Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  THE SUMMER OF 1963 marked the worst year of a seven-year drought. Wells were running dry, ponds drying up. One day, I went to pick some wild watercress from a nearby brook where it always grew this time of year. The brook had dried to a trickle of mud. So I decided I’d better go see how the other brook, farther into the forest in the same direction, was faring. I jumped across the mud and crawled under the barbed-wire fence that separated the woods from the field. There was a lot of old, rusty barbed-wire fencing from previous farms on our property. I have a scar on my calf and many tetanus shots to show for it.

  After a few minutes I came to the spot where another brook flows into a little pond that always dries up late in the summer. This spring it was already close to dry. I saw masses of doomed pollywogs. They’d never grow legs before the pond dried up. I had my trusty jar and I knew where there was water in another part of the forest. One little jar and thousands, millions of pollywogs wriggling black and shiny in half-inch pockets of water that would be gone for certain in, at most, a week or two. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, I dashed back and forth, filling my jar with them and running, sweating, dizzy, ten minutes each way, over and over, back and forth from the dying pond to a swampy area where three brooks met. Finally, I dropped to the ground. I couldn’t go on. I lay there with the impending deaths of thousands on my conscience.

  I passed out flat on the pine needles and slept for I don’t know how long. When I awoke, cool and rested, I got up and walked beyond the pond, resolutely not looking at it, and up to the edge of a twenty-five-foot drop of sheer granite where, some twenty thousand years ago, the last great glacier had passed by, laughing at the presumption of rock to be substantial. A brook ran along the narrow valley at the bottom of the cliff, and on the other side, the land rose steeply up again, trees growing between large boulders tossed by the glacier.

  In the valley at the base of the slope were two old stone wells and some rock arrangements that were clearly human-made. These thrilled me. My mother had said that the wells were probably from colonial times or maybe even from the Indians. Colonial times and Indians and cavemen and dinosaurs and Jonny Quest intermingled freely in my mind. Whenever I went to that place in the woods, I felt as though I were entering a lost valley. I skirted around the cliff and went down into the valley along the brook that flowed through it. I climbed up the slope on the other side and sat in the great lap of an old birch tree, just where it divided into three strong trees, and from my perch, looked down at the old wells. I imagined I was one of those half-ape, half-human women I’d seen in the Museum of Natural History. My imagination was such that, after a short time, all vestiges of my former life faded from consciousness. Gone was my house, the road, my sneakers, my pink skin, my name; I became a wild, hairy ape-woman. I lived by the cliff for protection. My heart began to pound as I thought of marauders. Then, I heard them coming.

  I chose a high point and waited, muscles taut, poised to hurl down a rain of rocks upon their heads. My eyes surveyed the area for possible escape routes in case there were too many of the enemy. I saw them coming over the far ledge. My bowels turned to ice; there were at least twenty heading straight for our wells. I picked up my club and ran noiselessly, just the sound of my pulse and the wind in my ears, fleeing for my life down the path of an old stream bed through the woods. I reached the swampy area where they would lose the scent of my trail and plunged in, weeds whipping my face and making little cuts on my legs. I didn’t feel the stinging until after my flight.

  I spotted our well-house2 and came abruptly to a halt. I was entering forbidden territory. I crept up to the window, daring myself to look in. The thought never occurred to me that the well-house was forbidden for my own safety. I thought, or more than half-thought, that someone had been murdered and was floating around in there, which was why we couldn’t use the well anymore and the water was rusty-colored and bad. I did not peek in. My club was powerless against bloated corpses.

  Beyond the well lay an old logging trail that led to the road. As I emerged into the dappled sunlight of the dirt road, familiar plants, and birches, I metamorphosized back into girl—hairy body became pink, uncovered breasts flattened, matted hair became messy braids, and I thought about a bologna sandwich with mustard.

  I WAS OUT IN THE woods, as usual, when I heard my mother calling my name. Since it wasn’t dinnertime, I raced back to the house to see what was wrong.

