Dream Catcher: A Memoir (51 page)

Love, James.

Makes
me
want to wonder, “throw up both my hands.”
⁴
It also makes me think about Holden’s exchange with his teacher, where he is told that life is a game and he needs to learn to play it by the rules. Holden agrees with the teacher out loud, but to himself, he thinks:

Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the
other
side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

(
Catcher,
p. 8)

I took Holly out to lunch recently to pick her brains for this chapter. I asked her what she remembered of Kit. In profound contrast to Viola and me reminiscing about Miss Chapman, our fourth-grade teacher, and giggling about how she once shook Vi so hard she wet her pants, Holly and I had no giggles. Holly told me that she has tried to put the whole thing as far out of her mind as she possibly can, with multiple
drugs when necessary. She said she’s been pretty successful at doing so, yet every once in a while she’ll be walking down the street or riding on a subway car, and suddenly she’ll shudder as if death itself had brushed her sleeve. Then she’ll realize that the old woman across from her looks something like Kit.

1
. Anders and Lane,
Cults and Consequences
.

2
. My school report confirms this: “A bit reluctant to plunge fully into out-time, Peggy has nevertheless come to enjoy sports like volleyball.—Paul”

I think that’s how I’d like to see my obituary begin: “A bit reluctant to plunge fully into out-time, Ms. Salinger . . .”

3
. I’m not sure the kind of hypermaturity we showed was evidence of good health, but I do know that given the general level of neediness and abandonment we embodied, it’s a darn good thing kids didn’t get in over their head sexually. The following year, in high school, breakups often engendered full crack-ups and a stay in McLean’s. When your boyfriend or girlfriend is your whole family wrapped up into one person, the one who kisses you good-night and has breakfast with you in the morning, attachments can become symbiotic in the extreme. At Cross Mountain, twelve- and thirteen-year-old passion was nipped in the bud and proceeded directly to sedate middle age.

4
. Marvin Gaye

D
ADDY WAS COMING TO PICK
me up and take me back to Cornish for Christmas. Looking back, it occurs to me that my mother always got the hard job, of dropping me off, whereas my father got to be the good guy who picked me up at vacation time. I packed my suitcase, mostly ski stuff, because I’d spend most of the vacation on the slopes at Mt. Ascutney. I also packed a few mandatory craft projects we were to bring home as gifts and evidence of our enriched education. Some of the children, such as Holly, worked for weeks, weaving truly splendid pieces on looms, experimenting with color and texture, learning to love the sensual feel of drawing wool through thread, fingers flying. Years later, there were times I experienced something perhaps similar at the piano. A place beyond technique and practice, where creation in the mind’s eye flows seamlessly through body and instrument. Beyond I and thou. Other children worked in clay, making pots on great stone wheels turned by foot, or by shaping large coils of it into vessels. Carefully, they chose their glaze and painted the raw clay. Then, in that leap of faith beyond one’s control, they placed their unfinished work where, in the womb of the kiln, the alchemy of creation takes place. A percentage of the pots, no matter how well made, abort, crack and char. It’s not so much due to inherent flaws, but to the luck of placement inside the kiln. The vicissitudes of flame kiss some and burn others. The shelves of the pottery studio held their quotient of kids’ lumpy ashtrays,
but here and there were pieces worthy of the life corner in a Japanese house.
¹

As for me, the art teacher’s terse two-line report speaks volumes: “Peggy has been generally uninterested and unproductive. She has made some drawings, paintings, and clay work.” Unproductive, yes. But I watched in awe. My own creations were aborted in their conception. They never even received a spark of life; instead I produced scraggy, sterile, unloved pieces of cloth as small as I could get away with and not cause trouble. Like Penelope, I tore apart in secret what I wove during the day. I never dared to love a lump of clay enough to succeed in erecting smooth, shapely mounds from the spinning wheel that magically, at the touch of a deft finger, opened themselves into perfectly shaped vessels. Mine rose up from the wheel, off center and misbegotten, only to collapse back into a flaccid heap.

I could, with effort, do an average job, academically, in the classroom, but it was written in stone that I could never create anything beautiful. My failure was further proof of all that was said, yelled, slapped, and hissed in my ears: something was terribly wrong with me. I had learned from my mother, early on, that there was something deeply shameful about me. I had learned from my father that there was something deeply shameful about
any
imperfection. He hid the process of his creation as if it were his most carefully guarded secret. He hid whatever he worked on, as well as himself I might add, until it was deemed perfect. I cannot tell you the raving lectures I heard up to this point about “second-rate” artists. Winning, being first-rate, a true creative genius, wasn’t everything, it was the
only
thing. God help the poor shnook who tried and was not, in my father’s view, a true Master. It was perfectly honorable to go into business or take up a trade of some sort; it was the artist who was pilloried with his rancor and contempt, as if he or she were a heretic blaspheming against all that was pure and holy. I’m not talking just about serious attempts at literature. I’d seen him go purple denouncing some hippie maker of macramé plant-holders at a crafts fair
who had the nerve to call himself an artist. Folk art by housewives at the Cornish fair was okay, it just depressed him. But just let someone fancy him- or herself to be a real artist, and I’d receive an enraged outpouring that lasted the entire car ride if I was unlucky enough to be a captive audience.

