One night during the long drought, however, those “portals” did matter. I had had glimpses all that week, a recurring vision of Christmas trees on the lawn bursting into flame. I think there is something about chronic danger that is conducive to developing such sensitivities. You learn to listen with more than your ears. Like a wild animal, I could sense danger approaching by the smell of the ground and the feel of the air. That night, I felt an electricity in the air that made the hair on my arms stand on end. I lay in my bed in the dark and watched.
My mother had set fire to our house. I smelled smoke, ran into my little brother’s room, and said firmly, “Matthew, wake up. We have to get out of here.” Mom may have shouted “Fire,” I don’t know. I was focused on the little hand in mine and getting us safely out the front door. I didn’t know if Matthew was asleep or awake. Sometimes he was in between and would walk into my room at night and pee against the wall thinking he was in the bathroom or something, so I held him tightly and went by feel down the stairs to the landing near the front door. Flames were coming up the other set of stairs from the kitchen addition below the landing. My mother was on the other side of the flames. She yelled, “Go get Daddy. I have to call the fire department.” I remember thinking it was crazy to stay where she was and to make a phone call, leaving no safe passage to the door should the flames spread as they were likely to do. I shooed the cats out the door, and to my great relief, they took off. I followed them into the Indian-summer night, my brother firmly in hand.
My father’s new house was about a half a mile away, down a steep and stony dirt road. In the valley between two hills the road became so dark that I saw sparkles in front of my eyes and absolutely nothing else. Country darkness. One of the things I love best about living in the city is that it never, ever gets that kind of blind dark. We were in pajamas and bare feet, and Matthew stepped on a sharp stone and started to cry. I talked to him and sang so he wouldn’t be scared. We got to Daddy’s house and told him the house was on fire. He went over, and I was told later that he and my mother held a hose on the house; apparently it took over half an hour for the fire engines to get there. At some point that night, Daddy came back from the fire to take us to stay with the Jones family over in Plainfield while he saw about the house. I wasn’t sure where my mother was. She later told me she didn’t leave the house because she was afraid of burglars ransacking the place. Daddy must have brought me some clothes from the house because I stank when I went to school the next day. My clothes weren’t burned but they smelled bad for a long time after.
There were no admissions or accusations. I simply assumed my mother had set the fire. I may have been wrong, she says now that I was mistaken, but at the time, the thought that it could have been an accident never once crossed my mind. A few days later I mentioned it in passing to my father, rolling my eyes about her story that she smelled something strange which she assumed were my Creepy Crawlers, those plastic toy bugs you baked in an oven.
Although the firemen determined that the fire had started in the hall closet and ventured a guess that perhaps a lightbulb had touched a sleeping bag and ignited it, and she, herself, to this day denies, perhaps quite rightly, that she had anything to do with it, Daddy shared my point of view, but for a different reason. He thought that she set it because of where it started. The hall closet was where her clothes were. He said she set it because she wanted some new clothes and he was unwilling to pay for them. It only confirmed his view of what women will do for vanity.
As soon as the workmen had made some progress rebuilding, Daddy came and collected my brother and me from the neighbors who had taken us in. He dropped us off at the house on the edge of a crazy cliff and went back to his house alone to work.
The ground floor of the house was gutted. The upstairs looked shocking. All the bathroom lighting casements, toothbrushes, and other stuff had melted and formed long pools of black, twisted plastic. Nothing looked the way it was supposed to. The gerbils, I found out, had been trapped in their cage when the fire swept through the room. I thought of them not being able to run and hide.
* * *
1. When I was in college, for example, I lay down for a nap, but before I fell asleep, I was jolted upright by a vision, a “glimpse,” of my roommate jumping off the bridge in town. I leapt up, told my friend James, who was in the room, to grab his parka, and we went running down to the river. We searched up and down the riverbank; no Annie. We went back to the dorm to wait for her to come home. Four hours later, she walked through the door soaking wet. She’d thrown herself off the bridge all right, but when the icy water hit her body, she snapped out of it, grabbed for the nearest branch, and pulled herself up onto the riverbank. She was fine except for a frostbitten toe. Some help my glimpse was! Bubkes. The message hadn’t come through stamped with the date and time.
13
“There She Weaves by Night and Day”
A magic web with colors gay . . .
—“The Lady of Shalott,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson
AFTER THE FIRE, I began to read as if my life depended on it. I snuck books into school and read them behind the dreary, brown-paper-bag-covered schoolbooks that I was supposed to be reading, wherein plodded those aggressively unthrilling Pilgrims and drawings of equally unnaked Indians. Having exhausted the resources of the children’s library in Plainfield, my mother drove me twenty miles to the children’s library in Hanover, where, each week, I was allowed to check out six books. The books I chose were portals to other worlds offering foreign travel, time travel, psychic travel, intergalactic travel, dream travel. East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Five Go Off to Smugglers Cave, Mystery at the Old South Lake, At the Back of the North Wind, A Diamond in the Window, The Phantom Toll Booth, A Wrinkle in Time, Tal, the Oz books. The last even provided a portal out of my own private nightmares. By some miracle, I was able to bring Dorothy’s technique into my dreams, and instead of being stuck in them, I could now click my heels three times, start spinning around, whirling through the galaxy, away from the dream, toward earth, then the map, then Cornish and my rooftop, and finally I’d land with a thump in my bed and wake up. I now held the keys both into and out of dream worlds.
