The Nesting Dolls

by Alina Adams

  Zoe couldn’t do it. Not for him, not for herself. She refused to rewrite the paper and ended up with a B for the course. Which kept her out of Advanced Placement English the following year. Baba was, naturally, quite disappointed.

  “Who won in that case?” Mama taunts now. “And who suffered? And all because you wrote the wrong truth.”

  Zoe follows Mama out of the store, into the street. Mama lowers her voice. Though if she thinks they’re less likely to be overheard here, she’s delusional. The sidewalk is as packed as the shop was. There are people rushing by in all directions, reckless children on scooters, women swinging their massive, knockoff designer purses. Mama returns to her original point. “When Baba was young, she learned you say proper things in public because you are always being listened to, and you think your own thoughts in private. Nobody intelligent expects the words coming out of your mouth to match what is going on in your head.”

  “But we’re not in the USSR. Nobody is listening to us.” Except the NSA. When news of their spying came out, nobody was more vindicated than Balissa. “You see? Even here they do this! Why you should always be careful!” Zoe presses on. “Nobody cares what we say. Why do we have to keep lying to each other?”

  “Because your thoughts are the only things that are yours. If others know what you think and how you feel, they can use those thoughts and feelings against you. They can hurt you. Why take such a risk? What you think is private; what you say is for others.”

  “How can anyone live like this? It’s insane! How can you love a person you’ll never truly get to know? And they’ll never get to know the real you, either!”

  “The real you is so wonderful?” Mama challenges. “When you go out on date—the rare time you go out on date—you are completely honest? Or are you a little bit”—she holds up her thumb and forefinger, first close together, then stretching them out until they are longer than her palm—“better? Nicer, friendlier, politer, prettier?”

  “Well, yes. But that’s just in the beginning, while we are getting to know each other.”

  “How will you get to know each other if you are not, as you say, yourself?”

  She has a point. Which is why, rather than concede it, Zoe tells Mama that, as a matter of fact, she has a date tonight. With a Brighton-born boy, no less.

  “And you will be completely honest with him immediately?”

  “Of course.”

  Mama sighs. “This is big mistake, my Zoyenka.”

  Zoe helps Mama carry her purchases home. She plans to dump the bags on the kitchen counter and make a quick getaway. Instead, Mama calls Baba and Deda in from the balcony, where they are “taking sun.” No matter how many public-service ads Zoe’s grandparents watch about the dangers of skin cancer, neither can shake their Old World conviction that the way to absorb vitamin D is to fry until your skin peels. That means it’s working and leaching down into your bones. A bit of folk wisdom handed down from Balissa’s childhood in Siberia.

  “Our Zoya has a date tonight,” Mama announces loudly enough not just for Baba and Deda but for half of Brighton to hear. The news brings Balissa from her bedroom. She proceeds to riffle through the bags while listening keenly. Mama’s tone grows grim. “She intends to be herself with him!”

  “No, Zoyenka,” Baba advises, her nose and cheeks brimming that healthy red. “This is not wise. Men, they are to be tortured. Men do not want what they can easily have. You must to make it difficult for them, or they will lose interest.”

  Zoe thinks about what Mama said, about how the public face you show has nothing to do with the private person you are. Zoe wonders if the family she’s certain she knows is, in fact, completely different from what she’s assumed. Zoe looks at her churlish Baba and, like an X-ray, imagines catching a glimpse of the southern belle trapped inside. (Zoe defaults to southern belle because she’s thinking Scarlett O’Hara at the barbecue and can’t summon up an equally Russian example—Anna Karenina at the . . . Borscht Belt?)

  Deda assures Zoe, “You are a lovely girl. Do not worry about this. If something is meant to be, it will happen; you do not need to manipulate. You must be patient and wait. Your moment of opportunity will come. And you will to take advantage of it.”

  Patiently waiting then taking advantage of an opportunity the moment it comes up? Like a sniper? Isn’t that what they do? Sit for hours, days, weeks, then, when a split-second chance opens, they blow their enemy’s head off? Deda is the most tenderhearted, gentle soul Zoe knows. He feels bad for contestants voted off American Idol. “They tried so hard!” But could something darker be lurking underneath?

