Those Keys Don’t Open Anything Here
My name is Margot Ellison.
I want to start with the house, because the house is the part that seems simple from the outside and was not simple at all, and understanding why it was not simple requires understanding what preceded it.
I am thirty-seven years old and I grew up in a family where love was not in question but resources were distributed according to a system that I did not fully understand until I was old enough to look back at it from a sufficient distance. The system was this: Chloe needed things, my parents assessed the need, and I was the mechanism by which the need was met.
This was never stated directly.
It did not need to be stated directly. It operated through the smaller sentences, the ones that accumulate across decades into a structure as real as anything load-bearing. When Chloe was sixteen and wanted the better ballet program that was forty minutes farther from home and cost twice as much, it was understood that I would not ask for the equivalent thing because I was the practical one and the practical one did not require the expensive program. When I was twenty-three and Chloe was twenty and she needed a car because the bus route near her apartment was inconvenient, I sent her thirteen thousand dollars because my father said she needs reliable transportation and my mother said you know how Chloe is and between those two sentences the thirteen thousand dollars transferred from my savings to my sister’s bank account.
I am not telling you this to make you think my family is monstrous. They are not monstrous. They are people who loved Chloe with the specific urgent love of parents for a child they perceive as fragile, as needing protection from the world’s sharpness, and who loved me with the different specific love they had for a child they perceived as capable of managing, as someone who could absorb cost without breaking.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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