My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  A few months later, when I was in fourth grade, I found myself alone in the girls’ bathroom. After I peed, I looked over the white walls. They were bright and blank. I’d never seen anything on them, no scrawls or stickers. I found the short pencil I had in my pocket and wrote, “I hate me,” in small letters next to the toilet.

  I was working at my desk that afternoon when my teacher crouched next to me and whispered for me to come with her. I followed her into the bathroom and the red stall I’d occupied earlier, where she silently pointed at the wall. I’d already forgotten what I’d done just a few hours ago.

  I froze. I’d done something really bad. My teacher was mad. She’d call my father, he’d be madder, and I’d be in trouble.

  But my teacher wasn’t angry. She put the toilet seat down, sat on it, and opened her arms, then nodded when I hesitated. I got on her lap and exploded into tears. When I calmed down, she asked why I hated myself.

  “Because I’m stupid.” I sniffled.

  “You’re not stupid,” she said.

  I insisted that I was.

  She shook her head, then took out a long pink eraser. She placed it in my hand, then watched as I made what I’d written disappear. I never told my parents what happened, and they never asked me about that incident. But soon I was taken to a hospital for an educational and psychological evaluation, the first of many I’d receive over the next few years.

  As the three of us sat in a waiting room full of families and wooden toys, I tried to guess what was wrong with the other kids. Eventually a cheerful doctor arrived and called my name. Long, shiny hallways led to a series of small rooms where I was told to copy drawings, memorize sequences of shapes, and list as many words as I could that started with the letter F in one minute. Several doctors casually asked questions about my feelings and my family.

  I found the results of this evaluation when I was cleaning out my mother’s house. It gave detailed descriptions of my performance—I was able to identify single words up to a seventh-grade level on an oral reading test, but my active working memory was well below age expectations. It listed my different learning disabilities before going into a psychological assessment.

  Anya, herself, is a very fidgety ten-year-old girl…She described in some detail how she cries when her daddy yells at her. She states that when dad is away on business trips, things are much quieter and that he yells at her too much for having messy handwriting. She states that sometimes she is scared more when her mother is out of the house, not for fear of any type of abuse, but rather that father would yell more at her. Her specific wish was that her father not yell at her and that she had more friends and better handwriting…She also felt that she felt sad more than other children and also felt that many other children were smarter than she was.

  This lucid articulation of my unhappiness was devastating when I first read it. Typed tightly on a page I could hold, a page I knew my parents had held as well, those words chiseled me back to child size and soaked me in the terror that spilled out whenever I’d heard my father’s voice. They also soothed me. I hadn’t retrospectively fabricated or embellished how I’d felt as a kid from an adolescent or adult perch.

  Doctors also spoke to my parents, who told them about my headaches and about Yuri. The report stated,

  Prior to Anya’s birth, parents had another male child who died in infancy. That fact was kept confidential from Anya until just recently. Approximately three to four months ago, a friend told Anya that, in fact, she had a brother who died.

  I didn’t know if I’d brought up Yuri when speaking with the doctors, or if my parents had told them. The evaluation simply states that I told the doctor I found out about Yuri from a friend, and that I went to church with my family on the anniversary of his death.

  It continued,

  Anya admits to being sad at times, but does not have any persistent depression that lasts for any longer period than a day. She admits to spontaneously crying and stated that “everybody likes to pick on me.” She has transient self-destructive ideation and has thought about hurting herself with either a knife or jumping into water, although she has never made any attempt to hurt herself. Notably, most of these thoughts were several months in the past and she currently denies any active suicidal ideation.

  The doctors concluded that there were

  many potential psychological dynamics that may impact on Anya’s headaches. This would include the report that Anya perceives that her father yells at her too much, that Anya was told about her brother’s death after such a long time, as well as potential intrinsic depression characteristics that Anya has evidenced in the past.

  I didn’t associate my sadness with Yuri. To me, everything was about my father.

  I was put into therapy immediately. My therapist was probably in her forties, but she seemed far older, ancient even, like a witch, not because she was wrinkled or hunched but because she was so cold. Her questions—“How are you feeling,” “Tell me about your father”—were clinical and flat. I answered her as if I were being quizzed. I was honest but not open. I sat on my hands, swung my legs, and looked around the room and tried to do “well,” but I didn’t understand what talking to her was supposed to accomplish. She met with my sister once, and with my mother, and once with all three of us. If she met with my father, or with my parents together, I didn’t know about it. She was fixated on my brother’s death, seeming to think that was what was causing my headaches and depression. I didn’t argue and say no, it was my father. I didn’t think she’d believe me.

  I stopped seeing that therapist after complaining that I didn’t like her. My mother told me she didn’t like her very much, either, and took me to another one, a man who was animated and liked to watch me play games. Though he was friendly, I felt the way I had with the first therapist: confused about why I was there and what was supposed to be happening. I never left therapy feeling hopeful or more prepared to handle my life. But I suppose some part of it must have been effective, because without my noticing, I stopped having headaches and didn’t have to visit so many doctors.

