Dear Fang, with Love Page 6

  “She gets obsessed with it. It started with that damn movie, you know the one, with the long rape scene and the girl is dressed as a boy? It was a big dramatic thing this winter with her English teacher because Vera tried to write some paper on rape. Oh, it was garbage, Lucas. Something like if there is no such thing as free will then rape is not a crime. She spent forever on this paper, it was thirty pages, well researched too, but very much insane. The teacher flunked her and after that Vera refused to turn anything in. Just don’t mention it to her. It’s the one thing I ask.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” I asked. I knew that Vera was failing all her classes, but no one had said anything about an obsessive term paper about rape.

  “I called you about it,” Kat said, “but you said, ‘Call me in the morning when you are sober.’ ” She did a mean imitation of my voice, a doofus Southern California accent.

  I remembered the night she was talking about. Katya had called me, quite drunk, saying that the genes for mental illness came from my side of the family. Somehow, since Vera’s initial episode, Katya and I had managed to switch places: She had gone from not believing a word the doctors said, claiming that Vera was just going through a phase, to worrying daily over Vera’s medications and attending support groups for the parents of mentally ill children. If anything, I got the sense that it was the Christian elements in Vera’s manic episode that had gotten to Kat. It creeped her out. The stuff about reading from the book of Revelation. Trying to baptize the cheerleaders with liquor. That her daughter was even reading the New Testament was disturbing to her. Vera’s doctors, meanwhile, had referred very casually to Vera’s tendency toward delusions of grandeur. I don’t think they used the phrase “messiah complex,” but that was what they were talking about. Vera was now lumped in with the boy who masturbated onto images of the cosmos, and this bothered and upset both Kat and me in our different ways.

  “Why not Moses?” Kat asked. “If she must have a messiah complex, why not at least have a Jewish one? It’s like Christianity seeped into her through the groundwater. Or maybe through Fang.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to be agreeable while not actually committing to any of these hypotheses. I didn’t exactly want to point out the fact that I was Catholic and Vera’s father, since Katya didn’t seem to be making the connection. But it made me feel even more responsible for Vera’s condition than I already did. It seemed obvious that the Christianity, if it had “seeped in” from somewhere, had seeped in through me.

  “You know what I think it is? I think Judaism is more about questions, whereas Christianity is more about answers, and so when she gets confused—it’s a place to go.”

  “Mmm,” I said. But I didn’t really think that was it. I actually didn’t think there was a profound reason why Vera’s mania had resulted in such a Christian outburst. I suspected it was more coincidental and arbitrary than that. I had noticed this, about the people in her group therapy: Their delusions were often painfully stupid. They never believed the FBI was following them. It was always Dick Tracy, or some other equally absurd figure. It was Mickey Mouse who told them to stop brushing their teeth. Something about the way your mind made connections when you were in that state had a random, chaotic element to it, as far as I could tell.

  But as Kat became more and more convinced of Vera’s illness and committed to her care, I became less and less sure of anything the doctors said. It wasn’t that I doubted Vera had some kind of brain chemical imbalance—there was no getting around the video of her that night, her claim to be God’s daughter. When they had breathalyzed her, she came back completely clean. She hadn’t even had a beer. So there was no other choice but to believe that she had a problem. But even if I believed that Vera had a problem, in fact, especially if she had a problem, there was no possible chance that Dr. Carmichael was going to have the solution. It was also painfully, visually obvious that the medication she was on was poisoning her: She’d gained thirty pounds in a matter of months, her skin was bad, her hair was falling out in a big patch in the back. She slept all the time. It was a nightmare.

  “You didn’t say anything about a paper,” I said, “you were accusing me of having the genes for mental illness!”

  “But that’s what I was going to tell you about.”

  “How could I have known that?”

  “She had come home, so angry about getting this F, and I said, well, let me read the paper. She threw it in the trash. I picked it out and read it later that night. Lucas, it was insane garbage. No normal person could write this. That’s when I knew.”

  I nodded, trying to be sympathetic. I had heard as much in her voice that night, the despair that I had felt in the beginning, the panic that it was true, that Vera was really mentally ill.

  “Do you still have the paper?” I asked. I wanted, badly, to read it myself.

  “No. I threw it away. Garbage. Don’t talk to her about rape. It is an obsession. It’s not good for her. Promise me?”

  “Sure,” I said, still wondering over what exactly Vera’s thesis had been. If there was no free will, was it possible even to give consent? And if there was no such thing as consent, was it possible to be raped? Or were human beings more like billiard balls, randomly, even violently clacking against each other, or like planets or asteroids, smashing into each other then re-forming in the vacuum of space, pulled into orbits around the nearest star? Possibly such a paper, while insane and even wildly offensive, could be logically consistent and, in its own perverted way, brilliant. No wonder Vera had not wanted to turn in any more work to that teacher.

  What I didn’t understand was why she was so concerned with rape in the first place. I had grown up being told the bedtime story of Grandma Sylvia’s escape. I had eaten the rape birthday cake year after year. But Vera didn’t know about any of that. Why had it been on her mind? I worried that something had happened to her.

