Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  What I didn’t enjoy was how the girls in my cabin decided to amuse themselves at quiet time and before bed. They told ghost stories. Seymour, of course, is immune to that sort of thing, but I was scared to death. I put my fingers in my ears and hummed quietly to myself in my bunk to block out the sound. My trunk began to get disheveled; I couldn’t make neat rows and sock bundles the way my mother did. The dirty laundry and the clean got all mixed together.

  The trouble started on the third day of camp. Barbara B., age eleven going on thirty, sat on the floor rolling her blond hair in curlers. We thought this was the height of sophistication. Most of us had never even had our hair curled by our mothers, let alone knew how to do it ourselves. She had all kinds of stuff in her toiletry case—perfume, curlers, face cream. We sat on our bunks in quiet fascination. Suddenly Barbara looked up and said sharply, “Who stole my shampoo? Someone has used two inches of it.” She held up the bottle and made two inches with her nail-polished forefinger and thumb for our inspection. Over the next day or two, other things started disappearing, mostly Barbara’s things. She began telling the other girls that I was the thief. Why she chose me, I’ll never know. A decree was issued, by her blond self, that none of the girls in the cabin should speak to me. After a day of being shunned, I was approached by Barbara on the path up to the cabin and she pulled me aside. “I’ll tell the other girls to talk to you again if you’ll help me raid the store.”

  The store was a shack by the dock that sold combs and toothpaste and candy for about an hour or so a day. I considered stealing to be unimaginably wicked, something rough men were sent to jail for over in Windsor. In Plainfield School, a kid stealing was unheard of. First of all, there wasn’t anything much to steal, but I think it was more the ferocious respect for private property in that part of the country that made it so unthinkable. An adult could be shot on sight for trespassing, a child bullwhipped for it. I wasn’t incensed; I was scared. But I was more scared of Barbara than of stealing, so I agreed. That night we snuck out and crept over to the shack. She jimmied the lock like a pro, climbed in, and we grabbed handfuls of lollipops and gum and Fritos. We brought the loot back to the cabin and had a big pig-out. Barbara was the hero. In the midst of midnight festivities, one of the girls forgot the ban and spoke to me. Barbara lifted a perfectly polished, mauve fingernail to her lips and said, “Shhhhh!”

  The next morning when I awoke, I found a piece of paper folded on my blanket. The message said “I don’t think that you took anything, but please don’t tell anyone I told you so. Marilyn.” A thin, dark girl with birdlike features smiled at me from her perch on the top bunk that stood at right angles to mine. I silently mouthed, “Thanks.” A secret friend.3

  That evening, Barbara decided we should hold a séance and try to levitate a girl who lay in the center of a circle. I dug down inside my sleeping bag and prayed: “I will fear no evil for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” I was spooked out of my wits. I wrote to my father and told him what was happening there. He didn’t come and get me. Instead, he wrote to thank me for the “terrific” letter I’d written and asked my permission to send it to Bill [Shawn]. Not knowing that he’d just published “Hapworth,” a letter from a boy at camp, I didn’t understand at all. I had the feeling that he must have mistaken another letter for mine.

  It seems odd to me now, though it didn’t at the time, that my father was never shocked by anything. It was as if my life were something he was reading in a novel or watching at the movies. “Don’t be so silly, Peggy, they’re not real, they’re actors.” Maya.

  LATE ONE NIGHT, FROM MY cabin window, I saw a red light hovering on the horizon. I watched it moving slowly, growing gradually larger. Then, time jumped; not the way time passes when you’re asleep and some internal clock keeps a record, but the way, under anesthesia, the electricity goes out, time stops, and the clock needs resetting. I came to and sat upright in my bed and looked out of the window into the moonlight. Hundreds of small dinner plate–size disks were moving slowly, perfectly spaced, like fat snowflakes on a windless night. I felt a quiet, snowfall-watching reverie; not fear, not curiosity. Then, in a blink of an eye, they were gone. The large red light nearby got smaller and smaller as it slowly joined the stars at the horizon. I swore to myself that I’d remember, remember, remember. I rehearsed it over and over again and then fell asleep. In the morning when I awakened, I asked Marilyn, secretly of course, if she’d seen the UFOs last night. She shook her head; no, she hadn’t, and she whispered, “Wake me up if you see them again. Promise?”

