I decided to take him up on his offer and spend the next Sunday with his family. The St. Jameses lived on the top floors of a four-family that they owned in a predominantly black and West Indian section of the city. They belonged to a tiny church right around the corner from their house. The parishioners were all Barbadian; well, all but that tall, stray, white girl the St. James family brought along with them. Sunday morning we ate a big breakfast, and Mrs. St. James hurried to put Sunday lunch in the oven to bake. Red-eye peas and rice, couscous with sour fish sauce (which for years I thought was called “coo-coo with sah-fish sauce”), and roasted chicken. It was like Thanksgiving. It was thanksgiving.
We walked to church together. Large brown women in flower print dresses and white straw hats greeted each other: “Good morning, sister.” Children passed by neat as a pin in little suits or dresses. A sprinkling of men. The pastor was more than ninety years old. His skin was deep black, not blue-black like some Africans’, but rather so brown and furrowed it had turned black over time like rich Barbadian earth. He had such a strong accent that I could not understand a lot of what he had to say. But when the man asked if anyone wanted to come forward and lay their burdens on Jesus, I heard the call to come forward loud and clear. “Does anybody want to receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord?” I wasn’t sure about the “Lord” part, but a savior sounded pretty wonderful. This Jesus and his family seemed to have strong medicine.
As the pastor invited those not yet saved to come up to the altar rail, people got down on their knees and prayed or almost chanted, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord.” Some got moved by the Spirit and looked as if they were having convulsive fits, yet it wasn’t the kind of fear-filled bedlam I was used to when boundaries broke down. The swirl of sounds and smells and movement, the women’s Ice Blue Secret deodorant and flowered dresses, songs and prayer, wove together a different kind of time and space. As the boundaries of this reality faded a bit, there was not the kind of annihilation or unbeing that I’d witnessed in madness; but rather, a kind of re-being or re-creation that happens in those rare epiphanies in art, music, theater, religious ritual, and lovemaking. I am over the edge, but flying, soaring on the updrafts above the cliff, not falling down the dark abyss. I’m not swept along to the altar, I’m gliding. I kneel and people lay hands on me and pray over me, asking if I wish to accept Jesus as my personal Savior. Yes. Yes, I do.
I walked home feeling light and happy. I wasn’t made to feel self-conscious or special, they didn’t like me any more or any less, nor did they treat me as any more or less welcome in their home. Espousal of their belief wasn’t a prerequisite for love and affection and respect. They were just happy for me and available if I wanted to talk or had any questions—of which I had lots. I was not used to people listening to me, really listening. I learned the difference between cult, where one is required to leave large pieces of who one is at the door, split off, as the price of entry, and community.
I SKIPPED MY HIGH SCHOOL graduation. Class of 1973. Daddy called and said, “You don’t want me to come to graduation and all that crap, do you?” How could I admit that I wasn’t too sophisticated to want any of that pomp and circumstance crap. He almost certainly would have come if I had had the courage to appear stupid. And perhaps he wanted to but said it that way so he wouldn’t feel stupid. Anyway, I didn’t go because I really would have felt stupid when all those kids were hugging their parents and taking pictures and being taken out for dinner.
THE NEAREST COLLEGE TO DARTMOUTH, as I looked on the map, seemed to be New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. It was about forty-five minutes down Route 114 from Dartmouth and offered, as a bonus, a season’s lift ticket to the local ski area as part of the activities fee. I met some good friends there and had a couple of really good teachers—especially my genetics professor, who took us all on a field trip to Boston to see the Spring Flower Show, where he wore his usual dark cape and swooped amongst the orchids. Aside from my introduction to drosophila and plant biology, the best thing about my year and a half of college, given my state of mind, was meeting my foster parents. They hosted a teen Bible-study group in their home, which is how I met them.
