As Daughters, We Learn
The first color that I remember is gray. Not the sky, not the walls, not the ceiling or the floor, but a perpetual grayness that manifested from nothing at all. It was as stable as air, and just as abundant. I don’t know where it came from, exactly; one day I just looked over my shoulder and there it was—looming over me like a beam of crackling static. I looked closer when I first laid eyes on it; it was new then, and strangely comforting in a sleepy sort of way—as if I were about to drift into a comfortable coma that would leave me feeling refreshed and eager to live again. I remember . . . I was sitting in the kitchen cutting onions: a ten-year-old, already a little woman, with a butcher’s knife in my hand. There was a dark bruise on my cheek—a gift from a girl at school whose name I couldn’t remember.
“Henrietta,” my mother said to me, and my focus withdrew from the corner where the grayness lurked. No one called me Henrietta except her; it was always Henri—as the French would say it. It was a nickname that my father had given me; he had always wanted a son.
She stopped sautéing the mushrooms for our traditional Monday stroganoff and walked over to where I was perched on the wobbly red barstool. She brushed her thumb lightly over the purple blister; I tried not to wince. “What happened here?” she asked. It was the first time she had noticed.
I scooted a little closer to the counter. I wasn’t really crying; it was only the onions. “She didn’t like my dress.”
My mother crossed her arms. “Who didn’t?” she demanded. “Your grandmother bought you that dress. It’s lovely enough.”
“I don’t know her name.” I didn’t bother commenting that the dress was, in fact, one of the most hideous things that I had ever seen. But my Grandma Cain had given me that dress, and because I loved my Grandma Cain, I wore it proudly.
My mother’s face stiffened—still beautiful, even in her disgust. Her lips were the color of summer wine, and her eyes were the color of the sapphires that my science teacher wore around her neck. Her blouse was puffed at the sleeves, and her skirt, like all the skirts she owned, was nearly too short and too tight for comfort. She never wore the dresses that Grandma Cain bought her. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” she said, finally. “Did you say something to her? Were you talking too loud?”
“No.” It was the routine response.
She grimaced—a look of disbelief. “No more bruises, Henrietta. It’s unbecoming,” she said sternly, and I nodded. But there were other bruises there—I remember—ones that she didn’t see. She just went back to sautéing the mushrooms in her dainty leather skirt and I to the onions that stained my fingertips.
The gray haze didn’t leave after that. Maybe it was that girl’s fist when I told her that I loved my ugly purple dress with the disproportionate patterns of ‘70s funk; maybe her knuckles embedded something deep inside me that could never be shaken. A new possibility came over me that maybe, after all, my mother was right, and I was being too loud. Maybe all the teachers who lamented my shyness were wrong. Maybe I wasn’t quiet at all. Maybe I died screaming, and it was the monster who took my place who was silent. Nonetheless, the gray stayed, and as I swore to keep that silence, the gray grew.
When I was fourteen, the haze deepened from smokey embers to graphite shadows. I started looking in mirrors a lot—little fleeting glances that left me numb. I didn’t look like other people; maybe that’s obvious. But I didn’t look quite like myself either. At one point, I couldn’t even recognize my eyes—the deepest, darkest green that was my father’s. My blonde curls didn’t bounce like they used to; they laid limp and flat against the curve of my face, which I swore was only getting plumper with each passing day. My gaze kept resting on the little mole—scarcely bigger than a freckle—that sat just above the left side of my lip.
“I look like Marilyn Monroe,” I had joked a couple of days before, and my mother glared at me over the top of her Cosmopolitan magazine. “Why would you want to look like that trashy woman? Haven’t I raised you to keep your legs closed?” she scolded, while my little sister, Lucy, played with naked Barbies on the floor in front of her.
The memory haunted me for a long time after; I even thought about getting the mole removed. I came close to asking when my mother took me to the dermatologist for my acne. “Well, it’s getting worse,” she told them, as two latex-gloved hands gripped the bottom of my chin. “See it there—the red ones? Can’t you give her anything to take care of that?”
I avoided mirrors after that. When I brushed my teeth, when I combed my hair, when I scrubbed my face raw with those foaming chemicals gifted to me by anonymous blue hands, I kept my eyes low, trained on the cracked white tile of the bathroom floor. I simply did not want to see. It was easier that way. I didn’t notice when my flat chest rose and my face narrowed and my towheaded locks straightened into distant waves. Nor did I notice the curve of my hips or the way my eyes looked under the fluorescent light—older, more solemn, and missing something that other girls at my school breathed like air. In my own mind, I remained small—a child with knobby knees and scraped elbows and dirt between my toes. I was a seedling in the permafrost, never destined to bloom, stunted while the world around me flourished.
When I was sixteen, the gray became endless—the color of winter gates that never opened. It seeped beyond my vision into the halls of my high school. “Be gentle with yourselves,” my history teacher told us on the first day of finals. “You’re going to see parts of each other that you’ve never seen before.” But I had already seen it all, in desks and textbooks painted black; there was no war to be won.
