by Anna Monardo
“Oh no. No.” Mary had to hug Natassia even though the gearshift was poking them both. “Yes, I feel all those things, but I wanted you to never feel them.”
“You do feel it?”
“I feel it almost all the time.”
Natassia gave in to her mother’s hug, let herself droop into Mary’s arms. “What do you do about it?” Natassia asked softly.
“I don’t know.” Mary, too, spoke softly. When she opened her eyes, she was staring into the dark, wiggly mass of Natassia’s hair, which looked like the exposed roots of plants the campus gardener had dug up from the garden a few days earlier; Natassia even smelled like fresh earth. “I guess I always…I don’t know.” The rain on the hood of the car was loud now. Mary had never felt so vulnerable, so naked. “I know I’ve never,” Mary said, “been able to…say it out loud. Like you can.”
“But you don’t collapse and cry in public and make a fool of yourself. Maybe you feel this bad thing inside you, like you’re worthless, but you’re still successful.”
“Successful?” Mary laughed, pulled away from their hug to see Natassia’s face. “Honey, I just keep moving. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone as brave as you to sit and feel this shit and be able to talk about it.”
In a tiny, tiny voice, Natassia said, “That’s why I do it, Mom. That’s why I tried to hurt myself with the matches, and with the Cuisinart.” Mary’s heart was beating too fast now. Natassia’s eyes looked very scared, and then she slowly turned away from her mother so their eyes couldn’t meet. “I never wanted to die, but I just had to punish myself for being such a, such an embarrassing person. Sometimes,” Natassia insisted, “I’m so mad at myself for messing up.”
“You don’t mess up, honey. We’re the ones who mess up.”
“Who?”
“All of us. Me, your dad, all the adults around you.”
“Mom, I know the BF’s a jerk. I’ve known that for a long time. In my—”
Still facing Natassia, who wouldn’t look at her, Mary said, “Listen, I have to say this. I’m sorry, Natassia. I’m sorrier than I can ever tell you. I’m just…I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” Natassia rolled her eyes again. “Okay, I know, listen, don’t get mad.”
“I won’t get mad.” Mary’s tears were dripping off her upper lip, into her mouth.
“Promise? Okay. What happens is that in my head I know he’s a jerk, but this thing happens in me, like a switch or something, and I start thinking this other way, like, okay, he’s really smart”—Mary desperately wanted to picture the man, but she didn’t have one detail—“and maybe I’m not smart enough to keep his attention, or, like, I’m too boring.”
“You are not boring.” Big, big bore was the harshest criticism Lotte and David had for writers they didn’t like. “You’re not.”
“But when I think it, then I am. And I think it so much, I really feel detestable.”
“Oh, Natassia.” She’s just like me. Mary pictured the man very tall, very dark, like Ross. “You have every reason to believe—God, Natassia, you are an amazing person. Everyone says so. Nora and Giulia, and now even Claudia, they’re always saying it. I don’t know how to tell you enough that you’re…special.”
Natassia made an embarrassed face. “I let my hair get really dirty sometimes.”
She was trying to lighten up, which made Mary feel worse. But she had to follow Natassia’s lead. “Sometimes you snore a bit, too. Aside from that, you’re perfect.”
Natassia shrugged. “If you say so.”
Mimicking the words Ross had poured into her ear so often during the years—in bed, over the phone, even sometimes during a fight—Mary said, “You can’t give in to all that bad feeling about yourself.”
“I know, or I’ll end up like Dad. How he keeps stopping drinking, then he starts again. Like now. He’s drinking again, isn’t he? Maybe he’s smoking pot again.”
“He called the other night. He wanted to talk to you, but you were asleep.”
“I know,” Natassia said. “I heard you.”
NATASSIA WAS by now spending most of her days on the computer. “What are you writing?” Mary asked.
“Nothing. Is there somewhere at this stupid school where I can print this out?”
Mary took her to the computer lab. Natassia knew what to do. She printed out fifty-three pages. That night, while Natassia slept, Mary snooped. The pages were gathered in a pink manila folder tucked inside Natassia’s suitcase, which was in a back bedroom that Natassia now used as her writing room. What Mary found in the folder was a chronicle of Natassia’s romance, starting with day one. Mary finally learned everything about the BF.
