All the Things We Never Knew (5 page)

“David says you are a journalist. What newspaper do you write for?” Lew asked.

“Oh, I don't write for newspapers anymore,” I said. “I'm in television.”

“Mm.” Lew's look turned. “There is nothing as valuable as the printed word, as far as I'm concerned.”

“Agreed,” I said, trying to cheer him back to the jovial point where we'd begun upon our arrival. “But television is about writing, too.” I started to explain my belief that the best stories married strong writing with powerful imagery. He stopped me midway through my sentence.

“Television is a scourge on our society,” he said bluntly.

I recoiled. David looked amused by the exchange; he'd warned me his dad was moody, charming, and complicated. I'd seen all of it in the course of twenty minutes.

“I think I'll freshen up,” I said. “David, would you show me where we'll be staying?”

Alice interrupted, standing and blocking my route to the hallway. “David will stay in here,” she said politely, pointing to a small den with a foldout bed. “And you can take the guest room.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” I blushed.

I surveyed the guest room Alice showed me. A Bible lay on the bookstand with a proper reading light and a bookmark midway through the pages. The single bed was covered with a lace bedspread, something my grandmother would have approved of. A portrait of Jesus hung above a chest of drawers, his face flooded with light and grace, his long hair cresting at the top of a white gown. He looked beautiful, I thought—and like Jim Morrison.

David had never mentioned that his parents were so religious. He called himself “a screwed-up Catholic schoolboy” when we talked of his private education and the mind-numbingly long Sunday services. I had followed the lead of my parents who, while deeply spiritual, had never really attached to the religion that dominated our state, Mormonism. I unfolded my clothes and placed them carefully in a chest of drawers. The top drawer had been cleared for my things.

The isolation and strict order in the house made me feel unsteady. My own family, however flawed, would have broken out a round of beer or a bottle of wine by now. Someone would be telling an inappropriate joke. And there would be laughter, lots of it.

I came back into the living room to find Alice darning a pair of socks—
who does that?
—and Lew reading the newspaper, a pair of reading glasses balanced on the crook of his nose. Alice was built similarly to David's sisters, whom I would meet later. They were all tall and lithe with beautiful bone structure. Her nimble fingers worked quickly, and only once did she reach for her reading glasses, when she was re-threading the needle. I watched this scene and found myself drawn to her deliberately attentive pace, the old-fashioned rituals of caring for house and home. Every move Alice made was purposeful; on her way to return Lew's socks to his drawer, she stooped to pick up the ads that had fallen from the newspaper, straightened a table lamp, and ran her finger across the piano.
I could learn a thing or two about how to run a household from this woman,
I thought to myself.

I'd never really learned how to nurture a household and longed for a proper role model; my mother's own domesticity alternated between manic bursts of activity and sheer neglect. I relied on my closest friends for instructions on how to cook a roast, scrub properly underneath a toilet seat, or bring order to a file cabinet. I tried desperately, often failing, to keep a few plants alive.

I followed Alice into the kitchen when she announced she was going to make dinner. When she opened the fridge, it appeared almost bare, the white light shining brightly on just a few items. But she methodically pulled together the ingredients for a lemon rosemary chicken roast, orange vinaigrette-glazed beets, and a delicious rice salad.

“You look like you've worked as a chef,” I said, admiring the rapid chop-chop of the knife and the exact size of the tiny red and orange pepper slices.

She softened, whispering, confiding in me. “I was a horrible cook
when I married Lew. I couldn't boil water. We both agreed lessons were in order.” She laughed at the memory.

“When I first moved to Portland, my best friend would come over and prepare the dinners I would serve,” I admitted. “She'd leave it all in a pan for me, with cooking instructions. David has benefited greatly from the skills of my talented girlfriend.” I chuckled, more relaxed now. “Now, David is really appreciative of anything I make. Never criticize the cook, right?”

A look of amusement crossed her face, but then just as quickly her eyes changed, as if she was realizing the impact of another woman cooking for her only son. She reached for a bunch of parsley in the fridge. “Ahh, David,” she mused. “How he loves to eat.”

I helped her slice and dice as she told me stories of David, stories that made me fall even deeper in love with her son—the heartache of his cleft palate, the multiple surgeries he endured until it was barely noticeable. She told me of his tender nature, “by far, the most sensitive,” and how, as a boy, David had been eager to win a paper route, rising at dawn to make his deliveries.

“When it came to collecting,” she said, amused by the memory, “he was paralyzed. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why that boy couldn't ask people for money.”

Denial and mental illness are easy bedfellows, and in that first meeting and many others, David's family gave no indication of a family history of mental illness. I would eventually learn David's family history through his sister, a psychologist, and his medical documents, crucial pieces to a puzzle I'd tried to fit together for more than a decade. But that night, I helped Alice move the food methodically from the kitchen into the dining room, accepting it all as normal—
We all have our quirks,
I thought. Lew and David had been reading the entire time, an oddity given that in my upbringing, the men pitched in with household work.

I caught Lew studying me intently, sizing me up as a potential
mate for his only son. His eyes were gazing past his newspaper, and I felt myself being examined, in an almost clinical way, the thickness of my skin, the health of the cuticles on my fingernails, the strength and straightness of my teeth. He smiled when he realized he'd been caught doing a once-over. The charming smile was back. “So, Sheeee-lah,” the Cheshire Cat said, “tell me about yourself.”

I grew up about as far away from the reaches of the Catholic Church as possible: Utah, land of the Mormons, big mountains, small towns, and the knowing feeling that I didn't quite fit into such a conservative community. We were not religious people and spent our Sundays at rodeos and horse shows rather than church. We lived on a quiet street with huge cottonwood trees and several acres of rolling grass and farmland behind our house. We owned five horses, two dogs, a goat, and a cat—not exactly a working ranch, but a kid's paradise.

