Dream Catcher: A Memoir (63 page)

IF MY LIFE IS GOING TO BE LIKE THIS FOREVER I JUST CAN’T STAND IT. Will I always be in some shitty apartment all alone with nobody when I need somebody the most? Will I always be pregnant and alone? Will I? If staying with Dan says that the answer is yes then I don’t want to be with him. I don’t trust him with my guts.

All I want is a
home.
Someplace nice and cheery where its MY home and I belong and I’m loved. Somewhere where I can always depend on the person who loves me not to leave me lonely. Someplace I belong. Someplace peaceful and safe. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never ever find a home where I’m wanted loved and TREATED RIGHT. I feel like I’ll never be not alone in some dump with bare light bulbs and no lampshades. . . .

Well I successfully stopped my hysteria. No more rocking and crying and talking to myself out loud. I suppose thumb sucking goes next but why take away all life’s little pleasures at once! Actually, seriously, I’m really glad I can stop myself when I get hysterical. I can tell when I start shaking and rocking and feeling super lightheaded that it is time to STOP. And I still can. When you have no one it’s imperative that you can control yourself and shrink yourself or else your up shit creek without a paddle canoe life saver etc. etc. I still feel kinda pregnant and alone.
Shit it’s a good thing I’m not or I’d really be SUPER CRAZY right now. Well, I’m off to find a friend in Jesus cause boy do I ever need one!

I sure hope and pray that Dan is OK and not alone. I know he knows what it means to be alone up in that shitty hotel room with lead paint chipping off the walls Big Bad Hard Tough 13 year old boy scared shitless so shitless he doesn’t even know it and all alone. That kills me. I hate to think of him like that. That little guy in the photograph in pajamas, barely four, nearly beaten to death by his old man in a drunken rage. The little boy spilled his last can of beer. Fractured chest, one eye blown out, face rearranged monthly ’till the old fucker died. I always wish I could have been there to make things better. When he needed me I wasn’t even born yet! . . . It must be pure living agony and hell to be a parent and not be able to provide for your kids. Pure living hell.

I may be getting an ulcer. I hope not but my stomach sure hasn’t felt too hot lately. Now its throbbing like its been throbbing and burning for the past few days. Actually, I almost hope I do have one and I don’t know why.

S
HORTLY AFTER RETURNING
from New York, I applied to Dartmouth early decision and was rejected outright. My father was furious at Dartmouth—my daughter’s not good enough for them? I now had to decide which of my secondary choices I wanted to attend. The selection criterion was proximity to Dan, who stuck around, after all, at Dartmouth. This is the crisis, the “sizable decision,” my father referred to in the letter he sent me when I didn’t get in. He said he was glad I always kept my head in a crisis. He enclosed some homeopathic medicine for the head cold he thought he heard in my voice over the phone.

I
GRABBED ON TO JESUS
like the drowning young woman I was. My daily diary entries of boys and babies and booze were interrupted in bold letters: “MAY 5
^th
I GOT SAVED.” I had never set foot in a church in
my whole life until now. The closest I’d come to any formal religion was when, at Cross Mountain School, Holly had brought me to synagogue with her once during the High Holy Days so we could escape school for the day and sit someplace warm.

I was talking to a classmate, Earl St. James (today the Reverend Earl St. James, I hear), feeling deeply miserable and adrift. He and his sister invited me to come to church with the family. I thanked him, but said that it was a real stumbling block to me that anyone should go to hell just because they weren’t Christians. When, years later, I brought this question up in divinity school, a Jesuit classmate of mine said, “The pope says we have to believe in hell, but no one says we have to believe that there is anyone in it.” Earl was such a kind and gentle person, he didn’t need Jesuit reasoning as his witness. When I said I didn’t believe in hell for non-Christians and wasn’t sure that a good God would even think up such a place, he said simply and thoughtfully that he didn’t know how it all worked, but he, too, believed in a merciful God and maybe there were chances for others, ways of getting to heaven that we don’t know about.

