Behind the living room, going into the hillside as it were, is a galley kitchen and a parallel narrow, long bathroom, each ending in the door to my brother’s and my room. It was not really ours, but it was the one that was called ours when we visited. When Daddy had the house built, we were allowed to choose the colors for the paint and trim for the room. Being kids, we chose our favorite Crayola-crayon colors, aqua (pronounced a resounding New Hampshire ack-wa not ah-kwa) and magenta. We wound up with a subdued pastel pink, not magenta, and the trim was forest green, not aqua, but it was close enough; we weren’t too disappointed. The closet mostly held Daddy’s good suits and jackets, the top shelf, one or two hats and some bags of things that we never looked into. We made room in the closet for our stuff when we visited. I think a drawer or two in “our” dresser was made available as well. Mostly though, our things just stayed in our suitcases under the twin beds.
I don’t know why his suits didn’t fit into his own bedroom closet. Though I’ve visited his house for more than thirty years now, I’ve never seen his closet or his bathroom. His bedroom, bath, and study are in an L off the kitchen. The door is kept locked. I’ve been invited inside maybe two or three times in my life when he wanted to show me something in his study. Once it was some new bookshelves he was thrilled with. Another time to show me a new filing system he had thought up for the material in one of his safes. A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this “as is,” blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.
Several big, floor-to-ceiling safes were housed in the room that was his study/bedroom before he built the L. My memory is a bit hazy about this room, but I remember clearly that at one time he slept in it, because he showed me how he had rigged up the bed so that his feet would be higher than his head, for some yoga reason. Beds had to point due north as well, for electromagnetic health. Above the safes in the old bedroom/study were reels and reels of movies collected over the years before video. The top edges of the room, where a picture rail might be, were papered with my old drawings from his Green house.
The dogs, Joey and Nice Doggie, barked like madmen as always when we arrived. Joey was the dachshund we got after Malinka, a large white husky, began snacking on our neighbor’s pigs. Apparently she didn’t even bother to kill them first: she just bit chunks out of them on the hoof. I was about seven at the time. My mother told me what Malinka had done and said that we had to give her away to an Alaskan sled-dog team. When I was fifteen, my boyfriend Dan, who loved Nice Doggie, asked me about other dogs I’d grown up with. I told him about Malinka and how we had had to give her away to an Alaskan sled-dog team. He looked at me in silence and then with an eyebrow raised said, “Pegs, Alaska?” “Ooh!” I remembered hearing at the Windsor diner that someone had shot a white wolf, but I hadn’t put two and two together. Funny how certain things from one’s youth get buried in a time capsule. Just as well.
After the great white Malinka, my parents bought Joey, a dachshund puppy whose tail had been slammed in a door by accident. When he wagged, it looked a bit like a propeller. Looking at silly city dachshunds in their sweaters and bootees, you’d never guess that they were bred for badger hunting. Real badgers, not the cute ones in stories, have a set of nasty teeth and a temperament to match and are about the last creature you’d want to go down a hole and drag out. That’s just what dachshunds do. Joey turned out to be a far more avid and bloodthirsty hunter than Malinka had ever dreamed of being; she was just too lazy to come home for lunch, I think, and stopped for a bite to eat. Joey lived for hunting. But his chosen prey were wild, not domestic, animals, so he was not deported to an Austrian badger team. He would disappear for days at a time, and you could hear his blood-crazed howl coming from somewhere deep in the forest. He was either a little crazy or a little stupid or probably both in his single-minded pursuit; I cannot tell you how many times he came home with a face full of porcupine quills that my parents had to pull out one by one with pliers. And the number of tomato-juice baths after being sprayed by a skunk—countless.
Joey was also allergic to bees. When stung, he went into convulsions and became rigid and had to go to the vet for shots. Daddy tried to treat him homeopathically with no luck. He lived nearly fifteen years before Daddy accidentally ran over him with his tractor while mowing the field. It was sort of a relief. Never a terribly savory dog—my brother and I used to watch in horror and fascination when he licked his “red thing” as we called it—he grew quite arthritic and wheezy in his old age and spent most of his time asleep, twitching and grunting on the rug in dream pursuit of his nemesis.
