Dream Catcher: A Memoir (60 page)

On school vacations, I often went with Pat to stay with her family on the Seneca reservation, outside of Buffalo, New York. She has seven brothers and sisters. The boys, twins then fourteen, had one room, and Pat, being the eldest at fifteen, had a room to herself; the other girls, ages twelve, eight, four, and three, slept on bare mattresses piled in one room; and the baby slept in a room with Pat’s mom and stepfather. Her mom had a pretty good job at the hospital, except she had to work a lot of nights, and her stepfather was a really important man in the tribe. Pat’s real father had died before I met her. I almost met him, though.

Once in the middle of the night at school, Pat sat up in her sleep, moved to the end of her bed, and stretched out her hand. Since I sleep with one eye open and have since I was a kid, I sensed danger and grabbed her arm and didn’t let her touch what she later told me was her dead father’s hand. She said that if she had touched his hand, she would have gone with him. After that, we slept with our beds together.

I loved Pat’s family and felt more at home on the rez than I had since I was a little girl in the forest, and things visible and invisible were accorded the same respect. With my Native American friends, I felt as though my life had come full circle: the fragile balance between dream worlds, forest worlds, spiritual realms, and what most middle-class white people would call reality—cars and jobs and bills—that was part of my life was also part of theirs. We tried, with differing degrees of success, to navigate among these worlds. I recall, for example, my Hopi friend from Second Mesa, Arizona, telling me about trying to explain to her air force captain why she had to go on leave to complete her corn-grinding ceremony or the consequences for her would be dire. Like my friends, I believed
in my bones, in a place beyond reason, in the reality of things that go bump in the night. Like many Native Americans of our generation, I, too, lacked the cultural roots, the teachings of previous generations, to be able to handle that kind of boundary-crossing with equanimity. We saw and felt things we didn’t know what to do with and then got drunk in order to provide an explanation for the disorientation and dislocation caused by knowledge not understood, dreams without context.

The experience of “glimpses,” things you know before they happen, but can’t explain how you know them, was something that on the rez was taken in stride, as part of life rather than a freakish thing. I felt right at home the day Pat and I decided to drive out to visit her grandmother, whom I hadn’t met. She lived way out and had no phone. When we arrived, her grandmother was waiting by the door. She took my arm, with no introduction, and said she’d just finished making up a batch of corn soup for me. Pat told me later it was a special soup you made for someone, with ceremonial ashes of some sort. I’m sure it was just what the doctor ordered.

Pat’s mom said that since Pat and I were sisters anyway, we should make it official and give me a tribal adoption. I didn’t tell anyone about my fears, but I just didn’t feel ready to inherit all those ancestor spirits as new relations. I sensed that my roots were not deep enough to weather well the influx of all those presences.
²

In hindsight, I don’t think the elders would have let me go through the adoption ceremony without preparing me, teaching me, taking good care of me, but at the time, I was so used to looking out for myself that it didn’t even occur to me. I just thought I’d be up the proverbial shit creek without a paddle.

B
ACK AT SCHOOL
, Pat, Tracy, and I began to go on road trips up to Dartmouth on weekends. There were a lot of Native Americans at Dartmouth, and weekends were one long party. One snowy day, I met Dan, who would see me through my teenage years as my boyfriend, and through the rest of my life as my beloved friend and brother. He was on the sidewalk outside of Chase Hall, where most of our friends lived until the college built Indian House. I can still remember seeing him and feeling my braces with my tongue, wishing they weren’t there. What I don’t remember is whether he was on crutches or I was. I guess you could call it merging at first sight.

Dan swears to this day that I lied about my age. (As his own daughter approached her teens, he got even more adamant!) I say I just never happened to mention it until my sixteenth birthday came around and his jaw hit the ground. He was eighteen or so (depending on which birth certificate you choose; his mother has two of them about six months apart) and a sophomore. His dad was a Mohawk high-steel worker, like many Mohawks from the rez outside Montreal who drive down to New York to work on skyscraper construction all week—they’re famous for walking along steel girders, forty stories up, as if they were on the ground—and drive back home on weekends. His mom, we discovered recently, was several people—multiple personalities sharing one frail body that lived on cigarettes, coffee, and the kind of dry assorted cookies that come in cardboard boxes with a cellophane window that only old people seem to buy in small, neighborhood markets. She was, but for the grace of God, and a lot of help from my friends, the very thing I was terrified I might become. But I never again had a blackout or “schizo” episode after Dan and I met. We were both loosely moored indeed, but somehow managed to keep each other afloat until adolescence subsided, and I got some psychotherapy—no,
a lot
of psychotherapy—and he
transferred from Dartmouth to Oberlin, for him a much more supportive environment where he finally allowed his brilliance to shine all the way through Yale Law School.

