A former teenager’s story. Ch. 29-34

CHAPTER 29

That summer dads hadn’t taken me to the country for some reason. Or, maybe, they had, but I can’t for the life of me remember that. But I can remember quite distinctly my father living at the villa with us, and mother coming only on weekends. Evidently, father was on holiday while mum was working.

It was exactly that unfortunate summer when I had fallen out of an apple-tree and couldn’t walk for two months after that. Two bloody months I had spent in bed and during those two months I saw still the same four walls, and the same fly-stained tacky chandelier with three lightbulbs, and the same wooden ceiling over my head. I felt I was losing it; besides, almost no one would visit me those days. The girls dropped in just from time to time; and seeing my gloomy disheveled mug sticking out of the blanket was of no interest to them. Yet Sue, surprisingly, would hang around our villa every single day, even though I would see her very rarely and in passing. About her loitering at our place not even coming into my room I knew only from the girls seeing me sometimes.

“Are you aware that Sashka is in the arbor with your father now?” they would blurt out right from the doorway.

“Really?” I answered angrily from my bed, “So what?”

“What do you mean “so what”? Wouldn’t you even like to have a look at what they are doing in there?”

I would pull myself up to the window, but not a thing could be ever seen through the foliage of the apple-trees and plum-trees growing around the arbor. At such moments I regretted that I hadn’t got a wheelchair so I could have used it to go out there and see what was going on. I recalled one movie with a guy who couldn’t walk and hated his wheelchair nearly blaming it for his immobility, and I thought, what an idiot he was. Because a case like that is a lot, lot worse if you have NO wheelchair at all.

I didn’t see – for I just couldn’t – what Sue was doing in the arbor with my father. But, just like anyone else in my place, I felt vaguely suspicious about it. This suspicion, unfounded still, was often enhanced by Sue herself when she visited me in passing:

“Would you like a baby brother or a baby sister?”

I would laugh at the idea as I thought she was joking. Besides, conversations like that didn’t interest me much and I would have rather spoken of something else. But Sue, since that memorable day when we both had been sobbing over One Wonderful Morning song – had shut me out completely. In the daytime she was hanging out at our villa preferring my father’s company to mine. In the evenings she would leave for the community and hang around with the locals, who condemned me. There they would bake marijuana on a fire and, having got high, they would sing dirty songs. In vain I used to plead Sue to cut loose from those guys and to stop messing with them. When I ran out of ways to convince her, she would wince at me with annoyance:

“You know what? You are so boring!”

And, turning away from me, she would approach the mirror, wiggling her **** and singing:

“The needle piercing – my heart, my heart, my heart!
It’s killing me but I feel so high, so high!..”

I couldn’t stand those bawdy songs she’d adopted from the locals and I hated her at such instants. And when Sue finished with wiggling her ass before the mirror and left me for them – I cried with bitter frustration and impotence.

Being sick and immobile I couldn’t know what was going on around me – but I could feel in my bones that something devastating was going on, something bad that would soon ruin everybody’s lives. And I, like a turtle, had hid myself into the shell of my illness not even willing to peep out of it so I couldn’t hear or see anything. I feared to even look through the shuttered window, for I was sure that I would see the reality from my old nightmare – the long pole creaking in the wind and the black flag of disaster fluttering over our home.

CHAPTER 30

That fall my father left the family.

His leaving was quite a shock for everyone – my mother, our friends and relatives… No wonder why – everybody around had used to think our family perfect, and make an example of my parents as a truly stable couple. Even Sue, as she had seen how chummy and close to each other my parents were, how quietly and amicably they did things together, for they had never aired their dirty linen in public – she had used to sigh and envy me, saying how lucky I was to have such a good family while their own folks had long been on the brink of divorce.

And now – it was like a bolt from the blue. All of a sudden. They had lived together for eighteen years, everything had been so great – and there you go.

