Sasha Masha

by Agnes Borinsky

  “You flatter me.”

  “I mean it. Maybe this is weird to say,” she said, “but I haven’t done a lot of this before. Like, going on real dates with anybody.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.”

  “Well I like it. I like how easy it is with you.”

  I didn’t answer. I just took her hand in mine and squeezed it, and then we swung our arms together in a big swooping arc. A pair of dogs ran up to us and nudged our crotches, and their owner called for them and apologized and called for them again and they went bounding off into the dusk. Then Tracy pointed up and I caught a last look at a flock of birds in silhouette, twisting and diving, before they disappeared behind the tree line. Already a cold, wet mist hung over the grass, and there was the littlest pinch in the air that made me think ahead to winter.

  We continued up the hill. I put my arm around Tracy and felt her warmth. We paused at a picnic table. I sat on one of the benches and she sat on the tabletop, facing me, her legs on either side of my legs, and she took my face in her hands and kissed me.

  In moments like this, everything felt easy and right. This was what I wanted. This was the way I wanted to be. But then I’d see my own hands, which seemed too big on her slender arms, and I’d wish I could send my body away and just be touch, and lips, and the flutter of a heartbeat.

  Then we were both lying on our backs on the table, looking up at the sky. The moon was big and you could start to see the stars. Tracy proposed that we make this our special spot, and I said I liked that idea. I slid over a few inches and pressed the side of my body against the side of hers.

  It wasn’t until her mom called to ask where she was that we started back toward the parking lot.

  * * *

  At lunch, we talked about whether Mr. Alstead and Mrs. Young were having an affair and whether our school could be considered “diverse” if the Latinx kids in each grade mostly hung out with Latinx kids and the handful of white kids basically stuck together. On the rare occasions when I made a comment, James looked at me and nodded, which I took to mean he liked me a lot. Jo asked our advice about whether it was weird to invite the senior she had a crush on to go with her while she got her hair cut.

  That Thursday I was supposed to go over to Tracy’s house for dinner.

  I stood in my room and picked up one of the shirts my mom had gotten me—the gray one, with dusty blue stripes. Why had I gotten so worked up about these stupid shirts? If my dad was right, I wasn’t supposed to care about clothes. I shoved my anxiety down in a dark corner of my brain, shut the door on it, and put on the shirt.

  I was probably just nervous about meeting Tracy’s parents.

  * * *

  Her mom was named Jennifer; she was friendly and had made vegetable lasagna. Tracy showed me her room and seemed very glad when I said I liked it. There was a small yellow couch in the corner, covered in stuffed animals. I imagined Tracy’s hands rearranging the bears and the dogs and the rabbits, smoothing the brown comforter on her bed, and straightening the orange pillows. Above the couch there was a postcard-size photograph of Toni Morrison, and on her desk were framed pictures of Jo and Jen and James and a few other people I didn’t know. Tracy introduced her dad, just home from work in impeccably pressed pants, who greeted me with a strong, enveloping handshake and asked if I would describe myself as a sports fan. (“Dad,” Tracy said to that.) Tracy’s kid brother, Antony, shook my hand, too, and did a little dance in his white socks. We sat and served ourselves and talked about the people running for mayor. We talked about Antony’s school project on dinosaurs.

  Whenever I meet new grown-ups, it’s like a wheel starts whirring very fast in my head. And the wheel is powering the light in my eyes and the smile on my face. And I get a little bumbly but also pretty charming, I think. And the wheel is spinning the whole time, trying to make sure I laugh the right amount and say good things and act polite but not too formal. I want to show that I am thoughtful but not pretentious, warm but not goofy. All through dinner I was focused on that.

  “You two are both so lucky,” Tracy’s mom was saying. “You know that? Don’t ever take it for granted. You go to a good school, you have nice families, you have so much. You can’t ever take that for granted—”

  “You know what I wouldn’t take for granted?” Antony asked. “The new Dragon Ball Z for PS4.”

  “All right, Antony,” his mom said, and we all laughed.

