Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found Read online

  Finally, they are satisfied (or they just give up) and we move on with the routine of reading and drawing and drinking more tea. It’s another night of my family being my family.

  I LOVED MY father but not as a child loves a parent. I loved him in a protective, I’ll-take-care-of-you kind of way. I loved him like a mother. I loved him like a hopeful lover. (In fact, I wanted my father to wait for me to grow up so I could marry him. I wanted to prove to him that I would be a good wife. Was this the guilt that came from believing I had failed in my task of being a gift from God?)

  I was obsessed with molding myself to be my father’s ideal. I set aside my fear of the ocean to go sailing with him, I tried to learn how to swim (despite my fear of water) to please him, and I ran on a competitive track team, winning trophies and medals because this is what he wanted. I detested running and could never get enough breath.

  My relationship with my father was defined by adaptations designed to impress him and still he remained a detached ideal.

  Looking back at Jennifer, that little girl with such adult burdens, I finally understand how my father and I were simply two souls thrown together by circumstance. His wife wanted another child (specifically a daughter) and he pulled some strings to fulfill her desire. I was like a handbag or a scarf. Any baby would have done. It wasn’t personal.

  In the end, we were strangers to each other. There were no markers of genetics or lineage between us. Our primary bond was shared time and shared tragedy.

  ON THE NIGHT my father died, I dreamt he was in my room, going through my dresser drawers, as if in search of something left behind. The next morning, I thought about the dream for a long time and in light of the news that he was gone—at least in body—I knew it wasn’t a dream at all. My father had been in my room, searching.

  What had he been looking for? What did he want? Was he attempting to pack me up and set me on a path that would take me far away from Deb? Had love, pure love, finally entered into our story? Was he trying, too late, to set things right?

  ABOUT A YEAR after my father died, Deb got it into her head that she was going to be a healer for her church. She secured an apartment for herself and her own children, sent Bryan off somewhere (I have no idea where), and I was farmed out to a communal house in central L.A.

  As she dumped me with my princess bedroom set and a few bucks, Deb said it was time I learned to be on my own. “You are a challenge to the family dynamic,” she explained. “This arrangement will teach you the obligatory skills of autonomy.”

  Each morning, I was expected to work in the kitchen and help make breakfast. Then I was to go to school at Hoover Street Elementary. After school, I had another job at her church, cleaning offices, and then I was to get back to the commune and help with dinner.

  The woman kept me busy and apparently collected and retained my wages from behind the scenes.

  I was eleven years old.

  FOUR MONTHS PASSED while I learned the obligatory skills of autonomy. I was alive and I was surviving but I was also terrified and began to hear voices in my head—a chorus of mocking insanity, a murmuring sound with laughter in the background. I could make the voices stop, but only by singing out loud. Snappy, energetic tunes worked best, such as “If I Were a Rich Man” or “When You’re a Jet.”

  I was a walking minstrel. Lunatic child.

  When I wasn’t singing at the top of my lungs, I was talking to myself. I’d say, “It’s going to be okay, you’re going to be fine.”

  IN THE LOW valley of what I considered my darkest time, nearly homeless, crazy, and parentless, I witnessed a miracle.

  One of the women, who also lived in the house, was having a baby in her room.

  I had been invited.

  I remember standing near the end of table, one of several witnesses. The woman, perhaps in her twenties, was moaning and rolling her head from side to side. She had a honey complexion and light reddish hair. Spiral curls of her hair stuck in the sweat that covered her forehead and neck.

  Her husband was at her side, holding her hand.

  There was great anticipation in the room. Sunlight fell through the tall windows and sent rectangles over the table, the floor, and the walls.

  When it was time for her to push, a midwife spoke in hushed tones—encouraging and reassuring.

  The Beatles’ White Album was on the table and “Blackbird” played on the turntable.

  Amidst the birdcalls at the end of the song, not one baby was born, but rather, two. Twins!