For all our people my father’s leave was like a bombshell. For everybody but me. Because I was the only one who knew what secret was hidden behind it all. I knew it but I kept my mouth shut. Reader, let me keep it quiet, in this story, too. Let me keep quiet about that heinous and  incredibly disgusting fact that had made my father leave the family – for even he realized that it was the only way out of all that mess he had made.

What’s the saying for it? Age mellows some people, others it makes rotten, right?

While young my father was a four-eyed nerdy swot, and he had never known other women but my mother. If for a woman it is a virtue, for a man it is a shame and disgrace, so men prefer not to share it. And if, in his declining years, such a “virtuous” man takes a walk on the wild side, all hell breaks loose then.

Anyway, our life under the same roof had become an issue. It had become so unbearable that the choice had to be made. One of us was supposed to be gone. It was my father.

That evening I was sitting at the desk in my room and doing my homework as usual, when the scraping of a key in the keyhole had become audible. The sound creeped me out; I could feel in my bones that it was HIM.

I couldn’t stand his presence in the house. Having him around suffocated me and freaked me out. But, happily, right after him my mother came back from work, changed into her home wear and went to the kitchen to make dinner.

“Dinner’s ready!” she shouted out in fifteen minutes.

I sat still in my room even though my homework had long been done.

“Do you need a special invitation? Come and eat!” mother knocked at my door.

“I won’t” I uttered through my teeth.

“What do you mean ‘I won’t’?”

“That I mean. I won’t. Until HE takes out the trash… I’m not going to have dinner with you!”

“Yury!” she called him, “Take the trash out; really, the bin is full!”

“Like hell I will!” father replied not even raising from his chair.

The atmosphere in the house became really tense. The conflict was already unavoidable. I ran out of my room, grabbed the kitchen bin and, without saying a word, I put it in the lounge room, close to my father’s chair.

Father, in his turn, also jumped up, grabbed the bin and, also in silence, kicked it into my room, scattering the rubbish all over the floor.

“What the hell?!”

A moment – and the bin, like a rocket, flew back. Another moment – and father kicked the bin out of the loungeroom again. All this thing was going on in silence, and it looked like we were playing football with the full kitchen bin.

“Are you going to have dinner tonight or not?!”

Mother came out of the kitchen and, as she saw the garbage bin flying around the corridor and all sorts of rubbish scattered on the floor, she clapped her hands:

“What the **** are you doing?! Stop it!!!”

“Yeah, right, stop it!!” I echoed, “Tell him to either take the damn trash out or… go to hell!!!”

“I **** will!!!” father roared.

“Fine! I don’t want a father like you!!!”

“Can you **** explain me now what the hell is going on here?!” mother yelled losing her patience.

“**** you all!!!” bawled my father and, as he pushed her away, he suddenly darted to the TV, grabbed it and, holding it in his arms, ran out of the house like a shot from a gun.

Mother just stood there with her month open and watched him go in silence. Father, in the meantime, as he had dragged the TV down the stairs, came back for the rest of his belongings – and, at a moment’s notice, he threw all his clothes in a sheet, twisted it into a bag which he slung over his shoulder – and off he went.

“So… what’s for dinner tonight? Fish and chips?” I asked her calmly, as if nothing had happened, when the frontdoor had slammed after my father for the last time.

Mother didn’t reply at once. She was still too shocked to speak.

“No, wait… Did you understand WHAT has just happened?..”

“What has happened? Something that should have happened long ago.”

I had long been waiting for his to explode, so I was cool and detached. Which couldn’t be said about my mother. She looked like a fish out of water.

And that was only the beginning…

 

CHAPTER 31

My mother’s life journey had never been just as tortuous as mine, even though she would complain about the hard time she had had with her siblings when she was a child and how hard she had found it working while studying and fighting for a place under the sun in the big city. Telling me such things she stressed that I was very lucky to be born the only child not having to compete with feisty siblings, and living in Moscow, in the horn of plenty. Back in my childhood, as she had noticed in me some markings of a smart, gifted person, she would say that I had every opportunity to achieve whatever I wanted provided I wasn’t that lazy and inactive. But, maybe, precisely because I was born “an only child living in the horn of plenty” I turned out to be totally inactive. And, you know that if one lacks activity and one’s biggest flaw is laziness – being smart and gifted doesn’t really matter.

