Each day I walk down to a beautiful open-air market, full of fresh vegetables and fruit and cheese and flowers. I was so far behind my eyes it was like looking through a movie camera at everything. I pointed to things, afraid to speak after the waffle seller on the street in Paris was so nasty about my French, mimicking me with a sour face as if he’d stepped in dog doo, but soon I was trying to speak and was being met with farmers’ smiles. A man at a flower stall handed me a small bunch of wildflowers to smell, making large sniffing gestures. So sweet I nearly disappeared again, but the sun caught me and I handed him the coins and walked back to the apartment. I put the flowers in a glass of water and emptied my shopping on the table. I sat at the little kitchen table in the bright sunshine and watched, quite detached, as entire wheels of Brie and loaves of bread disappeared. I was not thinking, not reflecting, just chewing and gazing blindly, taking in ballast.
I walked along the boardwalk by the sea; the fresh breeze and salt air was clearing my head a bit. Out in the harbor there were three huge U.S. Navy ships. Two sailors behind me thought the tall, thin, pretty girl walking just ahead of them was French, and they said something really dirty in American, laughing, thinking she wouldn’t get the joke or understand. I was so scared I made myself walk a measured pace and listen for footsteps all the way back, shaking, key in the lock, shut the door. I had to sit still, in the bathroom, for a long time and stare at the pattern on the wall, like some fixed point on the horizon, so I didn’t vomit. After that, I no longer walked by the sea alone. Michael offered me his arm as we walked, sea breeze in our hair. Did he know I might blow away?
I bought Michael’s mother a bottle of Cabochard, the perfume she wears, in the duty-free at Orly and one for myself. I have absolutely no idea at all where I went after I got off the plane back in the United States.
I WAS NOT A PERSON with her faculties intact. When I went to spend a weekend away from school at a friend’s family house in Connecticut, my doppelgänger appeared again. As in Paris, “I” disappeared and another “I” disgraced myself in my absence. We had a few drinks, and I mean a few, not many, at a cocktail party my friend’s parents were having, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the morning. His parents, he told me, were out for a walk and had asked me to leave. Apparently I had taken off my clothes, stood on the balcony over their living room stark naked, and I’m not even going to say what I yelled to the assembled guests below, I’m still too mortified nearly thirty years later. He grabbed a blanket, wrapped me up in it, and put me gently to bed. He wasn’t mad or anything, and he said it didn’t surprise him that I had no memory of it because he had this strange feeling that I was somebody else, I didn’t even talk like me.
I knew there wasn’t that much drink in the world to do that to me, but I kept the secret horror I might be schizo pretty tightly under wraps. I neither reached out a hand for help nor bolted the door. I did what had worked at Cross Mountain: I took care of others who were a lot worse off than I. I became a “catcher” to save myself from, as Holden said, “sinking down, down, down” and drowning in my own blood and misery. Other kids sought me out as a good person to talk to about their problems, and I got a reputation for being the person to call if someone was in crisis, tripping out, cutting themselves, suicidal, or whatever. I had and still have a gift of being a good soldier in a crisis and calming everybody down.
I started doing after-school tutoring at Centro Latino in Waltham and being a mentor to a young Hispanic girl who needed help with her homework. I also volunteered one afternoon a week at the Fernald State School for the Retarded. The first time I went there I was taken to a huge room, the size of a gym, that had naked, moaning men in it. Some playing in their feces, some being hosed down. The stench, the other-creaturely noises, the sight of adult male nudity, bludgeoned me, and after about five minutes, I excused myself to the supervisor, ran outside into a field, and threw up. When I went back the following week, they placed me in a higher-level ward where the young men wore clothes mostly, and you could do puzzles and games and talk to them. One of the guys I remember called himself Jughead. He seemed quite fluent and intelligent until one realized that his entire conversational repertory consisted of repeating phrases he’d memorized from an Archie and Jughead comic book. Another absolutely beautiful, perfect-looking little boy used to take my silver ring off my finger and roll it back and forth delicately, slowly, on the table in front of him. I think, had he been left to his own devices, he would happily have starved to death rolling that ring back and forth gazing at it in a reverie until he was released from this nightmare incarnation.
