Milla began as usual. “Malcolm didn’t just leave me, but also,
he wasn’t really there when we were married either.”
“Physically present, emotionally absent,” Stalina said, with
the same relish she brought to reciting Russian translations of
Shakespeare.
“Physically absent, too, though.”
“Very bad.”
“You know,” Milla said, sinking back into her pillow. “I had
other opportunities.”
“Of course. All my girls have the best legs, small ankles from
me and long from Papa.” Stalina petted Milla’s unshaven calf.
Milla took another bite of cinnamon cereal and started up again,
reciting a fragment of an Anna Akhmatova poem, guaranteed to make
her weep: “
This woman is sick / this woman is alone
,” but found she
couldn’t go into the next part. It would have felt ridiculous. “You
can go to work now, if you want.”
Her mother stared.
Milla shrugged. She was experiencing a feeling which it seemed
almost too much trouble to identify. “I might be bored.” When she
had said the same as a child, her mother had not been very happy
to hear it. (“
Maybe if we had a Blockade, you wouldn’t be burdened
with this terrible ennui?
”) Now, however, Stalina wiggled Milla’s
earlobe and smiled like a mime.
Katya
Katya, long-time family loony-tunes, family weakling, the
sickly baby, that same one, was re-tiling the kitchen floor. If they
could see her now — but her father didn’t want to see her now. Not
being the weakling meant not thinking about that.
“Bad-ass,” Chino said from his bed, where he was writing a
birthday card for his aunt in prison.
Old linoleum: a yellowing checkerboard. New linoleum: green
frogs on a shining white background. She would make sure it stayed
that way. She would make everyone go without shoes. “You know
I’m just renting this place, though, right?” Chino said.
She nodded and opened the adhesive.
Chino covered his nose. Apparently, you were supposed to
wear a mask, so she tied one of Roman’s undershirts over her face.
Chino turned his hooded sweatshirt around.
The first five squares were perfect, flush with her chalk
line. She didn’t mind, for once, Chino’s bragging about his five
thousand dollar signing bonus, his oft-revealed revelation that he’d
always felt like an army of one. She hummed to herself. The frogs
reminded her of Amston Lake — maybe she and Roman could go
there, once she started working.
The door slammed open. Katya said, “Your money or your
life.”
“Jacked my shirt.” She untied it and tried to hand it to him, but
his boots stepped past, over the floor she’d cleaned and sanded.
“Hey.” Her voice sounded young and surprised — not the kind
of voice to make anyone stop.
He poured himself a glass of water and turned around in his
own dark footprint. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She had a small advantage now. “Listen, like when
I first moved back to Stamford, my parents did this like cold-turkey
thing with me.” He didn’t look that angry. “Maybe you want to...it
would be one thing if the K helped you, like, lighten —”
“
Don’t nanny me
.” He opened the refrigerator and took out a
head of cabbage, tore off a leaf and chewed.
Katya leaned her hand on the floor. She couldn’t believe
Roman wasn’t affected by the fumes, or maybe he was, and that
was why he was saying those things.
Chino put on his sunglasses. “Later.”
“Pick me up something?” Roman said, but Katya shook her
head so angrily that Chino closed the door without answering.
Roman tore off another leaf. “So I am one who needs to lighten,
you think.”
She pressed another tile down. She’d gotten them out of order,
and a frog was missing half its face.
“But Katya is perfect shorty, right?”
“Look, you’re the one who practically made me pee in a cup
before our first date and now —”
In a deep voice, he said. “
I’m Brezhnev and comrades, I must
say this chickie is crazy to think she can order around a man like
Roman Pitursky.
”
Another square. You have to know what your energy is about.
“
Doesn’t she know that everybody laughs at her cretinsky
speech? Doesn’t she know how lucky she is to have a normal
man?
”
You have to —
“You fuck up floor,” Roman said in English.
“I should just talk like you, right, my G?” Katya said, swaying
to a standing position. Why couldn’t they go outside? “The guys on
your site never laughed at you? I saw them laughing.” A mistake,
if she ever wanted him to go back to work, but he wouldn’t,
anyway.
