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“Fine, I’ll stop using the card,”up

When I was a teenager and a, one of theain, and the other of the to pick up the pieces of my story, and each time I did, another interruption would coe of tears For soa denied ed the it By the tier remembered what I’d meant to say in the first place

My sisters and I used to play other gaether, too We crowded around our giant PC, to play the CD version of Jeopardy!, in which ould each pick a different computer key to buzz in and then type our answers We played Scrabble, which, in our literary faames like Monopoly or Life

I remember the first time I won Scrabble, because I didn’t just win once—we played all night, aiant whiteboard above the wet-bar banister that divided our living rooe, words that had been challenged before being located in the dictionary We stayed up, and I kept winning, ti my first asn’t a fluke I’d proven e I’d won Soain with ht

I learned early that verbalization, the ability to speak, ainst someone else’s narrative I caWithin my family my voice always seemed to represent a threat

In college, I spoke with my mother over the phone, much as my sister had done a decade earlier My ain: “When are you co home?”

“I can’t co up and drinking shots of cheap vodka frouilt and angst she unleashed in me, as a form of self-punishment My mother’s only interest in these phone calls see my failure via absence By “come home,” she didn’t ood, and to take care of her, as she often told me

In these phone calls, s that disturbed me because they si the rock wall at which I worked “It’s pyramid-shaped,” she toldand living abroad in Prague, when I’d never been to the Czech Republic In another call she’d decided I’d beco at the time, which I decidedly hadn’t

In reality I’d flown to college alone, with two suitcases’ worth of clothes, and she’d never visited me The rock wall I worked at wasn’t pyraned up to study abroad in Spain, but because of the paperwork involved, I hadn’t been able to

It was the particularity of her is that both confused me and provided her with certainty She was so convinced of the validity of her ideas, of her reality, she often made me doubt myself, as we debated back and forth whether her firmly held beliefs were true I tried to convey the troublesome quality of these calls to my friends, but they didn’t understand why I becaed when you didn’t,” a friend said “Just tell her you didn’t, what’s the big deal?”

In isolation, perhaps any one instance of confusion ht have sees that disturbed me I tried, more importantly, to communicate my concerns to my oldest sister, whom I appealed to for assistance

BecauseAlzhei wondered ifWhenever I broached the subject, though, h the state” She often delivered this verdict in her apartment, in the presence of her boyfriend at the tiy, and who concurred with her opinion

Trying to sway her opinion felt a task insur behaviors I’d given examples, but individually, my sister dismissed each one as explainable, as minor In the presence of her skepticism, I failed to verbalize I hadn’t enumerated all the many behaviors I’d seen from my mother that alarue, partially because I had only vague ideas of what nor such behaviors to an unwilling audience held little appeal, particularly when I was only beginning to sort out the mess of my childhood

My nitive i to believe anythingI witnessedHad I been able to enunciate it all, it would’ve beenShe simply didn’t want to hear me, or to entertain ideas that she believed impossible