Nice Doggie was a prince among dogs. He was a mutt with lovely brown eyes, blondish fur, and a body that looked like that of a well-fed fox. He showed up on my father’s deck one day and simply would not leave. Nice Doggie had chosen him and that was that. My father relented after several days and took him in. He named him Nice Doggie because he said he liked the idea of a little child patting the dog and saying “nice doggie” and then Daddy could say, “That’s his name, how did you know?”
MY FATHER IS A SUPERB dog whistler. He can put two fingers, pointer and ring man, in his mouth and call the dogs miles away. I tried and tried to learn to whistle like that. All I got was dizzy. My brother can’t do it either. I think an oboe reed is probably easier to master. The whole family finds highland sheepdog trials with their subtle and nuanced language of whistles and gestures one of the most thrilling things on the planet. My father especially.
Nice Doggie was happy to see me. He was so intelligent that you knew when he was happy to see you, he meant it. Joey was happy to see anybody who fed him. After nearly four months at Cross Mountain, I felt about like Joey. Food. I stood in front of the refrigerator and hardly knew where to begin, a whole den full of badgers. At my father’s house, though, you sort of had to sneak food. He didn’t so much mind your eating, it just drove him crazy to have somebody else poking around his kitchen. I used his pans wrong or put things back in the wrong place or didn’t put things in the dishwasher the way he did. He grumped about the mess and having to do dishes, but he couldn’t stand it when you did them either. He let me fix myself something to eat once in a while, but you could tell he forced himself to. And he just couldn’t stop himself from hovering nervously. Most of his kitchen stuff was from Sears, not fine china, but it didn’t matter. He always had weird drinking glasses that he was excited to have discovered. That year he had these hourglass-shaped glasses that looked like miniature drip coffeemakers. The ice would stick in the bottom half for a while and then, without warning, slip over the middle ridge and plummet into your teeth or nose. Boy was I glad when the last of those glasses broke. A lot of the stuff he had back then that I thought was weird was, like his interest in alternative medicine, just twenty years ahead of its time. Chinese rice bowls, chopsticks, tamari, sesame seeds, steamers—all standard items nowadays in an urban middle-class kitchen. Those glasses haven’t made it yet though, thank goodness.
It is a tall person’s kitchen. The shelves are built up high, and useful things such as cereal and rice are on top shelves where people of average height tend to store odd parts of food processors and pimentos. He has big, glass honey jars filled with gingersnaps, hard candies, and treats, which he digs into guiltily and hungrily. “Poison,” he’d say. They look beautiful. His freezers upstairs and down are packed, post-Depression/post-rationing style; if you like something, buy dozens and hoard them. Packed away are the latest Sara Lee cakes he’s discovered, vegetables from last summer’s garden, sticky buns from the Hanover Co-op, boxes of pure frozen horse meat (don’t ask, I have no idea why) for the dogs.
He hates to cook and complains and grumps and generally creates a tense atmosphere when he does. Nevertheless, he takes no shortcuts. He makes beautiful soups from scratch with vegetables from the garden and beans and rice. He’s always on the lookout for good recipes and, when he finds one he likes, often sends it to those he thinks might be worthy of such a good soup. The list g
rows smaller.
Breakfast at his house is always delicious. He cooks eggs perfectly, never runny or overdone, a buttered toasted bagel, green (cooked) little peas or perhaps some wild greens he’s picked on one of his walks, and wild mushrooms broiled in butter. He squeezes oranges on a hand juicer and mixes in just a bit of fresh lime. My tastebuds prickle just thinking of it. I think I appreciated it so much, even at that unappreciative age, because of the striking contrast to the daily fare at my mother’s. Hers was straight from the English nursery: milky, runny scrambled eggs that we called mucous eggs or snot-on-toast, and Special K, which, in its dry meagerness, made me feel anything but special.
