Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  I wonder if teens today have such places where they try to take better care of each other than they’ve ever been taken care of by adults. I can’t tell you how many safe places there were to crash in the sixties and early seventies, how many hippies, friends, both known and unknown, would take you in. It was like that. More food and hugs with no strings attached, nothing expected in payment; I can scarcely imagine it now, it seems like such a different world. Not heaven by any means, lots of deep, dark depression and troubles and loneliness and emptiness, but there sure were a lot of kids taking turn being catchers, a generosity that could make your head stop spinning.

  SHORTLY AFTER MY FRIEND landed in McLean’s, I received a letter from my dad telling me he found it hard to imagine what my life was like at school. He had heard from my mom that I liked school better than I did at first, which he said probably meant that I was enjoying my friends’ company a lot, which, in turn, made him wonder if their company was worth enjoying. Great, like I have another option? Moving in with the Brontë sisters perhaps? Then followed a major lecture on it’s not who you are with your friends that counts, that’s all an illusion anyway, it’s who you are when you’re alone, what goes through your mind in those moments of aloneness that really counts. All this stuff about some Zen question, “who you were before you were born,” and what is your Original Face. All I could think of was another friend who told me he had had a bad trip one time and saw everyone’s faces melting off their bones as he walked past them. He wanted to put his eyes out but, thank God, didn’t. If that’s the kind of stuff you think about when you’re having one of these moments of aloneness, that or promising the universe for the tenth time this week that you really will eat just cottage cheese and lettuce for lunch every day until those pounds come off, or that if a certain boy doesn’t like you back, you’re really going to die, or that you’ll really read the important books on religion that you asked your dad to recommend, after you write that note to a certain boy and rip it up a hundred times, then you can have aloneness. Dad talked on and on about Zen and translations, bad and worse, of the Bhagavad Gita, but how can you be mad at someone who takes the time to write you a three-page single-spaced letter that ends I love you, dear old Poogoss (an old nickname of mine).

  We had roommates, not just for the reason that the school could make more money that way, but also to save us from drowning in our adolescent aloneness. Holly and I wound up roommates after her assigned roommate refused to continue rooming with her, and my assigned dorm parents refused to continue to have me under their roof, after they accused me of stealing a bottle of wine from their quarters. (It was a stupid incident, stupid on my part, where I was kidding around and pretended to take it to freak out a fellow student and total goody-goody, who was baby-sitting. I returned it to the shelf a few moments later. She told on me, and the dorm parents thought that I only put it back because I was “caught” by the baby-sitter.)

  I moved into Holly’s room in another dormitory. It was known as being the worst room in the school. It was too small to walk around in, you climbed from bunk bed to desk, the ceiling was so low that you couldn’t sit up in bed on the top bunk, and naked pipes were suspended from the ceiling. It was a true pit. Oh, yes, and there was almost no daylight since a seven-foot-high fence ran between the side of the dorm and the street. The fence was less than a foot away from our window. It was put there because the previous year some guy had pulled his car over and was caught looking in the window. Ah! But does anyone smell a strategic advantage? It was an excellent room from which to sneak out at night, undetected, between the fence and the wall, and off into the woods. I’m going to have to drive by there to make sure I’m not dropping a dime on the current occupant. Who knows, these days, maybe everyone is up studying on their personal computers half the night to get into a good college. I doubt it, though.

  Holly had a problem that her other roommate couldn’t deal with. It seemed simple enough to me. Come home dead drunk and make a nuisance of yourself, I stick you under a nasty cold shower until you sober up. Simple. Ditto for whining. She still tells people proudly that I cured her of whining. I slugged her and promised I’d do it again till she stopped. Not the sort of thing a grown parent could or should do to a child, but in loco parentis, we did our best with those we loved, and I sure as hell didn’t see any parents stepping up to the plate.