My fictional Glass siblings with their precocious, grown-up reading lists were robbed, I think, of the wonderful experience of childhood reading.
MY FATHER LET ME COME with him to the Dartmouth College Library, where he browsed the stacks and sometimes borrowed books. It was a sanctuary of cool in the summer and cozy warmth in the winter and smelled wonderfully of dust, lemon oil, and old leather. You entered through a revolving door, exciting to begin with, and found yourself in a vast, quiet space with, I couldn’t believe it, a huge black-and-white tile floor like an almost endless chessboard. Daddy taught me how to play checkers, which I liked if I won, and chess, which took too long, especially when the only thing I really liked was to move my bishops—tall, oval-headed things with slits for mouths—on the diagonal. While Daddy went about his business in the stacks, I happily played games of patterns on the black-and-white squares.
At the end of the squares, just off the main hall, students sat reading at long tables by lamplight surrounded by a cozy glow. I hopscotched back across the main floor to look at the huge murals on the walls. I think they were of Indians, but I couldn’t show too much interest. It would have been a betrayal of the unwritten Salinger code of good taste. My father had made it stingingly clear that murals, as an art form, were beneath contempt. Ditto anything “primitive,” like the African art at my friend Rachel’s house. For him, there are those such as his “wondrous Chinese, and noble Hindus” with their “fine and subtle minds”1 and delicate features; and then there are the primitive, the physically strong, the great unwashed, including Negroes, Hispanics, and the vast majority of Caucasians. He has the taste in physiognomy of an Hasidic Jew: the paler and frailer and more studious looking, the more valued the being. For my father, there is something most definitely suspe
ct—not kosher—about physical robustness. When I brought home an A in Spanish one year, he said, “Oh, terrific, now you’re studying the language of the ignorant!”
It’s not that in his day these were atypical cultural prejudices, but they are strange attitudes, it seems to me, for someone who considers himself to be well read, to think Spanish-speaking writers and poets and painters, for example, are ignorant. Though my father considers himself to be widely read, I discovered as I grew older that what he is, in fact, is deeply and passionately read in very selected areas. He becomes an expert in whatever he falls in love with, whatever he is passionate about, and leaves the rest untouched.
His worldview is, essentially, a product of the movies of his day. To my father, all Spanish speakers are Puerto Rican washerwomen, or the toothless, grinning gypsy types in a Marx Brothers movie. Once, when he was criticizing me about my black friends in high school—“coarse” was what he called my friends and me—he said that blacks had no subtlety of humor at all. “Wasn’t it all that crap?” he said as he put on a big stupid grin and rolled his eyes and waved his hands. I said, “Dad, that’s in the movies, they don’t do that in real life amongst themselves. That’s for the camera, because that is what white people want to see.” His expression changed and he said thoughtfully, “No . . . of course you’re right. That makes sense.” He is by no means a heartfelt bigot who will hold to an idea in the face of evidence to the contrary. But his frame of reference is Hollywood in the twenties, thirties, and forties. When I was a teenager and announced my engagement to my karate teacher, who was black, my father was terribly concerned, but for fictional rather than real-life reasons, of which there were plenty; e.g., you’ve only known the guy a few months, you aren’t out of school, he doesn’t have a job except teaching karate and the occasional guitar gig, and so on. Instead, he cautioned me, saying he saw a movie once called The Jazz Man or something where a white woman married a black singer and “it worked out terribly.”
He used to borrow movies from the Dartmouth film library, and we often stopped there after a trip to the regular library. But someone at the film library apparently let it be known which movies J. D. Salinger borrowed, and he’s never since darkened their door. It’s not that he had any cause whatsoever to be embarrassed about his choice of movies; it was the violation of his privacy that so infuriated him.
After Daddy finished his business at the libraries, he’d take me to Lou’s or the Village Green for a tuna fish sandwich and french fries. Then we’d either go next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore or we’d go to do his marketing at the Hanover Co-op. He loved the fresh food but hated to go there because he stood a good chance of running into someone he knew and, to be polite, would have to stop and talk. The dreaded human encounter. I liked the Co-op better than the local stores because it didn’t smell like ammonia and old sour-milk sponges or death at the meat counter, the way the others did, like the old wooden-floored IGA or the Grand Union with its S & H green stamps booklets we filled but never redeemed. When, years later, Purity Supreme, which he referred to as Puberty Supreme, built a megastore in Lebanon, he gave up the Co-op, even though he liked the Co-op’s food better. He preferred the impersonal atmosphere.
