Over dinner, Sue asked about their home in Boston. My mother turned to my father. “Is that still your home?”
He looked at the table. “Of course.”
“Is it? Are you returning there with me and your daughters when this wonderful vacation is over?”
“Anita.”
She glanced at Sue and Martin. “Ask him about Anya’s last report card. Ask him how Alexandra’s sailing team is doing—”
Sue interrupted. “How about some dessert?” She brought gelato from the kitchen and a stack of bowls. My mother poured herself more wine.
When we got home, my mother began spending most weekends at our New Hampshire cabin, and my friends and I, including my new boyfriend Eli, quickly got used to reigning over the empty house and its many bottles of vodka, which my father inadvertently supplied when he returned to Boston from Ukraine. We called it “Ukrainian Death” because even when there wasn’t a drawing of a pepper on the label, even when we mixed it into extra-large cherry Slurpees, it seared our lungs and made us howl. I’d toss a Duraflame log into the fireplace, fill coffee mugs or paper cups with vodka, let people smoke packs of my mom’s cigarettes, and watch my friends make out or mug with our statues. I fed them and made sure they puked in appropriate places, and they did the same for me. If the Duraflame was still burning when we needed to pass out, we’d throw water on it. When that didn’t work, we brought it out to the sidewalk and beat it with a shovel.
Christmas that year was stiff with tension. My father flew back from Ukraine, but nobody wanted to be there. Alexandra and I went to our rooms early on Christmas Eve because we couldn’t stand to watch our parents not fight when they so clearly wanted to.
Early next summer, when I was sixteen, my father came home again for a few weeks. One Sunday morning, I wandered into the living room and announced that I was going out with Eli. School was almost over, and Eli was going to Ecuador for a community-service program. We wanted to spend the day together.
My father casually declared that I wasn’t going out, and said I should be doing homework. When I explained that I didn’t have any, he said I should be studying because my grades were bad. My grades were bad, but I didn’t care. I sputtered out excuses and pleas until I shattered and screamed “I hate you!” at adolescent level ten. “You can’t stop me!” I ran to the bathroom and got into the shower.
He followed and yelled at me from the other side of the bathroom door, telling me that I wasn’t going out. With shampoo streaming down my face and shoulders, I told him that I could do whatever I wanted, that he didn’t live with us anymore. After repeating ourselves at an increasingly loud pitch, my father charged in.
The room was filled with steam, but the shower door was clear. Terrified, I retreated into the corner and tried to cover myself. My father seemed almost as shocked as I was to find himself there. He tried yelling some more, but my voice prevailed as I told him to get out get out get out until he did.
I finished my shower as quickly as I could and ran to my room, where knee-high piles of clothing spilled into each other. I was crying when my mother found me and was embarrassed to be caught. I didn’t know if she’d heard what happened in the bathroom. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to have to tell her.
She sat down on my bed, a thin futon on a piece of plywood propped up by cement blocks. It wasn’t comfortable, but I thought it was cool, the kind of bed I’d have if I were a junkie or didn’t live at home.
“You can’t tell your father that you hate him,” she said gently. Her skin was shiny and her pores were large. I looked at the few patches of gray carpet that were free from clothing, which were dotted with black and maroon hair-dye stains. “You need to apologize.”
I told her that he needed to apologize, and said that she should have interfered with our fight. “Why don’t you ever help me?” I asked. “You never did when I was little. You just let him yell and yell, even though you knew I was miserable. You should have protected me.” It was the first time I’d voiced the thought that had been bothering me since childhood.
My mother was quick to correct me. “I did protect you,” she said. “Don’t you remember the time I took you and Alexandra out of the house after your father came down particularly hard on you? We stayed with my friend Lili for a few days.” I didn’t. Like so many of her other stories, this one didn’t produce the reaction she wanted. Instead of concluding that she was a good mother, I was left thinking, “Yeah, but you brought us back.”
Sensing that her story hadn’t done what she’d hoped, she abandoned it. “I talked to your father. He’ll let you go out with Eli, but only if you apologize.”
I couldn’t tell if that was her requirement or his. I weighed my desire to have him apologize against my desire to go out, and went down to the living room.
My father had taken his place at the table. His shoulders tensed when I came in. I said, “I’m sorry I said I hate you.” I got ready and left.
Eli and I had a great time, and when we were together I tried to forget about everything that had happened with my father. But when I was back home, I was overcome with anger. I couldn’t get rid of the wild fear I’d felt when he’d burst into the bathroom. He was my father, and a stranger, and someone I hated. A person who respected me and what I wanted so little that he would come in while I was naked because he needed to keep yelling at me. I was certain I’d only be safe when he was gone.
On his last day in Boston, my father, my mother, and I stood in front of the house and waited for the cab that would take him to the airport. My mother smiled and wished my father a good trip. He thanked her, and their faces met for a quick kiss.
I wanted my father to leave, but I didn’t want to have to hug him goodbye, although I knew I had to. It was one of the things that had to happen before he left, a step that had to be taken. It was what was done.
