Daughters of Daughters

Query

Daughters of Daughters is a historical fiction novel complete at 135,000 words. It begins in 2020s Los Angeles, but is set primarily in Berlin from 1926-1992. It’s a woman-centric intergenerational saga like Homegoing and The Joy Luck Club, but set in the turmoil of The Lives of Others and Babylon Berlin.

Franny knows that her mother fled to LA from communist East Germany, but her mother’s silence on the details has always torn her apart. When Franny loses her first pregnancy with her husband, he mourns. But Franny finds herself relieved. He gives her an ultimatum: try to become parents together, or get divorced. Franny decides to go to Berlin, meet her estranged grandmother, and uncover her foremothers’ life stories. What she finds will help her know whether to become a mother – or the last in a long line of daughters.

Readers go deep into three of Franny’s foremothers’ stories, which span 70 years of German history, from cheery Cold War-era youth camps to sinister Nazi bride schools to powerful protests in 1990s East Berlin. Each daughter struggles with how much loyalty she owes her mother, and each mother struggles with how much of the truth she owes her daughter.

First 5 pages

Los Angeles, 2022

Franny

My mother is a mother and her mother was a mother and her mother was a mother. And I am a monster who said Okay to having a baby, just to have something to do with my life.

She is probably a daughter. Because, as far as I’ve been able to uncover in my pokings-around since childhood, there are nothing but daughters on my mother’s side of the family.

But now she’s going away inside of me. The way I see it, not dying exactly, but not not dying too. She is her mother’s daughter, mine. From nowhere, going to nowhere. She was begun and suspended and now vanishing after only nine weeks. Uncommitted. The blood in the toilet bowl matches my sweater, which I bought with my employee discount at the store, twenty percent. I hadn’t thought about maternity clothes yet. Lucky, I guess.

I never tried for her. Never dreamt of her. I had gotten pregnant in college too, an episode with an ex-boyfriend home from Pasadena that led to an appointment at a friendly clinic. That time didn’t require very much blood, or thinking about it after. That time didn’t require a breaking of news to anyone, especially not a beloved husband who wants a child badly. 

Regret has never trailed me. Afterward, I’d gone to Vienna for a semester, earned my history degree, earned ten more years to think about whether to become a mother, or not.

She feels, felt, my ambivalence. I know it, knew it. Why would she stick around to see what kind of mother I’d be? Good girl, smart girl, shh.

I’ve been spotting for the last few days, rusty red splotches appearing in my underwear. But I haven’t told my husband, Chris, about them. I can’t stand to hear it: “Is the baby okay?”, “Everything okay with the baby?”, “How are you feeling this morning, Franny?” I pre-Googled the splotches so I can tell him yes, according to a well-regarded website, designed in a feminine-but-clinical purple, thirty percent of women experience this in the first trimester. It isn’t just me. I will be fine. We will be fine.

But now, no. Only one of us will live. Cramps streak like nails across my abdomen for an hour. I fold over, head in front of my knees. Feel something, Franny, I command myself, how a mother would. Focus on something else. Something outside your body.

I look at the large mirror over the sink at me: the woman with red eyes, mascara trails blurry like fuzzy yarns. There on the vanity is Adela’s toothbrush in its little white cup, her lipstick a mauve streak below the brush head, waiting for her to come back for it. I start to cry again, missing her, thinking of us in our pajamas, brushing our teeth together when I would come for a sleepover as a child.

“You look like my old friend Gilda,” she had said last week, her final words to me as she lay in the bedroom dying, my mother holding one hand and me holding the other, and my sister Lottie standing at the foot of the bed.

I hadn’t told Adela about the baby. Didn’t want her to think she was missing anything. Now she will miss everything. I put my head in my hands, forgetting about the blood in the toilet bowl beneath me. Only Adela matters.

This morning I finally came back to Adela’s to sort through more of her things. She never had babies, had never wanted to. She had no family, not even back in Germany. My mother was her heir, and Lottie and I, her stand-in grandchildren. I just wanted one last quiet morning with her in her house. To be alone with her things after the torrent of colleagues and friends and lovers at her memorial service, after the urn filled with her ashes had been given back to my mother. 

I emptied her refrigerator. A half-full jar of cocktail onions, pungent. Two plums. Slices of bright cartoonish cheese that she kept for me and my sister and nieces when we came to visit.