  “Margaret Ann Salinger, where have you been. I’ve been calling and calling. Oh, never mind, we’ll be late for William’s birthday party. Just look at that hair! Go get changed and bring down the brush. Your pink seersucker is on your bed. And change those socks and shoes, too.”

  I liked my pink-and-white-striped seersucker dress. It was sleeveless and gathered at the waist, and when the breezes blew, the skirt puffed out nicely. Had I been allowed to wear those scrunchy petticoats that Viola wore, it would have made real hoops. I was also relieved to find out that William’s party was going to be held at the Platts’, friends of ours, rather than at Saint-Gaudens’,3 where he lived in the summer because his parents were caretakers. I loved Saint-Gaudens, but William and I always seemed to get into trouble when we played together there. Like the time he suggested that we pick all the flowers, and there were great piles, literally over our heads, of uprooted orange lilies. It was just before a big gallery opening. “You’re going to get the spanking of your life when we get home.” The summer before that, William’s mother and mine came running out of the caretaker’s house, horrified. A group of old ladies on a tour of the grounds had just left terribly upset. Apparently two children were swimming buck naked in the goldfish pool in the rotunda, one of whom stood up on the sculpture of the turtle that spits water into the pool and was last seen peeing as far as possible—and it wasn’t William. “You’re going to get the spanking of your life when you get home.” Or the summer before that, when William showed me some shiny three-pointed leaves and told me to rub them all over my body. I landed in the hospital with one of the worst cases of poison ivy—I’d not neglected my genitals—they’d seen. “What were you doing, rolling naked in it?” the doctors asked. Then there was the time our mothers were having a ladies’ tea, and when one lady looked out the window, she spied William and me with our pants down playing doctor in the woods. I thought she must have had X-ray vision. We were in a grove miles away from the main house, or so it seemed to me. “I was so . . . humiliated. You just wait until we get home, you’re going to get the spanking of your life.” The earliest memory I have of our catastrophic visits is of me sitting on top of a great heap of toys I had piled together, sobbing, but refusing to let anyone play with them. William’s brother, still in rubber diaper pants, ran in and told. “How could you be so selfish . . .”

  All the children at William’s eighth birthday party went down to the Platts’ field and were told to pile into a cart that was hitched up to a tractor that William would drive. He was to take us for a hayride. He got going pretty fast and turned sharply to the left. The cart tipped over, Stephanie Yatsavich fell on top of me, and I fell on top of my right arm, which was out straight where I had been bracing myself against the cart. No one seemed hurt. Something was terribly wrong with my arm, though. I picked up the strange arm with my good one and cradled it, as if it were a baby. Then I walked across the field to get a grown-up from the house. I noted, sadly, that my nice pink skirt was all red. My arm had changed into an odd purply thing with the inner forearm distended like a pregnant cat’s belly. I told William’s mother I thought she had better take me to the hospital. Now.

  Instead, she drove me three miles up the mountain road to my mother’s house to ask her what she should do. I’d already told her what to do! I got into our car and Mom drove me up to Hanover, twenty miles away. By Lebanon, despite my best effort to stay in control, to make sure I got my arm to the hospital, I lost consciousness.

  Some idiot moved my arm to place it on an X-ray plate. Screaming agony. They did it an eternal hell
number of times. I had a compound fracture: one bone was splintered, the other was sticking out and covered with dirt. A mask came over my face. Some nurse, with a cheery stewardess voice, actually asked me to count! Jesus. Now?

  An instant later (in real time, six hours on the operating table had passed, I was later told), the mask was off my face, and I heard a group of nurses talking and laughing. They didn’t know I could hear them I guess, because they looked surprised and a bit flustered when they saw my eyes were open. “This one’s waking up.” On the table next to me was an old lady with tubes sticking out of her nose and face. Gross. That was the last thing I remembered until it was dark and I heard someone moaning terribly and it was me and I had to throw up over and over. (Ether was the anesthesia used in those days, and the aftereffect was pretty wild nausea.) Pain so bad there were no words, no tears. Moaning. My mother was in the room. There was only one bed. Days passed and I was stuck in a dream. When I was finally able to form words, about the time I remembered the taste of ginger ale in my mouth instead of bile, I was so scared I was crying.

