Whisper

By Jennifer Dillon

"Whisper" follows one young girl's emotional journey as she learns to navigate a perilously shifting family landscape. Jennifer follows her father as he moves their family through assorted university teaching positions and several wives. As the women come and go, many leaving him with custody of their children, it is Jennifer who remains his constant companion. But the years of chaos take their toll and when she learns the price her youngest sister has paid for family, she must choose whom to protect and whom to abandon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Dillon
• Release date: Nov 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301078820

Jennifer Dillon

Jennifer Dillon lives in New York City where she studies Hung Ga Kung Fu and lives with her long-time boyfriend Christopher and two dominating happiness providers (cats). When not writing she can often be found managing restaurants. She is currently writing a fantasy novel "Ailanthea Dusk."

Book preview

Whisper

A Memoir

Jennifer Dillon

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Jennifer Dillon

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Part One

Chapter One- Fort Wayne, Indiana

Chapter Two- Los Angeles, California

Chapter Three- Fort Wayne, Indiana, Again

Chapter Four- Tacoma Park, Maryland

Chapter Five- Tacoma Park, Maryland, Still

Part Two

Chapter Six- Cheap Ranch, Maryland

Chapter Seven- Tacoma Park, Maryland, Again

Chapter Eight- Big Rock Road, Maryland

Part Three

Chapter Nine- Seattle, Washington

Chapter Ten- Seattle, Washington, Junior/Senior Year

Chapter Eleven- Portland, Oregon

Chapter Twelve- The In Between, New York

Chapter Thirteen- New York, New York

Part One

Chapter One- Fort Wayne, Indiana

Kensington Road in Fort Wayne, Indiana was the kind of neighborhood that was advertised as the perfect place for couples with young children. The street was lined with trees and the two or three bedroom ‘starter’ homes were all placed on small plots of land, each set just far back to have both front lawn and a backyard. This is a town, country and time where predatory behavior was not yet the norm. CSI, Law & Order SVU and Dexter did not yet cram the airwaves with their increasingly bizarre plots of pain, disaster and the macabre. In the 1970s children who disappeared were, at worst, assumed to have wandered off and fallen down a well. Or maybe hit by a car when they wandered into the road, but the idea that people took children to hurt them, or use them, was far from the consciousness of the inhabitants of this tree-lined street that could have been nearly anywhere in suburban America.

I am four and I’m bored and decide to take myself to the grocery store. I know the way having paid attention all of the other times that we’ve gone before. I put my shoes are on go into the golden gentle, daytime sun remembering the way by pretending I am the cherry red Mustang. Soon the doors loom ahead and behind them, the bright sterile light that keeps everything clean. I go in walking the same way that we walk every time that we are here. Reaching with fingertips I finally touch the things I think of touching every time we come but don’t. I’m usually stuck in the cart. The glass feels wet beneath my fingers as I reach for the rows of green boxes of peas all in a row, but the fog doesn’t streak like it does when I touch the glass at home. The frost is on the other side of the glass. I try drawing a sun it does not show up. Magic denied. Up and down I go, boxes with cartoons, tigers and elves, rolls of toilet paper soft like clouds, like the picture says on the front. That picture is a lie. Then the gleaming bottles of different colored things, the row of don’t touch. Finally the bread, and then my time here in the endless comforting hum, muted noise from the murmur of people, music coming from somewhere up high and the engines of all the refrigerators and freezers, comes to an end as it always does, just a little sooner than I would like. I stand in line with the other people looking at the backs of legs waiting for the line to move again. I see purple and white boxes; boxes I can’t believe I’ve never noticed before. Selfish, I grab two, put one in the pocket of my overalls and grasp the other tightly in my hands.

Bye-Bye! Thank you. Bye-Bye! I’m waving as I have been taught to, not entirely understanding why this is necessary when leaving every place I go.

As I leave the sterile make-things-clean light for the golden keep-me-warm light, I delicately open the box, sliding my nail under the flap of the box and pulling the top off, and am delighted to find the contents exactly the same color as the box. Who knew such things were even possible? I take one out and put it in my mouth. As the color purple bursts across my tongue my thirst can immediately only be sated by more color. Before the taste is gone from the one in my mouth I have another. I can’t tell if the white and the purple taste different or the same.

