Jigsaw Part Five

The jigsaw pieces made up a picture. In it were three people, a mother, a father, and a baby girl. The child was newborn, but though so young, Alice recognised her own features. The mother and father were not the parents Alice knew. They were standing in the background, their hands neatly clasped in front of them, their eyes looking over at the other couple.

  Alice peered closely at the faces. The father seemed to blur, his features going in and out of focus so that she could not really say whether he was dark or fair, or handsome or blue-eyed or red-haired or anything. The mother was looking over at the older couple, Alice’s parents, seeming to fix her gaze on the older woman’s face.

  Alice ran her finger over the faces, wondering what the picture meant. The mother holding the baby suddenly turned to speak, and Alice snatched her finger away, and fell back on the carpet.

  “This is you, Alice. This is you, you realise that don’t you? I am your first mother, I had you and gave you away, because I could not keep you. I could not afford to keep you. I would have been beaten up by my father, and by my mother, and probably my brothers. My grandmother would never have spoken to me again. They would all have called me a slut, and I would have been cast out. They don’t know, and never will know, about you. They thought I went off to work in another state for a few months. Don’t you ever tell my secret, Alice.”

  Alice put her finger under the edge of a piece of the jigsaw. She flicked it up and sent it flying. She did this with the next one, then the next and the next. Until the pieces were strewn all around her room.

 

Jigsaw Part Four

She walked along Moggill Road, into Toowong, along Coronation Drive by the river, stopping once or twice to watch something float past. She dodged cyclists as they rang their bells at her, and studied one piece of anti-safe sex graffiti. She walked up onto Victoria Bridge, across the river, past the large concrete buildings, into the Southbank precinct. She had a swim in the lagoon.

After a short sunbathe on the beach, she dressed and walked into West End. The locksmith looked at her locked pocket and shook his head.

“Can’t you give it a bang or something?”

He looked at her with a pained expression.

“You don’t have to go to a locksmith to get something banged on,” he sniffed. “This is what they call a Hooley lock. Only the person who made it can unlock it. Unless.”

“Unless what?”

He didn’t answer her. He tried to open it, just to show Alice how impossible it was. After all of his various instruments failed, he resorted to giving the lock a good wallop. That squashed it flat, but didn’t open it. Alice and the locksmith smiled exhaustedly at each other, and agreed to give up.

When she got home, she took a pair of secateurs and crunched the battered lock apart. Fragments of metal flew everywhere. At least, that was what she thought they were, until she looked down at the pocket and realised the fragments were coming out of it. She stood up from the table and took a step back. Bits and pieces of strange objects were spurting out, at an ever faster rate. She tried to catch some of them, but they seemed to disappear into the corners and crevices of the room, like sparks from sparklers.

She got a broom and began to sweep the floor. Amongst the dust, dried cockroaches, corks and biscuit crumbs she found the fragments. They looked like jigsaw puzzle pieces. When the pocket finally ceased its production, she took all the bits she had found into her bedroom, and shut the door.

Jigsaw Part Three

Alice, of course, fiddled with the lock on the pocket, pulled it this way and that, attacked it with pliers, with a fork, and with a frustrated yelp, her teeth.

  Nothing would budge it.

  She banged on the shed door until her knuckles were sore. She pressed her nose against each of the windows, but her father hid from her each time. Every time he tried to emerge from the shed, Alice assailed him with the bag. He said he wasn’t going to come out until she stopped annoying him about the locked pocket. She said she wasn’t going to stop annoying him about the locked pocket until he unlocked it.

 

  The hours and days ticked by. He managed to get out for a leak and a meal when she was asleep, because, even though she tried to keep her eyes open for as long as she could by drinking fifteen cups of coffee and nearly being sick, she couldn’t stay awake.

 

  On the fifth day, Alice went out. She took her new black bag with her and didn’t tell her father where she was going.

Review of Secret Storms by Julie Mannix von Zerneck and Kathy Hatfield

This joint memoir is testament to the pain and heartache experienced by women who relinquish their babies at birth, regardless of how their lives unfold afterwards. Julie Mannix von Zerneck was born to a highly original couple, her father being a fire-eater and sword swallower, and her mother a radio actress. Their home was often filled with carnival people in the early days, and exotic animals. Her parents travelled widely and wrote books about their experiences, which was both fascinating and alienating for their children left behind.

But she begins the book with a disturbing chapter set in the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, where she has been placed because her parents view her as suicidal after she took three sleeping pills. She is also pregnant, and her mother wants her to have an abortion, but this is not Julie’s choice. The chapters describing her time in the ward, which is the entirety of her pregnancy, include graphic descriptions of her fellow patients, “Mafia Whore”, “The DuPont Executive’s Wife”, the “Zombies”, and Theresa. Although at first they seem terrifying and mysterious to her, she soon comes to regard them with affection; “Mafia Whore”, a loud and intimidating woman with a startlingly foul vocabulary, becomes protective of the mother-to-be.

 

Review continued at Maggie Ball's website, The Compulsive Reader.

Jigsaw Part Two

So making a bag out of a piece of vinyl was a cinch. But he wouldn’t let Alice watch while he did it, which was unusual, as he normally taught her how to make things as he went. No matter how much she pleaded with him, he would not give in.

  “No, Alice. Just this once, I want to keep my methods a secret.”

So her father went into his shed and didn’t emerge until he had finished.

  Alice loved her new bag anyway. It was shiny and black and had lots of room for all her books, her purse, hairbrush, sanitary pads and period painkillers, a notebook and pens, and lip balm. Then there was still room enough for lunch and a drink bottle.

  One thing puzzled her and that was the pocket inside. There was a tiny lock on it.

  “What is this for, Dad?”

  “Never you mind.”

  She frowned at him.

  “What do you mean? It’s my bag, and I can’t know what this pocket is for? That’s silly.”

  “One day you’ll know. Not yet.”

  “Come on, Dad. Tell me what it’s for. Come on.”

She proceeded to tickle him. But he gave her the slip and ran into the garden, round the vege patch, skipped over Rufus the Papa Great Dane, and shut himself in the shed.

Jigsaw

A long time ago, Alice’s father was a man who made things. He could make anything at all. Give him wool and he knitted a jumper or crocheted a rug. Give him fabric and he sewed you a pair of trousers or a dress. Food he could weave magic spells with, and create luscious fantasies, even with brussel sprouts and broad beans, which Alice spat out when she was young enough to know better. He made tiny cupboards with old bits of wood, huge bookcases with fallen tree trunks, grew vegetables of every type and raised Great Danes.

'The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook'

The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook


There have been a number of Australian memoirs written by adoptees over the last twenty years—Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Suzanne Chick's Searching for Charmian, Tom Frame’s Binding Ties:An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia, for example—as well as international adoptee narratives by Betty Jean Lifton, Florence Fisher, and A. M. Homes amongst others. These works form a component of the small but growing field of adoption life writing that includes works by “all members of the adoption triad” (Hipchen and Deans 163): adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees. As the broad genre of memoir becomes more theorised and mapped, many sub-genres are emerging (Brien). My own adoptee story (which I am currently composing) could be a further sub-categorisation of the adoptee memoir, that of “late discovery adoptees” (Perl and Markham), those who are either told, or find out, about their adoption in adulthood. When this is part of a life story, secrets and silences are prominent, and digging into these requires using whatever resources can be found. These include cookbooks, recipes written by hand, and the scraps of paper shoved between pages.

Article continued at M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture. This is in the latest issue of the journal, under the theme of 'cookbook', and edited by Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell.