by Rufi Thorpe
That day, as she smoothed aloe on my back—I was badly, chronically sunburned as a child—she told me all about the many girlfriends I would have. The first one, she said, would just be sort of awkward and painful. We would go to a school dance together and we would slow dance and I would smell her shampoo in her hair and neither of us would know what to talk about. But then, my mother went on, things would get better. The next girl, she promised, would have a great big wonderful laugh, and would snort when she was surprised, and would love Star Wars and skateboarding. Our love would be familiar and real and wonderfully normal. A sane love.
But I was not sure I wanted a sane love. “Tell me about the next one,” I said.
“Oh, the next one?” my mother asked. “The next one will break your heart.”
“How will she do it?” I asked, excited.
“Even I can’t predict that,” my mother said, clicking the cap of the aloe vera bottle closed and patting my shoulder to let me know she was done. “But everyone gets their heart broken at least once. The secret is to try to enjoy it.”
I was positive I would enjoy it. I wanted to get my heart broken more than anything.
—
Still, it had been a surprise to fall in love with Kat.
We attended Phillips Exeter Academy together, a New England boarding school so old and prestigious that every other New England boarding school was a kind of copy of it. She was in my biology class. When I first met her, I was more a dreaming embryo than a person. Something about the harsh winters had scared my California soul into deep hibernation, or else it was simply that having escaped the suffocating and yet intoxicating intimacy with my mother, I was haunted and lonely. That is the thing about living at school: No one touches you. The teachers are not allowed to. You have no parents. Occasionally, your friends punch you. And that is about it. Eventually your whole body starts to ache.
I also felt profoundly out of place. I didn’t belong at Exeter, though I couldn’t exactly express why. Part of it was money. I was there on an academic scholarship, not because I had connections or power. I was there to be a nerd, though I was also there to escape my mother, or else I was there to stop being myself and somehow become a character in a novel, only I had not become a character in a novel, even as everyone around me appeared to have successfully done so. I alone, of all my peers, had remained homely and real, and I assumed that this was transparently obvious to everyone.
The things that had happened to Grandma Sylvia hadn’t happened to me, and yet they altered me. In high school, that SS officer and my grandmother hovered just outside the realm of the visible, giving the lie to the grand glory that was Exeter, the easy confidence of those brick buildings, those Latin inscriptions, the beautiful children of powerful men scuttling up and down marble staircases in their blazers, laughing in dining halls over jokes that were no more insightful or interesting than the jokes told in any school cafeteria anywhere in America, but which were confused and amplified by the self-importance of youth and money. I did not feel self-important. I was not capable of it, even though in retrospect I can see that there was a kind of morbid egocentricity to the way I held myself apart.
I indulged the ghostlike feeling that would sometimes come over me even when I was with a group of people, in the locker room after wrestling practice, in the common room of my dorm. In the midst of raucous laughter or the most absurd pseudo-philosophical argument, I could become suddenly silent, pulled away to some other non-real space that I associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with the gas chambers.
What Sylvia had lived was a life. What I was living was some sort of cheap knockoff of a life. Never would anything as exciting, as epic, as painful, as important happen to me. What was worse was that I worried that if I ever were put in the same sort of situations as my grandmother, I would fail miserably. It is embarrassing for a young man to grow up feeling his grandmother was more of a man than he, but the idea of fighting Nazis hand to hand in the forests of Poland terrified me. Not only was my life a cheap knockoff of the past, I was a cheap knockoff of a person.
And so I studied Russian, wrestled, told jokes, and ate gross amounts of Top Ramen at night with my friend Taisei, a boy from Tokyo whose parents had unfathomable amounts of money. I quietly and hungrily read the poems I was assigned in English class, and sometimes got choked up in my room, smoking a forbidden cigarette out the window, thinking about my grandmother. If the other guys were thinking about such things, they did not let me know it. And so my isolation felt as simple and complete as the snow.
