Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  Also by Rufi Thorpe

  The Girls from Corona del Mar

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2016 by Rufi Thorpe

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Meaning” from New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 by Czeslaw Milosz, copyright © 1988, 1991, 1996, 2001 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thorpe, Rufi.

  Dear fang, with love / Rufi Thorpe.—First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-87577-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-101-87578-0 (eBook)

  1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Teenage girls—Mental health—Fiction. 3. Emotional problems of teenagers—Fiction. 4. Dysfunctional families—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.H787D43 2016 813'.6—dc23 2015018750

  eBook ISBN 9781101875780

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover illustrations by Tina Berning

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Rufi Thorpe

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  For Sam

  Meaning

  —When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

  The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

  The true meaning, ready to be decoded.

  What never added up will add up,

  What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

  —And if there is no lining to the world?

  If a thrush on a bush is not a sign,

  But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day

  Make no sense following each other?

  And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

  —Even if that is so, there will remain

  A word wakened by lips that perish,

  A tireless messenger who runs and runs

  Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,

  And calls out, protests, screams.

  —Czesław Miłosz

  Chapter 1

  Dear Fang,

  At this moment, we are mental twins. We are each alone, two discrete meat skeletons separated by space, cut off from each other by time, one of us reading a note, the other one writing it, yet we are finally together. Whenever you read this, even if it is years from now, though probably it will be only a few days since I hid this in your underwear drawer, but whenever you do find it: You will be inside my mind because you are reading and I am writing the exact same words. For just a moment, you are not Fang. You are me.

  It’s neat-o, don’t you think?

  I will write you lots and lots, I promise. Until, eventually, you turn into me! Even as I am farther away than ever!

  With love,

  Your silly,

  V

  IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what kind of girl my daughter, Vera, was, there is a story her mother, Katya, tells over and over. I wasn’t there myself, but it is part of the family lore: little Vera, five years old, her dark hair in braids, attending another little girl’s birthday. It was an overly elaborate party for a five-year-old girl, with candied violets on the cake, a gazebo, tasteful jewel-toned paper streamers, crowns made of real flowers for each little girl to wear, and a chalkboard listing a schedule of party games in cursive script.

  But it was a hot day. The children were beginning to melt. No one wanted to play the games, which seemed to be going on forever. Only the girl’s mother, wild-eyed and possessed by the fever of party orchestration, was enthused, and she led them through endless rounds of red rover, musical statues, even an egg-and-spoon race. By the time a game ominously titled “Doggy, Doggy, Where’s Your Bone?” was about to start, the birthday girl was crouched under a picnic table crying.

  Vera, ever the ambassador, ventured under there to powwow. The girl was hot and hungry. She could tell the other children weren’t having fun. The party had been going on for three hours and cake and presents were not yet in sight. Why was her mother doing this? Couldn’t they at least do one of the fun party games, like the piñata? Wasn’t the birthday party supposed to be about her? But her mother didn’t even care that she was crying there under the table. Her mother was going to make everyone play “Doggy, Doggy, Where’s Your Bone?” no matter what.

  Vera patted the girl’s skinny thigh. “Maybe your mom just doesn’t understand how you feel,” she said. And so Vera crawled out from under the picnic table, and went and found the girl’s mother, tugging at the woman’s dress as she was trying to explain the rules to the new game.

  “Excuse me,” she said politely, “Samantha would like to open presents and eat cake now. She doesn’t want to play games anymore.”

  “Well, right now we are playing games,” the girl’s mother said, leaning down to Vera’s eye level, her hands on her knees. “We have three more to go before it will be time for cake and presents.” She pointed at the chalkboard that listed the party activities.

  “But maybe,” Vera insisted, “you could just skip some. Maybe you could skip to the piñata?”

  “Samantha is welcome to join us if she decides she wants to be a big girl. Otherwise, she can stay under the table and cry.”

  Vera stared at the woman for a moment, and then said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “If you wanted a birthday party so badly, you should have thrown one for yourself.”

  Vera was always just like that. Almost brutally clear-sighted. Even as a child, she saw through people. Saw the reasons they did things. Saw the machinery behind the façade.

  As she became a teenager, her nose for hypocrisy became even keener and her thirst for justice more merciless. One of her high-school English teachers actually got teary-eyed during a parent-teacher conference out of worry that Vera didn’t like her. “I feel like she can tell that I’m not actually equipped to challenge her,” the poor woman said. “I mean, my degree isn’t even in English, it’s in education, and I feel like there is a real lack of depth to my analyses sometimes that Vera senses, and honestly, I don’t blame her.”

