A voice on a loudspeaker announced the dolphin show would “commence” in five minutes. The resident stars at the Seaquarium were Flipper and Snowball, a gray and a white dolphin. A series of them, really. I don’t remember the dolphin show; I remember my father. I don’t know why, not then, not now, but what happened at the end of the show was one of the highlights of my father’s life. He still talks about it. The dolphins circled the perimeter of the show tank, and for some reason one of them tossed a ring and my father caught it. He was delighted and threw it back. The dolphin followed him partway around the tank and tossed it back, right into his hands. The dolphin had chosen him. Over and over again they played catch.
What I liked best was outside the show tank near the bathroom and concession stand. If you put a quarter or fifty cents in the slot, you could get a replica of Snowball or Flipper in wax. The machine made them right on the spot—you could smell the wax as it cooked—and when the dolphin tumbled out of the bottom like a can of soda, it was still warm and deliciously smelly. I got Snowball in white and Matthew got gray Flipper.
Our Flipper and Snowball souvenirs would later melt when our house burned down. From dust ye came, unto dust ye will go. The first time I studied Ecclesiastes at Harvard Divinity School, planning a sober contemplation of the cycle of life, all I could think about were those darn wax dolphins: Flipper and Snowball. Waxes to waxes, dust to dust. “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants.”2
AS A CHILD, I collected myriad bright treasures from the beaches in Florida. The thing I’ve noticed that has changed the most from when I was a child on the beach, some forty years ago, is the paucity of shells. The difference is huge. On our family trips to Fort Lauderdale, I’d find scores of butterfly shells in pink, purple, yellow, orange, vast riches of shells strewn across the beach. Last year, my husband and I went to the great shelling beach in Florida that runs from Sanibel to Captiva. Perhaps we were unlucky, but there were mostly clamshells, white, brown, often chipped, few and far between, and none of the bright colors and odd, fantastical shapes.
This day, in Fort Lauderdale, however, I collected the wrong thing at the beach: an aqua blue balloon with long streamers that had washed up on the beach. I showed it to my father and he let me take it back to the motel with me. Within half an hour or so my hand had swollen to the size of a baseball mitt. The doctor from a nearby hotel said it was a man-o’-war jellyfish and told us that their tentacles could stream out twenty feet or more from where you spotted the blue balloon in the water. Swimmers came into his office looking as if they’d been bullwhipped, great long strips of inflamed, angry tissue where the tentacle lashed past them. I seem to recall putting Adolph’s meat tenderizer on it (which makes sense, actually; the papaya enzymes in the Adolph’s would break down or “tenderize” the tissue and get the poison out). Daddy was very upset that he’d let me carry it. “Da, you didn’t know.” “But I should have, I should have.”
Back at the beach the next day, Mama slathered suntan lotion on a wriggling Matthew, while Daddy and I headed straight for the water. He loved swimming in the ocean. On this particular beach, it was easy to get in, but getting out was another story because the waves tried to suck you back under. I tried to ride a big wave in to shore, the way Daddy did. Sometimes it worked; sometimes I’d just get tumbled under the wave and sucked under for longer than I thought was possible for me to hold my breath. It was much too scary. But the thing that got me out of the water for good, scared the daylights out of me, was what I saw as I lay panting on the beach after being underwater for too long and struggling against the waves to get onto the shore. I looked up and saw my father with the same expression of fear on his face that I was feeling. He had been tumbled under, too, and had had the wind knocked out of him. When he saw me looking at him, he put on a toothy grin and said, wow, that was a big one—something meant to reassure a child that Daddy’s all right and that this is fun. Too late. I’d seen Daddy looking scared and disoriented, and the sand shook from underneath me and I was sucked into a tumbling whirl of fear.