But from the moment I met Kat, everything was hypercharged, overly vivid, awkward, frantic. There was no chance for me to hold myself apart, I was plunged into reality like being shoved into a swimming pool. Kat often made fun of me, and yet she kept wanting to see me. After a week of awkwardly crossing paths (I was following her around), she began inviting me to do homework with her in the library, a wonderful brick building with huge open spaces designed by Louis Kahn. That library always made me feel like we were hiding inside some kind of puzzle toy built for giants.
She knew of an old abandoned bathroom on the basement floor of the Academy Building, which she could pry open with her ID card and which we used as our secret hangout. The knowledge of this secret room, which was filled with huge, basketball-size dust bunnies and housed a collection of broken radiators in one corner, was a secret passed down through her dorm, Amen. Amen girls were reputed to be weird and prudish, but perhaps this was because they kept their wonderful bathroom a secret. Only one girl in each grade was told about the bathroom, and that year it had been Katya, who had elected to tell no one but me. She would give me hand jobs with peach-scented lotion while I read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” out loud in the echoing silence.
She was a maddening girl, prone to eating baby food out of jars with a tiny spoon and defending the possibility of extraterrestrials. The walls of her room were papered in images of Marilyn Monroe. She convinced me to sneak out one night and meet her in the woods where we tried to get high on a bottle of Robitussin. I remember she had stolen a red carnation from one of the tables in the dining hall, and she was wearing the wilted thing tucked behind one ear, the red hyper-vivid against her dark hair in the moonlight. We did not get high, just felt terrible and sick, but she let me kiss her for more than an hour, standing in the woods, swaying with the trees, and I remember I had my hands on her rib cage and I could feel the little pull and push of her bones as she breathed in and out. “Lucas,” she would say, “you are mine. Tell me you are mine.”
“I am yours,” I would say, flabbergasted by the drama of those words. Life was finally happening to me. Everything else had been a dry run, a dress rehearsal for this.
—
“That lady was totally into you,” Vera said at dinner. “Can I order a beer?”
We had decided to try out the Belgian place that was the ground floor of our apartment building.
“You shouldn’t drink alcohol on your meds,” I said.
“Mom lets me.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “And that lady wasn’t into me.”
“Was too,” Vera said. “And I approve. Anyone is better than Amanda.”
I was flustered. What had been bad about Amanda? I had been unaware that Vera even had an opinion. “Well, Amanda and I aren’t seeing each other anymore,” I said.
“Good. When did that happen?”
“A few months ago.”
“Way to keep me in the loop. Was it mutual?” she asked.
I shrugged. I hadn’t told her because she’d had enough going on in her life at the time. And it had been mutual in the sense that I had slowly begun to feel like I was suffocating to death but was unwilling to do anything about it until finally Amanda broke up with me for not having proposed marriage to her in a timely fashion. Actually, my arguments as it was happening were all fairly rational: If we weren’t ready to have kids, there was no point in getting married. The wedding industry was a mega scam, i
t was just a way to get people to spend money they didn’t have. Maybe she wanted a wedding more than she wanted me, blah, blah. But the sheer relief I felt once it was over made me understand that she had been right all along. I hadn’t wanted to marry her. It was a crushing kind of realization, really. I was thirty-five and unmarried. It seemed indicative of something pretty damning, even though I wasn’t sure exactly what the damning thing was.
“Well, you could do way better,” Vera said. “She was younger than you and everything, but she was kinda fat.”
I sighed. “This is one of the areas,” I said, “where the fact that you are only seventeen is really pertinent, because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Vera laughed, clearly delighted to have someone to spar with. “Oh, I don’t? Explain it to me.”
“I don’t even want to. The amount you don’t understand is just—” I made a motion like my head was exploding.
“Oh, I get it!” she said. “You like them chubby!”
Against my will, I blushed flame red. I don’t think I had blushed so hard since I was eleven or twelve years old.
“You do!” she cried.
