Family Matters: From Tokyo to Mali Losinj

It was the wedding of the two wealthiest families in Croatia. We were sitting in the dining room, around dozens of round tables, adorned with crystal candelabras and bouquets of bright red roses. It felt very Old Hollywood with the over-the-top glamour. I was sandwiched between my sister, Sherry, and her friend Kat, the divorcée squirter. My sister loved advertising Kat’s sexual escapades over the course of this 3-night-destination-wedding trip. It was during the nights when the three of us shared a room that I learned how impressed my sister was of Kat’s orgasmic abilities, how surprised she was that I knew what a “squirter” meant, and how Kat just ended a love affair with a German man and grandson of a proud Nazi. Regardless of learning the inner workings of Kat, she served as the perfect buffer between me and my sister. In this case, three was not a crowd.

The dining room was all filled up now, as guests had made their way back from the outdoor reception along the Adriatic Sea (the next day we saw photos snapped by the paparazzi from boats). It was while we were sitting around one side of the round table that my sister leaned over to tell Kat about how prevalent suicide was in my Dad’s side of the family. One cousin hung himself from the tree outside his mother’s home five months prior, she told Kat. It was almost like she was bragging.

“Oh, you didn’t hear how Michael died?” she asked us, as if Kat would even know.

Persian Jews are so secretive about their personal lives.

“You’ve never heard?” she asked me. I shook my head.

All I knew was the lie my Dad’s brother and the rest of the family told people, that his son, Michael was hit by a car. They didn’t want anyone to know it was a suicide. In Anthropology, this concept is called “saving face,” something that is all too common in Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. You don’t want people to know how fucked up your family really is, for who would ever want to marry into it?!

I only learned the truth about Michael seven years later—I think—when my Dad visited me at college in Boston. We were eating oysters at an adorable shack of a restaurant in Cambridge when the topic of Michael came up. He said it was actually a suicide and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him how. Or maybe in this moment, my always inquisitive mind just didn’t want to know.

Sherry was so detailed and again, almost boastful in her description. No discretion at all. Only irreverence.

“He soaked long, white tube socks in water, put them on and jumped out of his window and onto electrical wires. He wet the socks so he would get shocked as much as he possibly could. His body was so electrocuted that he was unrecognizable.”

She said something about someone needing to go to Japan, where he was living, to identify the body. I think it might have been Sherry’s husband even. I don’t remember. At this point, I was in complete shock, but my tears and hyperventilation were insidiously beginning to get attention.

I was frozen; my eyes fixated on the fancy silverware before me. My sister’s words burned, as every detail to Michael’s brutal death burned me as much as it burned him. She’s facing Kat, Kat’s facing her, and I’m in the middle, staring off into space, transported to Japan, visualizing every moment of that terrible night (or day). My body: hot. My face: flush. If my olive skin were the kind to turn pink from embarrassment, I would expect it to be bright red at this point. And my breathing. It stopped. It didn’t help that I was tightly fastened into a black velvet Alexander McQueen dress with an inner corset, just barely my size. The type made for tall, lanky models, not little Persian Jewish girls with barely a torso. The corset was too long, so I couldn’t fully sit down, just a half-assed attempt with half my ass hanging off the dining chair.

Tears starting streaming down my face. I wondered if the rest of our tablemates were noticing, like Maurine, the queen of the Entertainment PR world or her husband Jake, a film producer. But no one did. Self-absorption was very much appreciated at this moment. But if they saw, it would probably be an opportunity for validation, for when they asked what was wrong and I told them my sister was recounting the gruesome details of my cousin’s death, they would probably take my side, that this surely wasn’t the appropriate topic to be had at a fucking wedding party.

I felt like a statue, frozen. Burning hot and crying. Sherry finally saw me.

“Are you crying?” she was shocked.

As if it was so out of line. Kat quickly gave me a glass a water, holding it to my lips as I took sips between my hyperventilating gasps for air. She was so motherly to me. I remember thinking how much of an oxymoron it was to be a sex fiend yet so nurturing at the same time. When she taught me how to puff on a Cuban cigar later on that night and told me I should get my lips injected like hers, I knew it was from a place of love. I liked being with her.

