Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  “No,” I said, “of course not.”

  “But Papa,” Vera said, “I’m really mentally ill. I really have that. I’m one of them.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my forehead. There was something creepy about the way Vera was talking, looking straight ahead of her in the darkness.

  “I just keep thinking, why would God make me and then make me be ruined like that? What’s the point of making something that’s ruined?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The engines of the plane created such huge, engulfing white noise that I felt like I was going deaf, even though I could hear her perfectly. We were flying through space at five hundred miles per hour. It seemed impossible, but that was what was happening. I might throw up. I held my hand over my mouth and tried to breathe. It was the word ruined.

  “Am I ruined?” Vera asked, turning to look at me. “I’m ruined!”

  “No, you aren’t ruined,” I said. “You’re not.”

  “The medicine makes my hair fall out,” she said. “It makes me fat. It makes my skin break out in these huge, goose-egg pimples that hurt. I’m going to be fat and bald and zitty.”

  I just stared at her frantic face. I didn’t understand why these things bothered her so much more than the fact that she was delusional. But then she said, “People will know, just by looking at me. They’ll know that something is wrong.”

  “We will find you the best doctor,” I said. “We’ll find medicine that doesn’t do that.”

  “There is no medicine that doesn’t do that,” Vera said. We both knew this was true. It was the constant complaint in her group therapy, on every message board online: the endless attempts to lose weight, the endless attempts to switch medications. Nothing worked. What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both. Even their mental lives were often dim and awful. They felt sleepy all the time. Their mouths were constantly dry or else tasted of metal. They couldn’t hold jobs or even really maintain friendships. They were sedated, kept from madness, but not really able to live, either.

  I did not know how I would keep her from that fate. But doing without the medication was no longer an option. There was a part of me now that was afraid of her. Afraid of how easily she held the knife, as though she had known all along how to unzip herself from the rules of everyday life. That line that kept people from deviating from the norm, that kept them from killing or stealing, it wasn’t there for her. She wasn’t even aware when she was crossing it.

  I wanted to take her to America where she would be safe. That was what I kept thinking: “You’ll be safe. If we can just get home, you’ll be safe.” The regularity of the planned streets, the laid-out neighborhoods, the new-construction houses, the strip malls, the perfectly paved massive freeways with eight lanes in each direction. All of it seemed like salvation. I kept thinking of the darkness of our stairwell in Vilnius when the waitresses would turn off the un-findable light switch, that darkness so complete you couldn’t tell if your eyes were open or closed. It was a darkness that made my heart pound. I thought of Kenneth in the candlelight, of all our faces looking like the faces of animals. The world before electric light must have been a very different place. A place where reality was much looser, and where maybe you could fall off of it without noticing and suddenly find yourself holding another person at knife point, or stabbing a Nazi in the neck, or giving away your baby in the woods. Had it even been truly possible to say who was mad and who was not in such a world?

  I thought of the way reality must have thinned for Grandma Sylvia, the way it must have frayed as she carried that baby through the woods, as she wandered amid the swamps without a map. I thought of Darius talking about the way people in the woods around Vilnius had worshipped fat, black lizards, the way Vilnius was known for all its blind, their eyes poisoned by wood smoke in shacks without ventilation. The beauty of irregular pearls. The beauty of ruined things. Those children climbing out of the pits at Ponary, struggling under the weight of the dead bodies on top of them, and then wandering back to their houses like ghosts. The lullaby the tenor sang for us that very first night: a mother and child chased out into the abyss, the world itself melting into nothingness, birdsong at the end of the world.

  I thought of Darius saying that everyone who visits Vilnius is destined to return, and I prayed to God he was wrong. I did not want us to ever have to go back there, to go back to that place.

  I had romanticized Grandma Sylvia, failing to understand what that story was about, failing to grasp that what she had lived through was horror itself, not something I should have ever wished upon myself. And I had wished it for myself, had courted it. I had seen the flicker of the irrational in Katya and I had followed it, followed it across the country and to a farm and straight into the thin brown arms of Chloe. That was my sin: romanticizing the past, romanticizing women, romanticizing madness.

  But it hadn’t even been a choice. It was a seed planted in me from birth, a seed fostered and watered by my mother who was maybe only ever pretending to be a real person, who was at all times simply acting, saying her lines and praying she’d gotten them right. Me, my mother, Katya, Vera, Grandma Sylvia: We were just dominoes, touching each other, a chain of being tipped over by war, not in an orderly way, the way I’d wished: lit off by one SS officer. Maybe that would have been understandable, containable, a story. But our family had been jumbled by history, by war, by falling and rising regimes, by escapes across the world, by drives through orange groves and trips to Disneyland and the slow poison of sugary flowers on supermarket cakes.

