The distance from the center of town can be measured, I’m sorry to say, in teeth per capita. Rural poverty is not remotely picturesque. It’s hungry, cold, and it smells. In school, we didn’t make complex distinctions between parents’ occupations or things like houses and cars and TVs: it was to the bone; who has B.O. (body odor) and who doesn’t. In the city where I live today, poverty seems more to do with things; in the country, it had to do with human bodies. The Courdelaine kids all had “wicked B.O.” and their bony elbows and knees stuck out of their clothes akimbo like a scarecrow’s. My mother once found one of the Courdelaine kids, Ralph, sitting on the playground after school, crying. His front tooth had been knocked out by accident on the playground. It wasn’t a baby tooth since, even though he was in the same grade as we were, he was retarded, and so had stayed back a lot. She picked up the tooth, wrapped it in a wet Kleenex as she was taught in first aid, and volunteered to drive him to the dentist. The principal said okay, so off they went. Ralph was smiling.
Mom came home white in the face. She said that when she walked into the dentist’s office with Ralph, carrying the carefully wrapped tooth, she was greeted by the front-office nurse, who asked her, “Why’ja bother? All them Courdelaines lose their teeth anyways.” The nurse told her to go on home.
PLAINFIELD SCHOOL WAS A FOUR-ROOM schoolhouse about the width of a double-wide trailer, which served eight grades, two grades per room plus the retarded kids in the basement, of which there was a high proportion. I believe there were three retarded children in my little class of twelve alone. On the first day of school, Mrs. Corette, who taught the first and second graders in one room, was standing outside to greet us. She was wearing a pink-striped seersucker dress with two huge green frogs appliquéd on the pockets. I loved her instantly. She started the day, every day, singing, “Good morning to you, good morning to you,” as she pointed to each one of us in turn, so no one ever felt left out, “We’re all in our places with sunshiny faces, oh, this is the way to start our new day.” It was, indeed, a most pleasant way to start our new day. Next, we stood, faced the flag, put our hands over our hearts, and said the Pledge of Allegiance. During the pledge, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts would get to do this neat-looking two-finger salute instead of putting their hand over their heart. After the pledge, we sang patriotic songs: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Home, Home on the Range,” “America the Beautiful,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Over Hill Over Dale,” as we march the dusty trail and those caissons go rolling along. Then we took our seats for prayers. We recited Our Father and afterward sang a children’s prayer that went:
Father we thank thee for the night
and for the pleasant morning light;
for rest and food and loving care,
and all that makes our day so fair.
Help us to do the things we should
to be to others kind and good;
in all we do at work or at play
to grow more loving every day.
Amen.
The prayer was lovely. More than lovely, it was a lifeline for me as I repeated my prayers in the dark of my room at night, stiff with fear, a talisman against the dark side of our inverted forest, a Grimm’s world in which goblins, ghosts, and other unnatural creatures and disembodied terrors existed just as surely as did the good fairies and their gossamer wings, just as surely as I saw, time and again, my parents’ eyes cloud with hatred, rage, and terror as they looked at each other. Worse still was when my mother looked my way. Although she complained that pleasing my father was a constantly moving target, to me, it was my mother who was the changeling. What was funny on Monday got you slapped on Tuesday. There was no winning, no staying ahead of that game, because, as I figured out years later, the whole point of the game was to punish you for being a bad girl, so that she could be the good one.
