Beth Ann Fennelly
Three micro-memoirs
Daughter, They’ll Use Even Your Own Gaze to Wound You
1. Chicago, IL
My high school teacher loved that I loved libraries, so she promised that she’d bring me to her alma mater’s archives. One Saturday, we took the train in and I strolled around the stacks on an upper floor while she went into Special Collections, where she donned white gloves to turn manuscript pages. I dreamed along an aisle, inhaling that dear dusty library funk, fingering the spines. Wait; did I hear footsteps on the other side? I stopped, studied the volumes in front of me. When I was sure I heard nothing, I pulled out a heavy tome and found something lain across the shelf. My first thought: umbrella. Yet that flesh-colored tube was not there to protect me from rain.
2. South Bend, IN
My college roomies and I were out, walking from campus to Brigit’s, a bar so seedy that, after graduation, it’d be condemned. A Tercel pulled over and the interior light flicked on to halo a man consulting a map. Good Catholics, we inquired if he needed directions. Can you show me where I am on my map? So we stepped closer and discovered where he was on his map: through the center, dickly. I’m guessing it was Beth who began laughing, or maybe Denise, but in seconds were all hooting, we could barely stumble away, hysterically shrieking and pounding each other. He didn’t even wait for the green light before he skreetched away.
3. Fayetteville, AR
From dawn till noon I’d reviewed Wordsworth, cramming for my comp exam, and now as I ran through the park, sonnets metered out my pounding feet. A bicycle came from behind, a man swiveling to see my face as he passed. At the top of the hill, he stopped, turned around, and coasted back toward me. I could see his fist gripping something low on his belly. What zinged through my head: a bouquet. But that was no bouquet. I didn’t even slow as he passed, just averted my eyes.
I’d run nine miles that day with one to go.
I guess I’d learned by then what women know.
My Father’s Reminiscences
At twelve, I learned my father had had a brother who died of cirrhosis. In all those years, my father hadn’t spoken of him. I knew I had an aunt and cousins, but somehow I wasn’t concerned with who their father was. He just wasn’t, that’s all I knew. Fathers were different when I was growing up. They wasn’t. They worked all day, they came home late. You’d been fed, you’d bathed and put on your nightgown. Give your father a good night kiss, Beth Ann.
My father’s father was a dental surgeon, served overseas for four years during World War II. Once I asked my father what that was like.
“We managed,” he said.
“But what was it like,” I pressed, “having your father gone for so much of your childhood?”
My father shrugged. “We got used to it.”
“But what was a day like? What did you do for fun?” “We played Japs.”
“Jacks? You played jacks?”
“Japs. We played Japs. My friends in the building and I, we ran around, ducking into doors, crouching with invisible guns. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat. We killed Japs all day.”
What was it like having your dad miss your childhood? Funny I had to ask.
Another Missing Chapter in the Parenting Handbook
When our daughter was nine, she contracted a brain-eating amoeba af- ter swimming in a neighbor’s pond. Or so she believed. There was no talking her out of it, though Lord knows I tried. The next day, she wouldn’t join the kids leaping through the sprinkler. Go have fun, I told her. She shook her head. She was done with fun. I found it, at that point, almost cute.
It grew less cute, acutely, over the following days, so I conceived the cure: a water park. Who could watch shrieking kids zoom down the slide and not join them? She could, as it turned out. She read a book of Greek myths, hunkered under a blue towel to ward off splashes. She was deaf to our pleas. As we walked to the car, the back of her thighs bore welts from the lounge’s plastic straps.
When I discovered she was faking her bath—she’d lock the door, run the water, then emerge later, dressed and dry—I became truly concerned. If I could get her to talk, I could help, but when I questioned her, she gave up nothing. Almost as if explaining would be putting our lives in jeopardy, too. I showed her articles detailing symptoms she didn’t have. She shook us off. Maybe she just wants attention, said my mother. Maybe . . . but it didn’t feel that way. Her light was on at odd hours; she was having problems sleeping. Should we consult a child therapist? I still couldn’t get her to wash her hair. While she was too young to develop serious b. o., her bangs fell in greasy hunks, and the back of her hair clumped with some pasty white gunk. I felt embarrassed, and ashamed at feeling embarrassed. One day, in the bathroom, frustrated at trying to get through to her while trying to get a comb through her hair, I grabbed the fist-sized tangle and shook. I’m going to have to cut this off, I snarled. Do you understand? Unless you get over this silly fear. I felt a little mad myself, I felt the urge to rattle her head until the crazy fell out. To lock the door, turn on the faucet, and force her head under: to prove she wouldn’t die. But her brown eyes in the mirror looked almost black, and what I registered there was fear of death, a fear that doesn’t discriminate by age.
After my fantasy of holding my thrashing daughter underwater, it was clear I needed a break. So we went out, my husband and I, we got a babysit- ter and met our friends at the bar, where we shared the saga. Many of our friends don’t have children and they like when we complain about ours. But this time they didn’t laugh. Instead, they started recalling their own childhood brushes with rare infectious diseases. Our friends, smart and successful adults who began life as smart and weird children, felt for our daughter, our smart and weird daughter, dedicated to her dying.
One friend, drunkish, a successful sports writer, said, Give me your phone. I can handle this.
How, we asked. How can you handle this?
He said, I’m going to tell her—here he deepened his already deep voice, right in front of our eyes his face sobered, sovereigned—This is Dr. Thomp- son, Anna Claire. There is no such disease as a brain-eating amoeba. Now, I command you to put aside these childish fears, and rise, and shampoo your hair until it squeaks.
Mesmerized, I passed him my phone. He put it on speaker and we all leaned in. We could hear the ringing. It rang and rang and rang.
Beth Ann Fennelly teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s won grants from the N.E.A., United States Artists, and a Fulbright to Brazil.Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-memoirs, will be published by Norton in fall of '17.