  I wanted to talk to her about it, but I had no idea how to bring it up. I couldn’t even force myself to be specific about it in my own mind: When, how, by whom did I really think she had been raped? I couldn’t imagine the scenario in which it might have happened, not concretely enough to start asking questions, anyway. I also did not want to undermine Katya’s authority as a parent, and so I did not tell Vera about Grandma Sylvia being raped in the snow and surviving on wild onions, or rather, I told her a highly edited version of the tale wherein the Nazi guard simply felt bad for her and set her free outside without explanation. “She never knew why,” I said. And at least that much was the truth.

  —

  “It’s you again,” a woman said to me on our next walking tour, and I started. It was the woman with the red hair, the woman who looked like my mother. “Mr. Not Nikolai.” She laughed.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry I was flustered that night. I was trying to find my daughter and then I was so rude to you.”

  “Not at all,” the woman said, falling into step beside me. I looked around for Vera, but she was already talking to a guy in his early twenties whose name I was pretty sure was Daniel. His khaki pants were ordinary enough, but he also wore a billowing white shirt that was somewhere in between a dress shirt and part of a pirate costume. It was unbuttoned to about halfway down his tan and hairless chest. He had taken her arm as they walked.

  “So if you’re not Nikolai, then who are you?” the woman asked me.

  “Right. Sorry, my name is Lucas.”

  “I’m Susan,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Are you going to have the genealogist look you up?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Did you not read your packet?” she asked. “They have a genealogist you can meet with to track down your family tree here. Some people even have living relatives still in the city.”

  We were stopped in front of another building and Darius was explaining something, but it was too difficult to hear over the traffic, so I settled into ch
atting with Susan at the back of the group. “Wow,” I said. “My grandmother was from Vilnius proper. I bet they might have some record of her.”

  “They might,” Susan said and smiled. We were walking through a kind of park set in an oversize median between the two lanes of a major thoroughfare. There was a massive bronze cubist sculpture and a fountain and a young woman talking on a cell phone, her baby carriage several feet away. You would never see a woman wander that far away from a baby carriage in America. All American women were convinced that their children were about to be stolen at any moment. It was the small differences I noticed most about Lithuania. The way shopkeepers preferred to keep quiet and never tried to talk you into buying things. The way even major businesses were marked with tiny, unobtrusive signs. The lack of billboards. The peculiar substantiality of the puffy white clouds that looked made of sparkling marzipan. I couldn’t help but try to imagine Grandma Sylvia here: a young girl, wandering through the city awhirl with different languages and different cultures.

  “Well, I’m gonna do it,” Susan said, clearly trying to nudge me toward also seeing the genealogist. I wondered if she was flirting with me or if she was just being friendly. My normal rule of thumb was that all friendliness was a sign of sexual attraction, but it seemed possible the rules were different on a history tour, a social setting where being chatty and friendly with people was simply expected.

  “Are your people from Vilnius?” I asked.

  “On my father’s side,” Susan said, and then launched into an inventory of her genealogical stock. “All of which is a long way of saying that I’m hoping to turn all of this into a book, like a nonfiction family-memoir type thing. If I can find out anything about my father’s brother. Are you a writer?” she asked. “It seems like everyone here is a writer.”

  “No, I’m just an English teacher,” I said.

  She laughed. “Well, so am I! I feel like all I ever do is grade papers anymore. My mind is slowly being poisoned by undergraduate prose.”

  “But you have a project,” I said. “You came here and made this trip happen. It’s very admirable.”

  She shrugged. “Why did you decide to come to Vilnius?” she asked.

  “For my daughter.”

  “Is she interested in Vilnius?”

  “No, actually.” I laughed.

  “Weird plan.”

  “I think I was hoping to surprise her with it. With the place.”

  “Of course, and you in no way wanted to come for yourself. To see where your grandmother was from.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “In fact, I think I stopped having personal emotions seven or eight years ago.”

  “Oh, me too, me too,” she said. “Next I’m going to give up eating, and then shortly after that breathing.”

  I laughed. I was beginning to sort of hope that Susan was flirting with me.

  “You know that famous Tolstoy line?” Susan asked, as we walked. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  “From Anna Karenina.” I nodded. She was walking with her hands clasped behind her back in a way that seemed wonderfully old-fashioned to me.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that might be wrong. I mean—do you think that’s true? It seems to me, if anything, that happiness is the more idiosyncratic thing, and unhappiness is this sort of chronic disease, where really it’s the same for everyone: They feel unloved or unseen, they resent the people around them, blah blah blah. I mean, doesn’t it seem crazy to you? To say all happy families are alike?”

  “I think you may be on to something,” I said.

  “Are you happy with your wife?”

  “Oh, I’m not married to Vera’s mother. We were never married,” I explained. “We were just teenagers. I didn’t even get to be part of my daughter’s life until she was four. Big drama.” This small lie, about reentering Vera’s life when she was four, had become routine for me. It was true: I had first met her when she was four. But the intervening seven years before I actually reentered her life were simply too damning to say to someone casually.