  If adults were unable to keep from seeking Vera’s good opinion, her peers didn’t have a chance. They worshipped her in a way that made her disdainful. The fall she was sixteen, she went to the homecoming dance in fleece footie pajamas printed with tropical fish and convinced her boyfriend, Fang, to do the same. They looked like giant, weird, Floridian babies. She also coerced him into memorizing a choreographed break-dance routine
with her. I worried the whole thing was deeply misguided, but the dance number was a hit. Everyone thought wearing footie pajamas to homecoming was hilarious and cool.

  “You’re a trendsetter,” I said.

  “Ugh,” she said. “Gross.”

  Because she wasn’t a trendsetter. No one could hope to be like her. She was one of a kind and, because of this, very much alone. About whether she was pleased with this state of affairs or saddened, I was never entirely sure. Maybe she would have liked to belong. Maybe her cruelty to the girls who would have done anything to be her friends was preemptive because she feared they would never accept her as she was. And maybe that’s part of why she and Fang became the way they were.

  But all of this is only speculation.

  —

  When I first saw Vera in the psych ward, she was wearing paper slippers and eating a banana.

  I rushed to the hospital in a hallucinatory state heightened by the paperwork, the waiting room, the complicated buzzing system of locks on the huge doors of the ward. Vera had been transferred during the night from an emergency room to an adolescent unit in a psychiatric hospital in Irvine, so I got there before her mother who was coming all the way from Rancho Cucamonga. Katya, Vera’s mother, had called at five in the morning to bark the address of the hospital at me, as well as a jagged, hiccuping slurry of facts and Russian curses and sobbing and bizarre speculation. Maybe it was a vitamin deficiency? Why would her devochka do this to her? What could have happened? The police had arrested her at a party, but arrested her for what, Katya wanted to know. “Is nakedness now a crime, Lucas?”

  The ward looked just like a hospital, but inside no one was in bed or hooked up to tubes. Still, the cues for sickness were everywhere, in the smell of something antiseptic, the tile floors, the bright lights. All the patients were under seventeen. They looked like normal teenagers. Normal teenagers wearing hospital scrubs.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, sitting down with Vera in the visiting room at a laminate picnic table that reminded me of school lunchrooms so suddenly and vividly it was like time travel.

  Vera shrugged, blinking her puffy eyes. “There’s a boy in here who says he can only masturbate to pictures of, like, geological formations or stars. Volcanoes. He keeps a stack of National Geographics in his room.”

  “He’s lying,” I told her, grateful at least that I could be sure of that much, could, as her father, contribute sound advice about the scenarios in which young men masturbate. “He’s saying that to get attention.”

  “You think?” Vera asked, seeming relieved. “He thinks he’s the next Messiah. He says he likes to come all over the Andromeda constellation. Which has a certain logic to it, I mean what else could cause God to feel desire?”

  “Stop talking to this kid—who is this kid? He is not God. How is he telling you all this?”

  “Just at breakfast,” she said. “The boys and girls eat meals together.”

  “So what happened?” I asked her. I had a rough outline of events from Katya, but I wanted to hear it from Vera because none of the pieces I had made sense. It seemed that Vera, then only sixteen, had gone to a party she should never have been at in the first place, had stripped naked and begun reading from the book of Revelation. She had then chased several members of the cheerleading squad around the living room, trying to baptize them with sour apple liqueur. “Why baptize?” Katya had cried on the phone. “Is she Christian now? For what reason?” Then, in front of everyone, Vera had tried to slit her wrists.

  The night ended with Vera strapped to a gurney naked, bloody, raving, and put into an ambulance. Stitches at the emergency room, and then the transfer to the psych ward and the commencement of the bizarre laborious protocol: “a danger to herself or others,” 5150, three-day mandatory hold, social workers, and now some asshole who masturbated onto images of the cosmos.

  But what had even happened? I wanted her to tell it to me so that it made sense. I wanted her to say it was a weird joke, or a dare, or that she had been shit-faced and didn’t remember any of it. Had she really wanted to kill herself? It didn’t seem possible, if only because Vera was usually excellent at whatever she did, and the bandage on her arm was high, almost halfway up her forearm. My daughter was not an idiot. She might not know which direction to cut, but surely she knew to cut the wrists.

  “Were you”—I began—“were you trying to kill yourself?” I motioned at her bandage. She just stared at me, sighed as though I were annoying her. “They said you tried to kill yourself.”

  “Of course I wasn’t trying to kill myself!”

  “Thank God. I didn’t think so,” I said, “but, please, Vera, just tell me what happened.”

