The Source of All Things (5 page)

I was a sucker for any four-legged creature, but there was something
about Jigger's eyes that made me want to tell her my heart's deepest desires. Asking Donnie's permission, I slid my hand under her collar and led her gently into the backyard.

We talked for a solid hour—well, I talked and she listened—sitting off to the side of the house under an aspen tree where I thought no one could see us. I whispered, in case Chris was spying.

“I love you, Jigger,” I began. “And I love your owner, too. He's the nicest man I've ever met. When you get home, tell him I want him to be my daddy. Then you can come live with us, starting tomorrow.”

Jigger listened, breaking her gentle, bird-dog stare every so often to lick my cheek or grass-stained foot. I took each kiss as a form of doggie affirmation, as if she was saying:
I like you. He likes me. Pretty soon we'll all be sharing the same steak
.

She was right. Mom, Chris, Donnie, and I tied the knot nine days shy of my fourth birthday, on November 3, 1974. I say it like that—
we tied the knot
—because that's how it felt: the four of us vowing to love, cherish, and honor each other till death—or some other unforeseeable catastrophe—tore us apart.

Y
ou're lucky,” my mom told me. “You know what it's like to be loved.”

She and I were sitting in the living room of our house on Richmond Drive in February 1976. I wasn't in kindergarten yet because I'd missed the cutoff date at my school, Sawtooth Elementary. My birthday was in November, the same month the valves in my unborn brother's heart filled up with calcium. One day Mom felt him rummaging around near her ribcage, and the next day: nothing. She called the doctor, who told her to lie on the couch and eat Jell-O; that would get the baby moving. A week later, when he still hadn't tickled her kidneys, she knew he was dead inside her.

The doctors scheduled Mom for something she called a D&C, a simple procedure to vacuum the baby out of her body. It happened a few days before my fifth birthday, but, due to complications, the simple procedure turned into a hysterectomy. Marlene
and Terry came over to make the ice-cream-cone cupcakes and blindfold the dozen kids at my party for pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. But sometime between presents and birthday cake, I lured my friends into my bedroom to tell them my mom was in the hospital and that we shouldn't be having so much fun.

Even then, I had a sense for which of my friends would respond best to my dramas and who would give me the wrong response. I'd already been caught—and punished—for showing Marcie and our neighbor Wendy a
Playboy
magazine I'd stolen from my dad's stash in the garage. We were simultaneously horror struck and mesmerized by the models' balloon-size boobs and hairy armpits, and our laughter made Marcie's dad look behind his La-Z-Boy where we were sitting. When he found us, he threatened to call my parents if I didn't tell him where we got the magazine. I could tell from the tone in his voice that magazines with naked ladies were bad, but there was no way anyone could make me rat out my new daddy. When my parents found out I'd stolen the
Playboy,
they scolded me, but only lightly, and later I heard them laughing about it.

At my party, my friends and I grouped up between my white-and-purple bed frame and the wall, buttercup yellow. Marcie stuck her feet in my flowered sleeping bag, while Wendy pulled my Porky Pig nightlight out of the wall socket.

“My mommy is in the hospital trying to get out our baby,” I told them. “We can eat cupcakes and I can open my presents. But after that, I think God would want you to go home.”

One by one, around the circle, my friends' faces clouded over. Most of them went to church, so they understood the concept of God. If they were Catholic, like I was, they also knew that God
the Father could fly down from heaven and light our hair on fire if we didn't put others' needs before ours. Nearly all of my friends prayed “Now I lay me down to sleep” before they went to bed. But when it came time to sacrifice their party favors for a woman they knew vaguely as “Tracy's mommy,” they just stared at me, blinking.

“Maybe we could finger-paint your mom a picture,” offered Marcie, pitching forward on her corduroys.

“Or save her a piece of cake,” said Wendy, picking at the carpet.

“Or maybe all of you can come back to the living room and join the rest of the children who were nice enough to come to your party,” said a mother I didn't know, sticking her head through my door and furrowing her eyebrows.

