In Pieces(45)

So, with an unconscious desire to fix the messy unit that we’d become, I took the three of us on a small vacation before I was sent back to the front lines of work. There we were: my drunken mother, my adolescent sister, and me, sunburned and waterlogged from the day at the pool, sitting in the living area of my room in one of Palm Springs’ small midcentury hotels. Each of us with so much bottled up inside, stuffed to the brim with words that pleaded to be spoken but unable to get the first word out. Like a jar of pickles so packed you can’t pry loose a single pickle.

Princess and I sat on the floor around a small coffee table with our room service order, while Baa sat on the sofa drinking. For most of the meal we laughed; we were good at that. Laughing till our stomach muscles cramped. Laughing at God knows what, something someone said, or someone we knew. Laughter that felt like holding each other, that felt like loving each other. And out of that safe place, I started casually trying to figure out how we had all ended up as we were, right at that moment. Which, of course, led to childhood moments, and slowly, unwittingly, I stumbled into feelings. I heard myself complaining about Jocko’s treatment of Rick and his attitude toward me, and as I edged closer to the visions in my mind, my insides started to tremble, filled with unexpected emotion. I’d never tried to reveal what was at the heart of my relationship with Jocko and was unable to say the exact words. I inched myself toward something I didn’t want to see, wanting them to get the picture without actually having to paint it, deeply wanting to remove some undiagnosed malignancy from our bond. I don’t know what I said, but suddenly Princess reared up, defending her helpless father against my self-righteous, self-absorbed woes (as she called them) while my mother, who was past the slurring stage, started talking about “the little pixie people.”

In an uncontainable blazing flash, I picked up Baa’s drink and threw it in her face. “I can’t stand this!” I seethed. “I hate you like this. I can’t look at you.” And with that the pickle was out of the jar. Everyone was crying and I was the cause of it. Princess put her arm around our mother, led her to her room and away from me. I was the monster who had caused the pain and had ruined the trip. In some weird way, I felt as though I was filling the space that Jocko had just vacated.

After that weekend, I reached out to my father for the first time in my life, asking him if I could come to dinner. I don’t know what was going through my mind when I climbed into the Ferrari, or how I felt driving for that hour. I only remember that when I finally found his house, one I’d never visited before, and pulled into the driveway behind what I presumed to be Dick’s car, it began to drizzle. My eleven-year-old half sister, Shirley, was the first one out the door to greet me, followed closely by Dick, while his third wife, Peggy, stood quietly in the doorway, watching as I said hello to her pretty blond daughter.

Dick had remarried twice since he and my mother divorced, his second marriage lasting only a few months. Then when I was nine, he married Peggy Walker, a kind but uninvolved British woman whom I was always happy to see but felt no emotional connection with—not from me to her, not from her to me. Soon after they were married, Shirley was born and I became their every-other-weekend babysitter, always assuring them that I loved getting up in the morning with the new arrival. But I didn’t love it. I was already spending a lot of time looking after my other half sister, who was four at the time. And whatever they might think, Shirley was not a playmate for a ten-year-old, she was a baby. I couldn’t say any of that, couldn’t ever tell my father what I was feeling. I could barely tell myself.

But right then, I wanted things to be different, and when I gave Dick a quick hug, I was flooded with how he smelled: not good, not bad, but familiar and safe. Instantly, my throat began to burn, so I put my head down to keep from looking in his eyes, to hide my longing while I followed Peggy into the house. And there, standing in the middle of the bland living room, were six or seven people, adults and children all smiling broadly as they watched me enter. A few had cameras; others carried little leather-bound autograph books or fan magazines with my picture on the cover. Dick was beaming when he introduced his neighbors, making me wonder whether he was proud of them or of me.

After signing everything there was to sign and smiling sweetly during their endless departure, after listening to Dick’s comments about the price of fame and wasn’t that a nice group of folks, after dutifully touring the new house and inspecting the small shrine that Shirley had created in her room with photos and clippings of the big sister she would never really get to know, I finally sat down with Dick and Shirley to watch a golf match on TV. When at last we were called into the dining area, which opened into the kitchen, Peggy was in the midst of delivering plates of food to each of the table’s four place mats with a pleasant “service with a smile” look on her face.

Dick sat on my left, carefully putting the paper napkin on his lap, while Shirley—on my right—never took her eyes off my face. I sat at the head of the table, locked in again, wanting something I couldn’t ask for because I was unable to find my voice. I wonder if my father could feel emotion radiating from me, because he began to talk a mile a minute, telling me how he and another man had purchased a pharmacy, a full drugstore, how it was a great deal, even though he wasn’t sure that he could make ends meet before it was up and running. After taking a few bites of the chicken baked in cream of mushroom soup, he began again. Maybe I’m paraphrasing, but not much.