To this day I have no idea how, in 1972, a New York tabloid got wind of our relationship; I was not exactly what you might call a social butterfly. They referred to Dan as “that Red-Indian that Salinger’s daughter is dating,” which, according to said tabloid, should “bring the recluse out of the forest!” I think Lillian Ross, our friend from
The New Yorker,
spotted it and told my father, who in turn told me about it so I’d hear it from him and not someone else. Contrary to tabloid predictions, however, when I brought Dan home for inspection and interrogation, Daddy took to him so well that he brought out old tapes of me singing my war songs at age four. Dan is the only person I know of who has seen some of the goodies in my father’s arsenal.
I
wasn’t even allowed to see most of them.

Daddy had taught me to shoot the way Seymour taught marbles—no aiming. You just think of the gun as an extension of your arm and point. If you think about it, you miss. I liked to choose a daisy far away and nip off just the flower; if you got the stem, it didn’t count. Daddy was impressed with Dan’s marksmanship, and it takes a lot to do that, but I wasn’t crazy about the “not there” look Dan got on his face when he shot. Even less crazy about it two years later when I walked into my college dorm room to find him naked, sitting in the dark, with a .38 pointed at his face, ready to blow, and I had to talk him back. Or the time I woke up to find him sitting bolt upright, shotgun pointing at the end of the bed. When I carefully asked what was up, he said, “Don’t you see them, don’t you see the bastards?” I crossed myself. Thank God, this time, I could not. I’m spooked by the unseen worse than anything else, the kind of thing a gun can’t touch. Silver bullets and henbane maybe.

Dan would never have survived his childhood had he not been very, very smart. Lots of people, aside from family members, had tried to kill him: living on the South Side of Chicago in the middle of Blackstone Ranger territory and being the wrong color didn’t help. Given the expertise he developed in strategies for survival, it wasn’t all that surprising that he had a natural talent for chess. Over Thanksgiving of ’71 he was in a chess tournament in New York City, so when my dad
wrote to tell me he was going to be in New York for Thanksgiving, I thought I’d hitch a ride with him. I also wanted to visit a school friend, Trisha, who had been hospitalized in New York for at least a year with a strange paralyzing disease. My dad spoke to her and convinced her to try sitting, or being sat actually, in an orgone box.
³
No miracle cure to report.

My diary, which I kept from ninth grade throughout high school, records the holiday pretty succinctly. I caught up with my writing during down time, like in class. The Thanksgiving holiday entry begins, “Here I am paying attention in math class as usual.” I wrote that my dad and I checked into the Drake Hotel and had a few meals together on the day before Thanksgiving. On Thursday, “he was going to go out somewhere and I was going to stay at the hotel and order a feast from room service.” I didn’t think much about it, but when I called Holly, who was in town for the holiday, too, she was horrified at the idea. She called back and we went over to her grandmother’s for Thanksgiving dinner. After dinner, “we went looking for a movie and booze, found neither, and went back to the hotel, watched a Bogart movie, and sacked out. Friday I kept trying to call Dan but he wasn’t in. Daddy left and dropped me off at Holly’s father’s house.”

I finally worked up the nerve to stop by the hotel where the chess tournament was being held. When I saw Dan, he was really happy to see me, but he was staying in a room with three other chess players from the Dartmouth team, so it would not have worked out to stay there, to put it mildly. Have you ever been near chess players during a tournament? It’s not pretty.

I flew back to Boston that night. I remember looking down at the city from the plane window and feeling frightened that Dan was somewhere down there amidst all those millions of lights and I was up here in the night, separated from my mooring by miles of black sky.

C
HRISTMAS WAS A WINNER, TOO
. Dan was in Chicago and I was in New Hampshire. I wrote in my diary:

Dec. 24
^th
’71

I HATE Christmas. I can’t wait until the whole business is over with. What the fuck am I doing with my life? I’m fat as hell, and completely hung up over Dan . . .

Monday 27 Dec.

Christmas sucked beyond belief. Dad and I had a fight. I miss Dan. I got new pens.

That’s all I wrote that day. I packed up and left and spent the rest of the vacation staying with Amy’s boyfriend in the South End. While I was there, I wrote about the fight I’d had with my father. It had started, as usual, over seemingly nothing. For some reason he got angry that I didn’t return a phone call from someone I hadn’t seen since fifth grade, but whom my father liked and chatted with each week as he paid her for the groceries she’d rung up. He had suggested she call when I was home, I guess. I wrote (cover your ears, gentle reader!):

The following day Daddy blew his cool. He went on about how I didn’t give a damn about anyone but myself and my friends in Boston; not him, Matthew, or anyone else. I was turning into a crass and vulgar person and was hanging around with vulgar and coarse people. He said, in partial reference to my Langston Hughes book, whom he said was a trashy poet, that I was being absorbed head and foot into that culture. “You’ll always have my love and affection but don’t make me lose my respect for you. I change a great deal once that’s lost.” Suck my ass, J. D. I cut out the next day.