“She’s very sensitive,” Sherry told Kat. Offering explanation to the subtle eruption that was happening inside my body and mind. I glanced over at Jake across the table. Still nothing. My earth-shattering realization of the painful length my cousin took to end his life went unnoticed in the ballroom of Croatian upper crust.

“Do you know how Pepper really died?” Sherry asked.

Was she taunting me? Was this a sick joke? Taking stock of all the losses in my life right now, during her best friend’s wedding and my mini European getaway.

I think people have weird ways of handling unresolved emotions. Maybe this was residual animosity from more than two decades ago, when my parents had an accidental baby, me, who became the center of attention and everyone’s world. I was the only person who could get my Dad out of his workaholism and be the somewhat present, all-American father my sister and brother missed out on.

“I remember Dad used to take you horseback riding at Griffith Park when you were little. He never did anything like that with us,” she once told me years ago. Her sense of loss in that statement was heavy. Maybe her blows of these painful death realizations were her way of evening out the playing field after my Dad’s neglect during her childhood, or lack thereof.

* * *

Pepper was a grey rabbit that was rescued—or abducted—from a park in Bel Air and soon became my first, beloved pet. It was the time in elementary school when everyone said they wanted to be a vet when they grew up, and my liberal Beverly Hills classmates and their families treated their pets better than people, so I felt the need to do the same. I made my mom drive to some far-off shop in the canyons to buy a bespoke wooden cage for Pepper. One that was elevated, so I could see him at eye-level. The persistent thought plaguing my young mind in those days was whether or not I closed Pepper’s cage, often running back outside to make sure it was. An early sign of the obsessive and ruminating thoughts that began brewing inside my little head. Ones that went unnoticed by my family but would plague me when I got older.

I always attributed Pepper’s death to that: I forgot to close his cage and he ran off, into the very hills he was plucked from. But apparently not.

* * *

“Lily let Pepper out once, and then out of nowhere a bobcat came down from the hill and grabbed him in its mouth and ran away,” Sherry told me and Kat. I didn’t say anything. No sense of relief came from the fact that it wasn’t my negligence that resulted in Pepper’s loss, but rather Lily’s doing—Lily was my longtime nanny and second mom. What bothered me the most was how she said it was a bobcat. I’ve seen plenty of wildlife around my childhood home. It was in the hills and not uncommon to catch the fleeting glimpse of a deer or coyote. Once I saw a racoon and fed it KFC. But a bobcat? How the fuck did a bobcat suddenly swoop down from a cul-de-sac in Beverly Hills to grab my one and only fat, grey rabbit? Maybe God was punishing us for toying with Mother Nature, removing an animal from its natural habitat. Or maybe this was to be Pepper’s fate all along, and I merely took him on a little detour to enjoy domesticated animalhood and spend some time in a fancy, outdoor rabbit hutch.

The party went on. We danced, we cried. Well, the bride did for obvious, joyous reasons. I did from newfound trauma. The night ended in our hotel suite. Kat and I stripped out of our dresses and into the hot tub on our balcony, overlooking the beautiful beaches of Mali Lošinj. My sister stayed outside, dipping her feet in briefly. Maurine came by at some point to tell us how Jake struck up a conversation with a man named Dinko, who told him that his story idea was stolen and made into a Hollywood film starring Michael Douglas. A movie that Jake was currently working on the reboot of. Everyone was struck by the uncanniness of it. No one commented on my hyperventilation or waterworks display a few hours earlier.

On our last day in Croatia, we all flew in three to four-person planes to Zagreb, the capital city. I had a sore throat that was increasingly getting worse, and the sleep deprivation and jetlag didn’t help. After checking into the hotel in Zagreb, we had a couple hours to kill before meeting back up with everyone for dinner, after which, I would only have a few hours to sleep before my flight back to New York. Kat wanted to kill time in the hotel room. My sister was antsy to see her friend, Nika, the newlywed and now official member of Croatia’s wealthiest family. I decided to tag along.

