Tanya
People often ask me if Tanya is a real person, and if I know whatever happened to her. The short answer is that there was a friend upon whom I based the character of Tanya, and people who knew this real person will easily recognize her in my writing. But that is not to say that any of the stories I relate about Tanya are really true.
Photo by Jules
Tanya is a character that I stumbled upon by combining a real person, a friend from a different lifetime, with all of hypotheses I developed about that friend and her experience, back when I was trying to make sense of her. The real person never gave anyone anything close to all of the answers, and in the process of trying to connect the dots I created the character of Tanya as a way of understanding both her and myself, insofar as who I was when she was in my life.
As for whatever happened to her, I cannot be sure. I found some internet evidence that she might be selling real estate somewhere not so far from where I last saw her. But, as is the case with everything about Tanya, if this is so, it is just the beginning of the story. It is just as possible that she is selling real estate as that this is a cover for her CIA identity, or that this is a money laundering scheme that somehow involves the Russian Mafia. Because of this, I prefer to muse upon the Tanya character that exists in my head, whose experience could not ever possibly be as fanciful and full of mysteries as the real thing.
Below are the archives of the Tanya posts I've written. They are not for everyone. I have written them for myself and for those of you in the audience who enjoy hearing about Tanya, and have asked for more stories. Insofar as the stories have any significance at all, it is in this context. They are not a statement about the world, nor do they constitute a politics of any sort. They are fiction. Sorta. So enjoy.
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It was almost Christmas, and the Stanford Shopping Center was awash in all of the trappings of silicon valley-funded consumerism. It was the mid-nineties, and as usual, you had no money to speak of, but had still agreed to accompany Cate, Linda, and Tanya to the shopping center to find gifts for sundry family members. Linda had all of her family members arranged on a list with stores marked where gifts for each person were likely to be found, and she preferred to hit each store in geographical order. Cate lamented the fact that these stores were so mainstream, and she could likely find better gifts once she got back home. You weren’t sure exactly what Tanya’s plan was: it was difficult to imagine her family exchanging gifts or adhering to any kind of formal tradition. Tanya had told you that many years, her mother bought her own gifts: she would buy skin care products from La Prairie and wrap them up for herself, so that she had something to open on Christmas morning. It seemed like Tanya’s dad–whoever he was, and whatever he did–wasn’t one for ceremony or romance. But by then you knew better than to ask questions about the goings on of Tanya’s family life.
This was the same mall where you had worked for the Coach Store, back before they went LA and started producing products that blurred the line between funky and trashy. Back then, most people on the West Coast really didn’t even know what Coach was, but they had a cult following among some of the East Coast transplants and, of course, The Gays. More interestingly, the Coach Store had been the site of a heist during your tenure, and though you had nothing to do with it, it seemed prophetic of your career in useless crime, now that you thought about it. The crack security team behind The Coach Store, Stanford Shopping Center, had determined that certain items of the small leather goods case had been pilfered by an elderly couple who liked to come in just before closing on weeknights. The pair had attempted to return several leather accessories on different occasions, for cash. The Coach Store security team knew that the pieces were stolen because all of the accessories still contained the business cards that were to be removed once an item was sold. This truth was purely academic, of course, because one cannot enforce an anti-shoplifting policy based on the presence or absence of a business card; however, one night when you were working and the old shoplifting duo came in, you slyly alerted your manager to the presence of yet another business card with a sigh and an overly dramatic show of removing it.
What you didn’t know then was that the pair was casing the joint for their real target. Coach introduced leather jackets to their line in early 1994, and the elderly duo was only seen one last time after the Stanford Shopping Center received its first shipment of coats. When last seen, the duo was running out the front door of the shop, carrying a few hundred pounds of leatherware between them. And it would have been a sight to see, two decrepit consumers carrying their weight in parkas each, bending under the pressure but no doubt exhilirated with the steal. Who would have thought they could pull it off? But then, why couldn’t they? What was going to stop them?
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The uselessly criminal exploit was in your blood now, and there could be no better target than the Epsilon Chi house to hit, now that you had conquered TAE and Delta Kappa. Epsilon Chi was lower down on the fraternity totem pole than your first two targets, but unlike the others its members still put stock in the silly traditions and rituals of its traditional Southern fraternal order. The Epsilon Chis were the only fraternity on campus to do things like elect a fraternity sweetheart, and choose “little sisters” of the fraternity from each new Freshman class. As such, the EX house was awash in institutionally sanctioned fraternity trinkets: lacrosse sticks and crew oars emblazoned with the house’s letters, sweatshirts and trophies, beer steins with pledge names, and rows and rows of professionally designed composite pictures of the fraternity brothers.
These were the kinds of things that other fraternities on campus thought were stupid and tried to eliminate from their chapters. Whereas the Delta Kappas, for example, despised the “travelling tools,” as they referred to the national fraternity representatives who oversaw their goings on, the Epsilon Chis sought to please their national fraternity and uphold its standards as stringently as might a chapter in the middle of the Deep South. And though the secret traditions of nearly all fraternities are whispered about, if you had to pick a house most likely to actually have engaged in the kinds of homosocial? homosexual? sadomasochistic? rituals you heard mentioned, the EXs were certainly the most likely of this campus’ candidates to have participated.
Like all fraternities, there was an air of secrecy about that house, and a certain East Coast and/or Old Southern aristocratic air to the house that both fascinated and creeped you out. Once, you were at an EX party, talking to your friend Ty (who had been recruited by the EXs, as well as several other fraternities, during rush quarter of your Freshman year), when you were approached by Daniel Finch, a notorious Junior alcoholic and card-carrying member of EX. Daniel Finch had taken a liking to you early on in the year, and had asked you to several date parties which you attended not because you liked him, but rather because the fraternities held such a fascination for you, and you felt like you wanted to know more about them, and about the boys who joined them.
