Until I was five years old, my mother and I lived with her parents in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
We never talked about my father. We never said his name, which meant that we never said my full name, Sherry Zimmerman. I first saw my full name written out in an inscription in a children’s alphabet book hidden away in a musty cupboard above my grandparents’ kitchen table. I didn’t recognize it, but I knew it was mine.
My mother remarried when I was five, and we settled into a new regime of pretend. We would say that her new husband, Milton Turkle, was my biological father, and their two children would be my birth siblings. She said it had to be this way for us to be “one happy family.”
In school, she explained, I had to sign my name Sherry Zimmerman, that was the law, but when I came home, I hid my books and became Turkle. My sister and brother and my parents’ friends could never hear the word Zimmerman. The members of my girl scout troop could never hear the word Zimmerman. When I was in Junior High School, Milton Turkle legally adopted me, and my name caught up with my lie.
Through all the secrets and secret-keeping, I loved my tall, beautiful mother, with her easy laugh and warm embrace. The woman who took me in her arms and promised she would love me forever. In that crucible of lies and love, I tried to understand why someone who cared about me so much could not see the damage she was causing.
I resented her taking my father away. But my real suffering was the fear of being found out to be a Zimmerman. That was the ugly, shameful thing. I began to have fantasies that I was invisible, and I realized, even as a child, that these were wishes.