  The following year, the Bank of Boston dissolved their Middle East and Africa division. My father was given a chance to find a domestic position within the bank, but he couldn’t find one he liked, so he started a consulting company. He no longer needed to take the long trips I depended on for the breaks they gave me. He was always around and was usually grumpy and short. His focus on finding clients and generating income became a sort of shield. He paid less attention to me and my homework, though I knew I could still do something, many things, to make him snap, and acted accordingly.

  My mother left her job at the Sierra Club and began teaching ESL to adults in the workplace, so there was some money coming in. She loved teaching and told me stories about her classes. I pretended I wasn’t interested because I didn’t want to be interested in anything about her, but I liked hearing about her students—Cambodian refugees who became nurses, Iranian physicians who’d had to become janitors—and their questions: the best way to address a boss’s spouse, what to wear to a work party, if Halloween was devil worship that would corrupt their children.

  If my parents fought about money, I didn’t hear them, but my mother worried about it in front of me. She told me that our family’s income had plummeted, but that our expenses were increasing. My sister would be in college in a few years.

  My father spent two years trying to establish a consulting business before finally finding a job with a company in Saudi Arabia that suited his background and interests. My mom had been pushing him to look for a “real job,” but she told him he couldn’t take this one. I didn’t know what the job was, only that if he took it, he’d live in a compound, and when we visited, we’d live there, too.

  My mother was incensed that he was even considering taking the position and told him that she’d divorce him if he accepted the offer. She tried to get my sister a
nd me on her side by telling us a story we’d already heard many times. In the seventies, my parents were detained at the Riyadh airport when security found a small, old bottle of whiskey in my father’s camera bag, something he’d probably swiped from a hotel mini-bar. They shouted at him as he apologized and explained that he wasn’t trying to smuggle alcohol into the country, he’d simply forgotten he had it on him. They rummaged through his suitcase and found another.

  “How many more?” the officers shouted. “How many more?”

  My parents were held separately for hours. Every thirty minutes, a sneering man would come into my mother’s cell and tell her that she would never see her husband again. They were only released after the American embassy got involved. My father accepted the job in Saudi Arabia despite her threats, but my mother never had the chance to make good on them.

  During this time, the Soviet Union began experiencing seismic unrest. Like many of its other territories, Ukraine was agitating for independence. In 1990, the Soros Foundation offered my father a job as one of the directors of Ukraine’s first national bank, and he took it instead of the job in Saudi Arabia. His plan, he told us, was to spend two years in the position. He’d come back to America for a few weeks every few months.

  My father didn’t tell me why he was working in Ukraine, and I didn’t ask. He was gone, just like I’d always wished. There was much more space around me and in my head. The difference in my life was so great that I often thought about him dying; if that happened, I’d be rid of him forever. I imagined his funeral and how sad my mother would be. These fantasies made me feel guilty, but they were also thrilling.

  I didn’t consider how my mother felt, or how his departure changed her life. After twenty-three years of marriage, her husband was gone. He wasn’t away on a business trip; he’d moved to a country where he could rarely make international calls, and where he couldn’t be called, even though he lived in the nicest hotel in Kiev. My parents mostly communicated via fax. My dad’s came in the middle of the night. The machine’s screech and buzz reached me in my bedroom and snapped me awake. In the morning, I’d find a note for my mother so long that it reached the floor and curled into itself.

  I was happy, or could have been happy if my life hadn’t also suddenly gone in a new direction. The year my father left, I started middle school. I’d failed to test into Boston Latin, the city’s best public school, and because my parents feared I’d “get lost” at another public school, I’d applied to a bunch of suburban private schools and was rejected by all but the worst two. My parents decided that I’d go to the one that was coed and that I’d repeat sixth grade instead of going into seventh. They told me I wasn’t prepared to be a seventh grader at this new school, where I’d have science and foreign-language classes for the first time. They also said I was too small to go into seventh grade. I was small, but I didn’t grasp why that mattered. I protested, indignant about the decision and that it had been made without me, and at my parents’ dismissive response: “You’ll be fine.”

  After commuting for forty minutes on the subway and then walking a mile, I entered my new school boiling with a mixture of defiance and insecurity. I wanted to be everyone’s favorite friend, but I also wanted to shun my peers because I was older than they were. I wore my favorite jean jacket, which I’d covered in Guns N’ Roses patches and pins, and was delighted when I heard the other girls talk about the New Kids on the Block. It gave me the perfect opportunity to roll my eyes and establish that I was the sophisticated one from the city.

  The students were the first rich suburban kids I’d ever met. They went to expensive summer camps, had lots of clothes, cared about having boyfriends and girlfriends. I could ride the subway by myself, which none of them were allowed to do, but I was totally unequipped to survive in their world. I’d arrived with an attitude that I hoped would elevate and protect me, but they had a Machiavellian understanding of social dynamics and power cultivated in basement rec rooms. At my old school, where almost everyone in my twelve-person class had been together since first grade, there were no cliques; everyone, at least all the girls, were friends. At my new school, girls paired off instantly so they’d have a best friend, and no one chose me. I had thick glasses and hopeless hair, and was both too eager to be liked and too obnoxious. I looked and acted like everyone’s least favorite little sister; I wouldn’t have chosen me, either.

