Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  The first call I made was to Boston City Hospital; I think it was the emergency room. I wanted to know, at 3 A.M., drowning in pain, if someone swallowed a lot of pills and wound up in the hospital, could the newspapers find out the name of that person. I was frantic that the papers might learn that I was Salinger’s daughter. My first instinct at this desperate hour was not to protect myself, but to keep my father’s secrets, to obey the family creed and avoid anything that might bring the attention of the press.

  If, in the midst of telling me not to do anything stupid, the nurse hadn’t told me that the papers had no access to that type of information, I don’t think I would have taken the pills. I dialed 911, told them I had taken a lot of pills, gave them my address, and then, after hanging up, swallowed two bottles of different prescription medications and washed them down with scotch. So they wouldn’t think I’d lied to them, and I wouldn’t get in trouble.

  The ambulance arrived, not what I’d imagined, sort of a square paddy-wagon-looking thing. It was the fire department rescue squad. They let me collect some stuff, which surprised me. They picked up the remaining pills off the floor and put them in their bottles, which I thought was very tidy of them. I realized later that the doctors needed a pill count. I took a small stone carving of an African head that Marc had given me the previous Christmas, and a handkerchief that had belonged to my grandmother. That’s all. I was too afraid my teddy bear would get lost. I walked partway downstairs and was then carried on a stretcher. The last thing I remember was a man in the ambulance in my face and yelling at me, “Stay awake, stay with us!”

  IT WASN’T CLEAN WHITE SHEETS. It was a metal table and blinding spotlights in the emergency room. It wasn’t like waking up; it was like being struck by lightning. I was sizzling and felt as though I had bees inside my veins. Bees and a thousand cups of coffee. I guess they give you some kind of stimulant to counteract the depressants after pumping your stomach. Something bloody was going on behind the green plastic curtains next to me. Then came the charcoal.

  “Drink it. All of it.” Quarts and quarts of gritty charcoal in water. Black ashes vomiting out of my nose and mouth, my asshole spewing charcoal. I got some on my grandmother’s handkerchief. The stain never came out.

  I was shocked to find out how close I’d come to killing myself. Apparently I would have been hard-pressed to pick a more lethal combination than what I happened to have around the house.

  I called my soon-to-be–ex boyfriend in New York from the hospital and told him I had kidney stones and not to worry. I called Wayne, one of my best friends from Brandeis, in Washington. He canceled a State Department reception, caught the next plane to Boston, and brought me a blanket because he remembered that I’m always cold. He called our friend Margie in Philadelphia, and she was there a few hours later.

  I hadn’t seen my therapist since I’d left for England. He came to see me and said, among other things, “Hey, next time use the phone, okay?” Point taken. He was glad to see me but sad to see me there. After some discussion, they let me go home the next day.

  When I left the hospital, I went home alone in a cab feeling lousy, but pretty sobered by the near miss. When I opened the door to my apartment, a lovely sight greeted me. Wayne and Margie, both Jews who wouldn’t know a Christmas tree from a cactus, had bought a tree and set it up in my room. One of the most oddly decorated Christmas trees I’ve ever seen, and one of the most beautiful.

  32

  On and Off the Fast Track

  I HEARD THROUGH A FRIEND that a major international consulting firm, based in Boston, was doing so well that year that they were taking on midyear hires. (Usually these things go with the business-school cycle; if you’re not settled by September, forget about it till next year.) I sent them a résumé, and they called me for an interview. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I told them that my areas of interest and expertise were industrial relations and organizational behavior, I.R. and O.B. as they are known, the “soft” side of business. They said great and placed me on a case team that was evaluating accounting software packages for a Fortune 500 computer firm. I didn’t even know how to use a computer, let alone evaluate anything to do with one. At Oxford, although I hear this changed dramatically over the next few years of the program, we had barely switched over from quill pens when we wrote our essays, longhand, on the philosophy of human resource accounting. I spent my first week trying to learn Lotus 1-2-3 on my own without attracting too much attention from the computer whizzes I was supposed to be supervising. Nightmare.

