Estranged by Jessica Berger Gross

Author:Jessica Berger Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

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In our room, with the beds pushed along opposite walls and our heads still only a few feet apart, we told each other our life stories. Her parents’ divorce, our respective family money problems. As another late-night talk session edged toward dawn, each of us smoking in our bed, I decided I would do it. I would tell Franny the truth about my father. I had never told a friend before.

“If I tell you something,” I asked, “something about my father, will you promise not to hate him?”

She nodded.

I took a deep breath. “My father hit me,” I said. That’s how I formulated the problem in my mind. It was easier to think about and say hit than abused. I put it in the past tense like that—hit rather than hits—because 1) the violence had pretty much stopped by then, and it had been a while since he’d done anything worse than yell or threaten; and 2) I thought it sounded better, like I’d already put the problem behind me.

“What?” Franny said, startled, reaching for another cigarette. Her father hadn’t been around much after he and her mother had separated when Franny was two. But I could tell by her voice, and the way she looked at me from across the width of that narrow room, reevaluating me, that she thought this was a much bigger deal. I hadn’t realized before that it would be.

Franny was sympathetic and asked the right questions but didn’t judge or question why I accepted my parents’ money and kept up the front of having a happy family. We were used to imperfect fathers, to pretending that everything was fine when it wasn’t.

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