Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

It was an interesting point. I didn’t want to bring up the other hypothesis, the one that Justine had introduced into my mind, that the guard had been moved not by Grandma Sylvia’s beauty but by pity. There was something terrible about pity, something dirty and terrifying about it, that I did not want to discuss or bring to Vera’s attention. Instead, I asked a question.

“Why did you write that term paper, Vera?” I asked her. “Why were you even thinking about rape? I mean, what was the assignment?”

“Oh, rape wasn’t the assignment,” Vera said. “That was part of why she failed me. I have no idea what the assignment was supposed to be, but I figured, like, ugh, it’s just a hoop to jump through, you know? They want you to do a certain amount of work and show you know how to format a bibliography, but then she got almost like personally offended that I hadn’t done the assignment.”

I nodded. Sometimes when I tried to picture Vera interacting with the world, the real, official, boring world, I got a nervous, almost giggly feeling and it made me want to cover my eyes with my hands. God only knew what that teacher made of her.

“But I guess it was just a way for me to think through what happened to me at the mental hospital.”

I reached across the table for her hand. “What happened at the mental hospital?”

“Oh, chill — no!” she said. “I wasn’t raped. I mean, like, sexually. But there are things you can do in this world that make other people decide you don’t have a right to your will anymore. I didn’t have a right to choose when I wanted to eat, when I wanted to sleep. I didn’t have a right to think my thoughts. I didn’t have a right to feel my emotions. It was the most complete form of rape imaginable. I didn’t want to take that medication, but they would make me. If I tried to resist, they would hold me down and inject it into me with needles.”

“So talking about rape was your way of talking about all that?”

Vera nodded. “But I mean, I don’t really believe that — that there is no such thing as consent. Obviously there is. It’s just in a different class of being, than, like, trees and rocks and stuff. I mean, consent is, like, fairly imaginary.”

“What?”

“Consent is just a nice idea. Like freedom or liberty. Or justice. It has reality and importance as an idea. And we should strive to make our real lives mirror those invisible ideals. But at the same time, you know, it’s not real like gravity. If consent were real the same way gravity is real, it wouldn’t be possible to rape anybody. Or maybe you could, but it would be much harder, I think.”

While what she was saying was uncomfortable, and could possibly be construed as wildly offensive, it was still intriguing. That was the thing about Vera. She was always coming at things from an unexpected angle. “Listen,” I said, “I just can’t shake this feeling that Herkus’s mother was the product of that rape. With the SS officer.” I told Vera what I had pieced together with Herkus and Justine the night before.

“But you don’t know for sure,” she pointed out. “And what does it matter anyway? Might as well let him believe his mother was the child of the forest husband.”

“But it just makes too much psychological sense of why she would leave the baby, why she wouldn’t want to raise it herself.” I was also aware that I was upset about something I would never have said to Vera, which was that I was upset that the Nazi had been evolutionarily rewarded for raping Grandma Sylvia. He had snuck his way into our chain of being. His genes were threatening sweet Herkus from the inside. It was an insane idea, I knew this.

“Maybe, and maybe that’s why she left the baby,” Vera said, “but there’s no way of knowing for sure.”

Still, it occurred to me that there was a way of knowing for sure. I knew the date of Grandma Sylvia’s rape birthday, had known it my whole life, had eaten cake with her on that day when I was a child. All I would need to piece it together was some idea of when Herkus’s mother had been taken to the farm, what her birth date might be. If they were nine months apart, then I would know.

“Yeah,” I said, “but doesn’t that just seem like too much of a coincidence? She gets raped, has a baby, but the rapist isn’t the father?”

Vera shrugged. “It’s not as easy to get pregnant as all that. You’re only fertile, like, three days a month.”

But it was as easy as all that. I thought of my own mother and father, who’d had sex only the one time. I thought of myself and Katya. Sometimes it was incredibly easy to get pregnant. Sometimes the stars aligned just so. Still, statistically speaking, Vera had a point.

“Did you know that chimpanzee males rape females all the time?” she said.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Fang and I watched a documentary. I put it in my English paper. And the male chimps kill the babies of their rivals so that the females will be fertile again quicker. So to deal with that, the female chimps mate with as many males as they can so that there will be confusion over who the father is.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

She shrugged. “They commit genocide, too. Just like us.”

She looked so grown up these days, with her clear skin and new clothes. But I was worried about her. I was worried about what being in the mental hospital had done to her. What it had cost her when none of us believed her.

“You know, Vera,” I said, “all your, you know, ‘delusions’ were really just metaphors taken a little too far, but they were good metaphors. The blue light on Fang, the rotting cheerleaders — all of that was insightful. There is way more to life than being cool in Rancho Cucamonga. And we really are all going to die someday. But if you focus on that, it will make you go crazy.”

“So you’re saying don’t think about it?” Her disdain was quick and cutting.

“No,” I said, “I’m saying — I don’t know what I’m saying. Just: It’s part of our obligation to go on living and wanting and becoming. I used to not understand this — how could Grandma Sylvia, after all that, how could she move to goddamn California and become a housewife, of all things! How could she possibly do it? But that’s what you do. That’s the heroic thing to do: To choose to be happy. To take your kids to Disneyland. To drive your station wagon through the orange groves and let the past go. ”

“I’m sorry, Papa,” Vera said, “but I just think that is really very stupid.”

I thought maybe she was right. Maybe it was stupid. But possibly because I had eaten so much fried dough or else because there was a sleepy magic to Trakai, I didn’t worry too much about whether I was right or wrong. There was no way, sitting there at that lake, looking at my daughter, to second-guess myself. I could only think the things I thought, just as the dragonflies could only be dragonflies buzzing. I shrugged. “I’m just saying, Vera, now that you’re not insane, what are you gonna do with your life? Are you gonna go to college?”

“Don’t even talk to me about college,” she said, her voice bitter like the words tasted of pennies. “Nowhere good will take me now.”

It was true that the public universities of California had become almost impossible to get into in the last decade. In order to be accepted as a freshman you had to have perfect grades, extracurriculars, the whole nine yards. Even B students had to spend a few years at a junior college before transferring in. And her grades this past year — they would be a lot to explain. “You could look at private schools,” I said. “Or go out of state.”

“With what money?”

“I could help with money. I’m sure my mother would help. We could take out loans. We’d patch it together.”