Roman pulled the brush out of her hand, reared back — would
he hit her? “
She’s just a
sterva yobanaya, see?
”
He threw the brush
in the sink.
Katya didn’t know what his words meant, but she knew what
would happen next: how she would leave now, without packing,
or finishing the tiles; how her mother would look behind her for
Roman, and let her in; how her father would make a joke about
the fall of the Roman Empire, and apologize; how Milla would
try to explain something about marriage, and cry; how Roman
would show up, drunk, fancying himself a Mayakovsky, only to
be captured by the Neighborhood Watchers in their orange vests;
how she would watch him through the window and would not jump
out.
Milla
Milla stood outside Katya’s door with a cup of valerian tea.
“Kat?” The door was closed and music was blasting, just like when
her sister had been a teenager. After a while, she and Yana hadn’t
bothered to try Katya’s door anymore. No wonder Katya had run
from a house where her own sisters had better things to do than to
knock and wait.
Milla said, “I’ve got drug tea.” She heard nothing in reply except
a singer who wished he were a lamp. “I should never make a joke,
ever. It’s not really drug tea, just
valiryanka
, like Baba Byata takes
when she visits.”
Katya opened the door, looking as pale as she had at Milla’s
wedding. Milla held out the mug, spilling tea on her hand in her
eagerness.
“Do you see this window?” Katya said.
Oh, no. She would have to get their mother involved. “I do see
it. This window is actually real,” Milla said. “What else do you see?”
She hoped, for poor Kat’s sake, that at least she was hallucinating
elves or talking flowers, and not blood-filled gasoline pumps, as
in a television film about a drug-addled single mother she’d seen
recently.
“What kind of asshole hung this?” Katya pointed at the window’s
frame. “What kind of fucking retard doesn’t level?”
“I don’t know…what
kind
…” Milla put the tea on Katya’s
desk.
“Do you want to know how crappy this frame is?”
In the weeks that followed, the house became increasingly
noisy. Sometimes, Katya asked whether the noise was bothering
Izzy, but most of the time, she didn’t. She never asked whether it
was bothering Milla, Stalina or Osip; perhaps she imagined they
felt grateful at the reminder of her ongoing fixes to what, to them,
seemed unbroken. On weekends, Osip was driven before the force
of Katya’s improving will, looking back over his shoulder, with
confusion and longing, at the television. On weekdays, Milla tried
to assist her, but Katya could be very snappish. Sometimes, Milla
wanted to say, “I have a child, you know,” or, “I’m going through a
divorce, you know.”
One day, while Katya was at Home Depot and her parents were
at the Chaikins’, Milla called Theandra Carlisle and invited her out
for a quick coffee, and offered to drive into Park Slope to meet her.
Roman
Roman opened the door. The television screamed, “My baby
needs milk —”
“Cartoons,” Roman said, but Chino shook his head.
An old man, bleeding, unbandaged, clothes torn, stood in a line
in the sun. Behind him, a woman waved a bruised arm from her
wheelchair. Roman’s mother could have helped them. She tied her
arm, nurselike, unafraid, her needle shone.
“I’m a U.S. citizen,” said a woman in her underpants on the
side of the road. Someone else in a wheelchair, head covered with a
flannel shirt, brown-blue feet in plastic sandals. A stadium without
water, shit on the floor, locked in, not even the babies allowed to
cross the road to Wal-Mart.
“Shut up,” Chino said.
A helicopter approached two boys and an old woman sitting on
a roof. It poked its nose at them like a dragonfly. The boys got up
and waved, but the woman knew better. The helicopter flew off.
Chino said, “You want some stuff, I know you steal it anyway.
Here, just shut up.” Water, gelatin.
A roof with an American flag, an inscription: “The water is
rising please.”
“I’m telling you,” Chino said. The camera pulled back from the
roof, back, back, and the people disappeared, and the roof, and all
the roofs, disappeared into gray and black. Chino pushed him out
the door, so he could disappear, too, to the house of the Molochniks,
where all his problems had begun.
Buses swept exhaust back and forth before the library, and he
gave the bus driver eleven dollars and a bonanza of change and the
driver yelled because he didn’t understand.