My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  My mother told me so little about Roman that I’d always assumed he was completely absent from her life, but Arlene said that he took her and my mother out on occasional Fridays. I was surprised that he felt even that much duty to the daughters he’d discarded.

  “We would meet him on the corner, he didn’t come to the door. We’d have to go half a block, stand on the corner. We could have been kidnapped! Your mother didn’t like it as much as I did. I had fun; I was happy to see him. He took us to little amusement parks or to the circus. If I wanted cotton candy, I would get cotton candy. If I wanted a turtle, he’d buy it for me. Anita stopped going after a while, I don’t know why, but I kept going.” Arlene said that he didn’t seem mentally ill or “off,” but he was quiet.

  My mother’s decision to stop joining them struck me as a pointed refusal to recognize Roman’s paltry effort. Occasional afternoons or evenings didn’t make up for his disappearance, and she didn’t want him to believe that they did.

  He gave Helen money when he could, but it wasn’t enough. When Arlene was eleven and my mother was eight, Helen consulted a lawyer about receiving child support. The lawyer returned with good news and a big question. Yes, Roman was working and could pay child support. But was she aware that he’d married someone else?

  She wasn’t. She barely spoke to him. Even though she was angry and embarrassed that Roman had left her, she hadn’t divorced him because she didn’t want to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church. That was also why she’d never remarried, though she’d had boyfriends who’d expressed interest. But when she learned Roman was married, she had to divorce him. Arlene wasn’t sure when he’d remarried, but thought he may have met Josephine during one of his hospitalizations. She remembered hearing that Josephine may have also dealt with mental illness, perhaps in the aftermath of her first husband’s death.

  “When your mom found out about Josephine, was that when Josephine found out about her and you guys? And that he’d never bothered getting divorced?”

  Arlene took a sip of wine and said she had no idea.

  He told Josephine at some point, and the way my mother told the story of her surprise visit made it sound like she’d met Josephine before. But he was still hiding his first family from most of the world, and my mother would have become even angrier with him than she had been; he’d been haplessly playing father while living a secret life.

  Arlene didn’t know why my mother stopped joining the excursions with their father, but she thought that my mother was brave because when she decided she did want to see him, she sought him out.

  I told her I knew the story of my mother showing up at Roman’s. “She was brave,” I said. “It took a lot of guts to go there alone. It was a kind of ‘Fuck you.’ ”

  Why had she gone to see him that day? To remind him of her existence, of his mistakes and choices? Did she hope that he’d invite her in, and they’d spend a nice afternoon together? She may have wanted his love, but according to Arlene, my mother wasn’t interested in forgiving him. If she’d wanted to needle him, she would have at least succeeded in making him uncomfortable. But that was undercut by his rejection, his literal denial.

  Teresa never contacted me, so I reached out to her again after I’d been in Chicago for a few days. I didn’t want to call her; I wanted her to call me, to want to talk. I wrote two short notes and delivered them to the addresses I had. Both were in humble neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. At the first, the current resident informed me that Teresa hadn’t lived there for years, but that he’d received my original letter and given it to her cousin. At the second, I slipped the note into the mailbox mounted next to the door.

  On my way back to Chrissy’s, I stopped by a supermarket to pick up flowers and wine. When I got back into my car, I turned it on and found I didn’t have the strength to drive the few remaining miles to her house. I turned the car off, pushed the seat back, and stared at the roof.

  There’d been so much noise all week. Every day I had absorbed more and more information. Sadness whirred beneath every discussion, and my mother was the center of each, even the ones that weren’t about her. When I wasn’t talking with Chrissy and Arlene, I was replaying our conversations as I drank in the kitchen while everyone else slept, or in my dreams when they came. My mind was always finding or making connections between stories, coloring them in and extending them. What had stopped me was the car’s intense silence, so loud that it stung my ears and made me notice they were raw, and that the rest of me was, too. I was wrung out but still wet, yet I couldn’t go completely limp. I had more interviews, more people to see and conversations to carry with humor and graciousness. I groaned as I sat up and started the car again, thinking about what Arlene had told me the other day.

  My mother was a natural performer and loved embarrassing Arlene in public. Sometimes when they were riding the bus, my mother would cause a scene as a joke. She called her sister “Hortence Anastasia Waskavinska,” and when the bus was crowded, she’d loudly exclaim, “Oh Hortence, will you behave yourself?” or “Hortence Anastasia Waskavinska, what’s wrong with you?” while Arlene held her bag in front of her red face.

  My mother’s mischievousness and spirit had one particularly infamous display. At her school’s end-of-year picnic, when she was in the fourth grade and Arlene was a seventh grader, my mother ran onto the makeshift stage at the end of the talent show and broke into a rendition of Georgia Gibbs’s 1952 recording of “Kiss of Fire.” She rocked her hips and tossed her hair, giving her best impression of a femme fatale, and crooned about being a “slave” to “devil lips” in front of a scandalized audience of nuns and children.

