Estranged

by Jessica Berger Gross

  We’d go for Chinese food at Chan’s Peking Kitchen on Raymond Avenue. I’d order chicken and broccoli. Franny was a vegetarian and would ask for a simple bowl of steamed broccoli with white rice and a dipping sauce on the side. It never occurred to me that she might be watching her weight or trying to be healthy; I just thought she was naturally thin and liked broccoli. When we ordered late-night pizza, she’d have one or two slices, and I’d have three or four. I figured she wasn’t as hungry as I was. At the all-you-can-eat dining hall, I’d load my tray with bagels and cream cheese or provolone on a roll and a plate of french fries. Sometimes my jeans would fit and sometimes they wouldn’t. Once, when I complained about my weight, Franny gently proposed that I skip the daily fries. I resisted the suggestion. I was a feminist and would eat what I wanted.

  Deep down, boyfriends and wardrobes and looks and eating aside, we were more alike than different. We were unmoored. We had intense mood swings. Without warning, we became depressed. We could go weeks feeling normal and upbeat and optimistic and productive, and then the blackout curtain would drop. There didn’t have to be a reason. Like anyone else, we had good days and bad ones. But our lows were ten times lower, sometimes scarily so. I worried about what might be wrong with us: Were we clinically depressed or bipolar? Franny liked to sink into her moods, whether manic or sad, and ride them out. She could afford to, I figured. Franny had her mother. I only had Franny. I fought against my depression when I could manage it. Other times I succumbed. All I had to fall back on, to return to when breaks came, was that house in Rockville Centre, the flimsy lock on my door and the bagels in the freezer. Sometimes I missed my mother. Not her, exactly. I remembered her as always tired, and the cold jangle of her keys, and the always nothing for dinner, and her complaints about my smoking and the mess in my room. But I missed the idea of her, or, more precisely, I missed the mother I wished I had.

  * * *

  Vassar wasn’t far enough from home. I wanted to go to the other side of the world. I’d originally applied to spend a semester abroad in Zimbabwe, but my mother freaked out that I’d have sex or need a blood transfusion and wind up HIV-positive. I couldn’t convince her otherwise, so we compromised on Nepal, a sliver of a country sandwiched between China and India, a mystical-sounding place I knew nothing about. In preparation for my trip, I listened to Nepali language tapes and read The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  My father bought me supplies at REI. Not knowing any better, I let him pick me up an expensive mosquito tent and forehead flashlight when what I actually needed were water bottles and decent hiking boots. The night before my flight, my parents and I went to see Alive, an Ethan Hawke airplane-crash cannibalism survival film. I couldn’t sleep, consumed by thoughts of mountain passes and unfriendly foreign lands and all that could go wrong. (Perhaps that wasn’t the best choice for the night before your trip, my father later wrote me in one of the many letters in blue airmail envelopes he sent to my school in Kathmandu. I wonder how many other kids in your program made the same mistake.)

  The day of my departure, my parents brought me to the airport, where I met the rest of the students flying out from New York. A group of crunchy college kids sat in a circle, drinking from their Nalgene bottles. They had the right sort of expensive Patagonia fleece and worn-in sturdy boots and lightweight body-contouring packs. I sat down and introduced myself as they passed around bags of trail mix, but I felt uncomfortable and shy and went off to write in my journal. It seems that everyone else is a vegetarian and really into health (vitamins, etc.), I noted about encountering this new-to-me type. A weird extreme to the smoking, self-destructive (in a black turtleneck kind of way) people that I’m used to. A couple of stragglers who seemed better suited for a dive bar than a Nepali trek kept ducking into the smoking area. We were the ones dreaming of drugs and gods.

  After landing in London with a twelve-hour layover, we stored our backpacks in airport lockers and made our own cheap London tour on the tops of double-decker buses before finding a pub for the required fish and chips. Sleep-deprived, we boarded our flight to Kathmandu. Half a day and one stop through Dubai later, I saw the white peaks of the Himalayas out the airplane window.

