from DAUGHTERHOOD
The following is an excerpt from the memoir Daughterhood, out on Aug 20, 2024, from Autofocus Books.
Why was I screaming at Wes? He was two and unwilling to get ready for bed. He was two, sobbing and kicking me in the stomach as I wrestled him into pajamas. Really, I was screaming because my husband was sick with a disease we didn’t yet know was Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. If our son had a reason for his nonverbal rebellion, it was that his dad had been to the Emergency Room three times that summer; Dan had stopped offering shoulder rides beneath the hot Virginia sun. He had skipped bedtime stories and mornings at the pool in our building’s parking lot. Confused, Wes had regressed and would not let me set him down. It was like having a newborn again except the newborn was thirty-five pounds and never napped.
As I begged him to stop crying, my voice splintered. I felt your hand on my back.
Had I forgotten you were there? Sort of. Two nights ago I had called 911 when Dan couldn’t breathe, and then I had called you. You came promptly, as if from across town rather than the opposite coast, though it meant asking your boss forgiveness and not permission. You packed your three favorite shirts, best jeans, hairdryer, reading glasses, and walking shoes.
“What can I do?” you asked now. “Do you want me to take the dog out? Wash the dishes?”
I stiffened. Not with resentment or annoyance, but with shame. More shame than I knew what to do with. Shame that wasn’t going anywhere soon.
*
That was August 2019. By the end of the summer Dan would have a diagnosis, antibiotics, and, for the first time in his life, an understanding of what I meant when I talked about anxiety. You stayed in Richmond about a week. Before you flew back to the West Coast, we left Wes and Dan asleep in the apartment and walked around the corner to the nearest restaurant. Since Wes’s birth two years earlier, you and I had rarely been alone together.
You asked me to order you a cocktail—“nothing too sweet.” I was nervous and ordered you a drink at random. You took a sip and cringed.
“I want to ask you something,” I said.
You steeled yourself. “Okay.”
“I want to write a book about your life.”
You took a second sip of the sugary cocktail. “I do think you had an interesting childhood.”
“Not my life,” I said. “Yours. I want to focus on the part after you left home and before you became a mom.”
“That was the hardest part,” you said, not quite looking at me.
I knew that. But for me, the hardest part was now. I wanted to know why motherhood had saved you, and why it was wrecking me.
*
And then I waited too long to write this book. I was scared. 2019 became 2020, and now I can’t interview you in person the way I planned. If I want to learn about your life, I will have to ask you through a screen. Strangely, you and I have never talked much when we’re apart. Probably because it makes us sad.
Do you know where I am when I close my eyes? I’m in the front seat of your car. You’re trying to tell me a story I’m only half willing to hear. Through the window the Pacific churns against sea stacks, or pine trees brace themselves against a red-dirt canyon. On the radio: Jackson Browne, James Taylor. Songs that take you back to the seventies. Songs Dad never liked because they weren’t jazz. I haven’t lived out West since I was twenty, but lately I have reverted to saying “home” and meaning Oregon.
Lately, I want the West the way a child wants her mother.
1974
Ellen drives to North’s Chuck Wagon for her 5 p.m. shift, though she could have walked. The October afternoon has already faded into the neon glow of McLoughlin Boulevard, where signs for diners and gas stations loom over four lanes of traffic. In the kitchen she ties an apron over her uniform. The brown dress, with its wide collar and pleated skirt, is meant to be hideous. Ellen is young and beautiful in spite of the uniform; her youth and beauty are nonnegotiable.
“You married?” asks her first customer, who has paid a dollar-fifty to load up his plate with prime rib, potatoes specked with parsley, hot apple pie. Old men are always asking her this. They love to hear her say no.
“No.” She pours coffee into his mug. Above the cushioned booth hang desert landscapes and a taxidermy jackrabbit.
“Boyfriend?”
“Yes.” Sam is new and the best one yet. A non-Mormon. His looks are tidy and symmetrical. A coworker introduced them.
“Your boyfriend want to marry you?”
Her smile is for herself, but she knows how it looks. “I’m sure he does.”
The man nods, his expression obscured by a reddish mustache. Before she can move to the next booth, he points at her nametag. “I knew you looked familiar. You’re one of Earl’s kids.”
