Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  But who is alike, who is a landsman, who is an appropriate mate? If we take his criterion—laughing at the same movies—then Holden and Phoebe are a perfect fit, as are Babe and Mattie, and my father and the ideal readers he imagines and addresses in The Catcher in the Rye and woos outright, unabashedly, with a “bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))” in the opening of Seymour: An Introduction.

  Unlike me, his ten-year-old characters, my fictional siblings, were perfect, flawless, reflections of what my father likes. Holden’s beloved sister, Phoebe, got it just right, every time:

  You never saw a little kid so pretty and smart in your whole life. . . . She’s only ten. . . . You’d like her. I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you’re talking about. I mean . . . you take her to a lousy movie, for instance, she knows it’s a lousy movie. If you take her to a pretty good movie, she knows it’s a pretty good movie. . . . Her favorite is The 39 Steps, though, with Robert Donat. She knows the whole goddam movie by heart.

  (Catcher, p. 67)

  Babe’s ten-year-old sister, Mattie, gets it right, too. In one scene he is waiting for her outside her school where she has stayed late, with a few other girls, to hear her teacher read from Wuthering Heights. Babe saw the girls coming out of the building:

  Maybe they didn’t like Wuthering Heights. Maybe they were just bucking for rank, polishing apples. Not Mattie though. I’ll bet she’s nuts about it, Babe thought. I’ll bet she wants Cathy to marry Heathcliff instead of Linton. . . .

  “Babe!” she said. “Gee!” . . .

  “How was the book?” Babe asked.

  “Good! Did you read it?”

  “Yep.”

  “I want Cathy to marry Heathcliff. Not that other droop, Linton. He gives me a royal pain,” Mattie said.

  (“Last Day of the Last Furlough”)

  My father’s ideal reader gets it right, too. A few pages on, Holden described a nightclub crowd’s reaction to a showy pianist. Holden speaks directly to the reader:

  You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. . . . People always clap for the wrong things. . . . Anyway, it made me feel depressed and lousy again.

  (Catcher, p. 84)

  I once told my father, I think I was about eight at the time, that he only liked people in homeopathic4 doses. He thought that my observation was so true and so insightful that he used to repeat it to everyone he knew, the way some parents go on about your first words or first trophies and blue ribbons. What I meant at the time, and I think he understood, was that he liked people only in minute doses, but I realize now that it’s true on yet another level. He only likes people who are like him, homeopathically like him, identical entities with identical properties, varying only in size and shape. Like with like.

  Being a girl with extremely sensitive antennae, I managed to keep in his good graces most of the time, to be the swell girl, the girl in the shaving mirror. In so doing, I dwelt in his magical world of stories and wild mushrooms and hotel breakfasts where no grown-ups, with their phony rules and conceits, were allowed. But the price of admission was steep. To enter his world, a girl had to become, in a sense, fictional and split off from the depth, complexity, and imperfection of a real, three-dimensional person. The mental gymnastics required to reflect his view and avoid rejection involved more than selectively expressing, or accentuating, one aspect of myself. My mind didn’t bend; it split in such a way that I became almost two people: the part of me that played with my friends and thought my own secret thoughts, and the part of me that was his voice in my head and enabled me to be a person he loved. This was something I learned to do without much reflection. It became automatic, the fractured glass a part of the structure of my being.5

  In my father’s story Zooey, I was surprised to see some self-awareness of this trait. At least, his mother seems to have his number. Bessie Glass tells her son Zooey, “you make people nervous, young man. . . . If you don’t like somebody in two minutes, you’re done with them forever.” What Bessie says about Zooey was certainly true of my father in relation to me. When I fell out of sync with him, the consequences were sharp and swift. After one disagreement my father and I had in the car on the way home from school, he called me on the phone to discuss it, which, as a ten-year-old, I thought was a very grown-up thing to do. I remember the conversation exactly. He said we’d better find a way to make up because “when I’m through with a person, I’m through with them.” Then, as if I needed convincing, he told me a story about a close friend he’d had a falling-out with and never spoken to again. I’d seen this happen with not one but most of his few remaining friends. He ended by saying, “I’ll always love you, but when I lose respect for a person, I’m done with them. Finished.”

  Even though his words made my stomach churn, I thought it was cool that he treated me as if I were an adult. Now that I am an adult, I think, Are you nuts? This is a ten-year-old child, your ten-year-old child you are talking to like this! But as Zooey tells his sister Franny:

  “And don’t tell me again that you were ten years old. Your age has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. There are no big changes between ten and twenty—or ten and eighty, for that matter.”

  Young Seymour (age seven) writing home from summer camp, in “Hapworth 16, 1924,” tells his three-year-old twin brothers that their age is no excuse for estranging themselves from their “chosen career,” tap dancing, for more than a few hours at a time. “I laugh hollowly down the years at the trite reports and customs firmly connected with the tender age of three!” Seymour continues with similar age-inappropriate messages for his sisters as well. In this, my father’s last published story, the confluence of adult and child has reached the point where the resulting offspring, the characters created by this Alice in Wonderland–like admixture (“Drink this”) of small child and old man, results in a creation that strikes me as more a product of taxidermy than of real, flesh-and-blood intercourse. No blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta here. These little Indians are preserved, unchanging, under glass, as in Holden’s beloved museum.