The only things I could do well, in eighth grade, were things I had learned so long ago that I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to do them well. I learned to ski when I was three or four, play piano at three, read before kindergarten. My view of creation as a sort of miraculous immaculate conception was supported by my father’s mythic stories about me, like the time I went to the keyboard before I could barely stand unassisted and picked out a tune perfectly, the first time. I was surprised to learn at Cross Mountain that I wasn’t wonderful at the piano. I had a lot of natural talent, but there were kids who actually practiced, and practiced in an organized, disciplined fashion. My piano teacher that year wrote:

Peggy’s piano work is characterized by a desire to skim the fundamentals in order to achieve a momentary “splash.” Her ability to concentrate on work that is not of immediate and obvious appeal is curiously lacking. She has a talent and could probably easily achieve a considerable competence if she were more willing to work a little.

While I certainly understand this teacher’s interpretation of my behavior as a sort of laziness, the fact is that the concept of creation as a process, rather than as a product that magically appeared if you had the genius, eluded me totally and completely. Salingers do things perfectly or they keep quiet about it. Again, I’m not talking about poetry here, I mean every aspect of life you can imagine. I never even followed a recipe, for example, until I was married; I truly thought food just happened or flopped. Mine flopped, so why bother. I ate out of the box or carton. As for keeping a room clean, controlling and manipulating the stuff of life in actuality, rather than the stuff of the mind in daydreams, I waited in a panic until I was neck deep in mess and somehow hurled a drowning battle scream and attacked it. My closest and most eloquent friend, David, once stood at the transom to my Marlborough Street
apartment and said, “Peggy, that’s not a kitchen, that’s a cry for help.” My college thesis adviser used to ask me, nearly every time he saw me, “Peggy, how do you eat an elephant?” The right answer: you cut it up into very small pieces. The Salinger answer: you drag it into a dark cave, alone, and swallow it whole or die trying to vomit it up. Or you declare that anyone who eats elephant is beneath contempt and stalk off in the other direction.

There was an even more pressing reason than shame and ignorance to hide away any interest or desire. Had I loved, it would be a small matter of time before the scent of my pleasure drifted upstairs to Kit’s den. It slipped out, that fall, probably via one of my teachers’ activity reports, that I passionately wanted to go on an overnight riding trip to Clifford’s Falls. Each time a trip came up, I would sign up, and each time Kit erased my name and informed me that I’d have to wait until next time. Finally, on the last trip before graduation, she let me plan and anticipate, rather than removing my name from the sign-up sheet as she had done before, right up until the evening before we were to leave. She caught me in the hall on the way upstairs to bed and said, “I’m sorry, Peggy, but I just don’t think you’ve earned the privilege of going on the riding trip tomorrow.” Had I had a horse phobia, you can bet I’d have been saddled up faster than Annie Oakley.

I
PUT MY UNLOVELY
C
HRISTMAS
presents into my suitcase along with my teddy bear, and a pile of clothes no one would know were mine without the name tags.
²
As I closed my bag, Jenny called up the stairs to see if my father had arrived. She was going to catch a ride home with us. Her family lived in Woodstock, Vermont, which was directly on our way.

She left her suitcase at the door, but carried her precious violin upstairs. By seventh grade, Jenny was already an accomplished musician. I had accompanied her several times in concert, playing the simple basso
continuo while she soared above. That week Jenny, Jason—another violinist—and I had played a Vivaldi concerto for two violins and harpsichord/piano as we had done earlier for the Thanksgiving “showcase” for the parents. This time we were taken in a van to an old-age home to play. I was a little frightened to be around old people. Frightened of the smells and the infirmity. Some of the old people did sit in their wheelchairs in the day room and drool, their minds a million miles away. But the joy that lit up many of the faces as they listened to us play was something to behold. I couldn’t believe that playing music could make someone’s eyes come to life like that. It was the most valuable piece of education I could possibly have been given. It is natural, I think, to feel small and helpless in the face of great suffering and need. I felt I had so little to offer. I still feel that way. Yet somehow, miraculously, our meager offering of a few loaves and fishes was transformed into a feast for the multitudes. This first Christmas concert gave me the courage, year after year, to visit the sick, the aged, the lonely, often with empty hands but trusting that somehow in touching the hands of a stranger a gift would appear.

I asked Jenny not to mention the concert to my father. I just said he was weird about that stuff. I knew exactly what his reaction would be, but it was too hard to explain. Charity was a highly combustible subject at our house. If my mother was foolish enough to let him get wind of any charitable act she might have undertaken, he’d say, “Oh, Christ, it’s the Lady Bountiful. Ego, ego, ego,” or, “The Lady Bountiful, thinking how good and kind and generous she is being—Phooey!” Twenty years later when I finally read his books, again and again I came across the same haranguing suspicion and denunciation of any unveiled female act of charity. Holden, reflecting on the nuns he met collecting for charity, thought how his aunt, or Sally Hayes’s mother, both of whom did a lot of charitable work, would never do it without lipstick and fancy dresses “and all that crap,” and people around to “kiss their asses.” Or again, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” a four-year-old girl asks Seymour about his wife: