After lunch, Daddy, Bet, my brother, and I went to visit Edna O’Brien for the afternoon. He told me with a conspiratorial wink that Edna was a good writer and a hell of a nice girl, but she wrote some really dirty stuff. (Not crummy, bad dirty, but sexy, naughty dirty.) Like a kid talking about a naughty and daring classmate, he clearly was really rather shocked and giggly about what she chose to write about. I wonder how many other writers of banned books are, in fact, rather prudish.
After tea, Edna took us out to a park where something was going on that was supposed to be of interest to children. The park was packed with people, and I had an attack of claustrophobia. I had trouble breathing and told my father quietly so the others wouldn’t hear. He picked me up and put me on his shoulders, high above the crowd. He said to the others that it was too crowded here to see anything and strode off across the park as if it were the most natural thing in the world to carry a five-foot-seven-inch twelve-year-old on one’s shoulders, which perhaps he thought it was.
The only not so fun part of the trip was the main reason he had come over in the first place. He had been corresponding with a teenage girl, and things had blossomed into a pen pal romance. He was to meet her for the first time in person. We planned to drive through Scotland with her in search of where my father’s beloved 39 Steps was filmed.
We flew to Edinburgh, where the girl met our plane. I could tell something was wrong the instant they greeted each other. I didn’t know what was wrong until he told me, later in the trip, how terribly embarrassed he was when he saw her. Embarrassed and guilty. I asked him why, and he looked at me as if I were puzzlingly obtuse, when it was as plain as the nose on her face. “She’s terribly homely, poor girl, I had no idea.” Now this girl did not have two heads, nor was she ugly; she was plain. And that was that for my father. At the time I accepted it as law: boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, requiring no further question on my part. Who knows, maybe she didn’t think he was such a bargain either. I rather doubt it though.
She was quite nice, but rather shy and awkward, and I had to share a room with her for the duration of the trip. They would not have shared a room, regardless of attraction, since, unlike my mother, my father was not of a generation or a mind-set in which a gentleman was remotely open about his sexual activities, if indeed there were any. This made all the difference in the world to me; the lack of overt sexuality on his part made things decent in my own mind, unlike my mother’s behavior, which so mortified and disgusted me. I wish, for this girl’s sake, though, that she had had a room of her own, rather than having to share one with me. I felt so sorry for her and I thought she probably wanted to cry but couldn’t because I was around. She sniffled a lot at night, but I was afraid to say anything, to try to offer a kind word, because she was the type to have allergies and adenoids, and I didn’t want to make her feel any more homely if she was just sniffling and not crying. My memory gets a bit cloudy at this point because I saw Hitchcock’s Psycho at a local Scottish movie theater, which unhinged me so that the next couple of days are a blurry mess, as if seen through a shower curtain.
What I saw of Scotland, as we drove from Edinburgh to the west coast, I thought was spectacularly beautiful, but most of the time I was horribly carsick and either throwing up or lying still in the backseat with my eyes squeezed shut trying not to throw up. Most of the scenery I saw was at the all too few and far between spots in the road where it was possible to pull over and let me vomit outside. The respite from the nauseating motion, the cool air in my face, and the relief of having just vomited made the already beautiful countryside look like God’s finest on the day of creation. Damp heather and heath smelled heavenly, lakes sparkled like Pearly Gates.
My father was absolutely delighted when we were delayed by a flock of sheep in the road. That was how, in The 39 Steps, the hero and heroine were able to escape, handcuffed to each other, from their captor’s car. The sheep blocked the road, and while the driver was shooing them, our heroes snuck out the back door and hid under a little stone bridge over a stream. We looked for signs to Alt-na Shelloch, but came up empty.
Years later, when I was home from Oxford, I was dating a British investment banker whose family had a house and farm in Scotland. My dad asked him, when they were playing golf over in Windsor, about The 39 Steps, if he knew where it was filmed. My friend’s mother not only knew, she remembered the filming, and when I visited, she pointed out the very house, still with its lovely diamond windowpanes, where Robert Donat was “led up the garden path, or is it down, I’m never sure.” I sent my father some photographs I took of the house and of the little stone bridge where they hid by the stream.
