by Jolie Damman
I wouldn’t become homeless – that was a distant worry. I had a family to take care of me, but I didn’t want their help. I wanted a life of my own where I didn’t have to do the thing they held in store for me. Marriage wasn’t good, and it wasn’t for me.
I tipped my chin up and waited for him to say something. The silence was already worse than his answer, and right now I was thinking what my life was going to be like from this moment onward. I would have to marry and become the wife of someone who was less than pleasant. All the members of that family were assholes. Maybe I should run away and buy a new identity for myself…
He grinned. “Not today. I’ve got more important things to do.”
Not today? What?! Was this guy here thinking I was some sort of ball he could kick around without bouncing right back, smashing against his face? I wasn’t going to let this slide. And about how much this job meant to me and what my life was going to be like from now on? Well, fuck those things.
I slammed my hand on his desk, making him yelp. “I’m done here. I’m done with this job, this company and YOU. I’m done with all this shit, and don’t come begging for me to come back.”
“No, wait!” He shouted while I stormed out of his office room. All my coworkers – and soon to be former ‘colleagues’ gawked at me. I smiled. I shocked them. I made them all think I would never do something like that. Their reaction empowered me.
I walked to my cubicle, turned off the computer and was going to head out of the building when he gripped my arm. “Please, don’t leave the company. We all need you.”
But I knew that was a lie. He wanted to humiliate me right in front of everybody again. Like hell I was going to fall for something like that. He thought I was going to eat right from his mouth one more time. He thought I was going to beg to stay here, but I was anything but a beggar, and I had my self-worth.
I jerked my arm free. “No, and that is my final answer.”
With that said, I admired the idiotic look on the faces of my ‘colleagues.’ This was a decision of my own. They all thought I would forever subjugate myself to this kind of environment where I had to be anything but myself. Idiots. They didn’t know the kind of person I was.
I then walked out of the building with a clear mind. I made the right choice.
✽ ✽ ✽
I found myself in the living room with dad right in front of me. “Natalie, you’ve made a big mistake.”
His tone was angry and rude. I knew he was going to feel that way about me firing myself, but at this point, I didn’t care. I was past crying over spilled milk.
“Dad, you’ve got no idea the kind of things I had to go through in there.”
“That is not important. I thought you were going to become an adult for once in your life.”
“What?” I said while putting my fists on my waist, my eyes squinting.
“Just look at you. Do you think Marat will be glad to marry you?”
“Dad, I’m not going to marry him!”
“Yes, you will. Our family has been a partner of his for generations. You are not going to break that tradition. It’s the only way to keep us afloat.”
I knew we were having a tough time here in America. Our house needed to be repainted and some rooms required even more attention, but I didn’t think we needed the Popov family to keep us afloat. We should be doing better than that, right?
I suddenly found myself wishing we could have kept at least Mrs. Freshour in here with us. She was so cool and we had so many nights where we talked about stuff. I wished so much she was here at this moment so that she could comfort me. She was the only one who understood I was no trophy of a man I didn’t even know.
“Fine,” I said, “I guess it can’t be helped.”
But all this could be made different, actually. If my YouTube career one day took off, I would be so rich we wouldn’t need the Popov family anymore. Marrying Marat, then, would be nothing more than a distant nightmare I defeated…
Those things, however, were not real life, and I needed to focus on it. I couldn’t sink into the abyss of my imagination again. That happened before, and it didn’t end well for me.
“Natalie, wait,” he said, but I was already running up the stairs and going to my bedroom. I needed time to think and ignore the things he just said. Every single thing I did with my life seemed to fail one way or another. Losing that job was only one of them, even if I was the one who decided to fire myself this time.
I slammed the door shut behind me and slid down onto the floor, my eyes watering up. I didn’t want to cry – crying was for the weak. But it was as if two strong hands were squeezing my heart right now. I felt so horrible, so terrible. I couldn’t help but begin to hate myself too.
That last thought, though, I pushed away. No pointing in hating myself when I kept trying to do the right thing all along. It wasn’t my fault my life was awful. I wished my family wasn’t deep in this Russian mafia shit. They were even worse than the Italians.
