When I was ten, I was walking home from the playground with my friends Hillary and Shira, along with Shira’s nanny, a tired Irish woman whom I saw more frequently than Shira’s parents. I’d known Hillary and Shira since preschool—we lived in the same neighborhood and played together often—but Hillary and I were much closer than either of us were with Shira. We were best friends and fixtures at each other’s houses; she’d often come to New Hampshire with my family or I’d go to Martha’s Vineyard with hers. Shira could be bossy and a little mean, but her parents regularly pressured us into including her—or worse, spending time with her alone. Shira often made fun of me for not doing well in school. She also reported the things her parents said about me, such as their surprise when she’d told them that I wanted to be a zoologist—they couldn’t believe I wanted a career with such a complicated name. They thought their daughter was too good for me, but I was one of her few options.
As we made our way home, Shira’s nanny asked if I had any siblings, and I told her that I had an older sister.
Shira perked up. “You had a brother, too. But he’s dead.”
“No, I didn’t.” I laughed and looked at her nanny. “I didn’t have a brother.”
“You did,” Shira insisted. “My mom told me.”
I was used to Shira making proclamations or correcting me with an adult’s authority, and I knew that she lied. We all did, if we wanted to win an argument about who owned the most pairs of jeans or to make one of our fantasies sound real. Shira was a mermaid like Madison in Splash because she ate shrimp with their tails on; I was a witch because I’d asked my cat Mischa if he was a witch’s cat, and he’d winked. But we lied about ourselves, not each other. I knew what she’d said wasn’t true, but I didn’t know how to prove it. I could call her a liar, but I couldn’t call her mother one.
“I did not,” I said again. “Stop.”
“You did have one,” Shira sang. “You did.”
Her nanny moved between us and said, “That’s enough, girls.”
There was something different about this lie: the outrageousness of the claim, the tone of Shira’s delivery, her mother’s involvement. It lingered among my thoughts until it was replaced by more immediate concerns, like what snacks were at home and watching ThunderCats.
Grandma Helen came to visit a few weeks later. One afternoon, she, my mother, Alexandra, and I were goofing around in my sister’s room, trying to recite a television commercial for long-distance phone service.
“Talk to your mother,” my mom said.
“Talk to your plants!” I shouted.
“No!” My sister laughed. “Call your mother, call your brother.”
Brother! The word summoned the memory of my conversation with Shira. I turned to my mother asked, “Did I have a brother?”
The question flew from my mouth like I was merely asking what time it was, but it landed with a thud and sucked everything in the room to it, including people’s smiles. Alexandra, my mother, and Grandma Helen exchanged uncomfortable looks. My grandmother and sister left the room, and my mother joined me on the edge of the bed.
I didn’t like what was happening or how it was happening: really slowly, but also really fast. The air was churning. I wanted to grab it and force it to be still.
“Yes,” my mother said slowly, “you had a brother. His name was Yuri. He was born after Alexandra, while we still lived in London. He died two months before his first birthday.”
I shut my eyes, found the edge of my sister’s mattress beneath her sheets, and held on to it. I thought I’d mastered my unsteady environment by teaching myself to expect disasters and danger, and to never relax. But that had only been training, and not a very good one. My mother had revealed that my immediate world was much bigger than I thought it was. It had a place, maybe many places, that I didn’t know about. They’d always been there, I just hadn’t been able to see them.
She guided me downstairs to her bedroom. I lay on the unmade bed while she collected two pictures of Yuri—one from the top of her dresser, another from its bottom drawer. The photograph on her dresser had always been there. In it, Yuri was around six months old, and Alexandra was offering him a red block as my mother beamed between them. I’d asked my mother who the baby was when I was very young, and she’d said his name, “Yuri. That’s Yuri.” She didn’t tell me that he was my brother or that he was dead. In the other picture, the one I’d never seen, he was only a few days old. He was asleep in a hospital nursery, and my sister was peering down at him through a large window. I recalled a picture in my sister’s photo album of my mother smiling over a double pram, and realized that Yuri had to be the other baby. He hadn’t been hidden from me, exactly, but his true identity had never been revealed.
I looked at the photograph that I’d seen before. It had changed. That baby was now my brother. I was older than he’d ever been, but I was his younger sister. “Brother” didn’t seem like the right word, since we’d never met. My sister had a brother, not me.
My mother explained that Yuri had died from pneumonia. She and my father were very sad when he died. My father had cradled his body and whispered “My son, my son, my son” as he wept. They’d been worried they wouldn’t be able to conceive again. “You were our miracle baby,” she told me. “Your father was hoping for another boy, but the second he held you, he was just so happy to have another child.” She stroked my hair. “We didn’t tell you about Yuri because we didn’t want you to feel like you were a replacement.”
She explained that she’d told Shira’s mother about Yuri, assuming they were talking in confidence. She wondered why Shira’s mother, a therapist and professor of psychology, thought it was appropriate to share the information with her daughter, who had “such a big mouth. But you shouldn’t be mad at Shira,” she said. “She didn’t know what she was doing.”
If there had been less agony in her voice, I might have been proud to be such a thing, a miracle, me. But I didn’t want to be one. I was so sad for Yuri. I wanted him to be alive, and I wanted to be normal. A dead baby was terrible; it should have been impossible. I felt haunted by his presence as well as his absence. He was there, and he wasn’t. He’d always been there, and I hadn’t known. I didn’t want to know about him. I wanted things to go back to the way they were before I’d asked my question, back to a way they’d never actually been.
We both cried, but I wanted to be the only one who was upset. My mother’s pain indicated yet another world, one that was hers, one I didn’t want to be in. If she needed comfort too, she wouldn’t be able to take care of me. If she was that vulnerable, I was even more helpless and alone than I’d previously felt.
