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Her mother never liked the idea of traveling anywhere far. She rarely spoke of the past, but she had once told Margot that at the age of four, she had fled with her family from the north during the Korean War. Somehow, she had been separated from her parents permanently in that bloody time. Movement for her mother was essentially an experience of loss that Margot, American-born, could never imagine. And yet Margot herself had inherited the same anxiety about driving fast, particularly on freeways.
Her mother had once screamed, “How am I going to pay for this? Why don’t you take better care of yourself?” Her mother didn’t have time for empathy. She always had to keep moving. If she stopped, she might drown.
The message had always been that women without men lacked shape, women without men were always waiting for them to appear like images in a darkroom bath.
Growing up American was all about erasing the past—lightly acknowledging it but then forgetting and moving on.
As a culture and country, they had so many tragedies from wars already that they persisted in a kind of silent pragmatism that reflected both gratitude for what they had now and an unquenchable, persistent sadness that manifested itself differently in each person.
“Good job.” Those words were like hands trying to touch her.
Was she still a daughter if her mother was dead?
In these rare moments of great tenderness and fragility, their sanity rattling like glass cups in a cupboard during a quake, Margot learned that families were our greatest source of pain, whether they had lost or abandoned us or simply scrubbed our heads. All of these feelings had turned into a kind of rage when Margot became a teenager, when the world demanded answers: Where is your dad? You don’t have a dad? What does your mom do for a living? You’ve been living in that apartment for how long?
