Where this was said
Growing Up in Wareham, Massachusetts
At 5:04 · chapter starts 3:05
Wareham, Massachusetts is 348 years old, and the Davis household felt every year of it. Geena's parents — a civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers and a produce-growing, canning mother born in 1919 — were shaped by Depression-era Vermont frugality. The moral code they instilled was extreme: have no needs, serve everyone, never be a burden. Geena tells the story of being invited to a friend's house at 9 p.m. as a junior in high school — her first real social invitation — and her father simply refusing to let her go. She was never invited again. Alongside the social isolation was a rich private world of compulsive rituals: she had to find Y-shaped sticks on her paper route to 'approve' her path forward, and at bedtime she worked to psychically deceive a mind-reading monster by mentally placing herself in the kitchen. Dax, who had his own OCD behaviors driven by a chaotic home life, finds Geena's childhood eerily relatable.