  My father told me that it was hard for him to imagine what my life was like for my friends and me. He would soon get a three-dimensional look, albeit a brief one, when a bunch of us, about a dozen or more, took the bus up to New Hampshire for the weekend to see Sly and the Family Stone in concert at Dartmouth. We stayed overnight at someone’s parents’ house in Belmont—they weren’t around—and took the bus up to White River Junction the next morning. I can’t reconstruct the logistics of how we all wound up on my father’s living room floor; maybe we went in separate groups in both my mom’s and my dad’s car, I just don’t know. It was a pleasant afternoon hanging out on the rug, drinking soda, eating whatever, my dad being a nice host. He liked us. And we weren’t staying long, which was even better. He told me he thought it was strange but nice that we all hung out together in a group, boys and girls together, as friends. When he was growing up, he said, girls were like a separate species. He really liked how natural we all seemed with each other.

  I was a little thrown off when I took everybody on a walk over to the Red house where I’d grown up. I had told them how beautiful it was, but when we got there, I suddenly saw for the first time what a small, modest place it really was. It wasn’t a status thing, it was the reality check that was so strange. I felt a little like Gulliver waking up.

  Somehow we got to my mother’s house in Norwich, where we were going to crash on the floor that night, and again, somehow, when darkness began to fall, we were holding our tickets and finding our seats to see Sly and the Family Stone. “Dance to the Music.” It wasn’t something for grown-ups, it belonged to the pleasures of another season, our time, the way one’s fragile adolescent boundaries, just taking form, loosen and blend with the music and the night and the moment. After a few years, access to that magical world seems to close over, like a baby’s fontanel. On to pleasures of a different season. Possessing fragile boundaries, where past and future slip away and you’re totally in the moment, while magical in times of joy, sucks beyond belief when you’re depressed or sad or miserable and can’t remember a time when you weren’t sad and can’t imagine a time when you’ll ever be happy again. But this weekend we were together with friends, at one with our music, our time, our world.

  Breakfast at Mom’s house in Norwich, lots and lots of eggs and toast, people rolling out of sleeping bags and smiling. At some point my mother and a professor she was seeing tried to be one of the gang and said something “cool” about smoking “pot.” So gross, don’t these people know they’re o.l.d.? I did something sort of mean, certainly mean-spirited. I took some oregano out of Mom’s spice rack and dumped it along with a few other cooking herbs into a baggie. I rolled it up and put it under a towel in the downstairs linen closet. I kid you not, she called a few weeks later to let me know she found “something” we’d left behind. Oh, yeah, what’d ja do with it? She and her professor friend, she said with a girlish giggle, smoked it. Just as I thought, rolling my eyes, so queer. Please, somebody, remind me when my son is a teenager that “cool” parents are so uncool.

  To everything there is a season, turn turn turn, and it’s not your turn, if you’re thirty or forty or seventy, to be wholly ten or fourteen or sixteen again; because if you are, then your kids or your students are forced to be old before their time. There were two old guys at school, one was a “dorm parent” and the other a really old teacher, both English teachers for what it’s worth, who were having sexual intercourse with students. In both cases that I knew of, it was the girl’s first time. It’s not so much statutory rape that occurs to me as an appropriate charge, but rather Theft of Youth, or a kind of Vampirism
these men should be charged with. The Greek and Italian country people have it right: allow your daughters out of your sight only with garlic and henbane woven into their hair and tucked into the hem of their dresses to ward off all things unnatural and out of season.

  In my father’s frequent letters, one thing he never asked about was “how’s school,” meaning classes. He had lost touch with Holden’s days of earthly pain—friends drinking, a kid jumping out a window, his friend Jane’s stepfather “getting wise with her”—and had departed for esoteric realms that left me behind entirely, but at least he hadn’t left the galaxy to the extent that he thought classes might be a great topic for conversation. Class time was, for me, at best a distraction. It was not unlike the myriad commercial interruptions of an engrossing movie on television: an annoying reminder that my life was “brought to you by” the Cambridge School of Weston.