She told me that she was still sad about Yuri and thought about him every day. Then she shared a story. She’d once accompanied my father to dinner at his colleague’s house in Zimbabwe. Afterward, the men went to smoke cigars and discuss work and politics, while the women drank tea and talked. The hostess complained that her maid was taking time off because she’d lost a child. My mother suggested that this woman might have some sympathy for her employee, and the woman said, “These people are used to losing children. It isn’t a big deal to them.”
“I wanted to strangle her,” my mother said. “To slap her and say, ‘How dare you? A mother never gets over losing her child.’ ” Although my mother loved showing me pictures of her trips and things she collected abroad, she didn’t tell many long stories about what happened when she was away. Once this story had been introduced, it joined the canon.
My father was out of town when we had this talk, and though I assumed that my mother told him about it, he never spoke of Yuri to me. I found myself looking for Yuri over my shoulder, wondering if he’d always been following me, hiding under my bed or in my desk at school.
On a Sunday morning a few months later, while my family was spending the weekend in New Hampshire, my mother told me to eat breakfast quickly because we were going to church.
I looked up from my yogurt. “Why?”
“It’s the anniversary of Yuri’s death,” she said. “Try to find a nice shirt.”
I put on a fuzzy green sweater that had once been Alexandra’s, the nicest thing I had in my collection of ski clothes, and zipped up my parka until the old lift tickets scraped my chin.
We went to a small brick church on the outskirts of the closest town. It was more like an office building than Boston’s dramatic churches, which had spires, turrets, and stained-glass windows. It was a regular Sunday service. Families clustered in the middle of waxed pews, and people who’d come alone sat in the back or close to the aisle. I stood, sat, knelt, and said “Amen,” but I didn’t listen to the priest. I thought about how bored I was, and that I was cold, and wondered what we’d eat for lunch. Maybe we’d go to the town’s one restaurant, since it was kind of a special occasion. Maybe I’d be allowed to get a sundae.
My attention was pulled back when I saw that the empty pew in front of me was shaking. I glanced at my father; he was clutching the back of it and convulsing with grief, his mouth contorted by gasps and groans. His pain was louder than my mother’s had ever been. It wasn’t pleading; it was violent. I shrank against the pew, horrified by his transformation. Like my mother’s grief, his also scared me, but in a different way. Hers made me think that she might not be strong enough to ever be relied on, but his made me wonder what else he could do to me.
When I looked at him after the service, he was back to normal, but I knew that whatever force had overtaken him could come back. I thought that if I could examine his insides as I had my own, the X-ray would reveal that a calcified deposit of melancholy held his body together and not a frame of bones.
We didn’t go to the restaurant. We drove the twenty minutes back to our cabin and each claimed our own space. I sat in the loft where my sister and I slept on the long, checkered futon that Velcroed together to make a couch, and put a book I’d already read in front of my face.
Thinking about that morning in church made me so uncomfortable that I batted its images and sounds away as if they were flies. I tried to do the same with the conversation I’d had with my mother. I didn’t want to think about that, either. All I knew was that a change had occurred because a truth had been exposed. Not only did I have a dead brother but my parents had secrets, and I didn’t know everything about the world we shared. We were operating with different maps. Mine had blank spaces, entire continents I’d never heard of.
My life was the same, but I was different. I was listless and morose. I didn’t attach these feelings to learning about Yuri as a person, my brother, a fact or event. I didn’t attach them to anything, so they grew without my help or awareness as I wandered through my days. My father still yelled at me about homework, but my reactions, and my efforts to make him happy, were dulled. Only my headaches were sharp.
A few months later, when I was in fourth grade, I found myself alone in the girls’ bathroom. After I peed, I looked over the white walls. They were bright and blank. I’d never seen anything on them, no scrawls or stickers. I found the short pencil I had in my pocket and wrote, “I hate me,” in small letters next to the toilet.
I was working at my desk that afternoon when my teacher crouched next to me and whispered for me to come with her. I followed her into the bathroom and the red stall I’d occupied earlier, where she silently pointed at the wall. I’d already forgotten what I’d done just a few hours ago.
I froze. I’d done something really bad. My teacher was mad. She’d call my father, he’d be madder, and I’d be in trouble.
But my teacher wasn’t angry. She put the toilet seat down, sat on it, and opened her arms, then nodded when I hesitated. I got on her lap and exploded into tears. When I calmed down, she asked why I hated myself.
“Because I’m stupid.” I sniffled.
“You’re not stupid,” she said.
I insisted that I was.
She shook her head, then took out a long pink eraser. She placed it in my hand, then watched as I made what I’d written disappear. I never told my parents what happened, and they never asked me about that incident. But soon I was taken to a hospital for an educational and psychological evaluation, the first of many I’d receive over the next few years.
As the three of us sat in a waiting room full of families and wooden toys, I tried to guess what was wrong with the other kids. Eventually a cheerful doctor arrived and called my name. Long, shiny hallways led to a series of small rooms where I was told to copy drawings, memorize sequences of shapes, and list as many words as I could that started with the letter F in one minute. Several doctors casually asked questions about my feelings and my family.
I found the results of this evaluation when I was cleaning out my mother’s house. It gave detailed descriptions of my performance—I was able to identify single words up to a seventh-grade level on an oral reading test, but my active working memory was well below age expectations. It listed my different learning disabilities before going into a psychological assessment.
Anya, herself, is a very fidgety ten-year-old girl…She described in some detail how she cries when her daddy yells at her. She states that when dad is away on business trips, things are much quieter and that he yells at her too much for having messy handwriting. She states that sometimes she is scared more when her mother is out of the house, not for fear of any type of abuse, but rather that father would yell more at her. Her specific wish was that her father not yell at her and that she had more friends and better handwriting…She also felt that she felt sad more than other children and also felt that many other children were smarter than she was.
This lucid articulation of my unhappiness was devastating when I first read it. Typed tightly on a page I could hold, a page I knew my parents had held as well, those words chiseled me back to child size and soaked me in the terror that spilled out whenever I’d heard my father’s voice. They also soothed me. I hadn’t retrospectively fabricated or embellished how I’d felt as a kid from an adolescent or adult perch.