  America was not safe. We would never be safe. The danger was within us and we would take it wherever we went. There was no such thing as the line between the real and the unreal. The only line was the present moment. There was nothing but this, holding my daughter’s hand on an airplane in the middle of the night, not knowing what to say.

  —

  Something of this mood passed by the time we finally landed in Los Angeles.

  It is a minor miracle that it is possible to move past such moments. It seems that you are on a cliff and about to fall off, that everything is portentous and meaningful and terrifying. But the secret is that if you just wait a few hours and eat something, it passes. I couldn’t run away from Vera. I couldn’t leave her the way I could leave Vilnius. I couldn’t leave her the way Grandma Sylvia had left her baby with her brother, or the way I had left Vera with Katya when she was a baby, or the way my own father had left me. It didn’t matter how terrified I was. It didn’t matter that there was no solution to the problem we faced. We would simply have to face it anyway. We didn’t have to be brave or heroic, we merely had to persist. And I found that I could do that.

  When we got off the plane, we were returned to normalcy, sleepy, disoriented, stiff. There was a giddiness to coming home, to being on American soil, to going through customs and being told “Welcome back.” After we had gotten our passports stamped, we headed down an escalator to baggage claim, a family.

  When it came time to say goodbye, Vera was still chatting away. I was waiting with her by the curb with the luggage while Kat got her car so that they wouldn’t have to lug two big bags to the parking garage. Kat had left her car in short-term parking, claiming she had not known how long she would be gone, which was patently absurd since the flight itself was almost two days. I knew the truth was that Katya had not understood how the long-term parking worked at LAX and had decided childishly to avoid it. It made me smile. I could only imagine what her bill was going to be. After I helped them get loaded up, I would make my way to long-term parking on the shuttle bus and go home.

  I would be going home by myself. And there was something sad about that but also something natural. I thought about what it would be like to get in my car, to turn the key in the ignition, to hear the last radio station I had listened to flicker back to life. I would be alone in the comforting way it is possible to be alone in one’s own car
. I would drive the arching freeways in their beautiful loops all the way back to my small apartment that would smell stale but also wonderfully of home.

  “I can’t believe it’s over,” Vera said. “It just seems so weird that it’s over. It’s so weird that we don’t live there. Travel is a really weird idea if you think about it. I mean, what is the point of it?”

  I was too tired to come up with an amusing rejoinder. “Vera,” I said, “I have to tell you something.”

  “You’re not really my father?” Vera guessed, then laughed uproariously at her own joke. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “What is it?”

  “It’s just…I wanted to tell you I love you,” I said.

  “Ugh,” she said, “you’re getting cheesy, I can already tell. I could spread you on a cracker.”

  “No, really,” I said, and I took her by the shoulders and looked into her face, which was still puffy and swollen. “I love you the way you are,” I said. “I love you any way you are.”

  She hugged me and said into my shoulder, “You’re like one of those horrible cheese-stuffed pizza crusts.”

  When she pulled away, the shoulder of my shirt was wet from where she had been crying, and Katya drove up and popped the trunk. I loaded in Vera’s Hello Kitty luggage, and opened the door for her to climb in back because Katya had a hideous amount of garbage in the front seat: fast-food bags and water bottles and discarded sweatshirts all tangled in a pile. What a mess! It endeared her to me, endeared both of them to me somehow.

  “See you soon, Papa,” Vera said, and I swung her door shut, and away they went into the night.

  Acknowledgments

  A thank you as big as the Ritz goes to my friends and family. Thanks to Simone Gorrindo for being my best friend, but also for being clear-sighted when I was snow-blind from so many drafts. Thank you to David Isaak for pretty much exactly the same reasons. Thank you to my mother, who literally read this entire book to me on the telephone so that I could hear how it sounded in her voice, and who discussed the characters with me as though they were real people that we knew. Generous and patient don’t come close. Boon, blessing, gift—all are inadequate.

  Thank you to my husband, Sam. For all the evenings you read my words out loud to me as I played blocks with the boy, for all the car rides in which you listened to me explore and plan and worry, for all the lunches at our secret hotel where I confessed my most half-baked ambitions—for all these hours I cannot pay you back. I cannot hope to pay any of you back. My debt is solid and gloriously heavy, and I feel bound to each of you in a way that I would not trade for all the world because I feel certain now that, having already invested so much, you are going to have to keep me for good.

  As always, thank you to Molly Friedrich, who is honest and terrifying, brilliant and breathtaking, a dragon in the form of a smallish woman. Thank you to Jennifer Jackson, who somehow knew what this book needed before I did and who gently nudged me in that direction, allowing me always the illusion that it was entirely my own idea. You are my best and only and favorite sheep-crab. And thank you to Nichole LeFebvre who is an amazing reader and an amazing writer and who spends far too much time helping me. Thank you to all the people at Knopf who are so fantastic and excellent at everything they do.

