Russian Tattoo (8 page)

Twelve

M
illie presses me to her cotton T-shirt with the letters
era
stitched in big red capitals across the front. She seems to have grown shorter and wider since August, when I first met her, her graying hair boyish, her eyes smiling out of pleats of skin behind her glasses.

In the evening, we sit in the kitchen and drink a sweet cocktail called a toasted almond. Millie likes sweets as much as I do, as much as any Russian, and she beams with pride when I say that she's Russian at heart. “My grandparents were Russian, you know,” she says and toasts me with her glass. The drink is thick and delicious; it is made with heavy cream and two liqueurs I'd only seen once in a foreign-currency store in Leningrad when I worked as a tour guide, Amaretto and Kahlúa.

We don't talk about Robert. Just as with my mother, I don't discuss Robert with my mother-in-law. I tell her about life in Russia. Kahlúa and Amaretto? They are not available. Heavy cream? I saw it once in a café in Moscow. Drinking? Not the way we're sipping a cocktail here. Half a liter of vodka for every two guests; if you open a bottle, you must finish it; pickle marinade in the morning for the hangover—those unwritten rules we all learned from childhood. Marriage? At twenty-four a woman is considered old, a spinster. Men? On March 8, International Women's Day, men bring flowers, then watch television all night as women whip up holiday dinner in the kitchen between serving them drinks. Children? Most couples don't have more than one; food lines, full-time jobs, and misogynist husbands vaccinate women against motherhood. The only available contraceptive is abortion performed without an anesthetic; you have to bribe the doctor to get one. Millie shakes her head, and I know she thinks I'm making this up to entertain her. Women's rights? she asks, and now I am the one shaking my head because I'm not sure if I don't know the answer or simply don't understand the question.

Sometimes Andy and Donald, two therapists who work for Millie, join us for toasted almonds after they are done with their daily patient load. Andy is handsome and funny, making Millie laugh, his jokes spreading a net of wrinkles over her face. Twice a week he drives to Princeton from northern New Jersey, where he lives, a part I haven't seen yet, a part as mysterious as Andy himself. I don't quite know what makes him mysterious, but I catch myself watching him furtively, trying to conjure up the man behind the ironic smile.

Donald, who lives nearby, is blond and tall and reminds me of passed-out Scandinavian tourists I saw loaded onto hotel luggage carts, on top of suitcases, after a vodka weekend in Leningrad. Only this Donald was born in Wisconsin and never drinks more than one cocktail with us because he is always in a hurry to return to his young wife, Beatrice, whom he married just last year. “Donald and Bea are fighting again,” says Millie, rubbing her chin. I don't know how she could have found this out, unless Donald fills her in on his family troubles, but maybe this is a skill she learned in her psychology graduate program, an ability to see through people's façades and go straight to the inner rooms of their minds. I sometimes wonder if she can take one look at me and see that I am not in love with her son, that I feel guilty about leaving Leningrad.

“You know,” says Millie, mixing Kahlúa with cream one evening when Andy is not there, “Bea is Don's second wife. He was married to Jill.” She pauses as if waiting for me to say something. “Jill is my daughter,” she adds when I remain silent.

“I didn't know you had a daughter,” I say stupidly, which, of course, means that I don't know Robert has a sister.

“Four years older than Robert, graduated from Wesleyan third in her class,” says Millie.

“And where is she now?” I ask, looking around, as if this were Russia, where adult children continue to live with their parents, and Jill would be likely to pop out of the childhood bedroom she'd never left.

“She moved to Cleveland after the divorce,” Millie says. “Didn't want to stay here to be reminded of the failed relationship.” I notice that Millie switches to more professional, psychological terms, which make her sound defensive, which make the word
failed
ring bottomless with possibilities. Did Donald fail to understand Jill? Did Jill fail to be a good wife? Did Millie fail in giving them professional advice that could have kept them together?

But the gravest realization for me, since I don't know Jill and barely know Donald, is that Robert never told me about his sister. Not when we went to see Marina in a play together during his second visit; not when he met my sister Galya, at whose apartment we had stayed before and after the wedding. He knew that I had six cousins who lived in the provinces; he knew that my mother had three brothers and one sister; he knew I had an Irish setter called Major when I was growing up. All I knew about him was that his parents were divorced. He never told me that he had a sister.

“So Donald is your son-in-law,” I say, stating the obvious. “Former son-in-law,” Millie adds, almost reluctantly. I want to ask her if she resents Donald's presence in her kitchen, his sipping toasted almond and talking about Bea, his new wife. I want to ask her why she's being so noble and so selfless when lamenting Don's fights with Bea. Do they evoke, in her mind, Don's former fights with Jill? Are these memories the only way Millie can keep her daughter close, the daughter who left to get away from all this? To get away from her?

“He needs structure in his life, and Bea is good with structure,” says Millie. “She maps things out; she delineates the boundaries.” Her voice is soothing, like honey-flavored cough syrup, as if she wished her daughter were Bea and not the woman Don divorced years ago.