It was easy to get my arms around him, but it was difficult to touch him. The hug I gave him was quick and cursory, a light squeeze and my cheek against the stiff wool of his thick, black coat.
That’s what I remember, but it couldn’t have actually happened—the part about my cheek against his coat. It was summer, so he wouldn’t have been wearing that coat. That’s the one I always saw him in; it’s who he was. But that day, he was probably wearing a thin navy suit or a blue short- or long-sleeved shirt. So my face didn’t touch his coat; it touched something else or was scratched by his gray beard.
I hugged him because I had to, but then I did something I didn’t: I told him I loved him. I was horrified to hear the words and see them floating over his shoulder. I wanted to stuff them back into my mouth, to return them to whatever place they came from, a place I didn’t even know I owned. I felt dirty and confused, like he had something on me. I’d lied, and I didn’t even have to. He didn’t respond. He just got into the cab and left.
I settled back into my life of smoking weed, hanging out with my friends, and working at the drugstore down the block. I didn’t think about his coming back. What I thought about was losing my virginity.
Eli was everything I wanted in a boyfriend. He had dark hair, blue eyes, a scar on his cheek, and a devious grin, and was desired by all the other girls but was somehow mine. He was enough trouble to be exciting but loving enough to be safe, a guy who was so ultimately good that his bad was merely fun. He’d skip class sometimes, but it was usually because I had a free period and we wanted to make out in the grass of the nearby nature preserve.
We decided to do it on the Fourth of July, two days before he flew to South America. My bedroom was too chaotic to be romantic, so we opted for my sister’s, which she’d mostly emptied before going to college. It was on the top floor, where the air was thick and still. The room was dominated by a single piece of furniture—a rickety white particleboard twin bed that was attached to an empty bookshelf unit.
Our house was ne
ar the Esplanade, the center of Boston’s Fourth of July festivities. A stream of people was making its way to the celebration down the street, and their voices reached us through the open window as we readied ourselves with Slurpees mixed with Ukrainian Death. The noise outside and the creaking quietness of the room made us feel far away and invincible.
Our skin was sticky, faces pink, tongues red. I lay on my back and looked at the spires of the enormous Gothic church across the street, where’d I’d spent mass every Wednesday in grade school and every Christmas. I wasn’t thinking about God or guilt. I was just thinking it was pretty, that it had always been there, and that I was finally going to have sex.
We fumbled with a condom, then another, and another, but between our nervousness and the Ukrainian Death, we just couldn’t do it. We gave up and went onto the roof and watched what we could see of the fireworks while swearing we’d get it done tomorrow.
We did, on a waterbed that belonged to some lady naïve enough to let one of Eli’s friends house-sit for her. It was brief. It didn’t hurt. He told me I was an angel.
Afterward, Eli and I giggled in the dark, wiped the sweat off each other, and looked at our arms in the thin orange light thrown by the streetlamps. When he dropped me off at the end of the night, we said goodbye and held each other. I went into my quiet house and jumped into bed, thrilled with myself and what I had done, and ready to wake up to a new world.
On July 9, 1994, I woke to loud knocking on the front door. It was early Saturday morning, and I assumed some of my friends needed to crash after clubbing. My house was open to my friends and their friends when my mother was away, but she was home that weekend, and I didn’t want her to discover what I got up to while she was gone.
I flew downstairs, wearing only the T-shirt I’d slept in, hoping to reach the door before she did.
I opened it to find my father’s boss, David, stricken and pale. As I blinked into the sun and my mother hovered in the shadows at the top of the stairs, he announced that my father had been killed in a car accident.
My mother went back into her bedroom. I stood dumbly in the entryway until David said, “Let me in, let me in!” When I didn’t move, he pushed past me.
The phone rang. It kept ringing. When I answered, I heard Alexandra’s voice, fogged with distance. She was interning in Ukraine that summer and had just returned from identifying our father’s body.
My mother picked up the phone from her room. “Please tell me it’s not true,” she whispered.
Alexandra couldn’t. I listened as she told our mother what had happened. My father and two of his Ukrainian coworkers, Yelena and Serhiy, had been visiting a factory they’d recently funded in Cherkasy, a city three hours south of the capital. They’d traveled by car, driven by my father’s driver of a few years, Vitaliy. They were supposed to spend the night there, but my father insisted they return to Kiev that evening so he could get to work immediately the next day. As they approached the city, a van coming from the other direction drove into their lane. Vitaliy swerved left to avoid it, but the cars collided. My father was killed on impact; Serhiy and Yelena died at a hospital a few hours later. Vitaliy, and everyone in the van that hit their car, only sustained minor injuries.
This was the story I whispered to people as they filled the house. News spread quickly through the neighborhood, and my mother’s friends descended fast. They found her on the couch, the floor, wordless or wailing that she’d lost both of her men, first her son and now her husband. Someone took her to the kitchen so she could have privacy. As my mother’s screams filled the kitchen and the house, a woman I’d known from birth looked at me and said, “You know there’s a chance your dad was murdered, don’t you?”