  Sixth grade the second time around was full of rejection and judgment as bad as my father’s. Previously, his voice had been the only one besides my own telling me I was terrible. School was the place where I could usually avoid it. But I quickly understood that home was now my refuge since he was gone, and school was the place to hide.

  Other students gleefully told me that I was ugly and weird. They ganged up on me in all the ways kids do at that age, making fun of me for not having breasts and for loving heavy metal, and I became twitchy and apprehensive. Sometimes I’d have a friend for a week or two, but they’d always drop me and I’d again find myself alone. Every day when I arrived, I wondered if something had changed the night before, if a new alliance had been forged over a series of phone calls and given me a new fate. It usually had, and I’d wander between classes with what felt like a fatal case of the left-outs.

  I hadn’t ever fought back against my father because I was too afraid of him, and though I was often in trouble, it was rarely because I’d done something on purpose. I was getting yelled at enough; misbehaving wasn’t worth it. Once he left and I began having so many problems at school, I felt I had to rebel against my enemies, new and old.

  I didn’t do my homework, picked fights, violated the dress code, failed tests, and received weekly detentions that turned into full-day Saturday detentions where I had to clean the cafeteria. When I finally got some friends and a little bit of power, I became just as cruel and conniving as the kids who’d terrorized me as our alliances continually shifted. I’d be swapped out when a cooler prospect had showed interest, or when someone’s parents, having heard that I might be a bad influence, warned their child away from me. I’d try to insulate myself by recruiting anyone I could, and found boys to be the easiest gets. I flirted with them, hoping it would help. But some of them—particularly those who were similarly ostracized—wanted to be my friend anyway, so all that did was start rumors that I was a slut.

  My mother begged, then yelled at me to do a better job on my homework, to get along with people, dress normal. I begged, and sometimes yelled, that I wanted to go to another school. I told her how mean the kids were. How miserable I was. But she was convinced that I was the source of all my problems. Every time I reported someone’s cruel deed, she asked me what I did to cause it. What was I doing that made the kids not like me? Why couldn’t I just dress and act like everyone else?

  I couldn’t be like them because I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to be. I liked different music. I wasn’t rich. My mom didn’t drive me to school or to the mall. I wanted to be myself, but I also wanted my classmates’ acceptance as much as I had wanted my father’s. They made me feel like a mutant. I tried to pretend that I didn’t care and was mean when I thought it could help. But I walked the halls nauseated, knowing that at any moment someone would tease me and I’d have to force myself not to cry. I was sick with the expectation that girls wouldn’t let me sit with them at lunch, or that they’d laugh when I spoke in class.

  At the end of the year, I started seeing the school psychologist. I loved her because she let me talk endlessly about my problems with the other kids and didn’t blame me for my problems. Talking to her was my favorite hour of the week, and I continued to see her for the next two years.

  When seventh grade came, the majority of my classmates had their bar and bat mitzvahs. Suddenly, I had to be out in the suburbs on weekends for a service in the morning and a party in the evening. Even though my classmates had to invite everyone, I was excited to be included and to have the chan
ce to redeem myself by showing I was likable. But my mom refused to drive to the suburbs twice in one day, so she only drove me to the evening celebrations. I didn’t want to go to temple, but I knew it was wrong to only go to the party because my friends’ parents always commented that I’d skipped the service. When I explained this to her and begged her to please, please get me to both, she told me the drive was too long, and added that it was ridiculous that my classmates’ parents were throwing such extravagant parties for their children, with booths where you could record your own music videos, chocolate fountains you could dip Twizzlers in, and personalized cameras already loaded with film. I believed she was being selfish and making my life harder when I badly needed her to help make it easier.

  I’d never owned a party dress, and since my mother refused to buy me one, I begged a friend in eighth grade to loan me hers. I knew I couldn’t wear a dress more than once, and agreed with my mother that the ones I was loaned, or looked at in stores, were too shiny or covered with too many rhinestones. But I also wished she’d just buy me a stupid ugly pretty dress so I could fit in for once. When she refused, I used birthday money to buy a tight black Betsey Johnson dress, which I hoped would be more successful at telegraphing my coolness than my jean jacket. However, what it seemed to tell my peers was that I was officially and undoubtedly a slut.

  The word stuck this time, though I didn’t know why. Sure, I dressed kind of “slutty” and flirted with boys, but I wasn’t doing anything beyond making out with them. In a way, I liked the word. It made me feel dangerous and exotic, more complicated than “weird.” I’d been veering toward goth, and being a slut gave me the final push. I wore low-cut velour shirts, spray-painted my shoes, piled on the makeup no one else was allowed to wear. I dyed my hair red, then blond, then maroon. I was frightened of actual sex but interested in the power I could have over boys.