Doctors also spoke to my parents, who told them about my headaches and about Yuri. The report stated,
Prior to Anya’s birth, parents had another male child who died in infancy. That fact was kept confidential from Anya until just recently. Approximately three to four months ago, a friend told Anya that, in fact, she had a brother who died.
I didn’t know if I’d brought up Yuri when speaking with the doctors, or if my parents had told them. The evaluation simply states that I told the doctor I found out about Yuri from a friend, and that I went to church with my family on the anniversary of his death.
It continued,
Anya admits to being sad at times, but does not have any persistent depression that lasts for any longer period than a day. She admits to spontaneously crying and stated that “everybody likes to pick on me.” She has transient self-destructive ideation and has thought about hurting herself with either a knife or jumping into water, although she has never made any attempt to hurt herself. Notably, most of these thoughts were several months in the past and she currently denies any active suicidal ideation.
The doctors concluded that there were
many potential psychological dynamics that may impact on Anya’s headaches. This would include the report that Anya perceives that her father yells at her too much, that Anya was told about her brother’s death after such a long time, as well as potential intrinsic depression characteristics that Anya has evidenced in the past.
I didn’t associate my sadness with Yuri. To me, everything was about my father.
I was put into therapy immediately. My therapist was probably in her forties, but she seemed far older, ancient even, like a witch, not because she was wrinkled or hunched but because she was so cold. Her questions—“How are you feeling,” “Tell me about your father”—were clinical and flat. I answered her as if I were being quizzed. I was honest but not open. I sat on my hands, swung my legs, and looked around the room and tried to do “well,” but I didn’t understand what talking to her was supposed to accomplish. She met with my sister once, and with my mother, and once with all three of us. If she met with my father, or with my parents together, I didn’t know about it. She was fixated on my brother’s death, seeming to think that was what was causing my headaches and depression. I didn’t argue and say no, it was my father. I didn’t think she’d believe me.
I stopped seeing that therapist after complaining that I didn’t like her. My mother told me she didn’t like her very much, either, and took me to another one, a man who was animated and liked to watch me play games. Though he was friendly, I felt the way I had with the first therapist: confused about why I was there and what was supposed to be happening. I never left therapy feeling hopeful or more prepared to handle my life. But I suppose some part of it must have been effective, because without my noticing, I stopped having headaches and didn’t have to visit so many doctors.
The following year, the Bank of Boston dissolved their Middle East and Africa division. My father was given a chance to find a domestic position within the bank, but he couldn’t find one he liked, so he started a consulting company. He no longer needed to take the long trips I depended on for the breaks they gave me. He was always around and was usually grumpy and short. His focus on finding clients and generating income became a sort of shield. He paid less attention to me and my homework, though I knew I could still do something, many things, to make him snap, and acted accordingly.
My mother left her job at the Sierra Club and began teaching ESL to adults in the workplace, so there was some money coming in. She loved teaching and told me stories about her classes. I pretended I wasn’t interested because I didn’t want to be interested in anything about her, but I liked hearing about her students—Cambodian refugees who became nurses, Iranian physicians who’d had to become janitors—and their questions: the best way to address a boss’s spouse, what to wear to a work party, if Halloween was devil worship that would corrupt their children.
If my parents fought about money, I didn’t hear them, but my mother worried about it in front of me. She told me that our family’s income had plummeted, but that our expenses were increasing. My sister would be in college in a few years.
My father spent two years trying to establish a consulting business before finally finding a job with a company in Saudi Arabia that suited his background and interests. My mom had been pushing him to look for a “real job,” but she told him he couldn’t take this one. I didn’t know what the job was, only that if he took it, he’d live in a compound, and when we visited, we’d live there, too.
My mother was incensed that he was even considering taking the position and told him that she’d divorce him if he accepted the offer. She tried to get my sister and me on her side by telling us a story we’d already heard many times. In the seventies, my parents were detained at the Riyadh airport when security found a small, old bottle of whiskey in my father’s camera bag, something he’d probably swiped from a hotel mini-bar. They shouted at him as he apologized and explained that he wasn’t trying to smuggle alcohol into the country, he’d simply forgotten he had it on him. They rummaged through his suitcase and found another.
“How many more?” the officers shouted. “How many more?”
My parents were held separately for hours. Every thirty minutes, a sneering man would come into my mother’s cell and tell her that she would never see her husband again. They were only released after the American embassy got involved. My father accepted the job in Saudi Arabia despite her threats, but my mother never had the chance to make good on them.
During this time, the Soviet Union began experiencing seismic unrest. Like many of its other territories, Ukraine was agitating for independence. In 1990, the Soros Foundation offered my father a job as one of the directors of Ukraine’s first national bank, and he took it instead of the job in Saudi Arabia. His plan, he told us, was to spend two years in the position. He’d come back to America for a few weeks every few months.
My father didn’t tell me why he was working in Ukraine, and I didn’t ask. He was gone, just like I’d always wished. There was much more space around me and in my head. The difference in my life was so great that I often thought about him dying; if that happened, I’d be rid of him forever. I imagined his funeral and how sad my mother would be. These fantasies made me feel guilty, but they were also thrilling.
I didn’t consider how my mother felt, or how his departure changed her life. After twenty-three years of marriage, her husband was gone. He wasn’t away on a business trip; he’d moved to a country where he could rarely make international calls, and where he couldn’t be called, even though he lived in the nicest hotel in Kiev. My parents mostly communicated via fax. My dad’s came in the middle of the night. The machine’s screech and buzz reached me in my bedroom and snapped me awake. In the morning, I’d find a note for my mother so long that it reached the floor and curled into itself.