He was in his early thirties (Natassia didn’t know exactly how old); a widower; Soviet; from Tbilisi, Georgia; Jewish. He’d been married to a painter who’d died—he wouldn’t tell Natassia the facts, but he implied that it was a bad death. Natassia had met him in the Quad movie theater, on Thirteenth Street, when she’d gone with some friends to see some foreign movie Mary had never heard of. He couldn’t believe such young girls were interested in French films, so afterward he’d invited them for coffee. Mariah had to pretend she liked coffee, which she detests, Natassia had written. But the guy, apparently, didn’t care about Mariah. For a week, he’d telephoned Natassia every night to practice his English. They talked for hours. He begged her to go to Brighton Beach with him. She finally said yes. He took her to a Russian restaurant, and they danced on the tables. He drank too much, and she had to get herself to the subway, ride to the Upper West Side alone. Mom would kill me if she knew. That one sentence gave Mary some relief but not much.
As she read, Mary kept thinking, Where were Lotte and David? Then, in the entry for day twelve, Natassia answered Mary’s question: My grandparents thought I was spending the night at Mariah’s. The man didn’t know how old Natassia was. She made him guess and never told him if he was correct. Since I live uptown and because I’ve read so many books, he decided I go to Barnard or Columbia. How convenient for him, Mary thought.
After the night at Brighton Beach when he got drunk, he wanted to make it up to Natassia. Two nights later, he took her back to Brooklyn, out to dinner and to an art show in a loft in Red Hook. Wasn’t there anyone there who recognized her? Mary wondered. Nora, Christopher, Ross—they all had friends in Red Hook. Apparently, in Tbilisi he’d been a sculptor. He hardly wanted to look at the artwork, Natassia wrote. He said he just wanted to look at me.
He took her back to his apartment in the East Village that night. She went with him willingly. He still didn’t know how old she was. That was the night the sex started.
All the details were there. His hands, the hair on his chest, his mouth all over Mary’s young daughter. I felt so much older, Natassia wrote, but also like I was a kid rolling around in the ocean when there’s waves. The fifty-three pages covered only the first month of their intimacy. Mary was glad; she couldn’t have taken any more.
She put the pink folder back into the suitcase, slipped into bed. Natassia was asleep next to her. Mary lay awake all night. Everything I did wrong, she’s doing. Everything I didn’t want her to do. This is my worst nightmare. I never wanted her to be like me.
OVER THE NEXT DAYS, Natassia kept writing, typing on the laptop, running up to the computer lab to print out her pages. The pink folder got fatter.
“What should I do?” Mary asked Dr. Cather on the phone.
“Let her write. Maybe she’s just getting the whole experience out of her system.”
By now they had made it to the first week in November. Natassia actually seemed a bit happier. Her appetite improved, and Mary tried to believe this was progress.
Until one Saturday, when the phone bill arrived in the mail. Two calls to Manhattan, a number she didn’t recognize. Mary dialed; a man’s answering machine, an accented voice. No name, just the gruff command “If you are calling for the lessons of Russian, give me your number. I will call you.” Then a grudging “Thank you”
and then the beep. Mary hung up and called back. And called again. And again. She heard everything in his message—the ruthlessness, cruelty. She heard approaching middle age, she heard despair. She imagined she heard the need for a green card.
Mary spent an hour choreographing in the studio, lots of combative movement. What the fuck was she supposed to do next? When she got to the cottage, Natassia was lying on the couch reading a big, fat, pretentious book. Mary, unlit cigarette in hand, stood at the foot of the couch. “Natassia, you called him. The calls are on my phone bill.”
“I’ll pay you back,” she said without looking away from her book.
“That’s not the problem. Why’d you call him?”
“He called me.” Natassia still hid behind the book, as if she and her mother had never talked face-to-face, crying, in the intimacy of that rained-upon Mazda.
“How’d he know where to reach you?” No answer. “You called him first, didn’t you? Don’t you understand you’ve been sick, really sick? And this man had something to do with you being sick.”
