Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

He is definitely extremely attractive (don’t get mad) but too clean and upright to be sexy exactly. Probably he has transcended having genitals and has been given some other, more interesting organ instead.

He is also maybe the smartest person I have ever met and I think that it actually causes him some kind of physical pain to explain basic things to us or when someone asks a stupid question.

I think he might have metal instead of bones. That is conjecture, but still, I’m trying to paint a portrait here.

He has an accent and a really nasal voice and it reminds me of Werner Herzog, so you know, there is that wonderful creepy factor. “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” Seriously, that is the kind of thing that Darius could just straight-up say, and because he is the leader or whatever, everybody nods and keeps following him. It is AWESOME.

Update: The being nice to my dad experiment is going super well. He’s totally relaxing and it’s making him way more likable. Sometimes I really wonder: Was he always this way? Did he ever love Mama? Was love something he was once capable of, or was he always just sort of numb and bumbling and like: Whoops, I got you pregnant, so sorry! I just can’t picture it. I can’t picture what she ever saw in him. And I know that at least she did really love him because there was one time when she totally lost it with me in a Macy’s dressing room when I was seven and I was whining about wanting to get a dress that was too expensive and she just snapped and she was like, “You are the reason he left. You think everything is about you, that you deserve everything, but did you ever think about what I gave up in order to be your mom? Did you ever think about everything I lost?”

She never said anything like that ever again, but I never forgot it, obviously. I can even still remember that dress. It was so stupid that I wanted it — it was green taffeta and black velvet, the kind of thing you would only ever wear at a holiday party. I don’t even know why I wanted it except that it reminded me of the Samantha American Girl doll who was like the only brunette role model I ever had.

The other thing I totally forgot to tell you about is the old woman who is also staying in our building, Judith Winter. This woman is my idol, Fang. I want to grow up to be her more than I want almost anything. For one thing, she wears red lipstick and no other makeup, which is a sure sign of someone who knows what’s going on. Also, she just turned seventy and her husband died only a year ago and this trip is her brave foray into the world and her attempt to live a life without him even though they were married for most of her life and he was her one true love. Also, she is a novelist and she has written eight novels and they have won awards. And of course, she is a Real Jew who has lived in Israel and whose husband was studying to become a rabbi but was also some kind of Buddhist priest or something? I don’t know, but shit, it all sounds amazing. She also had a freak-out after the concert and asked me if I had pot because she is a pothead but she couldn’t bring any weed on the plane. I felt really bad that I couldn’t help her out.

All of the Jews on this trip are much Jew-ier than me, Fang. I honestly feel a little out of place. I mean, Dedushka Pavel and Babushka Inna aren’t religious at all, like, at all, and when I was really little we never went to synagogue. In the Soviet Union, being observant would have meant no jobs, KGB investigations, it was illegal even to study Hebrew. They knew nothing about Judaism when they came to America. My mother said she asked them once, when she was a little girl, why they had to be Jews, and they said, “Well, someone has to be, I guess. The way some people are ugly or beautiful, or tall or short. It’s just a misfortune.” And that bothered my mom, I think. She thought they had no pride in themselves, and it was all also caught up with Dedushka Pavel’s coin dealership and him wanting to make money and be American and have a nice car, and my mom hated all that. So then right around when I turned twelve she developed this manic thing of suddenly we had to be Jews! She was going to give me the Jewish upbringing she never had! I mean, seriously, before that I’m not even sure we owned a menorah, though I do have childhood memories of playing dreidel and conning one of my cousins out of all his chocolate coins. And certainly we celebrated Rosh Hashanah.

Anyway, we started going to temple every week and I had to have a bat mitzvah and go to Hebrew school, which I wasn’t that into, to be honest, and it mainly felt like I was playing catch-up because I was so behind everybody else. I was shit at Hebrew, I was really terrible at it, and then I found out we had to do this service project? I was supposed to tutor this girl for a year for free, only I really hated doing it and she hated doing it, I mean — we kept meeting, but I wasn’t trying very hard, and the long and the short of it was that she failed math and it was all my fault and her parents were very, very angry at me. But it was too late to do something else so we just let it slide, but I always felt like I wasn’t really a bat mitzvah. I always felt like a fraud. Which is part of why I stopped going to temple, but also because that was right around when we moved to Rancho and we never did choose a new temple to start going to and whatever phase my mom was going through seemed to have died down.

Sometimes I feel so moved, like at the concert, at that Yiddish lullaby about being chased into the abyss of the world, or learning about the Holocaust, and I think: This is my heritage, these are my people. And it feels authentic. And I feel like it’s important.

And then other times I feel like an imposter and I think: Bullshit. You don’t know anything. You are a suburban little white girl who hasn’t done one single hard thing in her life. You are more of a Californian than a Jew! I don’t know. Is it enough that Hitler would have killed me? Is that enough to make me Jewish? I’m getting weird, I’m sorry. I’ll stop.

Stopping, stopping, stopping!!!

Anyway, it’s awesome that your brother’s band got that gig — I’m jealous I don’t get to go! I am totally fine with you going, by the way, but you are not allowed to dance with anyone and you are not allowed to even talk to any girls who are hotter than me. It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that I’m a reasonable human being, and do NOT let any of your cousins drive, they are always saying they are fine to drive when they are totally hammered.

Okay, I’ve gotta go, I’m exhausted, but FYI, it is almost ten at night here, and guess what? THE SUN IS STILL OUT. Do you see how deranged this town is?

With Love,

From Vilnius,

Your Imperfect Pearl,

V

PS: I left you a note in your underwear drawer. I have been waiting for you to find it, but you have said nothing about it and I am an impatient creature. Please tell me you are changing your underwear regularly while I am gone.

SOME KIND OF HAPPY SURREALITY began to take hold of both Vera and me the longer we were in Vilnius. It took a few days to get into the swing of the program so that we weren’t checking the schedule constantly, worrying we’d missed something, but by day four we were old pros at following Darius around. The routine of it reminded me pleasantly of school, and yet following Darius around was nothing like school. The stories he told us were bizarre and beautiful, and Lithuanian history, which was already complicated and difficult to understand, became a sloppy stew of stories and characters and details in my mind. Vilnius was a city of many peoples: Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Belorussians. It was a city of many languages, of many graveyards, of many histories. Part of what made Darius’s stories so confusing was that Vilnius kept being taken over by different powers, becoming part of first one country, then the next, sometimes changing hands two or three times in a single year.