I must remember to make sure that the way back looks the same as it does when we are in the car. Must is a word I hear a lot. Rapt in ecstasy, cradled by discovery and the balmy warm Indiana air, I feel it before I see it. My father bears down on me like a truck terrifying me into stillness. He, terrified into anger from his loss. How long was I gone before he noticed? Where could I have gone? What has happened to me? He is yelling while hugging me the second box of purple and white is now jammed under my chin uncomfortably. I am trying to swallow licorice-thick saliva so I can tell him what purple and white tastes like, but I may be in trouble. Finally, he lets me go, he is laughing now. He looks at my boxes. I feel my feet leave the ground and the whoosh in my ears as I do when he picks me up fast. I understand like a tiny pin pick in the velvet blanket of my safety that I have been unsafe, but danger has been averted. Danger is what makes my dad red. He is red again later after I try creating 52 more colorful epiphanies in different combinations, assuming that my crayons would lead to similar results. Crayons despite their brilliant array of colors, all taste the same. All I get from that box of color is a dry mouth and a bellyache. Drawing isn’t as good as eating.

Our backyard is planted with many colors. The rose bushes line the yard to the right, and though I like the flowers I don’t like the trick of the thorns. Worse than those are the buzzing bees. I’ve been taught that if a bee is buzzing around me to stand very still. Once the bee investigates me and decides that I’m not a flower or dangerous it will leave me alone. If I panic, then the bee will get scared and sting me. Then there is some stuff about how the bee dies from stinging me and that’s how scared it is. I don’t really understand that part so well. I’m stuck on the notion that the bee will think I am a dangerous flower. What does this flower look like? I’ve learned to shrug away such questions relying on a clarity that is soon to come with learning because asking my dad to clarify something I don’t understand leads to more heavy words and images I don’t understand, but feel obligated to pretend that I do, so I seem bright. A bee is buzzing after me and I remember my father’s words like an insistent stream floating down to me.

Jenny, remember what I told you. I remember and proudly stand very still, stock-still. The bee buzzes and though I very much want to run I hold my ground and the bee lands on my arm. Tickling a little bit. I marvel at its iridescent fairy wings. It stings me. Howling betrayal I run toward the house. Adults don’t know anything of value. I steer clear of the bees; they have won their territory dispute. The problem however is that they are everywhere in our backyard, in the peach tree my mother insisted on planting despite the deadly winters, the roses, the clover in the grass that tastes really sweet when the adults aren’t watching. They lurk in the strawberry patch when I gather the tiny wild strawberries for my father’s breakfast granola and hover along the back fence where the pickling cucumbers grow among the lilacs that scent my alley passage from here to there. The driveway is white gravel, so safe from the bees. I learn that the bees take naps. Morning dew time is safe and hot, hot sun time is safe and almost nighttime is safe. I learn the hard way that they perch on the ground when they are tired. It is lucky I am not allergic I hear my dad saying to someone with a laugh.

I am not allowed to leave my block. This leaves the alley as my only way to get from here to there. At the end of the alley live someone’s grandparents. I go to their house, sit with them on their enclosed porch, and eat cookies. There are never cookies in my house, only mint chocolate chip ice cream after I eat all of my dinner, even the gross monkey brains. They’re not monkey brains. My dad calls them that mistakenly thinking it will make them more attractive. I wonder what I have done to make him think I’d like to eat Curious George. The middle, where the ground beef and the rice are, is ok if the rice is cooked through, which it sometimes isn’t. Sometimes it’s a little crunchy.

Just eat the soft parts ok? my dad says embarrassed. He doesn’t need to be. I know that we are still learning. I pull out the brains, spread them on my plate, and search for the soft parts. We are still learning how to cook; the outside of the green pepper is always cooked too much. Par boiling ingredients like pasta in macaroni and cheese or the rice in stuffed peppers has not entered into our cooking repertoire yet.

