The Quiet Dinners

By the ninth grade, Diane had stopped trying to fix her mother's silences. The dinners were the worst part. Helen would set the table the way she always set it, same plates, same hour, same careful arrangement of glasses and forks, and then she would sit down and not say anything. Not for the whole meal. Not for the whole evening, sometimes. The depressions came in October and again in April, on a schedule almost as reliable as the seasons themselves, and the rest of the family had learned to live around them the way you learn to live around weather.

"I came to hate those times," she remembered. "They were painful and awkward, but I didn't have the time or the energy or the good will to try to comfort her as much as I had earlier."

It was Brooklyn in the early 1970s. She was a teenager at Brooklyn Friends, the Quaker school where she had been sent in part because her parents believed in the values it stood for and in part because Helen and David were the kind of people who believed deeply in private school the way other parents of their generation believed in public service.

What saved her, in the end, was her schedule.

* * *

Diane's life in high school ran on a kind of ferocious overcommitment. There were sports, the school newspaper, dance, and piano lessons on Sunday nights. There was homework, always homework, the kind that piled up in the way that homework piles up for a serious student at a serious school. She was, by her own account, a busy and productive person, and her parents, relieved that her grades stayed high and that her trajectory pointed clearly toward college, mostly stayed out of her way.

The autonomy felt good. But the schedule was also doing other work. It was the thing she could put between herself and the silence at the dinner table. It was the reason she came home later, slipped into her room to do her homework, and did not have to sit for very long under the weight of her mother's mood.

In ninth grade, the schedule found a center of gravity it had not had before: a history class taught by a woman named Miss McZanion, which Diane would describe more than fifty years later as "like taking four courses instead of one." For the first time in her life, school had become hard enough to occupy the part of her brain that had previously been spent worrying about her mother.

"He just would pull away and not try to relate to her. It was hard to navigate. But we both agreed it was very painful."

David, in those years, became a quieter figure than he had been when Diane was small. Not absent, never absent, but practiced at a kind of patient retreat that Diane recognized, even as a teenager, as a survival strategy. "This is just the way she is," he told her. "She has been in therapy. It has not really helped."

It was a small concession, a small admission that the situation was real. But it was also a kind of permission. David was telling his daughter, in the only language he had for it, that she did not need to fix her mother. He had not been able to. She would not be able to either.

* * *

The places where she was most fully herself, in those years, were the places her parents knew the least about. One of them was Powell House, a Quaker retreat center in upstate New York where Brooklyn Friends sent students for community-forming weekends.

"I recall being very happy then," she remembered. "Everyone was in kind of a kumbaya moment, and I thought, well, I'm me, and they're them, and we're friends, and this was a good moment, a good place to be."

It is a remarkable thing, to be fifteen years old and to have the presence of mind, in the middle of a happy moment, to register both the happiness and your own distinctness within it. Most teenagers experience belonging as a kind of dissolving. Diane experienced it, on that stone wall, as a kind of meeting.

The other place she was fully herself, somewhat to her parents' dismay, was in the small and complicated romance she conducted with a boy named Ricky. He was slightly older, slightly wilder, and entirely focused on her. Her parents did not approve. They told her she was wasting her time. The pressure had the opposite of its intended effect, of course. Pressure usually does.

"In the short term, it was a good thing to be defiant. In the long term, they were right."

That sentence is one of the most precise things she would ever say about her own adolescence. In the short term, her defiance was the thing that taught her she was a separate person from her parents. In the long term, her parents had been more right than she had wanted to admit.

* * *

What she was actually building, underneath all of this, was a plan for getting out. Not a plan to escape her family. She loved her family. But she wanted to be able to live, eventually, anywhere in the world she chose. Medicine became the vehicle. Pre-med was portable. Pre-med was a passport. Pre-med was a route to self-sufficiency.

It was, in other words, never really about being a doctor. It was about freedom. By the time she got to Princeton, she was already most of the way to becoming a person who could live wherever she wanted, do whatever she wanted, and answer to no one but herself.

That had been the work of high school, as much as the AP courses and the Sunday piano lessons and the long, painful dinners. The work had been to assemble, out of the materials at hand, a self that did not need rescuing.

From Helen, even through the depressions and the silences, she had learned a relentlessness about excellence. From David, she had learned something quieter and more essential: how to plot on, how to exist in the day-to-day world doing something that may not at all times captivate you, and how to relate kindly to other people.

And from Brooklyn Friends, where the Quaker silence in the morning meeting had been a different kind of silence than the one at her own dinner table, she had inherited something she would later consider the heart of who she was: a friendliness toward strangers, a generosity toward other people, and a refusal to look away from the world.

It would take her many more years, and her own bouts with situational depression, to begin to suspect that some of what she had been so determined to distinguish herself from, in her mother, had been passed down to her anyway. The cycle had not broken cleanly. But it had bent. And the bending was enough.