I wonder if anyone gets angry here. Back in Leningrad, you knew how everyone felt about everything: Marina screamed at me, I yelled back, and my mother shouted at us both to stop fighting. Babushkas on the street berated young mothers with strollers if their children were not properly bundled up. Teachers lectured students in front of the entire class for stupidity, lack of patriotic zeal, or a missing comma. School janitors waved their mops at you if you left dirty footprints on the floor. You always knew when you did something other people did not like. They scolded and shamed you to make you feel guilty, to cut you down to size. They were the volunteer eyes of the collective, vigilant and sharp.

Maybe Americans, because they don't have to waste time elbowing their competitors on lines, were able to evolve into a more advanced race of people who do not judge others, at least not openly. Maybe instead of resenting their former sons-in-law's new wives, as Russian mothers would, they analyze their new marital problems and offer professional advice.

Maybe one day I should catch Andy—with his quick movements and kind eyes—while Millie and Donald are still in their offices, and ask him what hides behind all this politeness and calm. Andy seems like someone who has enough insight not to wince at a question like this, who could possibly understand what it feels like to struggle constantly against the undertow of culture shock, to be so different and so unknowing of the most basic things.

The prospect of talking to Andy makes me feel buoyant and at the same time guilty, as if I was planning to reveal to him some innermost secret I've never even dreamed of entrusting to Robert's ears.

At night, I sit in my room in the yellow glow of a table lamp, the sweet taste of toasted almond turning to bitter in my mouth when I think of Robert. His parents divorced when he was fourteen, his father moving to Philadelphia and taking with him the science fiction books Robert had slipped off the shelves of his study, one by one, to savor in his attic room while his braless mother marched for the ERA between the workshops she gave on repairing faulty relationships and connecting to your inner self. Robert spent hours immersed in his father's articles on the laws of physics that governed stars, planets, and black holes—the universe that seemed so much less unruly and more intelligible and constant than the one around him.

I think of Robert teaching math to a freshman class in Austin; I think of him getting into Sagar's Volkswagen to go to the university. I think of the way he moves, the way he speaks. Measured movements, calculated words. A perfect specimen of this new race of people, Americans. I have never heard him raise his voice or swear. I have never seen gooseflesh bump his skin or anger crease his face. As far as I know, his brain has always been the master of his heart.

Thirteen

D
uring the second week of our cocktail sipping, Millie says that I should start looking for a job. This is what Robert said a few weeks ago; these were the words that brought me to the door of Milto's Pizzeria. But maybe New Jersey—only a tunnel away from Ellis Island—is more generous about jobs for recent immigrants than Texas. Maybe Millie will lead me across the lawn to the house hidden behind the rhododendrons and teach me about experiential development or, at least, about keeping her schedule or her books.

I need to occupy my time not to get bored, Millie says. But I'm not bored because I am finally reading all those banned and censored books that lure me openly from the shelves of Millie's study and the local bookstore. I discover that all those dangerous tomes by Solzhenitsyn and anthologies of Brodsky's subversive poems do not cause a stir in those who pass them. If only our steely Soviet leaders had known this, they wouldn't have had to spend sleepless nights banning and policing and confiscating these books at the borders, books that don't force anyone—as it turns out—to become an enemy of the state. Nobody trembles over Bulgakov's
Master and Margarita
here, no one's heart quakes over the line that summarizes the ultimate futility of Soviet censorship—“manuscripts don't burn”—when the Devil produces a novel the Master had earlier tossed into a fire.

Maybe Millie thinks that work will give me structure, the same therapeutic function that Bea provides for Donald. She doesn't know that structure is the last thing I need. I've been structured by jobs since I finished high school at seventeen. I did the first of four daily mail deliveries in Dekabristov Street, when the pavement still echoed with the night emptiness; I copied drafts of classified blueprints at a secret boat factory without ever seeing the slightest trace of a boat; I sliced the spinal cords of rabbits into specimens in my mother's anatomy lab; I occupied a huge desk that guarded access to the director of the House of Friendship and Peace. With everyone else, I chugged along the track laid down at birth: taking classes at the English department of the university; offering private tutoring to earn money for perfume, the only decent thing available in Leningrad department stores; getting a diploma from the hands of an unsmiling dean.

Had I stayed, I would be teaching yawning kids at the end of the metro line to retell Lenin's biography in English or to memorize a vocabulary list from the gray pages of a textbook called
Eternally Alive
so that they could write an essay on the achievements of the latest five-year plan. For thirty years I would walk to the metro station through the gray soup of the morning and after work return to the kitchen chair where my father used to sit when I was in nursery school, my dinner plate with a slice of black bread next to it waiting on the table set by my mother, then by my older sister, then maybe by no one at all. And when I would eventually turn fifty-five, I would no longer have to walk to the metro station to get to work since, like every other female citizen, I would be eligible for a state pension of 120 rubles a month. From the very beginning, there was nothing but structure in our Soviet lives, and nothing but state-­approved work.

