She was a very ordinary person. Five and a half feet tall if she stood up straight, Connie usually slumped to about 5’4″. She weighed 165, which on her frame looked like 20 pounds too much. Not enough for obese drama but too much for a dramatic diet. She had medium brown-and-gray medium-length hair, and her complexion was middle-white.

She was 47 years old. About halfway through adulthood. She had just enough gone wrong in her body that she knew her age, but not enough that she was challenged to effort. Increasing allergies, slower healing, hard periods, heartburn. A stiff neck, an aching back, a weak wrist from computer solitaire. A tendency, grown noteworthy of late, to forget what she was about to say or do. But no near-death encounters with heart attack or stroke.

Connie used to wish she were Catholic, or from the South, or had alcoholic parents. She thought any of those qualities would have made her life interesting. But she hailed from a boring Colorado family whose greatest dysfunction was a familiar silence, and if familiarity wasn’t ordinary in a family Connie didn’t know what was.

She flared with a little originality and passion in her early 20s. She spoke then about how she’d raise her children differently: open door and open mouth. But by the time she bore her only child at 35 she’d settled into boring. She’d grown almost as silent as her mother.

It wasn’t that Connie didn’t talk. Actually she and her mother were chatterers at times; Connie’s father learned early to tune them both out. It’s more that their talk was aimless. Each was totally unaware of her auditor’s response. Neither would even notice a big yawn. They threw words into the air with no intention of communicating, thinking aloud and out of a chaotic brain.

“Oh yeah,” Connie’s mother would say, apropos of nothing. And then words would issue from her mouth which were of interest to no one else, phrases which revealed nothing except the random thoughts then passing through her head. “I hope he makes it,” might be about her father getting home in time for dinner to be served without reheating, or a reference to Connie’s rebellious, delinquent youngest brother, or even a wish that Uncle Ethan would cook his famous potato soup for the Christmas Eve family get-together.

In Connie’s family, language was either meaningless or absent. Sometimes words filled the air and made ears nervous. But nothing important ever got said. Connie’s parents never spoke about birth or death or feelings. When her father became angry he stomped off to his garage and inserted his fury into turns of the vice clamp or rips with the table saw. When her mother was mad she stopped talking to them. Often for half a dozen hours and once even for two days, Connie’s mother ceased to speak.

When Connie was a kid she said she’d never be the way her mother was. She figured she’d be no more successful at giving others the silent treatment than she was at trying to lose her appetite. It was difficult, after all, not to speak when others were around. But Mormonism teaches nothing if not how to endure difficulty. Connie learned.

By the time she was 47, her daughter Megan was 12. Her husband Bill was as serious and dour as her father had been, and as distant. Although neither Connie nor Bill went to church or considered themselves Mormons any more, the heritage had stuck. They were both hard-working responsible people. They drank coffee but it was decaffeinated. They drank alcohol but not well. They didn’t like to dance. They had sleepy brains. They loved candy. Bill was generally quiet, getting fat as he aged, wanting sex twice a month, handy around the house. They slept in separate rooms because, as Connie explained to some, they had the space and Bill’s snoring disturbed her. Connie would smile with her mouth closed then, and murmur something about knowing the way to one another’s room, which information was deemed unwelcome by everyone to whom she gave it.

Connie chattered or sulked at home, and was always busy but never organized. As often as she recited her intentions to herself to accomplish one task, she distracted herself with thoughts about two others. Meanwhile, her daughter Megan spent as much time in her room as possible. She sneaked stale jelly beans or cellophane-wrapped caramels, and she entranced herself with her bookshelves of fables and folklore. Or she borrowed one of her father’s Playboy magazines, and fantasized to the pictures. Bill didn’t know about the borrowing; he didn’t even know that Megan knew he kept a stack of old magazines in his closet behind his gray suits and winter shoes. But Bill was a packrat and a masturbator, and his collection went back to 1961.