As I look back on this time, I was becoming more a creature of the forest or a fairy tale, of dreams and nightmares, than a visible, embodied, human little girl. Being seen, being noticed, just being, was not safe. While I would learn to build secret compartments in my mind to hide thoughts and feelings unacceptable to my father, with my mother the only solution was a full-company strategic withdrawal. I gave up the front line of my body and retreated behind an icy, numbing moat and cold stone battlements in order to survive to fight another day. I still have no memory, tactile or otherwise, of my mother’s hands coming closer than about a foot from my body, neither for blows nor caresses. It is as if my memory were stopped at the drawbridge and all instances of bodily contact chopped off by the fortress guards before allowing the rest to pass. The events surrounding such scenes, however, are fully alive. I can look down at my body and see what I’m wearing, smell things around me, hear what is being said, feel the blood rushing to my face and the shame in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that I have to go to the bathroom right now, that I’m going to mess my pants; that terrible, inexorable, hypnotized feeling of “Come here!” and your limbs feel stuck in molasses as in a dream where something horrible is chasing you and you try to run but can’t. And then it’s blank, hacked off, and nothing exists until the aftermath, when memory resumes.
Most of my strategic retreats were largely reflexive; however, I executed one key maneuver fully conscious of what I was doing. I learned how to cry soundlessly, without tears, silent as the stones of the Wailing Wall. I remember the instant I did it. I was in the room I shared with my little brother. I’d been brought in there to be punished. The door was shut and it began. I didn’t feel, or remember feeling, “the four hundred blows.” I knew I was being spanked only because I heard my brother’s terrified screams coming from the hallway on the other side of the door, and his little fists pounding against it. In a split second, I realized that it must be my cries that were terrifying him. I was the one who explained stuff to him and he believed me, the one who picked up his bottle and teddy over and over when he threw them out of bed at night and no one big came.
She tore open the door he was pounding, and the next thing I knew, he was off the floor dangling by one skinny arm and spinning in the air because she was hitting him so fast. I vowed that never, ever again would I make so much as a peep.
I would soon discover an additional payoff from my newfound skill, this one not just for my brother, but for me as well. Although, at first, my total lack of reaction infuriated her, her rage seemed to burn itself out faster, like a fire with no oxygen, as it were, no drama and noise to fan the flames.
AT HOME, DADDY WAS UNUSUALLY busy that fall, or perhaps I was just getting old enough to quantify his absences somewhat. My mother, too, had something with which to occupy herself. We were going to renovate and expand the house, and an architect had made a perfect little dollhouse for her out of graph paper, with movable walls and little pieces of paper furniture. The house would have a separate bedroom for each of us, and an underground passageway to the planned-for garage. Upstairs, above the garage, Daddy would have a little apartment of his own with a bathroom and a tiny kitchen.
While Mama was busy playing with her paper house, I’d sneak up to the open loft above the living room and play a game I’d invented. I swore my brother to secrecy and deputized him as my assistant. Then I began operating. First, I made incisions in my dolls and beloved stuffed animals. Then I’d begin to spank each one, methodically at first, then wildly. My brother joined in, and after an orgy of spanking, we hurled them, one by one, over the balcony to the floor below. After some time, my mother discovered the incisions in my menagerie, and after I explained that I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up and needed to practice, she stitched up the dolls and stuffed animals, without punishing me. I was thrilled with the scars; they looked very swashbuckling. She forbade any more operations, but my brother and I kept up the secret doll-spanking sessions, hurling them over the balcony. The scissors disappeared for good after my mother discovered that Maxer and Pearly, our two cats, had clumps of fur missing.
THE GAMES WE PLAYED AT school co
uld not have been more unlike the ones I played, hidden away, at home. Our teacher, Mrs. Corette, taught us wonderful games. The first day of school, we all joined hands in a ring and sang, “Bluebird, bluebird, through my window,” as one “bird” began to weave in and out of the circle of children. Then we’d sing, “Take a little girl and tap her on the shoulder,” and the “bird” would tap another child on the shoulder. The tapped child took the bluebird’s hand and together they’d weave in and out of the circle tapping others at the correct moment in the song, until there was a line of children holding hands where the circle had been. Finally, we would re-form a circle holding hands. The older kids taught us rougher games like Red Rover Red Rover send Peggy right over.