  “I was so embarrassed,” Arlene told me. “But even then, I was impressed by her stage presence. It was really incredible.”

  “Did the nuns call your mom?”

  “Not that time, but other times. They threatened to kick Anita out of school.”

  “Kicked out!” I cried. “Why?”

  “She was caught passing notes to a boy. I don’t know if he wrote it or she did, but it said, ‘If you want to kiss, I will.’ ”

  I laughed. “I did stuff like that at the same age. I think that’s pretty normal.”

  “Not in Catholic school!”

  “Your mom always had a way with men,” Chrissy said. “Whenever we went to a dance, she got the good-looking guy immediately. She never had any trouble attracting them. She was a big flirt, but she wasn’t obvious about it. She just had a way about her, smart and vulnerable at the same time. I think a lot of guys found that very appealing.” She spoke of witnessing my mother flirting with men and having them “wrapped around her finger” in minutes. I’d seen similar things as a child, my mother receiving extra attention, men lingering in her presence, and sensed there was something different and charged in those interactions.

  “I’m a big flirt, too,” I admitted.

  Arlene and Chrissy feigned shock. “No, you?”

  “I can’t help it!” I laughed. “I flirt with everyone. I always thought it was my personality, but maybe I do it because I watched it work for my mother.” I’d never considered this before, but it made sense. Flirting with people made basic interactions more fun. The attention was validating, probably more than it should have been, and whomever I flirted with generally seemed happy to participate. My behavior only caused problems if someone took it to mean that I was more interested in him than I was, or when I was dating a guy who was insecure.

  While I was in Chicago, I also visited my mother’s best friend, Sylvia. We chatted on her balcony, smoked her thin cigarettes, and drank instant iced tea. Sylvia had been a constant presence during my childhood. Every time we went to Chicago to visit my grandmother, we’d see Sylvia as well—she’d stayed in the city and had a family—and she would also visit us in Boston. She and my mother talked often on the phone and quickly regressed at the sound o
f each other’s voice, giggling and gossiping and making squeaky kissing noises into the receiver. Though they were grown-ups, theirs was the kind of friendship I’d always wanted to emulate when I was a child: intimate, necessary, and exalted. Despite my problems in middle and high school, I’d been able to cultivate and maintain friendships that were far stronger than the ones I had with my relatives. I often put more into my friendships than my romantic relationships because I found those alliances more rewarding and permanent. I’d loved few partners as deeply as I loved my friends.

  At my mother’s funeral, Sylvia handed me a stack of letters and postcards that my mother sent her over their five-decade friendship and said, “These are yours now.” In these letters, my mother confessed her deepest secrets and fears, details of her life both exciting and mundane, and gushed about her love for her friend. In 1973, almost twenty years after they’d met, my mother wrote Sylvia from London and explained, for possibly the thousandth time, how special she thought she was. “How do I love thee, let me count the ways…I’ve made several friends since I have been here but none will ever be as precious as you. Really, truly, you are a comfort, an excitement, a lasting you. I feel happy whenever I think of you.”

  I asked her to tell me again the story of how she and my mother became friends. They were in the same first-grade class at the local Catholic school. There were around sixty kids in one room, and at first they didn’t know each other. “Your mother was a talker.” Sylvia laughed. “Me, I was quiet. I didn’t dare step out of line. Finally, the nun had had it with your mother and said, ‘Change your seat and sit next to Sylvia. Maybe she’ll teach you to be quiet.’ So we sat next to each other. Your mother still wasn’t quiet. That’s how it all started.”

  My mother’s father was absent; Sylvia’s had died. “We had that as a bond from the very beginning,” Sylvia explained. Her mother remarried and had more children with her stepfather. Once she and my mother became friends, they spent their afternoons together because Sylvia didn’t like being at home. After school, they’d walk to my mom’s apartment so she could drop off her bag and they could play. After a few hours, my mother walked Sylvia halfway home as they held hands and then parted with a hug.

  Sylvia told me that when they became friends, she began praying every night for the opportunity to sleep over at my mother’s house before she died. She demonstrated, placing her hands together and looking up. “ ‘Please God, don’t let me die until I get to sleep over at Anita’s.’ And I did pretty soon after that. We slept with your grandmother in that one full-size bed. I slept over lots of times after that. I became a part of the family. Helen was so sweet. She was so good to me.”

  We both smiled at her memory. “My mother was always really sweet to my friends as well,” I said. “She really encouraged my friendships when I was young, made sure I had sleepovers and got to spend time with the kids I was close to.”

  Sylvia and my mother had more in common than missing fathers. Both were Polish, short, and had curly blond hair. “We were twins,” Sylvia said. “We did everything together. We had to do everything the same.”

  Wanting to have everything that the other had became a problem when it was time for their first communion. Sylvia’s family had more money, and her mother bought her a beautiful dress. When my mother saw it, she realized the one Helen had bought her wasn’t nearly as nice. So she begged and pleaded and ranted and raved until Helen gave in and bought her the same dress.