But, maybe, my laziness was no more than the weakness of a groundhog wanting to stay in his warm hole. Maybe it was just my fear and insecurity. Lack of confidence. For, to feel secure and confident one needs to have a source which I didn’t have.

Whatever it was, in the horn of plenty or not, life beat me down worse than my mom. At least, when young I experienced a lot more traumas than she did. She lived quite a good, successful life: she finished school, graduated from a university, got a job, married my father, bought an apartment in Moscow. Everything in her life was as it should be – smooth sailing. When she was young she had no idea how a real ****up feels – for example, when you get rejected or betrayed every now and then. Or when you get broken and defrauded. Or just dumped by your significant other.

Now you’ll say she hadn’t had that experience simply because she’d had no time to dwell on rubbish – her studies, work, family and daily routine would consume almost all her life. She had never known love and heartbreaks. My father had never cheated on her or stolen from her (because she’d had nothing much to steal), and he had honestly lived with her for all those eighteen years. And just like all happy women in the world she was deaf and blind to other people’s sorrows and troubles: it’s truly said that happiness makes people selfish. When her old parents used to call her with complaints about their poor health, low pension and ****ty youngest daughter – she would cut them off:

“Oh come on, give me a break! It’s not my problem!”

When I tried to bare my soul to her – she would find all sorts of excuses to escape the conversation. She was not interested in hearing out my stories about some Shurik or Roma – and she would run away from me to the bathroom or somewhere else. I got mad with her and I secretly hoped that someday she would find herself in my shoes and finally learn the hard way.

So, there she was, abandoned by her husband at forty five years old. The self-centered, arrogant woman judging scornfully miserable “losers”, “cuckolds”, “misfits” had finally joined the club. She deserved it, though, didn’t she…

But it’s one thing to be broke at fifteen or twenty, when you have your whole life ahead of you and plenty of chances to fix it. Another thing is to get so shocked for the first time after forty, when you least expect that.

Mother was totally unprepared for such a turn of events. For all the eighteen years of living with my father it had never occurred to her that he may have disappeared all of a sudden. Like all selfish, too self-confident people she would ignore even most obvious things; and the summer before he left, when not just I, but also the ladies in the neighborhood had intimated to her that she should have been keeping a better eye on her husband – she would laugh this off:

“Stuff and nonsense! That’s ridiculous!”

Needless to say how big a shock it was to her when my father had left the family out of the blue.

At first mother couldn’t believe it. It was quite hard for her to realize that my father had really broken up with her. For the first three days she was waiting for him to cool down and come back home. But he never returned back. Neither in three days, nor in a month, nor in a year. She kept calling him all the time – he would hang up on her or abruptly tell her to leave him alone and that he was not coming back.

She went from grief to drink. There was a big jerry can of homemade plum wine in our bathroom, and mother would knock it down glass after glass. Having gotten drunk she went into hysterics and began playing the blame game. And the only one available to blame was me, of course.

“Write a letter to your father!” she nagged at me, “Write to him, get down on your knees and beg him to come back!”

“I’m not doing that!” I muttered.

“What? You were the one who caused this whole thing, and now you’re not doing that, eh? You broke our family! You ruined my whole life! You ruin and destroy everything you touch, just everything!”

It’s very good for a sixteen-year-old girl to hear such things from her mother, isn’t it…

Other times she would wake me up in the middle of the night and say:

“If you don’t write a letter to your father to bring him back, I’ll kill myself.”

Of course, now I understand that it was just a bluff. Mother would have never really done it – it was completely inconsistent with her character. But she knew how to manipulate me. And then I, having gotten really scared, promised her that ok, I would write that goddamn letter…

But, as we say, “promising doesn’t mean marrying”. I would have rather stepped into a fire than written a letter to that man asking him to come back – for I can’t make myself call him “dad”. I dragged my feet over it as I could, I lied, dodged it, said that the letter was in the process, that I had already sent it…

“Why is he not coming?” mother would inquire with a childish voice, like a little girl about to cry.

