Back in Hanover, that fall, Rachel asked Owen if he “liked” me. When I arrived for a weekend visit, she said, “Oh my God, you were telling the truth about kissing Owen! I asked him if you were the one he liked and he said yes.”
I lived for the nearness of Owen. He was away at boarding school so I only got to see him on vacations. Skiing, I prayed I’d sit next to him in the van or the ski lift or at the lunch table. Nothing ever “happened” again, which was perfect, too. He confirmed he still “liked” me when Rachel asked. And I got to long for him, achingly, comfortably, from afar.
* * *
1. This photo, from Life magazine, of the young girls was taken at the Mayfair Swimming Club, in London, not at summer camp, I later realized.
2. As Holden said of Pencey Prep, “They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place” (Catcher, p. 2).
3. Truth being stranger than fiction, I asked a dear friend of mine, whom I’d met at Harvard summer chorus, to read a draft of this book. Marilyn suddenly hooted, “Oh my God! I went to Camp Billings, too. Last top bunk on the left-hand side as you walk in the cabin.” She remembered a “blond bitch on wheels” who was way bigger than the rest of us. She didn’t remember me in particular, she said, she was mostly focusing, with all her energy, on how to get the hell out of there.
4. See Zooey, p. 144: “I feel like those dismal bastards Seymour’s beloved Chuang-tzu warned everybody against. ‘Beware when the so-called sagely men come limping into sight.’ He sat still, watching the snowflakes swirl. ‘I could happily lie down and die sometimes,’ he said.” See also Seymour’s quotations from sagely men written on his bedroom wall, such as: “ ‘Don’t you want to join us?’ I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffee house that was already almost deserted. ‘No, I don’t,’ I said.”—Kafka
5. Yes, I know: bow, stern, starboard, blah, blah, blah. The only word I wanted to hear was port. What is it about amateur sailors that they feel this evangelical mission to inflict their pleasure on the unconverted? If being damp, cramped, and threatened with drowning or decapitation from that swinging boom is your cup of tea, fine. Make mine Michelin’s five stars, thank you very much—I get very ill-tempered just thinking about sailing.
16
The Birds and the Bees: Hitchcock’s
However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them.
—The second of the Four Great Vows
recited by Zooey in Franny and Zooey
BACK IN THE CLASSROOM THAT fall, we fifth graders were suddenly disturbed by an unearthly howling coming from the playground. The whole class jumped up and looked out the window. Two dogs were out on the playground, and they were stuck together. The farm kids were the first to laugh because they knew what they were witnessing. The rest of us soon caught on. Mrs. Spaulding rapped sharply on the window. She turned to us, glaring, and said, “Simmer down, people. People! I said simmer down.” But the slow simmer had begun, bubble by bubble, toward the full heat of puberty, and nothing, not even our principal, Mrs. Spaulding, could stop it.
Our mothers sensed it, the upward-thrusting energy, the great tangle of roots and swollen bulbs pushing beneath the flat white blanket of winter, and they tried to stop it. They pruned us back hard, to keep us tidy and under control. My mother began to braid my hair back so severely it lifted my eyebrows up. At least four bobby pins were jammed into my bangs to keep them off my face. I was swathed in shapeless woolen dresses so ugly and plain that even I noticed and hated them. Viola’s mother had a different strategy toward the same end. Tomboy Viola was sent to school looking like a baby doll in flounces and petticoats and curls her straight hair was subjected to from the cursed Toni home permanents her mother gave her.
Each morning, after our mothers dropped us off at school, Viola and I headed straight for the basement to perform our morning ritual. Viola held her head under the sink to dampen down the terrible curls while I pulled on her hair and blotted it between paper towels. Then she helped me break through the fifty-odd yards of rubber band wound round my braids, pulled them out, and checked for stray bobby pins.
