Bent

Daughterhood Recalled Through Skin and Bone

by Jeannine Ouellette & Billie Oh

I.

Mama tells me stories. Some, I make her tell me again and again. Like the one where she was three years old and rolled her neighbor’s pool balls, slick and shiny, down the buckled sidewalk of 24th Street. I like to imagine those balls, wild and free, careening down the steep hill to the rocky shores of Lake Superior below. Some of Mama’s stories are so real they grow inside me, like a baby.

     Fetuses can hear sounds in utero at eighteen weeks. The noise is bent, distorted through liquid, skin, and bone. Still, research shows that a baby will remember and prefer her mother’s voice over all others. One study recorded mothers speaking, then linked those recordings to sensors in baby bottles. When a baby sucked hard enough, she heard her mother, but when she sucked more softly, she heard a stranger. All of the babies sucked hard enough to hear their mothers. A mother’s voice, researchers say, is like a neural fingerprint in her child’s brain. We are still learning how much is passed down through genes. Can memories be inherited, like dimples? I don’t know. But I know my story, and Mama’s.

*

Remember the story of my headache? I mean, your headache? I’m pretty sure I was the one driving, but it could have been your dad.

*

My story is not my Mama’s story.

*

Because your dad and I were still—and you were a tiny thing. Barely two.

*

I was in my body.

*

Either way, Auntie Lolo was riding next to you in the back of the Volvo. You were in your car seat, sobbing. “What’s the matter?” Auntie Lolo said, eyes stretched wide. She put her hand on your doughy little thigh, bare-skinned and sweaty.

*

I could feel all the parts of myself.

*

“Mama has a headache,” you cried, clutching your own head between your hands. “And it’s hurting me. Hurting me!”

II.

When Mama was pregnant, she read books. So many books about babies and children and motherhood. She loved Alice Miller, D.W. Winnicott, Penelope Leach, John Bowlby. She called her books her bibles. I, on the other hand, call them textbooks. I got my degree in early childhood development. I have studied the intricacies of conception through birth and beyond. Still, I hold onto my childhood image of Mama’s womb as a cozy room inside her with shelves of toys and books and a bed where someone tucks me in at night.

*

I was afraid to grow a child in my body because of Mafia. The way he started slipping his hands between my legs when I was four years old and kept coming back for more all those years after. The oily smell of him, his callouses and fingernails. Trauma, they say, is coded into our genes, mapped into our DNA. Trauma, they say, shapes us and our children for generations to come. Still, I had you. Still, I have you.

*

Over the years, Mama’s stories wove themselves together into a singular truth of the human my Mama was before me. I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard each story, but I am pretty sure about the order of events. First came the wilted roses, then the bus driver, then the abortion. And, of course, Mafia. Grandma’s second husband. But I think I always knew about him—at least a little.

*

The idea is that trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes. That’s how the New York Times explained it. The article said the mark doesn’t directly damage the gene. Instead, it alters the mechanism by which the gene is expressed: “The alteration isn’t genetic. It’s epigenetic.”

III.

The first time I heard the Milo story, I must have been in middle school, because the kitchen walls were still bright yellow. I was perched on a stool at the counter. The morning had left warm light pooling across the cupboards and floors. Mama was seventeen when she met Milo. She was riding the bus to her foster home, the one where they locked the kids in at night, because it was easier that way. Milo drove the bus. He was old, in his thirties, at least, and had an ex- wife and kids. Mama’s foster sister—her name was Joy—started it, the idea of Milo, of riding his bus home late. The first time Milo kissed Mama was at the end of his route, in one of those parking garages where all of the buses pull off for the night. It was nearly spring, and the snow was half melted, leftover and forgotten. But the ground was still frozen and hard under its dirty blanket. I studied Mama’s face as she spoke to me in the kitchen that day. I created images in my mind of this man, with his early balding and too-big jeans. He was so sad. I could feel his sad in my chest. Resting on top of my lungs. And Mama. This was the moment it struck me, the completeness of her humanity. I held her face in my hands. “That was you,” I told her. “This body. This skin. These bones. You were there.”

*

But the kitchen walls were yellow until we moved—which was after you started college. Remember? Anyway, epigenetics is the science of what we carry in our skin and bones, what sleeps in our genes and travels through generations, ultimately waking up or not in response to our life experiences. On the one hand, we can’t control heredity. We get what we get. On the other hand, not everything underground will quicken come spring. When I was a kid, my mother smoked and got divorced. I swore I’d never do either.

*

During the autumn of the divorce, Mama hid cigarettes in the basement. I was in kindergarten then, and I remember having what my teachers called an “off day.” I was spacey, sensitive, quieter than usual. In the carpool line after school, I stood watching as one car after the next came with open windows and smiling blonde mothers. I watched little backpacks disappear and snacks get pulled out of crisp white paper bags. I counted the cars until my dad’s Volvo rounded the bend. Then, as my brother and sister folded themselves into the backseat, I turned and ran as fast as I could.

