In Pieces(62)

I tried to squint, to open my eyes enough to see my folded legs and nothing else.

“Look at us, Sally. Can you do that?”

I couldn’t.

“Look at us,” he said.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

“Yes, you can,” he gently reassured. “We’re here with you.”

I didn’t want to look at anyone because I didn’t want anyone to see me. When I opened my eyes, I looked only at Lee and cried for the little girl I once had been.


I’ve tried to piece together my childhood and early career most of my adult life, relentlessly going over the memories, occasionally telling some of the stories to a captivated few, and I realize I’ve become my own lore, halfway falling in love with the drama of it all. But when I try to look at my early years of motherhood, my relationship with Steve, and what it became, I run out of lore. Maybe it’s easier to remember myself as a powerless victim and not the perpetrator, not a player in the mindless damage game. I’ve never wanted to see the reality: that I was a young woman who began to have violent rages, who needed to find her sexuality in other men, and who hurt Steve. And more than anything, I don’t want to acknowledge how often I placed my children into the arms of my mother and walked away, only to feel jealous of her relationship with them when I returned.


My mother, my sister, and I had lived a life of musical chairs, never staying in one place very long before the music would start up again, and off we’d go. The only stationary structure in our lives was Joy’s house, and even though I was now paying my mother a small salary to help me with the kids, that’s where Baa went to live, along with Princess, who tried to convert another garage into a room for herself—this time Joy’s spider-ridden, car-less barnlike thing.

Visiting only occasionally, my brother stayed removed from most of the family chaos, first in Berkeley, where he received his PhD in physics, then in Long Island, New York, where he lived for several years to do postdoctoral research at the Brookhaven National Lab. But in 1973 he moved back to Pasadena along with his wife, Jimmie, and their son, Jason, who was only a few months younger than Eli. Rick would be working at Caltech with the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman, which ultimately became an important working relationship and a powerful friendship.

Maybe the lure of having Ricky and his young family living so close was part of the reason why my mother moved back into her childhood home, though it couldn’t have been easy for her. Over the years, my brother had become impatient and emotionally distant with our mother, like he was holding back from her any real affection. And though his disregard was palpable, she never asked for more or turned away, but always stood with her eager face toward him, waiting to be forgiven for things they never talked about. Joy once confessed to Jimmie that she could hear my mother crying every night—a tiny piece of information that Jimmie only recently told me, and the thought of that stays in my head. Baa must have felt injured in whatever direction she turned: Her husband had left for a younger woman; she was living with her mother, who criticized her constantly; and while her son was distractedly disrespectful, her oldest daughter was resentfully dependent.

And yet, on a moment’s notice she’d drop everything to drive to the Topanga Beach house and wrangle two young boys for the day. Then, when I’d drag myself home from some dumb game show, I’d walk through the door and turn into someone I didn’t want to be. Steve most often was nowhere in sight, while my mother led a little band of playtime junkies on a rampage through the house, looking for their next imagination fix. Blankets would be strewn across every piece of furniture, deck chairs pulled into the living room, and pillows piled into every woolen cave, leaving the house looking as if it had been ransacked. Never mind that she had taken good care of my children, that they had been entertained and creatively stimulated. All I could see was the fact that the toys—which I’d carefully organized into buckets and bins—were scattered everywhere, as if from a deliberate need to undo everything I’d done.

But the thing that turned me from Jekyll into Hyde was the sound of Baa’s high-pitched voice playing Bob or Joe or Martha and having a conversation with Peter’s character or Eli’s—and he, at that point, was pretty much preverbal. Most of the words were undecipherable, except for my mother’s piercing “walky, walky, walky,” which meant that whatever stuffed animal or Weeble Wobble she held in her hand was hopping around their make-believe world. The walky-walky game, as I called it. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be included in their game—which I never was—or was glad to be free from it. Not knowing what I wanted from anyone, including myself, I’d begin to clean up the kitchen, slamming pans around as I fixed dinner, torn between my gratitude for her devotion and my frustration with her presence. Eventually I’d have some sort of dinner ready and with an irritated ring to my voice, I’d call them to the table, only to hear Peter emphatically yell, “Mom, go away. We’re playing.”

Unvoiced resentment brewed into quiet rage, keeping itself hidden until suddenly that’s all I was: mindless red rage, unable to control impulses I didn’t want to have. One evening, Steve and I were sitting outside in the midst of an argument, and I remember crying and wailing, going round and round in emotional circles because I either didn’t know what was at the bottom of it, or didn’t want to admit it. Steve, in a last-ditch effort to break through, got on his knees in front of me and said, “Hit me. Will that make you feel better? Then hit me.” He kept saying it while refusing to let me move away. Suddenly I felt as if I were in someone else’s body, a body whose clenched fist hit him again and again, mashing a club of a hand into his face until his nose began gushing blood. Only then did I stop. Wrapping my arms around him, fearfully clinging as if we had faced some terrible dragon together. Me. Steve never hit me. Not ever in his life.