In Pieces(22)
“I have the ability to tell you what you could not stand to know about yourself.”
Without thinking or even believing my words, I blurted, “That’s not true!” And then, said it louder: “That’s not true!” Suddenly, I felt like a cuckoo clock whose hands hit midnight and all the cogs and gears automatically fell into place.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I dared. “You don’t have any abilities… to do anything. You are a fool and a failure.”
The room turned red, bright blazing red. I rose from where I sat perched on the edge of my childhood, rose up through the years of fear, fury, and longing, of confusion and love. I stepped onto the coffee table and there we were again, eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose.
“I hate you! YOU’RE the liar! Not ME! And you know NOTHING!” From my mouth came a voice, but it didn’t belong to me, and from a faraway place I watched as this little person who looked like me stood up until she seemed to tower over this man.
“You don’t know who I am!” This guttural voice, filled with loathing, vomited forth as she peered into his eyes. But it was me. I was still there, somewhere. And while she stood, I held my breath—for a minute? An hour? And a stunning realization hit me: He was frightened of her. He was frightened of me.
In one quick slash, he grabbed me by the neck, lunging with me in his meaty fist toward the sliding glass door that opened to the pool, now dark and covered with leaves. My shoeless feet fluttered in midair as he pounded my doll-like body against the glass again and again. Baa sobered enough to rise as Steve and Ricky haltingly moved toward the clumsy dance, but never made it far enough to cut in.
I didn’t roar, or kick, or cry. I hung in his overpowering, massive grasp and knew. I had won. Somehow, some part of me that wasn’t afraid, that didn’t care if I was loved, or if I lived or died, had beaten him. He knew it too.
6
That Summer
IN THE SPRING of 1962, right before Rick graduated from high school, my brother pulled me into the back door/service porch area where his room was located. We leaned against the wall, whispering with our heads bowed, our foreheads almost touching, feeling slightly awkward with each other. He wanted me to know that I could count on seeing him at Christmas and perhaps for a short time each summer and that was it. He spoke curtly, without emotion, then fumbled the next sentence as if he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. “I wish I could take you with me, Sal” were the words that came out. After a beat of silence, we both laughed, knowing that wasn’t true. “I’ll be okay,” I said, but when I looked at him, I saw the face of the little boy who had come to rescue me from Dick’s house and I felt my eyes burn. I knew Ricky was going to college, this wasn’t news, but until that moment the fact that my big brother wouldn’t be living in the house with me anymore had never registered in my brain. He was leaving.
At some point along the way, Ricky had stopped crying, had swallowed his tears and quietly begun propelling himself to beat Jocko at his own game. Knowing that there would be no financial support from our parents, my brother had worked toward and received a gymnastics scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley—eventually ranking second all-around in the nation. But when he was a junior his left biceps pulled away from the elbow, taking part of the bone with it, forcing him to quit. Rick then went on to become a high-energy elementary particle physicist. A first-class athlete and a world-renowned scientist, two things Jocko would never be.
By the time my own graduation rolled around, Ricky had been in college for two years and yet I never saw him as an example, never thought to make any plans of my own for the following September—or any day after that. All thoughts of my future were shoved out in the mist that vaporized everything I couldn’t deal with, while I floated around in a cloud, seeing only the few things that were manageable. I was a seventeen-year-old varsity cheerleader—or songleader, as we called it—and queen of the drama department. That was pretty much it.
Everywhere else in school, I felt slightly shy with a strong baseline anxiety, either unconscious of or uncomfortable with most people and always wary of the girls. Too many times in my middle school years, eighth and ninth grade, I was the one they decided “needed to go” and I’d be kicked out of the club (there actually was a club, the Shondells). Once, during an eighth-grade slumber party, after the girls had TP’ed a neighbor’s lawn, then turned on the sprinklers, they decided it would be fun to rub peanut butter all over my underdeveloped body, throw me into the swimming pool, lock all the doors, and wait for me to panic. I wasn’t sure if I hated being treated that way or liked it. I was somehow an integral part of everyone’s good time—though uncomfortably gooey—and being thrown in a swimming pool was nothing new. I didn’t enjoy being humiliated but at least I was familiar with it. And maybe this was the price I had to pay to be liked, to have friends.
These were the girls who became the heart of the A group, the three or four supremely popular girls who were certain to break through to safety in any playground game of life, or that’s how it felt. And the biggest jewel in the crown, for any of the girls, was to become a songleader—a feat that had always seemed like a foregone conclusion for the A’s, as if they didn’t even need to try out. For me, it was the first thing I remember deeply wanting, and I—not shrouded with foregone conclusions—was thought to have zero chance. But I’d already spent a fair amount of time onstage by then, and knew what it was like to stand in front of an audience, to risk failure, and to fall into a place that meant more to me than popularity. Without hesitation, I reached out to Lynn, a tall, sweetly awkward girl who hovered on the edges of the A group, exactly where I hovered. And after practicing day in and day out for weeks, we found we had kicked and pranced and laughed our way into becoming best friends—certainly the best I’d ever had. We also became songleaders for the following year. Whereas the others did not.