We switched classes every period, sharing the halls with the entire junior and senior high school. I made my way down corridors, surfing the wave of moving students, on that thrilling edge between mastery and danger. We passed seniors, on the top floor where the halls were carpeted, sitting on the floor by their lockers, taking up space with confidence, hanging out, stitching up a hem, talking till the bell rang over the intercom and the corridors became deserted and only those with hall passes, stopped and inspected at roving checkpoints by hall monitors, could proceed. Having been raised on a wholesome diet of World War II espionage movies, this system of passes and checkpoints and forbidden territory did not escape my eye. On lone forays to the girls’ room, hall pass in hand, I gathered intelligence regarding patterns of enemy movement. I was scarcely aware I was doing it. By the third week of school, I had the system down. My chance came at the end of the month when I needed to be absent for a whole day, for a reason I forget, probably dental, and in order to be excused, I had to collect all of my teachers’ signatures on a form. I copied each signature before turning in the form to the office. Now I just had to get a pass someone was dumb enough to fill out in pencil. Having spent my entire life picking my way through a veritable minefield at home, between my mother’s explosions and my father’s narrow path, school was a field day to negotiate. With my dad I pretended I was still the girl who doesn’t “understand the Parisians, thinking love’s so miraculous and grand, oh, they speak about it, won’t live without it, oh, I don’t understand the Parisians” (Gigi). At school, however, je suis une boulevardière.
The few places where school and home rubbed up against each other were the hardest to negotiate. I’m sure I’m not the only girl on the edge of adolescence whose father “went mental” about something every couple of weeks. My wearing mod stockings made him nuts. He wouldn’t say it to me directly, but when he’d pick me up from school as he did on occasion, he’d survey my schoolmates waiting for buses or rides and decry the “joiners, followers, and sheep” all wearing “the uniform of fashionable nonconformity.” One afternoon he lost it completely. I had drawn a small peace symbol on my leg with a pen in study hall. “Oh, my God!” he cried out, and put his hands over his eyes as if he had seen something so awful he couldn’t bear to look. Then he stuck out his finger, jabbing in the general direction of my leg. “What . . . the hell . . . is that?” he said slowly, flatly, spitting out the words with contempt. Man, my stomach went crazy. “Nothing. I don’t know. What?” I thought he was going to hit me. “Christ almighty. Do you have any idea what would happen if we pulled out of Vietnam? A bloodbath,” he yelled. “That’s what would happen, the Communists would come in and there’d be a bloodbath. You don’t know them, you don’t know what they’re capable of.” I licked my finger and tried to rub it off. Duck and cover.
I didn’t disagree with him; I knew next to nothing about the war in Vietnam except the flat way Chet Huntley or David Brinkley read the daily body count on the evening news. There was something much scarier, much more real and ominous, about those cold statistics, for me anyway, than seeing the Gulf War “up close and personal” on CNN. Sort of the way black-and-white photographs often seem more lifelike than color ones. I get the shivers writing about it. I kind of understand, now, why seeing your daughter wearing a peace symbol could feel like seeing a swastika, an attack on everything you and your army buddies had fought and died for. But then it just scared the hell out of me. I had no idea what I’d done.
It seemed that everything I did in terms of dress or style (which is all the peace symbol meant to me at the time; it was my mother who was starting to get involved seriously in the antiwar movement) that celebrated my fitting in at school provoked outbursts of rage from my father. Traitor: I was becoming like other people, people other than him. Sometimes these scenes would then be followed by his profuse, desperate pleading for forgiveness, as if I were his wife or something, which was even worse than the yelling somehow, it made me feel really icky and uncomfortable.
It was becoming increasingly tricky for me to stay in his good graces. Once in a fight I was having with my dad, he accused me of not caring about him or my brother or anyone in the family, just my friends. I countered, “Well, you don’t even have any friends.” He replied, as he has done on several occasions, that he didn’t have the same need for friends as I seemed to have, implying, of course, that it was a weakness on my part.
What I didn’t have the words for at the time, but only felt somewhere in my bones, was that to fit into my father’s family, to be his perfect Phoebe, would have meant turning, like Daphne, into a tree.4 I realize now why I saved all the notes my friends and I passed to each other in school that year and recall the “underground foliage”—the secrets of who likes whom, the hidden kisses, bodies meeting bodies beneath crepe-paper decorations at dances—with such affection, when so many other mementos fell by the wayside as time went by in move after move. To my dad, I’m sure our concerns, if I’d been so foolish as to let him know, would have seemed contemptibly shallow. I, however, treasure this time when I joined the dance of life, splashed and cavorted in the shallows, albeit hidden from my family, rather than sitting on the island cliff contemplating my navel. Just as I believe his Glass characters are cheated out of the joys of childhood reading by their focus on adult books and concerns, so, too, I feel they are cheated out of the joys and sorrows of inhabiting the mind and body and world of an eleven-year-old. To everything there is a season, and my turn had finally come to act my own age.