  Sunday evening, the campers put on a talent show in the dining hall. I’m in awe of people who can get up and put on a show, making up their own lines as they go along, confident that they will be well received. The thought of doing something like that myself is unspeakably impossible and embarrassing, like those endless dreams where you have to go to the bathroom but there is no door to the bathroom, or the toilet you’re sitting on is in the middle of a crowded room. The older campers put on funny make-up and did funny things and swirled around me like a circus gone out of control. People laughed in groups and said clever things in group skits, and I couldn’t even get a toehold into the glass wall that separated me from them. I sat at one of the picnic tables, shoulders hunched over, in stark contrast to Buddy and Seymour’s talented performance of a soft-shoe routine showcased for the campers and the adult guests in “Hapworth,” trying to make my weird, unclever, untalented, unpopular self invisible.

  I awoke the next day feeling strange. The nurse said I had a temperature of 101. For some crazy reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, they still made me go on the mountain hike scheduled for the day’s activity. My father wrote about another absurd expedition inflicted on children at camp. Seymour Glass is seven years old and in the infirmary recuperating and writing a letter home. He writes:

  After breakfast every Midget and Intermediate in the entire camp was obliged to go strawberrying. . . . We drove miles and miles to where the strawberry patches were in a little, ramshackle, old-fashioned, maddening cart, quite fake, drawn by two horses where at least four were required.

  The wheel of this cart had a big piece of iron sticking out of it that penetrated several inches into Seymour’s leg. He was brought back to the camp infirmary by Mr. Happy, the camp director, on his motorcycle. Seymour reported that he bled all over Mr. Happy’s new motorcycle. This situation had “several fleeting, humorous moments. . . . Fortunately, I find that if a situation is funny or risible enough, I tend to bleed less profusely. . . . [He threatened to sue Mr. Happy] in the event that I lost my ridiculous leg from infection, loss of blood, or gangrene.”

  Unfortunately for me, I did not have Seymour’s control of my ridiculous, risible body. Partway up the mountain, my throat closed and I couldn’t get a breath in. I heard terrible rasping sounds as I lay down on the dirt path. I looked up at the counselor above me and saw fear in her eyes. That’s when I got really scared. She did mouth-to-mouth, and after a while, I got my air back. What I remember, but have trouble believing, is that we kept on walking up the mountain. It happened again, my throat closed up, and the next thing I know I’m in the infirmary, listening to the nurse talking about me to my mother on the phone. She said I had a temperature of 103, but it was probably nothing to worry about; she only called because they were required to notify parents of anything over 102. I got on the phone and asked my mother just one thing: “Get me out of here.”

  Years later, Mom told me that when she heard the tone in my voice, she was out the door before she put down the receiver. She said it reminded her of her own voice when she called her mother from convent boarding school and told her that bad things were happening to her there and begged her mother to come and get her. Her mother told her she was just imagining things. My mother came and took me home.

  I brought home with me a Camp Billings Indian stuffed toy, a grotesque caricature with a huge nose and an idiot’s tiny, close-set eyes that was the c
amp mascot. It was a very ugly souvenir of my failure to bridge the gap between what my parents dreamed and the ugly reality I experienced. My friend Marilyn said she came across an identical thing leering stupidly out of a box of old stuff in her mother’s cellar one day when she was cleaning. She couldn’t remember what it was and threw it away.

  SOMETIME AFTER MY ABORTED STAY at camp during the summer of ’66, my parents announced they were getting a divorce. Or, perhaps I should say, they tried to announce it. It had been in the air for quite some time and came as no surprise to me. In fact, when they called us into the house to say they had something to speak to us about, something they never, ever did—speak to us as a team, I mean—I slumped down in our big red leather chair and beat them to the punch. I rolled my eyes and, with my best ten-year-old ennui, said, “You’re getting a divorce, aren’t you.” “Well, yes, actually, we are,” my mother said as she started to deliver her speech about how sometimes when grown-ups can’t get along . . .

