Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  The experience of “glimpses,” things you know before they happen, but can’t explain how you know them, was something that on the rez was taken in stride, as part of life rather than a freakish thing. I felt right at home the day Pat and I decided to drive out to visit her grandmother, whom I hadn’t met. She lived way out and had no phone. When we arrived, her grandmother was waiting by the door. She took my arm, with no introduction, and said she’d just finished making up a batch of corn soup for me. Pat told me later it was a special soup you made for someone, with ceremonial ashes of some sort. I’m sure it was just what the doctor ordered.

  Pat’s mom said that since Pat and I were sisters anyway, we should make it official and give me a tribal adoption. I didn’t tell anyone about my fears, but I just didn’t feel ready to inherit all those ancestor spirits as new relations. I sensed that my roots were not deep enough to weather well the influx of all those presences.2

  In hindsight, I don’t think the elders would have let me go through the adoption ceremony without preparing me, teaching me, taking good care of me, but at the time, I was so used to looking out for myself that it didn’t even occur to me. I just thought I’d be up the proverbial shit creek without a paddle.

  BACK AT SCHOOL, Pat, Tracy, and I began to go on road trips up to Dartmouth on weekends. There were a lot of Native Americans at Dartmouth, and weekends were one long party. One snowy day, I met Dan, who would see me through my teenage years as my boyfriend, and through the rest of my life as my beloved friend and brother. He was on the sidewalk outside of Chase Hall, where most of our friends lived until the college built Indian House. I can still remember seeing him and feeling my braces with my tongue, wishing they weren’t there. What I don’t remember is whether he was on crutches or I was. I guess you could call it merging at first sight.

  Dan swears to this day that I lied about my age. (As his own daughter approached her teens, he got even more adamant!) I say I just never happened to mention it until my sixteenth birthday came around and his jaw hit the ground. He was eighteen or so (depending on which birth certificate you choose; his mother has two of them about six months apart) and a sophomore. His dad was a Mohawk high-steel worker, like many Mohawks from the rez outside Montreal who drive down to New York to work on skyscraper construction all week—they’re famous for walking along steel girders, forty stories up, as if they were on the ground—and drive back home on weekends. His mom, we discovered recently, was several people—multiple personalities sharing one frail body that lived on cigarettes, coffee, and the kind of dry assorted cookies that come in cardboard boxes with a cellophane window that only old people seem to buy in small, neighborhood markets. She was, but for the grace of God, and a lot of help from my friends, the very thing I was terrified I might become. But I never again had a blackout or “schizo” episode after Dan and I met. We were both loosely moored indeed, but somehow managed to keep each other afloat until adolescence subsided, and I got some psychotherapy—no, a lot of psychotherapy—and he transferred from Dartmouth to Oberlin, for him a much more supportive environment where he finally allowed his brilliance to shine all the way through Yale Law School.

  To this day I have no idea how, in 1972, a New York tabloid got wind of our relationship; I was not exactly what you might call a social butterfly. They referred to Dan as “that Red-Indian that Salinger’s daughter is dating,” which, according to said tabloid, should “bring the recluse out of the forest!” I think Lillian Ross, our friend from The New Yorker, spotted it and told my father, who in turn told me about it so I’d hear it from him and not someone else. Contrary to tabloid predictions, however, when I brought Dan home for inspection and interrogation, Daddy took to him so well that he brought out old tapes of me singing my war songs at age four. Dan is the only person I know of who has seen some of the goodies in my father’s arsenal. I wasn’t even allowed to see most of them.