AT HANOVER JUNIOR HIGH, for the first time ever, I fit in. I don’t remember how I got to know everybody. It seemed to just happen. I was placed in the 7–1A track where the most popular kids were. Cliques are probably easier to write about if you’re on the outside. When you’re in one, at that age, you don’t really know what everyone else is doing; you’re just not aware. We were the cool group, the boulevardiers, the A-minus underachievers who wrote secret notes to each other about who liked whom and planned parties in study hall.
The smartest kids were in 7–1 and they were different; they actually studied. They even talked about schoolwork. Tracking is a tricky thing, attempting to group together kids who are alike. I’m sure it reinforced and perpetuated the established economic order—the kids with B.O. were in 7–4 and took home ec and industrial arts, and so on; but at the time, it reflected the order so well that it didn’t seem like an agent of it, it seemed objective and true. Like with like.
For a couple of kids, the tracks were a less than perfect fit. Gail, for instance, was part of our group socially, but took some classes with the dumb kids. I remember in sixth grade she couldn’t hear syllables the way the rest of us could. Was girl one syllable or gir-ul, two syllables? She was really smart and beautifully expressive, but just didn’t get certain things; her papers had lots of red x’s all over them. Now there’s a term for her difficulty, learning disabilities, but then it was a mystery. Gail actually knew Joan Baez. She called her Joanie and knew the correct pronunciation of her name—“Bize” rather than “Bye-ez,” as the rest of us mistakenly did. So cool.
The other friend I had who didn’t quite fit the track was Anna, who took some 7–1 classes. She was far more mature, both physically and mentally, than the rest of us were. She actually needed a bra, a garment we all wore but most of us only aspired to filling. She seemed to be able to handle homework and hormones simultaneously with humor and grace. Anna seemed to float comfortably between boundaries; she was smart and fun and cool at the same time. I’d be fascinated to know how life went for her. She used to report in on the 7–1 kids and give me a glimpse at how the tribe on the other side of the island lived:
Dear Peggy,
What goes on at your house, I’ve called 4 times but all I get is a busy signal zzzt-zzzt-zzzt. Does Rachel want us to feel sorry for her or something.
Man that kid (Van Orden?) that was outside of the classroom (Miss Berks) well, when everyone was talking to us about that
detention he kept on rubbing shoulders with me. GROSS!!!!!! He is supposed to be a real sex maniac.
You know Martha and Judy and their group? [7–1] Well, they don’t ‘dare’ say the word sex. They treat it like it was a swear word, you know they say (when they do) S-E-X. Shhhh!! Oh dear me.
Love,
Anna
The blending of the Norwich kids with the Hanover kids was a bit bumpy. Loyalties were strained as sixth-grade alliances were regrouped. My best friend Rachel McAndrew, with whom I spent summers in Maine and many a weekend overnight, was now my classmate in 7–1A. Rachel’s two best friends in sixth grade (in school that is; we were best friends outside school) went on to 7–1. I was jealous of her attention to them; she was jealous of my new friendship with Anna, and of my Norwich friends. As the year progressed, though, our group in 7–1A was seriously occupied in working out the question of “who likes whom” between boys and girls, while simultaneously still working out questions of “like with like” between friends of the same sex.
Most of our work, and by that I mean the business of sorting out who likes whom, was accomplished in study hall where secret communiqués were passed back and forth. Study hall was held in a huge room on the new, carpeted second floor, with desks divided into three blocks of neat rows. Off to the side of the room by the windows was a big dictionary on a stand. It had the strategic advantage of being the farthest point from the study hall proctor’s desk, and it served as our mailbox. You and a friend would decide on a password and place the note you’d written at that page in the dictionary, and then your friend would go up and get the note instead of risking passing it and getting caught. No one ever stole a note meant for someone else, that just wasn’t the system. On Mondays, Rachel and I would pick a new word for the week:
Peggy,
I just went to the dictionary and looked under unisexual—having to do with one sex.
Castrate—to remove male glands.
Luv—they didn’t have anything. Cheap.
That’s my favorite word.
Bye Rachel!!!
P.S. Is your knee getting better? It looks like it. Bye.
I would grow nearly six inches that year, and my knees were having trouble keeping up. It was great for the hemlines though! What was decent at the beginning of the year became decent—our slang for cool/great—by January. I found myself “in with the in crowd,” the Dave Stone group, quite early on in the year. I had heard about Dave before meeting him because his father, Dr. Stone, delivered me and had been my pediatrician ever since. On my last checkup, to enter seventh grade, he’d told me I’d be in the same class as his son David. I wasn’t impressed so much as curious: Who was that nice Dr. Stone’s boy, and would I be able to ask him what happened to his dad’s leg? (He had a wooden one, my mom told me when I asked her why he walked that way.) The first weeks were a bit confusing:
Dear Rachel,
I think I am going to get out of the group. Dave and the others were friends with me yesterday and now they don’t even know I’m alive.
Then I started getting to know Will, one of the boys in the group, and we helped each other solve a number of mysteries. First we had to figure out whether we “liked” each other. That solved, we went on to form a real partnership. What a treasure to have a member of the opposite sex you can talk to and trade secrets with. Otherwise it’s like Holden, all trial and error and mystery. By the way, an historical note is necessary here I think—when we talk about “sex” in notes, we meant making out, K.I.S.S.I.N.G. as the jump rope chant goes. “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes junior in the baby carriage.”