  I spent a year trying to “get up to speed,” in various traditional “hard” MBA areas such as finance and accounting, but everyone around me had been on a serious fast track from the start. When I had to take some time off to have surgery, it was a relief. The chief of urology at Mass General had examined me for chronic bladder inflammation and pain and told me my urethra was gapped wide open and some other things I didn’t quite understand. He brought in another doctor, who asked me some questions about my sex life, all of which I could answer in the negative, half of which hadn’t even occurred to me as possibilities. Then she’d like a family history. I called my mother to ask her if I’d had trouble with bladder infections as a child. She said yes, that after she was allowed to take me to real doctors, she was always taking me in for pain “down there,” because, she said in a sort of exaggerated whisper, “you masturbated so much.”

  All I can recall to date is a flashback I have, of sitting in the bathtub, alone, young enough that I was scared to be alone, because usually my mother gave me a bath. I was feeling absolutely excruciating pain in my peepee. I thought maybe I got some soap inside it by mistake when I washed and it was burning me, like soap in the eyes. It hurt so much I couldn’t cry. I made a harsh noise in my throat as I drew in each breath, to try to distract my mind from the pain. I sort of rocked myself until the water went cold. Then, my memory goes down the drain.

  My father appeared at Mass General the morning of my surgery. I was very surprised, to say the least. He looked green and worried. He said, “You shouldn’t have to go into surgery alone.” He and Sig and Joel took me home afterward. I was back in my old apartment, the landlady was finally rid of the awful tenants, and there I stayed put till it went condo some ten years later. Daddy liked my apartment. He’d never seen it before.

  A few weeks later, I received a call from a headhunter asking me if I’d be interested in a certain job they’d been hired to fill. To make a short story even shorter, I didn’t get the job, but the executive search firm for which the headhunter worked offered me a job as a consultant. Same great pay, but decent hours, and talking to people instead of crunching numbers. God, what relief.

  My dad came down to visit me at my new job and to take me out to lunch. He liked my business attire a lot, was suitably impressed by my office, which was in a beautiful old building overlooking a splendid courtyard where people could sit outside at little café tables in the spring and summer for drinks and Madame Robert’s wonderful French food. Over lunch, Daddy told me how glad he was that I had learned something practical and gone into business. He worried a lot about my brother choosing to be an actor and wished he had gone into some sort of business as well. I felt proud of myself and my position, and I could not have asked for a nicer boss or colleagues; nevertheless, it all felt a lot more like playing dress-up and acting than my father could ever have imagined. I still missed my trucks and cars and work boots, I still missed my libraries and writing, but I was doing the “responsible” thing, being a grown-up and using my degree instead of saying, to misquote a country song, you can take these nylons and shove ’em.1

  SOMETIME DURING MY SECOND YEAR of work at the recruiting firm I caught the flu. It didn’t go away. I kept trying to go back to work, and my boss, Jack Vernon, a truly decent, kind human being, kept sending me home. Over the next few months, I developed what I called my 100-degree rule: I stayed at my desk and worked as best I could until my temperature reached 101, t
hen I’d give up and go home. My doctor first suspected lupus or multiple sclerosis. I could tell by the tests he ordered, and then he’d tell me when it was ruled out. My blood tests came back very out of whack, white cells in the stratosphere, red cells down the drain, and so on. Something was obviously wrong, but they couldn’t figure out what. Meanwhile, I was exhausted, fevered, had constant diarrhea, and felt as if I’d been hit by a bus in all my joints.

