In Pieces(2)

I still don’t know why grammar school was so agonizing for me. Still can’t figure out whether the agony was waiting for me in the school or I brought it in with me. Either way, it didn’t matter because nothing and no one could distract or engage me enough to lessen the dread I felt. I don’t remember having any friends or playdates—basically, in those days no one had playdates, or they weren’t called playdates. But whatever they were called, I didn’t have any. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I hated all the games at recess. “Red Rover, Red Rover,” for instance, which was not only terrifying but, let’s face it, a truly mean, totally stupid game. A group of kids would lock their arms together, then call the other students, one at a time, to run full blast into their wall of arms. If the runner was successful, the wall opened, and that runner was allowed to join the barricade. I hated this no-win situation of a game. I was the smallest one, and even if they did call my name, I couldn’t break through, only bounced off and had to return to the land of the losers. But there was always the chance that they wouldn’t call my name, and I’d have to stand there as everyone else broke through, joining the line one at a time, until they were all holding hands and looking at me, alone.

I guess you’d have to say that in my early school days—at five and six—I was a problem. A little stress case with a brand-new family and a constant stomachache that no one could explain. I remember my mother’s concern, but I certainly couldn’t tell her how to help me because I didn’t have a clue why I felt so anxious, why I wanted to hide from everyone and couldn’t act like the rest of the kids. Maybe I needed a good hard push toward socialization, and maybe my loving mother was too consumed with her own evolving life to realize that. But I’ll tell you right now, if she had tried to organize a little “get-together” for me with one of those five-year-old strangers, I would have had a conniption fit, and my mother was not a battler. So as I watched everyone picking their friends, forming clusters of companions, I felt the hill to friendship getting steeper.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t about that at all. Maybe I just needed my mother.

I have a memory of clinging to her, a vision so dimly lit that it slips from my grasp like a dream after waking. Barely out of toddlerhood, I have blond-brown bangs hanging in my eyes and one very chapped thumb tucked into my mouth. With the other hand, I’m gripping her robe at the neck, snugly hooked onto her hip as she stands, slowly stirring a pot on the old gas range. Behind us, my brother, Ricky—who is two and a half years older—sits on the hollow wooden box of a bench, rhythmically banging his feet while holding a tiny metal cowboy in one hand and a matching Indian in the other, hopping them around the oilcloth-covered table. My mother’s eyes are focused on a book lying open atop the crowded butcher-block counter, and after a moment, she turns her head as if to look out the window, then speaks in a deep, loud, slightly false voice. Ricky looks up at her, then out the window to see who’s there, while I watch for my brother’s reaction. But when she stops abruptly, shakes her head, and looks back down at the book, we relax again into her cocoon.

I still have that book. All those books of hers I now own, hardcover Modern Library editions of Ibsen, Odets, and Chekhov, her barely faded notes jotted on the pages… the same copy she was using to memorize Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in that envelope of a kitchen.


Margaret Morlan had eyes the color of dark chocolate, laced with feathery black lashes, and was clearly drop-your-jaw beautiful. She resembled Jennifer Jones, except she had a cleft in her chin and a kind of lit-up giggle in her face that left Ms. Jones standing in the shadows, as far as I was concerned. When she looked at me, it was never through me, but into me, lifting me off the ground in an invisible embrace. I wonder if everyone felt that way. If they did, I don’t think she was aware of it, of her power. I never felt that she leaned on her looks in any way, though maybe she did before I knew her, before she was my mother. I wish I’d known her then, wish I had known what hopes and dreams she might have had.

Margaret in 1945.





I do know that in 1942 she was a twenty-year-old sophomore at Pasadena City College, where she’d been studying literature. Then when she met a soldier and married him three months later, her education came to a screeching halt. And maybe that’s what she’d been hoping for, to marry someone and to travel with him, to immediately move to Camp Barkeley in Texas. And when he was shipped overseas a year later, promising to write as often as he could, she waited for his return back in her California home, lovesick and pregnant. Maybe that’s exactly what she wanted to be: a wife and mother. But one fortuitous night, when her husband was far away in the war and my brother was barely a year old, when the world was caught in a tremendous struggle, something reached out of nowhere and changed my mother’s life.

It happened when a man named Milton Lewis approached her while she was sitting in the audience of the Pasadena Playhouse, waiting for the curtain to go up. “Excuse me,” he said. “I love how you look. Would you like to come to Paramount Pictures tomorrow for a meeting?”—or something to that effect. He then handed her his card, verifying that he was indeed a talent scout for Paramount. The next day, she traveled to Hollywood, where she met with Lord knows who and said God knows what (and as I picture her in my mind, with her soft shy demeanor, only now does it dawn on me how much gumption that must have taken on her part). She was immediately put under a three-year contract. Suddenly, without looking for it, my twenty-three-year-old mother had a career.