During playtime, they called me names I committed to memory, so I could repeat them to my mother and ask her to translate. Up until then, I’d been just another kindergarten wailer, crying because I was tired, or I missed my mother, or for reasons that now seemed microscopic. Now, for the first time, I stood out as the weirdo, and I was ridiculed, called “dummy” or “stupid,” and I didn’t know how to retaliate except to yell “you dummy,” to the laughter of my taunters. I wasn’t crying along to a Disney film in the comfort of my own home, distressed when Dumbo was teased for his big ears; I now was Dumbo, facing the taunts of schoolyard bullies. And there was no Grandma Xenia waiting in the hallway to take me away, to tell me stories and buy me a treat. In the past I had flinched when I was not given 100 percent of an adult’s attention, or when I made a tiny mistake; these days I was like a dog that had been hit with a scrunched-up newspaper so many times I no longer wanted to come out and play. I wanted to make myself small and invisible. I didn’t feel brave like my Grandma Xenia in her stories, and I was certainly not like any of my fictional heroes, a plucky Disney princess who would call upon her inner strength and teach bullies a lesson.
• • •
In the mornings, as my mother pushed Natalija’s stroller, we walked to school together, past suburban houses with flowering gardens. Tearfully, in Serbian, I speculated to my mother what might happen that day. Would they call me “stupid Sofia” or “idiot”? Would I understand a single word? My mother would cry with me. My sensitive personality was taking a beating, and she feared I would carry these memories with me for a long time.
My mother had tried her best to control my environment so far. Whether it was installing my grandmother at French kindergarten, or how she told me the truth about Santa Claus when I was three so I could learn this upsetting news in a safe, controlled environment. But she was now experiencing helplessness. She couldn’t protect me the same way when she herself was struggling. “I can’t speak English!” she would shout at my father—always blaming him for this whole mess—recounting some exchange she’d had at the pharmacy that resulted in the purchase of sanitary pads instead of diapers. When he told her she could speak English, reminding her that she read books in English and that she had learned the language since she was a child, she would snap back: “I only know the hardest words from academic books! I know what gerontophilia is, but I don’t know the word for face cream! Or apple core!” And if he corrected her for saying something wrong— “It’s not ‘How you are?’ it’s ‘How are you?’ ”—she would yell back: “I am sick of this English colonization! They are trying to get the whole world to speak their language, but I refuse to! I refuse to fix my mistakes for them!” And he’d laugh, amused and exasperated at the same time.
The dynamic of my parents’ relationship was changing. While in Belgrade, they had stood on similar footing—both of them having solid friendship groups and work friends—now Dad had the upper hand. He was respected at his workplace, he earned a good salary, and my mother was suddenly reduced to lonely housewife status. She knew no one except for the women of the diaspora, whom she found boring, and limited, and whom she complained about bitterly.
Her colleagues were not rapidly leaving Belgrade like the people in Dad’s field, and her friends back home were still struggling at their university jobs, still smoking and laughing in the face of Yugoslavia’s growing crisis. My mother felt that she stood out like a sore, artsy thumb, among people she insisted she had nothing in common with. Now that my parents were on unequal footing—Dad having a relatively good time, my mother having a bad time—their arguments became more intense, and more often than not, my mother cried.
From the moment we landed in Melbourne, my mother found herself homesick, frustrated, and frequently on the brink of tears. She blinked them back at the supermarket because there were too many choices. (We were used to one type of yogurt; now we were forced to search through a hundred of them!) She cried when she tasted some parsley she was planning to put into chicken soup. “What have they done to this parsley!?” she shouted (with a level of outrage similar to that of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby when she beholds the demon child and yells: “What have you done to his eyes!?”). She’d actually bought cilantro, and if someone had told her then that she would grow to love it, she would have laughed in their face, as she threw the whole bunch into the trash.