I was happy, or could have been happy if my life hadn’t also suddenly gone in a new direction. The year my father left, I started middle school. I’d failed to test into Boston Latin, the city’s best public school, and because my parents feared I’d “get lost” at another public school, I’d applied to a bunch of suburban private schools and was rejected by all but the worst two. My parents decided that I’d go to the one that was coed and that I’d repeat sixth grade instead of going into seventh. They told me I wasn’t prepared to be a seventh grader at this new school, where I’d have science and foreign-language classes for the first time. They also said I was too small to go into seventh grade. I was small, but I didn’t grasp why that mattered. I protested, indignant about the decision and that it had been made without me, and at my parents’ dismissive response: “You’ll be fine.”
After commuting for forty minutes on the subway and then walking a mile, I entered my new school boiling with a mixture of defiance and insecurity. I wanted to be everyone’s favorite friend, but I also wanted to shun my peers because I was older than they were. I wore my favorite jean jacket, which I’d covered in Guns N’ Roses patches and pins, and was delighted when I heard the other girls talk about the New Kids on the Block. It gave me the perfect opportunity to roll my eyes and establish that I was the sophisticated one from the city.
The students were the first rich suburban kids I’d ever met. They went to expensive summer camps, had lots of clothes, cared about having boyfriends and girlfriends. I could ride the subway by myself, which none of them were allowed to do, but I was totally unequipped to survive in their world. I’d arrived with an attitude that I hoped would elevate and protect me, but they had a Machiavellian understanding of social dynamics and power cultivated in basement rec rooms. At my old school, where almost everyone in my twelve-person class had been together since first grade, there were no cliques; everyone, at least all the girls, were friends. At my new school, girls paired off instantly so they’d have a best friend, and no one chose me. I had thick glasses and hopeless hair, and was both too eager to be liked and too obnoxious. I looked and acted like everyone’s least favorite little sister; I wouldn’t have chosen me, either.
Sixth grade the second time around was full of rejection and judgment as bad as my father’s. Previously, his voice had been the only one besides my own telling me I was terrible. School was the place where I could usually avoid it. But I quickly understood that home was now my refuge since he was gone, and school was the place to hide.
Other students gleefully told me that I was ugly and weird. They ganged up on me in all the ways kids do at that age, making fun of me for not having breasts and for loving heavy metal, and I became twitchy and apprehensive. Sometimes I’d have a friend for a week or two, but they’d always drop me and I’d again find myself alone. Every day when I arrived, I wondered if something had changed the night before, if a new alliance had been forged over a series of phone calls and given me a new fate. It usually had, and I’d wander between classes with what felt like a fatal case of the left-outs.
I hadn’t ever fought back against my father because I was too afraid of him, and though I was often in trouble, it was rarely because I’d done something on purpose. I was getting yelled at enough; misbehaving wasn’t worth it. Once he left and I began having so many problems at school, I felt I had to rebel against my enemies, new and old.
I didn’t do my homework, picked fights, violated the dress code, failed tests, and received weekly detentions that turned into full-day Saturday detentions where I had to clean the cafeteria. When I finally got some friends and a little bit of power, I became just as cruel and conniving as the kids who’d terrorized me as our alliances continually shifted. I’d be swapped out when a cooler prospect had showed interest, or when someone’s parents, having heard that I might be a bad influence, warned their child away from me. I’d try to insulate myself by recruiting anyone I could, and found boys to be the easiest gets. I flirted with them, hoping it would help. But some of them—particularly those who were similarly ostracized—wanted to be my friend anyway, so all that did was start rumors that I was a slut.
My mother begged, then yelled at me to do a better job on my homework, to get along with people, dress normal. I begged, and sometimes yelled, that I wanted to go to another school. I told her how mean the kids were. How miserable I was. But she was convinced that I was the source of all my problems. Every time I reported someone’s cruel deed, she asked me what I did to cause it. What was I doing that made the kids not like me? Why couldn’t I just dress and act like everyone else?
I couldn’t be like them because I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to be. I liked different music. I wasn’t rich. My mom didn’t drive me to school or to the mall. I wanted to be myself, but I also wanted my classmates’ acceptance as much as I had wanted my father’s. They made me feel like a mutant. I tried to pretend that I didn’t care and was mean when I thought it could help. But I walked the halls nauseated, knowing that at any moment someone would tease me and I’d have to force myself not to cry. I was sick with the expectation that girls wouldn’t let me sit with them at lunch, or that they’d laugh when I spoke in class.
At the end of the year, I started seeing the school psychologist. I loved her because she let me talk endlessly about my problems with the other kids and didn’t blame me for my problems. Talking to her was my favorite hour of the week, and I continued to see her for the next two years.
When seventh grade came, the majority of my classmates had their bar and bat mitzvahs. Suddenly, I had to be out in the suburbs on weekends for a service in the morning and a party in the evening. Even though my classmates had to invite everyone, I was excited to be included and to have the chance to redeem myself by showing I was likable. But my mom refused to drive to the suburbs twice in one day, so she only drove me to the evening celebrations. I didn’t want to go to temple, but I knew it was wrong to only go to the party because my friends’ parents always commented that I’d skipped the service. When I explained this to her and begged her to please, please get me to both, she told me the drive was too long, and added that it was ridiculous that my classmates’ parents were throwing such extravagant parties for their children, with booths where you could record your own music videos, chocolate fountains you could dip Twizzlers in, and personalized cameras already loaded with film. I believed she was being selfish and making my life harder when I badly needed her to help make it easier.
I’d never owned a party dress, and since my mother refused to buy me one, I begged a friend in eighth grade to loan me hers. I knew I couldn’t wear a dress more than once, and agreed with my mother that the ones I was loaned, or looked at in stores, were too shiny or covered with too many rhinestones. But I also wished she’d just buy me a stupid ugly pretty dress so I could fit in for once. When she refused, I used birthday money to buy a tight black Betsey Johnson dress, which I hoped would be more successful at telegraphing my coolness than my jean jacket. However, what it seemed to tell my peers was that I was officially and undoubtedly a slut.
