Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  I knew that part was true, that she wouldn’t think of marrying him. The huge unfairness of it all nearly crushed me. Joe was a guy with short legs and a tight little behind that scooted around the bases really fast when we played softball together. He was no match for my mother at all, and I sat there on the stairs thinking, Pick on someone your own size, you bully. Of course she “did it” with him, I thought, but the silly man fell in love with her, and she was only playing with him, the way our cat Pearly toyed with a chipmunk stupid enough to get into her clutches. It wasn’t fair. Most of all it wasn’t fair to Mary or the kids.

  Joe moved to California. I was certain that Mary would never let us play with her kids at their house again. But Mary went out of her way to show us it wasn’t our fault, and that what had happened was something that concerned grown-ups. I don’t think she said it exactly, but I felt it. It made me crazy though to see how much the kids missed their father, how disrupted their lives were, and how little it registered with my mother. She seemed almost retarded in her total lack of a sense of responsibility or even basic understanding of the consequences of her actions. Like a child who hides her head under the blanket and thinks no one can see her, my mother began to tell us in a giggly voice that she had a “meeting” to go to. I knew; I saw the sex look that erased the personal landscape of her face.

  My father called her a “pathological liar.” He put it in moral terms, so now I had a word for “it,” at least. I could express moral outrage at her sins. He gave me a language to vent my rage so I didn’t have to sit on my hands quite so often. One evening, I confronted her in the kitchen and lectured her about her behavior, which by now included having some of her boyfriends stay the night. I didn’t care for myself so much, I told her, it was my brother I was concerned about. It wasn’t good for a young boy to see her being a “slut.” She tried to slap me across the face, but I ducked and left the room.

  My father’s main concern wasn’t its effect on us, he never mentioned that, it was the $5,000 a year he had to pay her for child support. He was outraged that he was paying to “feed her boyfriends.” “You don’t eat and shit in the same place,” he’d often tell me at age ten or so as we drove by the house, referring to my mother having boyfriends there. He complained about the support money constantly. He, too, I realized later in life when I tried to get him to pay for my college education, as it was stipulated in their divorce agreement, had no more sense of being responsible for his actions in the real world than my mother did, except as it concerned his work. Child support, pet food, clothing, tuition—all were part of the great conspiracy to “sponge” off him.

  When I was a child, though, he was faultless in my eyes, a bit difficult and downright peculiar sometimes, but morally faultless. My father and I sat judge and jury and found my mother guilty of moral crimes. It’s easier to feel moral outrage than terror. Even though I focused my attention on the things she did that were wrong, what terrified me was the unidentifiable, unspeakable thing I had no words for, that something was deeply wrong with her. I had a horror of her bodily functions; even her clothing I didn’t want to touch for fear something unclean was catching. My mom had serious cooties.

  I had no explanation for the fact that Claire, at one moment, could be my mother who loved me and, in the next instant, as with a sandstorm in the desert, all traces, all recognizable features of her humanity were erased. Sometimes I thought she was possessed; then I decided she was just plain wicked. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and working in a home for abused and abandoned children that I again saw that “not there” frenzied look in someone’s eyes, and that flushed, silly, spooky little smile. I was coaching the girls’ basketball team and doing individual gross motor evaluations of the younger kids. I’d have a child playing, eyes focused, anchored, and present, and the second anything sexy, or bodily, happened—someone mentioned going to the bathroom, or a male teacher that a little girl liked came into the room—it was as if the integrity of that child’s being fell apart; the eyes had a smeared, clouded look, face flushed, and that spooky smile appeared.

  The second time I saw that transformation was in my thirties. I was living on the first block of Marlborough Street, one of the “best” blocks of Boston, in a building owned by a retired hooker who still ran a few girls out of the basement apartments off the back alley. I lived there for twelve years and spent many a summer afternoon on the front steps hanging out with the working girls. They were, like our landlady, nearing the end of their careers. One had bought a little house in Tennessee and was planning to move back near her family when she retired. She told me she got into the business because she had fallen in love, when she was young, with the wrong guy, who “turned her out,” and she added, because of these, pointing to her huge bosom. She used to do freebies for a blind guy who came around with his dog. He was sweet and nervous and came in the front entrance, like a gentleman caller, instead of slinking through the back alley like a john. We always greeted him as though he were there to pick her up for a date. The other woman, Vickie, had a father who had started her.

