Then I came across a folder titled “Albania,” and I clicked on it.
I remembered the purple orchid in the front hall. Classical music was echoing through each room in the house, and my mother had been anxious that morning, more uptight than usual. Behar and his wife were coming for dinner, and a translator would be present. Behar was a businessman running for office in Albania, and he and my father were orchestrating a deal to build an American university there. I was told to be on my best behavior that night. I was sixteen. My father had showed me the floor plans for the university a few nights earlier in the kitchen after school. I don’t know how the deal was related to IPOs and the stock market. I never asked. I never asked my father about his work. The only time I did was in middle school. My religion teacher had asked me what he did for a living—I don’t remember why she asked me this in the middle of class—but I told her he was a securities lawyer; not the kind that went to court. And I realized I had no idea what this meant. So that night at dinner, I asked him, and he explained to me about IPOs, the stock market, and taking companies public. But when I started asking too many questions because I didn’t understand what he was talking about, he grew frustrated with me and snapped, “That’s enough; finish your dinner,” making me feel that I wasn’t smart enough to understand it—that I was better off not asking questions.
“Christina, darling, we’re in the living room!” my mother called. I was wearing Mara’s floral Betsey Johnson dress, one she left behind while studying in Switzerland. I always knew when my mother was faking it; when she was trying hard to exude European charm. When she showed us off, her voice extended into drawn-out vowels and ascended into a higher register that bugged me. I walked over to say hello and sat down on the yellow sofa in front of the Brie cheese and crackers as I watched Behar and his wife, in their black suits, sip Kir Royales in crystal flute glasses. They asked me about my “studies.” The translator, wearing a plain gray suit, sat quietly next to them.
I felt stiff the entire evening. I was pretending to be in another century with manners I didn’t even know I had. The aura between us, foreign, the crystal chandelier dimmed to spotlight on lamb chops, green beans, and crescent rolls. I chewed with my mouth closed the entire time.
It was an old email exchange. The document opened up on the screen, and all I saw were words from Behar: “The deal off—the American university—everything off.” Someone had been killed. Stabbed was the word I saw printed in Times New Roman font. And it had something to do with money. Of course. I can’t remember if the date was before or after the trial. It must have been after, because that was when my father was despondent, right before he left for prison. I thought it was just because he was afraid to leave. But maybe it was because the American university deal was the only one he had left. Now nothing was left. Any hope for a future business and making money for our family was gone.
I grabbed the new disk next to me and shoved it into the computer. I didn’t believe what I saw, or I saw what I saw but didn’t believe my father’s business could involve violence. I slammed his laptop shut. I felt paralyzed by what I’d just seen. I couldn’t erase the words from my mind. But I could bury them in an empty part of me where they would sit, and they would wait, while I told no one, while the possibility meant everything and nothing—a lie I would tell myself through sheer omission, because the terrifying truth was unacceptable.
I started spending most nights at Josh’s parents’ house in Beverly Hills. It felt like the West Coast version of our former home. Perched halfway up Coldwater Canyon, it was a Spanish-style house with big glass windows, an alarm, a housekeeper, a fully stocked fridge, a swimming pool, and a mom who loved to cook. It was easy to live vicariously through them, as though nothing was changing for me.
When I fell asleep with Josh that night, that’s when the first night terror hit.
I was standing, staring at the walls of the Yellow Oval Room in the White House. The same color yellow as our living room, my mother had said. Not too bright, not too dull, just right. Crystal, crystal vases, crystal service bells, crystal trinkets, crystal glasses, crystal bowls, and crystal statues engulfed me. My chest felt constricted, but the room itself was airy. The French doors opened to the balcony with towering willow trees whose branches grazed limestone columns and lace curtains drifted out in the humid air. I was stuck, paralyzed. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t cry, my tears and breath clogging my windpipe like lava. My young reflection stared back in the gold Louis XV French mirror, while the acanthus leaves curled around beveled glass. I was eleven years old and wearing my choir uniform. And when I turned my neck, General Ratkovich appeared before me like a ghost on the Persian rug. My patent leather shoes would not step near him. My uniform, green, like Kermit the frog. His uniform, blue and gold, like war.
