Dream Catcher: A Memoir (61 page)

T
HE NEXT VACATION
, Dan was back from Chicago (I don’t know why he was away for a term), and we went to stay at Pat’s for the break. Winter was ending and it was time for spring cleaning, Indian style. Pat told
us that the Falsefaces would be coming around some night soon. The Falsefaces (certain men of the tribe who put on special masks that you sometimes see in museums, and who
become
Falsefaces) go from house to house one night each spring to drive away the spirits of winter and any others that need to be sent packing.

We were awakened by a loud crash. I ran out of the bedroom. Pat’s two littlest sisters, Tessie and Bethany, were in the hallway hugging each other, eyes squeezed shut. I grabbed them and picked them up. At this point the narrative can no longer flow smoothly because time stopped flowing smoothly. You can’t tell an in-time story about out-of-time or other-time things. That’s why the shape of some stories is a poem. That’s why the shape of other stories can only be a song or a dance. I know I saw the Falsefaces and heard them, but the only thing I guess I’m allowed to remember visually is just a fleeting swirl of the movement of the back of one of them dancing. I know that they were there, and I even have a sense of the pattern of their movements. I also know I had to have seen their faces at the time, since it was all done in the open and the lights were always on in the hallway. Time bends.

The next thing I remember is I was sitting on the couch with the little ones on my lap and it was dawn. The Falsefaces had gone. Four-year-old Bethany was on my lap giggling. She said, “I wasn’t scared, but Tessie [age three] was, so I hugged her.” Real “catchers” come in all sizes.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL YEARS LATER
when I tried to write down this story that I realized that there were things I didn’t remember, and that time itself had been altered. I called up Dan and asked him what he remembered. He doesn’t like to talk about that sort of thing much, but I really wanted to know. He has the memory for patterns of a master chess player, which he in fact was.
⁴
It turns out that he, too, did not realize
that time had changed until he tried to string it together, bead by bead, in a spoken story.

He remembers being even faster than I was out of the bedroom, and that Pat’s stepfather beat him to the kitchen where the Falsefaces had opened the front door with a loud crash. But after that, until the dawn, time and memory stepped out and took up the rhythms of the dancers.

I
BURST OUT LAUGHING ONCE
, right in the middle of class at Harvard Divinity School,
not
known for its levity, thinking about dating on the rez. Some speaker, who referred to herself as an “eco-feminist theologian,” was going on about Native American spirituality, as if it makes any sense at all in the first place to talk about such diverse peoples in the singular, as if they were one entity. She was waxing lyrical about their respect for the earth, and I thought about a double date Pat and I had gone on one weekend, long ago. We had been in town at the bar—I’d been getting served regularly since I was fourteen—and decided to get a couple of six-packs and drive out to a field by Versailles Plank (pronounced
ver-sails
) Road. We sat around talking and drinking and fooling around a little and looking at fireflies until it was time to go home. We picked up the cans, but as we were leaving, one of the guys left a can with beer in it on the ground. Being Miss Don’t-Be-a-Litterbug, I went to pick it up, saying I’ll just spill out the beer and we can take the empty. In a gentle voice, but one that had that unmistakable quality of authority, he said to leave it. Pat told me later that they always did that, left an offering for the spirits of the field.

As the professor spoke, I saw that sacred can of Schlitz and laughed with joy. Often where you least expect it, the Spirit is very near you. Sometimes it speaks in Psalms, sometimes in sacred dance, sometimes it just says, When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer.

1
. I believe in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

2
. I was at the Museum of Fine Arts last year and stopped in to listen to a presentation by an ethnomusicologist who studied the ritual music and chant of Tibetan monks. Toward the end of the lecture he turned on his tape recorder, as he had been doing, to play segments of chant. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed by a great swirling, whirling amassing of foreign presences. I gripped my seat, scared as a young child on a roller coaster, and hung on, frozen till it stopped, as the lecturer continued babbling about form and structure. Afterward I asked him the nature of that last piece of chant he had played. He said it was a chant to invoke the spirits of the dead. He told me, slightly sheepishly, that he had taped it surreptitiously—it wasn’t one of the ones the monks had given him permission to record. I wanted to hit him. I was so mad I didn’t even think about what he might think of me, and calmly (on the outside, that is) I told him what had happened when he did that. Do you have any idea whom you invited, or whether they were expecting tea or if they might be angry at their non-reception?

My questions were not entertained by him either, except perhaps in the form of an enhanced attention to the intricacies of packing up his gear. Quickly! As my dad once wrote of such academics, deaf to their own subject matter: “a peerage of tin ears.”

3
. Wilhelm Reich’s invention to capture purported energy rays that he called orgones.

4
. Dan is now a middle-aged, very successful corporate-takeover specialist. As he says, send a “skin” on a raid and look out! Actually it wasn’t so funny during Vietnam. He told me they’d take an Indian, who had probably been no nearer a forest than the city park outside the projects, and send him out on point.