After dinner, eating the mint chip ice cream is work. The chips must be separated from the ice cream and eaten afterwards. I can keep the chips in my mouth or in the bowl. Safer if I keep them in my mouth so as not to attract weird questions, usually starting with the word why. Adults have this way of talking at me in a loud voice that I don’t really like, the loudness makes it hard for me to understand what they are saying. The weight of that lack of understanding falls on my head too heavy for comfort like when adults pat me on the head telling me how clever I am. I like the someone else’s grandparents at the end of the alley because their words are not heavy. We sit in the sun looking at each other, me content to be on my secret mission and they content with young company.

Next door live the sisters. They too are older and their house is much more lively. There is a piano like in our house. I wonder where their parents are. They feed me Oreo cookies which I eat until I throw up in the bathroom sink at home later, standing on the platform my dad made me so I could reach the sink like a big girl. I feel terrible for betraying our secret by getting sick, because I’m not supposed to have too much sugar.

I finally get a bike and it has training wheels so I ride tilted to the left. I don’t like this feeling and try and convince my dad that I need to have the training wheels taken off. Standing in the alley behind the house, I want them off! I demand.

You’re not ready, he says.

"Well, when am I going to be ready?" I’m looking up at him with my hands on my hips. I stand like this because he does. The sun is getting in my eyes. My dad doesn’t do that weird bend at the waist thing that so many other adults do, he either squats so we are eye level or he talks to me from up high.

Soon, he promises.

"When is soooooooon?" I’m trying to look him in the face but all I can really see is his gold belt buckle.

When you stop leaning on the left training wheel so much, he says patiently.

I huff and get on the bike with the baby wheels on it. He grabs the back of the seat and steadies me so that I am balanced on the two big wheels not on the baby wheels. Feel that? he asks.

Yes, I begrudgingly say.

That’s what it needs to feel like all the time, he explains.

We go up and down the alley day after day until he thinks that I am ready. Then he takes the baby wheels off and rides next to me on his big boy bike. I fall on the same knee again and again looking over my shoulder to make sure that he is there watching me when I can’t see him. He always is. Finally I learn to stop looking, and then I stop falling.

Now I’m really desperate to get off the block. One day at dinner my father says words that are magic to my ears.

I have decided that after you turn five you are allowed to ride your bike off of the block.

Really? Really?

He nods. But you must promise to stay on the sidewalk and get off of your bike at the corners and remember to look both ways before you cross the street.

I promise! I say loudly so he knows I really mean it.

I’m serious, Jenny, he says.

I PROMISE! I yell out.

Ok. But not until then you understand? he asks.

I nod. I am excited vibrating from my toes to my head with the idea of what lies beyond.

Proud to be a big girl I follow the rules, getting off my bike at the corners, crossing the street after looking both ways, and then getting back on. I’m distracted by the marvel of how different everything looks in this direction, the direction we never drive in. I don’t notice the boy on the bike. I run into him knocking him to the ground. Horrified, I drop my bike rushing over to him; it is winter we are maxed out in our gear, little snowmen on wheels. He is on his side struggling like a turtle to get back up.

Sorry. Sorry! I didn’t see you! Sorry! He finally rolls over toward me and he is laughing. I start to laugh too. I help him up. He has really red hair! Not kind of red like mine, really, really red. I am instantly jealous and wondrous at the same time. My name is Jenny! I repress the impulse to wave.

Teddy, he says equally as quickly.

We pick his bike up and start walking toward his house. I have made my first kid friend all on my own. The pictures in the albums that are hidden somewhere in my father’s current house, hidden away from the gaze of a wife jealous of his life before her, tell me that I had other friends, other children were there at the birthday parties we all attended. We are smiling and content to be together but it is only the blaze of Teddy and his hair that remain in my memories still. Even my mother is not there. She is like a phantom that I chase. Always just turning the corner ahead of me, just beyond my reach, my sight, and my heart. And my father’s as it turns out.

