Although Alan has been far more a part of my life, I’ve written about Ray here, because Alan wove in and out of our lives over such a long period of time, it feels as though I’ve always known him. I can’t remember when Alan and my mom started seeing each other; I think they may have met even before she knew my dad, although I do remember being devastated one particular time they broke up because it was just before a promised visit to see my hero, Steve McQueen, the handsomest man in the world as he sat on that motorcycle in The Great Escape, on the set of Alan’s movie The Thomas Crown Affair, or maybe it was Bullitt, I forget. Alan would have taken me along regardless, but my mother nixed it, something about Faye Dunaway and how could he.6
When I met Ray, I could tell instantly that he, like Alan, wasn’t trying to be nice to me to get in good with my mom. Kids can smell that a mile away. And it stinks, let me tell you. Ray was widowed, I think, though I’m not sure, and his son lived with him. He loved his son, and even though Skip was a senior in high school—a time when boys don’t tend to be exactly demonstrative about their attachment to their parents—you could tell Skip loved his dad, too. Ray told me that Skip wasn’t always called Skip. Up until sixth grade he was called Billy. One day he came home from school and said, “Dad, I want to be called Skip,” and that was that. Ray didn’t seem to notice the fierce armor I wore. He’d give me a bear hug just as if I were a kid or something. And he never spent the night at our house. If he ever did, it would be because they were married, not shacking up and all that gross stuff. Even when he took us all camping together, I never once had to worry about what my brother might be exposed to or worry about them “doing it.” I never even gave it a thought. He took such nice care of my brother, I felt as if I could almost relax and take a vacation myself.
My brother and I talked about that camping trip recently. We both were surprised how strongly the images of that weekend stuck in our mind. “The red ball,” he said, “do you remember I lost my red ball on the lake in the wind and Skip rowed across the lake to get it for me?” I don’t just remember, it’s etched indelibly in my mind. The sky is a surreal gray, the lake gray and choppy, the trees gray before snowfall, the only bit of color a red, red ball blowing across the top of the water. My brother is crying, and Skip, without a word, pulls the boat down to the water. We jump in and Matthew stops crying. Skip rows across the lake like the wind, and I reach out my hand into the tossing reeds by the shore at the other side of the lake and catch hold of the ball. When we get back to shore, Ray has built a fire in the cabin and it’s cozy and warm and almost time for supper.
The only time we stayed over at Ray’s house was after one camping trip when a freak snowstorm hit. He insisted, quite sensibly, that we stay rather than drive the extra twenty miles from Hanover to Cornish. In the morning Skip drove me to school in his MGB. Skip, I might mention, was, in addition to being kind and thoughtful, the most handsome boy in the entire senior class. I was not alone in that opinion either. His hair was fairly short on the sides, but the bangs were Meet the Beatles long in front, and he had to toss his head a lot to keep it out of his eyes. “Oh, my God, Rachel, I might be Skip’s stepsister. [Massive giggles and “oh my Gods” and amazement.] Rachel, he has the coolest living room with big windows, and everything is light and new. [It was one of the early “contemporary” houses.] Maybe next Christmas we’ll have a tree in the living room and open presents and Skip will be in his pajamas.” “Oh, my God, Peggy, that would be soooo cool. You are so lucky.” “. . . Well, let’s hope she doesn’t blow it.”
RAY TOOK US TO EXPO ’67 in Montreal. They had loudspeakers everywhere that were playing the Beatles’ new song, “All You Need Is Love.” We waited in long lines, on perfect sidewalks like the ones in Fort Lauderdale, to enter pavilions, each sponsored by a different country. Pavilion. Isn’t that a beautiful word? We each got to pick a country. I picked Spain, I think, for the bright colors. My mom picked France. At a restaurant in the French pavilion, they ordered something called steak tartare, which I found out means raw. I almost barfed.
I couldn’t wait to tell my boyfriend Dave about it when we got back.
Dear [crossed out] is too personal. To David,
Do you like art class? I think it is O.K.—but really weird. I am drawing pictures of odd people. I hope I can go to the party. Will is a pill. Rachel hates him.
BOY, I HATE YOU TOO. AH, HA, HA,
that was an oppisite statement. Ah, ha, ha
Over thanksgiving we went to Expo and my parents tricked me into eating a bite of steak tar-tar. Do you know what that is? RAW meat!!! Mr. Bromley caught me writing and I am in English now.