“That’s not real cheese,” she would say, when we wanted a sandwich, a European to the last, despite herself. “It’s the mummy of something that could have been cheese.” 

I thumbed through the books on her nightstand, separating the library books from hers. Our Aesthetic Categories, yes, crisp in its cover, the UCLA library call number on the spine, and To the Lighthouse, browned from overreading. Outlander too; she had been reading it with Lottie. She had finally started to read things that weren’t horribly smart, to give her brain a break from the intellectual rigor of her life as a philosopher. 

I picked a few bottles of whisky from among her obscure collection from around the world. I wanted them for after the baby was born. I’d taken a whiff of our favorite, an Ardbeg Uigeadail, with notes of peat and sweet dark fruits.

Then I sat down at her desk. My mother, Nadine, had organized her papers into piles: tax returns, legal documents, love letters, academic projects, journals. I found her first American passport photo from right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, shortly before she’d brought my mother to California. 

There was a photo of her and my grandmother, Gilda, her best friend, from when they were much younger, nearly teenagers, but not yet. There were no pimples or awkward hills of flesh. My Oma Gilda and Adela stood with their arms around one another in a vineyard. There was no hint of where they would end up, what they would do in the world or to each other, or how much my mother would grow to love one and despise the other.

Finally, there was a copy of Adela’s will, this one with fresh blue ink. I read Adela’s familiar handwriting, its fastidious curls and dots. 

Bring some of me back to Berlin, it said, when I’m gone. I want to see my friend again. Paperclipped to the top, an envelope with a handwritten letter inside. For Gilda, it says. Deliver by hand.

Something happened in East Germany between Oma Gilda and my mother that was never explained to me. The thing that makes my mother hate her mother. I suspect that my mother has seen this letter and ignored Adela’s request. That she has stomped it into the sticky opaque clay of her memory, along with all her other stories about life in East Germany. Oma disgusts her so deeply that she can’t fulfill the final wish of the woman who took her place.

I have far more memories of Adela than of my grandmother, Oma Gilda. Most of them are from her annual birthday phone call around noon to our bungalow, just before dinner Berlin time. One year in particular has always stood out.

“Hallo,” said Oma Gilda carefully. “Happy birthday. How are you?”

“Good,” said Lottie, her eyes glued to the Full House rerun on in the living room.

“How are you, Franciszka?”

“I’m good,” I said. “How are you, Oma?”

“Summer is here in Berlin. It’s beautiful,” she said in slow English. “All the trees smell good.”

“I love trees,” I said.

“Me too.”

“I like your English, Oma.”

“It’s better, no? I am having lessons. Trying to remember what I used to know. Then you might would visit someday.”

“Tell me about Berlin,” I asked. “What does it look like?”

“That’s enough,” said my mother, tugging on the phone’s curly wire. “Say goodbye.”

Lottie went off to the living room and I sat down at the table, pretending to play with my new My Little Pony. After a few minutes of talking in German to Oma Gilda, my mother’s face was fresh-blood-red as a party balloon. 

“And now you learn English for your granddaughters? The trouble with you is you never decided if you wanted to be a mother, but look at you now, acting the part of a grandmother. As if you’re that kind of woman.” She said this in English, and I got the idea she did it so we would understand, so we would know that there was something wrong with Oma Gilda.

Oma Gilda said something else, unintelligible between the muffled plastic phone and the unknowable German.

“That will never happen. Adela may forgive you, but not me.”

More talking from Oma Gilda.

“Lisa? When? I can’t – Mama, don’t. I have two daughters. I’m not coming back. When will you understand that?”

The name, Adela, known, seen, who would be coming for birthday cake later today, with presents and a firm hug. And Lisa, unknown, unseen, the mention of who made Mama switch to German. I could hear Oma’s voice getting lower and slower, calmer. My mother, on the other hand, sounded to me like a whining baby.

Finally, Nadine hung up and poured a cloud of boxed cake mix into a bowl. Some oil, two eggs, ten minutes in the oven. The banded muscles in her arms strained while she mixed. I watched her from my spot at the other end of the beechwood kitchen table.

“What, Franny?” Nadine said, her right eye scrunching up in exacerbation. My mother never looked at me like that, ever. “You talked to your Oma Gilda. Now go watch TV with your sister and leave me alone.”

I started to cry. I didn’t know why. And my mother didn’t come after me.

I have always wanted to tell my family’s story, but no one will tell me what it is. 

I still can’t write the one thing I’ve always wanted to write.