I first met Evelyn in 1995, when I was 20 and she was 30. I moved into the empty bedroom of a house in Asheville, North Carolina that she’d been renting for some months already. About to begin my junior year of college after a devastating breakup from my high school sweetheart of five years, I felt adrift. For her part, Evelyn was having trouble finding a boyfriend, didn’t like her job, and felt a general dissatisfaction with life—perhaps made more acute by her promising background: she grew up in an affluent family, attended prestigious private schools, and had every reason to cultivate high hopes. If we bonded at all, it was over disillusion.
Our relationship was uneven; sometimes it seemed to approach friendship, though more often, it felt transactional. Occasionally, it was even adversarial. She often mocked the Appalachian locals from whom I came, and I remember her once remarking that, although my university had a good reputation (it currently sits in the top 10 in the U.S. News rankings for its category), it must not have been too hard, based on my high grades. (Evelyn finished college with a 1.7 GPA, the result, in her account, of too much partying.)In early December of 2023, I secured institutional approval from my university for a research project designed to explore the transformative experiences with works of literature of individuals who identify as writers in some capacity. My plan was to conduct interviews with people who saw their reading experiences as life-changing. I hoped that the participants in my study would tell stories like those of a host of writers (Manguel, Montás, Quindlen) whose accounts depict lives transformed by reading. In this context, with newly minted institutional approval and the study at the front of my mind, I received a message from Evelyn on in early December asking for my address to send me a Christmas card. The timing seemed fortuitous. Hm, I thought. She might be an interesting person to interview.
Evelyn talked at length—108 and 90 minutes, respectively—during our two Zoom interviews in mid-December, ranging over a variety of topics that, taken together, made a compelling case for the influence of reading on her life. Then, in early January, she suggested a get-together. I’ll share an account of that meeting forthwith, but a little context about my children is required first.
A generous comparison might be to Salinger’s Glass siblings, in terms of both their precocity and their quirkiness. Adriana started college at 14 and although she’s currently, at 16, in her second year at a large public research university, she’s reached junior status by amassing additional credit hours—for pleasure, mind you—in subjects like Korean and Chinese. She has a 4.0 GPA, has conducted original research in her major (finance) and a minor field (computer science; she’s also minoring in Spanish), presented at research conferences, coauthored an academic paper, and although she scored high enough on the GRE to get into Harvard, she’s taking it again in July because she’s convinced that she can do better. Robbie, 15, is possessed of a deadly wit and a 4.0 GPA from a different institution, a small, private university. He’s pursuing a degree in history in preparation for law school. Sunny, 8, is another voracious little bookworm but the kindest and best of us all. She was born on a Sunday, and it shows.
With this trio, I drove several hours one bleak Saturday in January to visit Evelyn. The trip was to be an overnighter rather than the full weekend to which we had been invited; as I wrote in my journal at the time, Evelyn “could be abrasive back in the 90s and, while I did think that she might have mellowed some in the interim, I still figured that more than 24 hours wouldn’t be a good idea. I advised everyone to mind their Ps and Qs, but I needn’t have bothered; her own behavior was atrocious.” Within 10 minutes of our arrival, I sensed that I had made a mistake in taking my kids there. Evelyn had interrupted one or another of us three times already, talking right over the top of whoever was mid-sentence, so that it occurred to me that perhaps she had trouble hearing (incidentally, I continued counting, and the total came to 17 interruptions in the 9 waking hours we spent with her). Almost immediately, she enlisted our company for a walk in the bone-chilling wind (the high that day, no doubt behind us by the time we sallied forth in the last weak rays of sun, had been 41), sneering that we’d never last in the Northeast because a couple of us had dared to arrive hatless.