Rachel and I are enemies because she is jeolous that I like Anna and Rachel hates Anna.
L (almost—too bad) rom
Peggy Barf Belch head
Who could resist my charms? Fortunately, he liked me anyway. Art class was weird, in large part because the teacher, Mr. Bromley, was going out with the sister of a boy in my class. She was a senior, and her yearbook picture even mentions it: “Likes Bob Dylan and Bromley immensely . . . skillfully slips cigarettes up her sleeve as she leaves class on the way to——?” Anna once overheard Mr. Bromley talking to Mr. Lavell, our math teacher, saying he worried if we really understood him. Barf. I found out in art class that if you spilled rubber cement on the table and let it dry a little, you could make your own superballs by rolling it up layer after layer during art period. When Gail had a party on the weekend of my birthday, a couple of kids brought me small presents including my own jar of rubber cement as a joke, because that’s all I did in art. Her parents accused me of sniffing glue and stopped the party. All the kids knew it wasn’t true, but her parents didn’t believe us. I don’t really blame them for thinking that, but the whole thing just seemed so dumb7—if they’d really known us, the idea that anyone in our group would actually sniff glue would have been so completely off base as to be inconceivable.
It was almost Christmas, and for some kids it was time to pay the piper. Grades were coming out. My father let me know in no uncertain terms that he thought grades were bullshit. That was a great relief for the next few years when mine were lousy; not so nice when I finally started getting good ones and got the same reaction.
Peggy,
. . . I am going to get creamed about my marks. They said that if I didn’t get a good report card, I would get grounded. I’m getting maybe 3 D’s. What really bothers them is that I have the capacity to be in the top 10% of the class. I agree, but I am bored to death and will be cremated.
Write, Gail
I don’t remember vacation. I probably skied a lot, by myself, at Mt. Ascutney, which is what I usually did on vacations. Back at school in January, Dave and I were working things out, note by note. I’m sorry to say that it was usually I who was the problem, getting mad over little things. Let me say clearly that I was just plain difficult. Part of the trouble, however, was that my dad’s lectures had seeped under my skin to such a depth I couldn’t get at them. Every time there was a gap, a break, in the “like with like” and a boyfriend liked something I didn’t, or vice versa, it threw me into a panic. It is only within my current marriage that I’ve been able to get this under control, albeit imperfectly. My brother once told me that he, too, had a hell of a time working that one out of his system. Dave was unbelievably sweet and patient.
Peggy,
Please tell me what is the matter? You are mad! Please tell me if its at me. Also I want to know if you still like me? I do still like you. Please write back soon!
D. Stone
Peggy,
I am sorry that I have been the way I have but now I know what you want, it is better (I hope.) It has been really hard because I didn’t know what you wanted. Now I can do what you want and can be the way you want. Its so much harder to be the boy because you don’t know weather the girl wants you to put on her coat or something. Therefore when they don’t the girl gets mader and mader. Please don’t give up yet.
David Stone
p.s. LOVE?
Valentine’s Day was just around the corner. I wanted to get David something nice, but not too nice or I’d be embarrassed. I wandered around Hanover for a while trying to decide what to get him. I told Mom I had some shopping to do and she didn’t bug me about it, which was great. I finally came across a bin of psychedelic posters with all sorts of Day-Glo optical illusions on them. I couldn’t choose between two of them so I got them both. I knew he’d like them. I planned to put them on his locker first thing in the morning so that he could still make me a Valentine if he forgot. I was pretty nervous, though. What I found on my locker the next day when I went to school was one of the nicest surprises of my whole life. Not one person that I knew, not even high school kids, gave flowers. But there, on my locker, was a single red rose. David’s mom had helped him put it in one of those little green florist’s stem tubes with water in it so it wouldn’t wilt. Twice-blessed flowers.