  She was interrupted as my little brother, just six years old, burst into tears and ran out of the house and down the road. On the doorstep, I told my parents in no uncertain terms, “Wait here, I’ll talk to him.” I found him by the roadside, down a bank, curled up in some leaves and sobbing. “Matthew, stop crying and listen to me.” You had to speak a little sharply to him at first because he could get quite hysterical, understandably lost in the swirling storm of rage and fear in and around him. A few months prior to their announcement, he’d been furious at my mother about something, and he had sat on the stairs, giving vent to the obvious tension in the house, screaming down at my father, eyes bulging, blood veins visible in his pale, six-year-old’s neck, “Divorce Mom! Divorce her!” I didn’t even know he knew the word.

  Matthew took his head out of his hands and, snuffling, looked up at me. “Listen,” I said, “nothing is going to be any different when they get divorced, except maybe they won’t fight as much. They both love you. They just hate each other. Daddy will still live in his house, Mom and you and I will still live in our house, and Daddy will still come over to visit and play ball on the roof and go for a walk with the doggies and everything. All right? It’s no big deal.” He smiled damply and said, “Okay,” and got up. Big Sister had spoken. I put my arm around his shoulder for a second or two as we walked back to the house. I told my parents we were fine now and that I’d explained to him that nothing was going to change except that you two won’t fight as much, as I glared darkly at them. Then we went back to whatever it was each of us had been doing, alone, before the “family conference.”

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, I received an invitation to spend the better part of the summer up in Maine with the McAndrew family at their summer house by the sea. My beloved friend Rachel McAndrew and I were in our mothers’ wombs when they met. Mrs. Cox, who was related to the McAndrews somehow, introduced them. She thought that Charlotte and my mother would be good company for each other. Although my mother did not see Charlotte with any regularity until my father moved out of the house, Mrs. Cox was correct as usual. I know my mother will always be grateful for Charlotte’s friendship. Her calm gentleness and uncommon intelligence were a tremendous help and comfort to my mother as she tried to raise two young children in isolation.

  Charlotte was married to a Dartmouth professor, and they lived in a wonderful old house in Hanover during the school year, and another wonderful old house in Maine in the summer. Her daughter Rachel was my best “out of school” friend throughout our childhood and early adolescence. Some of my happiest memories are of time spent with her. And there was the added excitement of having all those older brothers and sisters and their friends around talking about dating and new records and all that cool teenage stuff. I feel lucky to have been an adjunct member of their family for so many years.

  My father was woven, albeit loosely, into their family during the years my mother and Charlotte, and Rachel and I, were such close friends. Daddy liked Charlotte and the children very much, but Colin, her husband, was more problematic. Colin was a professor of literature at an Ivy League college, a robust and enthusiastic tennis player and sailor, and an exuberant specimen of what my dad refers to, with some genuine awe I might add, as “that damn WASP confidence.” Such was his confidence that he routinely insisted that my father join him in “activities.” Nine out of ten times my father refused, but Colin persisted with such good-natured self-assurance that continued refusal would have seemed ill-mannered. Usually my dad’s social debt could be erased by the occasional drinks and dinner. The summer of ’66 he must have run up a whopper. It was he, rather than my mother, the usual chauffeur, who drove me up to the McAndrews’ house in Maine.

  Daddy had agreed to go on a sailing trip with Colin and the boys. Can you imagine such purgatory if you’re J. D. Salinger? Being confined to a small boat, at sea, for several days, with a Dartmouth professor? “Why did you say yes, Da?” I asked him as we drove along. “Oh, Peggy,” he sighed, sounding tired, “I said yes because I get so sick and tired of saying no to everything all the time. It depresses me.”4

  When Daddy arrived back at the McAndrews’ from his sailing trip, he could barely walk. Not six hours out of port he had smashed his knee on something and it had swelled up badly. He took some arnica from the homeopathic medicine kit he’d brought on board. Without the arnica, he said darkly, it would have been very bad. To make matters worse, they were caught in a choppy rainstorm and everyone, except Colin of course, had been vomiting wildly since Nova Scotia. I would not be at all surprised if, when he got home to Cornish, he knelt and kissed the ground.

