The Nesting Dolls

by Alina Adams

  “Yes,” Gideon says. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “I learn it, too.” Deda grins proudly. He asks Alex, “I come work for you?”

  “Anytime.” Alex half bows. “It would be an honor.” But he isn’t looking at Deda as he says it. Zoe hopes her grandfather doesn’t notice. When his smile falters, it’s obvious he does. Zoe feels a flare-up of anger, followed immediately by guilt. How dare she nitpick like this after everything Alex has done for her this afternoon? Zoe is getting as bad as Baba! Will nothing ever be good enough for her? That, Mama would say, is why Zoe is alone. That is why Zoe is dying to prove them all wrong.

  “We are to be leaving.” Her grandmother waves the backs of her hands in the direction of the elevator. “Kish. Alex and Zoya are busy.”

  “Goodbye, Gideon.” Deda pronounces it Gee-Dee-One.

  “Goodbye, sir. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

  “Much pleasure for me, too.” Deda only nods in Alex’s direction. And Zoe feels strangely vindicated. Followed by more guilt.

  Alex offers his own goodbyes in Russian. Balissa reaches into her bag and hands him a plastic container of zephyrs, whipped strawberry puree mixed with sugar, egg whites, and gelatin, then stiffened into flower shapes.

  “My favorite!” Alex says.

  There is more handshaking and beaming all around.

  And the elevator doors finally close.

  Zoe sags like all the water has been drained from her body. She is nothing but packed dry sand. Any move will cause the edifice to crumble.

  Alex suffers no such exhaustion. He got to be the center of attention, receive waves of positive feedback—he obviously missed Deda’s diss—plus earn Zoe’s goodwill in the process. What’s not to like? Certainly not how calculated it felt.

  Alex opens the box of zephyrs and pops one in his mouth. He chews, swallows, then decrees, “They still taste the same.”

  “Are they really your favorite?”

  “They’re fine,” he dismisses. “It made your babushka happy.”

  “You were fantastic.”

  “No big deal. I knew what they wanted; I gave it to them.”

  “I really appreciate it.”

  “All in a day’s work.” Alex leans in and gives Zoe a quick peck on the lips, the rest of his body already turning toward his cubicle. “I’ll see you later.”

  Unlike her family when they first immigrated, Zoe knows that means no time soon.

  Zoe stops by Gideon’s cubicle on her way out. It’s in the opposite direction of her way out, but it would be rude to leave without saying goodbye and thanking him for indulging Deda.

  “No big deal,” Gideon echoes Alex, offering Zoe insight on why they work so well together. What others would consider a major effort or, at the very least, a generous concession, they take in stride. Nothing is difficult for either of them, because they refuse to see it that way.

  “I love talking to old computer guys,” Gideon says. “Hearing about the early days, how they had to stick wires into circuit boards or punch holes into cards, then sit around waiting overnight to see if they got it right. God help anybody who dropped their box of cards and got them mixed up. We forget how good we’ve got it these days.”

  “He appreciated you listening to him, making him feel valued. It’s hardest for his generation, I think. He lived half his life in one place, half in another. He’s neither here nor there.”

  “Like you?” Gideon guesses Zoe’s greatest fear.

  She denies it with all the vigor such unspoken truth deserves. “No! Of course not! I’m fine. My life is easy compared to what they went through.” She quotes Gideon, to drive her point home. “We forget how good we’ve got it these days.”

  “’Cause, you know”—Gideon lets her homage pass without comment—“I wouldn’t understand feeling like you don’t belong in any one place, with any one group.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Zoe expects Gideon to laugh at her. He doesn’t. He continues sitting there, patiently waiting to hear what uninformed, offensive nonsense will sprout from her mouth next. But Zoe’s not being glib or ignorant or culturally insensitive. She’s seen Facebook posts and tweets about black men needing to “act white” in order to get ahead, the lack of diversity in tech, code-switching, cultural appropriation. She can recite all the latest buzzwords. She’s woke. Ish.

  “It’s not the same.” Zoe gives up the ghost of her lie in order to make him see the truth. “You’re comfortable anywhere.”

  “I made myself that way.”

  “How?” Her query bursts like the xenomorph from John Hurt’s chest in Alien.

  Gideon asks, “Why do college kids go to bars?”

  Is this a trick question? “To get wasted?”

  “I went to listen. Not at the bars around Caltech. Caltech is, shockingly, not a cross section of the American public. I went farther out, where the regular people go. I’d sit there with my drink, and I’d listen to the conversations going on around me. It was like an anthropology project.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Enough that I could avoid being like my dad.”

  “What’s wrong with your dad?”

  “Keeping jobs wasn’t his thing. He’s a smart guy. Too smart, according to popular consensus. They call him Cassandra at work, always predicting what will go wrong. Folks don’t like that. Makes them feel stupid. My dad may have been smart, but he never quite learned what to say when. Or how. Or to whom. My dad went on a lot of job interviews. My mom would give him a kiss for luck before each, and she’d remind him, ‘Don’t be yourself!’”

  “Your mom should meet my family. They’re constantly telling me how nobody wants to hear what you really have to say. Or what you really think.”

