Why Can’t I Forgive Felicia Sonmez?
A meditation on cruelty
It’s 1974. I’m four years old, living in Copenhagen because my chemistry-professor father is on a Fulbright trying to figure out why beer gets cloudy after it’s been on the shelf for fifty years. (Answer: enzymes). I’m lonely. I don’t speak Danish, my dad is at work all day and my mom has never really spoken to me, and she wasn’t about to start now.
I sit on a log in our rental house’s front yard and somehow catch a white butterfly. Then I pull its wings off, slowly and cruelly, just because.
I’m bored and I have nothing else to do.
It’s 1991. I’m on study abroad program in Italy with one of the Seven Sister schools. There are seven students, all young women. Six of us are only interested in dating hot Italian guys; art history is an afterthought. The one exception, Elizabeth, was only there for the art history.
Genetically, Elizabeth had been dealt an unfortunate hand. She had an endocrine disorder and as a result, she was very short and very overweight. She had bad skin and terrible eyesight that required coke bottle glasses.
One day she came to school crying.
“What happened?” we all asked, gathering around. We were fiercely protective of Elizabeth. She was already a much better art history…