Just then, the waitress came and I ordered us both moules-frites, myself a beer and Vera a lemonade. I did like them chubby. Honestly, I liked them all. I liked them any way they came. Blondes, brunettes, white girls, black girls, skinny girls, fat girls, I liked them all. I thought my friends who had a very narrow definition of a woman’s physical attractiveness were insane. And as much as I had failed to want to marry Amanda with the proper urgency, and as profoundly relieved as I had been by our breakup, she had still inspired in me a tremendous tenderness that made me not want to talk about her to Vera anymore. There would be no explaining the lovely creatureliness of Amanda to Vera. Vera was not capable of that kind of soft, mammalian sentiment.
“So how was that guy, Daniel?” I asked. “Is he really a pirate, or does he just wear the shirt?”
“Shut up,” she said.
The outside patio where we were sitting was pleasant, and we were brought a bowl of delicious rolls. The beer, when it came, was very good.
“Did you love Mom, ever?” Vera suddenly asked me. Her face was painfully earnest and I was confused: What else could Vera think? That I had never loved Katya?
“Of course, I loved her,” I said.
“The way you felt about Amanda?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “The way I felt about your mother was much more serious than the way I felt about Amanda.”
“It was. So then—what happened? Why did you leave?”
I was baffled. I had never expected this question from Vera because I had thought the reasons for Kat’s and my split were out in the open. There was nothing secret about them. On the other hand, I had no idea what Katya had told her. I had always assumed that she had told her some toned-down version of the truth.
“Well,” I said, “at the time, we were living on a commune, and we were very young. We had run away from home. And Katya wasn’t getting any kind of prenatal care. Not even from a midwife: nothing. And she wanted to have the baby, I mean you, naturally at the farm. And I just got panicky that we were doing the wrong thing, I guess.”
I paused, took a sip of my beer, waiting to see if that would be enough.
“So why didn’t you guys just leave the farm and stay together?” Vera asked.
“Well, your mom was really mad at me. She was very mad at me. And I had, I guess, betrayed her by calling my mother and telling her where we were. So then she wouldn’t speak to me. After she was back at home with her parents, she wouldn’t speak to me when I called or answer any of my letters.”
Vera stared at me, considering this. A large black crow cawed from somewhere overhead, and at the table next to us a boisterous Dutch man and his much younger mistress began laughing.
“We discovered that we were really different people,” I said. “And I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be.”
Vera nodded. “So you’re saying it’s all her fault?”
“God, no,” I said. “It was no one’s fault—it was inevitable. It was the kind of thing that couldn’t be avoided. It was a calamity, like an asteroid hitting the earth or something. It was nobody’s fault.”
But I was lying. It was definitely my fault. It had always been and would always be my fault.
Chapter 4
Date: 7/11/2014 5:47 AM
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Destined to return to Putin
Dear Fang,
Why can’t I sleep??? Ugh. I just lie here in my creepy room that smells like tea bags and scroll through news stories on my phone. Fucking Putin is insane. Like, I think he is literally mentally ill. I finally did sleep for a little while, only it was like the difference between Pringles and actual chips, like someone took sleep and then put it through a horrible industrial machine, made it into a paste, and re-formed it and baked it into a shape that was supposed to look like sleep but was not anything even close. Then I woke up at 4:00 a.m. because THE SUN CAME UP. That’s how far north we are. The fucking sun came up. It is five in the morning right now, and it is as bright as midday outside. I even got up and got dressed and wandered around outside for a while, but nothing was open. Papa is still snoring like an ogre next door. Why do old people snore? Is it because the cartilage in their nose hardens and becomes a big grumpy whistle? Or is it just because they get fat? I think it is because they get fat.