To say that my oldest daughter, Adriana, is not a warm person is not to malign her character. With people she esteems, she’s very pleasant. For example, with my great-aunt Nette, who recently died of ALS, Addie was gentle and solicitous. She knew what my aunt meant to me, and although she saw her only a few times (we’d lived abroad for most of my daughter’s life), she perceived Nette’s gentle spirit and responded in turn. Evelyn, unfortunately, did not make so positive an impression. As I wrote in my journal, my daughter watched my former housemate “with no hand soap in the kitchen, raking her hand across her nose, digging through her hair to scratch her head, and licking her fingers, all while she preparing the food; holding forth while simultaneously misspeaking (she read the Greek word agape on a church sign, for instance, as a-gāpe); not letting anyone else get a word in; and Addie was not impressed and made no effort to pretend. This, evidently, was something with which Evelyn could not deal.” The latter was clearly triggered, so that after our walk, when she failed to hear my daughter’s please after a yes, she smarmily coached, “Yes, PLEASE.” That was the first openly tense moment. Adriana looked at her icily and rejoined, “I said ‘please.’”
Dinner was no better. As we sat over a cold hunk of store-bought lentil loaf (fridge to table, with no seasoning, the plastic merely turned down like a bedsheet), brown rice of indeterminate origin microwaved in a plastic Tupperware, and a dish of alfalfa sprouts, Evelyn complained about her coworkers. I should explain that we eat carefully at home, a mostly vegan diet and as much organic fare as I can afford; my kids have never tasted soda or eaten a fast-food burger. It wasn’t so much that they were put off by the food (they gave no sign of that, God bless them, and ate decent portions, though silently) as that the meal seemed designed to elicit that response. Meanwhile, Evelyn returned to a topic that she’d touched on in her first interview, extolling the virtues of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. When I dared remark that, while it might be a page-turner, it’s also a piece of racist propaganda, Evelyn was affronted. It’s a powerfully feminist work, she insisted, and chock-full of important historical details. My tentative, “but it glorifies the KKK” was met with a long rant that concluded, “what’s even worse is when Black people think all white people are the same,” followed by an uncomfortable silence. My Latina daughters and I sat looking into our plates until Robbie asked, “Read any other good books lately?” the implication being “Mein Kampf, maybe?” Robbie’s subtle. Evelyn ploughed on, oblivious.
There were several moments characterized by unnecessary unpleasantness, like when little Sunny glanced at me as she answered one of Evelyn’s questions and the latter said nastily, “Don’t look at her. You’re old enough to answer for yourself,” or when my offer to get out the breakfast muffins I’d brought was met with an irritated “Well, I guess I won’t make French toast then. They’re not going to eat both.” But two incidents require especial attention, I think. The first took place after supper, when Evelyn had us play a game called salad bowl. When Sunny, who was trying to describe the clue “the White House” without using any of the words therein, messed up and said, “The president’s house,” Evelyn pounced, gleefully declaring Sunny “out.” When Robbie, seeing his little sister’s confusion, suggested that we make the first time a practice round, Evelyn wasn’t having it. “Nope! Nope! You’re out! Sit down!” I know my child, and I could see what was going to happen next. While I whisked Sunny off, Robbie suggested that we have some popcorn after all, and Evelyn moved kitchenward. We made it down the hall to the bathroom before hot tears of embarrassment spilled down Sunny’s face.
This may seem like a minor occurrence. But for parents, there’s a brutal impotence in someone’s being able to usurp our ability to protect our children. I knew that Evelyn wouldn’t understand. Sunny was legitimately out, and Evelyn enforced the rule as only a person with no understanding of children could have done. It isn’t about Evelyn’s not having children of her own. There are plenty of people who aren’t parents but have the capacity to put themselves in the place of a child simply because they are compassionate, empathic souls. Evelyn is not one of those people. She might respond, even, that I coddle Sunny. I do coddle her. I was abused as a child, left in the houses of strangers, made to sleep in their beds, sometimes with them. I lived, at different points, with two sets of grandparents and an uncle and twice spent time in the custody of the state. I’ll coddle my child, to whom I gave birth via miracle at the age of 40, if I damn well please. It’s beside the point that she’s objectively a lovely human being, whom all the coddling in the world couldn’t corrupt. I calmed Sunny down. By the time we all reconvened, a slight pinkness around her eyes was the only sign of anything amiss. Evelyn didn’t notice; the game resumed.
