I wanted everything from my mother’s childhood—the paper doll with her photo superimposed on the head, the baby blue mini-wardrobe for doll clothes, the small pink poodle skirt.
My grandma released an item every couple of years from the attic. I was never allowed in. “It’s a mess,” she said. Or “You’ll just root around.” And later, “There are mice up there.”
When I was thirteen she brought over a brown paper bag full of letters addressed to my mother, all from the same guy.
My mother was characteristically bored by her past. “Oh those?” she said and stuffed them in her closet on top of all of the shoes she never wore.
I felt newly in awe of my mother—that she had induced these letters, this level of devotion—that the tangible evidence of it, the writing, the record was of so little interest to her.
“Who are they from?” I asked, perched on the cushiony fake leather frame of her waterbed.
“A guy named Keith,” she said and added, “He went to Vietnam and came back mean.”
“Can I see them?” I asked. I thought they were my legacy—a key to the nature of love. Documents that could teach me.
“No, they’re private,” she said, shoving them further back into the closet with her foot.
I nodded as she left the room.
The next day, while my parents were at work, I read them. I expected something dirtier, something more ardent and demanding, something about sex. I wanted to know what kind of girl my mother had been. My mother felt so visible to me and so completely secret. I wanted instructions for what love might sound like, or what sex for a woman in my family might look like in writing, on the page.
But the letters were dull—stories about guys I didn’t know, no mention of the war, and a recurring plea for my mother to send a photo of herself in “that bikini.”
Halfway through I stopped. I felt queasy. I was poring over these letters the same way I did my father’s Penthouses. Looking. Looking. Looking.
I shoved the letters back into the brown paper bag. I spent the rest of the afternoon flushed and guilty. I ate an entire can of Pringles, but I never told.