Grace.

I don’t know whose idea it was, but it sent several Russian immigrants running. My father came home last Friday evening from work, and he seemed glum, distracted even, as he watched his customary evening news on CNN. Mom leaned over to me and said, “His office is having him read a few lines for a skit.”

A skit? Oh, right. He does work for a big insurance company; corporate America at its best. His office will have five teams of about 10 people putting on a creative commercial in front of about 100 people at their biannual meeting. I don’t know if any prizes are involved, but I do know that a great deal of preparation is being made by my father and his neighbor, both Russian men, programmers in their late fifties, both with tremendous Russian accents. There are two other Russian programmers in his group of 10, and I’m willing to bet that they all had similar, pained expressions on their faces as they sat down to eat dinner that night.

Cultural discoveries have been made before my very eyes over the last week. “No,” I said to dad, “It’s not Mr. Hovel, it’s Mr. Howell. Pronounce the owell like the word owl, not like the word shovel.” Dad tried it a few times and finally got it. Sort of. “Dad,” I told him, “It’s Gilligan’s Island, not Gilligan Island. It’s a possessive apostrophe s.” Then, he sat on the floor in front of the new big screen TV watching an old episode of the show, singing along with the theme song, practicing it several times before he got the hang of it. Mom told him, “Just don’t sing loud and you’ll be fine.” Dad laughed at the show as Maryanne tried to seduce a native who resisted her by mumbling in an “ethnic” language: “You’re not the type of girl I can bring home to mother.”

Yesterday, as on most evenings, I carpooled home with my dad’s lifelong Russian friends turned neighbors turned coworkers. I listened as the woman corrected her husband’s pronunciation. “No, it’s not strugety it’s strutegy.” This went on for a few minutes, and I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. I threw myself into the fray and said, “it’s just like the beginning of the word stratosphere. Make that ‘a’ nasal sounding, and don’t mix up the ‘g’ and ‘t’. They had me say the word stratosphere five times, followed by the word strategy as it was intended to sound, with the g and t in the right places.

Four out of ten of the troubadouric thespians are Russian, I thought. Did the American who wrote the skit know that my dad has trouble with the word whirl? Did he even realize that my dad would be preparing for his five lines with the kind of fervor that he had when he was studying to be a physicist, the kind of diligence he tried to instill in me when it came to my own algebra and history classes?

My dad’s friend sat in the backseat and said to his daughter on his cell phone, “Listen to me and tell me if you can understand me…” and he recited his few lines, enunciating each syllable, massaging the sides of his tongue against his teeth as he emphasized the American, flat r, chiseling away the rrrolling exotic Russian r to the topography of Wyoming.

As we neared the end of our 50 minute car ride, dad surprised me by reciting his lines perfectly by memory. Each word rounded out like an apple pie’s edges, each intonation of a phrase ebbed and flowed like an American flag, and I could see the smile on his face when he finished and saw me staring at him. Almost a week later, he had finally conquered his demon, and I was reminded again of how each victory over the English language is really a victory for my entire family. These battles are being fought and won, but the word immigrant will never be fully conquered.

"I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before."

~Francesca Johnson in The Bridges of Madison County  

I quit my job today and accepted a new one in San Francisco. It’s the end of an era for me in D.C., as Kirsten noted, and I have to say that I’m happy to close this chapter of my life. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing an advice book for young women who’d found themselves in similar situations as me—moving to a new city with a guy, living with him, getting ditched, feeling lost, slowly recovering, learning how to make friends, growing sturdy survival legs, and moving on.

It’s sort of trite, but maybe it could make good material for some short stories.

List of Advice:

1. Unless you’re okay with endless dating, don’t live with the boy. Get your own place.
2. Don’t devote your time to his every need. Examples: Don’t sacrifice happy hours with your coworkers to go to his work events.
3. Don’t get involved in his family drama. As a follow-up, pay close attention to the relationships within his family. If they don’t sit well with you, take that as a predictor of your future together.
4. Reserve chunks of your life for yourself, like drawing a line in the sand which he can’t cross over. The hard part? Really meaning it. If you pick up painting, don’t paint and think, “I wish I was with him on the couch in front of the T.V.”
5. Don’t share finances, for the love of God. And don’t give out social security numbers.
6. When you feel you’re not being respected, believe that feeling.
7. Love is not hard. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to feel good, and you shouldn’t have to force yourself to like someone you should like naturally.
8. Sex is a huge indicator of how your relationship is fairing. If he’s lazy in bed, he’s lazy out of the bedroom. If he puts your pleasure second, he’ll put you second in other areas of your life together.
9. If you feel lonely while sitting with him with no distractions, something’s not right.
10. Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched—planning is great, don’t get me wrong, but planning the paint color on the walls of the house you haven’t bought together is bad news.
11. Keep your families apart until you’re engaged. There’s no reason for parents to become friends if you don’t even know how the relationship will turn out.
12. Don’t let your boyfriend’s mom treat you like a daughter. You don’t need another mom—you’ve got one already, like her or not.
13. Don’t let your boyfriend’s mom treat you like a daughter-in-law, since you’re not married to her son yet. Examples: shopping with her, and allowing her to question your style in clothing.
14. Make friends, the real kind. Call them, make plans, and follow through. Genuinely care. If you can’t genuinely care, take some time to figure out what’s wrong. Maybe all of your attention is being focused on one person?
15. Plan your life as if you were going to have to do it all alone. While this isn’t the best case scenario, it’s a contingency plan. Anything above that is gravy. As I’ve heard in a movie: “We come into this world alone and we die alone.”
16. Ladies, take your careers seriously. Divorce rate aside, desire to bare children aside, your job does matter. It affects your self esteem and from what I know of men, they love a strong woman. If the guy doesn’t appreciate that in you, re-evaluate why that may be. Does he feel threatened by you? Does he trust you without feeling like he has to bribe you to stay? Does he insist on earning more than you? Is he more competitive with you than encouraging regarding salaries?
17. Negotiate the job offers you get. A disproportionate number of men negotiate compared with women. Don’t be afraid of seeming like a bitch—this is your time you’re being compensated for. It’s your future, and if you’re planning like you’ll be doing it alone, salary starts to matter more.
18. No body owes you anything. If you were privileged growing up, don’t think that’s how things are supposed to be. If you want something, go out there and get it. Don’t expect people to hand you anything.
19. Stop leaching off your parents. It’s one thing if you need a place to stay when something goes wrong, or if you’re between leases, but don’t depend on them to bail you out. Remember: live life like you’re doing it alone. It builds strong legs to stand on.
20. If your goal is to get married, raise a family, and move forward in developing your relationship with your significant other, share that from the outset of a relationship. Once it’s out there, stick to your guns and be ready to leave if your instinct tells you it’s not going to happen. This is why #15 is important. You’ll be more likely to survive a break up if you feel you can take care of yourself no matter what.

I see how I’ve become. When I was so depressed that I could barely breathe, I’d fly and think about what it would be like to die. I know. It’s not PC to say that in this post-September 11^th world, but I’d have dreams about dying in a plane crash. While wide awake. It was my private, reckless way of saying to the world, “I don’t care if you take me, I don’t care what happens to me.”

I’ll call it my teenage depression because it lasted from 6^th grade through 11^th. It was always there, a lump of old bread in my stomach. Maybe it was a learned behavior from my mom, or maybe it was partly hormones, maybe both. I want to dig through boxes to find my old journals from those times. I’m sure there are some great quotes about wanting to die, morbid things I wrote, and really felt. But everything is already packed up and I don’t want to step barefoot on the garage floor.

I was depressed for six school years, most days surviving, some days clawing at anything that could help me out of the hole I was in, and very few people knew. I made it through alive because I never had the resolve to off myself, even though one of my classmates did, and her grave is next to my grandmother’s grave in Minnesota at a Jewish cemetery. This girl was also Russian, so I guess we had a lot in common. Except she still has an image of Winnie-the-Pooh on her grave stone, the one that’s carved in the shape of a music note, and I’m still alive.

I made it through the day by sleeping three hours after school and six more at night, playing flute in the band, and messing around with boys when I could. The more boys, the better. The more I could pull them along, the healthier I felt. Self esteem problems? Never. Seriously. I wasn’t plagued by such things at that age. I was sick with the disease that made me act like a self-destructive adult at fourteen.

I was also plagued by my mother’s frowning looks and her own depression. The way she and I squared off in the kitchen, one moment hating each other, then standing side by side, cooking at midnight.

My brother’s friend, Marc, would stop by our house some nights when it was very late, and he’d quietly knock on the window of the kitchen, jolting my mother and me out of our walking insomnia and shared depressed eyelids, sticky from sweat, cooking oil, and sadness. He’d sit with us at the table and eat dinner at two in the morning some nights.

I dated a guy for years who was controlling and very jealous. Marc came by one night, and I had to tell him that he wasn’t welcome to visit me anymore, that the guy I was with didn’t allow it. He’d get mad at me, and I’d have to deal with his anger. Marc’s reply: “The Marina I know wouldn’t let a guy do this to her.”

He was right, but I didn’t listen until much later. I’d make crepes with my mom and fill them with sweet apples and cinnamon. I’d rake leaves in the back yard during my weekends home from college, and I’d quietly hide the controlling boyfriend’s effect on me—the side effect that comes from knowing you can fall in love with abuse—the feeling that you could get through anything, if you were just strong enough, if you weren’t so weak.