  Balissa is the next to chime in. “Being yourself not always best idea. There is much that can then be used against you.”

  Balissa is always on guard against being exposed. Zoe chalked it up to good ol’ Soviet conditioning. But what if she has her reasons? Balissa makes no secret of what her life in the USSR was like, neighbors spying on each other, turning people in for off-hand remarks or ill-advised jokes. When Zoe kidded that it was the original political correctness, Balissa didn’t laugh. Could Zoe’s quiet, inoffensive great-grandmother have been an opportunistic informer? Could that be why she’s on guard all the time? Balissa never explained exactly how her stepfather got Balissa and her father out of Siberia. Or how he brought Balissa and her mother back. What crimes were committed on her behalf? How might Balissa have repaid her family’s debts?

  Mama confirms. “I told Zoya it is better to first listen to what person wants, then to give it.”

  “What good advice,” Baba says to Mama, adding, “only twenty-five years too late.”

  Seeing her opportunity, just like Deda advised, Zoe leaps in. “Then why aren’t we listening to Baba? She said she doesn’t want an anniversary party, yet here”—Zoe indicates the bags of paraphernalia—“we are!”

  Cheap trick. But it works to divert their attention.

  They’re still arguing, Baba grandstanding, Mama cajoling, Deda trying to calm them both, and Balissa, impervious, putting away the purchases into their appropriate cabinets, as Zoe steps out the door—and to her date with Alex.

  Chapter 37

  Alex told Zoe to surprise him. He ends up surprising her. What Zoe presumed was a date turns out to be a Young Entrepreneur Mix, Mingle, & Pitch Session, according to the sign hanging above the check-in table.

  Disappointment mingles with a trace amount of relief. Zoe had been stressing about what she and Alex would talk about. She’d rough-drafted a dozen different options. The fact that theirs wouldn’t be an intimate tête-à-tête was disheartening. Baba always instructed Zoe, “If man to avoid being alone with you, if it is habitually party or, how you say this, a group hang? He is not serious in feelings for you. You are merely way for him to get what he truly wants.”

  On the other hand, making conversation should be easier if they’re surrounded by people eager to talk about themselves. Which is what events like this inevitably are.

  Zoe peers into the main room. Over a hundred Young Entrepreneurs in casual business attire are gathered in loose circles, balancing paper plates of shrimp and grits on edible spoons, fried mac and cheese lollipops, and mini tacos. They wield plastic cups of something colorful and alcoholic, and wear earnest facial expressions.

  Alex materializes from the crowd like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, pecking Zoe on the cheek and drawing her inside, like he had a few days earlier for his office tour.

  Before any other conversation can take place, Zoe expects him to ask whether her company had decided to fund his. Instead, Alex, seemingly without a care in the world, proceeds to introduce Zoe to one new face after another, urging each to expound on their own projects, in case she might be interested in funding them. One woman talks about developing ebooks that gauge reader interest by measuring eye speed, respiration, heart rate, and perspiration, then customizing the story to their tastes. Somebody from the biotech industry is working on harnessing the HIV virus so its camouflaging propertie
s can be used to burrow in and treat cancer at the cellular level. Another is testing cheap, lightweight desalination plants that can be shipped to parched areas. A fourth is modifying nanotechnology so parents can track their missing children.

  “My great-grandmother would buy one of those for every member of our family,” Zoe jokes. To cover up how inadequate she feels.

  Alex subtly nudges Zoe with his elbow to join the conversation as more than a listener. He seems disappointed every time she merely smiles and nods to cover up not knowing what to say. She wishes she could make him understand.

  No matter how alike they might seem superficially, she isn’t like him.