I averted my eyes in silence.

CHAPTER 32

The fall 2001 was my blackest fall ever.

Having realized finally that there was no hope my mother began to slowly fade away. She shrank and became thinner, her eyes grew dim with indifference. Most of the time she spent lying in bed not getting up even during the day; and I, being still a schoolgirl, was frozen with fear thinking that I had already lost my father and was probably going to lose my mother too before long. The future gaped before me like a huge black hole I was falling into every new day.

One evening mother as she was lying in bed called me to her.

“Sit down” – she said.

I obeyed.

“Pull out the left drawer… Not this one!!! Haven’t you learned yet your left and right?”

I was scared every time she got irritated and yelled at me like that. But even now I can still tell my left and right with difficulty.

“Bring that drawer to my bed…”

The tone of her voice didn’t bode well.

“Now look: here, in this corner, I have my electricity bills… The water bills are there… These ones are for the central heating…”

I stared perplexingly at the papers not having a slight idea what I had to do with them.

“The number in bold is the sum that must be paid each month before the fourteenth. Here”, she pulled up another file, – “Here are the apartment documents…”

I got struck by the sudden realization. I shook my head in terror.

“But I, I, I don’t know… I’m not sure I can deal with it…”

“You have to,” my mother said firmly, “Tomorrow you go with me, I’ll set up a trust for you”

I sprang up like a scalded cat.

“Why? What trust? What for?!”

“Just do what I tell you… You’ve got no siblings, no one in the world but me. Your father left, he just dropped us like a hot potato. I’m gonna die soon, and you’ll be all alone…”

After that I ultimately wrote the bloody letter to my father. I hated myself for stooping so low, and even now I still do hate myself for it. I stooped to humiliating apologies, begging “We love you so, dear Daddy, please come back”. Just like that a person can be driven into a corner, broken and bled anything out of. I was driven into that corner too.

At six a.m. my mother went to hand him that letter personally. She humiliated herself too, standing in the freezing cold for a whole hour and waiting for my father by the bus stop like a fool. Then she saw him getting on a bus to go to work – and she came running up to him, thrust the letter into his hand…

It’s no fun going into these humiliating details, dear reader. But I have to. I’ve been keeping them to myself for fifteen years since that fall. And since I’ve decided to finally write this book, I think, I have to.

Fifteen years have passed since our family got ruined. Now it doesn’t really matter anymore. But back then it felt like the end of the world. And the weight of the tragedy was so heavy that it literally bent me down. I walked dragging my feet, my shoulders drooping, my hands behind my back like a convict’s. Mother couldn’t see me such; my shuffling gait and stooped posture infuriated her.

“Straighten your back, now!!!” she yelled, “Stop dragging your feet! Don’t you dare to walk so, do you hear me? You’re like a shackled prisoner!”

I don’t even know how we got through that fall…

 

CHAPTER 33

All hell broke loose, literally.

Do you know what it feels like to have your whole world drop out from under you? At the age of “sweet sixteen”, while finishing school and facing with fear your unknown still new adult life – to have your home, your castle – totally ruined?

Sure you will say, a lot of people have no fathers, many live in single-parent households and nobody has died of it. Of course it’s no issue if there has never been a father in the household, or he left when the kids were still babies, and his function was fully undertaken by the mother. Mother, grandmother or sister, at least partly if not completely, became a family to those kids, and gave them as much love and protection as they could. But what did I have?

I had a family as long as I had a father. Yes, we had fights and arguments, but we also had holidays, picnics, family dinners – like everybody else does. But once he left – everything went to the dogs. My whole life went awry. Everything collapsed. It was like the end of the Roman Empire.

I was finishing school, it was high time to choose a college. To think of my future occupation. But I had not a slightest idea, I was in total confusion, like an unattended child standing hesitantly by an escalator, watching the moving stairs with fear and insecurity.

I tried to talk about it with my mother, but she was absorbed in her grief so deeply that she just didn’t give a toss.