Raking leaves into little piles, filling a first aid glove with dead leaves, I’d make turkey heads and run around my parents’ yard. Those Indian summer afternoons. One such day brought me the news of my cousin’s suicide, and my dad’s way of delivering the information: “Irit is no longer.” Of course, it sounds different in Russian, but the gist is the same, and my mother snapped at him, “Tell her the truth! She is old enough to know. She’s in college for god’s sake.” So dad says, “She killed herself. With a gun.” And then mom told me to put down the damn turkey head, and what was wrong with me, couldn’t I feel grief like a normal person? Why was I so juvenile? But I couldn’t at the time. I was busy grieving for me. “People deal with grief differently, mom,” was all I could say. And I hated her for a while for not approving of the way I felt sad.

When I finally awoke from my rotting state, I eventually stopped cursing the world around me. I don’t remember when my desire to live resurfaced, but I knew one day, as I sat strapped into a plane seat that I didn’t want to die. So I started making all kinds of deals with god, “Please let me make it through this landing. I promise I’ll be better towards my parents. I won’t be so selfish anymore. I just want to land safely.”

I made it through without medication, or counseling. My general physician once did an exam and said to me, “I’m not sure why you’re so sleepy. Your iron levels are normal, so it’s no anemia. All other tests are coming out fine. Unless…” She trailed off, and then continued, “Unless you’re depressed and you aren’t telling me. Of course, there’s no way that I’d know if you’re good at hiding it.” I sat silent, mortified, wanting to curse the day I’d referred my mother to my doctor. This woman was treating my mother for heavy depression, so no doubt she knew my family history. I guess she could see that I wasn’t fully well, but there wasn’t much she could do for me unless I requested treatment, and I swear, the room was so uncomfortable because the word “depression” had farted its way into our faces. So I went untreated, and I survived.

That survival is a story for another day, but I saw how I’d become—I had finally started caring about my life, and I desperately clung to every missed opportunity, every chance I’d given up for happiness. I began to regret the self destructive things I’d done to myself, like being friends with a girl named Kari in high school who said I embarrassed her when we hung out with guys, how my shirt wasn’t low-cut enough, how I had to stop being so weird. I regretted that I never tried out for a play, or sang in the choir, or took writing seriously. How I doubted myself every time I’d raised my hand, how I didn’t kiss the popular boy I had a crush on and got to go home with after school to work on a home movie English project. I regretted wasting time. I cared, all of a sudden, and that change surprised me to my core, because the very mournful friend I had known for so long had somehow died, and I wasn’t grieving for her.

I’m back in DC, or Maryland, I should say. San Francisco was wonderful, as it always is, and I feel like it’s home.

Home.

What the fuck?

Why is it so hard to just find a place, slap a few things on the walls, get some friends to help lug your freaking oversized couch up the narrow stairwell, and really feel at home? Well, first off, I haven’t found too many friends in DC that would help lug a couch up some stairs. Second, I couldn’t afford an oversized couch when I first got here, and I now know better than to make that kind of an investment in this city. Third, home is about something intangible.

Like how happy I get when I sniff a heavily boy smell saturated t-shirt, my boy’s smell. Or when he puts me in a femi headlock and shoves my nose into his armpit, further emphasizing his masculine prowess as he whispers to me, “This is where your home is.”

And all of my insides melt like salami on a frying pan. My stomach flips, my throat prepares to say something, but all that I can do is laugh hysterically and hold him tightly and breathe in his armpit smell.

Bread, butter, tea, Russian salami.

Cool, San Francisco morning air.

Silent kitchen, two people at the table,

The whole day ahead to lazy it up.

I'm in San Francisco for the weekend. It's heaven here, and I don't want to go back to DC. The days involve long walks through pretty neighborhoods, where I explore cafes, which serve buttery croissants, and organc ice cream shops that serve flavors like "Honey Hill Mint Lavender". In between each mini adventure, I go back to my boyfriend's house and we take afternoon and evening naps, interspersed with movies on laptops and the kind of lovemaking that makes me feel like the entire state of California is on top of me, wrapping me up from the inside out with sunshine, coastline and sweet necatrines.

Yesterday morning we went to the farmer's market at the Ferry Building on Embarcadero. We bought some odds and ends, came home, cooked a late lunch, and before I knew it, it was 9 o'clock, and time to meet up with my cousin. She's great, and I love spending time with her.

More later on this adventure. Today, we're going to the Richmond District in search of the classic Russian store. We're hoping to find the great salami and smoked fish that I'm used to, and also a napoleon cake, filled with cream and layered with puff pastry dough.