*

There are times, still, when I want to run. Wasn’t it Goethe who said, “If I knew myself, I’d run away?” The same New York Times article that explained epigenetics disputed the theory: “Headlines suggest that the epigenetic marks of trauma can be passed from one generation to the next. But the evidence, at least in humans, is circumstantial at best.”

IV.

I was in my body until I wasn’t. Then again, leaving the body isn’t something we tend to remember. Children have brilliant little ways of getting through trauma. I remember being in my body. I remember bare feet on pavement. Warm winter sun through a frosted window. The tricky thing about memory, neuroscientists say, is that often, when we leave our bodies, we lose track of what happens while we are away. This protects us, but leaves us vulnerable. I didn’t know how easy it was to leave my body, how effortless, until I couldn’t get back in.

*

Your grandma on your dad’s side used to talk about isolation. How life’s most painful truth might be that no matter how close we think we are to another, we are still alone. I didn’t want to believe her. I wanted to think I could always see the whole of you. After all, you grew in me.

     But then, Arif. Remember, the autumn we binged on Grey’s Anatomy? Sophie had come home from Smith for a semester because she had all those extra credits, and we needed the savings on tuition, even though she only wanted to stay on campus with her friends. What I knew then: Arif was a college kid—or was he even older?—who supervised the campaign office where you worked. This was before you started becoming a girl who liked girls, or at least, a girl who liked girls more than boys. This was before you began questioning gender, too—your own and the construct in general. You were a junior in high school, deep in your policy debate phase, always at practice. Except when you were on the couch with Sophie and me—this was the old house, soft pink walls glowing and flickering with the TV screen. Meredith and Christina, Meredith and Derek, Meredith and her mother, Meredith and herself, credits rolling, and Sophie—so lovely and amazing in profile—saying, “One more?” and me saying, “Just one,” and you staring at your phone, fingers tapping out texts. I wanted to leap across the room and pry your phone away and wrap my arms around you like when you were little. Instead, I’d say, “Arif, again?” Then Sophie, “The episode is starting.” And you, “I’m fine, Mom.” Your hand would rise to that concave spot at the base of your neck, that hollow V pulsing in and out with every breath.

*

Milo came after the roses—the ones Mama’s first boyfriend gave her when they went to a high school dance. His name was John. Which is only funny because my dad is also named John. So is my stepdad. That’s a lot of Johns. Anyway, the boyfriend’s name was John and Mama said he was sweet. And kind. And he gave her roses at the dance. Not just one rose, but a whole bouquet wrapped in pretty paper and crinkly cellophane with a beautiful pattern printed on it. Mama left the roses in the back window of her car, where the sun shone and shone and shone until they were dry and wilted.

     Dead.

*

Actually, John wasn’t my first boyfriend, and it was Grandma’s car, because I didn’t have one.

     Also, we didn’t go to a dance—we went to dinner at a spaghetti place in a converted fire station that doesn’t exist anymore. But you are right about everything else. And I was wrong to start your story with Arif. After all, your first boyfriend was Graham, from your eighth-grade Waldorf class. Well, first was Sam E. in fourth grade, Sam E. with the shaggy brown hair and that little “oh” of a mouth. He gave you, what was it, a crystal squirrel with blue bead eyes, because you loved all things tiny and fragile. Then Sage, who fell hard for you when he played Tevye opposite your Golde in Fiddler. But Graham, he was the first you called a boyfriend, even though I always thought it would be Oscar, with his thick dark hair and charming cowlick and chipped front tooth. Eventually, it was Oscar, when you both ended up at South High after Waldorf. It was bound to happen, the two of you in your bedroom, tangled up in each other while I layered lasagna noodles and ricotta cheese into a glass baking pan and wondered if I should or shouldn’t keep trudging up and down the stairs to remind you to walk the dog or set the table or whatever other chore I could invent to impose a stopping point before the groping turned to more. Not because I didn’t want you to have more, but because I didn’t know if that’s what you wanted. I had yet to ask.

V.

Our bodies are a complicated mix of hormones, potent chemical messengers surging through our veins. Our microsystems are continually changing. Impossible to control. There are no hard and fast rules to teach anyone how to recognize what feels good or bad in their bodies. Which is part of why I don’t like the “good touch, bad touch” approach to teaching children about boundaries. It’s abstract and more rigid than real life. What I know is that human touch is essential to how we grow. Look at Harlow’s monkeys. Those cold “mother” bodies of made of wire and those frantic infant minds. Touch organizes our emotions, activates our nervous systems, literally paves our neural pathways. Touch calms our souls back into our bodies. At least, it can.

