Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“I’m not going to get you confused,” I finally decided to say. “This isn’t just a lark for me. I haven’t felt like this about someone in a long time.”

“Oh, just shut up!” she cried. “You’ll ruin it!” She threw her plum pit at me and burst out laughing.

“No, I won’t,” I said, brushing the wet plum pit off my chest and onto the floor and then lunging for her, tackling her on the bed. “It can’t be ruined! That’s what I want to show you. That’s why I’m talking about it.”

“You’re young,” she said, but she was smiling, a little out of breath, her eyes darting back and forth like she was trying to look in both of my eyes at once.

“I’m young,” I agreed, and I kissed her.

Date: 7/17/2014 4:30 PM

From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

Subject: Another sunset

Dear Fang,

I was very interested in your letter about Virginia Woolf, and I assume it is an olive branch. You always know best how to please me. I accept your gesture of intellectual rapprochement. I think it is very civilized of you. I also know you prefer brevity in writing and so for you to write me pages and pages like that was really impressive. It meant a lot to me. Even though I suspect you just got weed from your cousins and were stoned with no one to talk to. Still, you could have done anything with that time. You could have jerked off to porn of dragons fucking cars, for instance. The Internet makes anything possible.

But for now, lay your suspicions to rest: I am fine. I give you my solemn word.

There have been a few interesting developments here, however.

For one thing, my father says that he might be able to help me pay for college. And I got the sense, Fang, that he wasn’t saying it to get me to like him. It wasn’t a bribe. He was saying it because he genuinely wanted me to be able to go to college.

It just brings up all these possibilities that I had assumed were off the table, and it makes me feel very differently about starting school because if I could get good grades in the fall, then maybe colleges would see that last year was just a blip. I know you probably don’t like the idea of me going out of state. But you could too! I mean, couldn’t you? Why not? Why does everything have to be California California California?

I get so torn, Fang. About humans. About what we are. About whether God exists. Sometimes I am so hopeless about it, and then other times I feel blinded by this realization of exactly what we are. The truth of what we are. The beauty of it.

One part of me thinks I am just a collection of cells and hormones and hair. The idea that I am entirely a Jew because it was my mother and not my father who was Jewish — as though there is a metaphysical baton that she has passed me — well, isn’t it insane? I am equally my father’s daughter, and so half Lithuanian. Or Polish. It is always unclear to me whether we are Lithuanian or Polish. But isn’t Grandma Sylvia’s blood in my veins, too? It seems so obvious now that I am here, my connection to her. I was not aware of it, but I think my whole life I have been pretending he is not my father on some level. I have been pretending that he has nothing to do with me. But he does.

It turns out that Grandma Sylvia was raped by an SS officer and that is how she really escaped from Stutthof. This guy saw her naked when she was in line for the gas chamber, decided he wanted some of that, yanked her out, fucked her, then sent her off into the woods with his coat and some money. Which just goes to show you: Human beings, in the end, are nothing but a bunch of chimps.

And yet. Sometimes something will happen, like my father will offer to pay for college and I’ll think: But what beautiful, noble chimps we are. And it seems like we are more than animals, after all. I still don’t understand what beauty is. What it indicates, exactly. But it must mean something.

Do you think that we are made in God’s image, Fang? What does that idea even mean?

When I was eight, I told my mother I was an atheist. It was ridiculous, really. We were having a fight about the sunset. She said, “Just look at that. So beautiful. It looks enchanted, don’t you think?”

And I said, “It’s just what happens when the sun hits the atmosphere at that angle. There’s nothing magic about it. I read about it in science at school.”

“I’m just saying, there doesn’t have to be beauty,” Mama said.

“Are you saying beauty means something?” I asked. Because I didn’t know what a pretty sunset could possibly mean, but I did recognize that it was an appealing idea. Actually, I was very into the idea of EVERYTHING meaning something. Like, I would look at three candles burning, and I would think: Those three candles represent Dedushka Pavel and Babushka Inna and Mama, and that is why two of them are very short and one of them is long, because Mama still has many years to live and Dedushka and Babushka will die soon.

“I suppose that beautiful things always make me think of the divine,” she said. She was driving me home from piano.

“I don’t believe in God,” I told her. Which, I had never actually thought that before, but it seemed like such a daring and interesting thing to say, I just couldn’t resist.

“You don’t?” she asked.

“No.”

And she asked me why not, and I think I said something lame about how there was so much suffering in the world, how could there be a God who would allow it, if there was a God he was a sadist, basically. I don’t think I used the word sadist. I think what I actually said was that if there was a God, he was the kind of boy who liked to pull wings off flies. Anyway, she said that God gave us minds to question with and that she was proud of me, but that she took my atheism as yet another sign of the existence of God. Which, maybe she just said that to irritate me. That would be very like her. Or maybe she really did see it as a sign of God’s existence. Maybe it was this whole stupid conversation that made her want to send me to Hebrew school in the first place.

My dad wants to believe that Grandma Sylvia being raped is some big meaningful event, some kind of mystery that sums up all of human existence, but I am very afraid that it is just another sunset. It seemed like what you were proposing in your letter is that God is a kind of larger collective mind that is using our individual minds as neurons. And that strikes me as the most exciting and beautiful idea of all. I will try my hardest to believe in it.

I’m going to try to go to sleep.

With love,

From Vilnius,

Your fellow neuron in the mind of God,

V

I WANDERED HOME after dark had fallen, worried. I had used Judith’s note as an excuse to shirk my fatherly duties, though on the other hand, Vera was nearly an adult and all she was doing was hanging out with Judith. I guess it made me anxious not being able to use my cell phone. What if she had needed me while I was at Susan’s? What if something had happened? When I got to the apartment, I was relieved to see that Vera was already back and painting her toenails at the kitchen table. Judith had not been lying about coming home early.

“How was your night?” I asked.

“Where should I start if I wanted to read some Virginia Woolf?” she asked, not looking up from her toes. She was painting them black, or some version of brown-red that was nearly black.

“Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse,” I said. “Why?” I assumed she and Judith had been talking about Woolf for whatever reason.

“Fang said I should read The Waves, ” she said, looking up finally, and screwing the little cap on the nail polish.