Issues → October 2001 → Features →

What Ever Happened to Daphne?

COMMENT

SINGLE PAGE

EMAIL

PRINT

SHARE:

(page 5 of 8)

I drive Daphne to her house on a quiet Portland street. I ask if she'd write me about herself. A short time later she sends a 5,000-word e-mail.

When winning is predictable, it's boring. Winning is a psychodrama, it's a metaphor, which is why it reaches us so strongly. It says: She wanted that and she got it, and I can get what I want. It's a dream of effectiveness. Power, but in the sense "power to," not "power over." I guess I'm upset because I didn't really want all those things I won, and I wonder how many times that's true in the world, people struggling to get these honors they don't care about. What did I care about winning the spelling bee? I just wanted to do it because I could, because I felt it was expected of me. The question here is why did I feel this need to win everything all the time? ... Because I'm a Brinkerhoff, and Brinkerhoffs think they know everything.

We stayed in touch sporadically. She was fired from 7-Eleven four months later. The gas man came to her house to turn off the heat. She had 23 books overdue from the Portland Public Library and owed $32 in fines. She was still fighting the desire to stay in bed or play computer games all day.

When I see her again in May of 2000 she is working as a census taker. We eat at a floating restaurant docked in the harbor. I ask if she misses the 12-year-old Daphne, the prodigy. "What people saw in me is still there," she says. "But I know people will be incredulous. I know I'll have to explain all this."

She says, "I know I'm not a genius. I can learn math and get degrees in it, but my creativity is not there. It would be much more clear if I was a genius: 'Oh, that's what I'm here on earth to do.' I'd have no choice but to follow it."

She says she wants to find a way to make a living that is socially responsible. She wants to be a writer, but suffers from writer's block, what she calls "this emptiness, dry like a riverbed." She knows she cripples herself by overanalyzing:

"What do I have to say that is useful to anyone" she writes, "that is 'mine' and not just a copy of someone else's thoughts? If it's faith, then I'll stay up all night writing until my fingers fall off, if that would bring me inspiration. But most likely it won't. I seem unable to act from a place where I can remember the simple solidity of my fingers resting on this keyboard, from a place where the moment is not on the way to something else but is just here. I can act. I can shape and form. I know what it is I can do. I can speak. But there is nothing to say."

To my surprise, she seems happier. "I think my right path will come," she says. "I haven't lost all faith in myself. I hope I'm leaving my angst behind. I'm trying to trade the pursuit of intellectual achievement for wisdom. My intelligence has always been there -- but not my wisdom, whatever that means." She says if she could be anyone else she'd want to be the author Ursula K. LeGuin. "She's wise," she says. "If ever I had a conversation with her, I think she'd agree with me about the pointlessness of fame and money." She's been reading the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, "trying to think about how the world really works. The Western way of thinking is the status quo, climbing the ladder. This book is the opposite."

I ask what she likes about herself now. "I'm less likely to think a stranger will be ready not to like me," she says. "Even at Pat's Pizza I knew people liked me, and I liked them."