At my mother’s house we ate breakfast at the table, often with cereal boxes stacked a foot high between my brother and me in such a way as to create a demilitarized zone; we fought less when we couldn’t see each other. My mother grimly chewed her food over the din, while enforcing the rule that you had to eat half of whatever you had on your plate. At my father’s, we ate at a table only when my brother was quite small; after that we ate on trays in front of the television. This was a treat when I was young, but the older I got, the more the constant presence of the television at mealtimes bothered me, especially as my father grew increasingly deaf and the volume got louder and louder.
The next morning, with the predictability of Old Faithful, the comments would begin indicating he had enjoyed my presence long enough. I’d seen it every overnight visit for years. First, the pacing would start. Up and down the living room like a caged cat. This was followed by the general observation, directed at the air, and to no one present of course, “I can never get any work done when people are around.”
He’d set us up in front of the TV while he went back to his study to attempt a few hours of work, but it was clear he was not successful in doing more than a few bills or necessary letters. So, too, his irritation at my “constant fressing”4 grew. There was nothing to do at his house in the middle of winter beyond eating and movies and TV anyway. Reading was done surreptitiously because God help you if you were reading a book he didn’t think was a good one. Talking to my friends on the phone was tricky because it pissed him off and there wasn’t any privacy in the living room.
It’s hard to relax when you know you’re an irritant, that your mere existence is an irritation, regardless of your behavior. The following day, forty-eight hours after I had arrived, my brother and I went back to my mother’s house in Norwich, where I spent the rest of my vacation.
On the way back to school, Mom passed the Farleighs’ car on the highway. They had three children at Cross Mountain. We pulled over and it was decided that I would ride back with them. It was perfectly sensible, but I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to cry out, but I couldn’t. I was four years old again, trapped under the sheets, tears silently running down my face, and all the fireflies were dead or in hibernation.
* * *
1. The “life corner,” or tokonoma, is the place of highest honor in the house, a small alcove in which the family places a beautiful scroll or piece of pottery, maybe some flowers—but only the best is saved for this place of quiet meditation. Guests are seated with their backs to the alcove so that they become part of the place of highest honor and are (spiritually) protected by it.
2. One of my chores that fall was laundry. With name tags, nothing is hidden. I had an intimate knowledge of who had been naughty or nice—bed wetters, first-time bleeders, all the privacy of medieval wedding sheets held aloft for all to inspect and proclaim the deed done.
3. Sometime in the nineties, his third wife, Colleen, had them repaired.
4. Yiddish for animals eating: people ess, animals fress.
23
Midwinter
In the bleak mid-winter,
frosty wind made moan,
the earth as hard as iron,
water turned to stone.
Snow lay falling, snow on snow,
snow on snow on snow;
in the deep mid-winter,
long, long ago.
—Anonymous
ONE DARK DAY IN JANUARY, Kit noticed an oversight in my character molding. I had not yet “volunteered” to take advantage of the opportunity to participate in any of the overnight camping trips.1 She informed me that if I didn’t participate in the very next trip, I would not graduate. It was a three-day hike, midwinter, up Mt. Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks, wearing regular stiff, heavy, 1969, downhill ski boots and regular heavy, downhill skis that had sealskins strapped to the bottom of them for traction, which of course broke or slipped loose every half hour or so, necessitating bare-fingered adjustments that would have tested the patience of a watchmaker.
I was deeply scared because, past a certain altitude, I can’t breathe. I had discovered this at Camp Billings and had been reminded of it again the summer before Cross Mountain at the ski camp on a glacier. The van dropped us off beside the road at the entrance to a trail. We set off, rugged, resilient, and resourceful, wearing our downhill skis (not light, cross-country ones), carrying full packs of food, clothing, and sleeping bags. Eight children and one, count ’em, one teacher. “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye . . .” It didn’t take a genius to figure out that there was no turning back. If somebody were to break a leg, the teacher would have to carry the child a full day’s hike to the road and leave the rest of us on the mountain alone. We had no radio communication, and for the entire three days, we passed no one. It was irresponsible, idiotic, and insane.