  As the small ones were lifted out—bare naked and squirming with life—something in me shifted.

  The voices in my head were gone. All fear had dissolved.

  I could hear my own breath moving in and out of my body and I remember looking down at my own hands, touching my fingers together as if seeing myself for the first time.

  I was in that room, vivid and alert, but I was also beyond that room.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t feel all the feelings I used to feel—anger at Deb, confusion about my situation, sadness for the death of my parents, longing, loneliness, and fear. Those feelings were with me but had been diluted to become small and unimportant when placed in the sea of this larger feeling.

  It was awakening.

  NINE

  RETIREMENT

  BY THE SUMMER of 1975, Deb was finally busted for the way she was (or wasn’t) taking care of Bryan and me. An intervention of sorts took place—orchestrated by an aunt and uncle from Janet’s side of the family. Accusations of neglect and abuse were leveled at Deb and pretty soon the Lauck side of the family mobilized as well.

  Bryan was sent to live in Carson City with Janet’s people—Aunt Georgia and Uncle Charles—and I came to live with Bud’s parents—Grandma Maggie and Grandpa Ed.

  GRANDMA AND GRANDPA had a double-wide at the Sunset Mobile Home Park—one of hundreds that were lined up like building blocks on the side of a dusty Reno hill.

  Each day I lived with my grandparents, I’d amble down to the swimming pool that overlooked the city. I’d sit at the edge, kick my feet in the clear water, and study the long snake of the Reno freeway. Cars and trucks raced back and forth. I could see the Reno skyline too—casinos, office buildings, and neighborhoods with houses and schools and parks.

  Hot wind would sweep over me and I’d lean forward from my chest as if I meant to fly off the edge of that pool and swoop down to the city. The tug was magnetic but I didn’t know what to do with the sensation. I just felt this need to go down into Reno. I could almost imagine walking—like someone asleep and stumbling wherever I was supposed to go.

  It was Catherine of course. She lived down there. She was now twenty-eight years old. She had two children of her own.

  In my file, at Catholic Charities, it was noted that Janet and Bud had died and that I was living with my grandparents. I’m not sure how that information got into my file or who reported it.

  WHILE I IDLED my day away at the pool, Grandpa would play golf and Grandma would stay at the trailer, reading a paperback romance.

  Just before four, I’d wander back up to the trailer again, Grandpa would come home, and Grandma would put her book away.

  Cocktail hour went from four to five-thirty—they’d have vodka on the rocks and I’d get ginger ale—and we all watched Merv Griffin and The CBS News with Walter Cronkite.

  By six, we’d have dinner, watch the evening movie, and eat a bowl of ice cream—vanilla with chocolate sauce on top. Grandpa read Golf Magazine. Grandma finished her book. At ten, we all went to bed.

  They called this life being retired.

  AT NIGHT, AS I lay on the fold-out bed in the guest room, I created a dream where I finished childhood at the Sunset Mobile Home Park. I saw myself go to high school and then college. Details about what I might want to study or even become later in life were beyond my reach. I was too tired to imagine a future. I felt as old as Grandma and Grandpa. I felt older in fact. The way I saw things, I was retired too.

  NEAR
THE END of that summer, we all sat down for dinner in the dining room and the view was of the Sierra Mountains and the sunset. The sky was on fire.

  Grandma announced that Bryan was going to move to Oklahoma and that I was moving to a military complex nearby called Stead. We were being parceled out to Bud’s younger siblings.

  “It’s all set,” Grandma said.

  Grandma was a tiny woman who wore tropical print dresses she called muumuus. She had a million wrinkles that webbed over her face and down her neck. Even her lips were creased.

  I hadn’t even tasted my chicken noodle soup. My spoon was mid-lift. I set the spoon down on my napkin and put my shaking hands in my lap. “I thought I could just stay here with you,” I said.

  Grandma rested her elbows on the table and wrung her hands together. She looked from me to Grandpa and back to me.