  One afternoon I was on the stoop with Marcelle and Vickie. The conversation turned to the woman who lived on the first floor, a society girl who worked for the Fine Arts Museum. Apparently she had had her new investment-banker boyfriend over the previous night and they were rather noisy in their lovemaking. Marcelle and Vickie were in fits of giggles like two schoolgirls gossiping about it. I would have thought that screwing was about as interesting to an off-duty hooker as nuts and bolts to an assembly-line worker. Over the years, I saw it time and again: they went from forty-something-year-old women chatting about roses (we had a pretty rose garden in front) to fifth graders the minute anything sexual came up. Little girls seemed to coexist with middle-aged women with no integration, no blending of the ages. Now you see her, now you don’t. The Lady Vanishes.

  * * *

  1. Boys had dinks, wizzers, things, dongs, and so on. Girls’ parts “down there” were a mystery too dark to mention beyond babyhood when they had pee-pees or wee-wees—inseparable from the only function “it” appeared to possess. Another dark thought—now in middle age, I still haven’t escaped those black hairs that mysteriously appear, full grown, in ones and twos, on chin or cheek or nipple’s areola, without warning. A friend of mine, going through a painful separation from her husband, once sat crying on my couch. “Who will tell me when those witchy hairs sprout on my face? I’ll be in an old-age home somewhere, with no husband to ferret them out and pluck them. I’ll be one of those hairy old ladies,” she sobbed.

  2. Mr. Antolini, Holden’s teacher, promised him that if he applied himself to his studies, he’d find that he wasn’t the only person who was ever “confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.” I was tremendously relieved to find out, when as a graduate student I started going to the theater for the first time (student rush tickets were less than five pounds at the National Theatre Complex in London), that I wasn’t alone. Several Mediterranean writers captured the heated, swirling madness of mating just as I had felt it as a child: Pirandello’s Chaos, Kazantzakis’s Freedom or Death, Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, in which a mother (played by Glenda Jackson) watches over her five daughters in a house, shuttered against the terrible Spanish sun, and they prowl like cats in heat trying to escape and find relief in the cool of the night with a passing soldier.

  17

  A Perfect Ten

  I WOULDN’T BE NEEDING MY “R” pendant when I started sixth grade at a new school that fall. I bid a grateful adieu to my make-believe boyfriend Ritchie, who had stepped in so gallantly and served me so well—taking me to movies and giving me gifts when no one else would. Vast, empty tracts of the real world were coming under cultivation. It was 1966 and my mother decided to send my brother and me to Norwich Elementary School in Vermont. Norwich is a town directly across the river from Hanover, home of Dartmouth College. The school went up to sixth grade, after which all the Norwich k
ids went to Hanover for grades seven to twelve. It was a good school with a wealth of resources, and a good choice for all parties concerned, except for Viola and me, who wouldn’t really get to spend much time together again until we’d grown up.

  We sixth graders were the big kids of the school, and having my brother in first grade made me take my leadership responsibilities to heart. We were assigned in pairs to safety patrol, where, after training, we were expected to serve as crossing guards on the streets around the school to make sure all the kids who walked to school crossed safely. When we were on duty, we each wore a white safety-patrol belt of heavy canvas with a shoulder strap that went diagonally across the body. Off duty, you had to fold it a certain way, ceremonially like the flag, before storing it for the next day.

  We took our responsibilities soberly; there was no horsing around, but even more surprising, there was no throwing our weight around and being unnecessarily bossy. The teachers managed to hit just the right tone of service and responsibility. I wish I knew how; I’d bottle it. The best thing about safety patrol, I found out as the year went on, was that you were assigned your partner, you didn’t get to choose. Each season I was teamed up with someone who wasn’t part of my group of friends, and whom I would not otherwise have gotten to know. Away from the cliques of “best friends”—town versus gown and so on—we got to know our partner quietly, privately, over time, one-on-one. I spent the fall on safety patrol with the quiet, shy Linda Montrose, who turned out to have a lovely sense of humor. Spring duty was shared with Pauline Whalen, the only girl who was able to befriend Ethel, the poorest kid in our class, judging by B.O., breast size, and number of years held back. Ethel was fifteen or sixteen, fully developed, and year-round wore terrible, shabby cotton summer dresses that must have belonged to her mother. Through the long winter, she wore boys’ ankle socks or bare legs instead of warm stockings like the rest of us. One day on crossing duty, Pauline told me that Ethel’s father had whipped her real bad this time. She had shown Pauline the terrible stripes on her back in the girls’ room.