Everyone in town loved my father. “Bones,” as he was called, was a lanky, gregarious man who had built a thriving general contracting business on the strength of his personal relationships. He won nearly every city and county contract for huge pipeline jobs or sewer systems. As the population grew, so did the number of Caterpillars, graders, loaders, and gargantuan pieces of yellow equipment at his work sites. On the rare days that Dad would call me up onto one of his pieces of machinery, I felt dwarfed and tiny compared to the masculine power around me.

He'd met my mother in high school. “The Tempest in the Teapot,” he called her, a feather of a woman compared to his six-foot-four frame. (I would later seek out men of nearly the same height as my father, never doing it consciously.) Donna was fiery and smart and passionate, and she first caught his eye wearing a tight pink sweater and bobby socks that showed off her slim ankles, or so he said.

My father's nicknames defined him. Bones, for his length, and “Glue Tips,” for his good reach and sure hands as a tight end on the football team. He won a football scholarship at BYU. It wasn't until
Dad returned home from the Korean War that he set about wooing my mother. She wasn't easily convinced, and in hindsight, she said if it weren't for his good genes and long legs, he might never have had a chance with her.

My mother was in her early twenties when she married, and she started having children faster and easier than either of them wished. We were all beloved, and my mother recounts those early years, with five children under the age of seven, as her favorites. I was the middle child, squeezed between two standout older siblings and two mischievous younger ones.

Black-and-white Polaroids of my mother give distinct clues as to where the family started to break. In nearly every frame, you see the stress of a woman trying to do it all too well: standing or kneeling behind five adorable children all in a row with starched rompers and hair that had been twisted or curled into place. Five pairs of polished white shoes, never a scuff, never a detail wrong. The house is orderly in every shot. My mother is dressed as if she were having a professional photograph taken every day: trim and groomed, her hair in an updo even as she battled the reality of motherhood—diapers, puke, and colic. But there is sadness in her eyes, and I would later learn my father's approval was as rare as a full night's sleep.

In kindergarten, I saw, for the first time, a huge pile of dirty laundry on the laundry room floor. Mom was rarely up when I returned home from school. She started excusing herself from making dinner to stay in her room, and eventually she was absent from every family meal.

I remembered watching my father stir a marinara sauce after working all day long, his work shirtsleeves rolled up as he tested the sauce again and again. The steam from the spaghetti noodles whistled into his face, making him sweat above the stove. “Who's hungry?” he'd asked, forcing a cheeriness to his voice.

I was five when she slipped into a full-blown depression. Nobody called it that. All I knew was that I rarely saw my mother. One morning I stood outside the door of her room and offered a knock. “Mama,” I asked, “are you sick?”

No answer.

I slid my back down the door and waited. My brothers and sisters played rambunctiously in the hallways, and I shushed them.

The next morning I left toast at her door. By that afternoon, the edges of the bread had curled upward.

More days followed, with no improvement. I fished a dirty shirt out of the hamper to wear to school, not understanding the gravity of what that meant until a teacher pulled me aside and asked me if everything was all right at home. I lied. “My mom's on vacation.”

I missed her laugh—a shush of air that came out uninhibited, her white teeth flashing as she threw back her head, slapping her hand on her thigh. I missed her lying down beside me at night to tell me what a special girl I was, that I was loved beyond the moon and the stars.

I tried new ways to move Mom from her bedroom. One day, I brought her a Coke, with five ice cubes, the way she liked it, and put it by the door. It spilled, and I cursed myself for being so stupid. “She's not even in there,” I told my youngest brother as I scrubbed the carpet with a white bathroom towel.

Several more days went by, as my father hushed any discussion of why Mom wasn't feeling well, offering instead to make us pasta or pizza for dinner and instructing my older brother on the ways of the household.

By the time my father insisted on professional help a few weeks later, we'd all learned how to pack our lunches, wash the laundry, vacuum the floor, and finish our homework without supervision. We coped.

I started spending most of the time away from my house, in the garden or in the tree house. Nobody really seemed to notice my absence anyway. Time passed more slowly without the frequent visits from my mother's friends, without her remodeling the living room (again), and without the magical conversations we had about what I was reading or writing.

My older sister soon learned to saddle our horses, and we would ride in the fields behind our home. I avoided the house, my mother's
lingering sadness, and the heartache of losing touch with the one person who reveled in my stories, my theatrics, and my funny dances on the fireplace stage. Dad took her to a hospital and brought back bottles of pills that were supposed to make her better. One day she was up, folding the laundry, going through the motions of being a good mother. She attended our horse shows and clapped whenever we won a ribbon or trophy. But there was a hollow beneath her eyes that frightened me.

I would be an adult before I learned the true cause of my mother's pain, a family secret that unfairly left the burden of dysfunction on my mother.

One day, after we had been dating about nine months, David and I hiked up Hamilton Mountain on the Washington side of the Columbia River. The hike was the kind I liked, a tough climb with an amazing view at the end—in this case, a stunning vista of the Bridge of the Gods and, on the Oregon side of the river, Multnomah Falls, with a peek at Portland to the west.

Hiking always seemed like a good time to talk, and as we made our way up the mountain, I finally said out loud what I'd been thinking about for months. I wanted to have a child. I wanted a life beyond my own. I found myself breathlessly telling David how I'd come full circle on the question of children, largely because of his presence in my life. He'd brought a dimension to loving that felt sustainable, a connection as viable and strongly rooted as the old growth around us. He was the only man in my life that I'd ever considered having children with. I loved him for bringing out a side of me that I'd either ignored or marginalized for far too long. I knew I was risking our relationship when I told him I was planning to have a baby, either with him or without him.