It’s hard to write about the things we don’t like to think about. You know you have to, eventually, “sort through it,” but you can’t think about it today. You’re busy today. You need to accomplish something and now is not the time to go there. You imagine a time in the nearby future when you will be less busy, when you can pencil in thinking about it. But there’s no right time. It shouldn’t have happened. You can’t reconcile that happening in conjunction with the life you have now. They don’t fit. You can’t think about that while you’re living this. But in doing that, in not thinking of it at all, you give it a world of its own. There’s a whole universe that orbits around just not thinking about it now. And that isn’t right either. What I’m trying to say is, it’s hard for me to think about 2003.
But 2003 is now a compact, neat little decade ago. It has that crisp, full-circle feeling we subscribe to decades. We can compartmentalize the politics, pop-culture, or fashion of that age in a prim little unit and study it from a safe distance now. It’s the past. It’s so over. //
In 2003, two girls sat in very big, very empty house in a dry valley smack dab between Los Angeles and San Diego. These two girls were physically very similar, and 5 years apart in age.
The sweet neighbor boy from church would watch them sunbathing as he mowed his front lawn across the street. Being the sweet and unassuming boy from church, he would think that they were sisters and that the oldest one must be home from college. That’s why he hadn’t seen her before. He would think that maybe they fought sometimes over nail polish, but they got along alright for the most part and the dad loved them equally.
He would assume that the family in the house right next to his, solely by proximity, could not be too terribly different from his own. They all lived in the same neighborhood with timed sprinkler systems, perfectly manicured lawns, households that owned an SUV and a sedan in complimentary colors. They all had pools just like he did. The young girls with the father lived in this same universe. He would assume there was common ground.
Still, sometimes, the older girl would lie out on the back pool deck with nothing but sliced cucumbers over her breasts. She would do this while eating raw bacon and talking loudly on her new Blackberry in an altogether foreign language. One day, she had been lying out naked for half the afternoon and the sweet neighbor boy’s mother had called, concerned. Eventually, all the neighborhood kids figured things out, or their parents did, which was definitely worse.
The housekeeper quit when she finally understood the situation. The gardeners, however, became impossible to get rid of. They were very prompt, always lurking, and trying to find excuses to trim any hedge near the pool on the most oppressively hot Friday afternoons. The father didn’t mind much at all.//
“The women at the dentists office can’t get over how gorgeous my wife is, Stephie. They say she’s the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen.”
“When we got together, we decided we wanted the kind of relationship everyone else would be jealous of.”
“I’m very happy with her, you know. Very happy.”
“Galina and I are very happy.”
“She’s 5’8’’ and a model, you know.”
“She was a doctor back in Kiev, are you really going to argue with her?”
“My wife and I are very happy.”
“I’ve always liked ‘em tall but your mom was a dud. I don’t know what happened. Before her I was dating supermodels. I used to point at any girl on the cover of a magazine and that night she’d be in my bed.”//
The word seems so demanding by nature. The weight of their lineage upon you, the expectation, their massive hands big as your rib cage upon your chest in infancy.
And daughters, no simple thing- to have to hear me singing sexually suggestive pop songs before I knew what I was saying and sit there biting his tongue, to wonder if things were “normal” with me without ever feeling comfortable enough to ask.
It can’t have been easy for him to be left with me, a girl , and with that girlish laugh so reminiscent of all his ghosts. The women in his photo albums, some topless, or sprawled upon the hood of a blue car, kittens in the pocket of their yellow coats. I saw the photographs he kept. The women so fresh faced and glassy eyed. Peyote stained images, mistakes looping in his head, other men’s daughters he left curbside or worse. He either doesn’t try to hide it or hides it poorly that he wrestles with attempts to reconcile the man he is now with the man he was.
(Like that night when in a dream-state I got up for a glass of water and found him crying on his knees in the living room, the only light from an old videocassette playing on the tv. He kneeled before me, clutching my robe, rubbed his face into my round, childish belly, smearing me with tears, and begged me to forgive him. I didn’t ask why. I was seven and he told me anyway- that the woman in the tape, the woman he had hired for that evening many years before, had died from too much cocaine in her bloodstream.)
I want, despite all circumstance, to love him definitively.//
Galina arrived wearing an orange peasant style crop top and mutli-colored, vertically striped, drawstring bell-bottom pants she had made herself back in Kiev. Her hair was permed, and it frizzed down to the waistline of her pants, the last 4 inches of it entirely see through from chemical damage. Everything about her appearance, every stitch of thread on her clothing, the blue-ish grey tint to her mostly white teeth, the expression on her face, it all advertised something closely guarded, a stone fist of a self, a hand that could not be shaken, a person not truly capable of introduction or familiarity.