A FRIGID BLAST OF WINTER air snuck into one of our suitcases and came with us to Florida. Muscles tightened, drafts came out of nowhere. My parents fought as they always did, but fighting in a motel room is different from fighting in a house with other rooms and a study to escape to. My brother and I fought, too, as we always did, but in a motel room we were not able to hide it from my father, nor could he hide himself from the realities of us. It made him sick—he, quite literally, would turn green and become nauseated—when my brother and I fought. He was furious at me and deeply disappointed. My perfect, fictional siblings never fought as we did. Allie (Holden’s dead brother) “never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did.” Tough stuff to live up to.
I could avoid most of the things that aroused my father’s anger or contempt. But just as I couldn’t control fighting with my brother, I couldn’t avoid getting sick. This made my father crazy. He was terribly concerned when we were sick, but at the same time absolutely furious with us for having become so. And furious with my mother as well for not having adhered to the regimen of the week, whether it be megadoses of vitamin C, no protein, raw foods, whatever. Or for having followed last week’s regimen, now anathema. That was one subject on which my brother and I were united. We would whisper to each other, hiding the telltale Kleenexes as he came in the front door: “Don’t tell Daddy I’m sick.”3
Most of my father’s health regimens, such as drinking urine or sitting in an orgone box, he practiced alone. Homeopathy and acupuncture he practiced on us. When we became ill, or rather, so ill we couldn’t hide it from him, he’d go into an angry whirlwind and spend enormous amounts of time and energy investigating which homeopathic medicine would be correct for what ailed us. If it didn’t work, it was back to the books for hours of more research and much irritation at the time spent away from his work.
Homeopathy often seemed to work well for my brother, but seldom, if ever, for me. My father practiced acupuncture with wooden dowels rather than needles. Needles are nearly unnoticeable, I’ve found out since. Being treated with those dowels, however, was like having a blunt pencil shoved into your skin. It hurt like hell. When my brother caught an unhideable cold in Fort Lauderdale that year, I can still see my father and those damn dowels, pressing a point on the top of Matthew’s pinkie fingers. Matthew started crying. Having someone jam wooden dowels into the bones of your pinkie could bring tears to a grown man, let alone a small boy. But my father, predictably, was furious. He strode toward the door yelling, “You, your mother, and your sister have the lowest pain thresholds I’ve ever seen. You’d think you’d caught a piece of shrapnel, for Christ’s sake!” And slammed the door behind him.
My father was often pointedly irritable, or “tactless,” in the thralls of his more private fads, but the effect on me was more diffuse. I never questioned his judgment, I just had a pervasive, creepy feeling that something wasn’t right, that something disturbing and spooky was going on.
Early that spring, when I was eight, I walked down to his Green house to bring him lunch and heard a terrible sound. He was outside in a little lean-to he had built with reflectors for sunning—another health fad; he was dark brown by April that year. When I came around the corner, he told me he had been speaking in tongues (a form of Christian glossolalia thought to be a manifestation or outpouring of the Holy Spirit). He had been to a charismatic church in New York City, the Rock Church, and was enchanted with the experience. It gave me the creeps.
Some months later, he started to turn a sickly shade of green and his breath smelled like death. That was macrobiotics and fasting. If I think about the odor too much, even now, it makes me gag. I was scared he would die.
* * *
1. I still have one in my old jewelry box, along with my baby bracelet and a few other treasures in storage. Never mind that the monkey is plastic, not glass; it’s also garnet-colore
d, which is even better than red.
2. From the Chuckles the Clown’s funeral episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. One of our favorites.
3. My father wasn’t entirely unaware of this trait of his, I realized, when I read Franny and Zooey a few years ago. Franny tells Zooey:
“Just get sick sometime and go visit yourself, and you’ll find out how tactless you are! You’re the most impossible person to have around when somebody’s not feeling up to par that I’ve ever known in my life. If somebody just has a cold, even, you know what you do? You give them a dirty look every time you see them. You’re absolutely the most unsympathetic person I’ve ever known. You are!”
“All right, all right, all right,” Zooey said, with his eyes still closed. “Nobody’s perfect, buddy” (pp. 157–58).