The word stuck this time, though I didn’t know why. Sure, I dressed kind of “slutty” and flirted with boys, but I wasn’t doing anything beyond making out with them. In a way, I liked the word. It made me feel dangerous and exotic, more complicated than “weird.” I’d been veering toward goth, and being a slut gave me the final push. I wore low-cut velour shirts, spray-painted my shoes, piled on the makeup no one else was allowed to wear. I dyed my hair red, then blond, then maroon. I was frightened of actual sex but interested in the power I could have over boys.
I liked pushing boundaries, but I wasn’t good at dealing with the name-calling and rumors that resulted. I wanted people to like me, and when they didn’t, I became impulsive, then explosive. I’d had to swallow so much rage in front of my father; I couldn’t hold it in anymore. And since he was gone, I felt free to express all of it, but I wasn’t in control of what erupted. Anger at him, at my mother, anger at everyone and everything.
One weekend, I had a friend over. Chloe wasn’t very cool, but I was happy to have a friend for a bit and liked that my mother didn’t like her. I’d gotten some fireworks on a trip to New York, and I decided that we should light one and toss it out the window.
My mother heard the noise and started screaming my name from the kitchen. Chloe and I went downstairs and found my mother cooking. She yelled at me about how dangerous what I’d done was. I knew she was right. If I’d bothered thinking about it, I wouldn’t have done it. But I hadn’t. I apologized, but she wasn’t done. She turned her anger on Chloe, who was standing silently next to me. “You always do something bad when she’s around.”
I was incensed that she’d attack my friend. “It was my idea,” I said. “Not hers.”
She didn’t seem to hear me. Her eyes were fixed on Chloe, who was looking at the ground.
“It wasn’t her fault. Apologize to her,” I said.
My mother refused, and said that Chloe needed to call her parents and have them pick her up. Chloe looked at me nervously.
I felt protective of Chloe, who like me wasn’t popular with kids or their parents. I knew my mother was echoing things she’d heard before. “Say you’re sorry.”
My mother said no.
There was a long knife on the counter next to a stack of carrots. I picked it up and pointed it at my mom.
“Say it,” I hissed. I held it firmly while my mother and Chloe stared at me. It made me feel powerful, as did the terror twisting my mother’s face.
“Put that down,” she said quietly.
Again, I told her to apologize. I needed her to make the situation right. “Do it.”
She did. I placed the knife back on the counter. Chloe’s parents picked her up, but my mother didn’t talk to them. I spent the rest of the night in my room blasting Mötley Crüe and feeling satisfied. I’d gotten what I wanted. I could hear my mother talking on the phone in the quiet between songs and felt safe knowing that she wasn’t talking to my father. She couldn’t get in touch with him. We never spoke of that incident, and though I’m sure she told my dad about it, he never brought it up. Neither did the school psychologist. I took this to mean that I’d successfully asserted my power, and I thought I was done with being bullied. Years later, I learned from Aunt Arlene, my mother’s sister, that my mother had told her, and many other people, about what I’d done, and that I’d terrified her.
When my father swept into town after weeks in Ukraine, he saw that our lives in Boston were continuing in a way he didn’t like. Alexandra had started college in western Massachusetts, so it was only the three of us. He’d try to impose order, reinstate the rules and structure that my mother had abandoned. He didn’t care that my hair was always a different color or that I wore pounds of dark makeup and combat boots, but he hated how bad my grades were and that my mother was obviously not doing enough about it. He’d tell me when I had to be home and when I could or couldn’t go out, reminding me that I wasn’t actually free of him. I raged to myself when I encountered his obstacles, but I suffered them because I knew they’d disappear when he did.
I still didn’t know anything about his job. I didn’t ask what he did; instead, I asked my mother when he was leaving. I also didn’t ask about the strange things that appeared in our house, including enormous boxes of kupon, the interim currency that my father helped develop to replace the ruble. Inflation in Ukraine was so rapid that the kupon was near-worthless upon printing. It looked like Monopoly money and was barely more valuable. My sister and I would throw fistfuls of it in the air and at each other when she was home on break, fill our claw-foot tub with them so we could bathe in money and pretend we were the richest kids in the world, and try to pay with them at the 7-Eleven down the block.
That year, my father left his position at the National Bank of Ukraine after a year and a half. When I asked my mother why, she simply said, “Corruption.” Instead of returning to Boston as he’d promised, he established the first venture capital fund in Ukraine with the help of one of our neighbors, David, who ran such funds in China. My father promised my mother it would only be a few more years of back and forth. His plan was to make the fund successful enough that he could manage it from Boston.
In eighth grade, life at school became particularly bad after a new friend I’d had for almost a year turned against me and went after me ruthlessly. She and another girl took markers to the bathroom and wrote all over its walls and stalls that I was a slut; the school had to close the bathroom for a week so it could be cleaned. The following month, she stole my copy of the script for a play I was in and wrote the same thing on its pages. Teachers I spoke to said they couldn’t prove who did it, and I knew better than to tell my mother what was happening, so I walked around feeling the way I had as a kid—like an open target. It didn’t matter that I had some friends. Nothing made me feel safe. I assumed this was what life would always be like for me.
At the time, I had an obsessive crush on Josh, a boy in the ninth grade. Lots of girls had crushes on him, but mine was the most obvious because I followed him around and giggled whenever he spoke. One day, I noticed that people were staring at me more than they usually did as I walked between classes, and that the high-school girls laughed whenever I passed them. I grabbed a friend and demanded she tell me what was happening. “People are saying you gave Josh a blow job in the library,” she said quietly. I was more shocked than hurt by the rumor. I’d never even seen a penis in real life, and I didn’t want to. I’d given my summer boyfriend access to my whole body, and he’d used it happily, but even when I was naked, his jeans stayed on. Unlike the many others I’d endured, this rumor had traction, and by the end of the day, I was summoned to the principal’s office.
The principal and I were already enemies. British and in her sixties, she’d come to the school that year. She’d tried to be nice to me, but I refused to be nice back. I sat on her long floral couch as she pulled her chair out from behind her desk and sat down across from me.
Finally, she said, “I suppose you’ve heard the terrible rumor going around.”