Each afternoon, there was hell to pay when our mothers saw we’d done it again. “Honest, Ma, it just came out. On the playground, at recess. What do you want me to do, sit all recess? Jeesum Crow!” They must have worn their hands out spanking us, but it didn’t stop us. Each morning, curls “revived” by rollers went down the drain, braids and bangs liberated from bondage.
When spring came, the changes that were going on beneath the surface began to reveal themselves in our play and behavior. We girls stopped playing in the woods on our own at recess and began, instead, dancing to 45s we played on the blue, portable record player I brought to school. We practiced the new dances we saw on American Bandstand; the Pony and the Swim were added to the Twist. Although we danced in pairs of girls, and the boys played marbles in pairs of boys, here and there a boy and a girl would split off from the group and walk around the playground together, sometimes arm in arm for a few minutes, and then go back to their marbles or dancing. The intermingling of boy and girl was limited to this chaste promenade with your partner two by two, but the point wasn’t what you did together, it was the fact that somebody “liked” you. Now, when we played house, girls would show off the little key chain or cereal-box prize, more precious than diamonds, that their “steady” had given them. The girls who had older sisters knew they wouldn’t be allowed to go steady until high school, most of them, so that made it even more exciting. I had always been chosen early as a valuable player for teams of tag and red rover and jump rope, but in this new game, as sides were chosen, no one picked me.
I was in the J. J. Newberry five-and-dime in Windsor with my father when, like a skinny boy sending away for Super Weight-On drink, I spotted my miracle. There, in the jewelry bin, was a pendant with a big gold initial in the center of a plastic wood-tone circle, suspended from a foot-long golden chain. It was gorgeous. Daddy didn’t ask me why I bought one with an R on it, thank goodness. Perhaps he didn’t notice.
On Monday, I wore it to school hidden under my blouse. When recess came, I told the other girls that I had met the cutest guy over the weekend. He’s from Claremont and his name is Ritchie Davis. It wasn’t long before I was surrounded by girls asking for news of Ritchie who lived all the way over to Claremont that had a movie theater and everything. Ritchie took me to see movies that hadn’t been shown in theaters for some thirty years. I told the girls and even some boys all about The 39 Steps and how Ritchie had held hands with me during the scary parts. Then, as I slowly pulled the pendant out from under my blouse, which, given the length of the chain, provided ample, even Hitchcockian, dramatic time, I announced, “We’re going steady.”
A FEW OF THE GIRLS skirted the issue for another year or two by moving blithely from dolls to horses. They drew horses, talked about horses, rode horses, curried and stroked and fed and watered horses, and on the playground, pretended to be horses. For the rest of us girls, as well as all of the boys, it seemed, the progression was from a preoccupation with the animal kingdom of toads and caterpillars to the birds and bees of the human world, without the mediating stop at horses.
Our sexual education was confined to observations of animals, unavoidable in the country. Naturally, the farm kids were exposed to the more veterinary specifics of procreation. But for all of us, what humans “did” together when they “did it” was a vast screen of projections, observational misinformation, and the lore passed down as a legacy from the older kids. The chaste, sedate promenade of relations between the sexes on the playground met its doppelgänger in the dirty jokes and stories we told and heard in our efforts to gain entrance to the grown-ups’ big secret.
Oh, what we filled the vacuum of information with! A sump pump
of necrophilia, cannibalism, and excreta spewed forth like an uncapped oil well across the playground. One dirty joke was about a guy who is lost and asks to spend the night at a farmer’s house. Sure, says the farmer, but you have to share a bed with my daughter. Okay, says the weary traveler. At breakfast the next morning the farmer offers the traveler breakfast, but he refuses, saying he’s too full to eat. The following morning the same thing happens. The third morning, the traveler finally admits to the farmer that a curious thing was happening: “I tried to kiss your daughter but I got a mouthful of rice.” The farmer says, “Rice? That’s not rice, those were maggots; my daughter’s been dead for a year.”