  I stayed on in Maine, but no sailing trips for me. It was the source of some friction between Colin and me that I refused to go sailing. At one point in the summer he was so insistent that I felt it necessary to call my dad, collect, to ask him to tell Colin that I didn’t have to go on the boat. Tipping scared me senseless after the accident with my arm. My mother insisted I “try it, dear” every year or two, and I’d sit huddled behind in the dinghy or miserably straddling the front5 of the boat until someone took pity on me (or got annoyed) and brought me back to shore.

  I did like taking the rowboat, which didn’t tip, out to the tiny, un-inhabited sheep islands just off the coast of their beach. Local farmers took their sheep out to the islands at the beginning of summer and let them pasture there undisturbed until fall (access being granted to them by the king or perhaps the early colonial government too long ago to remember). Owen, Rachel’s eldest brother, asked Rachel and me if we’d like to camp out with him overnight on one of the sheep islands. Boy, would we! Any chance to be near the handsome, gentle Owen, included in his plans, was my idea of heaven. I’d had a crush on him for ages. I think I even let him take me around the harbor once in a sailboat. He was the only boy I knew, or adult for that matter, who was so careful with other people’s feelings. I trusted him; I knew instinctively that if I got scared, he’d stop and bring me back to shore right away, and without making a big deal about it either. A nice, nice boy.

  That evening, we rowed across to the island with our sleeping bags, water, and all the things we’d need for a cookout supper on the beach. Rachel and I went to track the sheep while Owen did the useful stuff like building a fire and putting the water on to boil. We were unsuccessful—all we spotted before the underbrush grew too thick were some sheep droppings. So we went back to the beach to help Owen gather mussels for our dinner.

  After dinner, we laid our sleeping bags out in a row on the beach. It was getting a little chilly so we climbed in and lay on our backs looking up at the stars. Stars everywhere. As we watched the sky and talked, we noticed one star behaving peculiarly. It seemed to be meandering around the sky. How completely cool, our own UFO. We fell asleep talking happily about UFOs we’d seen or heard about.

  I awoke in the middle of the night, leapt up, and just barely made it behind a big rock down the beach before my bowels let go. Then the other end started. Oh, I was so ashamed. I knew Owen would h
ear me going to the bathroom and throwing up, and he’d think I was the most disgusting person on the planet. When I was finished erupting, I called Rachel, and as soon as she got close enough, I whispered to her to bring me the roll of toilet paper. I got myself cleaned up while she went back for a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some water to rinse with.

  I couldn’t even look at Owen when I walked back and climbed into my sleeping bag. He asked me if I was all right. I nodded. “You know,” he said, “you must never eat mussels again. When you’re allergic, the next time can kill you. Promise me you’ll remember.” I nodded. And then he put his arm over my sleeping bag and hugged me! I was stunned. He picked up my outside arm, as you might a paralytic’s, and put it around him. Romance resided in my imagination, as a prelude to a kiss, and not yet in my body. The hormones that move one’s arms automatically toward embrace had not awakened.

  Then he kissed me. On the mouth. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, but only in hindsight, in the telling and the remembering. During the actual moment, I was in way over my head so I sat up quickly and nudged Rachel, who was asleep on my other side. I said I had to go again and asked her to come with me. We walked closer to the water and I told her the best secret I had: Owen kissed me. That was the best part, telling my best friend about my first kiss. She wasn’t sure she believed me; for both of us a real kiss belonged to that liminal region somewhere between a dream and the light of day, like a womb before the quickening, wherein dwelt such things as UFOs and fairies and meeting the Beatles in person. When we got back to our sleeping bags, I made her switch places with me and sleep next to Owen.