  Daddy had taught me to shoot the way Seymour taught marbles—no aiming. You just think of the gun as an extension of your arm and point. If you think about it, you miss. I liked to choose a daisy far away and nip off just the flower; if you got the stem, it didn’t count. Daddy was impressed with Dan’s marksmanship, and it takes a lot to do that, but I wasn’t crazy about the “not there” look Dan got on his face when he shot. Even less crazy about it two years later when I walked into my college dorm room to find him naked, sitting in the dark, with a .38 pointed at his face, ready to blow, and I had to talk him back. Or the time I woke up to find him sitting bolt upright, shotgun pointing at the end of the bed. When I carefully asked what was up, he said, “Don’t you see them, don’t you see the bastards?” I crossed myself. Thank God, this time, I could not. I’m spooked by the unseen worse than anything else, the kind of thing a gun can’t touch. Silver bullets and henbane maybe.

  Dan would never have survived his childhood had he not been very, very smart. Lots of people, aside from family members, had tried to kill him: living on the South Side of Chicago in the middle of Blackstone Ranger territory and being the wrong color didn’t help. Given the expertise he developed in strategies for survival, it wasn’t all that surprising that he had a natural talent for chess. Over Thanksgiving of ’71 he was in a chess tournament in New York City, so when my dad wrote to tell me he was going to be in New York for Thanksgiving, I thought I’d hitch a ride with him. I also wanted to visit a school friend, Trisha, who had been hospitalized in New York for at least a year with a strange paralyzing disease. My dad spoke to her and convinced her to try sitting, or being sat actually, in an orgone box.3 No miracle cure to report.

  My diary, which I kept from ninth grade throughout high school, records the holiday pretty succinctly. I caught up with my writing during down time, like in class. The Thanksgiving holiday entry begins, “Here I am paying attention in math class as usual.” I wrote that my dad and I checked into the Drake Hotel and had a few meals together on the day before Thanksgiving. On Thursday, “he was going to go out somewhere and I was going to stay at the hotel and order a feast from room service.” I didn’t think much about it, but when I called Holly, who was in town for the holiday, too, she was horrified at the idea. She called back and we went over to her grandmother’s for Thanksgiving dinner. After dinner, “we went looking for a movie and booze, found neither, and went back to the hotel, watched a Bogart movie, and sacked out. Friday I kept trying to call Dan but he wasn’t in. Daddy left and dropped me off at Holly’s father’s house.”

  I finally worked up the nerve to stop by the hotel where the chess tournament was being held. When I saw Dan, he was really happy to see me, but he was staying in a room with three other chess players from the Dartmouth team, so it would not have worked out to stay there, to put it mildly. Have you ever been near chess players during a tournament? It’s not pretty.

  I flew back to Boston that night. I remember looking down at the city from the plane window and feeling frightened that Dan was somewhere down there amidst all those millions of lights and I was up here in the night, separated from my mooring by miles of black sky.

  CHRISTMAS WAS A WINNER, TOO. Dan was in Chicago and I was in New Hampshire. I wrote in my diary:

  Dec. 24th ’71

  I HATE Christmas. I can’t wait until the whole business is over with. What the fuck am I doing with my life? I’m fat as hell, and completely hung up over Dan . . .

  Monday 27 Dec.

  Christmas sucked beyond belief. Dad and I had a fight. I miss Dan. I got new pens.

  That’s all I wrote that day. I packed up and left and spent the rest of the vacation staying with Amy’s boyfriend in the South End. While I was there, I wrote about the fight I’d had with my father. It had started, as usual, over seemingly nothing. For some reason he got angry that I didn’t return a phone call from someone I hadn’t seen since fifth grade, but whom my father liked and chatted with each week as he paid her for the groceries she’d rung up. He had suggested she call when I was home, I guess. I wrote (cover your ears, gent
le reader!):

  The following day Daddy blew his cool. He went on about how I didn’t give a damn about anyone but myself and my friends in Boston; not him, Matthew, or anyone else. I was turning into a crass and vulgar person and was hanging around with vulgar and coarse people. He said, in partial reference to my Langston Hughes book, whom he said was a trashy poet, that I was being absorbed head and foot into that culture. “You’ll always have my love and affection but don’t make me lose my respect for you. I change a great deal once that’s lost.” Suck my ass, J. D. I cut out the next day.

