Dream Catcher: A Memoir (58 page)

Dear Peggy,

Oooh, am I ever furious! Tonight we had that marvelous
all-purpose of evening activities: the Brentwood campfire. The cabins are each supposed to dig up a song, which we sing. (there isn’t actually any campfire—I guess they’re afraid we’ll hurt ourselves.) So, as a suggestion to our cabin, I mentioned that Country Joe and the Fish song, “Feel like I’m Fixin to Die Rag.” [“Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, Next stop is VietNam”] Of course, we had to write it down and submit it to a counselor panel for censoring—they must, of course, weed out anything corrupting; i.e. anything that is against war (un-American!) or anything that is not cheery. (unsuitable) They were
shocked,
and told us we couldn’t sing it. I asked why not, and they got all offended and self-righteous, and proceeded to give a few feeble protestations. (Well it just isn’t
nice,
that’s all . . . you know, it just isn’t the
attitude
you should have.) Well, I was sick of the “approved” songs, (each campfire, we sing such goodies as “The ants go marching” and most of the soundtrack to “Sound of Music”—off key, of course.) Also everybody sings as if they are ill, and all the counselors go flapping through the swarms of kids, shrieking “sing,
sing!
Come on, kids, let’s hear it! I wanna hear a little
camp spirit! LOUDER!”
And so on and so forth. Until we run out of approved songs, at which point it is about 8:30 and they send us to bed, or they try to make us all sing “100 bottles of beer on the wall” (We have to say “Coke” though—no kidding—instead of “beer”) all the way down to the end. (Two bottles of Coke on the wall, two bottles of Coke, if one of those bottles should happen to fall . . .) Anyway, I didn’t exactly feel like staying, so I left, which is a no-no, because you are never allowed to be in the cabin by yourself. You are also forbidden ever to take a walk by yourself. (They are afraid you might smoke
a cigarette!) (Shock!
) Not only is nightwalking a no-no but one of our counselors sleeps with her bed in front of the door, to make sure that no one passes through the portals—going
in
or
out.
Don also stays up—no joke—’till one in the morning, patrolling with a flashlight and his dog. Christ! Speaking of which, half the camp goes to church every Sunday. Pious. Nice.

There is no such thing as a private phone call.

We periodically have trunk inspection.

As for me, a week ago I flatly refused to go to activities I didn’t want to go to. There was no way they could
make
me play dodgeball, so Don just leaves me in peace, and steers the visitors
around
me.

I hope that you and Michael are seeing each other more and that your nerves have settled. And as for my coming and visiting you next year in Mclean’s, I’ll probably be sharing a room with you there! Why don’t we start another Prob Child Club? Sort of like A.A. (which I may join by next year! No, actually I haven’t been drinking too awfully much lately.) You know, where all the members play shrink to each other.

Well, that’s about all.
Nothing
is going on here. All the boys look like Kevin A. with a crew cut, they have all the sex appeal of Jon. B, and the winning personality of Dan R. Yeccch! Also, they are all under 13.

The food is inedible. One time we had pizza, (awful) bread and cake for lunch. Nothing else. No fruit or vegetables or (god forbid!) vitamins. I got sick from lack of vitamins and I got tonsilitis and ran a fever and was packed into the infirmary for 6 days.

WRITE! (I love mail too!)

Love ya,

holly

ps. I HATE IT HERE!

pps. I bought both James Taylor albums . . . sort of as a monument to R. (But I have sworn that I will never talk to him again!) Now, in memory of S. and R., I have 2 James Taylor albums and 3 Creedence Clearwater albums. I’m completely insane! But I really like the albums anyway, especially the James Taylor.

pps. Say hi to everybody I know.

1
. Chicago Bears running back,
poetry
in motion.

Ooooh storm is threatenin’ . . .

—Rolling Stones

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
, H
OLLY AND
I were back at school again to start tenth grade, but all was not well. Michael, having been graduated the previous spring, was now overseas, studying in Paris. I lived for our weekly phone calls and held on to his blue,
Par avion
letters as tightly as de Daumier-Smith held Sister Irma’s letters or the boy in France held on to Mattie’s. I, too, was in a real panic that I might not make it, I might not be able to hold on until I received the next letter. I slept with Michael’s woolly sheepskin jacket at night, praying that his scent wouldn’t fade from the coat before I could bear it. I was waiting, basically in hibernation, for Christmas when I was to fly to France and spend the holiday with him.

He called on December 10 to wish me a happy fifteenth birthday and to discuss our plans for my arrival a week or so later. He didn’t sound quite right. He said everything was fine, but the minute I stepped off the plane and into his arms, I knew it wasn’t. I have to tell you, I
hate
Paris. It was cold and gray and icy and damp and everyone was speaking in French. The friends of his parents, with whom we were to stay for a few days before leaving for the south of France, were lovely. Their apartment was beautiful and they had all sorts of pretty things to eat that I’d never seen before, such as marrons glacés and whole preserved apricots and kumquats, like orange jewels.

