“You do!” she cried.
Just then, the waitress came and I ordered us both moules-frites, myself a beer and Vera a lemonade. I did like them chubby. Honestly, I liked them all. I liked them any way they came. Blondes, brunettes, white girls, black girls, skinny girls, fat girls, I liked them all. I thought my friends who had a very narrow definition of a woman’s physical attractiveness were insane. And as much as I had failed to want to marry Amanda with the proper urgency, and as profoundly relieved as I had been by our breakup, she had still inspired in me a tremendous tenderness that made me not want to talk about her to Vera anymore. There would be no explaining the lovely creatureliness of Amanda to Vera. Vera was not capable of that kind of soft, mammalian sentiment.
“So how was that guy, Daniel?” I asked. “Is he really a pirate, or does he just wear the shirt?”
“Shut up,” she said.
The outside patio where we were sitting was pleasant, and we were brought a bowl of delicious rolls. The beer, when it came, was very good.
“Did you love Mom, ever?” Vera suddenly asked me. Her face was painfully earnest and I was confused: What else could Vera think? That I had never loved Katya?
“Of course, I loved her,” I said.
“The way you felt about Amanda?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “The way I felt about your mother was much more serious than the way I felt about Amanda.”
“It was. So then — what happened? Why did you leave?”
I was baffled. I had never expected this question from Vera because I had thought the reasons for Kat’s and my split were out in the open. There was nothing secret about them. On the other hand, I had no idea what Katya had told her. I had always assumed that she had told her some toned-down version of the truth.
“Well,” I said, “at the time, we were living on a commune, and we were very young. We had run away from home. And Katya wasn’t getting any kind of prenatal care. Not even from a midwife: nothing. And she wanted to have the baby, I mean you, naturally at the farm. And I just got panicky that we were doing the wrong thing, I guess.”
I paused, took a sip of my beer, waiting to see if that would be enough.
“So why didn’t you guys just leave the farm and stay together?” Vera asked.
“Well, your mom was really mad at me. She was very mad at me. And I had, I guess, betrayed her by calling my mother and telling her where we were. So then she wouldn’t speak to me. After she was back at home with her parents, she wouldn’t speak to me when I called or answer any of my letters.”
Vera stared at me, considering this. A large black crow cawed from somewhere overhead, and at the table next to us a boisterous Dutch man and his much younger mistress began laughing.
“We discovered that we were really different people,” I said. “And I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be.”
Vera nodded. “So you’re saying it’s all her fault?”
“God, no,” I said. “It was no one’s fault — it was inevitable. It was the kind of thing that couldn’t be avoided. It was a calamity, like an asteroid hitting the earth or something. It was nobody’s fault.”
But I was lying. It was definitely my fault. It had always been and would always be my fault.
Chapter 4
Date: 7/11/2014 5:47 AM
From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com
To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com
Subject: Destined to return to Putin
Dear Fang,
Why can’t I sleep??? Ugh. I just lie here in my creepy room that smells like tea bags and scroll through news stories on my phone. Fucking Putin is insane. Like, I think he is literally mentally ill. I finally did sleep for a little while, only it was like the difference between Pringles and actual chips, like someone took sleep and then put it through a horrible industrial machine, made it into a paste, and re-formed it and baked it into a shape that was supposed to look like sleep but was not anything even close. Then I woke up at 4:00 a.m. because THE SUN CAME UP. That’s how far north we are. The fucking sun came up. It is five in the morning right now, and it is as bright as midday outside. I even got up and got dressed and wandered around outside for a while, but nothing was open. Papa is still snoring like an ogre next door. Why do old people snore? Is it because the cartilage in their nose hardens and becomes a big grumpy whistle? Or is it just because they get fat? I think it is because they get fat.
I’ve been thinking about what I wrote you before, about being a bad Jew and about not really being Russian. Growing up I never wanted to be American, but I think what I really wanted was to be like my mom. I mean, Fang, she was so beautiful. She is beautiful now, but when I was a little girl, I was just in awe of her. She kept her hair long then, and it was so heavy and thick and shining, I would pick it up off her shoulders and I swear it weighed like three pounds. When I was seven and eight she was only, what, twenty-five? Twenty-six? Anyway, she was so into being Russian, and I think it was natural for me to mimic that. But — I mean, why didn’t she ever start identifying as American? She never did. She’s lived here almost her whole life, and she still acts like maybe it’s just temporary. Or, no. It’s not that, because she would never go back to Russia. I think it would terrify her, to go back, even to visit. It is more that being Russian is a way she has of being better or more interesting or more internally conflicted than other people. And I wanted to be like that too. The less American I was, the easier it would be, I thought, for her to love me. And I needed her to love me because there was no one else to do it. No father or brothers and sisters, I mean.
I wound up having an interesting conversation with my dad about why he left and it’s funny, the story he told was almost exactly the same as what my mom had told me, and yet it seemed completely different. Basically, my mom had always said, “He was afraid to have a baby,” like, Ugh, men, they are so afraid of commitment, but we women must wade into the gory blood and guts of life without hesitation because that is our destiny.
But my dad was really being kind of REASONABLE, Fang. I mean, she was wanting to have me on this farm with no doctor or anything, and she hadn’t had any prenatal care and they weren’t talking to their parents, and he just got freaked out and called his mom. He was only eighteen. He was one year older than I am now. I can imagine many different scenarios in which I would get freaked out and call my mom. But my mother always acted like it was this unpardonable sin. And to her, it really was. But they could have patched it up, you know? I don’t understand why he didn’t just try harder. Didn’t he know her at all? He must have understood that some phone calls and some letters apologizing weren’t going to do it. He needed to show up at her house with a guitar and flowers and stay on his knees singing her love songs from her driveway for three straight days. That’s how my mom does shit. Surely he knew that?
Anyway, I’m thinking of telling him what really happened the night of my episode. I think he would believe me. We’ve gotten closer on this trip. I have no idea how I am gonna bring it up or when I am going to say it, but just: Wish me luck. You know, we really should have told my mom in the early days, back when she still thought it was all a big mistake. But I never imagined she’d start to believe that I was really sick. I never imagined she would turn. I was so confident that she would go on believing me, it didn’t seem like there was any point to admitting it.
OH MY GOD, a cat just jumped into my room. I am not kidding. I had opened my window because it is sunny today and the breeze was nice, and the roof is at a really steep angle, like, literally if I sit up in bed, I will hit my forehead on the roof, so the window is in the angled part of the roof and a cat jumped through and then walked over to me on the bed and now its sitting here and looking at me. What do I do?