THE AMERICANS
In the show The Americans, Philip and Elizabeth’s teenage
daughter has a hard time accepting that her mother
killed a man in front of her, or maybe it’s that
her mother killed countless people not
in front of her, or more likely it’s that her mother
is capable of clipping someone in a matter of seconds,
crushing a windpipe or puncturing a major artery
to start a quick bleed-out, and if this is reality then what
is mere fakery, and what else are they pretending to be—
are they even travel agents?
My parents were immigrants, too, and also emerged
from behind the Iron Curtain, masquerading
as model citizens in a red brick house, three kids,
and what horrors, I wonder, lurked behind it all,
my father’s screams waking us in the middle of
the night from dreams where he still hid in the forest,
his rage when he felt that not finishing a meal
was a sign of our ingratitude and ignorance,
my mother’s heavy silence weighing her down
like a lead apron, her mouth clamped shut
like all the good wives of the postwar generation.
Life was a costume ball in the 1970s, avocado-
green furniture and wing-tipped collars,
and yet how many times did I come home from school
to the spectacle of jiggling cow hoof displayed
like a grotesque trophy on the kitchen counter,
Polish, Russian, or Hebrew music on the hi-fi?
Did they think they could really pull it off—
immigration, integration, acculturation, sophistication,
and us kids their new world experimentation?
They never taught us any of their many tongues,
enigmas laid out in Latin, Cyrillic, or Aramaic lettering.
Like Philip and Elizabeth, they hid many secrets
and, like Paige, I felt bewildered, confused:
my mother’s cancer, the radiation treatments,
how she kept every strand of lost hair hidden
from us, her children, although I loved to touch the wigs,
the wisps that looked so real until you felt
their unnatural stiffness and scratchy mesh
that held them in place; my father’s late nights, countless
affairs—a foreign singer, at least one prostitute,
a Russian dental hygienist he would eventually
run off with when mother finally said, Enough.
When Philip sleeps with other women he looks
miserable. He doesn’t want to be a cheater
but he does sneak off to EST meetings
and, when he returns, they fuck as if naked and
alone they can finally be who they really are
for a few intense moments before putting their
disguises back on. My father had pork chop burns,
my mother a bouffant wig and dresses with groovy
patterns. She looked nothing like the daughter
of a simple watchmaker, and he looked nothing
like the peasant shepherd boy he once was.
Once a refugee, always...? Well, I can’t say for sure.
What I do know is that when they left me home alone
I scoured the backs of my father’s closet drawers for clues
but found instead the Joy of Sex and How to Please
a Woman, a woman clearly not my mother.
With my erection and my shame who could say
what damage I soaked up through this
secret language of betrayal and rage
that no amount of money could overpower.
And yet, here I am, with my own children nearly
grown up, the burden of history folded
into my front pocket, imagining my father
homeless and ragged on the streets of Kyev,
his mother gunned down by Ukrainian fascists,
his father dying of starvation somewhere
in a Siberian prison camp, and who should offer
him food and shelter but a struggling Yiddish
poet, a true believer in the Communist dream,
who would one day die in the dank basement
of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison on Stalin’s bloody
Night of the Murdered Poets. In flashback we see
grainy footage of Philip’s and Elizabeth’s childhoods.
No spotty films of my parents’ childhoods exist,
the horrors of their lives recorded only in my mind
where I try to splice them together to better understand
myself, for aren’t we all products of history, children
of refugees scattered across the globe, descendants
of spies, dissidents, turncoats, double agents
trying desperately, impossibly, to survive our own wars?
In the show The Americans, Philip and Elizabeth’s teenage
daughter has a hard time accepting that her mother
killed a man in front of her, or maybe it’s that
her mother killed countless people not
in front of her, or more likely it’s that her mother
is capable of clipping someone in a matter of seconds,
crushing a windpipe or puncturing a major artery
to start a quick bleed-out, and if this is reality then what
is mere fakery, and what else are they pretending to be—
are they even travel agents?
My parents were immigrants, too, and also emerged
from behind the Iron Curtain, masquerading
as model citizens in a red brick house, three kids,
and what horrors, I wonder, lurked behind it all,
my father’s screams waking us in the middle of
the night from dreams where he still hid in the forest,
his rage when he felt that not finishing a meal
was a sign of our ingratitude and ignorance,
my mother’s heavy silence weighing her down
like a lead apron, her mouth clamped shut
like all the good wives of the postwar generation.
Life was a costume ball in the 1970s, avocado-
green furniture and wing-tipped collars,
and yet how many times did I come home from school
to the spectacle of jiggling cow hoof displayed
like a grotesque trophy on the kitchen counter,
Polish, Russian, or Hebrew music on the hi-fi?
Did they think they could really pull it off—
immigration, integration, acculturation, sophistication,
and us kids their new world experimentation?
They never taught us any of their many tongues,
enigmas laid out in Latin, Cyrillic, or Aramaic lettering.
Like Philip and Elizabeth, they hid many secrets
and, like Paige, I felt bewildered, confused:
my mother’s cancer, the radiation treatments,
how she kept every strand of lost hair hidden
from us, her children, although I loved to touch the wigs,
the wisps that looked so real until you felt
their unnatural stiffness and scratchy mesh
that held them in place; my father’s late nights, countless
affairs—a foreign singer, at least one prostitute,
a Russian dental hygienist he would eventually
run off with when mother finally said, Enough.
When Philip sleeps with other women he looks
miserable. He doesn’t want to be a cheater
but he does sneak off to EST meetings
and, when he returns, they fuck as if naked and
alone they can finally be who they really are
for a few intense moments before putting their
disguises back on. My father had pork chop burns,
my mother a bouffant wig and dresses with groovy
patterns. She looked nothing like the daughter
of a simple watchmaker, and he looked nothing
like the peasant shepherd boy he once was.
Once a refugee, always...? Well, I can’t say for sure.
What I do know is that when they left me home alone
I scoured the backs of my father’s closet drawers for clues
but found instead the Joy of Sex and How to Please
a Woman, a woman clearly not my mother.
With my erection and my shame who could say
what damage I soaked up through this
secret language of betrayal and rage
that no amount of money could overpower.
And yet, here I am, with my own children nearly
grown up, the burden of history folded
into my front pocket, imagining my father
homeless and ragged on the streets of Kyev,
his mother gunned down by Ukrainian fascists,
his father dying of starvation somewhere
in a Siberian prison camp, and who should offer
him food and shelter but a struggling Yiddish
poet, a true believer in the Communist dream,
who would one day die in the dank basement
of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison on Stalin’s bloody
Night of the Murdered Poets. In flashback we see
grainy footage of Philip’s and Elizabeth’s childhoods.
No spotty films of my parents’ childhoods exist,
the horrors of their lives recorded only in my mind
where I try to splice them together to better understand
myself, for aren’t we all products of history, children
of refugees scattered across the globe, descendants
of spies, dissidents, turncoats, double agents
trying desperately, impossibly, to survive our own wars?