I like to think that I was of some help, being the eldest of about ten foster kids and four adopted ones at any given time. But the biggest help by far was to me, that’s for sure. They took in kids no one else would take. Deaf kids, kids with seizures and cigarette burns on their genitals, seven-year-olds with drug addictions (black beauties from their biker parents to keep them quiet), three sisters who wanted to be placed together, mentally retarded twins. I finally had a place to come home to that was as much mine as it was any of the other kids’ in the house. I didn’t feel like a guest, as I did everywhere else, including my father’s, perpetually worried about wearing out my welcome.
DAN AND I BROKE UP when I was nineteen. We were living together that summer in Cambridge and fighting so badly we couldn’t stand it anymore and couldn’t figure out how to make it stop. I’m not kidding. When we decided we had to call it quits, we sat there in the apartment we’d rented for the summer sobbing so hard we had to soak towels in a bathtub of cold water and put them over our faces. Who’d believe you could love each other so much and not get along. Several months later, in a panic, I did my own version of Dan’s bolting off to Africa or Alaska, only I went through with it. I dropped out of school, asked my karate instructor to marry me, and he did. I thought it was God’s will.
I had wanted to have the wedding in Cornish at Saint-Gaudens in the summertime, but my mother and I fought so much over initial plans, I said to forget about it. Actually the plans were the least of it. I went up to check out the facilities at Saint-Gaudens. Just before we were to go down the road to visit, I had to use the bathroom at the Red house. I came back outside and called out I was ready to go. Mom ran out of the house wild-eyed, dangling a wet, used tampon. She was screaming at me, “How could you have flushed it? How could you, this is country plumbing, how could you be so . . .” While her boyfriend tried to calm her down, I backed out of the driveway and was gone. My foster parents hosted the wedding.
My bridesmaid, Amy, had some serious misgivings about what I was doing since I had only known the guy a few months. My dad called Amy and told her he was sick about the whole thing and was sure that I was making a terrible mistake. She agreed and asked him to come to Boston and talk to me about it. He refused, saying, “I have so much piled up on my desk right now, it’s impossible.” She called me right after he hung up, shocked, so I know I have the quote exactly. I found out, years later, that he’d also called Dan to intervene. Dan agreed I was a mess, and that he, too, was a mess about our breakup, but that if he’d known what to do about it, we’d still be together, and told my dad he was on his own on this one.
The evening before the wedding, my wedding party—six bridesmaids and six grooms—all squeezed into my foster parents’ tiny four-bedroom ranch house along with all the family’s many kids who had come home for the wedding. My dear old friend Viola drove down to be one of my bridesmaids. She was put in charge of looking after my dad and keeping him on good behavior, especially since my mother would be there. That night, a thunderstorm hit so badly that the roads from the highway to the ski area, where I was to have my reception, were washed out. In the morning, we slithered down the road to the trailer park where the mother of my Big Brother/Big Sister program kid had kindly offered to set my hair. Big hair.
The ceremony itself was delayed for two hours because my fiancé’s parents were late. We drove up and down the highway in the family van, looking for them for an hour or so, me in my Qiana wedding dress, getting stickier by the minute. Then we thought we’d just better get the show on the road, or off the road, as it were. We had hired a preacher to do the ceremony and provide the music; he was one of those traveling evangelists who do a whole package with a sort of proto-karaoke tape recorder set up with a microphone for gospel songs. He never showed up. My foster father ran out
of the church, down the road, and grabbed the town’s justice of the peace, who came into the church, no lie, wearing a fishing hat with fishing thingies stuck all around the brim. He kept the hat on during the ceremony. My husband’s parents and cousins turned up just as we were leaving the church for the reception. I felt awful about them just missing it, but we didn’t know what else to do.
At the reception, which Dad for some reason paid for, he was easy to spot. My dad was the one standing up with a pained look on his face, Viola trying to intervene, as his finger gesticulated, furiously counting heads, with body language subtle as Marcel Marceau’s, certain he’d been taken advantage of. “I paid for eighty people, where the hell are they!” The storm prevented a number of people—though not the tough guys from the karate school, of course—from making it there, including the caterers with the Chinese food, who finally showed up with cold lo mein about an hour late. My mother came, but after the pictures were taken, she told me she had to leave; she was meeting some friends for a canoe trip. I said, “But this is my wedding. Can’t it wait?” She said, “But I’ve been planning this for weeks, dear,” and left. It could have been worse. At my brother’s wedding she met the bride’s widowed father and, a few months later, announced that she was moving back East to live with him.