  I am also indebted to Mikhail Iossel, who took a chance on me as a writer before I had ever published a word and let me come to Vilnius to study and write and fall in love with that city. Thank you, too, to Laimonas Briedis who is more impressive and more interesting than Darius could ever be, and whose book Vilnius: City of Strangers every single person should read because it is brilliant. Thank you to Katie Farris, Emily Gould, Jacob Howley, Sherril Jaffe, Reed Johnson, Joe Kertes, Eglė Kirilauskaitė, Erika Lastovskyte, Daniel Mackler, Ramune Mazaliauskiene, and Val Vinokur for reading and advising me along the way. And thank you to Werner Herzog, for actually saying the words: “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”

  A Note About the Author

  Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. Her first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar, was long-listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A native of California, she currently lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and sons.

  An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Group Guide

  Dear Fang, With Love

  by Rufi Thorpe

  The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about Dear Fang, With Love, Rufi Thorpe’s mesmerizing and emotionally potent new novel about a young father who seeks to better his relationship with his troubled teenage daughter while on a trip abroad.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Discuss the Miłlosz poem that prefaces the novel. How does the content of this poem relate to the themes explored in Dear Fang, With Love?

  2. In the opening lines of Chapter 1, Vera writes to Fang, “At this moment, we are mental twins.” How did you interpret Vera’s relationship with Fang when you were first introduced to their correspondence? Why is Vera drawn to him? How did the inclusion of Fang’s letters in the latter portion of the narrative destabilize Vera’s narrative authority?

  3. Describe Vilnius, as interpreted through the eyes of Lucas and Vera. How does the checkered history between ethnic groups affect the city’s cultural identity?

  4. On this page, Lucas admits, “I had never developed the set of paternal reflexes and instincts I assumed would assert themselves.” Over the course of Dear Fang, With Love, would you argue that these instincts do emerge? If so, when are they most apparent?

  5. What are Lucas’s motivations for the trip to Vilnius? What does he seek to learn about himself? His heritage? How do Vera’s motivations for travel differ from her father’s?

  6. Throughout Dear Fang, With Love, the reader becomes intimately acquainted with Lucas’s insecurities and anxieties. Discuss his discomfort with fatherhood. How does guilt factor into his relationship with his daughter? Would you say that he is “simple,” as Vera states in her letter to Fang?

  7. How did the textual interplay between Lucas’s narration and Vera’s e-mails to Fang affect your reading experience? How did it help to elucidate or complicate the narrative?

  8. The story of Grandma Sylvia and her “rape birthday” causes a great deal of tension and reflection throughout the course of Dear Fang, With Love. How does Lucas’s search for truth create anxiety throughout the narrative? How does his discovery that Herkus’s mother was indeed the child of Sylvia’s forest husband, rather than the SS officer, affect him? How does his relationship with Vera change after he reveals the true story of Sylvia’s escape to her?

  9. Vera is clearly very intelligent, but, as the narrative often reminds us, she is still a teenager and, as such, prone to bouts of fanciful thought and immaturity. When does her age become most apparent in the narrative? How do Vera’s mental health issues make it difficult for her family to discern when she is being lucid but difficult versus when she is suffering from delusions and mania?

  10. The concept of family, and the search for it, is an important aspect of Dear Fang, With Love. Consider Lucas’s past. How does he define family? How do his attitudes about family affect his relationship with Vera? How does the discovery of Herkus and his Lithuanian family undermine or influence his understanding of himself and his identity?

  11. The ancillary characters in Dear Fang, With Love provide important context for Lucas and Vera’s trip to Vilinus. What role did Judith serve in the novel? How did Lucas’s fling with Susan affect his sense of self?

  12. Throughout Dear Fang, With Love, Vera and Lucas describe Katya’s rejection of her American identity. Why do you think Katya is so hesitant to embrace her American side? How does Vera identify with her cultural heritage? Does her understanding of her cultural identity shift over the course of the novel?

  13. Discuss the scene wherein Lucas a
nd Vera argue about how Lucas is the “patriarch.” How is this interaction demonstrative of the power struggle inherent in their relationship? How does Vera’s reaction play into Lucas’s insecurities about fatherhood?

  14. How did your understanding of Vera’s mental illness change over the course of the narrative? After she told her father that her breakdown at the party was the result of taking acid, did your perception of her change? Were you surprised by her eventual breakdown at the end of the novel?

  15. Describe Vera’s relationship with her mother, particularly focusing on the Word doc created by her in Chapter 15. What does she admire most about her mother? What does she value about their relationship? How does Lucas interpret their mother-daughter relationship?

  16. Discuss the final chapter of the book. How did you interpret Vera and Lucas’s conversation in the last scene? Would you say that their relationship is strengthened by their trip to Vilnius?

  Suggested Reading

  Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

  Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

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