On the way home from a trip to Hanover, I mostly just looked out the window because if you engaged my father in conversation while driving, he’d turn and look right at you, forgetting he was at the wheel. He’d swerve back onto the road or into his lane at the last instant. It was even worse if you were in the backseat. He’d turn his head all the way around to listen to you. If my brother made a peep, I shot him my most murderous look that said, “Shut up, will you. Do you want to get us all killed?” In an era of two-lane highways—your lane and the traffic coming toward you—he was an absolutely terrifying passer. When someone ahead of us was going too slowly, being a “road hog” (one of his favorite movies was one where W. C. Fields inherits a million dollars and spends it all smashing, one by one, into the cars of offensive drivers), he would pull up to the offending car’s bumper, lurk there at forty-five miles an hour or so until he reached what was technically a passing zone, and then pull out to pass. We’d careen down the wrong side of the road heading straight for an oncoming car. He’d duck back just in time. In the Jeep it was always dicey whether it would have enough pickup to pass the car in front before hitting the oncoming one. Terrifying. My hands, he noticed, were never unclenched as we drove. He thought it was just a habit of mine.
Right by the beaver pond, before the Plainfield town line, a solitary road sign said NO PASSING. “Will you look at that,” he’d say, “tsking” his teeth. “What would Miss Chapman say? ‘No Pissing!’ Can you imagine?” I fell out in giggles every time he said it.
MISS CHAPMAN, MY FOURTH-GRADE TEACHER, would not have been amused. Before they put in the interstate, we passed her house each way to and from Hanover. It sat at the edge of the road, brown, squat, square, and unlike its neighbors, utterly devoid of any decoration: no flowers, no lawn ornaments, no shutters to soften the severe lines of the house. Miss Chapman, like her house, stood in stark contrast to the lush world of Mrs. Corette and pretty, young Mrs. Beaupre. After a whole year, the only sign of life on my report card was the terse comment “Peggy is often careless in her work. She is capable of better work.” I got A’s and A-’s in most subjects. My only bad grade was a C- in penmanship, but considering that my right arm was in a cast that term and I had to learn to print with my left, it could have been worse.
The contrast between the worlds, over the rainbow, of my books and the reality of our classroom became unbearable that winter. We sat for endless hours beneath banks of poorly maintained, maddeningly flickering fluorescent lights, buried beneath an endless pile of purple mimeo worksheets made up thirty years prior by a spinster whose motto was “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, active minds the devil’s spawning ground.” The more you did, the more they came—endless, boring, numbing. I nearly wept in despair.
One dreary day in late February, with yet another endless hurdle to span between boredom and recess, something magical was to happen. Winter meant, for the most part, keeping out of range of the snowball-throwing boys, which was no joke, for more than once I witnessed a boy packing his with a rock in the middle. This was the same boy who slit open live frogs, and whose father tied him to a tree and whipped him with a bullwhip for punishment. Telling on H., even if it hadn’t been against my personal code of ethics, was out of the question.
There was one big rule on the playground, and that was we were not allowed to go “over the bank.” About twenty feet into the pine forest, the ground fell away sharply, almost straight down. As in old maps before the world was round, that steep bank was where the known world ended. One day, at recess, as I stood at the edge and looked over the bank, I felt a rush of excitement. It suddenly seemed like the wardrobe entrance to Narnia. I hadn’t planned to, but, unknown to anyone, I slipped over the edge and entered another world. I was dizzy with the adventure and the peril of what would happen if I was caught. I slid down the bank slowly so as not to slip and fall without stopping. (All those weekends of ski lessons over at Mount Ascutney stood me in good stead; I knew how to do a controlled side-slip.) At the floor of the forest where the bank leveled off was a brook with the most perfectly clear black ice I’d ever seen. It wove like a magical snake through the trees. Most ice is white and bumpy and you need skates to slide well; boots offer too much resistance. Here was skating heaven, even in boots, and it was my secret. I scrambled up the bank to make sure I was back before recess ended and walked back across the field when the bell rang. I had something to live for, I had a secret.
At recess time I went straight across the field and stood at the edge of the pine trees and busied myself with some feigned play and waited, one eye on the playground monitor, until she turned her back and I whisked over the bank. After a few days the enchantment of the secret began to wear off; it needed the added magic of a secret shared. I told Viola and she cam
e, too. Suddenly, from up above, we heard someone shout, “Miss Chapman’s coming!”
Miss Chapman, Viola has said in her kindly, generous way, should have retired years before. She was neither mean nor cruel, but she was fierce. Perhaps I can say this without being too mean since she is long dead: Miss Chapman looked like a gargoyle perched on the gates to every child’s land of nightmares. She had thick, terrible lips that, when she became enraged, were home to great stringy wads of white matter. Her great wrinkled wattle shook and her eyes bulged like a wrung rooster’s when she struggled to give breath to her fury at some misbehaving child. At particularly daring moments we whispered under our breath and well out of earshot, “The old battle-ax.” She was, indeed, old and terrible as medieval weapons. “Miss Chapman is coming!”
She strode across the playground like the Huns across the plains and she was headed straight for us. Somehow, in my mind’s eye, I recall seeing her coming from the point of view of an aerial camera, impossible in real life, panning the entire playground from above. We scrambled up the bank, and like the condemned without the mercy of a blindfold, we saw the whites of her eyes. We knew that she knew. We had gone over the bank.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 21