I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive by Lynn Melnick

Author:Lynn Melnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Silver Dagger

The Grass Is Blue, 1999, 4:55

BORN THE FIRST YEAR OF the baby boom, like Dolly, and coming of age in a Jewish household in conservative, working-class Seaford, Long Island, my mother was twenty and a year married already by the time the so-called Summer of Love rolled around in 1967. She was going to dental-assistant school because she thought she might be a dental assistant, and living in Queens with my dad, who was going to dental school because he thought he might be a dentist (neither stuck). “I smoked a cigarette once,” she told me of her rebellious youth. She is an extremely gentle, kind woman. In their passion for literacy and mentoring young children, my mom and Dolly have a lot in common. My mom went back to school when I started kindergarten, and she slowly worked her way through undergrad and grad school and became a teacher when I was a teenager; she only recently retired after having taught second grade for twenty-five years.

The happiest moments of my childhood were lazy summer days going to the library with my mom, or running errands with her, or helping her do housework. I loved dusting. I loved dusting a music box with figurines of a boy and a girl (me and Cliff, I always thought) that played “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” when you wound them up and let them spin. My mother worried, a lot, and about the wrong things. She had an outsize worry—as, to be fair, so many did in the 1980s—about her kids being kidnapped. If I was late walking home from the elementary school only a handful or so blocks away, I’d inevitably see her walking toward me in a mild panic and I could see her relief in seeing me even a block away as she stood there panting. Her severe asthma was a constant presence in my childhood, my own source of worry, similar to how Avie Lee Parton’s ill health overshadowed all of Dolly’s younger years.

Of course, having children of my own now, I understand that particularly mind-reeling feeling of wondering where your kid is and why she’s late. Being good at imagining the worst is a genetic trait at which I shine. I more than understand why one would head out to find her daughter even when one can’t breathe; it is singularly terrible to worry about your children being vanished. There were other worries too. My mom and my dad were obsessed, in a very midcentury Jewish way carried over from their own childhoods, with my intelligence, my grades, my musical ability (my flute teacher said I had “perfect pitch”). I’d learned to hide all things about myself that didn’t fit the narrative of the dutiful Jewish daughter. I hid bad grades, I hid music or clothes my parents thought were trashy, friends they didn’t like, my rape, all the drugs I tried, and all the sex I was having before my mother even thought to tell me, post-rehab, not to have it until marriage.

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