He shook his head at me with great disappointment. My right arm was heavy as it reached for my mother’s crystal rabbit. The general’s eyes burned mine. When I grabbed the rabbit, I pitched it hard over and over until he disappeared. Then I pitched the vase, the service bell, the bowl, praying for relief from the sound of shattered glass, but nothing would break. I paced back and forth in front of the fireplace, wanting to cry. But I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocating and shaking, my arms gripped when suddenly my unwavering screams, steady and deep in their grunt, woke me up. I shot up drenched in sweat. Josh grabbed me tight. We rocked back and forth as I sobbed, disoriented, in his arms. Until it was safe to look around the room, to remember where I was, Josh kept kissing my forehead and purring, “Shhh, it’s okay. You’re okay.” I held on to him as though I were falling off a cliff. “Don’t let me go, just don’t let me go.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder is what shrinks call this delayed unconscious feeling of terror. It appeared only in my dreams. Josh suggested I see a psychiatrist. I had never seen a psychiatrist before. “I don’t need one,” I told him. “I’m fine.” He was seeing one for his parents’ separation. His father had just leased an apartment down the street and was still seeing Becky.
“I like having a therapist. She gives you a safe place to unload all of your thoughts and feelings without being judged,” he said. But I was firm with him and held my ground. “No. I don’t need it. I’m not interested.” My father was the one who had kept me safe.
Wearing my pink feety pajamas, I held on to my father’s hand as we followed the beam of his flashlight down the back staircase.
“Show me where the monsters are, Bambina,” he said as we set foot into the playroom. The white bookshelf was filled with Shel Silverstein books, Nancy Drew novels, and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales.
“In there,” I whispered, pointing to the door of the electrical room. This was a nightly routine, checking for monsters. I wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise.
My father opened the door to the humming of air-conditioning pumps. “Nope. No monsters!”
When he carried me up into my room, I made sure he checked my closet too. I would watch as he rummaged through winter sweaters, shoes, and Halloween costumes. “Nope. No monsters, Bambina!” Once we were in the clear, he tucked me into bed so tight I could barely move my arms underneath the sheets. It was the way I liked it, cocooned in tight covers. Safe. Then he would plop down next to me, and I’d watch him put his arms behind his head and close his eyes. But before he would doze off, we listened to the engines of commercial airplanes descending into Reagan National Airport along the Potomac River running just behind our house. My father would predict each plane that soared past us—“747, 727, Cargo 737 . . .”—until I was fast asleep.
“Christina! Today is your birthday!”—the first without my father—“rather than send you a silly card, I thought that I would write you a letter.” They were hunting for me, the creditors and attorneys. I was in tears from the pressure, having locked myself in the bathroom for fear they would literally find me; I sat on the cold floor with my back up against the door holding the letter in my hand while the ph
one kept ringing in the other room. It was another attorney threatening to sue me over the American Express credit card balance, yelling things I didn’t understand into the answering machine. Creditors and more creditors followed thereafter. And the only thing I could think about was how I was going to make the $58 in my bank account last until I found a job. Digging myself into a deeper grave, a few days earlier I had received a notice in the mail informing me that, as expected, the letters I sent to the credit bureaus didn’t work.
Dear Christina Grace Prousalis, thank you for contacting Transunion. Our goal is to maintain complete and accurate information below in response to your request. Re: dispute status. After reviewing your correspondence, we were unable to determine the nature of your request. To investigate information contained in your credit report, please specify why you are disputing it (for example, “this is not my account,” “I have never paid late,” “I have paid this account in full,” etc.). Unless you provide us this information, your request will be considered frivolous under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, and we will be unable to initiate an investigation.