  My mother said, “What’s the matter? Shall I ring for the nurse?” She was standing on the right side of my bed. “Mama, I can’t tell whether I’m dreaming or awake.” She looked at me and said slowly and calmly, looking right into my eyes, “It doesn’t matter.” I heaved a sigh, a shudder of relief. I’m not quite sure why, but it was the most useful piece of information someone had given me in my life up to that point. Things weren’t so bad after that.

  After a week or so I was moved from a private room to the children’s ward. I was by the window farthest from the door. The girl to my left rocked her head to get to sleep. I thought that was cool and tried it myself, but it just made me dizzy. The girl across the way had psoriasis and had to have tar all over her, which stank to high heaven. My mom finally went home after insisting on sleeping in the hospital on a chair in my room, much to the annoyance, she said, of the staff. It just wasn’t done in those days. She and Daddy began to trade visits. He came one day, she the next, during visiting hours. One day the tarry girl became cross with Daddy and said, “Doctor, how come you only bring her presents, it’s just not fair.”

  Ugh! Bedpans and bed baths. The nurse who was giving me my first sponge bath in bed handed me the washcloth in the middle of it, having done much of what I could do myself with one hand. In a singsongy, cutesy voice she said, “Alrighty now. You wash in between.” And she left, pulling the curtains closed behind her. In between what? Oh . . . Oh, God!

  The glorious day finally came when I was allowed to get up and use the bathroom myself instead of a bedpan. I could also walk up the hall to the playroom. Once I was allowed to be up and about, I had the distinct impression that I was invisible. All this business of nurses and doctors and carts and trays went on around me as I walked the halls, and nobody seemed to notice me at all. It wasn’t unpleasant actually, it was rather like walking in the woods, animals busily at their work all around me. “However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them.”

  A person came into view. It was a very little boy wearing a hospital johnny but no diapers or underpants. He was walking toward the playroom looking lost. He was invisible, too, but we could see each other. I took his hand and brought him to the playroom where I spent what seemed like a very long time taking care of him and playing with him. A nurse materialized briefly at one point with some measuring thing he was to pee in. The sign pinned to his johnny said “Do not give liquids. Kidney patient.” I didn’t know what a kidney was exactly, but it had something to do with pee. I saw why when, at one point, his hospital johnny parted. His penis was shaped more like a tube than a penis (now I realize he was simply uncircumcised, but I’d never seen one like that), and I thought he was in the hospital to get it fixed. He mostly just wanted me to pick him up and walk around with him. I brought him back to my room on one hip, with my good arm around him. I was a little afraid I’d hurt or damage his penis and tried to be careful carrying him, but it didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. I sat him on my bed. I got in, hooked my arm up, and we looked at the books I’d hoarded from the play lady’s cart. About suppertime a nurse said, “Oh, there you are,” and scooped him up and took him out of the room. He waved to me over her shoulder. The next morning when I awoke, guess who was peeping over the edge of my covers waiting patiently for me to wake up.

  THE RIDE HOME WAS TERRIBLE. Mom tried to go slowly but the motion of the car as we went around left turns struck remembered terror in my body of the cart tipping over. I couldn’t help it, I was certain the car would flip on its side and land in the ditch. We finally made it home in one piece, and I put on a new pair of pajamas with blue smocking that Mom had bought for me because the top fastened with ribbons at the shoulders and you could easily slip it on over a cast and tie up the bow. They were lovely. As she did the bows, she said, “I just knew something like this was going to happen to you, you’ve been so bad lately.”

  * * *

  1. A small, wooden structure, with four walls and a roof, built over a well, presumably to keep animals and debris out of the water. They usually have a windowlike opening so you can check the level of the water in the well.

  2. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1848–1907. Considered the major American sculptor in the beaux arts style, honored for his coin designs; Grief, his sculpture for the grave of Mrs. Henry Adams; the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, a commemoration of Shaw’s leadership of an all-Negro battalion in the Civil War; and the equestrian sculpture of General Sherman. He maintained a summer home and studio, Aspet, in Cornish, New Hampshire, which became a National Historic Site in 1964.