As we sat in a cab, I looked out the window at a city I hadn’t been to in 15 years, since Nika’s first wedding. That’s when a feeling of gloom came over me like a blanket. Eastern Europe has a somber feeling to it. Maybe it’s the centuries-old Gothic architecture situated amongst austere, Soviet-era buildings that made this place feel far from home.

“This place really depresses me,” I said.

“Me too,” Sherry said, “that’s why I wanted to go to Nika’s house before dinner. To feel at home.” I was surprised to hear this. I always thought my need to feel “at home” was something immature, the remnants of my childhood separation anxiety, and something that wasn’t shared by others. I was the only person to hate Venice, Italy, for example, because it felt very foreboding and cold, quite like Zagreb.

She waited a few moments. Then said, “Were very similar.” I looked at her briefly then stared out the window. It’s one of the few times I felt close to my sister.

At the restaurant, my sister’s friends, the bride and groom, and Dinko and his wife were all in attendance. After berating Iris, a friend on Nika’s, on her new age parenting techniques, Sherry turned to me to say, “You have to gargle with salt water when we get back to the hotel.” It’s been a detested tradition in our family to gargle with salt water at the inkling of a sore throat. I never wanted to as a kid, and surely didn’t want to now at 26, but with only having a few hours before my flight and even fewer before my night shift in morning news, I knew I had to. She got the salt grinder from a server and began making a pile into a napkin.

“You know they have salt packets at your hotel,” Nika said.

“Yeah, but this is better quality,” Sherry said. My sister has four children. At this moment, I felt like her fifth.

After dinner, all the Americans squeezed in a car back to the hotel. I sat on my sister’s lap like I used to when I was little as she played with my hair. Maurine and Jake were confounded that I had to wake up just before midnight for my stint at CBS News.

“Yeah but she just had a great interview with 60 Minutes, so fingers crossed,” Sherry said while looking at me. She felt like my mother, a common misconception people had when I was a baby and she’d take care of me as a late teen.

Back at the hotel, I concocted a makeshift saline solution, but my ratio was way off. Too much or too little salt and that mixture has nowhere to go but the drain. After some swishes, I got myself ready for three hours of shuteye before heading to the airport, saying my goodbyes before bed so I could stealthily head out without disturbing anyone. When my alarm went off, I quickly sprung up, gathered my stuff and headed for the door. Kat was still asleep. Then a bedside light flicked on. My sister got up and came to hug and kiss me goodbye.

“Don’t you have the best sister in the world?” Kat said earlier that night.

“I really do,” I thought to myself.

A lot went through my mind as I sat alone in the airport, awaiting my delayed flight. The Mueller Report had just dropped and I was sure to have plenty of annoying fact-checking to do that evening at work. I thought about Michael and the disturbing details I had learned the night before, feeling bad for not being kinder to my uncle recently. They say it’s telling how a person chooses to take his or her own life. Actors tend to be more theatrical with suicide, “wanting to go out with a bang”, my choir teacher once told me, pun intended, I’m sure. I hadn’t made sense of what Michael’s suicide symbolized for his life, his family, our family. I also hadn’t made sense of the tumultuous relationship I seemed to have with my sister. I used to be her toy doll, going out with her friends after they got their driver’s licenses. I remember when I was six and she and Nika were 20, they took me out of school early to go to Disneyland. In some ways, I was practice for when they both were to have children of their own. But just yesterday, my once nurturing older sister was assaulting me with tortured memories.

My mind teleported through many stages that weekend, feeling appropriately aged at 26 while smoking Cubans and talking about collagen and sex with Nazi offspring with my 40-year-old sister and her friend. Feeling like a preteen when recollecting my last time seeing Michael in person—I remember thinking how outgoing he was back then—and age 13 when he died. And finally, like a little girl again, being taken care of by my sister like she would all those years ago. I still hadn’t made sense of it all, and didn’t really want to anymore. It’s something that time will tell, and I didn’t have the time. My plane had just arrived.