  Some students actually learned something. I’m not saying the education there was totally irrelevant, just that it was to me at the time. Every once in a while, around report time, it intruded in the form of having let down my adviser, Mr. Castillo, yet again. He was such a nice, sincere man who, to my real sorrow, believed in me and in my ability to use my mind. Like Holden, I kept promising to apply myself, meaning it, and I kept letting him down. I finally had to change advisers, I couldn’t stand it anymore, disappointing him that is. After that I “underachieved” with a clear conscience. I should probably have sent him my awards from Brandeis or Oxford with a thank-you note to let him know he needn’t worry about me anymore, that I really did discover the pleasure of using my mind and “applying” myself for the sheer joy of it. But for me, high school was neither the time nor the place.

  I paid attention sometimes, but not to the things that helped on tests. In the classroom where we met for English, for example, a beautiful glass mobile hung above us in a skylighted alcove. I remember the sunlight catching pieces of broken glass, in dozens of colors, each separate piece wrapped in a thread of silver, like a present tied with ribbon, the threads dangling from a single silver circle at the top. I do not remember a single solitary thing I read all year. I’ve come away from high school with exactly two books remembered: Nicholas and Alexandra, chiefly because it was so unbelievably huge, even in paperback, that I couldn’t believe we’d ever get through it. I recall a certain pride in sheer volume when I finished it. The other book was Les Chaises by Ionesco, because I loved my French teacher, Suzanne. She took us to see the play in Cambridge, at night, like real people, on her own time.

  It was not just the internal and social business of adolescence that made classwork so peripheral; society at large was in turmoil. America was at war in Vietnam. Around the beginning of November we heard there was going to be a march on Washington to protest the war. Many parents agreed to write permission slips to a phony destination so we could go. Perhaps the school needed such permission slips to cover themselves legally, but with the charter buses to Washington from the Weston area stopping off in the school parking lot, I don’t exactly know who was fooling whom. It was nighttime and I slept in the overhead luggage rack the whole way down, feeling very clever to have found a place to stretch out on the crowded bus. We were to spend the day and return home on the bus the next evening, so no one had brought luggage. I was excited to find that the author of one of my favorite children’s stories, The Diamond in the Window, in which kids really do get caught in dreams, was on board. I didn’t speak to her, of course, assuming she’d hate the invasion of her privacy. One of my favorite “children’s” books, I thought; this person wrote books for the eight-to-twelve-year-old group. I was thirteen years old on that bus to Washington.

  The letters I received, in conjunction with this trip, one from my mother and one from my father, are from two rather interesting planets, but not the one I lived on. My mom was so into the antiwar movement that I nearly didn’t go. P.S., I had no idea who “Green Phantom” was then or now. It’s a weird feeling to be called someone else’s nickname, a “familiarity” from a dimension you don’t happen to inhabit.

  Nov. 10th 1969

  To whom it may concern:

  Peggy Salinger has my permission to spend the weekend of November 14–16th with Adrienne F. and her family.

  Yours truly,

  Claire Salinger

  Dear Green Phantom,

  Enclosed are a few good things on Vietnam. Excellent book Peace in Vietnam put out by Quakers—good on theory and background. The others are the best of the things I have on hand. Please read them. If you object to the war, wish to go to Washington and demonstrate then I think you should know what you are demonstrating both for and against. Please return the Peace in Vietnam book when you are through. Please circulate others after you’ve finished them.

  I am having a hectic time. School is busy and requires much traveling. I am also getting deeper and deeper into protest work, so seem to be leading 3 full lives (other as mother and housewife—private type things) worthwhile but tiring!

  Now for the dates:

  1. I put off your orthodontist ’til Fri. Nov. 20 at 2 P.M., will write school for permission. Dr. Beebe said you had missed no appointments, didn’t sound a bit mad about one you were late for. NO apt. this Friday.