I walked barefoot along the tile hallway and saw her standing by the door alone with her luggage. Galina turned but her eyes scanned right over me. I didn’t notice at the time, but I was an inconvenient footnote to her dream back then. The vignettes of interaction between us make sense to me in little bursts now. Over the next few weeks of being regarded as furniture, I was left only to infer that father had not mentioned my existence to Galina. This didn’t seem like a stretch, because when he left for his business trip three weeks earlier, he had not mentioned Galina’s existence either.
Who is she? Why does she live here now? How long is she staying? How old is she? How did you meet her? What do you guys talk about? Can my friends meet her?
The best way to describe how father handled indoctrinating his new bride into his life, and incorporating her into the family, is to simply say that he did not handle it whatsoever. Nothing was broached, addressed, touched upon, illuminated, or in any sense of the word,
One day the girls stood back to back alongside the kitchen wall. It was one of the first times they even spoke. The youngest had insisted. It mattered. It just did. It was too blatant, the lie Galina kept telling. Surely, he would think so too. Surely, they would laugh together once more at how silly people could be, at what a silly lie it was to tell. Why did it matter if she was five foot eight inches or five foot four inches? What did it matter if she was really a doctor, a lawyer, a supermodel as she had claimed? She knew he would see it too.
I was 5’4” much to my father’s detriment. He was always so fixated upon this image of himself he kept, one in which he was surrounded by supermodels. He saw me as a lesser and quite literally lower currency. As suspected, Galina and I were the same exact height. I smiled, relieved and looked up at him for the kind of conspiratorial laugh we would often share. I met his hard hands like two flat river stones.
“She’s 5’8’’, God dammit!” Instantly, I was back against the bare white kitchen walls with eyes closed tight, bruising at his hand for the first time.
My mistake. Very bad. Worse than I thought. I can see it now, though. That the lie had become so big that challenging the smallest detail would obliterate the illusion.
I realize, now, I could never have won (and also that I didn’t really want to.) He did not want to be protected.
The 17-year-old, 5’8’’ supermodel-doctor had absolutely nothing to do with the frizzy haired teenager I stood back to back with. Truth had nothing to do with it. It was the lie he wanted.
The older girl wore heels every day, every single day, since and the younger learned not to argue.
I wanted to protect my father from the things I heard and saw. My stepmom carried with her a similar girlishness to mine, only perhaps with a bit more bite. Her whims and power struggles, guised with girlish innocence, were almost never so. Like the time she told me, at random, that she would leave my father if he couldn’t get her pregnant, and showed me the myspace of the man she would leave him for.
I went to tell my father, as she knew I would, and left with fresh blood on my lip. He began to see me as a barricade to his happiness. They read my journal together, found things to accuse me of. It was as if, overnight, I had an older sister that my father favored more. I never wanted it to be that way.
I was excited the first few hours after she arrived, hoping for closeness, hoping that my friend’s mothers would no longer have to do my hair in the morning or pack me lunches. Even with my then budding skill of self-deception, I could not convince myself this was to be my life. It was never more obvious to me that my universe had tilted to the left, askew, and if something had to give it would be me who would be thrown overboard. //
I’ve had years to think about why this is, or to be more accurate, I should say I’ve had years to try not to think about why this is. My father paid for me to attend a couple months of therapy when he forgot the real reason I was unable to eat and having seizures. He did that sometimes. He’d forget.
He’d forget about my body curled up in a ball at 6:30 am on the floor of my bedroom, unconscious. Woken up by being kicked repetitively in the stomach, blood spurts from my mouth. Still partially unconscious, so I can sometimes forget too. I prefer to forget. We have that in common.
I want, despite all circumstance, to love him definitively.
Can I do that without telling myself various degrees of lies? Can I do it by forgetting?
How far will I have to take the lies I tell?
Will I stand there, someday, hopefully not to soon but probably sooner than I care to admit, at his funeral, and give a speech where I cry?
Will Galina even be there? Will she see it through? Will she greet me at the old empty house and hold me for the first time? Will she cry? Or will she have boxed up, thrown out, and sold the relics of my past life long before I even get there and evaporate back into the world she came from, 10 years ago, without a trace except the blood bond between my half sister, Lea and I?
She has been in my life 10 years and I still do not know.
Her physical existence is surrounded by a field of blanks.
Who was she before she stood in the hallway of my childhood home and then, a few months later, made me feel like the one who did not belong there?
There was never any explanation.
My therapist attempted, once, to give me one. I never saw her again after that.