When she wasn’t crying, my mother wrote letters to Grandma Xenia, plotting when Grandma would come visit us, salvation dangling on the horizon. That is what she clung to in the early months when she was struggling with losing parts of her identity. She spent the rest of her time at the local park with Natalija, who soon learned to crawl all over the fresh grass while my mother would sadly smoke. She couldn’t blame Dad entirely for her misery, as they’d agreed to try Australia together. But she was depressed, obsessed with the idea that she’d become something she never thought she’d be: an isolated, powerless housewife.
One day, a letter came with an opportunity: it was from a woman who ran a matchmaking agency in Belgrade, who had a mutual acquaintance with my mother. She was asking if my mother would partner with her to find eligible Yugoslavian singles in Melbourne who were interested in hooking up with someone from back home. My mother, eager for something to distract her from her tedious existence, grabbed this lifeline and snapped into action. She drafted an advertisement in a notebook as she sat on a park bench, paying little attention to good-natured Natalija, who was toppled every now and again by a friendly dog. Her business partner was happy for my mother to take the lead, and my mother took it upon herself to design pamphlets for the matchmaking enterprise, which she named YugoLove—the logo printed in rainbow-colored font against the image of the famous hands reaching toward each other from The Creation of Adam fresco in the Sistine Chapel.
Even though she shied away from the diaspora, which she insisted she had nothing in common with, she now put an advertisement in the local Yugoslavian newspaper. In the advertisement, she invited Yugoslavian singles to put their faith in her, a professional with a background in clinical psychology. She requested that singles send a detailed description of themselves so that my mother could scrutinize the profiles and match each lonely-heart with the perfect partner. But even though she thought this might be her way of connecting with the community: putting her psychological skills to work, giving her something more interesting to do than gossiping with the Yugo mothers, her ad was a flop. She received a single reply, from an elderly Macedonian man, who had misunderstood the concept behind YugoLove. Using the familiar form of address, he wrote a semi-legible love note: “Hi girl. So, I see you put an ad in the paper. You’re trying to find yourself a husband. Well, I’m available.” For the first time in a long time, my parents laughed so hard they cried. My mother framed the note, and with no other takers and dwindling enthusiasm from her partner overseas, the YugoLove business fizzled months after it began.
And my mother, who been temporarily drawn out of her depression, now slumped back into it. Dad’s efforts to get her to persist were met with a sharp, “No. Maybe I’m just lazy.” He did manage to convince her to submit her University of Belgrade clinical psychology degree to the Australian Psychological Society (APS). Her qualification was recognized, and she was accepted as a member. “It’s not like I’m going to be working anytime soon,” she said, because she didn’t have anyone to look after us two. But privately, she was pleased with her APS membership certificate. She was, after all, a professional.
Meanwhile, in the hellhole known as school, I spent lunchtimes hanging out by a little barbed wire fence where the school pets lived: a goat (Josephine), a sheep (Mimi), and a pony accidentally named Matilda by school vote even though it was very clearly, and fascinatingly, male. I spent most of my time poking grass through the wire, hoping people would think I had a deep connection with animals, but really I did it so the teachers wouldn’t notice I had no friends. Just as I’d pretended to be interested in my baby sister a
t the Yugo party, I pretended I had something to say to Mimi and the others, gravitating to the stupid farm animals so I wouldn’t have to face the children. The school pets and I were dummies, but their apparently relaxed attitude to this fact somewhat calmed me. Eventually, I became a nonentity, a quiet background figure by the fence, and my classmates grew bored of bullying me. Pretending to focus on the animals, I became invisible to them, and keeping my eyes on the poop dangling off Josephine’s butt, or on Matilda’s pendulous penis so no one was the wiser, I perked my ears up and started spying on the other kids, picking up bits of language, storing them away, and practicing to myself when I was alone. I knew I couldn’t hang out with the farm animals forever.