  “We’d love to have you stay, Jenny,” Grandpa piped in, rescuing Grandma. “But you need young people. You need a family.”

  Grandpa was just like my father. His nose was bigger but they shared the same wide grin and fast laugh.

  “Did I do something wrong?” I asked. “Is that why I have to go?”

  “No, no,” Grandma said. She reached across the dining table to console me. She had skin like tissue paper.

  Grandpa spoke up again and called me a great little helper who would be so happy in my new family, which would consist of my father’s youngest sister, Peggy, and her husband, Richard. “They have a little one now, Kimmy,” Grandpa tossed in, like a baby was a prize. “Won’t a sister be fun?”

  How could I tell these sweet old people that I had no desire to have a sister or to have fun or to be in the company of more young people?

  How could I tell them that I knew they were pulling a fast one on me too?

  I had already overheard them bad-mouth Richard during cocktail hour. Grandma called him “a divorced Mormon,” which equaled “useless son of a bitch” to a devoted Catholic woman like Grandma. Grandpa had said he was “steamed” at Peggy for marrying Richard before she had finished college. They had both refused to talk to their youngest daughter for the better part of a year after she had gone against their wishes with the good-for-nothing Richard.

  I knew I could not say anything to change the situation or their minds. Who was I? I was a child. Eleven years old. Nothing.

  Instead, I hung my head and just cried. All my plans were about to change—again.

  TEN

  IN STEAD

  EVEN UNDER THE BEST of circumstances, it is difficult to be a mother. No matter how wondrous my own children were—my Spencer and my Josephine—there have been many dark nights and confused days. When Spencer was little, needing to be close and yet possessing a busy quality that had him wrestle me more than he cuddled me, I was tired. Sleep deprivation lasted almost five years. Nights of unbroken sleep had vanished and as a result, I was crabby and short tempered. A permanent furrow worked itself between my brows creating a nearly constant expression of exhaustion, worry, and selfdoubt. For many years, Spencer had a full-time view into this face of distress.

  The laundry list of motherhood challenges included breasts that would not cooperate with the mandated rule of nursing, frustration over the lack of privacy and solitude, and the loss of my identity as a career woman, which was then replaced by the lowly position of being a housekeeper, diaper changer, park squatter, and swing pusher.

  For a long time—even as I attempted to press these feelings down—a part of me also resented the neediness of the children. Why couldn’t they just grow up, keep themselves and their rooms tidy, and get jobs to help support themselves?

  Having come from my own childhood, where there had been no evidence of childishness, I was restless with the slow, agonizingly slow, process of getting on with it. What was this need within Spencer to stop and examine the bark of a tree for an hour? How could any child be fascinated, for several weeks, with the opening and closing of the lid on a Fisher Price CD player? What about this throwing himself down, in a busy coffee shop, and screaming at the top of his lungs while pummeling the floor with his fists?

  And Jo? How did I, this dark and intense soul, have such a light little girl who found endless delight with flowers, who gathered dolls in groups and talked to them in a language no one could understand, and who needed—no, insisted—on wearing every single princess dress she owned and changed her name from Jo to Belle for a full year?

  My kids were just so ... childlike.

  Their very nature was perplexing to me. Vexing at times.

  And more, I was plagued with a sense that I, due to my own dark past and resulting cynicism, would deprive them of that natural joy of being unbound, innocent, and free. How could I be a guide for such creatures as my own children? How could I turn off my own impatience and be as present to the joys of life as they were? How could I be the mother they needed instead of the person I was? When I moved from Grandma and Grandpa’s trailer—when I came out of retirement—I found myself in a community called Stead

  “I’m in Stead,” I’d say to myself just to hear the word come out of my mouth. Stead. I’m in-stead. I couldn’t say it enough. “I’m here now, instead of there.” In Stead, instead of being retired. I’m in Stead instead of living with Deb. I’m in Stead instead of being dead, which became a mantra sputtered from the mouths of the aunt and uncle who took me in. “If it wasn’t for us, you’d be dead in a gutter somewhere in L.A.”

