When my mom was four years old, she made it out of her house alone. She paused at the end of the driveway and looked back at the front window, hoping her mother would see her go and feel sorry for shouting at her for giggling with her sister during their nap.

She wandered along the edge of the freshly paved street, finding it easy to keep walking. She walked for a long time, carrying her cardboard suitcase. It wasn’t heavy; it held only a blue plastic comb, a pair of white socks rimmed in lace, and a doll with golden hair and tiny shoes. Her brother’s small red cowboy hat hung down her back. She had never taken anything from her big brother before. The hat’s white string pressed into her neck. She did not turn around to look back. She would never go back.

She made a gunslinger’s shadow in the street, turning her knees out bow-legged and pulling the hat onto her head. There were no sidewalks in the neighborhood and the street was a danger in itself, she knew. After a while, houses grew taller and yards widened and her heartbeat sounded in her ears. This was the feeling she was looking for, a little ripple of fear and thrill. She had always wanted to walk until she crossed the invisible line beyond which nothing looked familiar, but she usually got caught before she could.

She sat on a grass plot for a moment and pushed the toe of her sandal into a bubble of warm tar at the road’s edge. It didn’t pop, only squished silently. She rested awhile, and then walked on until she passed a white house with gray shutters and a green lawn full of trees and shadows. A stranger stood in her doorway waving her hand. Donna waved back and walked up the path to meet her on the covered porch. The woman bent down and asked her if she wanted a cookie. She wore bright red lipstick. Donna nodded silently and followed the woman inside. She asked Donna how old she was, and Donna held up four fingers. She asked her name and where she lived and she said, “Iveland Drive.” “Where is your mother now, dear?” she asked. Donna answered, “Home.” “Well, you made it pretty far on your own, didn’t you?” she asked. After two cookies, the woman told her she would walk with her back to the corner of Iveland Drive. Donna decided that was all right. She could run away again tomorrow.

She made it home just before the porch lights came on in the darkening street. The woman waved her inside, then disappeared. The house was cool and she could hear her mother’s radio crooning through the closed kitchen door. Donna smelled the dizzy lacquer smell of her mother’s nail polish. Her father was still at work; otherwise he would have whistled for her, a shrill single note that shot down the block like a bullet made of sound. Donna climbed up the small staircase to the hall of bedroom doors. She rested her brother’s hat on the floor in front of his door, then went silently into the room she shared with her little sister. Joanie was still napping under a pink blanket, breathing deeply with her mouth open. Donna lay down on her bed’s slick satin spread, a bit of saved cookie still curled in her hand. She passed it into her other hand and licked the melted chocolate from her salty palm and closed her eyes.

Riding to the grocery store with her mother the following week, they passed the woman’s house, a half mile or so down the road. Donna pointed and said, “That’s where the cookie lady lives.” Her mom didn’t know what she was talking about.

The next time she tried to run away, her mother saw her slip through the gate and was behind her instantly, swinging a switch torn from their tree, landing stinging licks on the backs of Donna’s legs. “Where do you think you’re going, young lady?”

I recognize my mother in miniature in this memory of hers. She was always a gypsy and a rebel. But most of her childhood stories play out in a strict home I don’t recognize at all. Her descriptions of her parents in no way resemble the kind people I knew as Grandma and Grandpa.

I have watched the Roosmann family home movies with fascination. Pastel-pink birthday parties, Christmas mornings around the tree, and trips to the zoo—each scene is orderly and formal. Donna is a tall, painfully thin girl, her knees poking out from under layers of petticoats, her teeth covered by braces that push her lips into a pout. She and Joanie wear matching perfectly starched white pinafores even while playing jump rope and hopscotch in their driveway.

Their mother, Tommie Jean, made all of their clothes, the curtains and throw pillows, everything in their home. She is gorgeous in printed day dresses protected by crisp aprons, her auburn hair set in elaborate swirls. She has the bearing of a celebrity, waving off the camera, peering over sunglasses. In several scenes, the kids are lined up on their concrete porch, dressed for church: the girls in buttoned coats and sculpted felt hats, their brother Gil Jr. in a suit and fedora, a miniature replica of their father. Laura, their baby sister, is held in Tommie Jean’s arms, her pale curls tucked under a white bonnet. They are groomed and still, like children imagined by Hollywood. I don’t entirely believe this lost world ever existed; it is completely foreign to me.

Donna traveled a long way from her origins before she had me, and brought very little discernible baggage with her. Mom raised me in a different world, one she built for herself. The more I learned about her childhood, the clearer that became.

Donna’s father, Gilbert Roosmann, worked for a trucking company as a rate clerk and her mother, Tommie Jean, stayed home with their four children. In the early fifties, they lived in a St. Louis suburb called Overland, one of many neighborhoods sprouted from seeds planted by the GI Bill for soldiers returning from World War II. Their little gray house on Iveland Drive was one of many identical homes built in a grid.