  Alex transforms into whatever an occasion calls for. Hard-selling entrepreneur at the office; cheerleading team player here. Zoe, however, possesses great faith in her ability to say absolutely the wrong thing at absolutely the worst time. To cover up that deficit, she’s watched lots of TV. She’s learned how to mimic a reasonable facsimile of acting correctly. Which means saying the appropriate things, looking like she fits in, being wholly American. Except what comes naturally to everyone else is practiced pantomime for Zoe, like speaking English without an accent. It’s not that she speaks it flawlessly, it’s that she knows which words she can’t pronounce—anything where a V and a W come too close together is a dead giveaway. It’s why she never waves at a Volkswagen or microwaves vodka. She’d suspected as much before, now Zoe feels certain: Alex isn’t faking his self-confidence. He really does move effortlessly from group to group, not forcing his way into the conversation but gliding. No one is surprised to see him—it’s like he’s been there from the start—and no one is offended when he peels off. That’s what real aplomb looks like, not whatever it is Zoe’s been doing. Real self-assurance isn’t bluster, where you make such an ostentatious showing of how in control you are that it’s obvious you’re anything but. Alex isn’t trying to prove he belongs. Alex knows it. Which makes everyone around him know it, too.

  If Zoe found Alex attractive when she thought he was merely better at faking than she was, that’s nothing compared to how hot he seems now that she realizes he’s the real deal.

  Of course, the obvious question that comes up is—and Zoe’s already wondered as much—what could someone like him possibly see in someone like her?

  In a move Zoe tells herself has absolutely nothing to do with that particular concern, she pulls Alex into a quiet corner and tells him, “We’re going to fund your company.”

  Alex grins, but not in an obnoxious way. He’s like Lacy. He assumed everything would be fine. So it was. He looks at Zoe expectantly. She’s not sure what he’s expecting. She’d planned out a dozen conversations they might have. She’d never planned for this. Which, in retrospect, was a mistake. She’d always intended to give Alex the good news. She just figured he’d take the lead on what came next.

  Luckily, Zoe has her years of TV watching to fall back on.

  On TV, moments like this always lead up to a kiss.

  So she closes her eyes. And she hears bells ring.

  It’s Alex’s cell phone.

  Zoe opens her eyes in time to see Alex answering it. When he says his name, it’s like a challenge to the person on the other end to justify their interruption.

  “Sorry,” he says as he hangs up. “Gotta run. American ambassador to Argentina is in town and she wants to see a demo of the app. This could be huge for us. You don’t mind, right?”

  Zoe smiles and nods and recalls what Mama said about not admitting what you really feel. Zoe sends Mama a mental text making it clear this isn’t at all the same thing.

  “Rain check?” Alex wonders.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re the best.” It wasn’t the most romantic sentence Alex could have uttered at the moment. But it was also, for the first time since they’d met, the first moment when Alex’s attention was focused exclusively on Zoe and nothing else. It feels only a little manipulative, considering he’d just been doing the same with everyone else. “I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

  “He’s the male version of you!” Zoe calls Lacy the minute she’s out the door.

  “He sounds perfect,” Lacy cheers.

  Zoe pauses at the entrance to the subway, loath to hang up before she’s gotten the answer she specifically called for. “You know how, when I date American guys, I feel like I don’t fit in with them, and when I date Russian guys, I feel like they don’t fit in with me?”

  “I believe you’ve mentioned that once or twice.” Just because Lacy is the nicest person ever doesn’t mean she’s immune to a periodic sarcastic interlude.

  “I thought Alex would be the perfect intersect.”

  “He’s not?”

  “He’s better.”

  “That’s great!”

  “He’s also worse.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not just being negative, like usual.”

  “You are.” Lacy isn’t so much judgmental as wishing to set the record straight. “Even if you don’t actually say the words evil eye—”

  “No. I’m being negative in a whole new way.”

  Lacy laughs. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  Zoe takes a deep breath, pushing out words one after the other, hoping they’ll make sense when rearranged into some semblance of order later. “When Alex looks at me, he sees the person I wish I was. When I’m with him, I kind of feel like I’m on my way to becoming her. I like it. But it also makes me nervous. Because when he finds out that’s not who I really am, he’s going to be disappointed. And I’m going to be disappointed. For disappointing him, and for losing my chance to become the person I really want to be.”