HERE IS WHERE FICTION IS more fun. The girl should grow up, marry her sweet prince, and live happily ever after. Here’s what happened. March. Mud season. Mom and Ray stopped seeing each other, and her boys were back. I decided to have a party and thought it would be cool to invite some older “men.” Anna had been going out for a little while with an eighth grader. She broke up with him, but I invited him anyway. None of us seventh graders had invited eighth graders to a party. I changed all the lightbulbs downstairs in the living room to blue ones and put my posters up on the walls. Because my house was so much smaller than everyone else’s in our group, it was hard to create the illusion of privacy—a kids-only lair. It still felt like my parents’ living room, but the lights did help some. The other thing that made creating a cool, independent illusion of our own world hard was that my house was so far away, parents couldn’t just drop you off and magically turn back into pumpkins and mice. There was a whole parental rigmarole about carpooling and directions and country roads and mud. It was decided that at 10 P.M., the boys would all go home in a couple of station wagons and the girls would have a sleep-over.
My party sucked beyond belief. Several couples broke up, I danced half the evening with Tim, the eighth grader, not even noticing that Dave was sitting by himself looking miserable until Rachel got mad at me for it, and by then it was time for the boys to go home. Thanks to me, and my big idea to invite older kids, the entire junior high school, seventh and eighth graders both, would know I had had a really bad party. Dave wouldn’t look at me in school on Monday, and I didn’t blame him. I guess I was going with Tim now. That weekend I wrote Dave a letter:
Sunday blah Afternoon
1968
Dear David,
I realize now what an ass I made out of myself and how I hurt lots of people. Tim is not the first person I’ve fallen for without much reason, but usually I don’t go as far as to really get involved with them because I know it will pass in a day or two so I keep my head. I found out about Tim and he isn’t at all what I thought he was, he’s nice and everything but he isn’t for me at all. I just wanted to tell you this but I don’t expect much because if I were you I wouldn’t take anyone back if they treated you the way I did. We both got it in a way, my party was a flop—not as bad as Gail’s or Brian’s party—but it was bad.
From me
I still have the letter because I never gave it to him. I was too ashamed.
And echoed in a well of silence.
* * *
1. Sort of like fishnet stockings, only with half-inch squares instead of tiny triangles.
2. For young ladies, garter belts weren’t kinky back then, they were standard. You wore socks or stockings. Undergarments were more like trusses: white, tight, and lots of metal fasteners. Even thin moms like mine wore long-line girdles with built-in garters for the stockings. “It’s new! Made with Lycra, too! With holding power that won’t wash out, introducing the new Playtex eighteen-hour bra with cross-your-heart protection. It lifts and separates. Even for full-figured gals like me, Jane Russell.”
3. I remember crying, even though the days of my mother choosing my clothing were far behind me, when I read that lovely scene in The Accidental Tourist, where a painfully shy, homely little boy whose mother dresses him terribly was taken by a nice man to a store to get his first pair of blue jeans. He looked at himself in the mirror amazed: “Wow, I look great!”
4. According to the legend of the nymph Daphne, she rejects Apollo’s advances and is turned into a laurel tree by her father, the river god Ladon. She chose to remain “an unmoving tree rather than the bride of Apollo” (D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, p. 95).
5. Once again, truth is stranger than fiction: Alex was a college housemate of the man who would become my therapist. When I started therapy, in my late teens, I certainly didn’t have to prove to him that things were crazy around my house. He remembers telling Alex to leave the kids alone and get out of there.
6. Apparently, he was seeing Ms. Dunaway at the time, or at least my mother thought he was, I don’t know, I only remember her name being hissed.
7. I’m so dumb that at a memorial service for Rachel’s mother last year, I saw Gail’s mother and urgently, passionately, wanted to convince her I didn’t do it. I refrained, but barely.
19
“To Sir with Love”1
Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.
—quoted by Teddy in Nine Stories
SPRING VACATION WAS AROUND the corner and my dad was taking Matthew and me to England and Scotland for two weeks. I couldn’t wait. I had no idea, at the time, that it would be the last time we’d take a real vacation together as a family. Writing about our last travels together, the twilight of an era, is bittersweet, like an Indian summer, a temporary reprieve, a stay of winter. And like most tales of leaving home, or the end of an era, something is lost, something is gained.
Daddy, Matthew, and I were off to London. Mom drove us to the airport, fifteen minutes away, in Lebanon. The driveway to the airport is easily missed. It’s just past the dump, now called “sanitary” something or other, and the crushed-stone pit. Back then, besides the dump and the gravel pit, there were just miles of open fields growing cattle corn. Now it’s all shopping malls and fast food. I saw my first McDonald’s a few years later, on that stretch of Route 12-A, and watched the sign outside with a kind of hypnotic fascination and disgust—like looking at a car accident—as the numbers mounted: over 7 million sold, over 11 million sold. I imagined all those carcasses stacked in great heaps in the parking lot around the West Lebanon McDonald’s.