She lets her posture go slack, childlike. “You know my dad?”
“Used to. We went hunting a few years back.”
She doesn’t want to tell him about Earl Sr.’s heart attack. Doesn’t want to invoke the house from which she, at sixteen, has already moved away.
“When you get home tonight, tell him Larry says hello. Tell him I hope he’s feeling better these days.”
Home is now the Whispering Pines Trailer Park. Her parents have given her the red trailer formerly occupied by her oldest brother and his teenage bride—but there’s a catch. After she graduates high school in the spring, a full year early, she has promised to go to a Mormon college.
“Sure thing,” she says, holding the carafe near her right hip. “Need anything else?” She’s eager to get to her next table, to be anonymous again. She hates to be remembered as one of seven honey-haired children following their devout mother and Jack Mormon father into church.
His eyes sweep her body. The man wears a blue flannel coat with a textured collar. “You tell your boyfriend he’s a lucky man.”
*
By the nineties, North’s Chuck Wagon had closed. In its place stood a strip club called The Dolphin. A towering blue sign buzzed with a pink promise of GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. In the parking lot, a plastic pod of dolphins leapt from a pool of dingy water.
We would drive by The Dolphin on our way to the Oak Grove movie theater or Lani Louie’s (where the owner still liked to croon your maiden name). Dad would deadpan, “That’s where Ellen worked in high school.”
Swatting him on the shoulder, you would clarify, “It wasn’t a strip club then. It was North’s Chuck Wagon, okay? I worked there with my friend Kerry and we raked in the tips like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Sure sounds like a strip club,” he would say.
Either I remember this routine because it was repeated often or because this detail from your past intrigued me. Generally, the kitschy sprawl of the boulevard made my eyes glaze over in Sunday afternoon apathy. But when we passed The Dolphin, I relaxed into an image of you as a teenager. Your broad smile and blonde waves. Your funny homemade clothes.
As a child, what did I know of your childhood? Only flashes, like a movie I’d watched home sick from school. I knew you were thirteen years old when your last two siblings were born: twins, including your only sister. I could not list all five of your brothers, though I recognized their names when you mentioned them. The oldest two were the reason nine of your teeth had been chipped and knocked out of alignment. The reason you’d hidden pets in your closet and dreaded your parents’ weekends away.
The list of things you hadn’t told me was long.
*
In 2004, I sat in the passenger seat of your Volkswagen Beetle; we were waiting for a light on the same boulevard. At fifteen, restlessness was my identity. I was bored of high school, of supermarkets, of inclement winters and dry, dreamy summers. I was so sick of adolescence, and so unselfconscious in front of you, I didn’t think twice about saying, “I hope I’m not still sitting at this intersection when I’m thirty. I hope by then I can say I haven’t driven down this street in years.”
Behind the steering wheel, you made the face you still make when I hurt your feelings: eyes hard and averted, lips almost smirking.
Would you believe I have never, in my life, meant to hurt your feelings? I have only expected you to absorb my feelings like a sponge.
*
Initially, I pitched a road trip, the kind we took often when I was growing up. I thought we would drive from Portland to Burns, through Rexburg and Salt Lake City, to Provo and back home. In each of these places I would interview you about your life.
“She’s not going to turn you down,” Dan said, knowing how you feel about road trips, and me. “Doesn’t mean she wants you to write a book about her life.”
“She does,” I assured him, because you’d said yes. Truthfully, I have approached this project like a child: it doesn’t matter to me what you want. It only matters what you’ll let me get away with.
I was going to interview you in motel rooms and cabins, across campfires and beneath the mountain ranges of Oregon, Idaho, and Utah. Instead, we meet on Zoom after I’ve put Wes to bed. The recordings capture the crickets outside my bedroom window in New Haven, Connecticut—my third state in three years. I haven’t seen you since February 2020; it is now September.
Even if I could get to Portland, we couldn’t drive anywhere. Wildfires have ravaged the West Coast, burning neighborhoods to the ground, turning the sky an extraterrestrial orange. You wake up to your windshield coated in ash. On the evacuation map, our hometown is listed as Level 1: Be ready to leave.
Still, I’m writing a book about your life. Yours instead of mine.