Fly Away (Firefly Lane 2)

“We were Ukrainian.

“Did you know that?

“No, of course you didn’t. I never told you anything about my life or your heritage. I guess it’s time now.

“You’ve always wanted to know my story. So here goes.

“As a girl, I …

thought it meant “ugly”—Ukrainian—and it might as well have. It was the first of the secrets I learned to keep.

Fitting in. Not standing out. Being Americans. This is what mattered to my parents in the plastic, shiny world of the fifties.

You can’t understand how this could be, I’ll bet. You are a child of the seventies, wild and free. You grew up around people who wore a whole different kind of headband.

In the fifties, girls were like dolls.

Extensions of our parents. Belongings. We were expected to be perfect, with nothing on our minds except pleasing our parents, getting good grades, and marrying the right boy. It’s hard to think now, in this modern world, how much it mattered that you marry well.

We were to be nice and pliable and make cocktails and babies, but neither until after marriage.

We lived in one of the first cul-de-sacs in Orange County. Rancho Flamingo, it was called, a horseshoe plan of ranch-style houses set on identical lots, with green, well-tended lawns out front. If you had really made it, you had a swimming pool.

Pool parties were all the rage. I remember seeing my mother’s friends clustered by the pool, wearing bathing suits and flower-dabbed rubber swim caps, smoking and drinking as the men drank martinis by the barbecue. They were all drunk by the time someone finally jumped in.

Weekends were a movable feast; one tropical-themed pool party after another. The weird thing is, I only remember watching the adults. Children were to be seen and not heard back then.

Honestly, I never thought much about it when I was little. I blended into the woodwork. No one paid me any mind. I was an awkward girl, with frizzy hair and thick eyebrows that overshadowed my face. My dad used to say I looked like a Jew—he would swear when he said it, and I had no idea why it bothered him—why I bothered him—but it was obvious I did. Mom told me to just stay quiet and be a good girl.

I did.

I kept quiet, so quiet I lost the few friends I’d had in grade school. By junior high I was an outcast, or maybe not an outcast, maybe just invisible. By then the world was changing, but we didn’t know it. Terrible things—injustices—were happening all around us, but we didn’t see. We looked away. They—black people, Hispanics, Jews—were “them,” not “us. ” My parents never mentioned our own ethnicity as they spewed their racism over cocktails. The first time I asked if Ukrainians were like Communists, I was fourteen years old. My dad smacked me across the face.

I ran to my mother. She was in the kitchen, standing at the avocado-green Formica counter, wearing an apron over her pale blue housedress, smoking a cigarette as she poured onion soup mix into a bowl of sour cream.

I was crying so hard snot was leaking into my mouth and I knew a bruise was forming on my cheek. Dad hit me, I said.

She turned slowly, a cigarette in one hand and that empty soup mix packet in the other. She stared at me through her jeweled, cat’s-eye black glasses and asked, What did you do?

Me? I drew in a great, gulping breath. She took a drag of her Lucky Strike in its holder and exhaled.

That’s when I understood it was my fault. I’d done something bad. Wrong. And I’d been punished. No matter how much I thought about it, though, I couldn’t figure out what I’d done that was so bad.

But I knew I couldn’t tell anyone.

That was the start of me falling. I don’t know how else to describe it. And then it got worse. In the summer, I began to change physically. I started my period (You’re a woman now, my mother said, handing me a pad and belt, don’t embarrass us or get in trouble), and my breasts developed and I lost layers of baby fat. The first time I showed up at a pool party in an Annette Funicello two-piece, I heard Mr. Orrowan from next door drop his martini glass. My father grabbed me by the arm so hard it felt as if the bone snapped as he hauled me into the house and pushed me into a corner and told me I looked like a tramp.

The way he looked at me was worse than the slap across the face. I knew he wanted something from me, something dark and inexplicable, but I didn’t understand.

Then.

* * *

He came into my room one night when I was fifteen. He was drunk and smelled like cigarettes and he hurt me. I don’t think I have to say any more about that.

Afterward, he said it was my fault for dressing like a tramp. I believed him. He was my dad. I was used to believing him.

I tried to tell my mom—more than once—but she avoided me now, snapped at me over the smallest things. She was constantly telling me to go to my room or go for a walk. She couldn’t stand the sight of me. That was obvious.