The airport was little more than a shack and a runway. Inside the shack was a small, five-stool lunch counter where guys sat and had a sandwich and coffee and watched the plane come in. On the lunch counter, by the cash register, was a wire rack of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and yellow packets of Juicy Fruit gum. Next to that, another wire rack with rolls of Life Savers in two flavors: grown-up toothpaste-tasting peppermint, which my mom, in her never-ending battle against bad breath, bought when she forgot her green, “this-is-not-candy” Clorets with real chlorophyl, and the rainbow-colored rolls that kids bought. My system for eating the roll was red, yum; green, yuck, give it to Matthew; orange, so-so; yellow, so-so; and the white mystery flavor I thought was slightly sophisticated, like an acquired taste, not for babies. Matthew made it even better by saying “yuck” and trading the white ones to me for green ones. I liked seeing the packs of gum and the rolls of Life Savers neatly displayed, each in its own rack, a sight that predates another inroad into the disorder of the universe: the alarming confusion of the two, gum and Life Savers, in “yipes, stripes, fruit-striped gum.” When that product made its way to Barto’s store in Plainfield, it smelled good and Life Savery, but once you put it in your mouth, the stick got mushy and almost instantly lost its flavor. You wound up cramming the whole pack in your mouth within minutes and were left with a handful of empty wrappers and a big tasteless glob the color of paintbrush water.
We had a couple of hours to kill before the plane to New York was scheduled to take off. Travel was an event that not only required a ritual rising at dawn but until about 1965, white gloves. I have clear memories of riding in New York taxicabs looking down at my gloved hands. All those ritual designations that one is entering a different place—grandmother’s, the city, church, a ship—were disappearing. When I was young, my experience of place had much more texture to it than now; the world was more like a pieced quilt—here a bit of a favorite summer dress, there my brother’s overalls—than a factory-made blanket, uniform and alike. Although I dislike intensely the distinction clothes and habits make between people—old-money rich, nouveau riche; popular, untouchable; virtuous and slutty; and so on—I do miss the distinction clothes and habits can make between kinds of place. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there is a difference in tone between a special event or place providing a person with an excuse to wear something nice, and the idea that something nice requires a reciprocal formality on your part, like a thank-you note, or covering your head with a scarf when entering an Italian church.
It was a world where clothing could signify not what time it is, but rather, what kind of time it is. Gazing down at my white-gloved hands in a New York taxi, I slipped into a quiet reverie; someone knew where and when the cab would arrive, but for now, the packing, the hurrying, the carrying, the “doing” time was over and there was a respite, a “being” time to sit and just be, a little girl gazing at white gloves in a taxicab. In middle age, my white liturgist’s robe usually signifies what time it is: it’s time for church. I busily serve people wine and bread at the Communion rail, half-consciously worrying if the bread will run out, or if the music will finish before everyone is served and you’re left with an awkward silence in which all the personal bodily sounds of swallowing and creaking are projected publicly in the splendid acoustics of our fine church, or whether I’ll spill the wine on one of the tiny old ladies kneeling—it’s a bit tricky to offer the cup so close to the rail, and God forbid they should wear a wide-brimmed hat and you can’t even see where their mouth is, which doubles the leap of faith in the offering. But once in a while, there comes a time when the work of the Mass ceases, the priest or guest speaker is giving a sermon or delivering a long liturgy, and I sit on the liturgist’s bench and gaze down at my robed hands, not quite mine, smelling the hempy smell of cloth and dust. I’m a child lying on my back in a barn among the roped bales of hay, looking up at the dust dancing in shafts of sunlight streaming in through knotholes and eaves. Barn swallows darting like miracles in the air. A cloud passes between the sun and the stained-glass windows that slowly blink like the eyes of a cat in the sunshine. Sounds of language wash over me, sounds that fall on my soul like a gentle rain on dry roots. It is not time to react to language, to agree or disagree. It’s a different kind of time, a time to lay me down in green pastures and beside still waters, a time to restore my soul.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 29