Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family

Calling Back

182 Calling Back lorraine m. lpez My daughter, Marie, is gifted, impulsive, and scary. As she lurches toward thirty, her teenage years are still too traumatic for me to recall without doubling over, reaching for a chair. Once during this time, when she had the habit of climbing out her bedroom window to roam dark and empty streets, she was arrested for assaulting a police officer who accosted her at a phone booth after two a.m. on a week night. He asked her what she was doing out this late. Her response was to bite him. Her probation officer, Kim, arranged for us to meet with the police officer and work out an agreement in order to avoid jail time for my daughter. The police officer, a blushing redhead , entered the meeting so timorously that I knew he had no more business upholding the law than I have manning a space shuttle. When Kim asked him if he had anything to say to Marie, he stammered , “I just want to know why you bit me.” Marie shrugged and said he shouldn’t have bothered her while she was on the phone. I nudged her to be more contrite, but I thought, Of course. Anyone knows better than that. Though not a violent woman, I suppressed the impulse to bite him myself, then and there. In this moment, I grasped my daughter, this urge, the flash of rage this feeble officer ignited. I abandoned myself and whooshed into her life—where things were happening, real things, hard things—just for this instant, an instant I call back again and again by writing about her. My daughter and I are well matched. I am a compulsive writer and she is an addictive, even obsessive reader even from her early years. 183 Calling Back She was the kind of child who would stumble into pillars and walls obscured by the book in front of her face. Like a chain-smoker, she scarcely finishes one novel before snatching up another. To feed her habit, I scour bookstores, yard sales, and libraries. Now that she is unhappily married, I send her novels about women who rise like phoenixes from the ashes of disappointing relationships. I have also written hard stories inspired by her, by her life. She reads these avidly , and still she always wants more. Tell me, she seems to be saying, tell me how you see me, tell me what it is to be me. Call me back and tell me about me. One morning not too long ago, I received an unsigned e-mail with normal capitalization, except that the sender consistently presented the personal pronoun “I” in lower case. The message read as follows: i disagree that your characters are fiction, i read the story Soy la Avon Lady The character is based on your cousin who is the diva from LA, and your relatives who reside in New Mexico! Just be honest! Typing this now, I realize how difficult it is to commit capitalization mistakes using most word-processing programs. My e-mail program likewise corrects such gaffes, especially when it comes to the first person singular “I,” an error that I have come to associate—in my long experience of dealing with electronic messages from students and colleagues—with a phenomenally oversized ego. My ego is so distended, the lowercase “i” says to me, that I should be famous like e. e. cummings. The message surprised me more than the capitalization. Who is this person who takes it upon herself (though unsigned, the e-mail address presented a distinctly female name) to exhort me—a fiction writer—to be honest? What is she saying? That I am not a fiction writer because she thinks she knows the people upon whom I have based some characters? And how can she claim to know them, if she refers to my aging cousin Molly, an itinerant Avon salesperson and temporary clerk-typist living in a tiny apartment with two geriatric cats, as a diva? And to whom shall I be honest to satisfy this disgruntled reader ? Future interviewers? Myself? Shall I confess myself to her? 184 López My first impulse was to answer the message. To ask the sender why she was writing me and what she wanted. But my delete finger, a cool and decisive pointer, acted swiftly and wisely...