In Pieces(19)

Then, when I was newly fourteen, I just stopped talking to him. One day I was his little Doodle and the next, I refused to look him in the face or acknowledge he even existed, answering his questions with as few words as possible. Without touching him or knowing why, I pushed him away. And he felt it as surely as if I had hit him with a club. I shut down, tucked everything so completely inside my fog that, at the time, I couldn’t clearly see what had happened, what had finally tripped the wire. I used the only words I could, which were no words at all, and my about-face infuriated, confounded, and hurt him. After that, Jocko and I entered a war together, mortal enemies, communicating with the only language our intense relationship could speak: anger on his part and silence on mine.





Turning fourteen.





With each day, a new theater of war opened up. He began spying on me, listening on the other phone if anyone called, accusing me of behaving in ways I couldn’t even fathom, things he saw only through his eyes. I was a teenager who desperately needed her peers, trying hard to be friends with a group of girls, to be invited to their slumber parties, to be included. Once, he lay spread-eagle on the big front lawn, flat as a pancake and undetected by the light of the moon or passing cars as he waited for me to return from an eighth-grade party I’d been allowed to attend. But when I was securely dropped off by the parent of another girl at exactly eleven o’clock—my curfew—his hopes of trapping me in some kind of deception were thwarted. God knows how long he’d been planted out there on the damp grass—which definitely needed mowing.

Then there was the time a boy I knew from school impulsively walked me home from the Little League field, less than a mile away. I remember feeling flustered, but, thinking Jocko wouldn’t be home until late, I invited the young man to stay for dinner. Ricky and Princess joined us, thank God, because they did most of the talking, making the conversation seem friendly and fun. As we all sat around the kitchen banquette, eating Baa’s dinner of pan-fried pork chops and canned corn, I was so caught up with the novelty of having this impromptu guest that I didn’t notice Jocko’s unexpected entrance through the back door.

Suddenly he stood looming over our giggling group. And as I introduced my stepfather to the first and only boy I’d ever invited into the house, Jocko turned to me with a sly look and the interrogation began. “What the hell have you got on your face, smart-ass?”

I was not allowed to wear lipstick, ever. I knew that, but since all the other girls wore it, when I was with them, I sometimes did too. Usually I was careful to wash it off, terrified to be caught behind enemy lines with Revlon on my face, but this time I’d forgotten and I got caught. I sat stunned on the sticky Naugahyde cushion, my mind began searching for possible excuses: I was in dress rehearsals for a play, I was testing it for a friend, my lips were really chapped so I grabbed the only thing I could find. Yet only a weak “I don’t have anything on my face” dribbled out of my bright pink mouth. I could usually lie like a pro, not because I ever had anything to hide—well, except lipstick—but because I liked lying to him. If he wanted the truth from me, he wasn’t gonna get it. He could ask if I’d had orange juice that morning and even if I had, I’d tell him it was apple. This time, however, I had actually broken a rule and needed a good lie. But I just sat there, so flooded with embarrassment that everything went white in my mind and I couldn’t think.

Desperate to show everyone—most especially this poor bewildered boy—what a lying sniveler I was, Jocko went to the sink, wet a dishrag, loaded it with soap, and as my mother stood silently at the stove with her hand over her mouth, proceeded to wash my face in front of all those who could bear to watch. He needed to beat me in whatever game this was.


Mom, where are you? Even now I want to call out to you. I want to look up and see you coming to help me. Gathering up these memories, forcing myself to look at ones that have been lying out in the open the whole time, I don’t know what to think. I’ve adored you all my life. But I’ve camouflaged the truth, fiercely believing my own fairy tale about you. I dressed you in clothes borrowed from the emperor, ones that didn’t actually exist, and during those important years you abandoned me. I don’t understand. I don’t want to discover that the piece I’ve been looking for is something I don’t want to see, I’ve never wanted to see… my anger toward you. I still need to hold on to you. Please help me to see something else.


I have a stack of letters Jocko wrote to my mother at different times during their marriage. Letters I’m sure she never wanted me to read, yet she didn’t rip them to shreds and flush them down the toilet, so she must have known that they’d eventually land in my box of puzzle pieces, helping me to see her and put it all together. I look at them now with my eyes squinted, my grasp light, ready to drop the onionskin airmail pages if I feel I need to take a break—maybe a quiet jog to the nearest fog bank. I’m surprised to read Jocko’s words, constantly pleading for her love, frantic for her approval, while she keeps him waiting for her answers. And though I have none of the letters she finally did write in return, I have a few pages of her journal writings, sometimes typed on an electric typewriter, sometimes written by hand in a spiral notepad. But there are so few entries—dashed off in a disorganized, misspelled way—it leads me to think that she put her feelings on paper only when she was at an overload point and blurry with booze; other than that, she kept her real anguish locked away.