Specifying would have meant admitting that my father had stolen my identity by taking out the credit cards in my name. Even the credit bureaus were calling out my ambiguity; my inability to see clearly or truthfully. The only way I justified it—the only way I managed to pick myself up off that floor and take the abuse from the creditors—was by believing my father’s words: “I’m really hoping to leave this place this summer. . . . We’re going to make a huge recovery! Success is the best revenge . . . within 24 months after I vacate this air base, believe me, we will be on Top of the world again. Also because you’re going to be a big film star, I will have a beautiful new Gulfstream to fly us to Paris for lunch! . . . I’m glad your BMW is waxed. Try not to leave the top down in the sun—it’s really tough on leather—except, of course, when you’re driving in your aviators . . . xoxo Dad.” He was so optimistic about coming home early, minimizing our financial avalanche, I wanted to believe in him because I had no comprehension of what or how it would cost me.
I took a deep breath and stood up, my head light and my body heavy with the weight of the world as I glided toward the ringing telephone. I grabbed it and then threw it as hard as I could against the wall until it shut up. In a few hours, Josh would be taking me to dinner to celebrate my birthday. He was trying to make me happy, but most days I couldn’t see him as I struggled to stay present, walking through each day more afraid of the next. All I wanted to do was climb into bed that night and pray that I’d never wake up.
-10-
First Job
There was no use for my name anymore. Dried up and used, it would remain on the “most wanted” list in computer systems at all the credit bureaus and bank law firms. Meanwhile, my mother had to figure out a way to negotiate a deal with the new landlord so that she and Chloe could keep a roof over their heads. They were moving into a two-bedroom town house, and my mother needed to convince the landlord to rent to her and Chloe despite their not having anyone to cosign the lease.
“An entire year’s worth of rent. Up front,” the landlord told her.
“This is crazy, Mom. It’s too expensive!” I tried to talk her out of it. I knew the rest of the money from Gary wouldn’t last much longer; it was his last wire transfer, and my mother had no plan in place for what she would do once it was gone.
The town house was in the Highlands, an isolated community high up in the Santa Monica Mountains, and hard to find if you aren’t a native. It had one bedroom on the bottom floor, a kitchen, a living room and eating area, and a second bedroom on the top floor. It was only a few thousand dollars less than the rental in the village. We had been looking at apartments all day in Hollywood, West Hollywood, and Westwood, but none would suffice. My mother’s anxiety flared up, she was short tempered, and we had stopped speaking to each other by the end of the day for fear of an outburst. Humility was not an option.
“I’m taking it,” my mother reiterated. “I will not lose my dignity, goddamn it.” She said it was imperative to stay in town because of the school district. She didn’t want to have to pull Chloe out of Pali High and place her in a school farther east toward the city. I sat there, flaming with anxiety, watching my mother write a check in my name for thousands of dollars. And I don’t remember my mother running the decision by anyone: not Ralph Adler, not her friend Suzanne. Money still remained a dirty secret, and how we used it would continue wrapping me in shame. I knew it was a reckless mistake and that there had to be a better, smarter way, but I couldn’t argue with her anymore. She wouldn’t listen, and I didn’t have the answers.
My father had been moved from the camp on the air force base in Nevada to a new federal prison in Herlong, California, way up in the cold and windy northeast corner of the state. He claimed the prison had determined that he was a threat to flee because of the nearby fighter jets. It had been a few weeks since anyone had heard from him. Mara would occasionally check in with us from Texas. She had landed a job at the Chanel makeup counter at the mall and promised that as soon as she graduated the following year, we would get an apartment together in Los Angeles.
Within the same week as my mother’s move, I made my last trip across town with my things before settling into Emily’s apartment. I had landed the job at La Scala.