I’ve been thinking about what I wrote you before, about being a bad Jew and about not really being Russian. Growing up I never wanted to be American, but I think what I really wanted was to be like my mom. I mean, Fang, she was so beautiful. She is beautiful now, but when I was a little girl, I was just in awe of her. She kept her hair long then, and it was so heavy and thick and shining, I would pick it up off her shoulders and I swear it weighed like three pounds. When I was seven and eight she was only, what, twenty-five? Twenty-six? Anyway, she was so into being Russian, and I think it was natural for me to mimic that. But—I mean, why didn’t she ever start identifying as American? She never did. She’s lived here almost her whole life, and she still acts like maybe it’s just temporary. Or, no. It’s not that, because she would never go back to Russia. I think it would terrify her, to go back, even to visit. It is more that being Russian is a way she has of being better or more interesting or more internally conflicted than other people. And I wanted to be like that too. The less American I was, the easier it would be, I thought, for her to love me. And I needed her to love me because there was no one else to do it. No father or brothers and sisters, I mean.
I wound up having an interesting conversation with my dad about why he left and it’s funny, the story he told was almost exactly the same as what my mom had told me, and yet it seemed completely different. Basically, my mom had always said, “He was afraid to have a baby,” like, Ugh, men, they are so afraid of commitment, but we women must wade into the gory blood and guts of life without hesitation because that is our destiny.
But my dad was really being kind of REASONABLE, Fang. I mean, she was wanting to have me on this farm with no doctor or anything, and she hadn’t had any prenatal care and they weren’t talking to their parents, and he just got freaked out and called his mom. He was only eighteen. He was one year older than I am now. I can imagine many different scenarios in which I would get freaked out and call my mom. But my mother always acted like it was this unpardonable sin. And to her, it really was. But they could have patched it up, you know? I don’t understand why he didn’t just try harder. Didn’t he know her at all? He must have understood that some phone calls and some letters apologizing weren’t going to do it. He needed to show up at her house with a guitar and flowers and stay on his knees singing her love songs from her driveway for three straight days. That’s how my mom does shit. Surely he knew that?
Anyway, I’m thinking of telling him what really happe
ned the night of my episode. I think he would believe me. We’ve gotten closer on this trip. I have no idea how I am gonna bring it up or when I am going to say it, but just: Wish me luck. You know, we really should have told my mom in the early days, back when she still thought it was all a big mistake. But I never imagined she’d start to believe that I was really sick. I never imagined she would turn. I was so confident that she would go on believing me, it didn’t seem like there was any point to admitting it.
OH MY GOD, a cat just jumped into my room. I am not kidding. I had opened my window because it is sunny today and the breeze was nice, and the roof is at a really steep angle, like, literally if I sit up in bed, I will hit my forehead on the roof, so the window is in the angled part of the roof and a cat jumped through and then walked over to me on the bed and now its sitting here and looking at me. What do I do?
Do you think it is a nice cat? It hasn’t made one single sound, not even a little mew or a purr, which seems sinister to me, like maybe it is a spirit cat and not a real cat. Okay, now it is purring, so everything is fine. I’m petting it. But it better not get stuck in here because I have no idea where it would go to the bathroom.
You know, Darius said an interesting thing the other day, he said that there is an old saying that anyone who visits Vilnius is destined to return to it one day, which, you know, isn’t that just a way of saying that anyone who comes to Vilnius will eventually be forced to leave? Because you have to leave in order to come back, right? But then I was also thinking, maybe I’m not Russian, but maybe I have to keep returning to the idea of Russia. Like, I’m not from there, but I’m destined to keep returning to it. It’s part of the dance of my identity. Which, you know, what if identity is more of a dance or a pattern than a thing? Like, what if it isn’t so much a noun as a verb? And in the same way, I am destined to keep returning to my own Jewishness or lack thereof. It’s a part of the pattern of the way I am existing.
Do you feel that way about being Tongan? Do you dream of going back for more than a visit, but to live? Whenever you talk about it, it seems like just a vacation, or like a pilgrimage, or something, but do you think you could ever actually live there and belong there again? Or would you be destined to leave, reenacting that initial departure when you were little, returning just so you can leave again, and then returning once more to make sure you really can leave one more time, and on and on?