  When I was ten, the thing I was most conscious of hiding, under glass as it were, from my father was that I had any interest in boys. (Now I’d put it a little differently and call it “my sexuality” that I felt a pressing need to hide from him.) When a couple would kiss in a movie we were watching, I distinctly remember saying, “Eeew!” and feeling like a liar. I was like his character Raymond Ford’s poem: an unchanging, “perfect ten” on the surface; beneath, not a wasteland but an inverted forest with all the budding foliage underground.6

  The flip side of perpetual childhood, in this conflation of child and adult, is the adult child, the “wise child.” From the moment, somewhere around the age of four and a half, when I realized that I was far more in tune with my baby brother’s needs than were my parents, I believed myself to be more grown-up than the grown-ups. This had both life-sustaining and life-threatening results. I often relied on my soldier’s sixth sense to keep me out of harm’s way. Being a little adult, however, made me a poor judge of safe and appropriate places for a child to play. It now makes perfect sense to me why, at ten, I thought my baby-sitter was my boyfriend instead of the child molester that he was. In this “inverted forest,” I was neither shocked nor did I feel any of the other things one might expect a ten-year-old girl to feel about a twenty-two-year-old man climbing into her bed. Like Franny Glass, I had been taught that there were no important differences between eight and eighty.

  Mac, my baby-sitter, was a senior at Dartmouth and a deejay at the college radio station. He picked me up from school in his sports car, held hands with me on the gearshift, and drove me home to Cornish. After Matthew went to bed, Mac helped me with my homework, rewarding correct answers with long French kisses. The kissing itself felt like fish wiggling in my mouth, but I figured it was like starting to smoke: with practice the coolness
of doing it outweighs the gross taste and feel. Tucking me in, he’d say he really shouldn’t touch me like this, but I wasn’t sure why he shouldn’t.7 I thought it was totally cool to be going out with a college student, though of course, in hindsight, we never actually went out anywhere.

  When I found out from my friend Beth at a sleep-over that Mac had been “tucking in” a number of girls he baby-sat for, and one of the girls had told her mom, it hit me all of a sudden that he wasn’t my boyfriend at all; he was a perv. I felt so gross.

  And, of course, I told no one.

  * * *

  1. My father wrote a story years ago called “Elaine” about a stunningly beautiful girl who is mildly retarded. Elaine is sixteen and in the eighth grade. She was, he wrote, the only girl wearing lipstick at her eighth-grade graduation except Theresa Torrini, the eighteen-year-old “mother of an illegitimate child by a taxi driver named Hugo Munster.” Elaine lives with her mother and grandmother in the Bronx. She is a lamb among wolves and is later raped by her first date, a movie usher. My father describes the three of them, mother, daughter, and grandmother, walking up the street together to the movies, Elaine “looking like centuries of Juliets and Ophelias and Helens. . . . There were thousands of Bronx people who saw them on their way. There was never one to cry out, to wonder, to intercept. . . .”

  2. Seymour’s secret can be found in one of my favorite passages. It begins, “One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on—some on, some still off—I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer . . .” (Seymour: An Introduction, pp. 201–2).

  3. Daddy later developed a way of purging himself of such delectable “poison.” He told me, quite proud of his newly discovered technique, that he’d stick his fingers down his throat and vomit it up. As one who struggled with bulimia for too many years, I find, in retrospect, his naivete less than appealing. Years later, he would teach Joyce Maynard this same technique of eliminating such impurities from her body.

  4. From the Greek homoiopatheia, from homoiopathes, having like feelings or affections; homoios, like, similar, and pathos, feeling, suffering. The theory or system of curing diseases with very minute doses of medicine that in a healthy person and in large doses would produce a condition like that of the disease treated (Webster’s).

  5. In the book Destructive Cult Conversion: Theory, Research and Treatment (American Family Foundation, 1981), Dr. John Clark of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry writes: “In effect, the convert’s mind seems to split. A factitious second personality (the cult personality) begins episodically to achieve a certain autonomy as it struggles with the old one for position in the forefront of consciousness. The stress on the individual here is, of course, very great.”

  6. Joyce Maynard writes in her memoir: “Jerry says nothing, ever, about me as a physical person. . . . No words are spoken about either of our physical bodies. . . . He virtually never mentions sex.” He does not mention, or perhaps notice at all, that Joyce, in her self-starvation, stops menstruating. In an article on “post–mind control” syndrome (Social Work, March 1982), Lorna Goldberg and William Goldberg, co-leaders of a therapeutic group for former members of religious cults, found that “almost all the ex-cultists appear to be much younger than their chronological age and display an asexual innocence. They act childlike although they may be well into their twenties. Indeed, during their time in the cult women often stop menstruating and men’s beards grow more slowly. During the initial postdeprogramming stage the ex-cultists regain their secondary sexual characteristics.”

  7. I’m not implying that my father caused the molestations, any more than my mother did in hiring the man. The perpetrator, Mac, is the only one who caused it. But this confusion of boundaries, which my parents and I certainly had, as to who’s a grown-up and who’s a child, creates conditions ripe for such exploitation.