  * * *

  When I got home I was exhausted.

  I ran up to my room, flopped on my bed, and pulled out my phone. Mabel had sent a picture. When I saw it, my chest cracked open and my insides spilled out. For a second I couldn’t breathe. It was the two of us, sophomore year, standing in her bedroom. I hadn’t realized that picture still existed. I wished I could teleport back to that moment; I wished I could be with Mabel again, laughing, in that house. I took a deep breath and used my fingers to zoom in on each of us and I squinted, holding the phone close to my face.

  Mabel’s aunt Agatha had visited for Christmas. Agatha was a tarot reader and a painter and worked sometimes in an office, sometimes in a quilting store, in Wise, Virginia. I’d met her once before, and I was over at Mabel’s when she arrived Christmas Eve morning. She pulled up in front of Mabel’s house in her beat-up, dusty blue Nissan Versa and emptied the trunk of six or seven bags of clothes.

  “These are for my beautiful queer niece. Take what you like and bring the rest to the Goodwill. I won’t be offended, because I won’t know,” she said, and winked.

  Three days later, after Agatha left, I was sprawled on Mabel’s bed while she dug through the clothes.

  “Does this make me look like a motorcycle dyke?” she asked, swiveling her hips in a dark blue jumpsuit with a red stripe up the side.

  Or, wearing a little veiled hat whose name we had to look up (a “fascinator”), she’d perch on the edge of the bed: “My dahhhling. I’ve been bereft since the funeral. Simply bereft.”

  “Who is this person?” I asked at one point, meaning Agatha, as I picked up a pair of cowboy boots, and marveled at the nonsensical-seeming mixture of looks.

  “Oh, you know.” Mabel grinned. “Just a witchy lesbian of a certain age who doesn’t like to be pinned down.”

  “Can I try some on?” I asked.

  “By all means.”

  We spent probably two hours putting on and taking off shirts, shoes, dresses, skirts, and hats. Agatha’s bags seemed endless. Everything smelled like dust and lavender. We talked to each other in stupid voices and gave ourselves name after made-up name. It was only after we’d found the outfits that seemed too right to ever want to take off that we decided to record the moment. Now, almost nine months later, in my bedroom, I squinted at the image of Mabel in a tuxedo with sleeves too short for her long arms. A razor-thin mustache in eyeliner pencil completed the look. She had announced in a gravelly voice that her name was “Jimmy Crevasse.”

  I slid the zoomed image over and squinted at the person standing beside her, with a hand draped over the nearby bedpost: me. I had on a green velvet dress that fell to just below my knees. There had been plenty of pants and cowboy shirts in the bag, but none of them seemed exciting to try on. The dress was calling me, even though I’d never worn a dress before. There was a little bit of trim around the neck, which opened in a rectangle around my collarbone. I had a string of blue plastic diamonds around my neck. I could still remember how exciting it felt to wear that dress, and how dangerous.

  “And who do we have here, little lady?” Mabel had asked me, a moment before we took the picture.

  “Who, me?” I said, playing for time, since I wanted a name as good as Jimmy Crevasse. I felt a bit silly. And I also felt like a Russian aristocrat. “Me?” I said again. “You may call me Sasha.” But that didn’t seem good enough, since Sasha could be a boy’s name or a girl’s name. I wanted something striking, something complete. So I said it again, with an addition. “You may call me Sasha Masha.” And I offered the ba
ck of my hand for Jimmy Crevasse to kiss.

  Which, like a gentleman, he did.

  Lying on my bed, looking at our faces in the photograph from what felt like a different life, I thought we looked young. We were kids. But there was something else in our eyes that struck me now. We were looking at the camera with a calm, thousand-yard stare. It was as if somewhere inside of us we knew everything already—everything we’d ever need to know. I wondered what I’d since forgotten.

  * * *

  I went downstairs to get a snack, thinking I should call Mabel. Probably it was time to tell her I’d started dating Tracy, tell her I’d become a Real Boy and hope that she didn’t feel betrayed. I was growing up. I wasn’t the kid in that photograph anymore. Probably Mabel was growing up, too, in ways I didn’t know yet. She’d understand.