“Mom?” I asked, peeking over my math book to where she sat across the room on the love seat. She still leaned to one side out of habit, leaving space for my father, though we both knew that he was never coming back. She was on the phone with a friend from work. “When you’re done, I really need help.”
“Hold on, Karen,” she said with a sigh, covering the receiver with one hand, and shot me a look that was all too familiar. It made my blood run cold, and I immediately wished that I had never spoken at all. “I’m busy, Henrietta.”
But I was desperate. And I knew for sure that I was, because I tried again. “Mom, please, the test is in two days,” I insisted. I remember hating how my voice sounded for hours, days after. “Just whenever you’re done—”
“I have more important things to do than look at your math questions,” she shot back, and the room turned to stone. “You’re a big girl, Henrietta. You can figure it out . . . Now, what were you saying, Karen? I’m sorry. My daughter. . . .”
A couple of weeks later, long after the comfort of the holidays, I found myself grounded in my room. I had failed my geometry final.
“You need to learn to ask for help if you need it,” my mother had scolded me as I made my way up the stairs. But asking her was like screaming into a void, into the empty walls of a home that taught me that I will hear nothing back.
Still, I heeded her words. As school dragged on and the tests came back, I began to realize that I had one chance of escape. My grades became everything as I poured over the computers in the library, searching for colleges—some far away, and some even farther. It was my ticket out, I knew, from the gray walls with the gray stairs and the graying loveseat. I would never again fail a final—or anything for that matter—and it would take me so far away that the gray would never touch me again.
I remember creeping down the stairs one night—a fool’s attempt to sneak into the kitchen and nab one of the peanut butter buckeyes that Grandma Cain had brought over for New Year’s Eve. Halfway down the stairs, I came to a dead halt with one foot still poised mid-step; I could hear my mother from her usual place on the loveseat, talking with someone. Her voice was thick and heavy; I heard it break at least twice in the rush of words that followed. It took me a moment to realize that she was crying.
“Mom, I just . . . I don’t know how. . . .”
There was a Grandma Cain’s muffled voice on the other end, though I could scarcely hear it over the gut-wrenching sobs that built a wall in the pit of my stomach. My mother had seen me cry so many times I had lost count. But, my mom—my mom never cried.
“Of course she doesn’t understand!” was the sudden outburst; I nearly jumped out of my own skin when the television remote went flying across the room. It clattered to the floor in another rush of bumbling words: “She’s a little girl—well, maybe not so little anymore, but it’s not like she would understand. She still thinks her father and I might get back together . . . No, she doesn’t know about the divorce. No . . . she has not talked to him since.”
My heart was pounding in my chest. I had never felt more dead yet so alive¾I could feel my flesh crawling with every word that fell from her cherry lips. I took one step back up the stairs, where the safety of my bedroom beckoned me forth.
“Mom, no, that’s not what I’m trying to say here.” Her voice cracked again. “I’m just worried that I’m not doing it right, and it’s getting to that point . . . already looking at colleges and . . . Lucy is going to be in middle school next year, and I don’t even know where it went! It’s like I wasn’t even there!” Another sob; I could practically see the tears rolling down her cheeks. “There were so many things I wanted to do—I wanted to love someone, and travel, and have a career. Is that wrong? Am I not supposed to want those things, or regret not . . . Of course, I know I’m lucky! That’s not what . . . I . . . I just don’t think I was ready to be a mother.”
The words hit me like a truck. I nearly tripped and tumbled back down the linoleum steps. My mother, who scoured romance novels and flipped through the Travel Channel, my mother whose eyes would light up at the possibilities of a night out or a chance for relaxation, my mother—a single mother—who got pregnant with me at the age of nineteen and worked behind a makeup counter at a local department store. My mother whose ex-husband had the luxury of freedom while she made dinner for two children and relied on Grandma Cain for rent. My mother who never finished college so she could take care of me, who sat on the phone each night, pretending to be far happier than she really was.
I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what any of it meant. So I ran.
Back in my room, the gray darkened to a shade that was almost black—burnt charcoal and volcanic smoke. Laying there on the hardwood floor with my arms crossed over my belly, I found that I really did know what it meant. I found that I had known for a long time. My mother had been young when she had me—too young to know what having me really meant—and she missed out on a lot because of it. What those things were, I really didn’t know, but she talked about them often, with that same wistful look in her eyes that my father had worn before he left. I had always known it, I think, in the way that she said my name—so hard and so coarse, with no touch and no feeling. It was the same feeling, too, when my sister “Lucy” was never “Lucille”, and I was always “Henrietta” and never “Henri.” I had always been able to recognize it, in the way she tucked my sister into bed each night while forgetting to visit my room, where I sat upright in my bed, waiting. I could sense her distrust like a dog smells fear. Every time she looked at me, she remembered what I had taken from her, what she could have had if I had never been born.
“If I had never been born,” I echoed. I didn’t sleep that night.
I was seventeen, and my dad was truly gone; shadows took his place. The house grew quiet, empty but for a couple of fleshy shells that called themselves human. Lucy was still in ballet at the time; she danced around the kitchen in the dark, but all I can remember from when I was seventeen is lying flat on my back, staring up at the bathroom ceiling. I can still feel the way my fingernails dug into my palms as I curled my fists back and forth, back and forth. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to feel something.