We drove westward across Scotland from Edinburgh to Oban. At Oban, or perhaps it was north a bit at Mallaig, we caught a ferry to the Isle of Skye. A big seagull bit my brother on the finger as he held out bread to them at the railing. All I remember is him crying a lot—it was a nasty bite that broke the skin—and my father was consumed in remorse that he had let Matthew feed them by hand. My father was furious with the seagulls.
Things picked up again as we dropped off his not-to-be girlfriend, boarded the Queen Elizabeth II at Southampton, and set sail for home. Thank God it’s just cars and sailboats, and not ocean liners, that make me vomit. Once I figured out where everything was, including all exits and lifeboats, I relaxed and enjoyed myself. I met up with a group of teenagers the second day and really started to have fun. That night, I stayed out later than my bedtime hanging out with them. Daddy came looking for me. I was holding hands with a young man as we walked down a corridor with a bunch of high school juniors and seniors headed for the dance area. When we turned the corner, I spotted my father coming from the other direction. I ducked into a side room, dragging my date by the hand. Daddy didn’t come after me. He allowed me to pretend I didn’t see him and to return on my own, a few minutes later, so as to let me keep my dignity. At an age when the mere existence of a parent was mortifying in public, Daddy was about as unmortifying as a parent could be.
I ARRIVED BACK AT SCHOOL to a slew of notes, asking after the Beatles, planning new dances, and with fast-breaking fashion bulletins. I’m sad to say, I had no news to report of the Beatles. Crazy as it might sound, I hold but one regret from my childhood—by regret, I mean sorrow for things that could have been, rather than sorrow for things that I wish were possible, such as my parents’ mental health, for example. I really, really regret that I didn’t meet Paul. Then. Although my father promised me that if I still felt the same way in a couple of years, he’d do his best to arrange it, I didn’t know it at the time, but, of course, the magic was not timeless. It did not belong to the realm where there is no difference between ten and twenty, or ten and eighty. It belonged to a time when the whole world was bursting into flower, and a twelve-year-old girl, even a tall one, was easily camouflaged in a sea of sunflowers; a time when 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, the trail of her scent undetectable amidst great wafts of Yardley’s English Lavender, Jean Naté lemons, incense and peppermints.
* * *
1. Lulu top hit for 1967, from the movie of the same title.
20
Safe Harbor: A Brief Interlude Between Islands
THE SUMMER OF ’68, BETWEEN seventh and eighth grade, I was off to a ski camp on a glacier in June somewhere in Montana. What I wound up learning was not how to be a better slalom racer, but something far more important to me. I learned what life was like in an extended family who made room in their lives for an islander. My technique in both areas, family living and skiing, needed a lot of improvement. I had won medals in a couple of races, but only in downhill events where, at that age anyway, the person who could live on that thin edge between movement and disaster, and keep a clear head, won. I did okay at giant slalom, too, where the gates were set far apart, and again, it was more speed than finesse. My n
emesis, however, was the slalom event with its zillions of poles set so closely together it was almost like ballet to get through; you had to be so quick and nimble and graceful. I was a nervy, powerful skier, but with all the finesse of a cannonball. I just didn’t have the chops to go all out and do all those tiny turns at the same time. I almost always skipped a gate or caught an edge and fell.
The camp bus met us at the airport to take us from Billings, Montana, to Cook City and base camp. I don’t remember how long the journey was, several hours at least, but I do remember thinking we were all going to die. I’d never been on such steep mountains and such narrow roads. The girl next to me took a look out the window on one curve and promptly vomited all over the seat. I’m sorry for the girl, but it turned out to be one of the best pieces of luck I’ve run into. If God works in mysterious ways, this surely was one of them; I landed in the arms of a family who, to this day, remain some of the most important people in my life. A girl named Liza invited me to sit with her rather than in the vomit. Liza’s mother and two younger brothers were on the bus, and by the time we got to Cook City, her mom had arranged it so Liza and I could be roommates.
