I am descended from a long line of bitter women. It all starts, as far as I know, with my great-great grandmother Julia, a delicate mail-order bride from Germany who was transported after her marriage to a ramshackle collection of dusty, sun-baked adobes in New Mexico.

Julia died in 1891 after bearing eight children and enduring what family legend terms a loveless marriage. When her husband moved her into a beautiful Victorian house about ten years before her death, Julia shut herself up in a small dark bedroom overlooking Santa Fe’s Palace Avenue, and never left. The old house is now a swank hotel, and Julia's ghost has never given up residence in her old room, where she creaks and rocks and appears before guests in a white dressing gown. And while I'm not prone to believing in ghosts, this one has a certain personal poetry that I find compelling.

The old bartender at the hotel tells us stories when we go for a drink in what used to be the living room: Julia saving a female cook from a falling pot of hot oil; Julia tormenting a pair of amorous newlyweds that slept in her room; Julia hurling an entire overhead rack of champagne glasses across the bar at a new bride.

My grandma Ginny wrote about Julia – though like me, she never knew her. Ginny had also moved to New Mexico as a bride and in a short story described her wedding dinner among strangers: "There wasn't a breath of fresh air, the red velvet drapes were closely drawn, the temperature still hovering around one hundred, and the spoiled New Bride felt violently sick. I didn't know where the nearest bathroom was, so I plunged out the front door and vomited quite thoroughly. My husband came storming out to tell me how rude I was."

By the time I knew Ginny she subsisted on vodka, but she’d once been a woman with high expectations. She’d published a short story, in Redbook, and she proudly hung the first page on the kitchen wall in the seaside house she’d returned to when my grandfather divorced her. The illustration showed a young woman clutching a cocktail glass and smiling adoringly at a dashing young man. He stood in a circle of jocular, attractive men and women, a swirl of gaiety.

"Do they get married?" I’d ask her, hoping for romance.

"Oh darling, that would be boring," Ginny would say in her way and laugh her charmed laugh, water on water, batting me away with an imperious wave.

When she died, we found boxes and boxes of her writing. In a piece called "The New Bride" she described Julia as a woman banished, a woman "corseted and gowned and groomed," a woman trapped. "The German Bride is lost," Ginny wrote of Julia, speaking also of herself.

If writing is exorcism, it never managed to expel the bitterness that came to possess her. A prickly woman, she would sometimes soften and, in a vodka-induced fit of sweetness, run her fingers though my hair as I fell asleep. She would tell me how she had once had these same curls – before she spent 35 years in the desert with my grandfather. It had, you see, pilfered the life from her hair as it had desiccated her soul. My grandmother Ginny lived on anger.

I find myself an unwilling heir to this legacy. When I was 13 and just starting to think about things, I tried, for the first time, to enter into a heated dinner conversation. My brother and father were arguing about an astronaut on Mars and his genetic clone on earth, and although I thought I had something important to say – about supreme beings or God or something – I couldn’t get a word in. Finally, I banged my hand on the table and shouted, "Listen to me!" They stopped, surprised. So exasperated that no one would listen to me, I got mixed up: "Do you think there’s some great carnal knowledge out there?"

Home for Christmas 11 years later, in the Year of the Woman, we had some family friends over for dinner. The conversation turned to politics and, though I had some strong opinions, I still couldn’t get the men to listen. I finally gave up and stomped bitterly into the kitchen, where the women, having fled the smoky opacity of male opinion in the other room, chopped vegetables companionably.

I feel as though I have spent my entire life raising my voice to be heard at the dinner table. Like Ginny, I imagine, my own expectations of myself are rarely reflected in the eyes of the males around me and I’m beginning to wonder if wanting to be heard is expecting too much.

Ginny wrote of Julia and I write about them both, and as the generations of disappointment continue to unfold into 1992 I wonder when that anger, like Julia’s ghost, will finally be put to rest.

END