  In the kitchen my mom was eating a cut-up apple, paging through the circular that came every week with coupons from the drugstore.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said. “You deep in homework?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got to outline this history section.” I’d already given my mom a report on how dinner went, if by report I mean a series of short, general answers to an endless stream of questions. Yes, they were nice, yes, I had a good time, yes, the food was good, yes, their house was pretty, yes yes yes. I peered into the cabinet to consider my snack options.

  “Are you feeling okay? You seem a little out of it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m just tired and have a lot of studying to do.”

  “They work you very hard.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Are you finding good people to hang out with at school? Besides Tracy, I mean. I know it must be hard without Mabel.”

  “Yeah, it’s good, I hang out with people. They’re mostly friends of Tracy’s.”

  “Did you know them before, or…?”

  “I sort of knew them. But not super well.”

  “And how’s Ms. Wilson? I know Ms. Garcia was so great, it’s a hard act to follow.”

  “No, she’s good, I like her.”

  I pulled down a bag of pita chips and poured some into a bowl.

  “I worry about you sometimes, sweetie,” my mom said, after a moment. “You seem like you’ve been stressed out a little bit.”

  What was with all the questions? I was tired, and I had too much reading to do. Couldn’t I just get a snack and go do my homework in peace?

  “I’m fine, Mom, really,” I said. I put on my best, sunniest, most likable smile and went back upstairs.

  * * *

  Murphy was waiting for me on my bed. Dear Murphy. That day Mabel and I went through Agatha’s clothes, I’d brought home this windbreaker and a pair of jeans that fit me. Murphy came up to them and sniffed them a while, then turned and settled in with his back nestled against them. The smell of those clothes—the gust of a new reality they’d brought into Mabel’s and my day—didn’t concern Murphy any longer than the few moments he needed to take it in. It was funny to remember how easily Murphy could adjust to a new reality.

  “You wanna take the dress? The Sasha Masha dress?” Mabel had asked me as I was leaving. “It suits you.”

  “Nah,” I said, though I had a knot in my belly. “When am I ever going to wear it?”

  It was getting late. I’d have to call Mabel tomorrow. I started back in on my history outline, wishing people could be more like cats. Sniff, settle in, move on.

  Chapter 8

  “Can I tell you something weird, Maybelline?”

  “Of course, Alexidore.”

  “I think I’m dating Tracy Lewis.”

  There was a pause.

  “You think?”

  I coughed. “I’m dating Tracy Lewis.”

  There was another pause.

  “Well, congrats, babe! Cupid strikes again.”

  “Maybe,” I said, blushing and relieved. “We’ll see.”

  That was easier than I thought.

  “Sounds like you’re taking over the school,” she said. “All according to plan.”

  I laughed. I was suddenly full of things I wanted to say. I tried to describe Querelle and struggled to remember what the officer-narrator had said about humility … or humiliation … I did my best serious art-film voice. Soon we were giggling like we were back in one of our bedrooms, lying on the floor on a random Thursday night. Then I asked her about her dating life, and she groaned and said she was sure she’d die alone.

  “The life of a dyke in Pittsburgh,” she said. “Amiright?”

  “Surely you’re not the only dyke in Pittsburgh!”

  “No…,” she admitted.

  Soon we were laughing again.

  “All right, Alexidore,” Mabel said with a contented sigh. “I think I’ve gotta go.”

  My heart felt very full. I wondered if the wall between life with Mabel and life with Tracy would start to crumble now—now that I’d explained myself.

  “I’ll talk to you soon,” she said.

  “Bye, Maybelline,” I replied. “Miss you.”

  * * *

  Things with Tracy started to move pretty quickly.