I didn’t have B.O., but I said my words queer, like “tomaahto” and “trousers,” which was almost as bad. And I came across another distinction that mattered, something most people would call politics, but which ran deeper than that: it had the fervor of religion. At recess, the eighth-grade girls culled me from the pack, and when the playground monitor turned her back to cuff some boy on the ear, the girls linked arms, formed a long gauntlet, and began kicking me, like some pack of feral Rockettes. This happened a lot. The first sentence I ever wrote was a note to Barbara, the worst of the big girls. “YOU ARE A RAT.” When I walked into the girls’ room to use the toilet, there she was, showing my note to the rest of the pack and laughing.
One day, when I was on the teeter-totter with a boy in my class, his sister Corleen, an eighth grader, came over. Because she was alone for once, I saw my chance. I worked up my courage and asked, “Corleen, why do the big girls hate me?”
“Promise you won’t tell them I told you?”
“Cross my heart,” I said, gesturing.
“Well, I’m not sure exactly, but I think it’s because your father is a Communist.”
I had no idea what a Communist was, but I was relieved, somehow, to know there was a reason. I don’t know if it’s universally preferable to know why you’re being beaten, even if the reason is wrong. I suspect so. In my case, the reason was dead wrong. My father was probably the most un-Communist, anti-Communist of any of them. He detests Communism. But he also detested McCarthy and that whole un-American idiocy of which New Hampshire in the fifties and early sixties was in thrall. Communist meant anyone who looked different, spoke different, and boy, did it mean anyone who was a Jew or had even visited New York City. Communists were why each classroom walked single file down to the basement, where we knelt against the dank green wall and covered our heads with our arms until a teacher blew the all-clear whistle. These “duck and cover” civil defense drills were to prepare us in the event that Communists dropped the bomb on Plainfield. Unlike any other assembly, there was no giggling or fooling around. We were scared, quiet, and in deadly earnest. Weekly we knelt, covered our heads, and silently contemplated our mortality.
WHEN THE SNOW FELL IN 1961, I was told not to put it in my mouth. This might not seem like a big deal to a city kid, but in Cornish where we drank out of the brooks, tapped maple sap from the trees, boiled it down, and poured it on snow for candy, and ate wild berries and apples by the handful, this was strange and disturbing. My mother said it had “fallout” in it from nuclear bomb testing. I examined great drifts of it that winter, looking for fallout, the deadly black flecks I expected to find sprinkled in amongst the white snowflakes. I never found any until we went to visit Granny, Grandpa, and Aunt Doris in New York City for a long weekend after Thanksgiving. The place was radioactive! Black, sooty flecks and more yellow dog pee than I could stomach.
The trip had not started out well either. We woke up in the dark, which was creepy. (It was a revelation to me, when I became of age to make my own travel plans, that it is, in fact, totally unnecessary to rise before dawn when going on a journey. Nor does one have to get to the airport several hours in advance.) I had a beautiful dress laid out on my bed in the nursery. It was a red print jumper with little smocked flowers across the chest, and underneath a white blouse with the same red print at the border of the cuffs and collar. I got myself dressed, except for the buttons up the back, and went in to use the bathroom. I sat down. Splash! Backwards into the toilet. Daddy had forgotten to put down the lid. Drowning in horror and disgust and panic, things went dark for a while, and then I remember arms wrapping me in “soft pinky,” my mohair blanket. I was inconsolable about having to wear a different dress. Life, as we know it, was ruined.
I’m not sure it’s possible, but I distinctly remember my grandmother walking out onto the tarmac to meet us as we climbed down the steep, narrow stairs that a man rolled up to the plane door when we landed. Life proceeded to get unruined as Aunt Doris said I could have the beautiful blue butterfly broach she was wearing, for keeps. Her bedroom in my grandparents’ apartment at 1133 Park Avenue was my favorite place to visit. She had a beautiful dressing table with a little chair she let me sit on and look into the mirror. But the best thing was she let me look into all the drawers and touch her make-up and jewelry and glass bottles of perfume and soft gloves. I could even take things out carefully and try them on one by one in the mirror. She told me strange and wonderful facts. For example, she called the skin on my face “your complexion” and said I should never wash my face with soap because it dries out your complexion and leads to wrinkles. I should use this pretty-smelling stuff in a jar, pat it on my face with warm water, and then rinse it off with cold water and pat dry.