Another joke involved a guy eating out a woman. I guess some-body heard the phrase and took it literally—who wouldn’t? This guy is eating out a woman, the joke goes, and he keeps coming across various foods, the more vividly described the better. The punch line is that it somehow turns out that, like an archaeologist, what he was coming across were layers from guys the previous evenings who had had dinner, eaten her out, and vomited into her hole. Nice, huh?
Holden spoke for all of us when he said, “Sex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t.” But Holden, published in 1951, was long gone from my father’s world by the time I was old enough to wonder. He had moved on from Holden’s human confusion to Teddy and the young Seymour’s world of preternatural, omniscient knowledge. Seven-year-old Seymour, for example, writes to his parents about the camp director and his wife, explaining that their marital problems stem from their not having “become one flesh to perfection.” With the help of Desiree Green, an eight-year-old who possesses, he says, an admirably open mind, he could demonstrate the proper technique to them “in a comparative jiffy.”
VIOLA AND I HAD just finished undoing our hair and she said, hang on a sec, I have to pee. After a minute or so she called out to me from behind the stall door, “Peggy, can you go and get me a Band-Aid from Mrs. Spaulding? There’s blood on my underpants. I think I sat on a piece of glass in the bathtub last night.” She was terrified when it didn’t stop for several days and seemed to keep happening every month or so.
I, too, made a horrifying discovery. I was in the bathtub, and suddenly I saw them. Overnight, two dark hairs had sprouted on my thing-I-had-no-name-for.1 It was like when the snow first melts in the spring and reveals not lush green grass, but mud and a tangled mat of yellowish exposed roots; petrified, white, powdery dog poop from last year; and all manner of things that look as though they crawled out from under a rock. My girlfriends and I watched in fascination and in horror as otherworldly shapes began to push through the surface, like little hairy fiddlehead ferns and mushrooms that, when they first poke through the ground, bear no resemblance to the grand unfurled forms that show themselves to the open air. Damp, earthy, peculiar-smelling things too red and shiny and rounded. One nipple grows inverted, the other one sticks out; no one explains you won’t go through life a freak. We would have died before we let anyone but our best girlfriends see, showing ourselves in secret sessions in haylofts and tree houses, examining each other like lepers for more signs of it spreading.
I was up in a classmate’s attic when we discovered, under an old trunk, a secret book of knowledge. We were hoping to find old dress-up clothes. What we found was her older brother’s secret stash of Playboy magazines. We gazed, glazed with desire, at the perfect mounds of breasts and buttocks. The Playmates in the early sixties were like Barbie, no sprouting pubic hairs; in fact, no pubis at all, and big, luscious ice-cream-sundae boobs. The gap between those girls and us was unspannable. Even in our wildest, bravest imaginations we couldn’t make the leap; we felt ourselves a separate species. We decided we must be lezzies. We weren’t quite sure what they were or did, but we knew they were girls who were sexually attracted to girls instead of boys, and I, at least, was very worried about this. I surely desired and thought about Miss March’s boobs and couldn’t imagine thinking Herbie’s or Henry’s “thing” I’d seen in third grade was anything other than completely gross, and the idea of their actually sticking one in me and peeing like the stuck dogs on the playground was beyond the outer limits of gross. Plus the way animals screamed and my mother bled on Kotexes she kept in a bucket under the sink, and how she had to have stitches after my brother was born and sit on a rubber doughnut, I knew it was not only totally gross but hurt and tore you up. A lezzie in the first degree.
Another source of unclothed secrets was the National Geographic magazine. But the breasts we saw in those pictures were pendulous and neutral as cows’ udders. I didn’t mind having those issues around the house until one day I found an issue right on our own coffee table that had a photograph of a bare-breasted, barely pubescent native girl. One of us! I could barely stand I was so dizzy thinking my parents might have seen the magazine before I got to it and had seen what she, I, we, looked like. Keep it our secret, don’t let them see or they’ll know what’s hidden under my shirt and in my underpants. I was paralyzed with panic, my face so hot with shame I couldn’t think. I grabbed the magazine and ran for the door. Outside I didn’t stop running until I was deep in the woods. I dug a hole and buried the evidence.