WHEN MICHAEL CAME BACK from France that spring, he seemed wrapped in an impenetrable fog of depression. So thick, so dense, was the gray, I really wasn’t sure he could see my hand in front of his face. I felt, like my mother before me, adrift at sea. The only thing that was clear was that when school let out for the summer, I would find neither “Wild Nights” nor “mooring in thee.”
That summer, between tenth and eleventh grade, I was fifteen, and I alternated between staying at my dear friend Amy’s house and the street. Amy was a day student at Cambridge School and we became like sisters. Neither of us was capable of shouldering the burden of being family—mother, father, sister, brother—to the other, but I never saw two kids try more valiantly to do so. The first week or so of the summer, I awoke one morning in the sunshine of Amy’s bedroom, and as I opened my eyes, I saw I was lying on top of the sheets and wearing a dress. What caught my attention was the mud all over the front of my dress. I let it register for a little while, rather like the time when I was eight years old and I noticed and observed, totally detached, that my pink-and-white seersucker dress had turned red as I carried my broken arm across the field. Terror struck with the dawning realization that I had no idea where I had been since the previous afternoon. I got up and ran down the hall to find Amy. She was in her sister’s room and I woke her up. “Amy, Amy, wake up. What happened to me?” I’ll never ever forget this as long as I live: she said wide-eyed and slowly, “You don’t know?” Oh, shit. This time I think I had more than a few drinks, but a lot less than I consumed on the average weekend at school. We were at an outdoor drinks party in her uncle’s backyard. The adults were drinking heavily; her father and his brother were psychiatrists, but they were obliviously, aggressively, off duty. We were invisible, as usual, leading our own lives and watching the sunset, which is the last thing I remember as a narrative. I recall, Polaroid snapshot fashion, a moment in the dark in the back of a car: Amy’s boyfriend had slapped my face. That’s all. Amy told me that shortly after sunset, I started speaking French to the gathering. She thought I was joking for a second or two, but it struck her very quickly that I didn’t look or sound like me, the way I would sound speaking French, that is. She said it was very spooky because my mannerisms were not my own. When “I” started weeping and shouting and thrashing about on the lawn, her parents told Amy and her boyfriend, Willie, to call a cab and take me home to sleep it off. In the cab, “I” expanded, becoming a large, black, Southern woman, speaking what Amy could only think was some sort of patois, something like Gullah with English. She could understand bits of it, but not all. I started crying hysterically again and her boyfriend tried slapping me in the face to snap me out of it. I reportedly went through a few more iterations, or personalities, on the way home, but fell asleep almost instantly as Willie carried me upstairs and laid me down on Amy’s bed. Her parents were angry that I’d disturbed the neighbors, but drunken scenes were pretty de rigueur around there at the time, and mine was forgotten. But not by me.
Amy’s house, not unlike mine, was a world through the looking glass where everything was inverted, or the reverse of what one might expect it to be. What got me thrown out was not my outrageous behavior at the party, but my accidentally burning a cooking pot with peas in it on the stove. I was so scared when I did it that I hid the pot. Her mother found it, threw me out of the house, and I spent the next while homeless. (N
either of my parents was a viable option.) It was already dark when she kicked me out, so first things first, I broke into a cellar in a nearby apartment building because I saw a couch through the window grate. I tried to sleep but was so worried that someone—the building super or another shelter seeker—might notice the broken window, catch me there, and attack me, I couldn’t do more than catnap. All the comforts of home.
I have to say, though, that given my circumstances, I was incredibly lucky. I hung out a lot in the South End, way before gentrification brought whites to the area; it was just the plain old ghetto back then. I was out on the street all kinds of crazy hours, staying with Amy’s boyfriend sometimes, his cousin’s neighbor another night, sometimes at old Marva’s house. I’d met her at a bar and she liked me. She was shot dead one afternoon in front of her granddaughter. It’s a miracle I had a pretty cozy summer: fish fries on the barbecue, sitting out on the stoop in the warm evening air, drinking blackberry brandy on the basketball court, and nothing bad ever happened to me. Partly because I was smart enough to hang out with the old folks and not get mixed up with trouble, partly due to the extraordinary generosity of people I met, largely because of blind dumb luck.
