In Pieces

by Sally Field

  Turning fourteen.

  With each day, a new theater of war opened up. He began spying on me, listening on the other phone if anyone called, accusing me of behaving in ways I couldn’t even fathom, things he saw only through his eyes. I was a teenager who desperately needed her peers, trying hard to be friends with a group of girls, to be invited to their slumber parties, to be included. Once, he lay spread-eagle on the big front lawn, flat as a pancake and undetected by the light of the moon or passing cars as he waited for me to return from an eighth-grade party I’d been allowed to attend. But when I was securely dropped off by the parent of another girl at exactly eleven o’clock—my curfew—his hopes of trapping me in some kind of deception were thwarted. God knows how long he’d been planted out there on the damp grass—which definitely needed mowing.

  Then there was the time a boy I knew from school impulsively walked me home from the Little League field, less than a mile away. I remember feeling flustered, but, thinking Jocko wouldn’t be home until late, I invited the young man to stay for dinner. Ricky and Princess joined us, thank God, because they did most of the talking, making the conversation seem friendly and fun. As we all sat around the kitchen banquette, eating Baa’s dinner of pan-fried pork chops and canned corn, I was so caught up with the novelty of having this impromptu guest that I didn’t notice Jocko’s unexpected entrance through the back door.

  Suddenly he stood looming over our giggling group. And as I introduced my stepfather to the first and only boy I’d ever invited into the house, Jocko turned to me with a sly look and the interrogation began. “What the hell have you got on your face, smart-ass?”

  I was not allowed to wear lipstick, ever. I knew that, but since all the other girls wore it, when I was with them, I sometimes did too. Usually I was careful to wash it off, terrified to be caught behind enemy lines with Revlon on my face, but this time I’d forgotten and I got caught. I sat stunned on the sticky Naugahyde cushion, my mind began searching for possible excuses: I was in dress rehearsals for a play, I was testing it for a friend, my lips were really chapped so I grabbed the only thing I could find. Yet only a weak “I don’t have anything on my face” dribbled out of my bright pink mouth. I could usually lie like a pro, not because I ever had anything to hide—well, except lipstick—but because I liked lying to him. If he wanted the truth from me, he wasn’t gonna get it. He could ask if I’d had orange juice that morning and even if I had, I’d tell him it was apple. This time, however, I had actually broken a rule and needed a good lie. But I just sat there, so flooded with embarrassment that everything went white in my mind and I couldn’t think.

  Desperate to show everyone—most especially this poor bewildered boy—what a lying sniveler I was, Jocko went to the sink, wet a dishrag, loaded it with soap, and as my mother stood silently at the stove with her hand over her mouth, proceeded to wash my face in front of all those who could bear to watch. He needed to beat me in whatever game this was.

  Mom, where are you? Even now I want to call out to you. I want to look up and see you coming to help me. Gathering up these memories, forcing myself to look at ones that have been lying out in the open the whole time, I don’t know what to think. I’ve adored you all my life. But I’ve camouflaged the truth, fiercely believing my own fairy tale about you. I dressed you in clothes borrowed from the emperor, ones that didn’t actually exist, and during those important years you abandoned me. I don’t understand. I don’t want to discover that the piece I’ve been looking for is something I don’t want to see, I’ve never wanted to see… my anger toward you. I still need to hold on to you. Please help me to see something else.

  I have a stack of letters Jocko wrote to my mother at different times during their marriage. Letters I’m sure she never wanted me to read, yet she didn’t rip them to shreds and flush them down the toilet, so she must have known that they’d eventually land in my box of puzzle pieces, helping me to see her and put it all together. I look at them now with my eyes squinted, my grasp light, ready to drop the onionskin airmail pages if I feel I need to take a break—maybe a quiet jog to the nearest fog bank. I’m surprised to read Jocko’s words, constantly pleading for her love, frantic for her approval, while she keeps him waiting for her answers. And though I have none of the letters she finally did write in return, I have a few pages of her journal writings, sometimes typed on an electric typewriter, sometimes written by hand in a spiral notepad. But there are so few entries—dashed off in a disorganized, misspelled way—it leads me to think that she put her feelings on paper only when she was at an overload point and blurry with booze; other than that, she kept her real anguish locked away.

  On her private pages she nonchalantly writes that because we now had no money, she was faced with the overwhelming task of selling the Libbit house and finding us somewhere else to live as quickly as possible, while Jocko vanished. Hired to play the villain in the film Tarzan the Magnificent—which starred Gordon Scott and was being shot in Africa—Jocko had decided to leave weeks earlier than the production needed him. Baa writes that he had to leave, that he couldn’t watch, that he found it too painful to witness everything, all his cherished possessions, dissolve. And so, during the next few months we packed up our belongings and moved from our sprawling house in Encino to a small home in, yes, it’s true… Tarzana. Everything seemed to disappear at once: the house, the Cadillac, and for a while, Jocko.