“Don’t know. Go to a teacher training college. Or whatever…”

“But I, I, I don’t know…”

“Neither do I. It’s your problem. You are big enough already, and no one is gonna coddle you.”

Those words were killing me like a naked baby shut out in the freezing cold. It was too scary and painful to grow up like that.

Once a month my father called in and brought his alimony. Every time he threw that money down with such a face as though he was saying “take it and shove it!” And every time he brought those humiliating handouts I would lock myself in the bathroom or my bedroom so I couldn’t see or hear it.

That year I didn’t go to college. I hadn’t yet turned seventeen; but when my father learned about it from my mother he totally refused to support me anymore.

“What the hell?.. Tell her to go work!”

But what could I do for work, really? Not much. I could only get lousy jobs such as of a messenger or a leaflet distributor. I was treated like dirt by everybody and in my own city I felt no better than some black immigrant.

Back home I was waited for by the empty table and the empty fridge. I lived on instant noodles, chips and junk. It was my dinner. I had forgotten the smell of nice home-cooked meals. Since my family was broken, mother didn’t trouble to cook anything.

“You should make a soup at least,” I would say cautiously.

She fobbed me off.

“What the hell soup? There’s no family!”

It made no sense to mention a Christmas tree for New Year’s eves either.

“What the hell Christmas tree…”

Do you still have any questions why I fled from Moscow to the province up North? Why I always startle on mentioning Moscow or my previous first name? Why once I turned nineteen and started dating guys – I clung on each of them with just one purpose to get married? It would scare them off, they disappeared, I was left alone again, clung on a new victim, and things went just the same way, in a vicious circle.

But it was going to happen later… And meanwhile, at the age of seventeen, I had only ruins, a pole and a black flag behind my back. No one was there for me but my instant noodles and onion chips. I made it a habit to stuff myself with junk food, and couldn’t do without it like a smoker without cigarettes or a drunkard without booze. I got addicted to food, and day and night I ate and ate and ate chips, ice cream, pastry, chocolate… I was so miserable and unhappy, and to at least somehow reduce my depression and satiate the bitter emptiness of my life I would buy and eat all that **** – and grow fat like a pig. At my seventeen I weighed 165 lbs – being 1.60 meters tall.

Of course, nobody wanted to date me.

I felt terrible. And I was quite unhappy with my life.

I felt the need to change something as soon as possible…

CHAPTER 34

A few years later at N. District passport office the following dialogue took place:

“I want to change my name”

The elderly officer woman glanced at me suspiciously through her spectacles.

“Why?”

“I have a reason” I said evasively not wanting to go into detail.

“Hiding from someone?”

I realized that what I had just said didn’t come out right. Suspicions were the last thing I needed.

“Why hiding? No… I just don’t really like my name, that’s all.”

“What’s wrong with it? Your name sounds quite alright.” said the officer, “What name do you want instead?”

I pronounced the first one I could think of.

“Are you going to change your surname, too?” the officer asked.

I shook my head.

“It’s not necessary. I’ll change it anyway when I get married.”

“Well, it’s up to you.”

I was sent to the registry department. And a month later I came out of there with a different name – and, as I felt at that moment, being a different person. The burden that had been weighing me down all those years was finally thrown off, and I was completely sure that from now on I was going to get a quite different, happy, new life.

“Hey you old fart! Take that! You can stuff your curses up your ass now!” I shook my fist at my grandfather up in the sky, “The one you hexed no longer exists, so you can go to hell and fuck yourself! I’m gonna get everything I want. A boyfriend. A husband. I’ll get married and go far away from here, and you will never, ever, see me again!”

I flipped him off and headed for the railway station to buy a ticket to Arkhangelsk.

In Arkhangelsk I did start a new life, indeed. I surrounded myself with new people, gained a better reputation. There I found myself in a quite different world.

In Arkhangelsk I did get everything I wanted: boyfriends, popularity, love affairs. It was really a big break for me. But, alas, my happiness was short-lived.

