Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

I had never imagined Grandma Sylvia arising (and I did in some way picture her as not born, but arising, thrust upward out of the sea foam) from a place so complicated or so multicultural. My feeble imaginative powers had been spent on the details of her escape from the camp, the brutal years as a rebel in the forests, her voyage to America. About her life before these things I had pictured — what? Sheep? A butter churn? It was a joke. I had not even really considered what it meant that Grandma Sylvia was Polish, nor had I understood that when she was a girl Vilnius was home to so few native Lithuanians. “There used to be a saying,” Darius told us, “that in Vilnius the façades were Russian, the interiors were Polish, the streets were Jewish, and the ghosts were Lithuanian.”

I was slowly coming to understand the implications of a history I had always technically known: that Poland and Lithuania had once been one grand combined state, which was part of why both Poles and Lithuanians called Vilnius home. In fact, many Poles considered Lithuania just a special, rather mysterious and pagan part of Poland, while many Lithuanians saw themselves as culturally assimilated and repressed. Darius, quoting somebody, had said, “Poland is like a pretzel — everything that’s good about it is in the outer crusts, and inside there’s nothing.”

I had always imagined Grandma Sylvia as a victim. It was startling now to frame her as an oppressor.

Walking around the real Vilnius made me suddenly consider questions I had not ever bothered to ask: Did Grandma Sylvia get along with her parents? What had her parents even been like? To whom did she feel closer, her mother or her father? How had the German occupation changed her daily life? Had she continued to go to school? How long was it after the occupation before her family was picked up, just a matter of days, or did it take a while for the Reich to get organized and assess their enemies? The whole thing seemed realer to me now in a way I could not have anticipated.

But I avoided the subject of Grandma Sylvia with Vera. I had not told her the true story of Grandma Sylvia’s rape birthday, and I suppose I was afraid that I would accidentally reveal something if we talked about her too much. The truth was that I wanted to tell the story to Vera. To me, it was the piece that made all the rest of the portrait make sense. It was the heart of the mystery. But Katya had asked me expressly not to mention it.

“She has issues about rape,” Kat had said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. This put me immediately on edge, worrying that it indicated some kind of psychological stress I had been completely unaware of. Since when did Vera have issues with rape?

“She gets obsessed with it. It started with that damn movie, you know the one, with the long rape scene and the girl is dressed as a boy? It was a big dramatic thing this winter with her English teacher because Vera tried to write some paper on rape. Oh, it was garbage, Lucas. Something like if there is no such thing as free will then rape is not a crime. She spent forever on this paper, it was thirty pages, well researched too, but very much insane. The teacher flunked her and after that Vera refused to turn anything in. Just don’t mention it to her. It’s the one thing I ask.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” I asked. I knew that Vera was failing all her classes, but no one had said anything about an obsessive term paper about rape.

“I called you about it,” Kat said, “but you said, ‘Call me in the morning when you are sober.’ ” She did a mean imitation of my voice, a doofus Southern California accent.

I remembered the night she was talking about. Katya had called me, quite drunk, saying that the genes for mental illness came from my side of the family. Somehow, since Vera’s initial episode, Katya and I had managed to switch places: She had gone from not believing a word the doctors said, claiming that Vera was just going through a phase, to worrying daily over Vera’s medications and attending support groups for the parents of mentally ill children. If anything, I got the sense that it was the Christian elements in Vera’s manic episode that had gotten to Kat. It creeped her out. The stuff about reading from the book of Revelation. Trying to baptize the cheerleaders with liquor. That her daughter was even reading the New Testament was disturbing to her. Vera’s doctors, meanwhile, had referred very casually to Vera’s tendency toward delusions of grandeur. I don’t think they used the phrase “messiah complex,” but that was what they were talking about. Vera was now lumped in with the boy who masturbated onto images of the cosmos, and this bothered and upset both Kat and me in our different ways.

“Why not Moses?” Kat asked. “If she must have a messiah complex, why not at least have a Jewish one? It’s like Christianity seeped into her through the groundwater. Or maybe through Fang.”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to be agreeable while not actually committing to any of these hypotheses. I didn’t exactly want to point out the fact that I was Catholic and Vera’s father, since Katya didn’t seem to be making the connection. But it made me feel even more responsible for Vera’s condition than I already did. It seemed obvious that the Christianity, if it had “seeped in” from somewhere, had seeped in through me.

“You know what I think it is? I think Judaism is more about questions, whereas Christianity is more about answers, and so when she gets confused — it’s a place to go.”

“Mmm,” I said. But I didn’t really think that was it. I actually didn’t think there was a profound reason why Vera’s mania had resulted in such a Christian outburst. I suspected it was more coincidental and arbitrary than that. I had noticed this, about the people in her group therapy: Their delusions were often painfully stupid. They never believed the FBI was following them. It was always Dick Tracy, or some other equally absurd figure. It was Mickey Mouse who told them to stop brushing their teeth. Something about the way your mind made connections when you were in that state had a random, chaotic element to it, as far as I could tell.

But as Kat became more and more convinced of Vera’s illness and committed to her care, I became less and less sure of anything the doctors said. It wasn’t that I doubted Vera had some kind of brain chemical imbalance — there was no getting around the video of her that night, her claim to be God’s daughter. When they had breathalyzed her, she came back completely clean. She hadn’t even had a beer. So there was no other choice but to believe that she had a problem. But even if I believed that Vera had a problem, in fact, especially if she had a problem, there was no possible chance that Dr. Carmichael was going to have the solution. It was also painfully, visually obvious that the medication she was on was poisoning her: She’d gained thirty pounds in a matter of months, her skin was bad, her hair was falling out in a big patch in the back. She slept all the time. It was a nightmare.

“You didn’t say anything about a paper,” I said, “you were accusing me of having the genes for mental illness!”

“But that’s what I was going to tell you about.”

“How could I have known that?”

“She had come home, so angry about getting this F, and I said, well, let me read the paper. She threw it in the trash. I picked it out and read it later that night. Lucas, it was insane garbage. No normal person could write this. That’s when I knew.”

I nodded, trying to be sympathetic. I had heard as much in her voice that night, the despair that I had felt in the beginning, the panic that it was true, that Vera was really mentally ill.