*

Here’s the thing about Arif: How he tried to choke you, then claimed you liked it.

*

We are conditioned to tell children what to do with their bodies.

*

His hands around your neck, his fingers tightening. Your trachea collapsing in on itself.

*

These are safety concerns. Don’t put that rock in your mouth. No, you may not bite your brother’s arm. Let go of her hair, that hurts her body.

*

You didn’t like it, but you weren’t sure whether to trust yourself.

*

Be polite, we tell them. Wave hello. Stop putting your hand in your pants. Give your uncle a hug.

*

Arif was so forceful. So sure of himself.

*

Of course, there are some things we just have to do.

VI.

My story is not my mama’s story. But I remember her stories. And mine. I remember it all.

*

You don’t remember your chicken pox. You were only one year old. But you know the story I’ve told you so many times, of how all three of you kids came down with spots that spring. Yours were the worst. Itchy sores festering everywhere—your scalp, your eyes and nostrils, tummy and thighs, the hollows of your armpits, the crevices between your toes, the folds of your vulva, the soft expanse from clavicle to chin. Even inside your mouth, the whole of it. I soaked you in the bathroom sink—we still lived in the country then, the big house with the black walnut trees—and I had brewed a concoction from plantain leaves, known for cooling and soothing. I kissed the top of your head and tucked strands of baby hair behind your ears. I played pat-a-cake with your fat little hands to keep you from scarring yourself forever.

*

On my off days, or when I was scared, Mama would rub my back. She still does. Just the right amount of pressure, big circles repeating themselves over and over across my skin. My breath would slow, an ocean inside my chest. I was inside my body. My Self with a capital S—that’s what Mama says—would push against the boundaries of my skin. I would curl there on the couch, head pushed into a throw pillow, floral pattern blooming around my face and tangled hair. I never wanted to go up to my bed. The couch was better. It was my boat, rocked by the currents of human bodies moving around me, floating in a sea of muffled sound, but, mostly, Mama’s voice.

     Grandma did not rub Mama’s back.

*

When I’m scared, I freeze. Your brother and I were at the U of M on a soaking March day, wending our way through the student union by Starbucks, when Max pointed. “Arif,” he said. My legs dissolved. Gravity multiplied to make an anchor of my body. Sounds in the atrium cracked open into silence as the fluorescence grayed around the periphery. I wondered if we should confront him. “I might lose it,” Max said. “I’d have to be ready to lose it.” College kids flowed past us like a river, shoulders curled under heavy backpacks. They parted around our bodies as water parts around a boulder, the girls’ fruity shampoo engulfing everything, their glossy hair swaying as if alive, their nude lips pursed as if they already knew. 

VII.

Mama was with Darius before my dad. Darius drove a hearse and lived in the basement of a funeral home. Mama thought she loved him. She would have had the baby if Darius hadn’t said no, absolutely not. Darius wasn’t as kind as John, who gave Mama the roses. Which was good, because Mama knew about the hurt inside her, how she didn’t deserve perfect beautiful things. Darius didn’t have an ex-wife or kids, either, which was also good. Mama didn’t want to write another sad letter to anyone explaining how her Spanish teacher/part-time mother/part-time woman she babysat for had found out and didn’t approve of her spending time with “that type of man”—a man like Milo. Darius was just the right amount of broken.

*

Darius didn’t live in the basement of that funeral home, but his best friend did. I spent many late nights there, on the other side of the wall from the morgue, watching them get high and play Dungeons and Dragons. As for Jacob, he lived at that rental house over in Como where all the debate boys hung out playing video games—the house where they threw that big party at the beginning of summer. I knew you and Jacob had a thing. But at least Jacob was your age. At least you could be his equal. At least he couldn’t deny your intelligence, the ferocity of your mind. That’s what I thought. You’d had a lot to drink by the time he took you upstairs, so much that the room liquified and the waves slapped the edges of the bed and made your stomach roll in that part pain part pleasure way and you were a little sea sick and the air was dark and humid and sour with booze and it was hard and it was fast and it hurt and it was over. The next morning you rode your bike alone to Walgreens and bought Plan B and stopped talking to Jacob. You only told me weeks later on a scorching July afternoon. I held your flushed cheeks between my palms. “This is your body,” I said. “I made you from scratch.”

*

Let me tell you, I wish there was a simple pictograph that could lay out where our limits should be. Like the face charts we use in preschool to teach children how to identify their emotions. You can give yourself up, sacrifice yourself for something until your face looks like this smiley, no, this one, right here, then you say stop.