My mother had called the school to discuss my secret life as a friendless mute, and the second she said “Hello,” the receptionist had sighed and said, “Ah, it’s you, Mrs. Stefanovic,” recognizing her accent before my mother had a chance to introduce herself and ask to speak to the principal. In our neighborhood, there were not many families who spoke a language other than English at home, and the school wasn’t used to dealing with tearful non-English-speaking students. But, after consulting with my mother, Mr B. tried a special tactic. He would come into class, sit next to me, and, every now and then, point to something (scissors, whiteboard) and say the word, as if he was just making a casual observation to himself, totally unrelated to me. “See Rebecca?” he’d say, pointing. “She has a ponytail. And Jessica has pigtails.” Sometimes, I’d preempt him and get a word right, in which case he’d act extremely impressed, and I felt like a watered flower, sucking up the nourishment and praise I longed for, growing. I’d store away the information Mr. B imparted, and on the walk home with my mother and Natalija—the time when I transformed back into an anxious blabbermouth—I would talk about the day, dotting Serbo-Croatian with the English phrases I’d learned, “So, even though ‘pony’ makes sense, because a ‘ponytail’ looks like a pony’s tail, why would you call two ponytails ‘pig’ tails, when a pig has only one tail!?”
To encourage my ESL education, my mother chose a two-pronged approach. One was cultural immersion: I was allowed to watch as much English-language television as I wanted. As soon as I got home, on came Play School, Sesame Street, Monkey Magic, and Masters of the Universe. Not only did these shows provide me with entertainment, joy, and linguistic skills that I desperately needed, they also offered the beautiful and comforting formula of beginnings, middles, and ends. I recognized the formula from books, films, and the stories I heard from Grandma Xenia. And even though I didn’t know all the words, I could make predictions based on my knowledge of storytelling, and learning English became less of a chore, more of an adventure. Watching TV brought some order into the chaos. I turned into a devoted couch-potato; the screen became my most loved teacher.
My mother’s second tactic for my English development was social immersion. One day in the park, she started talking to the only neighbor we had who also smoked. I assumed they bonded over their mutual love of the life-threatening Marlboros they favored, and our neighbor agreed to send her daughter Anthea to our place after school so I could learn English from her. I liked playing with Anthea. Every afternoon we would watch TV, touch tongues in secret pretending we were grown-ups kissing, and play with the secondhand My Little Ponies my mother procured through her new favorite activity: rummaging around at garage sales. Soon I knew English well enough to argue with Anthea, and my mother caught me, waving a toy dog who held her puppies in a Velcro-sealed stomach, emphatically shouting: “It is PREGNANTED not PREGNANT!” My misguided confidence was confidence nonetheless, and it showed that I was leaps and bounds away from the sobbing weirdo of a few months before. Having the language to express myself made it suddenly easier to define myself in the world. I rediscovered that part of myself that loved the spotlight, that wanted to be heard, and that felt her opinions and stories were valuable.
By the time my first school term was ending, I spoke English fluently, and my parents’ pride at my genius swelled once again. I warmed to Mrs. Melville when I found that teachers in Australia lavished far more praise on students than Madame Marie, with her halfhearted handing out of heart-shaped stickers. Children were commended not just for correct answers but for just trying, and in fact, while Madame Marie would deal in absolutes (“correct” and “incorrect”), Mrs. Melville would dole out the term “nice try” in a way that didn’t make you feel foolish. I stopped being afraid to use trial and error, and I began to talk, sitting happily right up front near Mrs. Melville’s bare feet, no longer terrified of making mistakes.
One particular day, I had managed to engage in a full conversation with other kids about Masters of the Universe, opining on the hero He-Man and his nemesis, Skeletor. No one laughed, and the other children offered the respect my observations deserved.
I was excited to tell my mother about it, as we walked home under blooming bottlebrush bushes while Natalija gurgled in the stroller. In rapid-fire Serbian I launched into my story.
“Today, the kids were talking about He-Man, and I joined in!”
I expected my mother to break out into applause, or high-five me.
“What?” she said instead, sharply.
“The kids were talking about He-Man, and I joined in!”
“Oh my god,” she said, in the way she did when someone mentioned something about the hole in the ozone layer.
She stopped pushing the stroller. “This, I did not expect,” she said, sighing, and I tried to work out what I had done wrong.