  Nepal was like nothing I had imagined. It was so much better. I took in the green hills landscaped with rice paddies and dotted with sheep, and the temples and markets and monkeys. There were rough dirt roads to drive on, and rickety bridges to cross, and families who rode through the city four to a moped. We drank endless glasses of milky chai tea. We ate steaming hot balls of pakora exchanged for a few rupees, and vegetable omelets for afternoon snack, and drank from small glass bottles of Coke during roadside café breaks. We squatted on Indian-style toilets with foot treads and used plastic pitchers of water to clean ourselves afterward. We went to sitar concerts on hotel rooftops. Cool, brisk valley mornings were followed by warm, sunny afternoons. And always we were surrounded by breathtaking views of the mountains.

  We’d later spend time living in Kathmandu. But that first day we took a short bus ride straight to Bhaktapur, the more mellow and manageable historical city in the Kathmandu Valley. Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square was filled with temples and shrines. We bought a knitting-ball-size chunk of hash from a local boy who asked for a new pair of sneakers in exchange. Our program directors and language teachers were holding a welcome dinner. Already high, I came down from my room and entered the candlelit guesthouse. The electricity cut off in the evenings on alternate nights; they were saving the power, our teachers said. We kept our flashlights close. At dinner we were served fiery scoops of lentils and rice and vegetables called dal bhat on compartmentalized metal plates. We ate with our hands, using fresh whole-wheat chapatti bread to soak up the sauces. After the meal, we were given blessings and Nepali names and placed pieces of fruit in front of small statues of the deities—our prasad to the Hindu gods and goddesses, later distributed back to the group and eaten as a consecration. Then we climbed up to the rooftop of the guesthouse and marveled at how lucky we were to have wound up there. I woke at dawn to the sound of our two male language teachers coughing and clearing out their tobacco-weary throats.

  I felt elated by the newness swirling around me. If Vassar was a different world, this was a new galaxy. Sitting in courtyards under the midday sun, letting my cheeks grow warm, I could feel myself change.

  In the mornings we studied the Nepali language, picking up just enough to communicate with our homestay families and get around on our own. In the afternoons we hosted guest speakers on Nepali life and culture. On the streets, children called out to us for pencils and candy and hellos. We walked by animals and around rickshaws crowding the road and covered our mouths with cloth. We girls wore long skirts and T-shirts with our hiking boots or flip-flops. Then we left Bhaktapur behind, taking a bumpy bus on a series of ever more basic roads toward our village homestay, in a remote hill town in the far western countryside. When the road ended, we trekked the rest of the way.

  I couldn’t keep up. Our teachers had arranged porters to carry our packs up and down the mountains (though some of the guys in our group refused the help), but even without a pack, simply propelling myself forward and walking all those miles was more than I could manage. I needed a break every ten minutes. I needed water. I needed a cigarette. I wondered if I could make it or if I should quit and go home. I had come to Nepal not knowing how to hike, not even realizing that was the reason most travelers came here. Some of the hardier hikers circled back to where I was at the end of the line, offering advice and encouragement and precious moleskin padding for my newly formed blisters.

  There was no way to turn back, so I kept walking.

  Darkness approached. We found a teahouse, ate steaming, spicy, overflowing plates of dal bhat, and rolled our sleeping bags out on the floor. By the time we got to the village a day later, I had a lump on my head from the bumpy bus ride, wrecked feet from my new boots, lice in my hair, and mosquito bites all over my forehead that looked like a rash of acne. I was bl
issfully happy.

  We spent a few days living in the village with host families, then a night sleeping under more stars than I’ve seen before or since. That blinding scrim of stars made the Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium show seem like a night-light. Afterward, the group split up, and we were charged with finding our own way back to Kathmandu. I set out with two friends to visit a place where, we were told, old people went to renounce their material belongings and pursue holiness in their final years. Over the next few days, we encountered devout beggars and blessings, medicine men and shamans, and deserted beaches where we sunbathed and did laundry. On our trek, we dug holes to shit in and set our maxipads and tampons on fire. In Kathmandu, I declared myself a vegetarian, got myself down to one cigarette a day, and went to my first yoga class.

