I have no real memories until about age 13. Maybe this is why I like mystery so much.
My memories up to age 13 are scattershot—an impression here, a story I’ve been told that feels like a memory there, a sense, a moment, a room I walked through. Never a complete story, only impressionist blurs. Shapes and shadows.
This is relevant right now because I’m having a teeth issue, which you know if you follow me on twitter (sorry). I have braces at the big age of 37 and it’s not because I care about straight teeth. It’s because the front two broke off halfway when I was—I am guessing, based on the place and the time of year—around 9 years old. I was racing the short-way across an in-ground pool with my older, competitive male cousin, and the way I remember it, he gave me a little shove and there was a big loud noise and then a curtain politely falls. After that I have no memory.
What I do have is a sloppy bondo job in the vague shape of two human teeth that was meant to tide a kid with a still-growing mouth over until proper, permanent crowns could be installed.
Problem was, once my mouth stopped growing, my teeth were too crowded to fix the bondo job. I needed braces. And braces? At age 25? In the 2009 economy? Absolutely not.
I had already spent a decade and change enjoying bits of my patch-job chipping off into my breakfast, or, one time, falling out wholesale while I stood behind a cash register talking to a customer. And now I couldn’t fix them until I had a procedure I couldn’t in my wildest dreams afford. So instead, every time I lost a hunk, a dentist in New York or Alaska or Louisiana or California would slather more bondo on top of whatever remained of the old repair job, like when your nail polish is chipping but you don’t have time to repaint them and so you touch up the tips and put some Seche Vite on top and hope nobody looks too closely.
Also, every time it happened, I would cry and cry, just fall apart in desperate angry toddler sadness. Sometimes it would spiral into a panic attack, or else the anger would swallow me and I would slam my fists into a door at the frustration I couldn’t name, the unfairness of it all. It was the money a little, though the repairs were never terribly expensive. It was the frustration a little, of trying to fit a dental appointment and the necessary recovery into a three-job or full-time class schedule. But mostly it was just formless, empty sadness, waves of it, a curdled stomach, clenched molars.
Well, I can afford braces now. So here I am, almost 30 years later, at long fucking last. But I cried when I ordered them—not from happiness, but from defeat. I cried when the box arrived, bright purple with millennial slogans about confidence spilled across the top in a vintage serif font. My hands shook when I inserted the first aligner and felt my bones begrudgingly acquiesce to it. Then I cried again. You are being so dramatic about this, I thought, in my best impression of my mother’s voice.
I told my dad I’d started braces in the way I always tell him things, which is to say jokily, via text, with a photo of my stupid face because for whatever reason my stupid face makes him happy. I joked about it because in my brain it goes: “I broke my teeth, [scene missing], and then I got my teeth fixed.
But he called me immediately, agitated and a little angry. He offered to front some of the cost (I declined). Then he launched into a rant about The Teeth Incident and filled in the rest of the day for my Swiss cheese brain.
I was under mom’s care, because it was summer and she didn’t work, and I was swimming in her then-boyfriend’s mother’s pool, playing with my cousin until, crack, broken teeth. She didn’t think it was a big deal, my broken teeth. That was her way, to hand-wavily declare things whatever and refuse to worry about them. She had a deathly fear of dentistry and, god forbid, orthodontia, and so didn’t know who to call. But if she ignored this problem, like her instinct told her to, my dad would be mad, and who wants to deal with all that?
So she called my dad and said: you have to handle this. He left work in the middle of the workday and he drove 45 minutes out to where I was, and found me sitting there crying with blood pouring out of my face while everyone played in the pool. He took me the 45 minutes back to his dentist in silent fury—fury i cannot specifically recall but which i know, somehow, to have been there—and got me the emergency orthodontia I very obviously needed. She then refused to pay for it, and he didn’t sue her boyfriend for damages because he couldn’t look his daughter in the eyes and tell her he was going to war with her mother.
(At this part of his story, a memory injects itself into my brain, the tilted chair, the needle into my gum, the view of the window and the sun peeking around the curtains, the counting backwards, fading out. From nowhere, like a desert oasis: a memory.)
My dad is, usually, a semi-reliable narrator. He’s prone to bouts of furious, irrepressible rage that cloud his vision and interpretation. Rage that I, as a fucking kid, always thought belonged to me. The rage belonged, of course, to my mother almost exclusively. But that’s something I’m still realizing. These things are always slow to unfurl.
The point is, my mother would almost certainly tell a different story. One where a kid had a normal kid accident, and she called upon some pre-existing agreement about who would pay for what, and why does she have to be the villain of every story? Why is it always her fault? I can hear her saying this, because there is nobody whose head I am better at trying to live inside than hers, with all of its denials and blame shifting and rules lawyering. That’s what she does about everything I’ve ever attempted to talk to her about: diffuse. It’s fine, everything is fine, every kid has accidents, it’s not “trauma,” Amy. You are being so dramatic about this.
In my life I’ve found that this is often how trauma works. Every incident becomes one with drastically, tragically diverging viewpoints. My dad, aggrieved and broke and doing his best with an ex who insisted on making every benign incident into a power struggle. My mother, afraid and also broke and incapable of handling emergencies, defending herself before anyone had the chance to punish her.