“What those children were talking about,” she said, looking me in the eye and putting her hand on my shoulder, like she had when she’d told me Grandpa Gonzo had died, “is a thin membrane covering a woman’s vagina, which is penetrated by a man’s penis when she has sex for the first time.”
What.
Oh God, I thought. What?
My rudimentary picture of the human anatomy was enriched in my mind’s eye as these new and cruel elements she had described were added to it. A giant rocket-style penis, for one.
My mother sighed. “I am surprised those children are talking about advanced sexual concepts, but you know I have always been straightforward with you. Now you know,” she said, in the same no-nonsense tone she’d used when telling me that Santa Claus didn’t exist. The word He-Man, to my mother who was more familiar with academic language than with popular culture, sounded an awful lot like “hymen,” and her anxious mind had gone right there.
“He-Man,” I said, weakly, thinking about furious penises, “. . . his sister is She-Ra.”
“Oh,” she said, the penny dropping, as she remembered the show I watched. “Right.”
Then, cheerfully: “Forget what I just said. So, you joined in talking about a television show, and the other children were receptive. Great work!”
But it was, of course, too late for praise.
So it was that my mother, whose goal was to protect me from trauma, presented me with some terrifying truths: there was such a thing as a hymen, it could be penetrated by a penis, and there was nothing He-Man could do to stop it.
Instead of walking home crying, or talking over each other, like we’d done so many times before, we walked in stunned silence.
• • •
By the time I was in grade one, when we called my relatives on the phone, they said that I sounded like a foreigner when I spoke Serbian. It made me feel ashamed, but it was also validation that I was an English-speaker. I was speaking English all day at school, and even though we spoke Serbian at home, my tongue had softened up and my Rs came out unrolled, my consonants soft. But at thirty-six years old, my mother’s brain wasn’t as absorbent as mine, her tongue was less flexible, and she felt her foreignness more than ever.
A ten-minute walk from our place, the shopping strip on Centre Road was where we’d go most days after school. One day, I darted into Benn’s Books to see if there was a new Baby-Sitters Club book. I had gotten into these books thanks to Anthea,
who was two years older, and I started to read them voraciously, dreaming I would one day be a thirteen-year-old babysitter, too. My mother, pleased I was reading at an above-average level, happily bought the books for me whenever a new one came out. We walked past Buci boutique, a shop whose window mannequin often wore a beret and fancy tights, a place where I imagined only very fashionable people went. Then we went to the supermarket. Natalija was placed in the cart where she would eventually become surrounded by grocery bags, reaching into them and sinking her new little teeth into fruit, and I hung off the side of the cart, letting my mother push us along, until I spotted a musical lollipop. I asked my mother if I could have it, and in my excitement, I assumed she’d said yes, when in fact she hadn’t heard the question. I grabbed it as we rolled past, like some sassy skateboarder, I thought. At the register, after my mother paid, the shop assistant asked whether we would be paying for the lollipop as well, which was still in my hand. My mother grabbed her wallet, paid, and when we got out on the street, she snatched the lollipop out of my hand, hurled it in the trash, and for the first time in my life, slapped me across the face. Her nostrils flared and she hissed near my ear, though no one would have understood her anyway, as she was speaking Serbian: “What do you think those people in there think of me!? They think, Look at that ethnic woman, stealing from us!”
Back then, I couldn’t shrug off my mother’s outburst as paranoia. I didn’t have the insight to tell her that they didn’t think she was a thieving ethnic, that they could see she just forgot to pay. Instead, I thought that because of me, people thought my mother was an ethnic thief—a label which, thanks to my mother’s tone, sounded even more pejorative than a native-born thief.
The truth is that she felt worthless, and she imagined others saw her that way, too. In her own esteem, she was no longer a respected, witty, professional; she was an inarticulate, lonely, funny-sounding stay-at-home mom who, as far as anyone knew, was as dumb as those Bentleigh West farm animals her daughter had communed with. Everything was strange, and being foreign, she was powerless.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 8