  Unlike the law stating that I couldn’t wear lipstick until I was five feet tall (which didn’t happen until 1963), one of my stepfather’s ironclad rules doesn’t seem completely unreasonable in retrospect. This edict—which Jocko had repeated regularly and emphatically for years—pertained to dating: I was not allowed to do anything that resembled a date, could not go anywhere with a boy alone, until I turned fifteen years old. But I was not quite fifteen when I started the tenth grade and met a boy. And even though I was terrified of Jocko’s scrutiny and avoided inviting anyone to my house, miraculously this boy walked right in, mowing the lawn for Jocko, doing the dishes for Baa, making everything seem easy. So, two days before my birthday, when I hit fourteen years and 363 days, before we moved from the Libbit house and before he departed without a word, Jocko allowed me to go to the movies with Steve.

  Steven Craig Bloomfield was born in Fargo, North Dakota, a year and a half before my birth. His father abandoned his family when Steve was only a few months old, never initiating any contact with his son again. Steve then grew up under the scrutinizing eye of his mother, Glory Rose, who was a hard-edged, exacting businesswoman, perhaps because she had to be. And maybe she placed her four-year-old son in a military boarding school because she felt she had to, felt it was the only option she had. Maybe that’s true. But at four?

  When Steve was thirteen he no longer went to a military school but attended Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, which at that time was both junior and senior high. Finally free from scratchy wool uniforms, he joined up with a little band of Valley guys who got their kicks from pushing parked cars over whatever cliff was available, occasionally getting lucky when the car landed in someone’s swimming pool. On a smaller scale, they’d fold wads of dog shit into the daily newspaper, set it on fire, then leave it on a stranger’s doorstep after repeatedly ringing the bell. You can imagine what happened when the victim answered the door and began stomping on the package hoping to extinguish the flames.

  Never comfortable being one of the gang, Steve split off from that band of merrymakers and started breaking into houses. But not to do any harm. He would find an unlocked window or crawl through the dog door and walk around the home, never actually stealing anything but looking in people’s drawers and closets, or rearranging the furniture the way he thought it should be, then sitting in the house for a while, as if he lived there, always departing through the front door. It was a home, with a family, something Steve didn’t have.

  When he was finally caught, Glory found a way to keep her son from being sent to Juvie Hall (a juvenile correctional
facility) by agreeing to have him imprisoned in a different institution for a year: a boarding school for children with learning disabilities. Maybe that too was the only option she had, I don’t know. But at the time, the term learning disability could include a whole range of things, so among the students were kids with varying forms of autism and borderline mental health issues, like the overweight fourteen-year-old boy who felt compelled to save all his bodily fluids. There were kids with different degrees of brain damage along with a few whose parents were simply too busy to deal with them.

  Luckily, one of the counselors at the facility recognized Steve’s bright mind—which must have been like spotting an orange jellybean in a bowl of green ones. He ordered Steve to go to the small library every morning, find a book, then take it outside and sit under a tree on the big lawn the rest of the day. For one solid year, day in and day out, Steve sat under that tree and read. From Dickens to Hemingway, Steinbeck to Twain and Tolstoy. Devouring book after book.

  Steve had spent much of his childhood in institutions, not unlike my grandmother. And whether in a military school or a facility for the mentally challenged, there was always a list of rules, a strict set of enforced boundaries, walls that held him in and doors that locked him out. Steve refused to surrender, refused to play by those rules wherever they were. He went in the door that said Exit and left through the door that said Enter. Forever in deep revolt against the world that tried to tell him in what tempo he had to march, starting when he was only four.

  A year or so after being released from the facility, he intercepted me at a school football game, jumped right into step as I walked to the snack bar to get drinks for the girls, who were waving at me from the bleachers. Steve began the conversation by saying that his friend wanted to meet me, then pointed to a boy waiting in the stands, but since that sounded like the prelude to a humiliating prank, I shied away. He kept right on talking, and by the time we’d completed fifteen laps around the snack bar, he’d forgotten about his friend’s attributes altogether and focused entirely on his own. Long after halftime was over, I continued to sit on an empty bench—snackless—with persistent, determined, gentle Steve.

  Steve’s grad night 1962.