  The week after I went over to her house for dinner, Tracy came over to mine. She wore a cream-colored sweater and looked beautiful. I put on my other nice new shirt and sat up straight. My dad wanted to tell all these old stories about me, things I’d heard him tell a thousand times. Tracy was eating them up, but I wanted to crawl out of my skin. As soon as she left, my dad came up to me and clapped me on the shoulder and gave me an affectionate shake.

  We had another Friday-night date, this time Vietnamese food. And then that Sunday I spent the whole day over at her house. It rained and rained. We sat on the yellow couch and watched eighties music videos on YouTube. Antony showed us the turnip seedlings he was growing for his science project. Around dusk the rain slowed, and Tracy gave me a ride home. The house was empty. I stretched out on my bed and could smell Tracy on my clothes.

  Pretty soon light jackets became heavy jackets. All the trees in the neighborhood looked like they were on fire. It had been a month since Tracy kissed me in Jen’s bathroom.

  I liked the feeling I got when I was close to Tracy. But it was weird: whenever I happened to see what we looked like together—in a store window, the mirror in the hall, wherever—I’d feel oafish and clumsy and wrong. It was the thing I’d felt when I saw my big hands on her thin arms: that these hands weren’t right, somehow. I’d have moments when I felt that about my whole body. It was too big, too bulky. It was … what, exactly?

  Wrong was really the only word. This was worse than being not-Real. It was Real in the wrong direction.

  One Saturday the debate team was set to compete as part of a tournament out in the suburbs. I woke up at six and drove with Tracy as spectator and supporter. In the car she practiced her arguments for and against voting rights for people with felonies on their record, and I asked questions. The sun was just coming up as we parked. Subdued voices echoed in the unfamiliar school lobby and the air smelled like coffee; we stood for a moment in a circle with the other debate kids from our school, all in nice clothes and name tags, and then Tracy and I were speed-walking down a hallway toward the first of her matches. It was a round-robin competition among five different schools. Over the course of the day, Tracy faced off against a series of other debaters—all boys, all white—and destroyed them all.

  “Not bad, huh?” she asked me, after we’d said goodbye to the rest of the team and started walking out to her car.

  “That was pretty cool,” I said, feeling very proud of my girlfriend. “You were the only girl—the only Black girl—the only Black debater.”

  “Oh, I’m aware,” she said with a wink. “I’m always aware.”

  It struck me that I spent a lot of my life trying not to stick out. On an afternoon like today, in a place like this debate tournament, Tracy had no choice.

  “How…,” I started to say, not sure what I was trying to ask. “How does th
at feel? To stand out like that? Is that a weird thing to ask?”

  Tracy shook her head. “I feel really alive when I debate. It’s maybe why I like it so much. And being different,” she said, cocking her head a little, “that feels like life. I just try to own it.” She buckled her seat belt. “Wanna get some food?”

  * * *

  Mabel generally thought schoolwork was overrated and rolled her eyes at me when I showed that I cared. So I was too embarrassed to tell her that for our first English assignment, Tracy and I swapped papers. I’d decided I wanted to up my game. I wrote comments on her essay and she wrote comments on mine. Her writing was clear and strong; mine felt wobbly and vague in comparison. But she showed me some things I could cut, and the paper got better.

  Our next assignment, though, came on a day when I was in one of my irritable moods. It was a history reading response, and that night Tracy texted to propose a deadline for us to send drafts to each other. I texted that I didn’t think I wanted to; I just wanted to do it myself and get it done. She texted to ask if I didn’t like her feedback. I texted that I did but that I didn’t want to always share everything. She texted to ask if I was mad at her. The whole conversation was making me mad—I could feel that anger bubbling in my stomach—but I texted back no, with an exclamation point, and promised we could swap on our next one. After that we both stopped texting and I did the rest of my homework. Anyway, by the next day she seemed like she’d forgotten about it, and then it was Friday and Fridays were our nights. We went to hear a singer and a pianist play old songs in the back of a music store.

  We had those tense moments every once in a while, moments where we’d get annoyed at each other. I’d get angry and wouldn’t say anything about it; I’d just want to be left alone. Then the next day the tension would be gone. Or that’s how it seemed.