15
Boot Camp and Iced Tea
MY FATHER FINISHED his last published work to date, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” in the spring of 1965. It appeared in The New Yorker in June, a week or two before school let out. I was nine years old and unaware that my father had published a story at all, let alone a story set in a summer camp. Nevertheless, I was all too aware that summer camp was in the air, as the brochures piled up. I was able to stave off the inevitable for a year, but the following summer, between fifth and sixth grade when I was ten years old, it was my turn. I did not want to go, any more than I’d wanted to take tennis lessons or sip iced tea on the sidelines with the “summer” people up from New York. My mother, of course, as any well-brought-up young lady, played a good game of tennis and drove me many thankless, sulking miles to Hanover and back for lessons. All I really wanted to do was swim in the pond, catch turtles, and play baseball in the summer, but chances for girls to play on a baseball team were nonexistent. My dad taught me to play, at least the parts you can learn without a team. When the weather was good, he came over almost every afternoon and pitched to me, played catch, and a game we called ball-on-the-roof, which was a variation of a city kid’s game played against an apartment building wall. We’d take turns throwing a rubber ball or a tennis ball against the shingles of the garage roof, and the other one had to catch it. To score a point, you had to have your ball land in fair territory (for us it was the exposed, flat cement area that covered the underground passage between the house and the garage) without the other guy catching it first. It provides good training for catching both pop flies and grounders that take an odd bounce, with the added benefit that you don’t have to worry about being slammed in the face with a hard ball if you miss. We loved baseball. Tennis was another story. Daddy was quite cutting, as well as right on target in his mimicry of tennis people’s (including my mother’s, of course) language and all the hidden aggression it masked. (This dates me well before John McEnroe’s yelling at the referees and slamming his racket.) “Good try!” he’d mimic in his best upper-class, jolly-good-sport voice. I would later recognize this voice in his fiction, in the Ivy League, Lane Coutell–type (Franny’s beau) characters. Back then, lessons notwithstanding, I drew the line at the dopey white skirt with underpants that showed when you bent over. Mom and I reached a compromise with white shorts. Oh, how I hated that desert of red clay, white net, and lines shimmering like a mirage. I longed for the grass-green oasis where guys pledged allegiance and spit and didn’t smile a whole lot.
It was the same with riding. My mother drove me at least an hour to a stable for riding lessons each week one summer. I managed, technically, to lose my virginity on the pommel of a western saddle when the damn horse stopped short on the upswing of a trot. That ended as I refused to “get back up on the horse” again. But I did like to go and watch—from a safe distance—the Morgan horse show that my dad used to take me to when it came to a field near Windsor several times a summer. We sat up on the hillside above the ring and ate hot dogs with mustard and watched the horses. They were a sight to behold, deep chestnut bodies gleaming in the sunshine, green fields, wonderful warm smells of hay and manure, leather and sweat.
Although my parents had widely differing ideas about summer camp, the tide of their dreams proved irresistible. My mother told me stories of her happy summers spent at Camp Wyonagonic. She showed me a photograph of a group of girls in swimming costumes lined up the way they do in group photos, a row of little kids on the bottom, the bigger girls standing behind them.1 There was little Claire, looking directly into the camera with serious, wide eyes, tummy sticking out nicely, hair beautifully cut at her chin, parted on the side and held back by a ribbon band. She pointed out various other girls: “There’s Princess Margaret and Lady so-and-so.”