  We were living with new homestay families. Mine was all the way on the opposite side of town from the schoolhouse, out by the Swayambhunath Monkey Temple. You couldn’t depend on there being street signs, so my homestay father drew me an intricate map of the route. Way too afraid to dare a borrowed bicycle through the needle-narrow and bustling crowded market lanes, I walked the seven or eight miles round-trip each day instead. In between morning language class and afternoon excursions or lectures, I drank sweet chai and sat with my new friends on the schoolhouse lawn.

  Mail arrived in the early afternoons. My father sent a growing stack of letters. He wrote that he missed me so much he could cry. He sent me kisses; he took care of arranging my course schedule for the fall and made sure that Franny saw to my housing. He wrote news reports about the first World Trade Center bombing and Zoë Baird’s “Nannygate” and television show updates and disappointment about how little I’d written in return. My mother, in her own smaller batch of notes, added concerns about my health. Is the nutrition sufficient? What are you doing about protein? I skimmed the letters, waiting for the inevitable backhanded remark. It wasn’t so much what they said but the tone I could hear in my ear as I read. We have only received one letter from you. You must be having a great time and are too busy to write. But give us a break. Or there might be a complaint about their lives. We had a good time in Italy but didn’t find the food as great as everyone says . . . Mom and I are having another romantic night in front of the TV. You really know how to hurt an old couple . . . It snowed most of the day. Mom is worried as usual . . . Daddy and Josh are outside shoveling—so you avoided that one . . . I couldn’t stand these stacks of mail, bothered by how easily my parents pretended we were a normal family. My father’s letters, in particular, made me sick to my stomach. My mother’s concerns about my health and safety felt forced and fake when I knew I was safer (and healthier) in Nepal than I’d ever been in their house.

  Then, on a hike one day in the hills outside of Kathmandu, a friend confided in me about her father. He’d sexually abused her and her sister for years, coming into their bedroom in the middle of the night. She had finally told her mother. Her parents were working on their marriage; they met with their pastor for counseling sessions; her father was sorry. I told her about my family. Knowing there was a worse thing than what I’d experienced gave me an odd courage. (I collected these worse things.) If my friend could forgive, maybe I could, too.

  I went off on my own for a monthlong independent study in a village in the middle hills of the Himalayas. I set out carrying rupees and clothes and iodine pills for my water and a journal and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and a tiny purple paperback of the Dalai Lama’s A Policy of Kindness and a Tom Robbins novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. With the help and company of a guide I’d hired along the way, I trekked through green valleys surrounded by snowcapped peaks. We stayed in teahouses and walked across questionable suspension bridges that were missing every third slat. Through exhaustion and rain and an unexpected snowstorm I kept going, feeling there was something out there bigger than me, guiding me forward. Afterward, when I was back with my program, we went river-rafting and on a jungle safari where we took stoned naps in the heat of the day and went on elephant and canoe rides in the early mornings and late afternoons.

  But I wasn’t all courage, and I hadn’t changed as much as I would have liked. Back before my independent study trip, I’d pierced my nose at a Kathmandu jewelry shop one afternoon with some friends. I told my mother about it in a letter, explaining that I had learned to love myself, the bump on my nose, all of me. I feel beautiful, I wrote. And I did. Which felt like a miracle. She fired her response back, said she was sickened and disgusted by me and wouldn’t be able to sleep at night unless I took the nose ring out. You are acting like a barbarian, she wrote. My father took to labeling his letters post mutilation 1 and post mutilation 2 and so on. I was self-destructive, they said.

  So I left Nepal with a hole rather than a ring in my nose, a choice my friends couldn’t understand, and a hollow I didn’t fill for almost ten years, before finally placing in a small silver hoop and then, later, a tiny diamond stud.

  ELEVEN

  AFTER NEPAL, I spent a carefree summer traveling around Israel and working on a kibbutz with Stefanie. We cleaned toilets, mopped floors, and scrubbed tables. In the communal kitchen, we peeled and sliced, mixed and grated. Once promoted to the fields, we sipped hot coffee at dawn, climbed into the back of a pickup truck, and headed off to pick fruit and check irrigation pipes. At night, after hanging out at the kibbutz bomb-shelter-turned-bar, I went skinny-dipping with guys who thought me (and my nose) sexy, and sometimes I followed them to their rooms. But when I was back at Vassar, a familiar feeling of depression returned.