And the kid, sitting at the table, bleeding onto her t-shirt, as her mind erased the hurt and replaced it with an inscrutable set of neuroses she thought would save her.
Trauma is a swirly hallucination of synapses firing and cortisol flooding and muscles sparking. It warps sense memory and reasoning and makes it so that three people can have three totally different understandings of a scenario that played out between them. It moves reality around under your feet. It spins like a kaleidoscope.
Or throws shadows.
So let’s talk about Sundial, the new Catriona Ward, a book that understands the stupid story of my stupid teeth almost better than I do.
There’s Rob, an English teacher and mother of two. She is a woman who wants a normal life, to be a normal parent in a normal suburb. But she can’t be this, because she is married to Irving, a charming but philandering professor. At first, her marriage to Irving feels like a toxic game between two damaged people who want to hurt each other to feel something. But then it changes.
And that’s the thing about this book—it always changes.
Rob’s not normal, actually, she’s a collection of fears in the shape of a woman, and she is running from her past. Rob’s eldest daughter Callie is a strange, frightening girl who collects bones and talks to a ghost puppy. I understood her, instantly, as someone who needs her neuroses to stay alive, her little fantasies of power and control.
Rob is scared of Callie for reasons that will be revealed slowly and terrifyingly through the course of the book. But when she suspects Callie of hurting Annie, her youngest, Rob takes action. She whisks Callie away—away from Annie, away from her cheating husband—to Sundial, the ranch in the Mojave desert where she was raised with her twin sister Jack and her parents and all their dogs.
And instantly, at Sundial, Rob is back in the past (chair, needle, black), back with her parents, back in her strange and upsetting upbringing, with her twisted parents. And Catriona Ward is so deft at peeling away the onion skin layer by layer until you get to the odd slippery center of it all—what she’s running from, why she’s scared of her daughter, why she hates her husband. From page one you are dying to know what the deal is with this family, but she leaves you twisting as she takes her time telling you. Things unfurl slowly to you, because they unfurl slowly to Rob. The bones unearth themselves, the layers of desert sand blow away.
Just as you start to make out a figure in the distance, the narrative switches POV. Now we are in Callie’s mind, or in a fictional story, or watching Past Rob, Teen Rob, at the ranch, seeing the same story unravel, colored by other traumas and other unseen histories. And you change with it.
A lot of books give you twists to make you guess. I never get the sense that Ward is doing that. She’s taking her time with the twists, luxuriating in them, pulling you down, not tripping you up. Because that’s what life does. It gives you, in my case, 20 years to uncover why something is what it is.
The result is a story that’s at once always getting clearer, and simultaneously always slipping away, always morphing. It’s a plot that’s impossible to describe because nothing is what it seems, and nothing goes where you think. It’s a story in a story in a story (braces, broken teeth, bloody shirt), like memory, like trauma, like people.
Here’s the thing, the nut, the crux, the onion under all that skin: “Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them.”
I would add: kids don’t even know they’re doing it. That’s the creepiest fucking part. They only collect the bones, because they must.
I liked The Last House on Needless Street, which you know because I did one of these dealies about it. But Sundial is the book that turned me into a forever reader of Catriona Ward. You gotta do it. It’s NOTHING you expect.
Purchase Sundial from your local indie, or at this link
Drinking: I’ve made two batches of this Spiced Blood Orange Shrub, and I’m not saying you HAVE to put it in some gin, but I am saying it’s a good idea
Cooking: I have possibly never gotten more messages about a food than I did about Pizza Alla Vodka, so here you go: my process for things I suddenly decide I want is to look at like half a dozen or more version that are close to the thing I want and borrow bits from them to make the thing I want. So basically, it’s a bit of this one where I use mostly paste to make the sauce so it’s thick enough for pizza and a bit of this in terms of flavor profile. I used a dough from a pizza shop, because that is a magical thing you can do on the east coast. I topped it with mozz and some red onions and sliced soppressata. After it came out of the oven, it got a dusting of parm and some slivered basil. It was, without exaggeration, the best pizza i’ve ever made.
Honorable Mention I Should Probably Write a Whole Post About: Sarah Weinman’s new one is out, and it’s a rollercoaster, you’ll love it.
Watching: A show called CRIME SCENE KITCHEN, where bakers go into the CRIME SCENE KITCHEN and find clues about what was previously made in the CRIME SCENE KITCHEN. They smell things and they root through the garbage and they find false clues they have to ignore (unopened cocoa powder bag? that’s a RED HERRING, BABY), and they have to cook what they think was cooked in the CRIME SCENE KITCHEN and if they get it right they are safe and if not they are judged in comparison to their fellow competitors and the rules are very confusing in the CRIME SCENE KITCHEN and I had to explain them to Alan every time he walked into the room, perfect garbage show, super american, no notes. Anyway it’s on Hulu.
Fairy Tale: Here’s one where the king’s Big Boy gets killed and then it’s seven stories in a trenchcoat. Critics (Casey) are saying it’s our best episode yet.