I was to go to Camp Billings in Vermont, and I can assure you that no princess of any sort had ever set foot on the shores of that lake. Nevertheless, we went shopping for camp as though I were one of the young ladies in my mother’s old photograph. They sent a list of required clothing, which my mother taped to the inside of my new trunk. I loved that trunk, with its orderly, private compartments all smelling of cedarwood. My clothes were to be camp colors, navy blue and white, with name tags that said “Peggy Salinger” sewn in. Even in the underpants. I had seven new white underpants, three pairs of white socks and four of blue socks rolled into tidy bundles, five blue shorts, five white shirts with short sleeves, buttons down the front, and a Peter Pan collar, one blue pullover, one white button-down sweater, one pair of sneakers, one bathing suit, and for Sundays, one pleated navy blue skirt and one pair of saddle shoes. My mother placed these into my trunk in neat rows and bundles. I had my own toiletry kit with my own bottle of shampoo, soap, a toothbrush still in its case, and an unsqueezed, perfect tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste was still yucky old Crest that smelled bathroomy instead of the cinnamon-smelling Colgate that my friend Becky got to use. I had asked for the Colgate because it seemed within the realm of possibility, unlike what I really wanted, which was the new fizzy stuff called McCleens that made my tongue go numb when Viola let me taste some. It was really cool and totally out of the question. With the English, there is something at best suspect, at worst French and immoral, about things that taste too good or are too comfortable; plain pudding not fancy pastries, cold rooms with lots of fresh air at night instead of fluffy warmth. It was sensible Crest for me. I probably had slippers, but they are overshadowed by the memory of great plush, fuzzy things, in Kool-Aid pinks and pastels of a forbidden palette, that the other girls in my cabin wore on their feet.
When I arrived at camp, I was shocked by the appearance of my cabin. All those bunk beds stacked against every free bit of wall space. It was dark and dirty and not at all like my beautiful trunk. It was far too much like the photograph I had seen of concentration camp barracks, the prisoners stacked up in bunks. I was afraid one might peer down at me as the skeletal man in striped pajamas peered down at the photographer below. I chose an upper bunk so no one could look down at me with those eyes, although my cabinmates were nine-to-eleven-year-old well-fed girls.
The latrine was dark and filthy and it stank. I don’t think I had a bowel movement for a week. I didn’t go into the moldy showers either. Blue uniforms notwithstanding, this was not a camp where they inspected you or your bunk for cleanliness, the way Mr. Happy, head of Seymour’s camp, bounced a quarter on each boy’s bunk to make sure it was made tight, to army regulation. Our counselors barely let the cabin door hit them at night as they ran off to meet boys and go drinking. When I overheard two of them talking about it, I thought they meant sodas, which were no longer allowed in our refrigerator at home, and that sounded really sexy and exciting to me, sneaking off to drink Sprite in the woods with boys at night.
The following day we had general orientation, which meant sitting in the dining hall and listening to the head of the camp tell us about the camp’s facilities and rules. Basically, the facilities consisted of the lake and a few boats; the rules, dock safety. On rainy days we would do crafts in the dining hall. I had expected horses and was torn between relief at not having to ride, and disappointment at not being able to just
hang around them.2
At Camp Billings, we seemed to spend most of our time in the dining hall at picnic tables singing what I now know to be “Christian” songs, led by the camp director. “Oh, Noah, he built him, he built him an ark-y ark-y; Noah, he built him, he built him an ark-y ark-y; made it out of hick’ry bark-y bark-y; children of the Lord. The animals they came in, they came in by twoseys twoseys; animals they came in, they came in by twoseys twoseys; el-le-phants and kangarooseys-rooseys; children of the Lord.” There were hand signals and gestures to go with the various songs such as “Dem Bones Gonna Rise Again,” which I can still do to this day. The things that stay with us!
We may have been singing about the Lord, but to me, that first meal in the dining hall was as though I’d entered Sodom and Gomorrah. I stared, openmouthed in disbelief, at what they allowed you to do if you didn’t like the food. Instead of eating what was served, you could take a slice of white bread, the wonderful spongy kind I was never allowed at home, and you could spread it with softened butter, which I knew to be crawling with germs when left unrefrigerated for more than a few minutes, and sprinkle or douse it, as the case might be, it didn’t seem to matter, with sugar straight from a big pourer, just like the ones at the diner in Windsor. And then you’d eat this sugar sandwich open-faced so there’d be room for several. I just couldn’t believe it. When I tried one, it was like chewing sand, but I thoroughly enjoyed the wickedness of it all. Years later when I read a story about a Jew eating pork for the first time and imagining his father turning over in his grave, I could feel that gritty sugar sandwich in my mouth.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 23