  2. Enclosed permission slip for Washington.

  3. If you don’t go let me know as soon as possible. If you do go: think Peacefully.

  4. I will be away all day Sat. (from about 4 A.M. to 11 P.M.) am going to Canada with some members of American Friends Service Committee to give medical supplies to NLF and North Vietnam as part of stop the war day.

  If you want to be at home that weekend its fine with me as long as you know I’ll be away Saturday. Daddy and Matthew will be going to a Dartmouth football game Sat. afternoon otherwise you could be with them or in Hanover or whatever you feel like. I would love it if you came with me, for I think you would like the people but the car trip is long and I don’t know what we will face at the border.

  Anyway let me know. I could drive you on Friday if I knew well enough before hand.

  It rained for a week here. Aretha [my cat] brought home a young fish. Still don’t know where she found it. Maybe from one of our rich neighbors’ outdoor fish ponds. Maybe the sky dropped it. Maybe it thought our swollen brook a river. I think Aretha is pregnant again!

  No more news—

  Much love,

  Mom

  XXXX

  p.s. Keep an account of how you spend your money!

  p.p.s. Fill in Adrienne’s last name please.

  Oh, the drama! But she was probably quite right in saying I should know something about the war if I was to go to the protest. I read the book cover to cover . . . right! I was never a pacifist, nor did I think I was at the time. I was partly just being a follower, a “sheep” as my father put it, and partly protesting against the lies I thought we were being told. I’d heard stories of guys over there fragging their superiors who were following insane orders, such as having to stop pursuing the enemy when they crossed a certain geographical line on a map and just sit there like ducks while the enemy regrouped and attacked again. But I was even sicker about this business of my mother and her friends giving money for “medical supplies” (not to mention a North Vietnamese orphanage) to the NLF. Did you just fall off the back of a turnip truck? There is a war on. If you don’t think that money will find its way to the war, you’re a complete idiot. Or so I put it, with my usual tact, to my mother. That seemed like a bigger lie than even the stuff that came out of Washington.

  My father’s letter arrived a few days after I got back. He was writing in answer to some questions I had about macrobiotics. A friend of mine went macrobiotic and I was seriously worried that he was going to starve himself to death. He looked just terrible. I asked my dad for some help in this matter, knowing he used to adhere to the diet. He wrote back a long, detailed diatribe against the founder of macrobiotics, George Ohsawa. It must have taken him hours. I was glad to have it, even more s
o that my father had suggested meeting with the boy over lunch sometime to let the conversation flow naturally, since it might turn him off in a letter. How many kids in the sixties could write home to their parents with questions about new stuff like macrobiotics and get a multi-page single-spaced letter in return? Sometimes strange is not so bad. But strange barely begins to cover it.

  The basic argument was that George Ohsawa could not have been a good scientist or discoverer of worthwhile, valid principles of diet and health because he was, himself, an impure person. He was a name dropper and an opportunist, according to my father. This was the first and foremost argument, that the source of the diet was not a pure person, and therefore, his purported discoveries could not be pure. Then my father documented some basic lies and cover-ups, such as that Ohsawa himself died of cancer when he promised perfect health to those who followed him. Fair enough. And a whole bunch of stuff about crystalline properties of salt and blues and violets and the subtlety of yin and yang classifications that escaped Ohsawa, to say nothing of Miss Salinger. The letter was interrupted at one point, I remember, because my brother had awakened from a bad dream and walked into my father’s study crying, so he had to take a break from writing to me to put Matthew to sleep in his (Daddy’s) bed with the lights on. This was both astonishing and inconceivable to me, or I should say, were it me. I’d have no more dared knock on either of my parents’ door at night—well, it wouldn’t even have occurred to me as a possibility. It’s amazing how siblings can experience totally different families, how life can be so much different for one than the other, and they’re both telling the truth. At the very end of the letter he mentions that I should take good care of myself if I go to Washington. “Please do. You’re the best of girls and I love you.”