When I did get into trouble, it was my own stupid fault, nobody else’s. My French teacher, my pretty guardian angel, bailed me out of jail. I had stolen an $11 pair of black satin hot pants from Jordan Marsh. Amy met me at the store to hang out and to try on clothes. She had some really cool clothes, mostly from swiping stuff. She said it was really fun, she did it all the time and showed me how, cramming half a wardrobe into her massive handbag. Guess which one of us got caught? No sooner had I slipped one tiny pair of hot pants into my pocketbook, than a store guard slipped a tight grip around my arm and it was all over. I had $40 in my pocketbook and offered to pay for them, but no dice, I was going downtown. The store had a policy of prosecuting everyone, and the police cooperated to the hilt. I rode in the back of a police car, tears streaming down my face. Each officer took an arm and escorted me like a criminal on TV into the station, where they put me into a holding cell by myself and locked the door.
Different officers walked by every twenty minutes or so and just shook their heads or clicked their tongues in disapproval or said things like “A young girl like you, a thief, imagine that.” The scariest part, one that they hadn’t planned on I think, was that I had no guardian who could come and claim me. My parents were out of state, and I was looking at an overnight in the D.S.S.1 juvenile lockup where a girl I knew once told me there were big lezzies who beat you up and stuff. I called Suzanne, my French teacher, and she came and got me. Oh, man, jail was one place I never, ever wanted to see again.
Later, I used to get out of a car and walk if I found out there were drugs in it—I knew if someone was going to get caught, it would be me. Same with taxes and so on. I’m a big fan of nipping that sort of thing in the bud. I had to go to court twice over those darn hot pants and even see a probation officer. I remember having to go in front of the judge, and the court-appointed lawyer told me to “lose the jeans” and get a “damn skirt.” I borrowed one from another girl who looked as if she knew the ropes and was waiting to see the same judge. We traded clothes quickly in the girls’ room, hardly speaking, and flashed the thumbs-up sign.
Cops and court personnel kept looking at me as if to say, What the hell are you doing here? They sort of made you feel as if you’d let your favorite uncle down. Boy, am I ever grateful I got slammed before I really got into trouble. Even at the time, I wasn’t used to people taking an interest like that, as if you were part of the community and they expected better. “And don’t let me see you down here again, young lady.”
My probation officer was the only one who seemed cynical. She dismissed all that “I’ve learned my lesson” talk as though she’d heard it a hundred times before. She was pragmatic, and her parting words were that it would be a good idea to stay out of downtown department stores for the next six months.
SOMEWHERE INTO THE FALL TERM of my junior year, I was in trouble with the powers that be once again. In fact, my entire dorm was suspended, en masse, for alleged drinking. One of the teachers was visiting my dorm parents when he observed a bunch of us girls all rowdy and giggling and, he claimed, acting drunk. No bottle was found, no evidence of liquor on the breath was mentioned, just the way we were acting. Now, to tell you the truth, I have no idea whether or not some of us were, in fact, drinking at the time. This is because some of us, most especially me, were drinking with such regularity, it is impossible to remember if this was or was not one of those occasions. I couldn’t get too self-righteous about the whole thing on my own behalf, but one of the girls in the dorm, a tiny thing named Phoebe who played the violin and studied, got so scared that her parents would kill her for being suspended that she couldn’t stop shaking. It’s a particularly terrible thing to see someone very underweight, skeletal almost, shaking with fright.
We protested the suspension as a travesty of justice. My mother called and asked my permission to stage a “sit-in” protest in the headmaster’s office. The idea embarrassed me hugely, but she did ask, and I said it was okay, so I don’t have a leg to stand on. She arrived with her sleeping bag and some food and locked herself in the headmaster’s office, issuing a written statement of exactly what she was objecting to, and her list of demands. The outcome, if I remember correctly, was a compromise. We were still suspended for two weeks, but it would not go on our permanent record. One of my dormmate’s parents invited me to come along with them and spend the suspension weeks at the Cheeca Lodge in Islamorada, Florida. My friend and I decided to treat the holiday as a chance to lose weight. I had been in a constant struggle with food since I lost Michael, trying to fill the empty place inside. She and I skipped most of our meals, bingeing, instead, on untold numbers of heads of iceberg lettuce sprinkled with saccharin from little pink packets back at the room.
