Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  We treated my father as an alien invader. His presence, perhaps because it was infrequent, was always an intrusion. When he walked through the front door, I knew it meant trouble. Siding with my mother, I saw him as the bully who came into our lives and trampled on our daily rituals. My mother brought us up with a mixture of aristocratic tastes and sensibilities and disdain for money. She always stressed the importance of maintaining standards, from good school grades to proper table manners. We were taught to use a saucer with our teacups, and she would bake homemade éclairs for our afternoon tea. My father would turn up and plop himself down at the table with his shirt out and the top button of his pants undone and dive into a box of cornflakes. My mother would watch in disgust with me at her side, a loyal deputy, as he sliced bananas into bowl after bowl of cereal. It was a cultural feud. He wasn’t one of us. The tension led to a perpetual state of warfare in our home. It vacillated from the cold-war variety of icy, disapproving stares to sudden explosions of violence.

  When we were growing up, I never understood why my father often disappeared for days at a time. Sometimes he would say he was going out to the market to get milk on a Friday night, and not show up at home until Sunday night. Only later did I realize that he was slinking off to spend the weekend with his mother and sister. Torn between two families, he was destined to disappoint both.

  By the time I was a teenager, I too lived a double life. I ignored the anger and despair that shrouded nearly every exchange between my parents. I did my homework and brought home my honor-society grades. I played in the school band and acted in school plays. I seemed quiet and good but I was beginning to be someone else. I smoked dope with my friends and puffed on cigarettes under the bleachers on the football field. With my mature looks and buxom figure, I could buy booze and not be asked to show ID. I took to shoplifting, both stealing and also using a price-changing technique of peeling off the sticker and putting a cheaper tag on my target. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would get caught.

  One day the store buzzer rang as Cindy, my best friend of the week, and I stepped out the door of Bamberger’s. Beach season was approaching, and my part-time-waitress wages at Dunkin’ Donuts were not enough to get the right clothes. The two new bathing suits I had carefully hidden under my shirt must have had some new secret device that eluded my notice. The store security guard hauled us back inside and marched us to an office while he called the police. “They are just trying to scare us,” I told Cindy, a novice at theft compared with me. But before long we were in the backseat of a squad car, in handcuffs, two fifteen-year-old girls. I tried to make light of it, joking to Cindy, “If we were going to get caught, we should have at least ripped off Saks.”

  The store security’s call to the police was one thing. But the police did something a hundred times worse: they called our parents. Cindy was crying. I was still trying to make her laugh, although I knew I was in big trouble. I hated disappointing my mother. The police let me off easy. I had to write an essay on why it is wrong to steal. I learned my first lesson on writing one’s way through the chaos inside. I also learned that I was comfortable living on the edge.

  My mother let me off easy too. She was distracted by larger problems. She didn’t tell my father about the incident, sparing him the worry. A medical checkup for a new job he had landed detected swollen lymph glands. I didn’t really understand what that meant, but no one discussed it. Alexandra and I, through overheard snatches of conversation and by trading intelligence, became vaguely aware of my parents’ anxiety over medical insurance and whether my father would get it before his new employers realized he had cancer. I tried to ignore the medicine cabinet that was suddenly overflowing with drugs to kill my father’s cancer, and more drugs to kill the side effects.

  That summer I went away to Barbados after being selected as an American Field Service exchange student. My father wanted to take me shopping for new summer dresses before I left. I felt awkward about going with him, but he insisted. When he decided we’d go to Bambergers, I was terrified that the store security would recognize me and toss us out. They didn’t. My father helped me choose a few cotton shifts for my big adventure. There was a brown-and-white-striped dress he particularly liked. I didn’t, but I took it anyway to please him. It was one of only a handful of intimate memories I have of us together as father and daughter. With death looming, he was trying to get to know the daughters whose childhood he missed.

  Although I was still only a teenager, I learned the art of escape through travel. I wanted to get as far away as possible from my life in Highland Park, New Jersey. I had been chosen to represent my high school after a series of interviews with community members and teachers whom I convinced of my ability to adjust to a new country. It made sense: a clash of cultures had been under way in my own home since I was an infant. Two alien cultures lived under one roof with no dialogue, just hostility, misunderstanding, and resentment. I’d been straddling the customs of two worlds all my life.

  It was the mid-seventies when I left for Barbados. There had been race riots in New Jersey and all over America, giving me a sense of looming crisis. But suddenly I was living with all black people, in a calm and peaceful environment. Now it was my turn to feel what it was like to be the outsider, to be the one in the minority. Sometimes it made me uncomfortable, but people in Barbados are so friendly, most of the time my racial differences were cause for laughter. When I first arrived at the home of my host sister, Janice, her five-year-old nephew walked into a bedroom where I sat, and he ran away screaming. “There’s a big white doll in Janice’s room!” After I was settled in and started to forget about race, I was walking downtown with Janice and a bunch of her friends one day when I caught a glimpse of us in a shop window. It took me by surprise to see how much I stood out. Janice and I came from completely different worlds, yet as teenagers we found it easy to understand each other. She’d cornrow my curly blond hair just like her other friends’. We often hit the discos, or cut school to hang around downtown, checking out the boys. West Indians have a penchant for standing around on street corners, gabbing and watching the world go by. They called it liming. It was good training for all those future stakeouts I had to endure as a reporter, waiting around for hours for faceless officials to emerge from a meeting. For Janice, who dreamed of getting off that tiny island one day, I seemed an emissary from another world. For me, this lush tropical paradise let me forget the world I’d left.

