Olga Dies Dreaming(83)
There was a pause before he asked, a little desperately, “Did she say anything about me? Karen, I mean.”
“No,” Olga lied again, this seeming easier than involving him in the truth. “It was a very quick conversation.”
They stayed up for hours, drinking together, remembering their father, talking about Prieto’s next steps for his medical health, his trip to Puerto Rico. Finally, when they were both a little drunk, Olga confronted the elephant in the room.
“When are you gonna tell Lourdes?” This was, essentially, the same as asking when he was going to go public, because they couldn’t ask Lourdes to not tell her mother and, Olga knew, once this was out beyond the two of them, and maybe Titi Lola, it was just a matter of time before it came out.
“I, uh, haven’t decided yet.”
“I’ve thought a lot about this and if you want a chance at keeping your seat, you have to come clean about everything, right away. You will garner a lot of sympathy, and then you’ll have till the mid-term to be able to establish yourself as more than the guy who’d been in the closet with HIV.”
Her brother was quiet for a moment.
“But what if it doesn’t go that way?” he asked. “What if it becomes a controversy and I need to step down? I can’t leave my seat. Not right now. Not with this president and not with what I saw down in P.R. I’ve got to get back down there. I can’t have this as a distraction.”
* * *
HER BROTHER’S DIAGNOSIS shook her core. The rational part of her knew he’d live a long, wonderful life. But she was feeling far from rational and she couldn’t stop imagining the worst. A life without her brother felt unbearable. Rootless. Recognizing this, though, only made Olga more aware of how rudderless her existence already was. Her brother, who even now, in the face of this illness, was directed by a larger purpose: his fight for others. It provided him a beacon, a way to redirect himself. Olga felt she had been paddling for years in no discernable direction except away from her fear of not being enough.
As a child, when people found out that Olga had been “left,” she could see how quickly she was recast as a victim in their eyes. She felt their pity and it made her feel broken. Damaged. Her grandmother astutely observed that any foible or stumble at school would be attributed, with an air of inevitability, as the ramifications of her being “parentless.” Any success Olga found would be attributed, with an air of disbelief, to her “resilience.” Very early on, Olga and her grandmother calculated that, if given the choice between the two, Olga’s easiest path was to be a success.
This strategy worked well initially: do well in school, excel at a talent, look pretty, make people laugh, solve problems for yourself, don’t trouble anyone, when possible be helpful. Success, then, looked as simple as escape: from the chaos her parents had left in their wake, towards “opportunity.” After high school, though, with her grandmother ill-equipped to guide her through the new terrain of the Ivy League, the goal began to be less clear, her toolbox less adequate. As a result, Olga fumbled in the dark, trying to adhere to a path that led to a fuzzy destination known simply as “success.” In college, she became convinced that meant affirmation by institutional powers. After college, celebrity and its proximity were what she thought she should be striving for. Only in adulthood did she ascertain that no, it was money that would inoculate her from feeling less than.
Her parents, of course, had always viewed success as a White Man’s construction. Her mother used her letters to continually remind Olga of this, to emphasize the futility of her pursuits. Her mother, though, didn’t know what it was to be deemed the thing less important. Less important than drugs, less important than a cause. Her mother didn’t understand what it required to shake that label—“less”—to prove it wrong to the world. A world that, despite how her parents liked to see things, valued the way you looked, the kinds of clothes you wore, the places you went to school, the people you could access and influence. Even her brother, rooted as he was in his place of good, understood all of this. Olga formed her ambitions in reaction to her mother’s absence, but she surely calcified them in rebellion to the very values that led her mother to abandon them in the first place. Grounding her identity in the realm of the material seemed to her the perfect revenge.
Until one day it didn’t.
After Spice It Up and the Great Recession, Olga began to notice that her clients were growing steadily richer while the people doing the work were getting compensated in exactly the same way. Even the rich people appeared less content than before. Simply existing seemed an immense burden to them. Their wealth bought them homes that were “exhausting” to deal with, vacations that were “overwhelming” to plan for. What was required to please them, to make them feel joy on their most joyful day, became increasingly impossible to achieve. Olga raised her prices, inflated her bills, increased her markups. But the money didn’t make any of it feel better. She began, gradually at first, to find not only her actual day-to-day work tedious and stupid, but also the entire project of her life. Around this time Olga noticed that her mother’s notes no longer filled her, even for a moment, with smug satisfaction.
She began to wonder if the only person she was enacting revenge on was herself.
Sometimes, like now, a feeling of unease would come over her and last for days, a strange kind of melancholy with no starting point or definitive end. A therapist she was forced to see at the fancy college told her this feeling was likely a longing for her mother, a suggestion Olga had rebuffed by storming out of the room. But over the years, Olga revisited this conceit, quietly wondering what her life would be like had her mother deemed her worthy of her time and affections. What would she, Olga, have done with all the energy she’d spent convincing anyone and everyone else that despite this lack, she wasn’t broken? So, although Olga very well knew that her mother’s affections were fickle, when Reggie said that she needed her, Olga could hardly stop herself from wondering, what if the therapist was right? What would happen if she could alleviate that longing? What sense of peace and purpose might she find for herself if given the chance to earn her mother’s admiration?