I burst into tears. I was mad that I was crying in front of her, but it probably helped her believe me. “I didn’t do it!” I said.
She asked if I knew who started the rumor. I told her I figured it was the high-school girls who always made snide comments about my clothing.
When I was finally calm, she told me that she was going to call my mother. “Please don’t,” I begged. “It’s stupid. She doesn’t need to know.”
She told me she had to.
After school, I walked into the living room and threw down my backpack. When my mother spoke my name from the couch, I groaned. I dragged myself over and sat as far away from her as I could. “Your principal called.” When I didn’t speak, she continued. “She was so upset. She told me, ‘I can’t even say the word.’ ” She started to laugh, but caught herself.
I crammed my face into a pillow. “I didn’t do it.”
My mother nodded. There was nothing either of us could say that we hadn’t said before.
I didn’t understand how alone my mother was, or how she’d come to resent my father’s absence during this period until months later, when she mentioned that she’d once called him to vent about my behavior, though she didn’t say what I’d done to prompt the call. She was excited that she’d actually been able to reach him, but he’d interrupted her rant and said that he had tickets to a concert and didn’t want to be late. “He has a life there now,” she told me sadly. He’d created a world for himself that didn’t include her. She was solely responsible for dealing with me and all of my problems.
I understood the extent of the distance between them when I found a fax he sent her for Mother’s Day in 1993.
Hi! We don’t have any real contact with the U.S. calendar here so it was only this morning when several U.S. types got together that someone mentioned that yesterday may have been Mother’s Day. If that is the case, please accept deep and humble apologies for not having properly noted this important day!
Be it hereby duly noted and proclaimed that the finest, sexiest, and generally kinkiest mother in the world is one said Anita Kieras Yurchyshyn. A pillar of strength and inspiration to her daughters, an awesome source of love, support, and erotic dreams to her husband and a general source of liveliness and linguistic communications to the community.
We all respect her deeply and love her intensely. Happy Mother’s Day!
Love, George
When I read it, I was annoyed at my dad for forgetting a holiday that may have been important to her, but I couldn’t comprehend how hurt and invisible she may have felt.
Since I was still struggling with my schoolwork, my teachers and my therapist recommended I be evaluated yet again. The report, which is covered in my mother’s illegible notes, stated that I was there for issues with “spelling, behavior, fine motor difficulties, and peer relationships.” My school had told the doctors that I was
extremely hyperactive and impulsive, demanding of attention and sulking if deprived…explosive behaviorally, and appeared to have difficultly separating her personal preoccupations from class activities. Her teachers have hypothesized that attentional and emotional issues are combining to make it difficult for Anya to learn and function at age-appropriate levels.
The report stated that I had
mild to moderate levels of depression. She indicated she felt sad and discouraged about the future. She indicated she does not enjoy things the way she used to, expects to be punished, and has thoughts of self-harm but she would not carry them out.
After a day of tests, doctors determined that I had ADHD, and I was put on Ritalin. Because I often didn’t eat breakfast, the medication made me nervous. My schoolwork didn’t improve, but my behavior did because I was too anxious to interact with anyone.
My mother and sister visited my father in Ukraine for a few weeks that winter while I stayed with friends so I wouldn’t miss school. They returned with stories of empty supermarkets and department stores, and brown tap water. They’d seen churches, gone to the ballet, and visited artists in shared apartments or storefront galleries, but they hadn’t liked it. My mother said it was a terrible, depressing place and swore she’d never move there. I hadn’t known that was an option, and was glad that although it could be, it still wasn’t.
She returned to Ukraine a year later and took me with her. I was fourteen and had just dyed my hair black, and was living in overalls and men’s T-shirts. I had zero knowledge of or interest in the political and economic changes that were sweeping the region. The trip was a chore. I was annoyed to have to see my father and abandon my friends and free summer days for even a few weeks.
We arrived at the hotel where my father had lived for three years, having chosen, like most foreigners, a place that usually had heat and hot water, unlike even the nicest apartments in Kiev. The nodding staff said hello to my mother, then looked at me with shock before forcing smiles onto their faces. They said something to my father in Ukrainian. He laughed, said something to them, and then they all laughed together.
He saw me looking at him with suspicion. “They said they didn’t know that my daughter was a mechanic.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said you’d be here for three weeks and could look at their cars anytime.”
I rolled my eyes and stomped to the elevator.
My father’s room was a suite. He used the large living room as his office. Towers of papers stood on his desk and on the brown carpet, and modern paintings, which he’d been collecting, leaned against the wall because he’d already hung the others he’d bought and there was no room left. He had a small TV and a VCR and three videos: Dick Tracy, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Madonna’s Truth or Dare. My father was a huge Madonna fan—he even bought her controversial book, Sex. When I asked why he liked her so much, he told me that she was a very smart businesswoman. I watched the videos at least a dozen times, and when I got bored, I watched American and European movies on one of the television’s few channels. All dialogue seemed to be dubbed by the same Ukrainian man, regardless of the age or gender of the person speaking the lines.
My mother and I trailed my father out of his room for meals in the hotel’s staid restaurant. Every time we sat down we were handed a menu, but after the first morning, we understood not to bother reading it. The waitress would tell my father the one or two dishes they were serving that day: usually boiled noodles and kashi for lunch; boiled noodles and kashi with an unidentifiable meat cutlet for dinner.
Kiev seemed overcast even when it was sunny. No one smiled. The roads outside the city were littered with cars. Some were wrecks that had been stripped. Some had been abandoned when the driver ran out of gas, and those, too, were missing tires, bumpers, even doors. We visited old wooden churches and spent a few nights in a resort that wasn’t yet open in the Carpathian Mountains, where there were only a few other guests. We went to Lviv, which I grudgingly agreed was interesting and pretty. Somehow I ended up hanging out with a group of local girls my age—perhaps they were distant cousins, or friends of some distant cousin—and we went to a decaying amusement park where I bought us all tickets and Popsicles, as I’d been instructed. My parents didn’t bother taking many pictures of me during the trip, and in the few they did, I’m scowling.