ALTHOUGH MY MARRIAGE didn’t work out in the long run, I have to say that it was pretty restful till it blew up. He was cheerful, pleasant, helped around the house, and left my insides alone. No scary merging, just pleasant cohabitation. For most of our marriage, I worked a swing shift, 4 P.M. to 12 A.M., at Boston Edison, and he, I thought, was working nights, so we didn’t see much of each other, which was also okay.
Best of all, for the first and last time, thus far anyway, I loved my job. Right after we got married, I had gone to work as an airport security guard, but had to quit after I threw this weird little “sergeant” who was harassing me up against the cement wall of her office cubicle. Then I got a job waitressing, and one of the girls told me that the Edison (Boston’s electric utility company), headquartered across the street, was hiring clerks, and that it was a great company to get into. After my shift was done, I walked over and applied. It was sort of embarrassing because the human resources guy asked me if I could type, which I couldn’t. But he asked me to put down all the education I had, and for some reason, probably because I felt dumb about applying for a clerk job when I couldn’t type, I included a night-school class I’d taken in auto mechanics after the last car repair bill I’d received and couldn’t afford. He asked me how I’d like to come to work in their Mass. Avenue garage. I looked at him as though he had two heads, and he did something really cool. He pushed the printed details of the starting salary for clerks across the table toward me. Then he pushed across the starting salary for Grade D auto and truck mechanics. Wow! That’s how I became a mechanic for the Boston Edison Company from 1975 to 1980.
I was scared to death my first week or so. I thought the guys would resent a girl in the shop, but luckily a co-worker, Cathy, had preceded me and was such a wonderful person and good worker that my way was very smooth. Cathy, in contrast, didn’t even have a shower installed for her in the ladies’ room for about six months, they were so sure she wouldn’t make it. At first, I got the business from a few of the guys, but somehow I wound up having a garage full of about ten grandfathers, a dozen fathers, and a whole bunch of brothers. They’d been ribbing me for months, saying that the old leather hippie bag I had was big enough to steal car batteries, and so beat-up and stained it looked as if I had been sneaking them out at night. They pooled together some money for my birthday and bought me a nice handbag and a cake—a gorgeous thing from Linda Mae’s bakery—for a surprise party at coffee break.
I was a member of the United Utility Workers Union of America, A.F.L.-C.I.O., wrote for the union paper, and helped organize a chief stewards’ conference on health issues, such as asbestosis. What a great feeling to have worked hard writing an article and the next day have guys hanging off trucks cheering when they came up to the gas pumps. It was our union secretary, Don Wightman (shortly to become union president), who gave me the encouragement and confidence to give college a second chance. I was working that summer, in lieu of a layoff, at Edison’s Pilgrim nuclear plant at a time when it had the dubious distinction of being the dirtiest (most radioactive) plant in the nation. Don and I got to talking over a grievance we were filing down at the nuclear plant, and he asked me if I’d given any thought to my future. He told me he knew it was none of his business, of course, but that I was a smart kid and could probably go pretty far, even in the union maybe, if I went to college. I said I hadn’t exactly done too well in school, and he said, So what, I know you’re smart. Why don’t you just take a day course or something and test it out. I worked four to midnight so it would be easy enough to arrange. I said I’d think about it, especially with the layoffs yet to come when they shut down the old coal-burning station near town.