  I was majoring in psychology and secretly hoping to understand more about the cycle of violence that plagued my family. I felt safer examining this from an intellectual remove, walking through leafy paths under the brick archway that led to Blodgett Hall, where the psychology classes were held, settling my things amid the comforting quiet and slightly musty smells in small, old rooms there. I stayed up late reading Freud. I signed up for a seminar in abnormal psychology and searched the DSM-III-R for what might be wrong with my parents and, in turn, with me.

  I wondered about my maternal grandmother, Ruth, and why exactly she’d spent time in psychiatric hospitals when my father was a teenager. And about my mother’s father, Jack, who’d been temperamental and unstable. And the uncle I’d never met, my father’s mysterious nameless brother, who my parents claimed was truly crazy. I had to wonder about my father, too. Was he mentally ill? Or just an awful person? And then there was me. As much as I loathed it, I had inherited my father’s temper. I argued loudly and stubbornly with friends and boyfriends. Once, when I was younger, I had kicked my dog, Snoopy. Going by genetics alone, I worried that something intrinsic and unfixable was wrong with me, too.

  Vassar had a free counseling center where students could go for short-term therapy. After years of putting it off, I set up a meeting. My counselor, Sherry, had reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck.

  “What brings you here?” she asked.

  I was unsure how to begin. Only a few friends knew about my father, and I wasn’t used to talking about it openly. Even though I wasn’t living at home, my father’s grip remained tight. Don’t forget who’s paying your tuition, he’d say. I never did. I thought about it every time I swiped my meal card.

  I told her what I could stand to say aloud, bits and pieces about the slaps and scratches and screams and black-and-blue marks, about the name calling and the cutting comments, and also about the many ways he and my mother loved and provided for me. I told her about the TV shows my father taped for me on the VCR and about the wonton soup he brought me when I was sick and about the bargain-shopped clothes my mother collected for me to try on when I came home.

  “Your father abused you,” my therapist said at the end of the first session. “Physically. And emotionally, too.” Sherry said she could help. She thought that by improving the way I communicated with my family, and dealing with some of my emotional baggage, I could allevia
te my depression.

  Excavating my childhood memories was halting, terrifying work. In subsequent sessions, I wanted to complain about friends and boys and how ugly I felt. Sherry wanted to discuss my father. Each session I allowed the conversation to enter those thick forbidden woods for only the last few minutes. By necessity, though, we had to be brief and results-oriented. Students were offered a limited number of free meetings each year.

  Sherry wanted me to send a letter home. “Write to him,” she said. “Tell him how you feel.”

  Confront my father about the abuse? Bring everything out into the open? Was she insane? The idea horrified me, making me feel vulnerable and naked and sending me into a massive anxiety attack. This was the conversation I’d spent my whole life avoiding. Sherry was adamant, saying it was the best way to move forward. And so, like getting a prescription filled without asking about possible side effects, I approached my father by mail, with the plan of offering my forgiveness in the same envelope as my accusations.

  I wrote many drafts of that letter, and read a final version to Franny one night in our dorm, her smoking and making last-minute suggestions, tweaking an idea or phrase here or there as if it were one of my term papers.

  I wrote something like: Dear Dad, Please don’t be mad. I’m seeing a therapist and she says what you did to me was child abuse. I forgive you but I need you to admit the truth. Love, Jessie.

  He called me. “We’ll discuss it when you get home,” he said.

  I returned for Thanksgiving, heavy and tight with fear.

  We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, scene of all those fights and put-downs. I was terrified, not knowing how he’d react or what he’d do to me. I was trembling. It took everything in me to sit there and face him. But my father was older and gentler now. At first he denied and rationalized. He cried. He made excuses, placed some of the blame on me, and downplayed the extent and frequency of the violence. I persisted. I wouldn’t let him get away with half-truths. Only then did he get angry, furious when I wouldn’t accept his smaller story. His face flushed the familiar red. He pounded his fists on the table. You were a difficult kid. You bruised easily. We went back and forth. You hit me, I said. How could you do that? Part of me wished he’d keep denying it, as if that could somehow erase the past. He regretted what he’d done, he finally admitted. He was sorry. The next day, he even volunteered to go into therapy with me.