  My boss finally had a long talk with me and suggested I take some real time off and get better. He assured me my job would be waiting for me when I returned and that I would be of more value to the company if I got well instead of trying to hang in there. I can’t tell you what a difference that made to my mental and probably physical well-being. So often people report going through a terrible period before diagnosis where they’re suspected of malingering or being a nutcase or just plain lazy. It turned out that I had a classic case of a “new” or newly discovered disease first called Epstein-Barr virus, or CFS—chronic fatigue syndrome—or in England, myalgic encephalomyelitis. When I could no longer safely hold a teacup in my hand without dropping it, fibromyalgia was added to the pot. Some retrovirus was making my autoimmune system wage war on itself. I attacked my own joints as if they were foreign entities, tried to expel ghostly poisons through vomiting or the runs. My whole body seemed engaged in a deadly bout of shadowboxing that left me so exhausted I could no longer walk a block without assistance.

  I lived on the second floor, and I remember many times sitting at the bottom of the stairs weeping because there was no way in hell I was going to make it back up. After about a year, I basically stayed in my apartment and neighbors and friends and people from my church helped out with shopping. I can hardly believe how long I was disabled and virtually confined to my apartment. The reason it seems unreal is that I was too exhausted to be bored. I really didn’t mind just sitting there as long as I wasn’t in too much pain. I wasn’t depressed at all, surprisingly; when I felt anything besides tired, it was fear. I was scared I was going to die.

  After nearly a year and a half of solid sickness, I started to have days and parts of days where a bit of sunlight, a bit of energy, would break through. My hands had stopped deteriorating, too, thank God; that was something I really couldn’t stand. After nearly two years, I felt well enough to be a bit bored and began to devour the contents of the Boston Public Library, subject by subject. A friend would walk me there on a good day and carry the huge stack of books home. I spent several happy months learning about ancient Japanese theater—its art and dance and music—which branched naturally into Japanese religion and religious worship—chanting and liturgical music in particular. This experience was complemented by the church I attended around the corner from me, which presented the entire cycle of the Bach cantatas as part of the liturgy on Sundays, the way they were heard in Bach’s time, as an integral part of worship. The church, needless to say, attracted a lot of musicians and music lovers, as well as people in the arts and others who didn’t fit into a traditional mold. Nicely, though, we had our share of old Bostonian ladies in hats and white gloves. Emmanuel Church truly welcomes you to come as you are, and to stay that way if you wish. You are welcomed, in booklet and banner, to join in as much or as little of the Episcopal liturgy as your conscience permits, “wherever you are on your spiritual journey.” It is not unlike Woodstock, in the way everyone is welcome without having to be like everyone else. Music lovers, Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, and nonbelievers share pews with old Bostonian Episcopalians. The liturgy stays the same, the liturgical year goes through its cycle with integrity, and you are permitted to do the same.

  ONE DAY I GOT A phone call from a representative of my disability insurance company. I was ordered to see a doctor hired by and paid for by the insurance company. The state and the company’s insurance agency had been paying me a comfortable check each month, and my doctor would periodically send in the results of my lab tests, which confirmed in black and white that something was very wrong, though it didn’t have a DRG (diagnosis-related group) number yet. The experience of seeing a company doctor was not unlike being in Kit’s office once again. Do you know how spooky it is to be examined, clothes off, by somebody who keeps up a steady patter trying to get you to admit or confess that you’re malingering? Enraging, humiliating, powerless, are a few words that come to mind. Two weeks later I received notice that my disability payments were to be terminated. My real doctor was outraged; he held up my tests and said that what the other doctor had done amounted to malpractice.

  The trouble is, that if you really are disabled, you’re in the worst shape possible to go to court and fight it. Insurance companies are not unaware of this. I feel like a wimp writing it now, that I didn’t fight it, but that’s only because it’s nearly impossible for me to remember or reconstruct the degree of fatigue I suffered. As my friend Marilyn, who has lupus, polymyositis, asthma, and a host of other problems, says, you can’t imagine what tired means until you’ve been there, until you’ve had to lie there and wet yourself because you’re too tired to roll out of bed, let alone make it to the bathroom. I had many, many days like that. Days I was too ashamed to call anyone over to help because I’d lost control of my bowels or bladder again and couldn’t change the sheets yet. Now my worst fear was not dying, but that I’d wind up living, destitute, in some state nursing home.