Dear Will,
I am not “thick” I just can’t read your handwriting. You have dropped a million girls on the grounds that they didn’t play with you enough. That means you think more of sex than Love. If you really loved someone you wouldn’t care if they constantly gave you sex. I’ll be good friends with you now. Later it might be different. Much different. But that is the future.—
from Peggy
Peggy—
You are completely right. I never thought of it that way.
Thank you
Will
Dear Peggy
Who is around? I am lost. I want to just be good freinds with you [OK] and Joan. I much rather just like you as a freind than a girlfreind. [I feel the same way] Cause you are better that way. I don’t like to go places in the school because I would rather be in a study hall. [You like study hall?]
Bye
Will
P.S. Who should I like?
Will,
You like Joan don’t you? [Just as a freind she is better that way] If not there is nobody who wants to go with you. When I asked you over I did because it would be fun that’s all. [I know] When we made-out I did just because I like you a lot. Not because I love you. [Same.]
Hi Peggy
I agree with you. Lets do it. I like you a lot too! But not someone to love aussi.
I do know most boys better than you. And you probably know most girls better. I like Linda N. but I am afraid its hopeless. Who do you think I should like. Or who needs and likes me. Please tell me.
Write
Will
Will,
Try Rachel. I asked her what she thought of you and if she wants to go with you. She said, “I don’t know him anymore. But I don’t know mabey.” That’s what she said.
Write back Peggy
The notes I saved record that the first school dance of the year was the occasion of much excitement, intrigue, and blundering. Can you believe this guy?
Peggy this is poor (ron) speaking if someone you liked asked you to go to the dance before DAVE might you go?
ronnie
Peggy
I’m sorry about saying “When was the last time you washed your hair?” Don’t tell rachel that I said I’m sorry. She would just make fun. If I asked you to go to the dance [might] you go? I couldn’t ask rachel because of what I said to her in study hall.
ronnie
Luckily for me, Dave came through with flying colors.
Peggy, after lunch or sometime else, not in class I have to ask and tell you something.
O.K.—D.S.
Peggy,
The thing I wanted to tell you was . . . If someone asks you to the student council dance say you’ve already been invited by someone else me.
O.K.?
D.S.
Even more fun than the school dances were the weekend parties each of us, in turn, gave. Rachel had the best house for a party of all of us (except one girl who had an indoor swimming pool, but that was so out of this world it almost didn’t count). The McAndrews had a huge playroom in the finished basement beneath their living room and dining room. It had a TV and a fireplace and a big couch with cushions that you could toss all over the floor and lounge around on and eat popcorn and nobody cared. Rachel had three older brothers and sisters, so by the time it was her turn to have parties, all the battles had been fought. Her parents retired to another part of the house, and the playroom was strictly off-limits to younger brothers and sisters for the evening. The door to the upstairs remained shut, the music loud, and as the evening wore on, the lights virtually off.
Rachel’s party itself is eclipsed in my memory by one of the loveliest moments of my life. It was one of those few moments when time stands still and everything is perfect. Simon and Garfunkel were singing “Sounds of Silence”—“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk to you again, ’neath a halo of a streetlamp I turned my collar from the cold and damp”—and Dave and I were slow-dancing, the moon shining through the basement window; his cheek touched mine, and we didn’t move apart. I’d never felt anything so soft in my whole life, nor did I again until I held my son for the first time and touched his face as he nursed, just him and me and the quiet of the night.
And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains and echoes in the well of silence.
WHEN THANKSGIVING CAME ROUND
THAT year, I had a lot for which to be thankful. For a short time, all my stars were lined up in the heavens. Even my mom had done something right in the male department for once. Most of the guys she brought home were young dopes. Like Alex, a college student she dated, who once came into my room all puffed up to give me a charming “father knows best” lecture about being nicer to my poor sweet mother—this from a guy whose voice had barely changed. “You asshole,” I said, tired, contemptuous, despairing. “Get the fuck out of my room.”5
I told my dad what Alex had said and that I told him he was an asshole. Daddy laughed and said, “You said that to him, really?” “Yup.” “I’ll bet he was shocked.” I just shrugged my shoulders; I didn’t say it for effect, I was just calling a spade a spade. What I really felt was none of Alex’s charming business. What I felt was, who the hell are you to talk to me about anything, especially my mother, you little boy. How dare you.
Around Thanksgiving my mother started seeing a man. A real, genuine grown-up, one of only two real, grown-up men I remember her dating. The other, Alan T., is still an important part of my brother’s life and mine. Aside from being a pleasure to know, both when I was a kid and as I grew up, I don’t know what I would have done without Alan at several crucial junctures of my life where he ran interference for me with the real world, such as the time my divorce lawyer started making passes at me and threatening to raise his bill if I didn’t comply. Alan put me in touch with the “big boys,” an old buddy of his who is a divorce lawyer to the “stars,” who set things right for this small fry in short order. Alan has been there for me in a way my parents never were, bringing to mind the saying “When God closes a door, he opens a window.”
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 28