  Hundreds of children were receiving their first communion on that day because the bishop was in town. My mother and Sylvia made sure they sat together so when they went up to the communion rail, they could be next to each other. A cloth was laid over the rail so the children wouldn’t be tempted to touch the Eucharist. As Sylvia and my mom stuck their tongues out for the bishop, they put their hands together under the cloth and linked pinkies.

  “That’s adorable,” I said.

  “It was, but we were hardly angels. We were very unsupervised growing up, so we found lots of time to get into trouble. Your mother was an instigator; she had a lot of courage. The trouble that I got in, I got into because of her.” Her smiled puckered around her cigarette. “We started smoking in third or fourth grade; that was all your mom.”

  “She always said that you were the one who got her smoking!”

  “Me? I would never have had the nerve!”

  One of Sylvia’s favorite stories was about their prom. They’d double-dated, worn puffy dresses and tiaras. After the dance, the couples went out to dinner, per tradition. “Your mom and I had the brilliant idea of switching outfits. So we went into the bathroom, switched dresses, and came out. We thought it was the funniest thing in the world, we got such a kick out of it. Our dates were not amused.”

  They’d always intended to go to college. “We both had wanderlust,” Sylvia said. “We wanted adventure. That was one of the good things about both of us coming from humble backgrounds. We were always striving for more, and we wanted to travel more than anything else. Your mom traveled a lot more than I did, though. I was a little jealous, I think, but I was happy for her.”

  “Did she talk to you about my father’s decision to work in Ukraine? Was she angry that he made that choice and went somewhere for so long without her?”

  “She did. She resented Ukraine because he felt closer to Ukrainians than he did to his own family. And I think a lot of that was just loneliness, and being with a kid who was out of control.” She gave me a tight smile and I hung my head.

  I thought of how I treated my mother when I was in high school. I hit her and I held a knife on her, and she’d just taken it. I spoke quietly. “Did she complain about me?”

  “I wouldn’t say complained, but she was frustrated. She just didn’t know what to do with you.”

  “When I think of how I behaved as a teenager, I feel terrible. I gave her hell.” I sighed. “I feel so guilty for everything I put my mom through when she was already going through so much.”

  “Good!” She laughed. “Kids should feel guilty about stuff like that.” When I winced, she quickly added, “But you know, you can’t be too harsh on yourself—that’s part of growing up. Adolescence is an awful time; you say and do terrible things. So you can’t…you can’t punish yourself.”

  “Well, I do,” I told her. “I feel a thousand times worse about what I did now than I did then.”

  When I was leaving, she took my hand. “There was a lot to your mom. She had so many positive things going for her, but she had her demons. She did the best that she could, so there’s no blaming her, there’s no thinking less of her. She was human.”

  “I spent a long time blaming her for the problems I had with my father,” I said, “struggles I had as a young adult, for her drinking. But I don’t want to. Not anymore.”

  We hugged. She was smaller than my mother, and skinnier than my mom had been at the end. When we held each other, I felt that we were holding my mother between us.

  “I hope I don’t cry when you leave.” Sylvia’s eyes were already full of tears. “I lost her so many years before I really lost her. It’s such a big, big sadness.”

  The next morning, as I was getting ready to drive out to the second address I had for Teresa, I decided to call her first. If a machine picked up, I wouldn’t leave a message. If she picked up, I’d hang up and jump in my car.

  After a few rings, a woman answered. I froze, then started speaking without meaning to.

  “Is this Teresa?”

  “It is.” Her voice was thin and testy.

  “This is Anya Yurchyshyn,” I said. “I’m the woman—”

  She cut me off in a voice far stronger than she’d answered with. “I got your letters. I didn’t respond on purpose. It was embarrassing to have that letter forwarded by that other family because that was from forty-five years ago.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset
you. I just want to ask—”

  “I don’t want to be a part of this! It’s in the past. I have enough grief.”

  I knew that conversation was probably the only one I’d have with her; my sympathy was overridden by my desire to know what had happened. I rushed to appeal to her. “There has been a lot of grief in my life as well, as there was in my mother’s life, and I’m just trying to understand what happened—what Roman was like as a father, and if you knew that he had children from another marriage.”

  She said, “I’m not ready for this,” but continued anyway, speaking in fragments that were difficult to connect. “Roman was very secretive. He was hiding a lot of things. Roman never spoke to me about having other children. That was one of the things that bothered me.”

  “So he didn’t tell you about his other children? Who did? Your mother?”

  “We always had his family over for dinner on Sundays and no one said anything.”

  “That must have been so upsetting.”

  “My mother went into a terrible depression.”

  “After she found out?”

  “I didn’t find out until my mother went into her postmenopausal depression.”

  “So your mother hid this information from you, or do you think she didn’t know, either, and finding out—”