Our hosts’ little boys were just learning to speak, and their French and English were delightfully mixed up. One showed me proudly how he could “put the wrapper
dans la poubelle.”
After the children were put to bed, the parents discreetly retired and left Michael and me the living room to ourselves. I pressed and pressed and he finally told me, in sheer misery, that he had met a thirty-year-old French divorcée who had two children, and he wasn’t sure he was still in love with me. I remember that part perfectly—where he sat on the couch, the marrons glacés on the coffee table, even the sheet music on the piano. Then suddenly it went dark. I remember another flash photograph, an image that lasts a single frame. I am on an examination table of some sort, in our host’s home office. His wife has her arm outstretched reaching for some medication on a high shelf. She is going to give me something to make me sleep. Michael told me the next day that I hadn’t fainted, I’d been crying and breathing hysterically; our hosts couldn’t help but hear, and they gave me a sedative. I was absolutely mortified. I’d never disgraced myself like that, lost control with no memory and become so completely unmoored.

I went about the business of seeing Paris with a grim determination, sleet inside and out. I emerged briefly in a garden with statues by Rodin tucked into corners,
The Kiss,
and something with a group of people in a circle groping and in chains—I can see it but I don’t remember the name. Maybe
Les Aveugles.
The blind. We decided there was nothing to do but go on with the holiday as planned, and we took the train to the south of France where another friend of the family, an artist, had an apartment he was not using over the holiday. There was no mistaking the occupation of the absent owner: large canvases of his work were everywhere, some hung on walls, some leaning up against them. This artist went down to the sea, all over France, and collected bits of dolls, baby dolls, that washed up in the tide, and he glued these akimbo—an arm here, an eyeless head, a torso there—as if they had washed up dead on various parts of his canvas.

Each day I walk down to a beautiful open-air market, full of fresh vegetables and fruit and cheese and flowers. I was so far behind my eyes it was like looking through a movie camera at everything. I pointed to things, afraid to speak after the waffle seller on the street in Paris was so nasty about my French, mimicking me with a sour face as if he’d stepped in dog doo, but soon I was trying to speak and was being met with farmers’
smiles. A man at a flower stall handed me a small bunch of wildflowers to smell, making large sniffing gestures. So sweet I nearly disappeared again, but the sun caught me and I handed him the coins and walked back to the apartment. I put the flowers in a glass of water and emptied my shopping on the table. I sat at the little kitchen table in the bright sunshine and watched, quite detached, as entire wheels of Brie and loaves of bread disappeared. I was not thinking, not reflecting, just chewing and gazing blindly, taking in ballast.

I walked along the boardwalk by the sea; the fresh breeze and salt air was clearing my head a bit. Out in the harbor there were three huge U.S. Navy ships. Two sailors behind me thought the tall, thin, pretty girl walking just ahead of them was French, and they said something really dirty in American, laughing, thinking she wouldn’t get the joke or understand. I was so scared I made myself walk a measured pace and listen for footsteps all the way back, shaking, key in the lock, shut the door. I had to sit still, in the bathroom, for a long time and stare at the pattern on the wall, like some fixed point on the horizon, so I didn’t vomit. After that, I no longer walked by the sea alone. Michael offered me his arm as we walked, sea breeze in our hair. Did he know I might blow away?

I bought Michael’s mother a bottle of Cabochard, the perfume she wears, in the duty-free at Orly and one for myself. I have absolutely no idea at all where I went after I got off the plane back in the United States.

I
WAS NOT A PERSON
with her faculties intact. When I went to spend a weekend away from school at a friend’s family house in Connecticut, my doppelgänger appeared again. As in Paris, “I” disappeared and another “I” disgraced myself in my absence. We had a few drinks, and I mean a few, not many, at a cocktail party my friend’s parents were having, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the morning. His parents, he told me, were out for a walk and had asked me to leave. Apparently I had taken off my clothes, stood on the balcony over their living room stark naked, and I’m not even going to say what I yelled to the assembled guests below, I’m still too mortified nearly thirty years later. He grabbed a blanket, wrapped me up in it, and put me gently to bed. He wasn’t mad or anything, and he said it didn’t surprise him that I had no memory
of it because he had this strange feeling that I was somebody else, I didn’t even talk like me.

I knew there wasn’t that much drink in the world to do that to me, but I kept the secret horror I might be schizo pretty tightly under wraps. I neither reached out a hand for help nor bolted the door. I did what had worked at Cross Mountain: I took care of others who were a lot worse off than I. I became a “catcher” to save myself from, as Holden said, “sinking down, down, down” and drowning in my own blood and misery. Other kids sought me out as a good person to talk to about their problems, and I got a reputation for being the person to call if someone was in crisis, tripping out, cutting themselves, suicidal, or whatever. I had and still have a gift of being a good soldier in a crisis and calming everybody down.

I started doing after-school tutoring at Centro Latino in Waltham and being a mentor to a young Hispanic girl who needed help with her homework. I also volunteered one afternoon a week at the Fernald State School for the Retarded. The first time I went there I was taken to a huge room, the size of a gym, that had naked, moaning men in it. Some playing in their feces, some being hosed down. The stench, the other-creaturely noises, the sight of adult male nudity, bludgeoned me, and after about five minutes, I excused myself to the supervisor, ran outside into a field, and threw up. When I went back the following week, they placed me in a higher-level ward where the young men wore clothes mostly, and you could do puzzles and games and talk to them. One of the guys I remember called himself Jughead. He seemed quite fluent and intelligent until one realized that his entire conversational repertory consisted of repeating phrases he’d memorized from an
Archie and Jughead
comic book. Another absolutely beautiful, perfect-looking little boy used to take my silver ring off my finger and roll it back and forth delicately, slowly, on the table in front of him. I think, had he been left to his own devices, he would happily have starved to death rolling that ring back and forth gazing at it in a reverie until he was released from this nightmare incarnation.