Daniel Finch, his obvious issues with alcohol aside, seemed like a relatively normal person beneath all of the greek bullshit. Yet that night, as he tried to rush Ty for EX, he explained that Ty would potentially play an important role in the fraternity. “See,” Daniel Finch had slurred, “We have one graduating this year.” It seemed like a strange conglomoration of words to you, but then you were a sheltered Anglo-Saxon from a fairly homogenous town in Southern California. Your experience with demarcations of difference was limited, and you were not yet suspicious of statements like these, made by drunken boys wearing Polo and too much Drakkar Noir.
When Daniel Finch left, Ty had said, “Did you hear that?” and chuckled. And you–dumb–said, “What was he talking about?” Ty explained, “They ‘need’ me because they have only one other Jew in the house, and he’s graduating this year.” And you knew he was right, and sure, Daniel Finch was a lush, but still, wasn’t it odd that he, in this day and age, would not only think of a Jewish person as a token, but also feel comfortable being open about it. Initially, you wondered where Daniel Finch would have picked up the idea that these were acceptable expressions, to blatantly treat humans as objects, and to advertise to those very humans the fact that you did so. It was strange, wasn’t it?
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It was the same fateful quarter that would forever acquaint you with the standard procedures of incarceration for those individuals deemed a danger to themselves or to others, and you had a week to find an elective to cover the science area requirement for graduation. Admittedly, it had been stupid to put it off this long: you had covered the other annoyance, the math area requirement, by taking Stats 60 the first quarter you had been at school. That was back when you actually rode your bike to class, paid attention to things like office hours, and performed well in courses concerning topics outside of the comparatively narrow subject matter of the formal novel of the long British eighteenth century.
Compounding your stupidity that Fall was the fact that you decided to take an upper division course to cover the requirement, when you could easily have taken Rocks for Jocks or Oceans or some other lecture course teeming with athletes to bring down the curve. But Elaine, your “little sister,” had really wanted you to take the course with her, since it also counted for her major. The major that she had this week, that is. Plus, it was psychology, so how hard could it be?
Your times in class were not as productive as they could be. You tried, but there were so many joke openings, what with the constant reference to laboratory rats and their psychological tormentors. This was the class that spawned the entire comic book mythology of Brutal Researcher, a research psychologist of the Mengelean school, and his white whale-like sidekick, Happy Mouse, a lovable ball of fluff who seemed always to have a trick up his sleeve for evading the menace of Brutal Researcher’s gigantic hypodermic needle. Sure, when the Brain and Behavior lectures featured stories with titles like “the little boy who liked salt,” about a child born lacking some kind of brain connection having to do with salt, your ears perked up. But it was always disappointing, because at the end of the scientific study of a young child’s obsessive compulsion to eat salt, you hungered for an explanation–even if only a narrative one, for the introduction of salt to the story . . . why salt, and not vinegar? or sugar? or pepper, for that matter? What did the salt represent, you wondered?
But it was all for naught. The Brain and Behavior lectures were ripe for constructing stories with fully realized narratives of your own, but they rarely provided the kinds of neat explanations upon which you had come to depend. Perhaps it was your first brush with the mechanisms of creative non-fiction–the kind of stories that did not end, could not end, with anything other than death. Like the woman who–on a manic high–bought six pink Cadillacs and allowed research psychologists to videotape her exploits. She was not going to have her problems magically solved by the scientists who studied her: their goal was not to cure her illness, but to map it. And more importantly, they did not even seem to care about its solution or its trajectory. They did not seem to need more of an explanation for her circumstances beyond a chemical one. Ultimately, if she refused treatment, they were happy to just let her be. Let her be crazy.
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You were still high from your recent criminal success and, having escaped without suspicion, you both hungered for another quest. Your next target, the TAE house, was also out for the summer, and located just next door to the Delta Kappas. Had you been real cat burglars, perhaps this would have deterred you, to hit two houses right next to each other in quick succession. But this was not Mayberry, it was still summer vacation, and the campus was still had a one-week turnover rate for conference-goers and corporate seminar attendees. The only other campus inhabitants were graduate students who, made easily identifiable by the ever-presence of their bicycle helmets, would rather die than be caught at the top of fraternity hill.
Besides, it would be vaguely poetic to hit the TAEs next, second-in-line as they were in the grand pecking order of mid-nineties Stanford fraternities. The Delta Kappa house might be the only place on campus you could catch a glimpse of the surfer dude/water-polo player straight out of Central Casting–that species of Southern Californian boy with whom you had grown up and for whom you had, in spite of yourself, developed an begrudgingly loyal affection. But for their own part, the TAEs attracted the New Englander version of him, a J. Crew-wearing, witty retort offering, summer home- and trust fund-boasting incarnation of the same snotty jerk, both familiar and strange wrapped into one. It was the house that would take Fred Savage, eventually, and though they were the same, though they were all the same, you were not yet acclimated to it. Your understanding of men in those days–nay, your understanding of people–and their relative value could be read with astounding accuracy from across a room, while intoxicated, at a crowded party. There, in the dark, you studied those differences with a highlighter and tape flags, tucking away your notes for later, never suspecting that the answer was to be discovered in the similarities . . . a milestone of another day.
It was fascinating, this brave new world with such people in it. You sometimes saw a magic to it, a hoodoo voodoo, and that night was no different, when you stumbled into the main room at TAE, after plenty of prepatory drinking precautions. There, you discovered what must have been a beacon divined just for the two of you, Tanya and Anna, and placed high above the dance floor that had been host to countless How Soon Is Now? moments in this and years past. Because there, framed by vaulted ceilings and in the middle large white wall, should have been the fraternity’s letters, TAE, in carved wood and spray-painted gold.
Except.
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