“Mom, he wants to get back together again. You should have heard his voice, how happy he was when he heard me.” Natassia rested the book on her chest and smiled at the ceiling. “We love each other. This is real, Mom. I told him I’d be in the city next weekend.”
Mary had no idea what to do.
“I guess,” Natassia said, turning to her book, “I’ll get the train Friday afternoon.”
I have to do something. Mary walked away. By the time she reached the kitchen archway, she heard herself saying, “Good, I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
Natassia finally sat up. “You’re not coming.”
“Natassia, if you go, I go. After everything that’s gone on, we’re all involved with this man. It’s time someone else in the family met him. I’ll be with you. If you decide to see him.” Mary was conscious of giving Natassia an escape hatch. Mary imagined Cather telling her, Well done.
NOBODY SAW HIM, neither Natassia nor Mary. The BF didn’t call Natassia on Sunday, as he had said he would, to confirm their plan to get together. On Tuesday, when she tried to call him, there was no answer. On Wednesday, Natassia yelled at Mary because they were out of English muffins, told Mary she hated her. On Thursday morning, Mary had to cancel class to stay in the cottage with Natassia, who was having another crying jag. On Thursday afternoon, Natassia had a double session with Dr. Jamison Jonson.
Friday morning, Natassia was still determined to go to the city, still trying to reach the BF on the phone while she tossed clothes into a canvas bag. Mary pulled out her backpack and started packing, too. Then Natassia dialed the BF once more, and a young man answered and told Natassia that his uncle had gone away on a business trip and that he’d be gone for a while.
“Where did he go? When will he be back? I was supposed to see him today,” she said urgently into the phone.
After a few minutes, she hung up. Quietly, in a voice so full of adult bitterness it scared Mary, Natassia cursed, “Bas-tard.” She stared at the phone.
“Who’d you talk to?” Mary asked.
“Some guy said he was his nephew.”
“What did the nephew say?”
This was the instant everything changed. Natassia looked Mary full in the face a long time, so Mary saw for herself the moment Natassia decided to be sane. “You want to know what the nephew said?” Natassia burst into giggles that crescendoed into huge laughs, and when she spoke again her voice was full of a fake Russian accent. “He said, ‘I am not knowing when he is back. Is maybe for big long time.’ ”
Mary understood the game right away. “Big long time?”
“Da. Big long time.”
They laughed so hard it was beyond laughter, it was pain in the gut, and they had to walk around the room holding themselves, trying to stop. The rest of Friday and all through the weekend, they spoke in exaggerated Russian accents. Every time they looked at each other, they laughed.
A WEEK PASSED before Mary could bring up with Dr. Cather all the things that Natassia had said in the Mazda that rainy afternoon she spelled out the mess inside herself. “It’s so weird,” Mary told Cather over the phone. “Everything I ever felt inside that I tried to hide from her, she said it.” Sitting in her office with the phone receiver to her ear, Mary found herself weeping. She stood up, turned out the overhead light so no one would knock on her door. Deep-breathing, she sat at her desk.
Cather spoke softly: “Especially with our daughters, Mary. They often bring us to the self we’ve tried to run from.”
“You, too?” Mary asked.
“All of us.”
What Mary couldn’t understand was this: if she, as Natassia’s mother, had been the originator of this bad feeling, why hadn’t she, Mary, ever tried to kill herself or hurt herself the way Natassia had? “Why’s it more intense in her?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s more intense in Natassia. Perhaps it’s just been more hidden in you. Perhaps you never felt you could vent it, or show it. Maybe what you did instead of self-mutilation was have the abortions. That couldn’t have been fun for you.”
“It makes me so mad when people say that if you’re not anti-abortion you’re pro-abortion. Nobody’s pro-abortion. It was bad, really bad, every time.”
“And also, maybe you didn’t act out as Natassia has because you didn’t feel anyone would come to help you, the way Natassia knows you will help her.”
Mary had to admit that Cather was seeming smarter these days.