At the same time that I was desperately trying to duck and cover up, my mother’s sexuality was beginning to emerge from beneath a long winter of convent schools, ignorance, and abuse. That’s not how I would have described it then, though; for me, that spring, she became an animal. The sex I saw or heard in nature was a teeming swirl of madness and violence. During mating season, horrid sounds and screechings emerged from the woods. I’d seen my dog Joey have a madness come over him, and he disappeared for several days, returning to sit on the couch and lick his sore, swollen “red thing,” as my brother and I called it. Blood lust and lust were inseparable in my mind.2
MY MOTHER, BROTHER, AND I came down with a vomiting flu and fever in the January thaw. My father came over to give us some homeopathic medicine. My mother was in bed. I was in the doorway when she sat up and pointed a finger dramatically at my father and yelled, “You’re poisoning the children. . . . I cannot stand it a minute longer. I am going to my mother’s.” My brother and I—“poisoned” or not—were not invited to join her.
I found out later that year that she hadn’t gone to her mother’s, but instead had had a romantic rendezvous with a boyfriend in California. An ex-boyfriend of hers just happened to spy them at some restaurant there. The little sneak told my father, who, in turn, told me. I kept it to myself for about a year and then sprang it on my mother, a little act of false “glimpse” terrorism, at an opportune time: “Oh, by the way, I know where you were last year when you said you were at your mother’s in New York.” I told her where she was, and with whom, but refused to say how I knew.
I could pretend to be all-seeing and all-knowing, but when my mother’s eyes clouded with passion, hatred, anger, fear, and desire, what was truly terrifying was the realization that she couldn’t see me at all. I looked in her eyes and saw no person, no solid ground beneath the blue. She was like some force of nature let loose, a dam breaking, a fire in the wind, a twister. She struck close to home that spring, tearing a rent, a wide swath, in the social fabric of Cornish.
My father pulled into the driveway and strode over to the house. “Where’s your mother? I have to talk to her. Claire?” he called in the strained voice he always used with her. His throat literally closed up and he got hoarse, it was such a huge strain for him to speak to her. He went into the house and met her on the landing. My brother and I took our first-row, front-balcony seats on the stairs. “Claire, Mary Jones just called me in tears. She said that Joe is leaving her and wants to marry you. Is that true?”
My parents never once sent us out of the room nor said to us that they had to discuss something in private. My father—far more than my mother, who took great pains at times to tell us that Daddy was a good father—aired every accusation, ugly feeling, name-calling, every bit of his and my mother’s dirty linen,
in broad daylight. For a person so devoted to a cult of privacy surrounding himself and his work, he had less of an appropriate sense of privacy, what one should and should not say before an audience of children, than any other adult I’ve ever met. Behind the curtain of virtue is a private table reserved for a party of one.
As my father demanded to know whether what Mary had said was true, I watched my mother’s face intently. What I saw shocked me. I assumed she was guilty but I expected a defense, an outraged denial, a protested innocence. Instead, what I saw was a frightening, silly little smile. She was flushed, but it didn’t look as if from shame or embarrassment; she looked like an excited little girl. My father may as well have asked her, on her way home from school, “So what’s this I hear about little Joey Jones dipping your braids in the inkwell, is it true?” When she spoke, I could tell she was lying, but it was the way a child under five lies, looking at the cookies on her lap and telling you the doggie must have dropped them there. In a child, it can be naively sweet; in an adult, it is almost indescribably enraging. It made me want to beat her head in just to wipe that creepy, silly giggle off her goddam face, and to smash her teeth down her throat if she didn’t start talking like a grown woman instead of in that little voicy-poo. I sat on my hands, as I often did throughout my childhood and teens, scared they’d go for her throat and never stop. I really mean that: the self-control involved in not strangling her often left me limp with exhaustion. She told my father that she just couldn’t understand what could have made Joe fall in love with her, silly man, and of course she would never think of marrying him.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 25