| I’m
only tempted to write about my father’s side of the
family mainly because everyone’s batshit insane there.
I can only mean this in a good way, of course, considering
I inherited everything I could from them. In fact, my father’s
family line is so predominant that when I first saw my grandmother,
I thought it was my dad in drag, playing a practical joke
on me. I was tempted to pull at her hair and tell her to quit
horsing around.
It was only because the gods were looking out for me that
day that I didn’t.
Observe the following illustration to get a vague idea of
what I mean:
(No,
it’s not Michelangelesque…but I’m simple
like that.)
One of the strangest things about such distinct characteristics
is that I now know EXACTLY what I’ll look like when
I’m old. Due to this foresight I can start picking out
my ‘old person’ clothes (purple outfits, kitchen-tablecloth
dresses and such) right now, simply by judging by how good
they’ll look on my grandmother.
By the way, did I mention yet that she hates my guts? Yeah,
it’s true. I haven’t quite understood just why,
but the moment I arrived to Russia, she informed me of it.
“Daria, you’re no good,” she said.
I suppose the blame partially falls on my older brother, who
came to Russia and stayed with her several years earlier when
he was having his passport made. In her words--and I have
little reason to doubt this--he spent the entire time listening
to his Walkman. He didn’t eat any of her pie; he didn’t
want to listen to her stories; he just sat there, softly banging
his head to music that wasn’t audible to her.
This naturally pissed her off, and before you could say: “Take
a chill pill,” she was on the phone to my father, telling
him how my brother had made it clear that he wanted her to
die, and that he wanted to take her stuff. No joke. Until
this very day Grandmother insists that we’re all after
her possessions, and what's more, we are all a bunch of heartless
robots (as opposed the regular kind, which apparently DO carry
hearts). The robot comment stemmed from the fact that my brother
never took the earphones out of his ears. She calls him ‘Robot
Boy’ and hates him more than anyone else.
If she had a stick, she’d poke us all with it while
calling us names. I was thinking of getting her one for Christmas,
but then decided that I was perfectly content just getting
the evil eye from her.
Anyway, we’d spent years listening to her badmouth us
over the phone, and when we first came to Russia, we had to
LIVE with this person for over three months in an apartment
that is LITERALLY smaller than the bathroom we have now.
She’d regularly have a tantrum, and when she did, she’d
run into her bedroom (slamming the door alà teenage
angst) and turn on her pre-1960s revolutionary Russian music
full-volume. Her favorite, if my memory doesn’t fail
me, was a recording of a catholic priest best known for his
falsetto and his acoustic guitar.
Grandmother’s tantrums were, in turn, followed by my
father’s tantrums--he is the proud owner of the quickest
mood swings in this here wild west.
…which reminds me of a rather funny incident that took
place when I was still a girl in school. I was hanging around
with a bunch of my friends in the playground during lunchtime,
when I decided to show them an impressive little thing I had
learned the day before called the ‘Turkish Trick.’
The ‘Turkish Trick’ is completed by a person putting
his hands on the neck of another person, and then by pulling
the victim’s skin back tight towards the nape of the
neck. Medically speaking, this stops the flow of blood to
their brain, causing them to faint.
Except when you’re in sixth grade, you don’t think
in medical terms.
The ‘Turkish Trick’ was indeed a trick--and one
that worked, at that. It was just a way to raise your ‘cool’
status, which I was always in desperate need of, nothing more.
And so I put my hands around my best friend’s neck and
pushed the skin back as far back as I could. 20 seconds later
she was on the ground, twitching and groaning.
Now, in ‘Turkish Trick’ terms, things were actually
going according to plan. My friend stood up, a little dazed,
but okay. Everyone clapped me on the back with shouts of encouragement
and my popularity status bar went up +1 point(s). To this
day, the bar has remained unmoved.
What I wasn’t counting on was my ‘best friend’
running off to tell a teacher what I had done to her. I was
blissfully unaware that she had done this, and it wasn’t
until several hours later, during geography, that said teacher
came in and told me I had to go to the principal’s office.
I arrived to see my best friend, her mother and the principal
all staring at me like I had just sacrificed a white lamb
to the god of gore. Next followed a string of words that no
A-student ever wants to hear in their life: “We’re
calling your father.”
My dad’s been known to freak out about some pretty mediocre
stuff. How would he handle me nearly killing a fellow classmate?
To make a long story short, he picked up the phone, said something
like: “Who cares?” and hung up. He so
couldn’t care less, it was scary.
And
there you have it: two characters straight out of a "Goosebumps"
book (one of the earlier in the series, I should say, I never
cared for latter, more psychological effect the children’s’
book author went for), and I’m sat here helpless, like
a cow watching a train wreck in the countryside, wondering
just how much of that is me.
These
incidents are but mere blips in an otherwise long-running
series of events in my life which often remind me, that though
there are few nice things I can say about my father and his
mother, I’m overjoyed knowing that I’ll inevitably
have inherited their ill logic and madness. Not to sound like
a softy, but I truly hope they know, that there is no one
else I would rather be like one day, than them, those crazy
sons of bitches. |