  THE NEXT VACATION, Dan was back from Chicago (I don’t know why he was away for a term), and we went to stay at Pat’s for the break. Winter was ending and it was time for spring cleaning, Indian style. Pat told us that the Falsefaces would be coming around some night soon. The Falsefaces (certain men of the tribe who put on special masks that you sometimes see in museums, and who become Falsefaces) go from house to house one night each spring to drive away the spirits of winter and any others that need to be sent packing.

  We were awakened by a loud crash. I ran out of the bedroom. Pat’s two littlest sisters, Tessie and Bethany, were in the hallway hugging each other, eyes squeezed shut. I grabbed them and picked them up. At this point the narrative can no longer flow smoothly because time stopped flowing smoothly. You can’t tell an in-time story about out-of-time or other-time things. That’s why the shape of some stories is a poem. That’s why the shape of other stories can only be a song or a dance. I know I saw the Falsefaces and heard them, but the only thing I guess I’m allowed to remember visually is just a fleeting swirl of the movement of the back of one of them dancing. I know that they were there, and I even have a sense of the pattern of their movements. I also know I had to have seen their faces at the time, since it was all done in the open and the lights were always on in the hallway. Time bends.

  The next thing I remember is I was sitting on the couch with the little ones on my lap and it was dawn. The Falsefaces had gone. Four-year-old Bethany was on my lap giggling. She said, “I wasn’t scared, but Tessie [age three] was, so I hugged her.” Real “catchers” come in all sizes.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL YEARS LATER when I tried to write down this story that I realized that there were things I didn’t remember, and that time itself had been altered. I called up Dan and asked him what he remembered. He doesn’t like to talk about that sort of thing much, but I really wanted to know. He has the memory for patterns of a master chess player, which he in fact was.4 It turns out that he, too, did not realize that time had changed until he tried to string it together, bead by bead, in a spoken story.

  He remembers being even faster than I was out of the bedroom, and that Pat’s stepfather beat him to the kitchen where the Falsefaces had opened the front door with a loud crash. But after that, until the dawn, time and memory stepped out and took up the rhythms of the dancers.

  I BURST OUT LAUGHING ONCE, right in the middle of class at Harvard Divinity School, not known for its levity, thinking about dating on the rez. Some speaker, who referred to herself as an “eco-feminist theologian,” was going on about Native American spirituality, as if it makes any sense at all in the first place to talk about such diverse peoples in the singular, as if they were one entity. She was waxing lyrical about their respect for the earth, and I thought about a double date Pat and I had gone on one weekend, long ago. We had been in town at the bar—I’d been getting served regularly since I was fourteen—and decided to get a couple of six-packs and drive out to a field by Versailles Plank (pronounced ver-sails) Road. We sat around talking and drinking and fooling around a little and looking at fireflies until it was time to go home. We picked up the cans, but as we were leaving, one of the guys left a can with beer in it on the ground. Being Miss Don’t-Be-a-Litterbug, I went to pick it up, saying I’ll just spill out the beer and we can take the empty. In a gentle voice, but one that had that unmistakable quality of authority, he said to leave it. Pat told me later that they always did that, left an offering for the spirits of the field.

  As the professor spoke, I saw that sacred can of Schlitz and laughed with joy. Often where you least expect it, the Spirit is very near you. Sometimes it speaks in Psalms, sometimes in sacred dance, sometimes it just says, When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer.

  * * *

  1. I believe in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

  2. I was at the Museum of Fine Arts last year and stopped in to listen to a presentation by an ethnomusicologist who studied the ritual music and chant of Tibetan monks. Toward the end of the lecture he turned on his tape recorder, as he had been doing, to play segments of chant. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed by a great swirling, whirling amassing of foreign presences. I gripped my seat, scared as a young child on a roller coaster, and hung on, frozen till it stopped, as the lecturer continued babbling about form and structure. Afterward I asked him the nature of that last piece of chant he had played. He said it was a chant to invoke the spirits of the dead. He told me, slightly sheepishly, that he had taped it surreptitiously—it wasn’t one of the ones the monks had given him permission to record. I wanted to hit him. I was so mad I didn’t even think about what he might think of me, and calmly (on the outside, that is) I told him what had happened when he did that. Do you have any idea whom you invited, or whether they were expecting tea or if they might be angry at their non-reception?