  But my refuge was cut short. When my father was taken to the hospital, my mother called to tell me to come home. I said good-bye to Janice, not knowing it would be more than two decades before our next meeting. I landed at JFK Airport, and Alexandra, at seventeen, just old enough for a new driver’s license, was sent to get me. She had been warned not to tell me until we got home. But when I asked her if we were going directly to the hospital, she let it out. Somewhere between the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the New Jersey Turnpike, Alexandra told me that I wouldn’t see my father again. He had died a few hours before my plane landed. All those years as a small girl, I had hoped my father would somehow leave our lives. I never imagined he would do it by dying.

  My mother told me later that she had decided not to tell me how ill my father was, justifying it by saying she didn’t want to ruin my big trip. But I always wished she had. I needed to see him one more time, to say good-bye. My mother had indirectly trained me not to like my father and to reject him, so I didn’t know what to feel about losing him. I repressed the pain and confusion, allowing it to fester for years.

  His funeral is a blur in my mind. I arrived at the last minute, so there was no time or perspective to absorb it. I wasn’t prepared at all. Jet travel allows no time for adjustment. One minute I was drinking rum on the beach in Barbados, the next burying my father in New Jersey. I remember being ashamed of his plain, unvarnished coffin. I thought it was the final indignity of our poverty. I learned later that it was what he wanted. A simple coffin is part of the Jewish faith. A rabbi perfor
med the ceremony at the funeral home as a courtesy to my Protestant mother, who had better ties to the Jewish community than my father did. He wasn’t a member, so the service couldn’t take place at the temple. Despite her anger with my father, my mother had a deep respect for Judiasm and scraped together a minyan, the required ten Jewish men, to carry the coffin, carrying out my father’s wishes to the letter. I wore the brown-and-white dress we had picked out together before I left for Barbados.

  My last year in high school was unhappy. My insides felt gouged out by my father’s death, and the ensuing instability in our home made it worse. I started reading The New York Times, which my mother revered, and I began to focus my anxiety on the outside world. It was 1976, and the stories about the Soviet Union and arms control grabbed my attention. I became terrified by the possibility of a nuclear war. During loud storms in the middle of the night, I sometimes awoke with a start, convinced the end had come. It seemed outrageous to me that an arms race was allowed to happen. The newspaper was so full of doomsday scenarios that it made me feel it was inevitable that the world would be destroyed by some nuclear accident. There was no guarantee the world would last long enough for me to grow up, have children, and lead a full life. I lived with a low-level but constant sense of dread. I also began to resent the way people in the newspaper said, day after day, how villainous the Soviets were. I felt like I was being lied to, that Russians were being demonized. It was something I felt in the pit of my stomach, an underrated organ as a natural arbiter of truth. So when it came to the so-called “evil empire,” my gut told me we were not getting the whole story. The Soviets were painted as the enemy, but I knew they couldn’t be all bad. When I enrolled at Duke University, I chose a Russian language and literature course.

  I arrived on campus in Durham, North Carolina, with a deep tan and wild, bleached-blond hair. I didn’t look anything like most of the other girls, with their sweater sets and tennis bracelets. The place was swarming with Southern belles, and my bohemian look stood out, with my masses of curly hair, exotic features, and thrift-shop fashions. My first roommate was half-Indian and half-black, and the black students assumed I was some such combination as well. The black sororities rushed me along with my roommate. Originally I planned to be a philosophy major. My mother taught me that education was a goal in itself, not a means to an end. I knew that the more unmarketable my major, the more my mother would approve of the choice. She looked down her nose at people who were good at making money. “The merchant classes,” she’d say with a sniff as she wrote out another likely-to-bounce tuition check to Duke.

  I gravitated to the Slavic department. My Russian language professor, Bogdon Bogdanovich, was tall, lanky, and a bit disheveled. He was handsome in a dangerous kind of way, a man who looked as if he could make himself comfortable in the beds of many women. I fell instantly, madly in love with him and knew I had to be in the Russian department. Bogdon was a sign. He was married and he was my professor, making him off-limits. My attraction to the unavailable began. At the same time, I began my infatuation with Russia, the place of my father’s origin. I wanted to know the enemy. I couldn’t know my father; it would have been too much of a betrayal of my mother. So I took a circuitous route to find him, crossing the ocean, the world, and enemy lines, to Russia.