The town was spooky. It looked like a stage set for the Clint Eastwood movie where, in the opening scene, some guy gets bullwhipped for about forever. (I can’t tell you the rest because I ran out of the movie theater.) It was all dusty with unfinished splintery-wood buildings; the sort of place that might still have outhouses, I thought with dread. But when I saw a big sign on the general store that read “We sell fireworks,” I knew everything would be okay. Contraband was the coolest. On a trip to Venice with my grandmother and mother, I had sailed through New York customs with one red and one black Venetian stiletto knife, scored on a stroll through the back streets near St. Mark’s, tucked in my sweet little navy blue purse along with my beautiful Murano glass egg and a millefiori broach. Anything to declare?
The first night Liza and I had a scare. We caught some creepy boy peering in our cabin window. Her mom, Mrs. R., immediately had us moved into the main hotel. The next morning, after breakfast, we were trucked up to the snow line in the back of some sort of convoy of dump trucks. There, we were met by a Sno-Cat with ropes hanging from the back that we were to hold on to while it pulled us up to the glacier. It was a sunny day in June, the snow sparkled, and I felt confident because I was one of the few kids who knew how to fashion a makeshift Poma lift with my ski poles on the rope tow, freeing my hands, and because I had the pleasure of my new friend’s company. Liza’s mom, an instructor at their local ski area, had covered our ears and noses with zinc oxide so we wouldn’t get sunburned. All the cool instructors were wearing zinc oxide the same way, I was relieved to discover. I couldn’t wait to get started.
As the Sno-Cat towed us higher and higher, I tried to take a breath and suddenly found there was no air. I started blacking out, or “redding” out really; the zigzags that blanketed my vision from the outside in were red not black. I’m fuzzy on how I got back down to breathable air. They said it was altitude sickness and it would pass in a few days, but try as I might, it never did. Liza’s youngest brother, Joel, was having a ball, but the rest of the family was less than thrilled about the skiing, and so Mrs. R., never one to let an opportunity go to waste, arranged to borrow a station wagon, and we spent the next few days touring nearby Yellowstone National Park. What a blast that was, like walking around in one of my science fiction books, great mud pits burping sulfurous bubbles, otherworldly blue-green, jewel-like craters of liquid, and geysers of warm water that carried smells from faraway places, journey from the center of the earth.
Stranger still was being a member of such a closely knit family in which parents and children did not, for the most part, lead separate lives. I had no template for that, not even in books, where, at that age, most of the characters were orphans or living with a strange aunt or running with a pack of friends away from home on holiday. Foreign “adventures” I understood; daily life with a family was entering terra incognita. After camp, I spent most of the rest of the summer with them at their home in Pennsylvania. Liza’s brothers, Sig and Joel, shared a room plastered with ski and racing-car posters, while she and I bunked in together in the “princess suite,” the small room of a beloved only daughter, done to the nines in “girl” thanks to Nana’s sewing machine, and Kurtz Brothers’ Department Store downtown, where Mr. R. was a partner. I had a great summer, riding Joel’s go-cart around their cul-de-sac, riding around in cars with boys Liza knew because she was sixteen. I tried my best, at the time, to ignore her middle brother’s existence because at thirteen, he was, technically, a year older than I and, as such, was a walking threat to my inflated opinion of my own maturity. No way am I that young, I’d think, looking at him, rolling my eyes.
When God was doling out patience and good cheer, Mrs. R. got a triple portion. I had no idea how to behave in a family that wasn’t at war, or whose parents hadn’t, basically, recused themselves from active duty. Mrs. R. still teases me to this day, saying, “Remember how mad you got when we said, no, you couldn’t do [such and such]?” I was, indeed, ready to put up my dukes and fight to the death over every little thing. “You used to say your dad would have let you.” (I kept it to myself that I would have told my mother to f——off.) I don’t remember my reaction so much as their saying, firmly and gently, “Well, dear, you’re in our house now and we say no.” Big sulks hurled at Mrs. R., which didn’t seem to trouble her in the least. She was the grown-up and I was the kid, and if I wanted to sulk, fine; it wasn’t going to rain on her parade. I stopped sulking.
