure or pain too deep to bear then a necessity rises, in some people, to short circuit experience so that it doesn’t—as is feared—destroy them. Craziness is really an appropriate reaction to what is too intolerable for a certain nervous system to bear. It occurs in weak egos not in strong ones, so I don’t think you have any need to worry about it.

Just don’t block and close up.

But, also, on the other side, take into consideration other’s weak egos and tendencies toward self-protective hypocrisy or fantasy and BE KIND. If this is not possible keep out of their way. If this isn’t possible because they have you in some sort of authority bind, try not to let them get you down and listen, if you are able, to any valuable or pertinent advice; for the rest be tolerant of their weakness knowing that it is
their weakness.
If they weren’t fallible they’d be reaching you.

You are, and it seems ridiculous to have to write it to you, but I was worried by your letter—

Not
paranoid

Not
crazy

Not
perverted

Unsettling to some adults—YES—Definitely!

If you have deep resentments just try to think them through clearly and cooly—you may be right.

Please be sensible. Please don’t get kicked out of school. It
isn’t worth it. There are too many good things, really good things happening there.

Guess that’s all.

I love my daughter very, very much: perverted or unperverted, lesbian or fairy, crazy or sane, weird or square, undersexed or oversexed—(they are all only definitions in somebody else’s mind anyway.) Just try to think and know what you are doing and why and if it is right for you, try not to hurt anyone else or yourself.

Your loving and moralistic,

Mom

I could have died with embarrassment when she said the part about “demonstrating,” but I was glad that she at least knew how dumb it was to call boys “lesbians.” Everyone knows boys are “homos” and girls are “lezzies.” If only I had known at the time who had the dirty mind and who didn’t.

I begged my father to take me home. I called him weekly, collect of course, with the one phone call we were allowed to make each Sunday. I could always hear someone listening in on another extension. Older people often breathe loudly and don’t know it. What I didn’t catch on to, until Holly pointed out the obvious, was that the letters home that we were required to write once a week, sitting, as a school, in the dining hall, were open to inspection before being mailed. “Why do you think we have to turn them in with the envelope unsealed?” she said, rolling her eyes. In a session with Holly, Kit made the mistake of quoting too closely from a letter Holly had written, and she figured out that Kit was likely to have been mail-reading rather than mind-reading. These items aren’t mentioned in those chirpy “How to find a good boarding school for your kids” guides. Questions to ask: Do you tamper with the mail? Do you listen in on phone calls? Do you search rooms? Do you allow children access to food when hungry? Do you keep the rooms above freezing in the winter? What are your disciplinary procedures? I’d want to know about the state of basic human rights sorts of things before inspecting the beautiful riding stables or the state-of-the-art science lab.

Regardless of the suspected surveillance, I told my father what was
happening to me, though not the mortifying details of being accused of harboring the wrong sexual orientation, and that Kit was out to get me. He believed me. He said he’d met several “Kits” in his lifetime. Mostly in schools or in the army, he said. He told a few stories that hit the nail on the head; he definitely had her number. But he didn’t come to get me.

At Thanksgiving, he drove up for a visit. Parents were allowed to visit for the day but not to take their children home. Or so I thought until, years later, my father drove up to Cross Mountain to take my brother home for Dartmouth football games several times during the fall of his first and second years there. Maybe the policy changed after Kit retired.

Kit was all smiley-smiley to him when he came to visit at Thanksgiving and put her arm around me. He said she didn’t fool him in the least. “She wants people to believe she’s a
won
derful woman, a pio
neer
ing educator, but you see right through her. She’ll never forgive you for that, Peggy, never.” He said I was “cursed with a readable face” just like him and I couldn’t hide how I felt about people. I saw her self-image in the mirror and must have let it show that I thought, You don’t really look like that, you’re
not
the fairest of them all.

My father also had some interesting things to say about the school program. We put on a big show for the parents with music and skits and all sorts of wonderful artistic stuff we were being exposed to. Don, the music teacher, composed the songs and the school play in a great flurry just three days before the performance. We were so impressed (though less so when I visited fifteen years later on Thanksgiving, heard the same buzz about the show being composed in just a week or so, and I recognized half the tunes), I expressed my enthusiasm to my father about the amazing amount of work Don was able to produce in such a short time. Daddy said, “He knew all fall that the show had to be ready by Thanksgiving, didn’t he?” I nodded. “I don’t find it so admirable that he waited until the last minute to begin work on it, do you?” Hmmmm. I never thought about it that way.