In Pieces(95)

What followed was an hour-long improvisation of sorts, a blur in actuality. I’d done enough research to have a decent idea about the Lincoln-Todd relationship—as had D.D.L.—so we instantly became something. If not precisely the Lincolns themselves, then at least we were two actors unafraid to poke around in the right direction. When the filming was stopped and things were winding down, I thanked Steven and Daniel, and with Mary still clinging to me, I nodded to all the others, saying it was time for me to leave so they could talk amongst themselves. I then bundled my dress and my heart out of the room and back to the Malibu mountains.

Mary Todd and her Mr. Lincoln.





No matter the outcome, I walked away from it all feeling awake and alive. An hour later, as I stepped through the door of my home, the phone began to ring. “We’re both on the line, Sal,” Steven said. “We want to ask you together. Will you be our Mary?” Then Daniel: “Yes, will you please?”


Sharing any of this unfolding adventure with my mother had seemed out of the question. I don’t remember even mentioning the film to her until that Saturday after the two men had called, and then only because she had rushed out of her room, worried that a rattler had gotten me, since I was jumping around the kitchen, screeching like a stuck pig. Yet when I relayed the events to her it was with unemotional brevity, containing all my excitement, never inviting her to relive it with me. And in that way: cutting off my nose to spite my face.

But at the same time, a force was building inside me, an urgency to face her, to finally jump off the platform, over the pool pole, and into the icy water. Baa had been determined to try every different treatment that the doctor suggested, some making her sicker than others, until now she looked like a baby bird, big-eyed and featherless. Seeing her made me want to find something she would eat, so I was constantly making things like tapioca pudding or peach cobbler or rice and beans, foods that might seem appealing.

One evening, not long after Mary had become mine—a Friday, I think—I’d been released from work early and decided to make Baa’s favorite dinner: pot roast with egg noodles. I hadn’t planned to talk about anything, didn’t pick the time or gear myself up. It was just an ordinary night. And as she sat at her usual counter spot, I leaned against the sink a short distance away, watching her cut up the food on her plate into tiny pieces like she was about to feed it to a two-year-old. When I’d felt trapped as a child, caught in the heat of my stepfather’s scorn, I would look for my mother’s eyes, hoping to be saved. And now, so many years later, I looked for those eyes again, half-hidden in the loose folds of her shrunken face, and started to talk.

I began with Joy, asking her questions about my grandmother, the woman whom I had loved but who had always seemed rigidly straightlaced. “Joy could be funny, and even playful when she was young,” Baa told me. I shook my head, sympathizing with how difficult it must have been for my mother to be raised by someone who herself had received so little parenting, who had spent her childhood in a loveless world of fear. We both smiled, recalling little things about my grandmother, then laughed when we remembered how she would grit her teeth at the hint of anything sexual, even a word. Aware of my own jabbing discomfort, I asked Baa about her sexuality, if she’d ever found it difficult—then watched her flinch, just as Joy would have, just as I was. She turned her head, looking out the window for a moment, then reluctantly told me that there had been a time, once in her life, when she had seen a psychiatrist to “work some things out.” And oh, how I wish I had that moment back again or had more time, or could have been the me I am now. I never asked her about that. Never asked her how old she was when she’d seen that psychiatrist or what it was she had hoped to “work out.” I wish I had.

But on that night, I was focused on where I needed to go and couldn’t get sidetracked. “You told me once that Jocko had confessed to you, told you that something had happened with me, that he was seeking your forgiveness.” (Her forgiveness, mind you, not mine.)

With a quick nod she said, “Yes.”

“What did he tell you had happened?” Without taking her eyes off me, she took a deep breath, and with a slight stutter she recounted how he’d explained that it had been one terrible incident, that he’d been drunk, that he’d always felt awful and had suffered because of it. And when I calmly asked her again what exactly he’d told her, she braced herself, took a beat, then continued.

“He said he’d put his thing between your legs and…” She took another breath and gave me a gift, which cost her a lot. “And… and came.”

I was slapped in the face with the truth. What he had done was real and it was unforgivable. And for years and years and years my mother had known, talking to my sister about it but never me. Only then did my heart begin to race, my insides vibrating as they always did whenever the memories came near.

Without looking away or hesitating I flatly told her what needed to be said. “It was not one moment of drunken indiscretion, Mother. It was my childhood. My whole childhood.”

She sat back in her chair, horrified into silence for a long moment before defiantly crying out, “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you!!!”

I waited, not angry or frightened, feeling only clarity. “Mom, why would I lie? Why would I do that right now, knowing what’s happening in both our lives? Why would I do that?”