My family has always understood the world through its surfaces.
This is not a cruel observation, just an accurate one, the specific understanding of a daughter who grew up in a household where the external presentation of a thing was treated as equivalent to its substance, where what something looked like was what it was.
My mother’s name is Carolyn, and she is a woman of considerable intelligence and energy, both of which she has spent her entire adult life organizing around the project of how things appear. The house she raised us in was maintained for the benefit of visitors rather than its inhabitants. The cars she drove were chosen for what they communicated rather than what they provided. The relationships she cultivated were constructed along lines of utility rather than affection, the careful assembly of a social network that could be shown rather than lived in.
She is not a happy woman.
I recognized this when I was twelve and have understood it more clearly with each passing year, the specific unhappiness of a person who has organized their life around a standard they can never quite meet because the standard exists relative to other people’s standards and therefore always requires upward revision.
My sister Madison inherited the engine of this, the ambition and the relentlessness, without inheriting what little self-awareness my mother occasionally showed in her private moments.
Madison was three years younger than me, twenty-seven when this story happened, and she had been performing the role of the family’s most successful product since she was old enough to understand what the performance required.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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