In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad because Ralph Adler would come in to check on me. His office was down the street. He would wrap me up in a bear hug and ask me how my budgeting was going and if I was using my QuickBooks. I’d lie and tell him it was going great because I didn’t want him to think I was stupid and couldn’t figure out the damn thing, which I couldn’t.
La Scala is an Italian restaurant where movie stars like Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda dine; also agents, lawyers, and studio executives. They stroll in at one in the afternoon for the Hollywood lunch hour and, without fail, complain about needing a booth. They will actually die if they do not have that full, round booth. Not a half booth—the booth where only one side is a booth, where only one or two people get to sit, and then the others have to, God forbid, sit in chairs—no, they need the full, round, red-leather booth where everyone’s ass gets a cushion, or they will die. And if I do not give them that booth, they will humiliate me in front of waiting tourists and other angry guests behind them, their entitlement always traveling backward like a disease to each and every other guest, who are now thinking they can pull the same shtick.
I wasn’t making nearly enough money to put up with their bullshit booth problems. So I started lying, to save myself. “Oh, I’m so sorry, that booth is taken,” I’d say. Even though it wasn’t. So they would tip me off—mostly twenties, but if I was lucky and it was a busy night, they’d whip out the Benjamins. It worked for a while, until one night it was slow, and a few customers refused to tip me. “We’ll just wait for a booth to open up, then.” They knew I was lying. The manager, who wore a pin on his blazer, as if this were a country club, came over and asked me why the customers hadn’t been seated. I didn’t have an answer for him. I managed to last there for about a year before I was fired.
I wondered if we, as a family, had acted as entitled as some of the customers who came in to La Scala. A few times my father had complained when we weren’t given the finest table in the house. He’d cause a scene until it was handled and we were sitting where he wanted. And never near the bathrooms. Never. I remember our first family trip to New York, when I was ten. It was 1995. Doormen in white gloves stood beside the gold revolving doors of the Plaza Hotel, moving toward us as our limousine pulled up. Chloe hopped out first, running up the red-carpeted steps, hyper, excited to be in the Big Apple. I ran up behind her and then turned around. “You guys, hurry up!” I wanted to run inside, explore the hotel. Home Alone 2 had been released a few years earlier. Ever since, we had been begging our parents to take us to New York.
“Girls, hold the bus!” my father yelled, trying to turn on the video camera. Mara s
tood with her arms crossed. She had entered her Bush and Nirvana grunge phase; she wanted to be at the Chelsea Hotel downtown, smoking cigarettes. She held up her hand in front of the lens. “Don’t film me,” she said.
“Oh, Mara, stop being such a sourpuss,” my father replied.
“Daddy! Daddy! Film me! Film me!” I cried, craving his attention.
Doormen pushed our mountain of Louis Vuitton trunks inside toward the front desk.
“Reservation name?” the front desk clerk asked.
“Prousalis.” Dad took out his wallet from inside his camel blazer.
“I’m sorry, sir. I do not have a reservation under the name Prousalis. Could it be under a different name?”
“Negative,” my father said. He was always using flight terms when dealing with “pedestrians.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I do not have a reservation under that name.” I looked up at my dad and felt the energy of his rage brewing.
“Girls, come with me,” said my mother, sensing a scene coming between my father and the front desk. “I want to show you Eloise. Do you know who Eloise is?” She ushered us into the hallway of the lobby. As we walked away, I could hear my father demanding to speak with the general manager. I knew what his face looked like: his furrowed brow, his blood pressure shooting through the roof as he raised his voice, like whenever Mara and I would fight during a conference call.
I held my mother’s hand and stared at the gold-framed portrait hanging on the marble wall.
“Eloise was the little girl who lived on the tippy-top floor of this hotel,” my mother explained. I stared at the disheveled blond girl with the red bow in her hair and her blue suspenders and wondered if she ever got lonely.
“I want to be like Eloise!” Chloe cried. Mara sat on a chair a few feet away from us with her head leaning back against the wall, sighing loudly so that everyone could hear her exasperation.
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