Warring parents give their daughter a dangerous gift
The French thought they could fix everything with words. Nuance. Affliction.
The English thought otherwise, and channeled themselves into hermits; verbal cannibals.
I started a letter to you one day with Red. Subtlety or barbarism? Salt-sweet or blood.
I wanted to write to you about our morning in the bathroom. Your sickness. Terror gone to seed. Smile with roots. You kicked me out and peed.
I knocked, knocked, knocked — but never got back in.
We named our daughter Blue. Like the ocean. She would clean out the crowded shelves, drown the book ends, batter both our coasts a constricted torrent. An open sea.
Blue started school in a red coat, turncoat, scapegoat of our war. She wore everything in reverse, to show us that we were either shabby on the inside or that everything was joined by ugly seams. Sewn tightly underneath. Cross-stitched and frayed at the same time.
Her teachers gave up early and told us we were no-good parents. Do you remember? They were right. You knew it all along. She was a brilliant odd gift, and the one and only thing we both agreed on was Hands Off the Daughter. No literature. No words. Not even a little bit. If she wanted apples someday, she would have to dig up snakes on her own.
It took her so long to find her way through primary colors all the way up to high school and boys. Nuance. Affliction. I smiled, smiled, at how she could only describe her first crush with outstretched palms, fists, hammering on her chest and temples. Mute, forceful. The sea without wind. Somewhere off an echo I heard stones ground to melancholy on Dover beach. Cross the cusp to Normandy a general with a spyglass frowned. We should teach her to talk, you said.
“And have her end up like us?” I frowned deeper. “Eat herself alive on elegance? Why not just invite Derrida into our house to live? Sure-take the bedroom, rename the whole kitchen till it’s inedible, refuse to ever flush the toilette because it makes a whooshing sound that is too suspiciously like motion. Lyric. Lies, and lies. Sure- why not?!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” you rolled your eyes. “You just hate that I’m French.”
I put my letter to you down. “Baby-”
“Don’t baby me,” you cut back quickly. “We can’t spare her every scrap of pain just because we can’t deal with ours. She needs to talk to get on in the world. She needs to talk to fall in love. Fall out of love. Get broken. Fix herself again. I think we made a mistake by not giving her our burden. Not giving her any tools.”
“She has been making her own anyway.” I trailed off. And it was true. She was resourceful, innovative, and could almost communicate like a human without us. But she also tied rebellion around everything with black strands; wilting ribbons, barb wire; she made a point to tell us every single day that she knew exactly what we weren’t giving her.
Blue had become a master of gestures. Motion. I caught her once between two red cars in the parking lot picking her up from school, with a boy. Hand signing.
She wrote to him on the condensation of the window. Symbols. Carnal ideographs. Scrawling kanji. He would read, pause, then bite her neck. Slowly, she made signs like music clefts and long notes. But never in a sentence. Only singular barbarism. Then she would sign furiously and he would just kiss her, consuming, staying a long time on her mouth.
I felt ashamed to look as her father, but I was fascinated to see the new language two lovers had just taught each other in five minutes. That raw drive of necessity.
She was more quiet with the girls.
Angela was a tai kwon-do tomboy with severe cut hair and we didn’t think a thing of it — do you remember? Because she wasn’t a boy and she would just laugh and every single bit of their homework was done by morning.
Except that we learned Angela’s sounds too. Her laughter had a punctuated pause between the beats. That was the silent space where Blue was laughing too. Where she was talking, talking. Long silent moments from upstairs ended only by Angela reading torturously slow from their homework.
With an occasional gasp.
“Do you remember?” Casting your eyes back down to me, odd smirk on your face. “Our daughter is going to take the world into her mouth whether we like it or not. We need to give her tools. Her ingenuity will get her there without us, but give her blind alleys too. Let’s give her everything before we lose her anyway.”
And you were right. And I loved you. Loved how you could still shock me, twenty years deep, into action. Reaction. The visceral truth.
I never, ever, tell you in this letter to you, but you are my hero.
Blue learned to talk at sixteen. Sixteen.
We put that one little thing in her out-stretched palm, and there it was. Coin to Charon. Horrible. She was so angry, so once again incapable of expressing it. She hated us. Stumbled out and spit garbled sounds at us. We hated us too, sometimes; we tried to tell her. Just talk. Talk. Talk and then some more. It will get better.
She disappeared for two months and made a good point to wrench with a bloody trail our hearts across two decades. Showed up back home twenty pounds gone, and with track marks on her wrists, the nook of her elbows.
“Shit.” You nearly fainted, but were too angry. You squeezed her arms, made her roll up her hoodie for you. Somehow, you knew.
“Get the hell into your room you stupid little bitch, and you’re not coming out until you talk to us!” She resisted. You slapped her.
I was aghast and amazed at you. She broke out in sobs (destroying for me to hear for the first time) but you just pointed, pointed to her room until she gave up. Sulked.
Walked. Shut the door quietly.
And then you whirled and I thought it was going to be that same hurricane I wrote around so carefully in all my letters — but you just grabbed me — and I pulled you closer too, clambering for your body heat and raging tears and I remember that burning minute or twenty of just kissing your face with the water tap running hot across it and then hurtling you to the couch and there we stayed for hours and hours and I woke up with my arms around you like we were sixteen again too.
How I loved you. Do you remember? How I re-learn to love you. Continuously. Disastrously.
Blue came back out. Washed. Days later.
We almost caught her mouth about to say, “I’m sorry Mom,” but she somehow stifled her throat, thwarted the wild tides, and instead began cleaning the mess of the storm that was something like our family.
She washed dishes for days on days. Flood of clean. Straightened. Dusted. Scrubbed and inexplicably even changed the oil on both of our cars. Renault, Jaguar. Nuance. Affliction.
And then we heard her as we peeked through the curtained, veiled transcepts of windows talking to the post man, laughing with the most incredible music we’d ever witnessed about something with a stamp, and no return.
But she never talked to us again. Only everyone else. Soon her co-workers. Her many lovers. Her diary, yes, even her diary out-loud.
Blue was born somewhere in the ocean. Somewhere left of the wild skies. Somewhere between the continents, where our two hemispheres will never meet.
I want to finish this letter to you. Red days and wanting.
I want to retell this tale of how much I love you. But I can’t. Don’t have words anymore, just an emissary who refuses them.