To thank her for hosting us, I had told Evelyn ahead of time that I wanted to pay for her lunch on Sunday. She suggested a restaurant, an apparent favorite of hers about a half hour away, and we drove there in separate cars. They seated us in the back, near the kitchen, in an area that Evelyn chose because of its beautiful decoration. It was beautiful, with walls brightly painted in the style of a county fair and an ornate mini-carousel as the centerpiece. But the air was thick with the smell of shrimp, and, as luck would have it, Adriana has the kind of severe shellfish allergy that necessitates carrying an EpiPen wherever she goes. Seconds after we sat down, my daughter silently passed me her phone, on whose screen I read that shellfish allergies can be triggered by airborne particles released during cooking. We exchanged a look, my daughter’s thin face anxious.
“I’m so sorry,” I told Evelyn, “but I think we’re going to have to find someplace else to eat.”
“What?”
I explained, stressing the severe nature of the allergy. When she looked dubious, I had Adriana pull the bright yellow medical bag from a side pocket of her backpack. Still Evelyn sat there, as if she couldn’t grasp that we needed to stand up and walk out of the restaurant, like now.
“We need to go,” I said. “We’re going to go.”
Then she moved from incredulity to anger, saying that she chose the restaurant specifically because she thought the kids would like it. She didn’t know when she’d be able to come back; that section of the restaurant wasn’t always open. We stood by awkwardly, having gathered our things, while Evelyn, still seated, began a conversation with the server during which she queried the restaurant’s closing time, when that dining area would be open again, and why it wasn’t open on weekdays, at a time more convenient for her.
In the parking lot, Evelyn declared that we could go eat somewhere else if we wanted; she was going back home to have a sandwich. “We should probably get on the road,” I said. “We’ll just grab our things and go.” So back we went. In that suffocatingly tense atmosphere, Evelyn watched wordlessly as we collected our belongings and filed into the kitchen, where I laid a 20-dollar bill on the counter for her lunch. Just as we were gathering the last of the snacks we’d brought with us, she declared, “I really think we should talk this out.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary,” I chirped. “Addie, would you grab that?” I pointed to our casserole-sized food storage container on the counter and bent to stuff some oatmeal cookies into a grocery bag on the floor. Before Adriana could move, Evelyn picked up the container, apparently meaning to hold it hostage while we talked about our feelings. Thereupon ensued a literal tussle during which Evelyn would not let go of the container when my daughter reached for it. “Adriana,” she growled in the same warning tone she’d used with her poor dog, whom she’d scolded incessantly for coming into the room during meals. After a second or two, my daughter prevailed, passing me the container as Evelyn said, “I’d like to talk to you alone, without an audience.”
“No,” I said, gesturing to my children. “We’re a team.”
The rest can be summed up quickly. She mentioned hypoglycemia, to which I said, “Eat! You’re in your kitchen now. Please eat.” She told me that ever since we’d arrived, she’d felt left out, “not part of the team.” I said I was sorry she felt that way. When she bewailed how rude Adriana had been to her, a mirthless laugh of disbelief escaped me. “That is not accurate. Nobody was rude to you. She may not be warm, but she is also not rude. What happened is that my kid has a potentially life-threatening allergy, and the situation required some grace, which was not demonstrated. And now we’re ready to leave.”
And we did.
It was Robbie who first coined the term “Evelyn-gate,” Addie who channeled Mark Twain by remarking, “All she wanted to do was make sure there warn’t no p’ints about these frogs that was any better’n other frogs.” It was so clearly true; Evelyn had invited us so that she could size us up and find us wanting. My so-called prodigy of a daughter was rude to her, and she got to be wounded and was glad. But I was glad too. Not because Addie really was rude—she wasn’t—but because my daughter is not the type of person who feels obligated, as I do and always have, to smile and ignore snide remarks and let people steamroll her. She’s her own extraordinary person, who couldn’t care less what Evelyn thinks. Most intoxicating of all, I—I, of all people!—had somehow managed to bring my beautiful Adriana (and Robbie!) (and Sunny!) into being.
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