  She stared into the pale fibers of the side of her banana. “It’s like it’s woven together,” she said.

  “Vera?”

  She blinked shut her eyes again and rubbed at them with a curled fist. “Papa,” she said, in the Russian way, with that long, soft first syllable like a pillow, “you aren’t good at this stuff, so why not just let Mama do it?”

  “Let Mama do it?”

  “Don’t make me spell it out for you,” she said.

  “Spell out what?”

  She set down her banana and looked at me. “We see each other on the weekends, and it’s fine. You rent whatever movie I want, we order whatever food I want, great, fine. But sometimes you are so desperate for me to like you that it makes me annoyed. You’re like a dog begging for attention. It disgusts me. You are honestly the last person in the world I want to talk to right now.”

  It was like I had awoken to discover I was at the top of a Ferris wheel, the car bobbing over empty space. Vera could do that to me, pull the rug out from under me. It was always a struggle not to let her know how badly it hurt. “Your mother will be here soon,” I said. “I know this whole thing must have been scary. Did you sleep at all last night?”

  Vera shrugged, raised her eyebrows in a tired way, and continued eating her banana. Every day, she looked more like Katya. Both of them had peculiarly round heads like Persian cats, wide mouths, and thick, shining dark hair. My blond genes had been swept away like nothing but recessive cobwebs. There was something about Katya and Vera that I recognized as biologically different from myself, some cellular Russianness that caused their necks to smell like raisins and made their eyeteeth a subtly different shape than other people’s.

  Katya and I had only been together for our senior year at Exeter, a boarding high school with brick buildings and marble staircases at which neither of us felt we belonged. Our courtship was brief, only a single year, and we had been estranged most of Vera’s childhood. I had never changed one of Vera’s diapers, never put her in time-out for hitting the dog. What did I know? I had no clue how to father her.

  I had assumed that if I gave it enough time and put in the years of consistently being there, being steadfast, being warm, some kind of authentic intimacy would grow between us. Now she was sixteen, and I was gradually coming to the conclusion that waiting for a teenage girl to want to be friends with her father was like waiting for a cat to want to take a swim. And for my part, I had never developed the set of paternal reflexes and instincts I assumed would assert themselves. I had been only eighteen when she was born. In fact, most people who saw us in public assumed we were dating, which I attempted to combat by loudly calling her “kiddo,” which she hated.

  “Let Mama do it,” she had said.

  Though what we were supposed to be doing to her, whether this was bad behavior or a medical emergency, was still unclear to me. I wished I had stopped to get something to eat. My stomach kept making haunted-house sounds that were embarrassingly audible in the empty tiled room.

  When Katya showed up, she came with dark brown bottles of vitamins, a thermos of some green, vile-smelling tea, sure that Vera had just had some kind of aberrant attack. “My daughter is not insane,” she said to the doctor, when we finally got to see one. Katya and Vera and I were all seated in the doctor�
�s small office. He was a thin, blond man with watery-looking eyes in his late thirties named Dr. Sneed. He told us he was diagnosing Vera with bipolar I with psychotic features.

  I knew what bipolar was in a vague, strictly literary way, but I didn’t know the differences between I and II, didn’t know the treatment protocols. I didn’t know that they were telling me my daughter would never live a completely functional adult life, that she would always be on medication, that the medication would affect her health, that she might not be able to hold a job, that she might not be able to graduate college, that she might not be able to sustain long-term relationships, like a marriage or even close friendships, that she should not have children. I thought they were telling me my daughter was being rebellious and emotional, things I already knew. That was part of what was great about Vera, after all. She was a dervish of a girl, smart and a little mean and absolutely charming. It seemed possible this was just another of her high jinks, a kind of social experiment gone horribly wrong.

  But the doctor did not think so. The doctor thought it was very clear. “Normally, I hesitate about diagnoses with adolescents,” he said, “but in this case, I think we are better served with a clear treatment protocol that we can move forward with as rapidly as possible.”

  Vera sighed, annoyed, as though her diagnosis were detention being doled out, and it was difficult to tell what she really thought. But Katya, Katya actually tried to argue the doctor out of the diagnosis as though she were haggling at a swap meet. “She is very young, maybe this is just a phase?” Kat pleaded.

  Maybe this, maybe that, Katya went on, describing an aunt of hers who had a vitamin D deficiency that made all the doctors think she had lupus.

  Dr. Sneed nodded. “I know how difficult this is to hear,” he said.

  “It’s difficult to hear because it’s bullshit,” Katya said, suddenly hostile. “Bullshit is what it is.”