  The next year, in seventh grade, there was Ethel, walking the halls wearing her perpetual blush and faded old cotton dress, pregnant as a barnyard cat. She did not have a boyfriend. Everyone knew, but nobody did anything about it. That was my world. Telling a grown-up anything was tattling; you did it to get somebody in trouble. Never, ever, did I think of grown-ups as resources for getting somebody out of trouble.1

  It had been the same at Plainfield. Everyone knew about RuthAnn, a girl a year ahead of me in school, that her father was also her grandfather. That’s how it was put. When the original mother died, the father took up relations with his eldest daughter and produced an entire new generation of kids, including RuthAnn. What a man did on his own property was his business—you could disapprove, but it wasn’t your business. Pauline gave me a darn good look at the dark side of privacy, where parents’ unbridled freedom to do as they pleased could create a private hell for their kids.

  I also discovered that breaking down the walls of privacy and sharing your problems with a friend made you not feel so weird and alone. It was at Norwich School, I found out, much to my relief, that I wasn’t the only one who thought her mother was a “slut.” My classmate Nikki and I got to talking about our little brothers one day, and it turned out that we had both tried to intervene on their behalf to keep the boyfriends out of the house. Nikki’s mother was pretty, smart, and divorced just like mine; and just like mine, Nikki’s lecture to her did no good at all. It drove us crazy. Since they were “doing it,” these guys should have slunk out the back door like foxes, tails between their legs, and flown the coop before dawn. But there the boyfriend would be, sitting at the breakfast table, bold as a rooster. We couldn’t believe it. We were furious, impotently furious.

  Nikki dropped out of school in ninth grade. This was unheard of in Hanover, but quite legal in New Hampshire. You had to finish eighth grade, then what you did was your own business. This usually resulted in a lot of guys who shaved in the eighth grade in some school districts, rather than a lot of thirteen-year-olds on the loose. Nikki used to hang out in Hopkins Center, the Dartmouth College arts building. I’d see her in the student café smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and reading. She never looked at loose ends; even at thirteen she looked as if she were supposed to be there, working on her Ph.D. or something.

  My father spotted her in Hanover from time to time, in later years, while I was away at school and would write and tell me the news. In one letter he mentioned that he had run into Nikki’s mother in the checkout line at the supermarket. He acknowledged she was probably disreputable as hell, but admitted that “your stupid father” liked looking at her face. Back then he was, like Holden, honest about his attraction to a pretty face, and about the discrepancy between what the hormones desired and what the mind knew was best. It never concerned me though, because I trusted him completely to control himself, unlike my mother. I thought he might remarry someday, but the mortifying prospect of one’s father “dating” never crossed my mind, so outraged was he on the subject of my mother’s loose behavior.

  YOU MIGHT THINK IT WAS cool, back then, that my dad was J. D. Salinger “the author,” but in sixth grade and junior high, that fact wasn’t even a blip on the screen of any of my friends’ awareness. Among my group of friends, there was nothing an old guy could do, worse yet, a parent, that was anything but the polar opposite of cool. Younger kids and parents and teachers were unbearably dumb; we were somewhere on the slope between dumb and cool moving upward with a rock climber’s determination and tenacity, while the seniors lounged at the top, the apogee of cool, master of all they surveyed.