Brandeis University’s admission officer said that if I “aced” the two courses I was taking, one at Harvard Extension, one at B.U.’s Metropolitan program, both taught by full professors for working people in the community, they’d consider my application. When I told my father the good news, he had a fit, first with me, then with my mother. He said he’d warned me when I got married that he wouldn’t pay for anything. To my mother, he said, “What does she need college for? What’s she going to do with her life that she needs college?” Mom threatened to go to the press if he didn’t pay for my college education as stipulated in their divorce agreement. Well, that insured compliance all right, but not without a nasty letter in which he informed me that if, indeed, I should be accepted anywhere, to have them send the bill directly to him, but he sure wasn’t happy about it. He said that some of the most unpleasant exchanges of his life had been with me and he hoped we’d do better in the future. He enclosed some homeopathic medicine to counter the radioactivity I was exposed to at the nuclear plant.
WHEN MY APPLICATION to Brandeis was accepted, I applied for a nine-month leave of absence from the Edison and it was granted. My replacement didn’t come through for about a month, so I began my first term working full-time 4 P.M. to 12 A.M. and going to school full-time days. Actually, that made the transition easier on me, because I was really scared I’d fall flat on my face at college, and I sure didn’t want to lose the good job I had. Brandeis went out of its way to ease the transition, too. They had a special orientation program for older students who were starting school in their mid-twenties. We got to meet each other the first day, and I can’t tell you how much that helped me not feel like a total oddball. The first person I met was Steve, a Hispanic guy from the Southwest who had just gotten out of the army. He asked me what I did for a living, and I said I was a mechanic. He said, “Yeah, right. Let’s see those hands.” With quite the street “attitude,” as if I had nothing to prove to him, I lazily put out a hand. One look, and his tight face broke into a grin and he said, “Hey, all right, girl!” A high five, and that was the beginning of that friendship.
A few weeks into the term, just about the time my replacement at work showed up, life fell out from underneath me. I pulled into the driveway after my shift at about 12:30 A.M., got out of my car, and some guy appeared out of nowhere. I thought he was going to try to kill me, but, thank God, it turned out that he was just there to repossess my car. After he realized I wasn’t going to give him any crap, he apologized for scaring me, handed me some papers, and drove off with my car. I’d bought that damn car with the down payment I’d earned working round the clock for nearly a week during the blizzard of ’78. My husband sent in the car payments and the mortgage payments on the house that I had bought with a down payment through the credit union. I just gave him my paycheck to deposit. I hated fussing with bills, so I was happy for him to handle it. The mail came after I left for work in the afternoon, so I never suspected a thing. Well, girls, you know what comes next. Several weeks into college, I have no ca
r, the bank is repossessing my house in three weeks, all my savings for college are gone, and so is my husband. No arguments, no fights, no scenes, just gone. A call to a lawyer told me to get everything I still owned out of that house ASAP or it’s joint property, to say nothing of the fact that he might come back for it.
The creepiest thing was not knowing who the hell I’d spent the last few years with. No one who knew him could believe it, he was such a nice guy, always cheerful, always smiling. Seriously spooky. My guess, in hindsight, is that he got into some bad debt with guys who don’t play games about collecting. Something about big black cars pulling up to the curb, and him telling me how to throw bleach in somebody’s face if they break through the door. Living in a war zone and not asking questions were second nature to me, though, and I just took it basically in stride. Part of life. Like the reporters or kidnappers or bogeymen who climbed trees outside the Red house when I was a kid.
I’m not quite sure how it all came about, but Saturday morning bright and early my new friend Steve from Brandeis, fresh out of the army, and my old friend Lou, not so fresh out of the marines in Vietnam, showed up with a truck and began moving out matériel on the double. We were out of there by noon. I was in shock, physically and every other way, and I really don’t know much about what happened the next few weeks—just that my friend Lou took care of it. Took care of me. I stayed with him for a few months I think. The girl he was dating, who is now his wife, wasn’t thrilled, but she was both understanding and levelheaded, which is the way she is, one of the most thoroughly decent people I’ve had the privilege of knowing. Lou drove me to school and literally fed me food, with a spoon, in front of the TV until I came out of shock a few weeks later. He had done time in an orphanage as a kid. God bless friends—kinsmen—you don’t have to explain things to.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 43