I knew the man that would marry me. I guessed that was inevitable from the very beginning. Even if I had become a successful worker in that company, dad would still have made me marry Marat. It was part of his ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, after all.
I wept for minutes and then stood back up, my mind clearing up somewhat now. I needed some peace of mind so that I could know what to do from now on. Finding another job? Maybe I could, but right at this moment, I felt like doing something else.
Something much more fun.
Outside, I heard a gunshot or two. Who would have thought a couple of years ago that this neighborhood would become so shitty without dad’s business in its prime. The building and everything else were still there, but he had so few employees now. People now had to resort to stealing and killing one another. This place almost felt like Detroit now. Raleigh was going through some weird kind of Detroitization process, and it sucked.
I took one good glance at my room. The faded paint on the walls reminded me, once again, that our former mansion needed to be rejuvenated. That, however, would cost a lot of money – money that we didn’t have. We had food and it wasn’t an issue, but we couldn’t buy things as we used to five years ago. So much changed because of the Coronavirus for me and dad. It wasn’t his fault his business went downhill.
The gloomy look of my bedroom wasn’t going to impede me from doing the right thing. I positioned the lights and the camera, and then recorded myself while I talked about my life. A low number of subscribers or not, I was still going to finish this video. I needed to vent. Talking about the stuff that happened in my life with my work friend wasn’t enough. I could never feel that I was being fully honest with her whenever she came here to check up on me.
I talked and talked in front of the camera, and then edited the video before uploading it. It was going to take one frigging hour for the upload to finish. Jeez, I wished I had a better internet, but out here, the ISP was afraid of installing their fiber connection. People will steal the cables or do something just as horrible to them. I could almost hear one of their representatives telling me that.
Upon finishing the upload, I didn’t feel disappointed that the video drew less than 20 views and not one comment or like a couple of hours since it aired. I sighed. No point persisting with my YouTube career. It was never going to work.
I opened up Tinder and began swiping. I had some matches, but never talked to them. Why should I do that when my destiny was set anyway? Job or not, a boyfriend or not, I was set to marry Marat Popov. He would make me live with him in Russia and I would have to learn their language, their culture and do all the other things I didn’t feel like adding to my life.
When it came time for dinner, I sat down with dad and filled my plate. Not sure how much I was going to eat, though. Just enough not to lose more weight, I imagined. “Put some more,” my dad affirmed once he glanced at my plate.
I said nothing. I was still resentful he said those things to me before, and firing myself d
idn’t make me feel jubilant about what life held in store for me. If only I had a good job and a lot of money, I could build an independent life and not have to worry about Marat ever again. I knew what he did for a living, and I didn’t like it one bit.
While we dined, dad said, “I’m not sorry I said those things. You need to learn to take responsibility.”
I sighed. I felt like strangling him right now. Couldn’t we at least have one peaceful dinner together?
“I do take responsibility. What do you think I’ve been doing with my life? Wasting it until I have to marry that son of a bitch?”
“I don’t tolerate that kind of tone.”
“Then kick me out of here. I don’t have anything to lose. Not anymore, anyway.”
A moment of pause while he glared at me. “No, you will live here until the next month. It has all been arranged. You’ll marry him when we go there again.”
I tightened my grip on the fork. I felt like hurling it at him, but contained myself. He was my father and I would never hurt him, despite this whole forced marriage bullshit.
“I’m not going to marry someone I don’t like!”
“And you think it was easy for me? I learned to love your mother after I married her.”
A moment of pause. The memory of what happened to my mom still hurt me so much. I held a tear back. He couldn’t know his words made me a bit weaker right now.
“Whatever,” I said before eating the rest of the dinner on my plate.
I refrained from looking at him before going to the sink and cleaning my plate and cutlery. Since we didn’t have maids working for us anymore, we needed to do the dishes ourselves. And, I would rather do this now instead of later.
I then got into my room and plopped down on my bed. The last thought I had in my mind before falling asleep was: what was my life going to be like from now on?
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