  “But you never got married after that? To anybody?” Susan asked, clearly shocked.

  “Nope,” I said, and tried to smile as though I were unaware that this might be raising some kind of red flag for her.

  “How old are you?” she asked, still staring at me like I didn’t make sense.

  “Thirty-five.”

  She made a noise in her throat, a kind of skeptical groan, before nodding her head. It was as though she had been told the number of jelly beans in a jar and was having trouble reconciling it with her own estimation. “Well,” she said, “I loved my husband very much. And I still do. We’re friends now. Which has its own challenges. Anyway, he’s an alcoholic, he’s in recovery. But I spent a long time going to Al-Anon meetings, which are for, like, friends and family of alcoholics, and all the stories I heard there—they were all the same. It was all different, but it was all the same. And I started to think that really the thing none of us could ever say, because it was so unique, so personal that it was almost unspeakable, was what happiness had been like. When it was good. That was the thing that I started to get interested in when other people were talking: I would try to imagine what it had been like when they were happy. Had there been mornings of NPR and coffee and burned toast, just quietly sitting together and feeling safe? Or had it been torrid? That was the thing about my parents, they were always fucking each other’s brains out!”

  We had wound up near Vera and Daniel and I tried to eavesdrop enough to make sure everything was all right.

  “Is that her?” Susan asked. “Your daughter?”

  “Yes. Vera.”

  “She certainly doesn’t look seventeen! I thought she was in her twenties.”

  “I know. It terrifies me.” The day was hot and Susan was sweating slightly. I had a flash image of myself licking the dew from her breastbone.

  “Well, I think having a teenager is all about being terrified,” Susan said.

  Of course, there was no way she was talking about the kind of terror I experienced loving Vera. “You learn self-control in a mental hospital,” Vera had said to me once. “If you have a freak-out, they get you with the booty juice.” Booty juice was what the kids in her ward called being held down and injected with a sedative in the buttocks. That wasn’t the kind of story one told a stranger though, and so I nodded and agreed that teenagers were very difficult.

  “Would you like to go out to dinner?” Susan asked.

  I did want to go out to dinner with her. I imagined laughing with her, drinking wine as the sun finally set, hearing her husky voice in my ear telling me things, things about her life, about her ex-husband, things about being a writer, things about why she had wound up on this odd tour in Vilnius. But I couldn’t imagine abandoning Vera, nor could I imagine letting Vera tag along, although surely Susan was aware that I was Vera’s guardian and any dinner with me would involve Vera as well. I wasn’t able to read her intentions quickly enough to answer, and I was interrupted by Darius. “This will be all for today, my ducklings. Oh, but I must tell you one more thing. There is a legend that upon once visiting Vilnius, you are destined, or perhaps cursed, to return. So I am afraid all of you are already committed to this journey much more seriously than you might have imagined.”

  Darius gave a queer little laugh. Vera came out of nowhere and grabbed my hand.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she whispered, and my daughter and I slipped away without saying goodbye and set out alone in the city.

  —

  At twelve, I had confessed to my mother that I worried I would never have a girlfriend. “Is that possible,” I asked, “that it could just never happen?”

  “Oh,” my mother said, drawing air into her deep lungs and then giving one of her low, beautiful chuckles, “you will have so, so many girlfriends, Lucas. I promise you.”

  My mother, Rose, was an actress and it hadn�
�t been a sure thing that she would make the dangerous crossing from ingenue to leading lady to character actress. She was so blond and pretty and short that for a time she had despaired completely. These traits had made finding work easy when she was twenty but miserable when she was nearing forty. I remember her wailing about it when I was little. I would hold her hand as she sat at the kitchen table sobbing, telling me about this or that evil casting director, tossing her long curly hair. I was my mother’s confidant, always. I suppose you could say I was a mama’s boy, except that having no father, no brothers or sisters, it didn’t seem I had much of a choice.

  After my father, who was also an actor, turned out to have no interest in fatherhood, I became my mother’s little companion, some cross between child, toy, and friend, and she took me everywhere with her: to plays and bookstores, on long car trips to Santa Barbara and back for no reason other than to drive in the rain and listen to the radio. She told me everything, allowing me full access not only to the adult world but to her world, which was not entirely the same thing as the real world, stuffed as it was with Shakespeare and odd bits of remembered novels and family mythology. When I was five, I found her diaphragm on the lip of the bathtub and she explained explicitly what it was for and how it worked. When I was ten, she liked to joke that Gushers candy lunch snacks had been invented to get girls used to the idea of swallowing surprising liquids. She dated throughout my childhood, but she was never with one man for long and I rarely met any of them. She never remarried. “Why would I remarry when I have you?” she would say. “I’m never going to love anyone the way I love you, Lucas, so what’s the point?”

  She had perfect pitch and an unbelievable mental recall for song lyrics, and so she would often burst into song in public places to embarrass me. She would sing “Danny Boy” through the door when I was on the toilet. Once, she kept up an Irish brogue for four days, though I begged her to stop and even started crying at one point. And yet, she was everything to me. Once Grandma Sylvia was dead, she was literally my only family in the world.