  I didn’t know any boys, other than my brother—had never been friends with a single one. There had been the awkward parties in the seventh and eighth grade, gatherings where everyone danced to Paul Anka singing “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” as the parents hovered in the kitchen. Times when we actually played “Spin the Bottle” and everyone smelled of Hershey’s Kisses, not human ones. Even the distanced flirtations in the ninth grade never included having an actual conversation. Every boy’s hand felt sweaty and sex was described using baseball terms, as though reaching home base was more for the bragging rights than anything else. But not Steve. We talked and talked because he wanted to know me and needed to tell me how filled with feeling he was. He seemed like someone who knew his way through the woods and whether he did or not, I felt safe to wander out beyond where I had been before. If my mother was my backup generator, then Steve was my flashlight, illuminating what was right in front of me.

  He instantly became a member of my family—not because they invited him in; they weren’t like that. He simply made room for himself, forming a solid friendship with my brother, who also didn’t have many friends; performing athletic antics with my little sister; staying up late in the night to talk philosophy and literature with my mother—later on getting drunk right along with her. Jocko seemed to get a kick out of Steve, although he still tried to belittle him, like he did the rest of us. But to survive his complicated life, Steve had developed a wily, honest charm that even Jocko couldn’t penetrate. He was going to find a way into my life, no matter what. If the door was locked, he’d climb in my window or crawl through the dog door. He wanted a family and I was it.

  And for the first time I heard myself verbalize my feelings, an endless stream of verbiage about Dick and Baa, Ricky, and slowly, bit by bit, about Jocko. Steve never backed away from emotion; to the contrary, he thrived on it, would push to find it—in everyone. He had an intuitive sense of anyone’s despair and like a hound dog on the trail of fugitive feelings, he’d root them out, lock his focus on the injury, then comfort and soothe. I had never told anyone anything, convincing myself my life wasn’t any different from any other little girl’s. But Steve’s concern told me it was different and since his own childhood had not been a skate in the park, I trusted his perspective. Because he was with me, I began to feel what I had been afraid to feel alone. And by helping me, he, in turn, felt stronger himself.

  I was fifteen and a half when Jocko returned and saw the tract home we now owned, an obvious demotion in the world. The El Caballero house was compact, a one-story place that had very little yard in the front and even less in the back, but Jocko took one look at it and immediately started building a swimming pool. I mean, he literally started shoveling dirt, and only after many days of shirtless digging did he finally decide to hire a professional pool contractor to complete the job. When the dust settled, we had a swimming pool that practically butted up against the sliding glass doors to the backyard. You could almost jump into the pool from the living room, without ever stepping outside. But since I had my own bedroom—which was connected to my sister’s by a small bathroom—I thought it was perfect.

  Not long after his return, when I was sound asleep in bed, lying on my side under the window I always kept open, I was suddenly pulled awake by the smell of booze oozing from someone’s pores. It was Jocko, trying to worm his body next to mine, fumbling with the blanket I had tightly wrapped around me. We were no longer in the Libbit house; the upstairs bedroom was gone (though it has never left my life), and I’d lived for months without the on-edge feeling of his presence. But now, instantly it was back and I couldn’t move. I gripped the covers, holding them in place while I played possum, and as I pretended to be asleep, he wiggled up close, whispering something I couldn’t understand. I held my breath—not only out of fear but to avoid the sickening smell of his drunkenness.

  And then one night some piece of me that had been quietly, wordlessly growing in my brain finally ripped out of my self-imposed fog and took center stage. Rage. Jocko and I met nose-to-nose, just as we had when he swept me off my feet at the age of four.

  It had all begun innocently when I’d asked permission to go out, something that by then hardly needed clearance, and as Steve waited for me in the small foyer off to the side, talking softly to my brother, Jocko began to flare.

  “I have the ability,” he slurred at me. “I have the ability to see your Achilles’ heel, little lady, everyone’s Achilles’ heel. That one thing about people… about you… and if I told you, it would destroy you.”

  “What are you talking about? What does that mean?” I tepidly threw back after enduring twenty minutes of his incoherent rant while sitting quietly on the sunken-in sectional. Across from me sat my mother, cross-legged on the floor with her swaying torso propped against the coffee table, barely able to keep her head up. I wanted to look at her, but I didn’t want to see how repulsive she was, so I didn’t.

  “You little smart-ass, listen to me. You think I can’t tell you things you don’t want to hear? Things you can’t hear! Things that you could not bear to hear! You think you know anything? ANYTHING?!” He stood up over me in a familiar stance of power and intimidation as my mind frantically searched for what it was that could destroy me.

  “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 ros
e 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.