*

By the time of Ryan, your debate coach, you were eighteen, about to graduate. I remember the June night you told me, the way the sun slid behind the red roof of our neighbor’s house and bounced all that warm light through our picture window. Your cheeks radiated that light as if it was shining from inside your body. The TV was on—some news report about yet another high school teacher in a sex scandal with a student. I said how awful, how awful. And the lamp inside you switched off as you stood and left the room, pounded up the stairs. I found you face down on your bed, crying. “Mama,” you said, “don’t you know I love Ryan? And I need you to love him, too? I need you and Sophie to love him and be happy for me, for us. I need that, Mama, I need it.”

*

What does it mean to be autonomous? To have the right to decide what we want and how we want it? When are we not compromising some desire, some comfort or need, for something or someone else?

*

I haven’t even mentioned Ethan. Remember that time you and I went shopping—it was the end of your junior year—to get you some “business casual” clothes for a debate tournament in Georgia? Soon after, you won the state tournament, got that college scholarship. Anyway, you and Ethan had been together—was it a year already?—and you had begun having sex. I had taken you to the doctor for birth control. Anyway, you told me, as we drove home from the mall that day, past Pier One and Second Wind Sports, that Ethan didn’t like talking about sex. “He gets embarrassed,” you said. “But, I told him, look, if we can’t talk about it, we shouldn’t be doing it.” You laughed and I laughed and my heart was so full, because your words sounded like a shield, or a net, or a spell, something stronger than I’d dared to hope. That’s what I was thinking as the gray ribbon of highway stretched out behind us and you opened the window of the Prius and threw your bare feet onto the dashboard, a thing I’d warned you so many times not to do, because of that YouTube video, the one showing how dangerous this carefree gesture can be, how in the event of a crash it can buckle your legs, shatter them on impact, explode your bones in all directions, like stars, or like hope.

VIII.

I know my story, and Mama’s.

*

You’ve heard this one before.

*

The Mafia story.

*

No. The one where you slid out of me so fast the nurse was caught off guard. Begged me frantically not to push, even though I was already pushing with everything I had.

*

His booming voice and hairy hands. How he put Auntie on the hood of the car to stop Grandma from driving away after the worst fight, the bloody one. How he plunked Auntie down in her diaper on the hot metal and said, “Going somewhere? Not so fast.”

*

So fast that the doctor almost didn’t make it, wasn’t even in scrubs. So fast he could barely catch you. You’ve heard how I shook so hard once you came out that the bed rocked and banged against the wall.

*

How Mafia broke things—heavy wooden cabinets and tables. How he hurt and hurt and hurt. I know all the stories. How all that hurt grew into Mama. How she soaked it up through her spine.

*

How I could barely keep you in my arms, between your slipperiness and my shaking. How the nurse had to lean over my right shoulder—with her clean, soapy smell—to help me hold you. How I nestled you in my arms and the nurse nestled us in her arms, and I kissed your damp head and vowed with all my heart never to let anything hurt you, including me. An impossible vow I knew I would break, because I had already broken it time and again with your sister and brother. 

IX.

It was impossibly beautiful, my rose. I clutched it in my warm fists, held myself tall and still in the backseat, so careful not to crush its tender petals. I was given this rose on the first day of first grade during a welcome ceremony.

*

I cried when you were born.

*

I walked through a bridge of rainbow silks in my Mary Janes to the sound of my teacher’s voice, singing.

*

I cried as I caressed your tiny arms, fragile as wings. Even through the riot of my trembling, your flesh—pillowy soft and still waxy with vernix—was instantly familiar. The feeling of you was exactly as I remembered the feeling of my Great Aunt Lala, the one who loved me best, when I was small.

*

The rose was perfect and red. At home, Mama helped me put it in a tall clear vase that ruffled at the top. When my rose began to die, as all things do, Mama tied a ribbon around its stem and hung it upside down in the kitchen, saying, “This way you can keep it forever.”

*

“I know you, little baby,” I said, searching the open water of your eyes. “I’m so glad you came.”

*

Flowers soak up whatever we pour into their vases.

*

Still, I vowed. Still, I vow.

Jeannine Ouellette is the author of several educational books and the children’s picture book Mama Moon. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in many journals including North American Review, Narrative, Masters Review, Writer’s Chronicle, December, Penn Review, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, Nowhere, and others, along with several anthologies, such as Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men and Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Her work has received two Puschart nominations and been supported by Millay Colony for the Arts, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and Tin House Writers Workshop. She teaches writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, mentors through the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and is the founder of Elephant Rock, a creative writing program based in Minneapolis, where she lives near the banks of the Mississippi. She earned her MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and recently completed her first novel.

Billie Oh is an emerging writer whose work has been published in a variety of magazines and literary journals. They use fragmented and experimental literary forms to explore the intersection of brain, body, and identity. They live above a coffee shop with their cats 豆苗 and 豆花 in St. Paul, MN.