At the point in which I began therapy, Galina had arrived two years earlier and had Lea the previous Spring. I had never planned or expected to wind up on my therapists yellow velvet chaise lounge. I was happy when I was allowed to be so, when I was left alone long enough to be in charge of my own feelings. What I really mean is, it was easy to avoid the anger all around me. Yes, my friends mothers had all decided it was “not a good idea” for them to come over anymore “considering,” and I spent most weekends in the empty house, still lacking many staple furnishings despite us living there since before my mom left when I was four. The unfinished curtains she had been making the month prior to her late night escape were still hanging limply from the sitting room window. Despite the few home-touches she made in the six months she spent in that house, it was essentially a bachelor pad. And yes, I spent most of my time there alone (but not lonely), or with Galina and my infant sister, which, for some reason, was lonely.
My mother having made first willing contact with me was the initial catalyst for my visits to the therapist. I started considering an alternate life at a very inopportune time for my father. My sister had just been born, and having a built-in babysitter is every new mothers dream come true, even if the babysitter was me. Galina’s sister, Natalya, and her daughter, Bogdana, had recently moved in with us from Ukraine. I was sharing a room with them. My father had promised to help Natalya find a situation similar to the one he shared with Galina. Many promises were made. Natalaya ended up pregnant two months after moving in with us by a man we knew from church who paid for her abortion and then married her eight months later.
It was not uncommon throughout this period in my life for me to go a few days without being ever directly spoken to. I would walk into the living room to see the four of them, Galina, my baby sister, Nataliya and Bogdana, eating a traditional Ukrainian breakfast. All conversation would cease to a halt, all eyes would avert back to their breakfast foods, and the women would abruptly engage in a prolonged silence until I left the room. As if I could understand them anyway. This was the loneliest period of my life. And my father, I now know, blamed his marital stress on me more so than the birth of his newborn child and the sudden presence of two in-laws whom he was financially supporting. I began to sleep with kitchen utensils in my room, wrapped in my bedding. I would kick Bogdana out and lock the door. I frequently experienced a series of nightmares in which my father, in total silence, would drive me up to the top of a nearby hill and kill me. And these threatening dreams were not solely a figment of my imagination. My life was threatened on a few occasions, in the spirit of jest. The running joke was that I would be “sold.” And my body was frequently and visibly bruised.
“What would you do if it was Lea?”
I asked her once, at an all time low of bodily degeneration, shaking hard like electric jolts. Bright blue around my cheekbone and my shoulders in a summer month when all my friends were out of town- a summer month in which I wore a hoodie every day.
Galina did not look up from her magazine.
She turned the page. My whole body stung, particularly around my eyes, which for the first time were full of tears because of her and not my father. I’d long before accepted that the man I was supposed to face challenges with had become the challenge I faced. I could delude myself into thinking Galina was ignorant of what was happening to me until this moment. I believe she feels regret about this conversation now that she is older. In either case, I walked away, fifteen years old and weighing in at 87 pounds, disgusted with my body and myself.
She continued to read an article about the 5 quickest calorie burning breakfast foods. //
For whatever reason, I was not suspicious when my father insisted on meeting with my therapist (sometimes for up to thirty minutes) directly before I entered sessions with her. It had never occurred to me that, perhaps, he was negating my feelings or emotions by eclipsing my every session. That possibly he had already painted the picture for her, in that convincing yet loveable way he does, and conditioned her to see me as something I was not. In retrospect, the violation of my trust could not have been more blatant.
Still, I ended up there with the palest woman in all of Southern California. And she told me something that I have never forgotten. It was both disturbing and emancipating in equal measure. In a few simple sentences, she clearly defined for me those elusive waning, unreachably nightmarish years of my life. It went something like this:
Your father could not adjust to your womanhood, and therefore replaced you with an equally diminutive, childlike girl he could dote upon. You were undoubtedly the first healthy female relationship he had in his life until this point, and this was only because you were a child. Mimicking the father child relationship you shared is the only way he sees himself having a successful marriage, so he sought out a woman reminiscent of you in your dependent and diminutive state of childhood upon whom he could superimpose that love.
I want, despite all circumstance, to love him definitively.//
I think the first American purchase Galina ever made defined a large part of her late teens and early twenties. We took her to the grocery store. She asked me what “muffins” were. She followed us silently down the aisles. My father handed her a credit card, told her to pick out something she wanted, dotingly. He meant food, but she came back with a People magazine with Paris Hilton on the cover in a mini skirt holding a little teacup Chihuahua next to her pursed pink lips. She paid for it on credit. Within three weeks, copies of People were littered throughout the house. She had a stack on our back deck by the pool where she would lie in the sun and devour the magazines one by one, ravenously, lustfully, hungry for America.