  My father, throughout these years, kept asking me if I trusted the doctors I was seeing. Wasn’t there something more all these Harvard men at their Harvard so-called teaching hospitals could do for me? I went to several alternative-medicine practitioners at his suggestion: a homeopath, a chiropractor, and an acupuncturist for a series of treatments. They weren’t cheap, either.

  I called and told my father the grave news that my disability payments had been cut off. A week or two later, something arrived in the mail. He had taken out a three-year subscription, in my name, to a monthly booklet of testimonials to miraculous healing put out by the Christian Science Church. He also sent me a hardcover copy of Science and Health with Key to The Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. I would get well when I stopped believing in the “illusion” of my sickness.

  What began to crack was my belief in the illusion of my father.

  * * *

  1. I had a book when I was a little girl about a country bear who lived in the woods and wanted to see the big city. He was told, you’ll have to wear clothes first, so he fashions a fedora out of a cabbage leaf, two pieces of a hollow log for shoes, quite uncomfortable but de rigueur, and a suit of bark. At the end of the book there is a wonderful illustration of him returning to the woods, kicking off his shoes, tossing his hat in the air with abandon and pure joy at coming home, shedding all those uncomfortable things that just weren’t him. (If he’d stayed in costume, he’d have probably gotten sick, too, after a while, just like me.)

  33

  Weaving My Own Life

  I TOOK A LONG, QUIET look at my life and decided that if I were to live much longer, I should not waste any more time living someone else’s dream. Easier said than done, but framing the intention was a start in the right direction. It was not some quick and easy conversion, I assure you. Those who say that the process of waking up and making one’s own way, of slowly tearing down old walls and reintegrating parts of one’s self separated by war or violence, ignorance, or neglect, is a “wonderful journey of exciting self-discovery” are the same folks who brought you “The Army: It’s an Adventure” and those “fun for the whole family” childbirth films they show you when you’re pregnant. Dream on! It’s brutal. Like childbirth, though, you do get the best thing in the whole world after the agony. But even then it’s still a load of work: sleepless nights, more terror, endless piles of shit (as the joke goes, there must be a pony under there somewhere!), and the privilege of meeting up with one’s own terrible twos and adolescence isn’t always pretty.

  One of the first things I took a look at were all the Salinger “thou shalt nots.” Tho
u shalt not dabble in the arts unless a born genius, thou shalt not study religion unless in a sackcloth at the foot of some foreign guru. Thou shall not set foot in the unclean Ivy League. And for God’s sake, for father’s sake, never ever take an English class. Thou shalt not do anything unless it’s perfect, thou shalt not be flawed, thou shalt not be woman, thou shalt not grow up.

  What do I like to do, and given my level of disability, what am I able to do? These are the questions I wrestled with. My priest, Al Kershaw, is a wonderful human being to talk to. I told him I didn’t feel right making any commitments that I might not be able to live up to. Literally—I can’t stand letting anybody down. I think I needed his permission, in a way, to relieve myself of active duty for a while. He said that contemplation was work, too, and suggested that I might think about attending divinity school. I remember looking at him as though he had two heads, exactly my reaction when, years ago, the human resources person at Boston Edison suggested I go to work in the garage. Who, me? I thought divinity schools were places in the Bible Belt where evangelical Christians, people who had it all figured out, went to train to become ministers, places like Oral Roberts U. My priest, an old Kentucky boy himself, laughed so hard he started coughing. When he recovered, he told me about several divinity schools in the immediate area where one could go to explore what one’s “ministry” might be, and that plenty of people went who were not considering ordination. Otherwise, he said, it’s just another layer of something that isn’t you, that isn’t genuine.