Here’s my “risible tale” of injury and mishap on a mandatory outing, which, as Seymour said about strawberrying in the mud, no thirty-year-old man nor sixty-year-old woman had any business inflicting on a child:
At first the trail was fairly level and manageable. We skied all morning. By lunch, I was exhausted but not collapsing. By the afternoon, the trail began to climb, and by evening we reached the shelter where we would spend the first night. Our camp was an open-faced lean-to, the shape of a triangle on its side but somebody forgot to draw in one of the lines. Food is supposed to taste good cooked out of doors, but this was no Eddie Bauer commercial. It was freeze-dried slop that stuck in the throat on the way down. We ate quickly and almost silently, too worn-out even to joke around. I peeled off my damp jeans, climbed into my sleeping bag in a line of other children side by side like peas. The only bit of luck was that my bag was next to a boy I had a crush on. I enjoyed knowing he was near for the few seconds I remained conscious.
The next morning, I realized the stupidity of taking off damp jeans. They were frozen stiff. The sky was an ominous gray and a light snow began to fall. We ate breakfast and set off, leaving our sleeping bags there and carrying only food. The trail was steep from here on in, and I followed endless herringbone ski marks of the kids in front of me as they ascended. I became keenly aware of my pulse beginning to drown out all other sound in my ears. Several hours into it, I saw fear in my teacher’s face when he looked at mine. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me my face had suddenly gone from bright red to ashen. He took my pack, but there was nothing to do but go on. There was no hint whatsoever of my being a slacker; it was clear that my best was not good enough. Dangerously so. I think it dawned on him, at that moment, just how out on a limb we really were.
It was a task not of his own making. He was quite happy, I think, to take kids who were up to it and wanted to go, but it was another thing coaxing a child he knew was forced into it. He, like many of the other teachers who found their way to Cross Mountain, was a bit of a misfit. He was an extraordinarily peculiar-looking, ears-akimbo, awkward kind of guy. I was never quite sure whether he had been in a terrible accident that had rearranged his face sort of all over the place, or whether he had been born that way. Paul would have been quite ugly-looking but for the fact that he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Instead, his gentleness modulated his features into an odd, quizzical expression.
I learned a terrible law of the forced march: the person who
needs the most rest gets the least. Every time the teacher and I caught up to the other kids, they had been waiting some fifteen to thirty minutes. So after five minutes of rest, it was time to push on. I felt like the biggest failure on earth. I didn’t understand the rosy glow I saw in the other kids’ faces. It became clear to the teacher and to me that I was on the verge of collapse. I was ashen, dry; I had no more sweat or tears; I couldn’t think straight. I heard myself moaning as I climbed. I hadn’t enough strength to cry. The other kids can do it. And I may die. Weak, weak, weak. Kit’s words struck home. I must be a coward. I have no moral fiber, I don’t have what it takes. Failure.
Late in the afternoon we hit the tree line. The kids were waiting, having a snack. Breathing was nearly impossible. I inhaled in harsh doglike cries and whimpers that utterly humiliated me to have all the kids hear, but it was beyond my control. Paul told me to look up at the mountain because we could see the top for the first time. It was the worst thing I could have done. I can’t judge distances, and though, in reality, it was about an hour further, it looked to me as though we still had to go the distance we had come, and I knew that was out of the question, beyond any glimmer of a possibility. I looked down at the snow and barren rocks of that scrubby elevation in utter despair and lay facedown in the snow to die.
I began to leave my body. I didn’t know then that I have an autonomic response that causes rapid and life-threatening dehydration. At forty, failure and collapse can occur within a half hour or so of adrenal stress or vomiting and I’m in the hospital for a day or two before I’m properly rehydrated and stable. At thirteen, I thought it was some shameful weakness. What I knew then and know today beyond a shadow of a doubt is that a boy named Charles Romney saved my life.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 36