  My little brother, Matthew, had achieved a certain dominion over his world right in the first grade. He was the marble king. He started with a small bag of marbles like every other boy, but his kept getting bigger and bigger as he won the other guys’ marbles each recess. By midfall, he had to store some of them at home in shoe boxes, he had so many. Daddy had taught him to play marbles a couple of years earlier, and by now he was deadly. I don’t know if Daddy taught him Seymour’s technique2; I wasn’t privy to the secrets of boys, and playing marbles was one of the mysteries, right up there with peeing in a urinal. My brother’s life and mine didn’t cross paths very often. At school, we were separated by a chasm of grade level and gender. At home, as well as during the long commute to and from school, we coexisted with widely varying degrees of tolerance. The only thing I remember us doing together, with any regularity at this point in our lives, was going out to eat with Daddy. Although he still played with my brother, marbles and cars and stuff, he didn’t seem to know what to do with me anymore.

  Going out to a restaurant—the ones at home at least—couldn’t hold a candle to picking mushrooms, on our long-ago walks together, and making an omelette with them when we got home. Restaurants in our area were nothing like the exotic Wolfie’s in Florida or the Russian Tea Room in New York. Ours came in three basic sizes. First there were the “fancy” places where you could get a shrimp cocktail. These consisted of a single cavernous room filled with a sea of tables with tablecloths and dim lighting for “atmosphere.” When we went to the Montshire House or Lander’s or the Windsor House, Daddy complained loudly about the lighting. Every time. He’d tell the waiter that next time he’d have to bring his flashlight to read the menu. Every time. The next size were the Howard Johnson’s, home of the deliciously clamless clam roll, and peppermint ice cream cones with real candies in them.

  The third type of restaurant was the small place with maybe ten Formica tables and booths or just a big lunch counter. These places served ice cream in a raised, pewter-colored, scratched metal dessert dish that sat on a plate with a paper doily on it. I always got chocolate ice cream with butterscotch sauce; my brother, vanilla with chocolate sauce. We eyed each other’s ice creams with a surveyor’s expertise, to see who had gotten luckiest with the collar. The collar, before the days of gargantuan ser
ving portions, was the little ruffle of ice cream that surrounded the round scoop. If you were lucky and the ice cream (or its server) was a little warm, you might get half again as much ice cream in the collar. If cold, you got just the perfectly round scoop. My father never failed to let us order ice cream, nor did he ever fail to tell us that “frozen protein is poison for the liver, almost impossible to digest.”3

  The only restaurant I really liked going to, and where I felt happy when I was there, was Tony’s Pizza on the road to Claremont. Tony made the pizza, and his beautiful little girl, Maria, who was just Matthew’s age, sometimes came over to the table to bring us something. We always had the same thing: pizza with extra cheese, ginger ale for me, orange soda for Matthew, and a martini with an olive for Daddy to start, followed by a glass of Chianti. One day, soon after Tony’s opened, Daddy told Tony that his was the best pizza he had ever eaten . . . except for one place in New York’s Little Italy—Rosa something or other. Tony’s eyes narrowed; he took his cigar out of his mouth and said an address, street, and cross street, in Little Italy. “Yes, yes, that’s the one!” my father exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you’ve been there?” my father was in the middle of asking when all of a sudden Tony had his arms around him, embracing him, slapping him on the back, tears in his eyes. “That’s my mother! That’s my mother’s place!” If you made that up in a story, no one would believe you.

  The other thing my brother and I shared on these occasions was the sermon du jour. Our father recited the same litany, in a desperate, passionate tone, ever since I can remember. I cannot begin to count the number of times I heard it growing up, at least once every month or two from the time I was seven or eight until I left home and was beyond redemption. I’m not exaggerating. It reached a crescendo that year when I was ten. Whether this was in response to my mother’s emerging sexuality, or to the prelude of mine, or to neither, I don’t know. It began: “Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.” Sometimes he’d add a cautionary tale such as the one about a date who, in the middle of a movie theater, actually laughed at a bit of slapstick, the pain it caused him and so on. Where other parents might lecture you, ad nauseam, about not making the same mistake they did, “stay in school, get an education, make something of yourself so you don’t have to sweep floors for a living like me,” my father’s litany of warning told his children not to make the same terrible mistake he did in marrying someone like our mother. The litmus test of compatibility was laughing at the same things at the movies. “Opposites may attract, but not for long.” Then he’d stare off with his I’m-about-to-impart-wisdom expression (oh, boy, lecture time), as if it were the first time we’d heard it. “Treat like with like,” he’d say. “Like with like”—the main tenet of his beloved homeopathy.