  18

  Notes from the Underground

  IN 1967 THE WHOLE WORLD burst into flower. An eleven-year-old girl, even a tall one, was easily camouflaged in a sea of sunflowers. Big Day-Glo daisy stickers bloomed on countless bedroom walls, paisley swirled across bedspreads and dresses, dashikis enrobed black and white alike in colors of the sun, girls’ long legs sprouted up through the pavement overnight. The trail of my own scent was undetectable amidst great wafts of Yardley’s English Lavender, Jean Naté lemons, incense and peppermints.

  Before the beginning of school—oh, manna from heaven!—my mother let me go shopping for clothes. I don’t know why she finally stopped insisting on my wearing drab, English-schoolgirl, itchy-caterpillar-like tweeds and felts and woolens. I emerged from a store in Hanover that day with a beautiful, soft, blue, fluffy, acrylic knit mini-dress that I wore with white windowpane stockings1 and a garter belt that wasn’t from the store where we always bought my sensible white Carter’s Spanky Pants, a name that always caused me to cringe, as if underwear shopping wasn’t devastating enough.2

  I also bought a paisley mini-dress with orange patterns on a yellow background, colors previously illegal in my closet, and a navy blue dress that had horizontal stripes of yellow and red. The coolest thing about the latter dress, other than the colors, was that, at the bottom where the hem was, some extra material was rolled up and stitched, forming a slightly padded inch-and-a-half-thick ring around the bottom of the dress. Sort of like a Hula-Hoop sewn into a dress. Very “mod.”

  I was allowed to buy a pair of normal shoes, shoes like the other girls wore, for the first time in my life. My mother was sure they would ruin my feet. There is nothing wrong with my feet, but I had had to wear orthopedic-looking lace-up oxfords, “sensible shoes,” every day since I learned to walk, even to birthday parties where the other little girls wore patent leather Mary Janes. We bought a pair of size 9 (I was a size 81/2, but the extra half size was so my toes wouldn’t be ruined the very moment I put them on), navy leather Mary Janes that were blessed with a heel of about an eighteenth of an inch. That made them real pumps! Heaven on earth! Heels. I also had a blue raincoat, a “slicker” to Beatles fans in the know, with a big zipper up the front and a bold yellow band about a foot wide around the middle. What a marvelous thing, for once in your life, to feel you look great instead of dreadful. I know most of the world has to worry about having enough clothes to cover body parts and keep warm. But, oh, what a lovely thing to feel pretty; it was the first time in my life.3 “I could have danced all night”—and not ruined my toes.

  When we got home, my mother let me take my old dresses from the closet and put them in a bag for “the poor children.” This time, however, “the poor children” were no longer siblings of classmates with real faces and real embarrassment at the situation; they were a distant concept. Into the giveaway bag went my three old dresses, like evil, ugly stepsisters. In went the tight maroon-and-cream-plaid wool jumper worn for two years over a choice of cream or maroon turtleneck, with white bobby socks, and sensible shoes. In went the navy wool jumper with the contrasting navy-and-white-plaid skirt that always hung at a queer angle and itched; and in went the most hated of all, a dog-doody-brown jumper, made of hatting felt so stiff that it bent into me like cardboard when I sat down. Boy, did I hate that dress. I could have hung it in effigy and burned it as they did the stuffed “enemy” at the Dartmouth College bonfires the night before a game. Or dumped it into the harbor like the Boston Tea Party we’d been reading about in our history book at school, “no taxation without representation.” Freedom.

  Once again, a dollar surreptitiously spent at the Newberry five-and-dime in Windsor, home of my gold-tone “R” pendant, provided me with contraband accessories and solid cachet among classmates: a pair of screw-back earrings that had great big “pearl” balls that dangled deliciously from two-inch gold chains, and a tube of white lipstick. I smuggled these beauties into school. Where once it was just Viola and me who went straight to t
he girls’ room to do our forbidden uncurling and unbraiding, now there were legions of us in the girls’ room before school applying make-up, rolling up miles of skirts at the waist to the desired mini length, some even having a smoke in the stall. The air was thick with excitement.

  Each seventh grader was assigned his or her own private locker on the first day of school. I loved this, that the first order of business was to give you a secret place to put things. The little slip of paper with my combination written on it was as magical to me as my secret, moonlit worlds of fairies and wood sprites had been years ago. It was a key to my own world, away from my parents. Inside the locker, there was a hook for my coat, a bottom shelf for boots, and top shelves for books, notebooks, brush and comb, lunch bag, or purse of money for lunch in the cafeteria. It also served as a mailbox for friends who might wish to leave a note on your locker or push it in via the vent slats. Once in a while there were locker inspections, but I never took them personally; they were more for one’s own protection against some gross guys who left their gym socks or ham sandwich in there, stinking up the hall for weeks on end. Drugs had not made it into the junior high school at that time, so it wasn’t like a police search. We heard rumors of “hippies” smoking pot, but it was smoke curling on the far horizon, distant, scenic and cozy, not near and threatening.