Some people don't know how to recognize a child's strange way of coping with trauma. But when my mom came home six days later, I knew I had been a good daughter. She pulled up her nightgown and showed me the layers of blood-stained gauze wrapped around the center of her abdomen. Her skin looked doughy and waterlogged and blue bruises lined the insides of her arms.

“I'll be good as new in a little while,” she said, when she saw me staring at her injuries. But for some reason I knew better than to believe her. We were standing in the bathroom in front of our big oval mirror. Static lifted my hair from its roots and stuck it to my mom's bandages.

A few months
after her surgery, though, Mom actually did start feeling better. She came out of her bedroom dressed in a black
leotard, matching tights, and glittery, navy blue legwarmers. She turned on the TV, and a man with hair like a space helmet started telling her to do leg kicks. I hopped around behind her, trying to copy her footsteps.

In the mornings before my first year of school, Chris went to Sawtooth Elementary and my new dad drove his jeep to work in the boy's department at Van England's. If Mom was feeling happy, she'd pull my hair into braids and tie my Holly Hobbie pinafore into a bow. We kept ourselves busy, cleaning out the closets and watching
As the World Turns.
But every afternoon, something came over my mother that made her want to go to sleep. Climbing onto the black vinyl sofa in our upstairs living room, she'd mutter, “I wish I knew what it was like to be loved. But no one's ever really loved me.” When she said it, she wasn't looking at me, but somewhere beyond me, near the fake oak tree we kept in the living room, flanked by matching statues of Asian kids in kimonos.

I sat Indian style near the base of the couch, studying the bottom of my mom's feet. It'd been more than a year since we'd married Donnie, and I was confused by her confession of loneliness. It made no sense for her to say that no one loved her, because even I could see that my new dad waited on her hand and foot. The stories she told about my old dad made me think he'd loved her too. And what about me? I loved her more than anything.

Besides that, ever since the wedding our life had seemed so much happier than before; even a five-year-old could see it. In my Mother Goose–influenced worldview, everything about our new life shouted love, from the songs we'd sing on our way to go skiing at Soldier Mountain to the TV dinners we got to eat in the basement while watching
Sonny and Cher
. Love is what made my
dad jump out of his beanbag during a chase scene in
Starsky and Hutch
to rush down to Safeway for Ruffles, my mom's favorite potato chips, and spend an entire Saturday during the middle of sagehen-hunting season helping Chris build race cars for his Boy Scout troop's pinewood derby.

I was pretty sure love accompanied my parents into their bedroom on the rare occasions when my dad would sneak out of work and surprise us for lunch. After a quick grilled-cheese sandwich and tomato soup, he and my mom would make me go down for a nap, then nudge each other into their bedroom, smooching and holding hands. When I heard the latch on their door lock behind them, I'd sneak out of bed and press my ear into the two-inch space between their door and the carpet. The muffled noises seeping through the gap made me feel weird but happy. They sounded like people licking strawberry ice cream.

So when my mom offhandedly mentioned how alone she felt on that blustery February afternoon, confusion swirled like a cloud of mosquitoes. Even then, a part of me knew that my mom's sadness was more powerful than any love anyone could give her, and that her life before me had been too difficult for her to ever be truly happy. I knew she'd grown up in a place where love was doled out in slaps and insults, and that, more than once, she'd received actual coal in her Christmas stocking. This knowledge made me feel both lucky and guilty. I'd sit with her on the couch looking at pictures of my real dad and hold her hand as sobs wracked her body. But I was young and full of energy. I bounced up and down on the sofa and said, “But I love you, Mommy.
I
do.”

“Oh, I know you do, sweetpea,” she answered. “That's not what I mean.”

The house became melancholy when Mom slept, and the wind sounded like someone scraping against the door. I went to my room and took out my Barbies, then tiptoed back down the hall. On the couch, Mom had covered her face with a blue-and-red afghan someone had crocheted for my unborn baby brother. I sat with my back against our new wallpaper—black velvet trees painted on a white background—and watched her chest rising and falling under the cover.