  3. The first of the Four Great Vows recited by Zooey (Franny and Zooey, p. 104).

  12

  Glimpses

  . . . those two, tantalizing, tiny portals in my mind I mentioned last year are still far from closed; another brisk year or so will probably turn the tide. If it were up to me, I would gladly shut the portals myself; in only three or four cases, such as the present one, is the nature of the glimpse worth the wear and tear on one’s normalness and blessed peace of mind . . .

  —“Hapworth 16, 1924”

  IN HIS LETTER FROM CAMP, Seymour dispenses advice to all and sundry, based on his glimpses into their past or future, rock certain of the correctness, the perfection, of his vision. He tells his mother, for example, not to retire from dancing until a certain date the following year; advises his three-year-old twin brothers on their “chosen career”; discusses advising the school nurse on her virginity and a seven-year-old bunkmate on his past-life weakness regarding alcohol; and so on. Seymour forecasts the ebb and flow of the karmic stream with the certainty of yesterday’s news, rather than doing the meteorologist’s modest best.

  The gap between his experience of glimpses and mine was nearly as great as the difference in our third-grade reading material. I always distrust someone who claims to have a hot line to God, with perfect ears for reception. It has been my experience that most glimpses are as imperfect as the rest of real life. They’re more like radio transmissions on the battlefield: you almost never get the message clearly,1 or when you do, it’s about weird stuff that doesn’t really matter, like the time I glimpsed the depth of our well before it was drilled. After several years of using water that often amounted to little more than a rusty trickle from the faucet, my father had finally agreed to give up on our spring-fed well and drill down into the bedrock for an artesian well. He was not happy about the expense, especially coming on top of building his new house down the road (having found the tiny apartment over the garage to be inadequate). The driller came and said, “We’ll probably have to drill down a couple of hundred feet. There’s no guarantee, though; you’re on a thick ledge of granite, you know.”

  “Where will you drill?” Daddy asked him.

  “Don’t know that yet. Have to dowse for it first.”

  The driller surveyed a couple of our trees and found what he was looking for, a sturdy yet suppl
e Y-shaped branch. He took a jackknife out of his pocket, and cut it down. Then he began slowly, deliberately, but in a relaxed manner, walking across the property, holding the stick, one fork in each hand, parallel to the ground.

  My father asked him with the hushed respect of a novice inquiring who is your master, “How did you learn how to do that?”

  “My mother was a dowser. Showed me when I was about your girl’s age.”

  The stick began to waggle slightly and the nose slowly pointed down toward the ground. “See that? There’s a water vein under there, but it’s a weak one. We’ll keep moving.” After a time he found one he liked and stopped. “Now here’s a real good one. Feel it?” He put the stick in my father’s hands. “No, not like that, you have to pull out on ’em. Not too much or you’ll split the stick, but too little and you won’t feel it pulling.”

  Daddy and I spent several afternoons dowsing the property and felt some really good pulls, sure enough, in the area the driller had chosen. He came back with his equipment a few days later and the whole family stood around to watch. He guessed he’d have to go down about two hundred and fifty feet. We each took a guess, and my mother wrote them down to see who’d come the closest. My father guessed three hundred; my mother, two hundred; my brother said four, which, not coincidentally, was also his age; and I said ninety-eight feet.

  Ninety-eight feet to the inch later, we struck water. The driller nodded at me, making a “hats off to you, kid” gesture, and said, “Jerry, you’ve got yourself a little water witch there.” What in many families would be considered an amazing hole in one was simply par for the course for the Salingers, myself included; or, as with the dowser and his family, taken for granted that some folks simply have the gift. When you know it’s going to be ninety-eight feet, it is a shoulder shrug to have it confirmed, just like most of the “experiments” we did in school where we already knew what the outcome was supposed to be. These “glimpses” are not in any way the same experience as the “Eureka!” of discovery, or the thrill of winning a game of chance, as when I guessed—but didn’t know—the number of marbles in a jar at a town auction and got to keep them because I came the closest.