Everyone who knew my mother feared her. My father told lies the way other men tell jokes, and thought they made him interesting. From the birth certificate I learned that I was born to them on a November night in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1970.
No one ever retold the occasion of my birth. There is no tale of a mad dash to the hospital; the event is empty of stories. My mother’s fog swallowed them. I will wear out the story of my son’s birth. Nobody ever wore out mine.
There was drinking in my family. There was mental illness. And there were things done to children that nobody ever named. Nobody would have called any of it a story. So nobody told it.
A few years ago I began my own memoirs, so that at my funeral my son would have more to say than that I bought the good yogurt. I expected the difficult part to be remembering. It wasn’t. The hard part was deciding what not to say. I soon discovered that much had never been asked about.
In most families, nobody asks tough questions. We talk around a thing for forty years, and then somebody dies, and it goes into the ground with them. Facts usually can be reconstructed. What cannot be recovered are the untold stories. The stories that person would have told in their own way, had they been properly asked, even just once.
My uncle was adopted into the family by an arrangement nobody ever talked about; I guess no one wanted to untangle it. He rarely spoke, and when he did, we listened. His voice was as heavy as the steel tools he gripped. He communicated with the same callousness that defined his labor. Grandfather called him oldest son, and that was enough for everyone. He was more storied than anyone, and yet it was all undocumented. He took every one of them with him, as his sister did, and their mother before her.
When I was a toddler, I went missing in Mexico. It made the news, and the papers got it roughly right. What the papers did not print: my mother blew the steam off her coffee, said, “I think he’s been kidnapped,” and went to her bedroom and shut the door. What happened in that room was the true account, and it belonged to her alone. Nobody was ever invited into the fog.
So I wrote down the set of questions I wanted put to me. They are not gentle.
When have you hurt someone physically, outside of self-defense?
What was never spoken about openly in your family?
What did they survive that you have never had to?
They became a book, What Nobody Dares to Ask. I answer them, one a week, from my own copy.
Take your time. It took me fifty years to get to the first question.
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