  They felt I was lucky to be in Stead.

  AUNT PEGGY WAS almost petite compared to Auntie Carol, but her body wasn’t small, it was sturdy. With wide shoulders, wide hips, and an ample bosom, Peggy could have filled in Wonder Woman’s suit quite nicely. She was solid but womanly.

  Peggy was twenty-six years old and a housewife who stayed home with her one-year-old, Kimmy—a sweet, chubby, angelic child with curls of blond hair and huge blue eyes. Peggy passed her time doing laundry, shopping for groceries, and planning meals. At the end of each day, she prepared dinner for Richard—tacos, enchiladas, Salisbury steak, chicken-fried steak, and something called rigatoni, which was mashed-up beef stuffed into pasta shells.

  Richard was twenty-eight years old and born on September 19, which seemed to be an odd coincidence. How was it that I ended up in the home of a man who shared Bryan’s birthday and the day my mother died? I couldn’t fathom it.

  RICHARD WAS A tall man with long arms and an oddly shaped torso. With no waist and nearly no behind, his pants slid down his narrow hips and hung midcrack. He was forever tugging them up in a distracted, habitual way. He worked as an appliance repairman, and at the end of the day his fingernails were black with the grease of his profession.

  After dinner, most nights, Richard had a ritual where he would turn on the TV, root himself into the sofa and watch episodes of Bonanza and Wild, Wild West. All the while, he would carve grime from under his nails with a pair of clippers. He did the same to his feet, bending his leg wide around his belly in an act of contortion that seemed physically impossible. Toe jamb.

  And Richard smoked. Chain smoker—one after another—all day, all night (until sleep finally made his mouth go slack). When he spoke to me, it was usually to command that I replenish his dwindling supply of smokes, locate his lighter, or empty his overflowing ashtray.

  He’d call out, “Hey, no-neck, get me a pack of cigarettes”; “Hey, no-neck, get me my lighter”; “Hey, no-neck, clean out this damn ashtray.”

  RICHARD WAS ONE of five children who came from what he would call “mountain people,” meaning hillbillies who (man and woman alike) chewed tobacco, threw back moonshine, grew their own marijuana, and unloaded ammo on empty beer cans shot from rough rail fences.

  Mountain children were raised being called “no-necks.” Children were “hands,” not people; they were like pesky livestock, best corralled, contained, and trained to do tough homesteading work.

  Richard had had a brutal childhood. He had been whipped more times than he could count. He was p
roud to have endured—without a whimper—those bloodied beatings. He had gone hungry. He had tasted fear many times.

  Richard felt my past was a holiday in Hawaii compared to his childhood and wanted to teach me the lessons of life that I hadn’t yet learned. He went to work on me immediately.

  LATER I LEARNED that Richard was not only born on September 19th, he was also born in the year 1945. An investigation revealed that Richard shared both birthday and birth year with my birth father—Bill Wright—the man so eager to give me his name when the story began.

  First Bryan was born on September 19, then Janet died on that day, then came Richard with that day as his birthday, and finally I was able to connect all of this to my own birth father—exact day and year.

  There was no explanation for the synchronicity. The information, once revealed, made me feel as if I teetered on the edge of cosmic complexity beyond my capacity for comprehension.

  While Richard seemed an impossible match as my father, he was an exact replica. Had I attracted him to me? Was there something unique in my chemistry that energetically vibrated with a character like Richard and if yes, why and how?

  It seemed so odd that life gave me a father (Bill) and then took him away, gave me another father (Bud) and took him away too, and then, gave me Richard. Richard instead of Bill. Richard instead of Bud.

  RICHARD AND PEGGY’S house was one level with three bedrooms and asbestos siding. A chainlink fence surrounded the yard and the grass was burned brown.

  I was given a place to sleep in the sewing room at the back of the house and Peggy enrolled me in school, a big challenge due to the fact that few records were available.