  Love à la Russe

  I met Dima in my quest for a decent meal. As a visiting university student in Russia in 1980, I was obsessed with finding food. I lived in a bleak, poorly heated dormitory on the outskirts of Moscow and found it hard to adjust to the challenge of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union. It was still five years before Gorbachev and perestroika appeared on the scene. The food was unbearable. The cafeteria served gray sausages for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The surly cooks did not seem to care, but then they snarled at us when we returned our plates, meals uneaten. Out on the streets, in the drudgery so well known to the average Soviet, workingmen’s eateries offered soup that tasted like dirty dishwater with a hunk of gristle and a rotten potato on the side. Some of the other American students appeased their hunger by befriending marines at the American embassy and getting invited there for specially imported hamburgers. Others of us, hungry for the true Russian experience, toughed it out. That meant wandering the streets of Moscow, ever searching for food. It brought me adventure, even when my stomach remained empty. I explored Moscow’s extraordinary museums overflowing with cultural riches of its czarist past. I loved the parks full of monuments, gleaming statues of cosmonauts heading into space and muscled Soviet woman workers toiling toward a bright socialist future. I ventured into Russian bathhouses, where naked strangers engage in the peculiarly pleasant experience of pouring buckets of hot water over one another and beating one another with eucalyptus branches. “We are all equal in the bathhouses,” Russians would say to me.

  One day I got lucky. A fellow student took me to the home of a fashion designer named Slava who lived in an elite apartment in the center of Moscow, on Marx-Engels street. In contrast to the daily drudgery outside, there was a hidden, colorful world of privilege and comparative luxury. It was my first peek at the dual world that then existed in the Soviet Union. At Slava’s there were always beautifully dressed people, and delicacies like French cognac and imported chocolate. Slava’s was a bastion of comfort in an otherwise gloomy environment.

  On one of my early visits, I noticed a young Russian man with enormous sad brown eyes. His name was Dima, and he was the most handsome Russian I’d ever seen. He was learning fashion photography in order to immortalize Slava’s creations. He often entertained us with songs and jokes. I fell for Dima the moment he opened his mouth and started singing. I thought I had never heard a more sensual voice, and could listen to him for hours. It was as if he had just stepped out of one of the nineteenth-century Russian novels I had been studying. Dark and melancholic, he sang Cossack ballads and made fun of a regime that did not have much of a sense of humor. All the harshness and bleakness of Russia’s soul reverberated warmly in his gravelly baritone. His favorite pastime was singing renditions of Vladimir Visotski, a banned Russian singer whom nobody was officially allowed to listen to but everyone secretly loved. On the anniversary of Visotski’s death, Russians would congregate with bootleg recordings of his verses, which were reminiscent of Bob Dylan, and gave voice to the dreariness of average Soviet workers’ lives. In parks, people would gather, singing the outlawed words, posting the lyrics to trees in tribute.

  Dima introduced me to many underground cultural heroes, opening a spiritual world as rich and forbidden as the food at Slava’s. The authorities proudly displayed Lenin’s pickled body in Red Square, solemnly marching schoolchildren and tourists past his hallowed resting place, yet Dima showed me how ordinary people discreetly paid homage to their forbidden icons. He took me to the grave of Boris Pasternak, the banned Russian poet and author of Doctor Zhivago, where devotees would gather and recite his contraband verses aloud to one another. Dima also took me to a downtrodden Moscow alley where literary pilgrims made the journey to another shrine, the onetime home of Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, a banned classic work about the devil turning up in Moscow and causing havoc, a thinly disguised allusion to Stalin. Bulgakov fans painted the hallways of the old apartment block with passages and figures from his book. The authorities constantly painted over the graffiti, but Bulgakov’s admirers always returned to keep their hero alive the only way they could. I delighted in their subtle defiance. I loved this hidden world, and I fell in love with Dima.

  The truth is, I loved Russia. I was hooked as soon as I stepped out onto the cobblestones of Red Square and caught my first glimpse of St. Basil’s Cathedral, with its colorfully painted gingerbread cupolas, so magical it looked plucked out of a fairy tale. On the other side of the square was the solemn, somber, modern Soviet tomb encasing Lenin. It all clashed, yet coexisted. The lack of distractions of capitalism heightened the appreciation of whatever small unexpected pleasures life doled out. Some Cuban banana
s on sale outside the metro stop or a plastic cigarette lighter from the West could make someone’s day. In those days, Russia had a genuineness of spirit born of hardship and a sense of community. Russians would always share what little they had with one another. Moscow was cold and severe on the surface, but the dismal totalitarian sameness could not contain the warmth and earthiness of its complex soul. It was refreshing to someone brought up in New Jersey in the 1970s in a culture of shopping and consumerism. The Soviet Union was giant, unruly, chaotic, and constantly in conflict with itself. Nothing worked. It was full of tragedy. It repelled me and at the same time attracted me, just as my Russian-blooded father did.

  Russia felt like one giant dysfunctional family. I was perfectly at home there. As in any dysfunctional family, one puts on a brave front no matter how bad it is inside. Russia, for many years, pretended that its armed forces were a real threat to the West when it couldn’t even feed its soldiers. I could relate to this way of being tough on the outside and a fragile, quivering wreck within; I’d been operating like that for years. One day the chaos couldn’t be hidden anymore and the Soviet Union fell apart. I would have my own unraveling as well.