  “Yeah, that’s a new one,” Lacy concedes.

  “What should I do?”

  “Risk it.”

  How American of her.

  And how exactly what Zoe needed to hear.

  Alex barely waits a day before cashing his rain check. He takes Zoe to the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle. He says it inspires him. He kisses Zoe as they’re exiting. Right across from the towering statue of Columbus. How symbolic.

  Alex asks her out again for the following day. Zoe knows she’s supposed to say no, play hard to get. She says yes. Alex wonders if she’d mind meeting him at the office; they can head out from there. Zoe tells him she doesn’t mind. Zoe tells herself she believes that. Zoe doesn’t tell Baba or Mama anything. Not even that she’s about to have a third date with a boy whose parents still live in Brighton. No sense in their getting too excited. No sense in her getting too excited.

  It’s a sensible precaution since, when she arrives to meet Alex at the office, he isn’t there.

  Gideon swivels in his chair and pops his head out of his cubicle to fill Zoe in. “He’s in a meeting. Doesn’t want to text, disrespectful. He asked me to tell you to wait, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” Zoe lies again, wondering where she’s supposed to not mind waiting.

  Gideon says, “You can hang out here, if you want.”

  His space is smaller than Alex’s and, unlike Alex’s minimalist decorating style, Gideon’s cubicle is stuffed full of books.

  “Sorry for the mess.” He clears a stack off a chair, adding it to another one on the floor.

  “Got much free time for reading?” The tech guys Zoe knows live, breathe, eat, and groom tech. That’s another way Alex is different. He’s so well put together. He smells nice, too.

  Gideon fits somewhere in between. His clothes are washed but wrinkled. His shirt has hanger bumps on the shoulders where he hung it up to dry but didn’t iron it. “I make the time.”

  “You’d rather read than dedicate your every waking moment to the pursuit of Internet fame and fortune? How in the world did you end up working with Alex?”

  Zoe settles into the chair Gideon offers, craning her neck to peruse the titles he moved. It’s an eclectic mix of technical manuals, PHP Cookbook, JavaScript, C++, MySQL, Perl;
classic sci-fi like Robert Heinlein and Dune, along with books on metacognition, the physics of superheroes, a history of Chinese sailing ships, and a tome on sustainable salmon fishing. Gideon reads like an alcoholic who’ll chug anything. His openness about his habit makes Zoe smile. When Zoe still lived in Brighton, Baba frowned on her buying books. She pointed out they were free at the library, so why waste the money?

  “But what if I want to keep something I really love?” Zoe asked.

  “Copy it out longhand,” Baba snapped. “See how much you love it then.”

  Now that Zoe lives alone, she could, theoretically, buy all the books she wants. But old habits die hard. She hoards them on her phone, instead. And Zoe never lets Baba know how much she paid for a book that “isn’t even real.”

  “If it weren’t for Alex”—Gideon sits across from Zoe, swaying side to side in his chair—“I’d be hanging out at home, working on programming puzzles that interest me, giving my code away free for the thrill of watching what others do with it. Alex is the one who insists on my being paid for my work.”

  “You’re not interested in making money?”

  “Not as much as I should be, according to my grandma. She likes to remind me how much they spent on my education. And it wasn’t so that I could, quote, sit around playing with my crazy toys all day, end quote.”

  Zoe wonders what Gideon’s grandmother thinks of his wasting money on books. Especially ones that don’t apply to his chosen career or other moneymaking endeavors.

  “Alex said you went to private school,” Zoe recalls. She can guess how much his family spent. And why they expect a return on their investment.

  “Yeah, only kid in my neighborhood. Every morning, I got to stand alone at the bus stop in my khaki pants and blue blazer, people staring at me like I came down from Mars. You should have heard me complaining. And you should have heard my grandma telling me to talk to the hand. You know how, when you’re a kid, all you want to do is fit in?”