YOU THE DAUGHTER

In winter I have seen my grandmother grow orange peppers in her bedroom, saving the seeds for next year’s garden. I saw it when my father and I visited my mother one Christmas. He had said, “Come on, it’s Christmas. You need to see her.”

I’d sat slumped in my mother’s room, one that she rented with two other girls, all of them housekeepers at the Ashworth By the Sea near the strip at Hampton Beach. My grandmother slept there, too.

I was nine and sullen and dressed like a boy. That’s what my grandmother said. I only remember I loved racing down to the river, filling bait bags with herring if my dad was hauling traps, stretching belly-down on the pier, calling out to the seals. How else was a kid going to dress?

That day, I was supposed to be at Rosa’s, decorating little wreaths and reindeer cookies with sweet sugar glitter. Instead, I kept my distance from my grandmother, with her mean little eyes and sharp sour smells of cooking. My mother sprawled in a chair, her arms dangling over the sides. “Maid,” she said. “I never worked so hard in my life. You don’t finish a room in thirty minutes, they say you aren’t working.” Her eyes scrunch up. “Oh, my legs ache.” My grandmother wasn’t listening. She was yelling at my mother, and I understood that she wanted my mother to go with her to Lowell, to their old apartment.

“These Cambodian girls in America,” my mother and grandmother had said. “They grow like giants.” They were looking at me, mussing my T-shirt, my baseball cap. My grandmother talked in English that didn’t match, and sometimes she didn’t bother with verbs. Mostly I remember my grandmother demanding, “You come. You the daughter.” I took my father’s big, calloused hand to ward her off, terrified that she could make me. I would not take the cup of sticky rice that she tried to jam in my chest. But my father took it, and under his stern eyes, I ate.

I could already stitch bait bags as fast as a bufflehead could dive for food, and I could mend my father’s nets. I was a fisherman’s daughter from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Nothing to do with these people.

But against my will, all the time I missed the smell of the room where I wouldn’t talk to my mother. I felt her hand smoothing my shirt. I remember the surprising sweetness of the rice. I wanted her to have more than a room. I didn’t want her legs to ache. Now and then she called me after she went with her mother to Lowell. What could I say? Please, please let me live with you in your room. I won’t bother you.

I thought by sixteen, I’d be over her.