I decided to take him up on his offer and spend the next Sunday with his family. The St. Jameses lived on the top floors of a four-family that they owned in a predominantly black and West Indian section of the city. They belonged to a tiny church right around the corner from their house. The parishioners were all Barbadian; well, all but that tall, stray, white girl the St. James family brought along with them. Sunday morning we ate a big breakfast, and Mrs. St. James hurried to put Sunday lunch in the oven to bake. Red-eye peas and rice, couscous with sour fish sauce (which for years I thought was called “coo-coo with sah-fish sauce”), and roasted chicken. It was like Thanksgiving. It
was
thanksgiving.

We walked to church together. Large brown women in flower print dresses and white straw hats greeted each other: “Good morning, sister.” Children passed by neat as a pin in little suits or dresses. A sprinkling of men. The pastor was more than ninety years old. His skin was deep black, not blue-black like some Africans’, but rather so brown and furrowed it had turned black over time like rich Barbadian earth. He had such a strong accent that I could not understand a lot of what he had to say. But when the man asked if anyone wanted to come forward and lay their burdens on Jesus, I heard the call to come forward loud and clear. “Does anybody want to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord?” I
wasn’t sure about the “Lord” part, but a savior sounded pretty wonderful. This Jesus and his family seemed to have strong medicine.

As the pastor invited those not yet saved to come up to the altar rail, people got down on their knees and prayed or almost chanted, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord.” Some got moved by the Spirit and looked as if they were having convulsive fits, yet it wasn’t the kind of fear-filled bedlam I was used to when boundaries broke down. The swirl of sounds and smells and movement, the women’s Ice Blue Secret deodorant and flowered dresses, songs and prayer, wove together a different kind of time and space. As the boundaries of this reality faded a bit, there was not the kind of annihilation or unbeing that I’d witnessed in madness; but rather, a kind of re-being or re-creation that happens in those rare epiphanies in art, music, theater, religious ritual, and lovemaking. I am over the edge, but flying, soaring on the updrafts above the cliff, not falling down the dark abyss. I’m not swept along to the altar, I’m gliding. I kneel and people lay hands on me and pray over me, asking if I wish to accept Jesus as my personal Savior. Yes. Yes, I do.

I walked home feeling light and happy. I wasn’t made to feel self-conscious or special, they didn’t like me any more or any less, nor did they treat me as any more or less welcome in their home. Espousal of their belief wasn’t a prerequisite for love and affection and respect. They were just happy for me and available if I wanted to talk or had any questions—of which I had lots. I was not used to people listening to me, really listening. I learned the difference between cult, where one is required to leave large pieces of who one is at the door, split off, as the price of entry, and community.

I
SKIPPED MY HIGH SCHOOL
graduation. Class of 1973. Daddy called and said, “You don’t want me to come to graduation and all that crap, do you?” How could I admit that I wasn’t too sophisticated to want any of that pomp and circumstance crap. He almost certainly would have come if I had had the courage to appear stupid. And perhaps he wanted to but said it that way so he wouldn’t feel stupid. Anyway, I didn’t go because I really
would
have felt stupid when all those kids were hugging their parents and taking pictures and being taken out for dinner.

T
HE NEAREST COLLEGE TO
D
ARTMOUTH
, as I looked on the map, seemed to be New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. It was about forty-five minutes down Route 114 from Dartmouth and offered, as a bonus, a season’s lift ticket to the local ski area as part of the activities fee. I met some good friends there and had a couple of really good teachers—especially my genetics professor, who took us all on a field trip to Boston to see the Spring Flower Show, where he wore his usual dark cape and swooped amongst the orchids. Aside from my introduction to drosophila and plant biology, the best thing about my year and a half of college, given my state of mind, was meeting my foster parents. They hosted a teen Bible-study group in their home, which is how I met them.

I like to think that I was of some help, being the eldest of about ten foster kids and four adopted ones at any given time. But the biggest help by far was to me, that’s for sure. They took in kids no one else would take. Deaf kids, kids with seizures and cigarette burns on their genitals, seven-year-olds with drug addictions (black beauties from their biker parents to keep them quiet), three sisters who wanted to be placed together, mentally retarded twins. I finally had a place to come home to that was as much mine as it was any of the other kids’ in the house. I didn’t feel like a guest, as I did everywhere else, including my father’s, perpetually worried about wearing out my welcome.