After the Texas preview of the jobs available to me, I don't fool myself into thinking that I will be teaching grammar anytime soon. Millie seconds this thought when we are driving back from the supermarket past a sign that says
beefsteak charlie's
, hiring now.
She stops the car and says that we should go in. I don't know who Beefsteak Charlie is, but next to the restaurant's name is his picture, almost cartoonish: a pancake face, round and puffy, with a mouth smiling under a thick mustache.

Inside, Beefsteak Charlie's is a huge, murky space with ladders and coils of thick wire strewn across the floor. The space is as big as a ballroom, and as always, when I think of a ballroom, I think of the first ball of Natasha Rostova from Tolstoy's
War and Peace,
one of the
chapters I didn't skip in the four-volume novel, as I leafed through the descriptions of military maneuvering and battles. Written in prose that made my heart flutter, it was all about young, handsome counts in military uniforms and romantic expectations of first love. This isn't a Tolstoy ballroom, of course, by any means. I know we are in New Jersey and not in nineteenth-century Petersburg, but my mind seems very slow to adapt to my new reality, constantly turning back and dredging familiar images out of the silty riverbed of memory. In my head dazzling pairs of dancers have already begun to spin on the parquet floor, and Natasha's eyes have already caught the stare of Prince Bolkonsky, setting in motion the passion and betrayal and Tolstoy's view of redemption that followed.

“Can we have an application?” asks Millie when a woman in jeans rushes past us, erasing my vision of Natasha waltzing before the eyes of the whole Petersburg beau monde, setting in motion the Beefsteak Charlie's chapter of my own destiny.

“Sure,” says the woman, without slowing her trot. She disappears behind a door, then reemerges with a paper in her hand. “Give it back to me when you're done,” she says and vanishes again.

I fill out my name and Millie's address. On the previous experience line I write, “Milto's Pizzeria,” amazed that there is something I can write that qualifies for experience. “Position desired,” I read.

“What am I applying for?” I ask Millie.

“You're applying to be a server,” says Millie, deliberately using the gender-neutral word, unlike those gender-specific names “waiter” and “waitress.”

When I sign my name at the bottom, Millie gives the application to the woman in jeans who keeps running past us, back and forth, with loads of folded linens on her arms. “We'll call you in a couple of days,” she says without glancing up at us, taking my paper and stuffing it between the creases of cloth.

Every week Robert calls from Texas. His calls are like the letters he wrote to me in Leningrad: foreign, formal, incomprehensible. With the absence of real life around us, there seems little to talk about. Devoid of the convenient concreteness—the correct pronunciation of characters' names in
The Three Sisters
, the blur of supermarket aisles, the hot tedium of Milto's afternoons, when the place stands empty of sound and life—we stumble and search for topics during the awkward pauses in long-distance airtime.

“How is life in New Jersey?” he asks.

“Good,” I say. “We made chicken cutlets for dinner. Millie says I should work so I don't get bored. I'm not bored, not at all. Yesterday I applied to be a waitress at Beefsteak Charlie's.” I state the facts in simple, first-grade sentences, for which my university English professor would have given me nothing more than a satisfactory
troika.
For a moment, I think of telling Robert about Andy joining us for dinner, but then I don't.

Robert chuckles on the other end. “That'll be a step up from serving pizza,” he says.

“Definitely,” I agree. “It'll be a promotion. If I get the job.”

There is a pause, one of those uncomfortable silences.

“How is Sagar holding up?” I ask, knowing that his mother's visit is looming close.

“He told me his mother is arriving from India next week. I guess he's happy to see her.”

No, he isn't, I want to tell Robert, but I don't. I realize Robert doesn't know anything about his roommate's emotional life, and he probably wouldn't want to know if I told him. What do Robert and Sagar talk about when they drive to the university in the morning? The density of matter in black holes? The laziness and stupidity of freshmen?

“You have to tell me what she's like,” I say.

“I probably won't see her much,” says Robert, and I know it means he'll be spending even more hours at his office than he was when I lived there. I wonder how often he sees Karen. I wonder if they spend time reading Russian books together, if she corrects his pronunciation and points out new vocabulary.
I doubt that she even knows enough new vocabulary to try. And her vowels, I'm certain, are way too clipped and happy—as inauthentic as her soaring intonation at the ends of sentences. But all these linguistic wonderings are tiny mice around the feet of one elephantine question: What happens at the end of their Russian lessons? Do they go to her apartment, where there is a real bed, not just a mattress on the floor? And how frequent are those visits in the book of open marriage? I try to conjure up what happens on the pages of that book; yet I'd rather not imagine. I can only think that Robert must feel relief now—free to see Karen as often as he likes, free to make love to someone who hasn't been damaged by her Motherland, free of a stranger loitering around his house, clueless. Robert is free now to do whatever he wants—whatever Karen wants—since I have been exiled to New Jersey.