Stripped of my bluster, though, I felt downright uncouth, like a bull in a china shop. I kept trying to plow through things that required civilized stepping. I don’t mean things like using the right fork or pinkie spoon; it was all this weird stuff like operating under the assumption that, come what may, you’re going to work things out, because you’re family and you’re going to be family until death do you part. Even after.
Through the years, I’d go with their family to my first wedding, first funeral, first bar mitzvah; thanksgiving and mourning, celebrations and days of atonement. And the same cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and children showed up, rain or shine, at family gatherings year after year. If some couldn’t make it or were sick or had passed away, they still remained a presence, their stories were told. Even the ex-wife (for the longest time there was only one in the extended family) didn’t just vanish into oblivion; all someone had to do was mention her horrible poodles, Beaujolais and Bubbles (BoBo and Bubbie), and the names alone were known to provoke untold glasses of ginger ale or milk laughed up through the nose at the kids’ table.
What a singular thing of beauty to have had the experience of moving from the kids’ table at large family gatherings, to the teenagers’ group, to the young-adults-who-ought-to-be-getting-married-soon, to the blessed producers of GRANDCHILDREN (oy, do we have pictures!), who now sit at the kids’ table together. What a ballast as the planet hurtles through the universe, a way to check in and regain perspective and a sense of where you fit in, or more importantly, that you fit into a pattern of life regardless of how strong or how tenuous your grip on life may be at a given time. Nor is this some perfect fiction like the Waltons. There is luggage teetering off the overhead rack a-plenty, but no one goes unclaimed. And there is always a place set for Elijah.
TOWARD THE END OF THE summer, the whole family—Mr. and Mrs. R., Liza, Sig, Joel, and I—piled into the station wagon to drive me back to Cornish. Mrs. R. asked me recently if I remembered the big argument my parents had had after we arrived. “You had a strep throat and Claire wanted to get you on antibiotics. Jerry wanted to treat it homeopathically. I think your mother won.” She smiled, shaking her head. Plus ça change . . .
I don’t remember that particular argument; why should I when I’d heard variations on that wretched theme my whole life. Even if it had been a real doozy, it would have been eclipsed anyway by emerging events. S
hortly after the R.s went home, Daddy called to take us swimming in the Coxes’ pond in Windsor. This is something we often did each summer—we had a standing invitation. I put on my new two-piece bathing suit that I’d bought at Mr. R.’s store, threw on a T-shirt and shorts, and waited outside for my father to pick up my brother and me.
I’m sitting in the front seat of the Jeep. Daddy all of a sudden looks at me as though he’s never seen me before. Oh, God, he’s looking right at my chest. “Is that really you under there?” he asks. There is no right answer. Either way I’m a phony.
They weren’t falsies exactly; all bathing suits had shaped cups in them back then. Which isn’t to say, however, that I didn’t like the effect, but not on him. The boobs were real enough . . . well, almost, but immediately I noticed a change in his behavior. I’d come under watch, suspected of being one of them, the enemy, a phony. I started to become the object of his suspicion and attacks, previously reserved for my mother, athletic men, and college professors.
At the same time that my sexual development was catapulting me out of my father’s world, life at my mother’s was increasingly sexually charged and unsafe. She was sleeping with younger and younger guys, college students in fact, and as I grew taller and prettier, they were looking at me in that predatory way. It was mortifying having my mother behaving like a wild, rebellious sister. I had heard from several different sources, usually kids with much older brothers, that my mother’s nickname around Dartmouth’s campus was Mrs. Robinson. I didn’t understand the full implications of that until I saw The Graduate, where, to my horror, both the mother, Mrs. Robinson, and her daughter were objects of Dustin Hoffman’s character’s sexual attention. This added an additional layer of humiliation and revoltingness to the Mac “baby-sitting” affair, to think that he might have been playing the “Graduate.” I also took it to be a portent and knew I had to get out of that house before I got any more developed, or it was just a matter of time before one of those boys woke me in the middle of the night and might not take no for an answer. I slept with my fists balled in readiness and my baseball bat under the bed.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 31