Tommie Jean kept her home quiet and spotless. Their dinner table was silent, without talk of school or sports. Their days followed a steady routine, from Mass in the morning until bedtime prayers.

Six days a week at 8 A.M., Donna went to Mass at All Souls Church. She was awakened in darkness and sent to clean up in the bathroom, where she crouched over the heating vent and let the warm air fill her nightgown like a balloon. She smoothed her navy jumper over a freshly starched white blouse. She liked wearing her school uniform; she felt it disguised her secret self like a costume. She was a dreamer, a ballerina, and a painter hidden in a schoolgirl’s garb. In winter, she wore a wool beanie secured to the crown of her head with a felt-tipped hatpin. In spring, a white lace chapel veil covered the curls made by the perms her mother gave her. Every few months, starting at six years old, Tommie set Donna’s head in tight rows of metal curlers, arranged according to the charts in her hairdo magazines. The chemicals burned her scalp and stank.

Donna rode the school bus to church, and her class entered the pews ordered by age, youngest in front, eldest at the rear. All Souls Church was the most beautiful and exotic place in Donna’s life. The grand stone walls danced with transient stained-glass colors and the air smelled of spicy sweet incense. The Mass was chanted in Latin, a low humming drone that washed over her like a magical incantation. They sang hymns and memorized catechisms. Who made you? God made me. Who is God? God is the creator of all things. Why did God make you and all things? For his own glory. How can you glorify God? By loving him and doing what he commands. A carved Christ hung on a cross high above them, a remarkable presence: a mostly naked man, beautiful, long-haired, and bleeding. The girls took in his transmogrified body in the form of the sacramental wafer, dusty and bland on their tongues. Donna loved the way it made her feel to share in the rituals, like secrets unspoken but witnessed and kept.

After morning Mass, a long day at All Souls School began. The Sisters of Notre Dame, in starched bibs and wimples, shepherded the girls through their lessons in mathematics, history, and religion. The nuns’ bodies were hidden under layers of black wool, and long rosary beads swayed from their belts as they walked between rows of desks.

After school, Donna retreated to the bedroom she shared with her little sister Joanie. She played her parents’ copy of the Warsaw Concerto on her child’s record player and choreographed elaborate dances to the swelling, serious music. Time fell away; she was so engrossed in her body’s ecstatic movements. Her room became a castle in the air. Her body was a ship adrift on the wind, her hair a spinning halo of light. She could stretch out, guided by the music, finally released from the confines of the day.

One afternoon, Donna sat at her dressing table and wrote a story describing what it might feel like to kiss a boy. She dipped her fountain pen in peacock-blue ink and imagined her lips touching the mouth of a boy she knew. Warmth spread through her like she was stepping into a bath. She pictured the boy’s pale cheeks and dark eyelashes and her heart began to pound. She realized that what she was doing was wrong; she was having impure thoughts. So she tipped her bottle of ink over the whole page until a deep wet stain eclipsed her words, and put the ink bottle away. The lid on the bottle was loose and ink soaked the bottom of the drawer, the blot a reminder of her sin.

Her daddy was a calm and quiet man, tall and handsome with bright blue eyes. He was raised on a farm but held his body with the upright posture of a gentleman. He wanted nothing more after a long day at work than to read the newspaper undisturbed, reclining in his chair. But before he settled in for the evening, he had to address his wife’s long list of daily grievances. She described the girls’ noisy fights, the disrespectful, mouthy answers they gave her, and the messes left behind by their hands. He would walk heavily upstairs, unhooking his belt, and call out his daughters’ names. Discipline was his duty as a father. Donna would hide in her closet and watch him spank Joanie through the slats of the door. Watching her little sister’s red crying face was worse than knowing her own spanking was coming next.

Other times, a spanking would come from nowhere, a terrible reminder of the price of breaking a rule. One night, behind the closed door of her room, Donna taught herself to braid her doll’s hair. After struggling for what seemed like hours, she had a breakthrough and her hands just seemed to know the right rhythm. After dozens of feeble tries, the code was cracked. She held the slippery golden ends of three twists and tried to keep them from unraveling. She distantly heard her mother calling her down to dinner, but she ignored her. She knew that if she stopped now, she would forget how to braid. She had to keep going so she would always remember. Her father came stomping upstairs and threw her door open. Before she knew what was happening, he was jerking her up by her arm and striking her. He bent her over his lap and spanked her until she couldn’t breathe.

At the dinner table, she gasped and shook while her brother and sisters stared at their plates in silence. Her mother told her she didn’t need to help with the dishes, which was as close to a comforting word as she was going to get. Once safely back in her room with her blanket over her face, Donna cried in rage. She tried to think of Mother Mary laying a comforting hand on her head, but she couldn’t help it: She hated her father, and her mother, and everyone. Then her daddy came to her and put his big hand on her head. She couldn’t help but love him, a wide warm feeling of forgiveness and repair spreading through her.