  My questions were not entertained by him either, except perhaps in the form of an enhanced attention to the intricacies of packing up his gear. Quickly! As my dad once wrote of such academics, deaf to their own subject matter: “a peerage of tin ears.”

  3. Wilhelm Reich’s invention to capture purported energy rays that he called orgones.

  4. Dan is now a middle-aged, very successful corporate-takeover specialist. As he says, send a “skin” on a raid and look out! Actually it wasn’t so funny during Vietnam. He told me they’d take an Indian, who had probably been no nearer a forest than the city park outside the projects, and send him out on point.

  28

  The Baby Vanishes

  THE SUMMER BEFORE MY SENIOR year I stayed in my father’s old apartment over the garage in Cornish. Dan had a job teaching for the summer with the ABC program at Dartmouth. I might have moved in with him, but my little brother was home in Cornish for the summer, too. I didn’t want to set a bad example, so each and every morning before he woke up, I made sure Dad’s old Saab, which he gave me (couldn’t hold a candle to the Jeep!), was back in the driveway. Dan was great about that, too; he took my brother around and played basketball with him, but he did not show up at the breakfast table.

  One day that summer something quite out of the ordinary happened. I went into town for the mail with my dad. I waited in the car while he went into the post office, no sign of either Mr. Custe or Mr. Curzon. Daddy got back in the car and was looking at the front of an envelope. He stared at it for a few moments, then calmly tore it, unopened, into several pieces and put it in the side-pocket trash. When he looked up, he said it was from Sylvia, his first wife. It was the first he had heard from her since they’d split up after the war. “Weren’t you even curious what she might have to say?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. He said no, when he was finished with a person, he was through with them. At the time, I was impressed by his self-discipline and ashamed at the knowledge that I would have had to at least peek at the letter were our positions reversed. I wondered, silently, if I had a half sister or brother somewhere.

  When I was a very little girl, I used to sit by the side of the road and wait, looking up the road. When my parents asked about it, I told them I was waiting for my older brother to come home. I wasn’t playing, either; I can remember it clearly, waiting for him, certain he was out there, somewhere.

  Shortly after the letter, I was in for another surprise when I woke up at my father’s house and went into the living room only to find this girl enveloped in a flannel night
gown, sitting on my father’s couch. He may have mentioned her, but I don’t remember anything but the strangeness of meeting Joyce Maynard. Forgive a fellow teenager’s thought, Joyce, but this is what Daddy had been waiting for all this time? This is the first “woman,” to my knowledge anyway, he invites to stay? I mean she was perfectly nice and everything, but who expects to find someone looking like a twelve-year-old girl? In the place of a potential stepmother, here was this bizarre little sister of sorts. It was so weird. When she got dressed, she was wearing these little Mary Jane–style sneakers, straps and everything, and Daddy said, “Aren’t those great, Peggy, you can get them at Woolworth’s, you know. Joyce has them in several colors.” I grunted noncommittally and thought to myself, Yeah, Dad, they’re grrrrreat. Gonna run right out and get me some real soon. Right after I turn into a total geek, okay? Converse All Star high-tops were the only thing to be wearing that year, those and my beloved pair of killer black suede, over-the-knee boots with three-inch heels and a contrasting orange suede platform on the bottom. And any self-respecting teenager slept in her boyfriend’s basketball T-shirt, size XX-large, not a kid’s flannel nightie. In my book, if you were a grown woman, you wore a wedding ring, a bathrobe, and were dressed before breakfast with the exception of the flu, Mother’s Day, or nuclear war. In my book, in my fiction.