After a while, I thought maybe she had changed. When she had cried on the phone with Grandma Cain, I thought a part of her softened, and she would try to see me as her daughter. Maybe she would be more accepting. Maybe she would love me like the mother she was trying so hard to be. Maybe she would be okay with seeing me cry. Maybe she would be okay with me.
I didn’t know what I was getting into when I told her that I was gay. She stared at me with those beautiful cerulean eyes—straight into my soul—and said, “Tell me what it’s like to burn.”
But it felt no different—not the confession, not the nonexistent feel of her arms. There was no breath of air, no quench of thirst, no sense of awakening. It was just me on the bathroom floor, like a mangy dog whose teeth had just been pulled out. The gray shadows loomed over me, whispering amongst themselves. My father was one of them, ever reluctant, always putting on his shoes and packing his bags. I remembered how he had frowned when my mother told us she was pregnant with Lucy; he always frowned that way in my dreams when the memory of him would project itself off the bathroom tile. Lucy was one of them, too, a perfect happy girl with rosy cheeks and a knack for performance, and so was Grandma Cain, who would cradle me like a child yet never raise a word against her own daughter. My mother’s shadow was the biggest of them all, squirming with taunts, empty words, a looped hiss of despair and biting snarls.
Stop that!
Be quiet, Henrietta.
Go upstairs, Henrietta.
You’re a sinner, Henrietta.
From her, other shadows sprung, and with her, they grew. Louder and louder, they grew, until they towered over me, until I couldn’t see.
“Get out,” I told them, but they never listened. I wanted to make them suffer for all that they had done; I wanted to be cruel and mean and spiteful and cold. I wanted to march down the stairs with the Scripture in my hand and demand compensation for all the years that I had spent alone. I wanted to scream at her for all the times that she had screamed at me, and tell her that I was my own mother, forever without the need of her or anything that she could ever say to me. I wanted to make her cry again, and I wanted it to be my fault.
But I couldn’t. I was too weak, and I was too afraid; I had no idea who I was, or who I had become. So, I just laid there in that monochromatic sea, set aflame by all of the hands that never touched me.
Why am I so loud? I often wondered, and I left those walls still wondering. When was I ever anything more than this?
At some point that I still can’t quite remember, when I could see nearly nothing even when the lights were on, I began to understand. I grew older; I saw things—I met a girl who was even taller than me, who had sunlight in her hair and gold in her eyes. She breathed honey and traced it across my skin; the Muses could sing poetry about her hands alone. She picked me up from the underground, and the permafrost melted.
“Nadia,” I called her.
“Henri,” she called me, and I felt liberation in her arms. It was love, I knew, and each time I laid eyes on her, it would spread throughout me in a great burst of flame—brighter and brighter, until the shadows began to fade.
“Look,” she told me one afternoon when I was helping her get ready for her interview. She pointed an olive-toned finger toward the bathroom mirror, and I had no choice but to follow. I expected the glass to break or the shards to rise in the air like knives. But instead I saw myself. I still didn’t look like everyone else—that hadn’t changed. My hair was darker, more bronze than blonde, and my eyes were, as always, my father’s. But I was older. I was stronger. I was no longer a child swaddled in gray, but a woman. And I was free and capable and deserving of love, of a mother, of being a daughter. I had been—after all those times I hid in the closet, all those hours I spent sprawled out on the bathroom floor. I never needed to.
The shadows receded, little bit by little bit, until I was no longer laying down, but sitting up with my eyes locked on the bathtub. I crawled in and turned the gauge all the way to the left and let the scalding water burn me clean. Clarity rose with the steam, bubbles of misty lilac, and I could finally look at my mother face-to-face. I always thought her a cruel woman, wrought from trials that came before me, whose lips were painted permanently with wine and whose hair never fell loosely around her shoulders. She had her moments where she was cruel, just as I had, and just as my father had. It was no excuse to her, to have birthed her pain instead of a daughter, but I learned from her rage the value of freedom. Some are just not meant to be mothers, and though as daughters we suffer, we learn. No, my mother never hated me; she hated her lack of freedom, the loss of something she could have had. I used to think it was lost to us—lost to me, that I could never find myself holding a flower of my own and giving her the love she would need to bloom. That was wrong. We could have been something else, and when it was my turn, we would be.
The gray never truly faded, even after I forgave her and bathed in colors that I had never seen before. It trailed after me like a forgotten mist, licking at my elbows in a numb sheen of silver. It was cold still, with that same lulling buzz of the abyss—the canyon that I had yet to cross. But the gray chains had never jingled so softly as they did when I stepped out of that house, dripping with blistering dewdrops. I was twenty.
“Henri,” she said to me, her smile thin as I made my way to the train station. It was my second year away. Her wan lips twitched at the sight of my suitcase. That was all that I ever got from her, but it was all that I ever needed to know.
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Alexis Berry is an aspiring writer from Northwest Indiana with an ultimate goal to write something worth reading. Her work, Grandpa’s Chair, was recently published in Columbia College Chicago’s Punctuate. A Nonfiction Magazine.