Did you know water can smell? Water at home is just water, but in New York it smells nice as it comes out of the faucet and into the sink. My mother wrinkled her nose and said, “That’s chlorine, dear. It’s a chemical.” Well, I had learned a thing or two myself. Getting ready for bed that evening, I announced to my mother as she began to wash her face, “Soap ruins your complexion, you know.”
My grandparents had a dining room off the living room. You could see it from the couch, but you had to go through a sort of archway to sit down at the table. In the corner of the dining room stood a big black-and-white television set at an angle where the three of them, my aunt, grandmother, and grandfather, could watch the news throughout dinner. I couldn’t see it very well; I think I was too small to see over the table anyway, but I remember the flickering light from the television reflecting across the polished table and the dark, disapproving looks my aunt and grandmother exchanged in silent commentary. I was glad it was someone on television who had been naughty instead of me. I got gingersnaps to dip in whipped cream for dessert.
I only remember the living room at night with the lights on. Grandpa sat in a big chair at one end of the room and listened to the Mills Brothers on a huge Victrola. He had a nice singing voice, and a good ear like me, and I couldn’t figure out why his singing made Daddy squirm the way he did when Mama sang off-key. There was also something embarrassing about Granny’s prints of the Life of the Orchid that hung over the living room couch; I could tell by the way he mentioned them, but I didn’t get that either.
I went to sleep with the comforting hum of traffic and city buses a dozen stories below. I loved it that, in the city, the night had people in it. In the country, the night, like the winter, is too solitary, too devoid of human consort.
THE NEXT YEAR, IN THE fall of 1962, a wonderful thing happened. The earth opened up and swallowed the big girls. Plainfield and Meriden townships consolidated their school districts: we sent over our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders; they sent us their third, fourth, and fifth. So now, with the exception of first and second grades, there would be only one grade per room. We not only kept our beloved Mrs. Corette for another year, but the playground, in all its glory, was ours.
That winter, we did not take our family trip to Florida, as planned. Instead my mother was going to take my brother and me to spend several weeks in Barbados with her mother, whom my father referred to as “Mummy De-ah,” which he always said in a strained, high-pitched voice, mimicking Claire and her mother talking together. Daddy had some business
to take care of in New York, I was told. No one mentioned that his book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction was to be published that January. In fact, I’d venture to say that no title of any of his books was ever spoken in our house; they were like the boxes of books with his name on them, sent by his publisher I suppose, that I discovered in the cellar, stowed away and unmentioned. He used to tell us things his characters said though, quoting them as though he were talking about old friends, like Mr. Custe or Mr. Curzon or Bill Shawn.
He wrote to us in Barbados from his room at “The Sherry Netherland 781 5th Avenue 10022 ELDORADO 5-2800.” It was addressed to Miss Peggy and Master Matthew Salinger c/o the Buccaneer Bay Hotel St. James Barbados W.I. He said he loved and missed us and hoped we were having warm weather. He also assured us that he’d pick up Joey, our dog, from the kennel the minute he got home. The next letter included my mother, sort of, beginning Dear Girls and Boy. It was a very funny letter, full of news about our imaginary friend Mr. Curzon. Again he tells us he misses us, but adds that his work is going well so we should just concentrate on swimming and being warm. What I took as my due then, but now strikes me as not exactly normal, is that all the lavish expressions of affection in my father’s letters to us as a family were directed, almost without exception, solely to me. The last letter we received before returning home from Barbados began Dear Fambly, but ended in boldface type that he was convinced more than ever that Peggy Salingers don’t grow on trees. It was signed with about a million XXXs.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 17