When other Westerners asked about my impressions of Ukraine, I’d say, “Ukraine’s awful!” I’d get them laughing with stories of choking on the random chunks of bone in a gray pork patty, or how once, when my father’s driver Igor was cut off on the road while he was taking my mother and me to a church, he sped up so he could cut off the other driver and forced him to stop. Igor grabbed a crowbar from underneath his seat and leaped out of the car as the other driver approached with a pipe. Igor forgot to put the car in park, so we started rolling backward and screaming until Igor abandoned the fight and ran after us. I couldn’t imagine why my father—why anyone—would choose to be there. Most of the Ukrainians I saw looked like they’d be thrilled if they could leave. But my father seemed happy. He looked like the people I saw on the street and spoke their language.
I was able to leave my school for a public high school when I reached ninth grade. My first semester, I received D’s in a number of classes and got suspended for skipping, but found there were a few things I cared about. I became a sex educator for a nonprofit, and began giving talks at schools and community groups, and also got very involved with my school’s drama program. I was as committed to ignoring my academic responsibilities as I was to ignoring any demand my mother made. I no longer asked to do things; I either told my mom I was doing them or just did them and dealt with the consequences, which were rare. She let me smoke pot and have my boyfriend in my room with the door closed. She’d never been strict, and I didn’t question why she’d become increasingly lax. Whenever she tried to corral my behavior, I lashed out like she was trying to leash me.
One morning, I encountered her while I was about to leave for school in a velvet blue crop top. I was surprised to see her; she still slept through the mornings like she had when I was a child.
She grabbed my shoulder. “You can’t wear that shirt to school. It’s barely a shirt! Go change.” Her voice was firm, but she was calm.
I told her that I wouldn’t.
She said that I would.
I’d grown so accustomed to an absence of rules that being told what to do seemed like an outrageous injustice. I brought my face to hers and snarled, “Fuck you.”
Her smack was hard and fast, and the one I retaliated with equaled its force.
We glared at each other. I was appalled by my behavior, not hers. I mumbled “I’m sorry,” ran to my room to switch shirts, and stuffed the one I’d wanted to wear in my backpack so I could change into it at school. As I ran to the subway, I kept seeing my mother’s stunned face. She’d looked so tiny and vulnerable when I’d hit her. I knew I was responsible for the awful thing I’d done, but I tried to find a way to blame her for it.
When I came home late that afternoon, my mother was on the phone. She chased me down and handed it to me. I found myself listening to my father telling me how terrible I was for hitting her. Surprisingly, he wasn’t yelling; he was just trying to explain how wrong it was. I handed the phone back to my mother, then “ran away” to my friend’s house. Her mother, who knew mine, rolled her eyes when I told her not to tell my mother I was there. Later that evening, she found me and said, “Your mom says you can come home whenever you want tomorrow.” I understood this to mean that my mom wanted time away from me—not that I’d bullied her into giving me more space—and that made me feel even worse. I didn’t care that she’d hit me. I thought I deserved it. As angry as I was with her in that moment, and had been for years, I believed I’d made an unforgivable transgression. Smacking her felt worse than raising a knife to her. I hadn’t bothered regretting that. Seeing how sad and weak she’d looked when I’d hit her made me feel sorry for her.
When I came home the next day, both of us pretended the previous morning never happened. I was still sick about what I’d done, but I couldn’t make myself apologize again.
The following summer, we took a family vacation to Italy. My mother, sister, and I flew from America while my father flew from Ukraine. My parents had rented a villa in Tuscany with their old friends from England, Sue and Martin, whom I’d met in London a few times on family vacations and adored. My father was in a good mood. He never yelled, helped Sue with the cooking, and took long walks with Martin. But my mother’s energy was sour, and she picked fights with my father whenever she could.
Over dinner, Sue asked about their home in Boston. My mother turned to my father. “Is that still your home?”
He looked at the table. “Of course.”
“Is it? Are you returning there with me and your daughters when this wonderful vacation is over?”
“Anita.”
She glanced at Sue and Martin. “Ask him about Anya’s last report card. Ask him how Alexandra’s sailing team is doing—”
Sue interrupted. “How about some dessert?” She brought gelato from the kitchen and a stack of bowls. My mother poured herself more wine.
When we got home, my mother began spending most weekends at our New Hampshire cabin, and my friends and I, including my new boyfriend Eli, quickly got used to reigning over the empty house and its many bottles of vodka, which my father inadvertently supplied when he returned to Boston from Ukraine. We called it “Ukrainian Death” because even when there wasn’t a drawing of a pepper on the label, even when we mixed it into extra-large cherry Slurpees, it seared our lungs and made us howl. I’d toss a Duraflame log into the fireplace, fill coffee mugs or paper cups with vodka, let people smoke packs of my mom’s cigarettes, and watch my friends make out or mug with our statues. I fed them and made sure they puked in appropriate places, and they did the same for me. If the Duraflame was still burning when we needed to pass out, we’d throw water on it. When that didn’t work, we brought it out to the sidewalk and beat it with a shovel.
Christmas that year was stiff with tension. My father flew back from Ukraine, but nobody wanted to be there. Alexandra and I went to our rooms early on Christmas Eve because we couldn’t stand to watch our parents not fight when they so clearly wanted to.
Early next summer, when I was sixteen, my father came home again for a few weeks. One Sunday morning, I wandered into the living room and announced that I was going out with Eli. School was almost over, and Eli was going to Ecuador for a community-service program. We wanted to spend the day together.
My father casually declared that I wasn’t going out, and said I should be doing homework. When I explained that I didn’t have any, he said I should be studying because my grades were bad. My grades were bad, but I didn’t care. I sputtered out excuses and pleas until I shattered and screamed “I hate you!” at adolescent level ten. “You can’t stop me!” I ran to the bathroom and got into the shower.