I was still getting used to the story I’d woken up to; I hadn’t had time to doubt or complicate it. I said, “I guess,” because I had to say something, and sure, it was possible.
But the idea seemed ridiculous. Why would anyone murder my father? I decided she was being tacky, trying to turn a bad situation into an interesting one.
That summer, I was working at the drugstore down the block, and I was due there at eight that morning. I asked a neighbor to give the pharmacist the news and tell him that I wouldn’t be in for a few days. The neighbor returned with condolences—the whole staff knew my family well—and two Valium for my mother. When the pills landed in her palm, she looked up and said, “That’s it?”
I took advantage of the commotion and walked to Starbucks. I didn’t drink coffee, but I needed something to do. I took my time getting back, saying “My father is dead” out loud to see how it sounded.
At home, my mother was moving in hobbled shock. It was as though the car that had hit my father’s had crashed into our house as well. We all had to sway for a bit longer before we could assess the damage, glancing at our bodies and touching our faces before we tried to stand. I pressed my fingers to my chest and cheek, but found no injuries.
As the day stretched out, I performed the tasks expected of a daughter who’d lost her father. I accepted flowers and muffins, shook hands, received hugs, and tried to look sad. But I wasn’t. I didn’t want to feel sad. To feel anything other than relief over my father’s death meant being generous to a man who had never been generous to me. The weight that had been crushing me for my entire life was gone. There was so much grief around me, but to me, the world looked friendlier than ever.
The freedom I’d enjoyed when he was in Ukraine was now permanent; he was never coming home. But I couldn’t begin my life without him that day, or even that week. There was too much to do: streams of papers to sign, meetings with florists and priests, formalities and calls and waiting. A fax arrived from the American embassy in Ukraine, explaining what we needed to do to get my father’s body and personal effects back. We needed to plan a funeral in Boston, a burial, and we had to decide if we would be flying to Kiev in a couple of weeks to attend another service honoring my father and his coworkers.
My mother was fixated on my father’s body. She wanted it back in Boston immediately, but the process was complicated. We needed the death certificate. We needed the death certificate translated into English. We needed the body shipped, which required a zinc container, and a funeral parlor to receive it. What companies shipped dead bodies from Ukraine? Why was it so hard to find a translator? Why did we have to get an autopsy if he was killed in a car accident? My mother called someone every hour: the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, the American embassy in Ukraine, David, Aunt Lana, anyone she thought should help. No one was doing enough.
Two days later, Alexandra called crying from Ukraine. She’d been staying at the apartment my father had recently bought so she could organize his things but had been kicked out by David and another coworker when they arrived from Boston. They told her that the company owned the apartment, not our father—he had purchased it on behalf of the company and kept it in his name, to simplify what was usually a complicated process for foreigners—and that she needed to find somewhere else to stay. The only personal items they allowed her to take were his passport and briefcase, where, she discovered, he’d kept nude photos of our mother that he’d taken on our recent trip to Italy. Alexandra had her own apartment, but she’d felt my father’s bosses had been needlessly cruel and was worried they were doing something shady. She’d asked for more time to go through his files, but they’d told her those belonged to the company, too.
Alexandra was back in Boston by the end of the week. She was quiet and detached, constantly ducking the net of our mother’s hugs.
She and I at that age—twenty-one and sixteen—knew little about each other or each other’s lives. The first time we were alone, I asked what it had been like to identify our father’s body. She described the experience like she was reading a dishwasher manual. The morgue didn’t have storage or refrigeration, so she arrived to find bodies piled everywhere and bloated from the heat. Our fathe
r’s corpse, still wearing his bloody clothing, was laid out in the bed of a pickup truck because it was about to be transported to a morgue in the capital, and was partially covered by a sheet. His skull was smashed, his nose was broken, and his eyes were open. She held his hand, took his watch off of his wrist, and placed it on her own, then kissed his bruised forehead.
The scene was so vivid and appalling that it played like something from a low-budget movie. Because she didn’t seem upset, I didn’t become upset, either.
Our mother alternated between bouts of grief that kept her in her room and a state of lifeless composure that allowed her to handle practical matters like the wake. But as the practical matters got more complicated, she became increasingly unhinged.
My father’s mother inserted herself and her wishes into the planning process, and they differed greatly from my mom’s. Babtsia insisted on having a wake, funeral, and burial that were “appropriate” and Ukrainian. She wanted to hold the wake at a fancy funeral home in Boston, the funeral at a Ukrainian church, the burial in her family’s plot at a Ukrainian cemetery in Connecticut. My mother agreed to Babtsia’s first two demands, though this meant the funeral would be in Ukrainian, so no one in our immediate family would understand the service, and neither would most of my father’s peers. She wasn’t capitulating; having a Ukrainian funeral supported the story she was telling to comfort herself: Her husband had been so dedicated to helping Ukraine and its people that he sacrificed himself for its eventual glory. My mother, of course, had also made sacrifices, and she’d made them happily, because she had been the good wife of a great man.
My Dead Parents Page 6