T
HE SUMMER BEFORE MY SENIOR
year I stayed in my father’s old apartment over the garage in Cornish. Dan had a job teaching for the summer with the ABC program at Dartmouth. I might have moved in with him, but my little brother was home in Cornish for the summer, too. I didn’t want to set a bad example, so each and every morning before he woke up, I made sure Dad’s old Saab, which he gave me (couldn’t hold a candle to the Jeep!), was back in the driveway. Dan was great about that, too; he took my brother around and played basketball with him, but he did not show up at the breakfast table.

One day that summer something quite out of the ordinary happened. I went into town for the mail with my dad. I waited in the car while he went into the post office, no sign of either Mr. Custe or Mr. Curzon. Daddy got back in the car and was looking at the front of an envelope. He stared at it for a few moments, then calmly tore it, unopened, into several pieces and put it in the side-pocket trash. When he looked up, he said it was from Sylvia, his first wife. It was the first he had heard from her since they’d split up after the war. “Weren’t you even curious what she might have to say?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. He said no, when he was finished with a person, he was through with them. At the time, I was impressed by his self-discipline and ashamed at the knowledge that I would have had to at least peek at the letter were our positions reversed. I wondered, silently, if I had a half sister or brother somewhere.

When I was a very little girl, I used to sit by the side of the road and
wait, looking up the road. When my parents asked about it, I told them I was waiting for my older brother to come home. I wasn’t playing, either; I can remember it clearly, waiting for him, certain he was out there, somewhere.

Shortly after the letter, I was in for another surprise when I woke up at my father’s house and went into the living room only to find this girl enveloped in a flannel nightgown, sitting on my father’s couch. He may have mentioned her, but I don’t remember anything but the strangeness of meeting Joyce Maynard. Forgive a fellow teenager’s thought, Joyce, but
this
is what Daddy had been waiting for all this time? This is the first “woman,” to my knowledge anyway, he invites to stay? I mean she was perfectly nice and everything, but who expects to find someone looking like a twelve-year-old girl? In the place of a potential stepmother, here was this bizarre little sister of sorts. It was so
weird.
When she got dressed, she was wearing these little Mary Jane–style sneakers, straps and everything, and Daddy said, “Aren’t those great, Peggy, you can get them at Woolworth’s, you know. Joyce has them in several colors.” I grunted noncommittally and thought to myself, Yeah, Dad, they’re grrrrreat. Gonna run right out and get me some
real
soon. Right after I turn into a
to
tal geek, okay? Converse All Star high-tops were the only thing to be wearing that year, those and my beloved pair of killer black suede, over-the-knee boots with three-inch heels and a contrasting orange suede platform on the bottom. And any self-respecting teenager slept in her boyfriend’s basketball T-shirt, size XX-large, not a kid’s flannel nightie. In my book, if you were a grown woman, you wore a wedding ring, a bathrobe, and were dressed before breakfast with the exception of the flu, Mother’s Day, or nuclear war. In my book, in my fiction.

Joyce, too, wrote about meeting me. I’d nearly finished the first draft of my own memoir when hers came out, so it was interesting to compare two views of the same event.

Sometime in the night Peggy comes in and lies down in the single bed beside mine. It’s late. She’s been with her Dartmouth boyfriend. When I wake up, she’s still asleep. . . .

It’s close to noon when Peggy emerges from the bedroom. . . . She’s not unfriendly, but neither does she exude enthusiasm.

“I want you to meet Joyce,” Jerry says. “She’s the one I told you about. She wrote that magazine article.”

“Hi,” she says. Then she picks up a magazine and flips through it. No small talk. (
At Home,
pp. 111–12)

. . . I like Jerry’s children, but I have little in common with this cheerful, friendly twelve-year-old boy and his basketball-loving sixteen-year-old sister . . .

Where my way of operating in the world has always called for large amounts of conciliatory behavior—cuteness and charm, dissembling for the purpose of pleasing adults—Peggy’s demeanor speaks of uncompromising honesty. Peggy, though she’s two years younger, seems far more self-possessed than I. Whatever insecurities she may harbor, or secretly competitive feelings she may have toward me, I watch her with a kind of awe and fear, viewing her as someone who seems far more sure of herself in the world than I am. In Peggy’s presence, I feel naked and oddly silly.

(p. 143)

To tell the truth, I didn’t give her too much thought. It was, indeed, like having someone naked and oddly silly in the room; I instinctively looked the other way, to avoid embarrassment. Dan and I seemed so normal, which was both comforting to me and a source of discomfort in comparison to the “whatever” (that’s how I would have put it then—I just didn’t “go there” in my mind) of Dad and Joyce. She wrote:

Sometimes they [Peggy and Dan] hang out together in Jerry’s living room. They come over on Sunday afternoons to watch sports. They bring their basketballs. Peggy carries hers in a case. They do not abide by Jerry’s dietary rules, that I can see. [Dan] even drinks Coke.