My father wrote me a letter thanking me for my postcard from Islamorada, which he said sounded rather like Fort Lauderdale but without Wolfie’s. He said he hoped I’d been able to watch the whole suspension proceedings with some “detachment” and to note how justice becomes distorted when each side uses the truth for its own purposes. Love to you, old kid.
* * *
1. Department of Social Services, for those fortunate enough not to be familiar with the acronym.
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Kindred Spirits
Credo in unum Deum, factotem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium, et invisibilium.1
WE ARRIVED BACK FROM OUR suspension from school, my friend and I provokingly tan, to find that we had been split up and assigned to different dormitories. I’m not quite sure what the thinking was, if any, behind the move, but it turned out to be a life-altering piece of luck for me. I was transferred to a private house on school property whose elderly owners rented out two large, upstairs rooms to schoolgirls. The girls in the smaller room were Minnie-Lu, a Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma, and Sheila, an African American from Miami. I shared a room with a Jewish girl, Debby, and Tracy, a Gros Ventre Indian from Montana. Later, Pat, a Seneca from upstate New York, would replace Debby. The Native Americans at school were there through the federal ABC program—A Better Chance. I don’t know what, if any, “better chance” this program in general or Cambridge School in particular offered any of them. Perhaps it has changed, but back then it took smart, poor kids right off the reservation or out of city projects or backwoods Maine and dumped them off at lily-white boarding schools with no cultural support system whatsoever; not surprisingly, the graduation rate for the Native Americans I knew was pretty abysmal. I, however, without doubt, was given “A Better Chance” at life through our friendships. As I write this, I’m wearing the beaded bracelet my roommate Tracy sent me in celebration of my fortieth birthday. In the night-table drawer, next to my bed, are the beaded, deerskin, medicine medallions to wrap my braids that Tracy’s grandmother made for me for my sixteenth birthday. I believe she knew how much
her grandchild’s friend needed some good medicine. Now Tracy writes and tells me that her daughter, Carleen, whom I remember rocking in her baby swing, just had a baby girl of her own. Our kids haven’t met yet, but I can’t wait. Maybe this summer at Crow Fair, we’ll see.
On school vacations, I often went with Pat to stay with her family on the Seneca reservation, outside of Buffalo, New York. She has seven brothers and sisters. The boys, twins then fourteen, had one room, and Pat, being the eldest at fifteen, had a room to herself; the other girls, ages twelve, eight, four, and three, slept on bare mattresses piled in one room; and the baby slept in a room with Pat’s mom and stepfather. Her mom had a pretty good job at the hospital, except she had to work a lot of nights, and her stepfather was a really important man in the tribe. Pat’s real father had died before I met her. I almost met him, though.
Once in the middle of the night at school, Pat sat up in her sleep, moved to the end of her bed, and stretched out her hand. Since I sleep with one eye open and have since I was a kid, I sensed danger and grabbed her arm and didn’t let her touch what she later told me was her dead father’s hand. She said that if she had touched his hand, she would have gone with him. After that, we slept with our beds together.
I loved Pat’s family and felt more at home on the rez than I had since I was a little girl in the forest, and things visible and invisible were accorded the same respect. With my Native American friends, I felt as though my life had come full circle: the fragile balance between dream worlds, forest worlds, spiritual realms, and what most middle-class white people would call reality—cars and jobs and bills—that was part of my life was also part of theirs. We tried, with differing degrees of success, to navigate among these worlds. I recall, for example, my Hopi friend from Second Mesa, Arizona, telling me about trying to explain to her air force captain why she had to go on leave to complete her corn-grinding ceremony or the consequences for her would be dire. Like my friends, I believed in my bones, in a place beyond reason, in the reality of things that go bump in the night. Like many Native Americans of our generation, I, too, lacked the cultural roots, the teachings of previous generations, to be able to handle that kind of boundary-crossing with equanimity. We saw and felt things we didn’t know what to do with and then got drunk in order to provide an explanation for the disorientation and dislocation caused by knowledge not understood, dreams without context.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 40