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Grandmother and Dad arranged to have Mother cremated, and then Dad drove back into the city in time for his performance of "Mister Roberts." Didn't miss a beat. I don't think this implied he didn't feel anything; it's just that Dad didn't know how to deal with feelings or to process pain. He knew only how to cover it up. Or maybe he'd grown numb, like me. Maybe I learned it from him. As soon as Dad left the house, I went into Mother's room and found a favorite purse of hers, with its special lipstick smell. On the bedside table lay her dog-eared copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Everywhere — on the floor of her closet, in her coat pocket — there were pieces of her unfinished — never to be finished — life. In the medicine cabinet all the little bottles were lined up: FRANCES FONDA, with dates of expiration — but she'd expired first — lined up like orphans. Like me. Would they be thrown out now? Would I? My girlhood friend Diana Dunn told me recently that her father said to her, "Jane's mother has just died and we have to go to her house and bring her here." Dad or Grandmother must have called and told him. Diana says I stayed with them for several days, but not one word was ever spoken about Mother's death. "You never cried," she said. "I felt fear then. Your mother had just died and I didn't understand why no one said anything to you. You were my best friend. I loved you and I didn't know what to do for you." Never in all the subsequent years, all the way to his own death, did Dad and I ever mention Mother. I was afraid it would upset him. I was sure he felt guilty because he'd asked for the divorce. Make it better. I don't even know if he knew that I knew the heart attack story wasn't true. Don't ask, don't tell. Peter, on the other hand, wore it all on both sleeves. The following Christmas, eight months after her death, Dad came up from New York City to open presents with us in Greenwich, where we were being looked after by Grandma and Katie, the maid. Peter had filled an entire wingback chair with presents for Mother and a letter he'd written to her. Looking back, it is so terribly sad and poignant, an eleven-year-old boy needing to let his mother know he loved her and missed her and wanted people to acknowledge her. But, oh God, nothing he could have done could have made that Christmas Day any worse. I was furious with Peter and sided with Dad, who seemed to see Peter's behavior as a play for sympathy. What a thought! In the week that followed Mother's death, my seventh-grade teachers seemed to go out of their way to be kind and understanding. I became aware that the rap on me was just what I had hoped: that I was remarkably brave and took everything in stride. What was really happening, though, was that I was getting psychic perks for shutting down! What had been a tendency for most of my young life was now being praised, and I began to hone this into a fine art: You don't really feel what you feel; you didn't really hear what you heard. It's not that I consciously did these things — buried them. It's just that I'd been doing it for so long that I had begun to live that way. I simply didn't know anymore what I knew or wanted or thought or felt — or even who I was in an embodied way. I would become whatever I felt the people whose love and attention I needed wanted me to be. I would try to be perfect. It was safer there. It was a survival mechanism that served me well — back then. Excerpted with permission from "My Life So Far," by Jane Fonda. Published by Random House. Copyright © 2005 Jane Fonda.