Seven years later, on that same pool deck the gardeners loved to watch her on, the older girl, Galina, would tell the younger, Stephanie, something true about herself. Possibly the only real moment they ever shared. No one was watching. They didn’t need to be polite.
It was early morning. This was the only time the heat outside was not sweltering and stale to the point of suffocating. It was also the closest thing I could get to feeling alone in the house I’d grown up in one last time.
3 years earlier I’d gotten what I wanted. My father came into my room with a duffel bag and told me to “pack my shit” begrudgingly. “You don’t live here anymore,” he spat. I cried on the floor with relief. I pulled my hair. I prayed.
Now when we discuss that day my father tells me he was debilitated, paralyzed by grief. He felt certainty in his heart that I would end up dead with my mother. He says in the months following my move to my mothers that he barely left the bed and that Galina often spoke of leaving him and returning to the Ukraine. That she spent many nights at her sister’s new husband’s house trying to escape my father’s misery and my ghost. He tells me these things as an attempt to make me feel important, but all it makes me feel is crazy.
I was there, as much as I’d love to believe him, this was simply not how it was. Whatever fondness he felt for me during my absence was epically nonexistent whenever I was around. And it was true this day too, the day Galina and I sat on the pool deck one last time.
It was the first time I had been back home since the day I left but my father ignored me just the same. Our long phone conversations arranging the trip seemed like something I’d hallucinated.
“I love you my sweet angel. I can’t wait to spend time with you.”
The things he said were laughable now. I spent the first two days listening to my ipod by the pool, hugging my childhood dog, while my father worked and my stepmom hid in the bedroom watching reality tv. My little sister attended a very expensive top of the line daycare facility so that my stepmom could get manicures in peace.
I was lying out by the pool with my music turned up, hoping maybe if I got enough freckles they would eventually all connect and give the illusion of a healthy tan. When I opened my eyes and saw her beside me by the pool that day I was startled. I’m still unsure how long she sat beside me in total silence.
I turned towards her and she began asking me trivial questions about my current boyfriend who I was about to move in with- was I happy? Did I love him? Would we marry? It felt surreal, otherworldly, that she all of a sudden took an interest. I was unsure she even knew about us moving in together until this moment. I was unsure how much she knew about me at all.
She turned at me, stoically, but with a sense of urgency and leaned in close, our heads almost touching.
“You must never love the man,” she said, lifting her eyebrows to confirm that I understood her.
“You must only let the man love you.”
She said this as if she was inducting me into some special club of womanhood. It had this air of, “You’re old enough to know this now” to it. But it sickened me to the core. There were no gender enemy lines here. It was my father she was talking about.
What must she consider our relationship to be, that I would take this advice from her? Does she assume I want to be as unhappy as she is? Does she truly believe this to be the ultimate secret to a successful relationship? Was she trying to help me, to save me some amount of time and pain she considered elemental to being in love?
Was she simply fucking with me?
She was my sole role model of femininity from the ages of 12-16. She was enigmatic, manipulative, materialistic, she was naïve, she was in many ways innocent, she was the product of a hard, Ukrainian, male centric culture, she was misguided, she was confused, she was miserable, she was guarded, she was pretending, she was in constant flux. She did not know how to love me and that is not her fault. //
It’s hard to write about our lives when we do not understand ourselves, or the closest people to us in the world while growing up. It’s hard to write about myself, because anyone who could tell me the truth has died, and those who are leftover have been lying for so long, they do not know how to stop. I worry I am becoming more like them.
I decided a long time ago that what others do to me does not make me who I am. But knowing what does not define me has not helped me get any closer to what does.//
It’s interesting that through reading something I put down on paper, people can immediately diagnose me. Total strangers read into some phrase I use like it’s my internal blueprint. And they’re right. They’ve been right long before I knew about it. Some of the people closest to me don’t see it, but in the emotionally sterile realm of academia, somehow, I am exposed. Strangers find it in everything I do. A professor told me once, after critiquing the first 3 pages of a short story I was revising, “Don’t avoid the emotional center.”
He recognized I was doing something good. Or, I should say, he recognized I was doing something bad, but doing it very well. And he isn’t the first person I respect who has told me this, that I do this thing. It is something I’ve attuned and specified in ways to make it an advantage. But it isn’t. It’s bad. It’s bad in writing and bad for myself, but it was mandatory for me to have arrived here, where I am right now, in one piece. I am thankful for it above all else. It’s the one tool that I have attuned throughout my entire life for protection, and it doubles as both my shield and my barricade.
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