Tension rises in the house and the words divorce and custody begin to fly. Even still, my friend Carrie and I would sit against the aluminum white siding of the house still warm from the days earlier blaze waiting for my mother’s music. The warmth penetrates our light coats keeping at bay the encroaching fall chill. We wait, knowing that soon wistful, beautiful music will spill out the window coating us with the light footsteps of fairies and unrequited love. My mother touches her pale tapered fingers to the keys lightly and the slow trilling of the first few high notes mark the beginning of the tale. In these few moments a day, I can hear the love that is in my mother’s soul, even if she can’t share that love with me.

Quietly, underneath the music, whispered so as not to miss a single flight of notes, Carrie asks, So, what does divorce mean then? And only because we are still in the beginning phrases that repeat do I answer, It means they will be happier. Or so I’ve been told.

The repeat is coming to an end and the music is about to pick up to the part where I always imagine tiny ballerinas spinning with their tulle skirts flaring at their waists. Quickly, Carrie launches her next question knowing that she won’t get an answer for a few moments, Yea, but what does that mean? As they spin in the air before my eyes, I consider the question. I’m don’t like this conversation and wish that my parents would stop insisting on being the first at things. The first to put their daughter in an non-traditional school, to have unconventional jobs, to want only one child, and now the first of many to get a divorce. As the music slows I respond, I’m staying with dad and the house.

Carrie looks at me puzzled, Because of her eyes? My mother has been diagnosed with a degenerative retinal disease that is slowly darkening her vision. One tomorrow, years away, her world will exist completely in the dark. Though this is a source of her sorrow, it is not the only one and somehow an understanding is born on the wings of Beethoven. She isn’t really leaving me behind, but gifting me to the better parent. The parent that I know loves me, the one who is as warm as his brown eyes and red beard.

We are getting to the angry part, where the heavy lower notes come in and try to stamp down the light upper ones so I say slightly louder, No. Because she’s starting from scratch. The upper notes fight and push back the thumping insistence of the bass. Do they even let dads have kids without moms? Carrie asks. The light treble notes celebrate their victory by showing off the same trilling beauty they possessed at the beginning of the piece. As my mother lifts her finger from the last note letting the padded hammer finally rest against the piano's wire, a terrible fear fills my heart, and the fragile stolen love of a daughter for a mother goes as dark and chilly as the evening.

My mother simply walks out one day taking nothing but her crock-pot, leaving literally everything else, her clothing still hanging in the closet, her piano, her Pekinese Siegfried that we had adopted because what she really wanted was a cat but my father was terribly allergic. I have few memories of my mother before she left that house on Kensington Road that I know are mine and not gleaned from repeated watching of my father’s home movies or the poring over albums that contain pictures of a family I cannot remember ever being part of.

My father fills my memories and it seems in my five-year-old view that we did everything together including cooking. Cooking became a ritual of connection that we practiced daily. We are making spaghetti, and even at this age I know that the onions and garlic go in the pan before the ground meat that we then make brown. Sometimes the fat sizzles and starts to spit when we do this. My father blocks me with his left arm keeping me out of the way until it is safe again. I lean against his arm, not in a hurry to stir but because it is warm and kind of furry.

You’re home early, my father says over my head. I have the wooden spoon to push the meat around so that it browns evenly. I look over my shoulder and a woman is standing there in a white nurses’ uniform. I remember her only from her neck down. I turn back to the pan. She wasn’t a nurse but rather a graduate student getting her degree in clinical psychology. By self-admission, she only stayed in the marriage the last three years of the ten that they were married because my father was paying for her degree. The minute she got the degree she took her crock-pot and moved into a trailer with one of her teachers. It was a double wide. Big enough for the two of them and the rotation of children, his three boys and her one daughter that all visit sometimes on the weekends.

Once she left, dad and I graduated to many more dishes and my father rediscovered cooking with a wok that had been given to him years before. Our cupboard became full of black bean sauce, hoisin, Thai chili paste, cornstarch. The veggie drawer in the fridge with scallions, watercress, ginger root, garlic. Gone are potatoes and in comes rice. Kung Pao chicken with peanuts, so hot that I learn quickly that