O
kay,” said my new dad, Donnie, “you're sure about this?” We were in the bathroom of our new house, on November 11, 1977. The previous summer, Mom and Dad had bought a new place on Parkway Drive. It resembled our old place, with three bedrooms, a basement, and two baths. But this one had so much built-in storage that the first time Chris and I went there, we played hide-and-seek in the walk-in closets for two solid hours. Now I also went to a new school called Harrison Elementary, and the next day, I would turn seven, becoming one of the older kids in my first-grade class. My hair was pulled into two tight ponytails that were wrapped around pink sponge rollers so they'd be curly for my birthday party the next day. All afternoon, my mom had baked, frosted, and decorated nineteen ice-cream-cone cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles on top. But the success of my birthday hinged on one thing only: I wanted to lose a tooth.

I'd convinced myself that I couldn't be happy unless a tooth came out before I turned seven, so I begged my dad to extract one for me. A few days earlier, Dad had gotten out his needle-nose pliers and tried to pry a tooth out of my mouth. He yanked and wiggled, scraping off some of my enamel. When I started to cry, he described an easier, more reliable tooth-pulling method. He would tie one end of a piece of floss around the tooth and the other end to a doorknob. When he slammed the door, the floss would yank, tearing my tooth, roots and all, out of my gum.

I sat perfectly still, just like Dad instructed me to, but my insides felt like Jell-O. I held my breath and tried to think happy thoughts. I thought of my grandpa, and how fun it was to steal his Tums, which tasted like minty candies. And of camping at Magic Reservoir, where, during the summer, the water was always warm enough to swim. Dad looked at me while looping the clear floss around the doorknob. When he finished, he squatted down in front of me and put his hands on my kneecaps.

“Your eyes are so big,” he said. “We don't have to do this if you're afraid.”

I was afraid, but I trusted my new dad. He was the one I turned to when I needed a good adventure or big, strong hands to swoop me out of trouble. Over the summer, he'd taught me to roller-skate, ride my bike, and jump off the high dive at Harmon Park. My mom always watched, but she never urged me to test my bravery. Out in the living room, I could hear her laughing at something Sonny told Cher. I knew she was watching TV because she was too scared to see Dad ripping my bone from my head. I, on the other hand, was exceedingly brave. Even though it was November, I still went outside in my Wonder Woman swimsuit with a towel
pinned around my neck. I ran laps around the trailer, flying in my invisible jet. I climbed fences and did cartwheels and chased Jigger around down the sidewalk in my bare feet. So it didn't matter that my mom was hiding out in the basement, because I had my dad, and I had me.

Dad stood with his hand on the door, waiting for my cue to slam it as hard as he could. A jolt of electricity shot through my spine and into my pigtails. Holding on to the backs of my legs, I said, “It's okay, Daddy. Just do it, please?”

A second later, Dad slammed the door, tearing the tooth out of my gum. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and blood-tinged drool trickled down my chin. Dad lunged for the tooth as it shot past him, tiny, square, and Chiclet-white. He scooped me up and sat me on his lap, where he kissed the blood-tinged drool off my lower lip.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “You'll be the queen of the first grade.”

He was right.
The next day, I did feel like birthday royalty. My pigtails bounced like wire springs affixed to the sides of my temples. I carried a small, square mirror in the front pocket of my jumper and took it out often to admire the gap in my teeth. My tongue kept finding reasons to fiddle with the metallic-tasting hole until my teacher, Mrs. Galloway, asked me to stop.

But I didn't need a missing tooth—or anything else—to get me excited about going to Harrison Elementary. I already thought first grade was hitting the jackpot, because it meant I finally got to spend all day at school. In Mrs. Galloway's class, I cruised through my reading lessons in the advanced reading group. Art and spelling
were a cinch, and math was a piece of cake too. But after I realized the smart kids didn't get any extra attention, I started intentionally writing down the wrong answers to my addition problems, so Mrs. Galloway would have to “help” me figure them out. (This didn't last long, because it was only after I compulsively answered them correctly that I erased my answers and “recalculated” them. And my erasing skills weren't as good as my math skills.)