He followed and yelled at me from the other side of the bathroom door, telling me that I wasn’t going out. With shampoo streaming down my face and shoulders, I told him that I could do whatever I wanted, that he didn’t live with us anymore. After repeating ourselves at an increasingly loud pitch, my father charged in.
The room was filled with steam, but the shower door was clear. Terrified, I retreated into the corner and tried to cover myself. My father seemed almost as shocked as I was to find himself there. He tried yelling some more, but my voice prevailed as I told him to get out get out get out until he did.
I finished my shower as quickly as I could and ran to my room, where knee-high piles of clothing spilled into each other. I was crying when my mother found me and was embarrassed to be caught. I didn’t know if she’d heard what happened in the bathroom. I didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t want to have to tell her.
She sat down on my bed, a thin futon on a piece of plywood propped up by cement blocks. It wasn’t comfortable, but I thought it was cool, the kind of bed I’d have if I were a junkie or didn’t live at home.
“You can’t tell your father that you hate him,” she said gently. Her skin was shiny and her pores were large. I looked at the few patches of gray carpet that were free from clothing, which were dotted with black and maroon hair-dye stains. “You need to apologize.”
I told her that he needed to apologize, and said that she should have interfered with our fight. “Why don’t you ever help me?” I asked. “You never did when I was little. You just let him yell and yell, even though you knew I was miserable. You should have protected me.” It was the first time I’d voiced the thought that had been bothering me since childhood.
My mother was quick to correct me. “I did protect you,” she said. “Don’t you remember the time I took you and Alexandra out of the house after your father came down particularly hard on you? We stayed with my friend Lili for a few days.” I didn’t. Like so many of her other stories, this one didn’t produce the reaction she wanted. Instead of concluding that she was a good mother, I was left thinking, “Yeah, but you brought us back.”
Sensing that her story hadn’t done what she’d hoped, she abandoned it. “I talked to your father. He’ll let you go out with Eli, but only if you apologize.”
I couldn’t tell if that was her requirement or his. I weighed my desire to have him apologize against my desire to go out, and went down to the living room.
My father had taken his place at the table. His shoulders tensed when I came in. I said, “I’m sorry I said I hate you.” I got ready and left.
Eli and I had a great time, and when we were together I tried to forget about everything that had happened with my father. But when I was back home, I was overcome with anger. I couldn’t get rid of the wild fear I’d felt when he’d burst into the bathroom. He was my father, and a stranger, and someone I hated. A person who respected me and what I wanted so little that he would come in while I was naked because he needed to keep yelling at me. I was certain I’d only be safe when he was gone.
On his last day in Boston, my father, my mother, and I stood in front of the house and waited for the cab that would take him to the airport. My mother smiled and wished my father a good trip. He thanked her, and their faces met for a quick kiss.
I wanted my father to leave, but I didn’t want to have to hug him goodbye, although I knew I had to. It was one of the things that had to happen before he left, a step that had to be taken. It was what was done.
It was easy to get my arms around him, but it was difficult to touch him. The hug I gave him was quick and cursory, a light squeeze and my cheek against the stiff wool of his thick, black coat.
That’s what I remember, but it couldn’t have actually happened—the part about my cheek against his coat. It was summer, so he wouldn’t have been wearing that coat. That’s the one I always saw him in; it’s who he was. But that day, he was probably wearing a thin navy suit or a blue short- or long-sleeved shirt. So my face didn’t touch his coat; it touched something else or was scratched by his gray beard.
I hugged him because I had to, but then I did something I didn’t: I told him I loved him. I was horrified to hear the words and see them floating over his shoulder. I wanted to stuff them back into my mouth, to return them to whatever place they came from, a place I didn’t even know I owned. I felt dirty and confused, like he had something on me. I’d lied, and I didn’t even have to. He didn’t respond. He just got into the cab and left.
I settled back into my life of smoking weed, hanging out with my friends, and working at the drugstore down the block. I didn’t think about his coming back. What I thought about was losing my virginity.
Eli was everything I wanted in a boyfriend. He had dark hair, blue eyes, a scar on his cheek, and a devious grin, and was desired by all the other girls but was somehow mine. He was enough trouble to be exciting but loving enough to be safe, a guy who was so ultimately good that his bad was merely fun. He’d skip class sometimes, but it was usually because I had a free period and we wanted to make out in the grass of the nearby nature preserve.
We decided to do it on the Fourth of July, two days before he flew to South America. My bedroom was too chaotic to be romantic, so we opted for my sister’s, which she’d mostly emptied before going to college. It was on the top floor, where the air was thick and still. The room was dominated by a single piece of furniture—a rickety white particleboard twin bed that was attached to an empty bookshelf unit.
Our house was near the Esplanade, the center of Boston’s Fourth of July festivities. A stream of people was making its way to the celebration down the street, and their voices reached us through the open window as we readied ourselves with Slurpees mixed with Ukrainian Death. The noise outside and the creaking quietness of the room made us feel far away and invincible.
Our skin was sticky, faces pink, tongues red. I lay on my back and looked at the spires of the enormous Gothic church across the street, where’d I’d spent mass every Wednesday in grade school and every Christmas. I wasn’t thinking about God or guilt. I was just thinking it was pretty, that it had always been there, and that I was finally going to have sex.
We fumbled with a condom, then another, and another, but between our nervousness and the Ukrainian Death, we just couldn’t do it. We gave up and went onto the roof and watched what we could see of the fireworks while swearing we’d get it done tomorrow.
We did, on a waterbed that belonged to some lady naïve enough to let one of Eli’s friends house-sit for her. It was brief. It didn’t hurt. He told me I was an angel.
Afterward, Eli and I giggled in the dark, wiped the sweat off each other, and looked at our arms in the thin orange light thrown by the streetlamps. When he dropped me off at the end of the night, we said goodbye and held each other. I went into my quiet house and jumped into bed, thrilled with myself and what I had done, and ready to wake up to a new world.