In Pieces(15)
The yard echoed with screams and shrieks, the kind of laughter that comes from riding the Intimidator or from being tickled to the point of peeing in your pants. I desperately hated the diving platforms, felt a failure on the trampoline, but the ropes I could do. I could cling to that knot of hemp and live.
The inside of the house kept changing too, as Jocko began accumulating bigger and better things. Furniture, television consoles, and in the living room, a new stereo was set up, allowing the music of Dean Martin and Peggy Lee and Martin Denny to rumble through the house constantly. I remember watching them dance: two people, four feet, my mother on tiptoe while Jocko’s big hand lightly gripped her waist, guiding her to move with him, pushing her back, drawing her in. I watched, fixated, as they danced the cha-cha, that one, two, one-two-three pulse vibrating the floor where I sat with the roaring fireplace hot on my back. When the music stopped, they continued to embrace, Jocko running his hand down her back, cupping her butt, then pulling her toward him. I watched as my mother pushed him away, then headed toward the den to refill their drinks, making a distinct “tsk-tsk” sound with her tongue, the same sound my grandmother would make—a “naughty” reprimand. Was that because of me? Because she suddenly saw me sitting there with my chin resting on top of my bent knees?
Jocko always described Baa as a prude, overly uptight about most things, especially sex. If a crude or suggestive word was uttered in her presence, she’d blush, putting her hand to her face—just as Joy would—and I could feel her embarrassment radiate across the dinner table. It was no secret that Jocko thought my mother was loving but limited and while she could kiss our boo-boos, it was his job to bring us fully alive, to unleash in us all the important primary colors of being human; colors my mother felt uncomfortable or incapable of revealing and he did not. We were her children, for goodness sake, so perhaps she felt it was inappropriate to behave in an openly sensual way in our presence. That’s true, I’m sure, but it was more than that. Joy had raised her, and my grandmother’s troubled childhood, complete with daily lectures on the sin of sex, clung to Baa. It was like a cloud that floated through my mother’s life, dimming her brightness, sometimes making it difficult to see her clearly.
When my mother had left the room, her “tsk-tsk,” floating away, Jocko turned to me. “Come on, Doodle, let’s dance.” I jumped to my feet, having recently attended the Tap, Ballet, and Acrobat class at the dance studio down the street, which oddly enough had included the cha-cha. But Jocko didn’t put one hand on my waist and hold the other out straight, like he had with my mother. He put both his big familiar hands on my hips while he stepped with me—one, two, an’ cha-cha-cha—all the time instructing, “Move your hips. Move your hips,” pushing them this way and that. “That’s my girl.”
They both looked impossibly perfect: he in his dark suit with just a hint of cowboy, she with the black lace bodice of her dress cinched at the waist above layers and layers of a black tulle skirt that whispered when she walked. After a fleeting good-night kiss, followed by the tip-tap of her heels and the thud of his boots, they floated off together on a cloud of glamour, the white Cadillac carrying them away for the evening. As soon as the door was closed, Mrs. Roberts, the new live-in housekeeper, went to her room above the garage—assured that the kids were safely tucked in front of the television—and I drifted up to my mother’s big walk-in closet.
Hiding behind the forest of Baa’s clothes—hers on one side, his on the other—I sat against the wall looking up at the hanging garments, hypnotized by the lingering smell of my mother’s Femme perfume, then chose one beautiful dress, stepped out of my nightgown and into the silk and satin. When it wouldn’t stay on my body, I got a handful of big safety pins from the sewing basket on a shelf in the back, pinned the dress everywhere in a suggestion of a fit, and moved out into their bedroom. Lost in a world of pretend, I danced around the room, remembering Jocko’s hands directing me to move this way and that, the whole time trying to keep the gown from falling off my child’s body. When I finally tripped on the hem—breaking the illusion—I took Baa’s sewing scissors and cut the bottom of the beautiful dress… off. Maybe I just needed to make it work. Or maybe destroying the dress was a message, trimmed in lace.
The Libbit house, the new white Cadillac, and the perfect couple.
When she finally found her once-beautiful dress, now wadded into a ball and hidden in the back of her closet, she sat with her head down, confused and disappointed. She didn’t ask me why I had done such a thing, or demand to know what on earth I was thinking—which were two questions I couldn’t have answered anyway. She never yelled or even raised her voice in anger. Not ever. She expressed hurt. And that was much worse. Somewhere in me I had the feeling that I needed to protect her from hurt and as I got older, that meant protecting her from me. There were times when I longed to have her explode in a fury, times when I knew she was silently disturbed by my stepfather’s rough treatment of Ricky—ridiculing him for no other reason than to make him cry—times when I wanted her to rescue me, and on the rare occasions when she did try to dry our tears or soothe our fears, Jocko would call her a worrywart, discrediting her, claiming she would surely ruin us as she had been ruined herself.
One summer afternoon when I was about eleven, my mother and Jocko were sitting on the patio with a group of their friends. It was a hot day and I kept asking if I could go into the pool, since by that time, I’d become a fairly strong swimmer. The answer was always a distracted “in a while,” and when I asked one too many times, Jocko, in a quick flash, picked me up and threw me, fully clothed, across the patio into the pool—a distance of perhaps thirty feet. The water slapping me in the face didn’t hurt nearly as much as the sound of laughter spewing from Jocko and his friends. It’s the only time I remember Baa actually reprimanding him (even though it was done lightly) and, against his orders, coming to my aid, folding her arm around me when I pulled myself from the pool, then walking me to my room as I hid my tears in her chest. But if she ever told Jocko definitively to stop or expressed her dissatisfaction with his form of parenting, I was never aware of it.