Who likes long love stories with a sophisticated plot and a sad ending, go read “The Heat of Arkhangelsk” in three volumes. Right here and right now I don’t really feel like another go-around, for I have neither the time nor the desire for it at the moment.

But later on I did get married. Not to Arkhangelsk, though, but even farther – to Australia. I got farther than I had ever planned. Farther was only the Mars, probably. Of course, there is a big, long book about it, too. But my husband’s love for me in that lovestory was no more than chocolate in “Bounty”. So this marriage went real bad for me, and had, subsequently, a bad ending.

But, to be honest, my break-up with Brent was mostly my fault. My fault was that I couldn’t manage my family life. What is a family life, anyway? It’s, first of all, compromising. It’s respecting other people’s needs. It’s making some sacrifices for the people around. But who had taught it to me? Nobody had.

Yes, I had been longing for a family – but for fifteen years I hadn’t known what having a family feels like. For fifteen years, all my adult life, I hadn’t known what it feels like to live in a family. So, for those fifteen years since my parents’ family was destroyed, I had grown unused to all sorts of compromise. And, on finding myself in a new family, I had to face the fact that apart from a family idyll there are also commitments to get up early, to cook, to do the washing and cleaning, to make some money not just for myself but for the household, too. Plus, to respect the rules of the house: not to play loud music, not to use the toilet with the door open, to be nice, after all, to my in-laws, to offer them my help, to participate in family events even when I didn’t really feel like it. And, with all this, to put up with the presence of the people I didn’t like, their annoying pets I couldn’t care less about…

The reader will say it’s not a real problem. Maybe for you it’s not, but for me it is.

Just kick a little puppy out of the house, leave it outside, neglected and uncared for until it grows up, and then try to take that adult homeless dog back home. What will come out of it? Piss in the corners, ripped furniture fabric, barking and howling at night and ultimate running away, back to the street. Because the dog personality has formed OUT THERE, and there’s no changing it. It’s rather a wolf, not a dog. No point taming it, it just doesn’t make sense. You can give the wolf the best food, but he would hanker for the wood.

My dream of getting a family came true. But it came true too late and in the wrong time. And a dream fulfilled in the wrong time, as I said before, is worse than an unfulfilled dream.

I couldn’t keep up with the duties of a wife. And my husband saw it. At first he tried to change me, but later on, as he realized that it was of no use, he just gave up and divorced me. And, in order to compensate for his losses, he scammed me out of money and kicked me out. Just like in a bad scam-and-rube movie, but, unfortunately, it’s reality, not a movie. And in this case the rube was me, not him.

Now I am thirty years old and I am on my own again, homeless and penniless. I’m never going to save for a home of my own because without a degree I earn peanuts. Luckily I have no kids so I don’t have to work my ass off to feed them. At least, the one thing I should thank my ex-husband for is that he didn’t knock me up for the three years of our marriage. Just like the song goes: “Thank God our kids are safe and sound – because we ain’t got no kids”.

Doom and gloom, you will say. Yes. Doom and gloom. So how do I live with it? Oh, quite alright. Like everybody else does. I’ve got arms and legs, and thanks for that.

Being single, having neither a husband nor even a boyfriend is not a big problem. My grandfather’s curse has come true and I have never built a good relationship with anyone, but I don’t care. Guess, it’s just my destiny, and it can’t be helped.

It doesn’t matter what my real name was. Destiny is not a name – it’s a character. My character is unsuitable for a relationship and family life – or, rather, it HAS BECOME unsuitable. After all, not all people are meant to live in a couple. So I have already accepted it and let it go.

Really, I’ve had enough bad experiences with men, and I don’t want to step on a rake anymore. If you fail for the hundredth time, drop the idea: it’s just not your way.

There was another “rake” not long ago, though. It was last summer. I met a man I sensed a little sparkle with. Then I got a vague hope: maybe he was the one? After all, I can’t be that unlucky forever.

But no. It didn’t work out with him either.

Of course it made me sad and upset, but not for long. I’m used to it already.

(THE END)