CHAPTER 20 :
NOVEMBER
1989
Natassia abandoned her chronicle of her love affair with the BF—the last fifteen days were simply sketched in—and she began to write poetry. She didn’t show any of it to Mary, but she left pages where Mary could find them. First, Mary found two poems:
ASSHOLE
If I were your
mother I think
I’d have to tell you something
like, it’s time to grow up.
I’d say, I’m sorry
I died when you were ten
and your father was so mean
a man and all that, but come on,
it’s time to pay your electric bill.
Get a job.
MY BOYFRIEND
The way he kissed me
with his mouth
was like an ocean.
I put my face against
wild wind from
an electric fan the other day
and I remembered his
lips on my eyes.
Mary copied the poems down, word for word, and one afternoon she went to find Claudia in her classroom. “Natassia wrote these. Are they any good?”
Claudia was the kind of no-bullshit person Mary liked. She had a son in the Peace Corps someplace dicey, so the mess with Natassia didn’t make her flinch. On her way out the door for the day, Claudia had her poncho on and her book bags hanging around her shoulders, but she squeezed herself into one of the student desks and read the two poems and said, “Hmm.”
“What? They’re bad?” Mary asked. “They’re good? Yeah? Why’re they good?”
“They’re playful. They’re spare. They’re full of moments.” Claudia lifted her glasses onto the top of her head. “She’s good.”
“Don’t say a thing to her. She doesn’t know I look through her stuff.”
“So I can’t include these in the school literary magazine?” Claudia laughed her huge I-don’t-give-a-fuck-who-hears-me laugh.
Mary gritted her teeth and said, “Don’t even think that thought, don’t you dare.”
“Don’t get too heady,” Dr. Cather warned when Mary recited the poems over the phone, “about these early signs of progress. It’s definitely progress. It’s good. She wants to live, that’s what I hear in her poems. But she’s still deeply hurt and in need of deep, deep healing. You’re sure you feel comfortable with the counseling she’s getting up there?”
“HEATHER JAMISON JONSON. Heathe
r Jamison Jonson.” Natassia was saying it over and over as Mary drove her to the yellow clapboard house on the hill for her Tuesday appointment. Autumn had become more serious, the heater was up high in Claudia’s Mazda. “Heather Jamison Jonson.”
“Why do you keep saying her name?” Mary asked.
“It’s my mantra. It soothes me.”
“It does, does it?” Mary laughed. Since they’d upped Natassia’s therapy to two visits each week, Natassia had become almost jolly. For stretches of a couple hours, especially on therapy days, she’d be silly. Now that Mary had learned how to get reimbursed from the insurance company for these expenses, she’d cheered up considerably herself. “What does Heather do that makes you so happy?”
“It’s not Heather, Mom. It’s Heather Jamison Jonson. You have to say the whole name for the mantra to work. Like this.” She closed her eyes, placed her hands palm-upward on her knees. “You say, ‘Heather Jamison Jonson, Heather Jamison—’ ”
From the car, Mary watched Natassia skip up the long stone stairway to Heather Jamison Jonson’s house. Ten days had passed since Natassia had turned the corner away from heartbreak. Mary’s anxiety was easing up a bit, but her moods were largely defined by what she found in Natassia’s journal, the ongoing story of her daughter’s secret former life. Mary was relieved that Natassia was no longer addressing her journal to him. These days there were poems and lots of talk about HJJ, Natassia’s abbreviation for Heather Jamison Jonson. But then, one night, late, Mary turned back a big chunk of pages and landed on one of those early entries that were nothing but a love song to the BF.
Oct. 25, 9 p.m.
By now you’re probably forgetting I ever existed. I don’t forget. I think about how you brought me things to eat on that little plastic tray with the picture of Miami Beach on it and you said we’d go there when we got married. After we made love once you brought me small purple grapes and you even popped the pulp into my mouth and then you sucked the skin and you kissed me and we slid the purple skin back and forth between our mouths with our tongues. And by then, whenever I felt your tongue, it was automatic that I needed to touch your penis, too. Your tongue stroked my tongue and then we were making love again. Just because of those pulpy purple grapes, tiny globes. Wine.