  “Until you find somebody who does.” Gideon one-eighties.

  “That’s totally going to happen.” Zoe saves her greatest scoffs for matters she most wants to believe are true.

  “My mom and dad used to talk for hours. About everything.”

  “My grandparents can not talk for hours. About everything.”

  Gideon laughs. He has a great laugh. He doesn’t let it out in trial balloons, as if waiting for permission. He doesn’t stop if no one joins him. He doesn’t hold anything back.

  “So tell me, how does one go about finding someone who actually wants to listen to you, like your mom and dad?” Zoe is teasing.

  He answers as if she’s not. “You listen to them. Especially to the things they don’t say.”

  “Are you for real?” Zoe does her speaking-without-thinking bit again. And then she takes it a step further. She puts her money where her mouth is. She doesn’t just speak without thinking; she acts without thinking, too.

  She kisses Gideon. For real.

  Chapter 41

  Gideon doesn’t break off their kiss like Zoe expects him to. He kisses her back, not tentatively or politely, like a man taken by surprise and acting on instinct, but enthusiastically. Alas, their current positions aren’t conducive to grand passion. They’re sitting on office chairs. With wheelies. Which means their bodies drift side to side in opposite directions while their lips remain plastered together. They’re bent at the waist, cutting off a good amount of necessary airflow. If they remove their hands from the plastic armrests, they risk the chairs twisting even farther apart.

  In spite of that, it’s still a hell of a kiss. One that starts at the lips, but snakes down to the stomach, from which it branches off in all directions, reaching as far as the tips of Zoe’s fingers and toes, while turning her ears bright pink.

  Zoe’s the one who finally breaks it off. While kissing in general, and this kiss in particular, is awesome, breathing is kind of a vital function, too.

  “You didn’t break it off,” Zoe accuses, as if Gideon had violated a previously agreed upon social contract.

  “I figured you would, when you wanted to.”

  “Stop treating me like an adult who knows her own mind.” When
Gideon fails to grasp the gravity of the situation, Zoe extrapolates, “What if the decisions I make for myself are wrong? What if I’m a huge disappointment? As long as I’m following other people’s expectations for me, I have somebody else to blame my screwups on.”

  “You’ll figure it out.” Gideon swivels back to his computer, smiling.

  He expects her to leave his cubicle. That’s what she stopped by to tell him she was about to do. Before they got . . . distracted. Instead, Zoe asks, “Want to do something crazy?”

  Gideon turns back around, looking at Zoe with what she hopes is newfound—if undeserved—respect. “Always.”

  Flying a plane, scaling a mountain, driving a race car, slicing fruit with a ninja sword . . . These are all things Zoe wants to do. As soon as she gets up the courage. In the meantime, she’ll settle for checking out a Midtown Virtual Reality place where yellow bellies like her can attempt all of the above, only with goggles strapped to their heads and feet planted squarely on the floor.

  “No one ever wants to go with me,” Zoe confesses to Gideon as they pay their admission and are issued their gear. Gideon helps himself to the Wet-Naps on offer and wipes down first her equipment, then his. “All my friends said, quote, lame, nerdy, and pathetically lame.”

  “Leaves more Fruit Ninja for us.” Gideon flourishes his weapon dramatically. In real life, it’s a black plastic stick with a censor on it. But on the VR screen, it’s a mighty sword meant to slash any and all fruit that comes flying their way.

  So they gleefully slash fruit. They climb the Matterhorn using disembodied metal hands that periodically lose their grip and send them tumbling. They race cars and crash into walls without dying fiery deaths. They blow the heads off zombies and maneuver spaceships through asteroid fields while improvising a pilot-to-pilot dialogue that goes like this:

  Him: You’ve got a Bogey on your six.

  Her: You’ve got a Bacall on your five thirty.

  Him: Great, kid, don’t get cocky.

  Her: I shot first.

  Him: I’m Spartacus.

  Her: I’m Brian!

  Him: I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.

  Her: I’m Mrs. Robinson.

  Him: I’m the entire Swiss Family Robinson.

  Her: I’m the Swiss Miss.

  Him: You are the sun, I am the moon.

  Her: That’s no moon; that’s a space station.

  Did somebody say lame, nerdy, and pathetically lame?

  Ha! Zoe slices them with her ninja sword like so much airborne banana!

  Zoe has never closed down a bar, had sex in public, or done anything similarly cool in her life. But she’s getting the impression that’s what the staff fears she and Gideon are doing as they climb into the airplane simulator . . . and decline to come out. (What’s the problem? Nobody else is in line. It’s the middle of the day, and they’re the only ones playing hooky.)

  There’s something mesmerizing about sitting in a room designed to look like a real cockpit, pushing buttons and twisting dials, watching the view outside their windshield as it turns from clear blue skies to lightning storms to an image of the ground coming at them at many miles per hour to the Himalayas popping up out of nowhere, all the while knowing that, even if you make a mistake and send your plane plummeting, everything will turn out fine.

  This is how Zoe likes her danger, behind a screen and as far away from reality as possible. When she was little and scared to get shots, Baba commanded Zoe to be a brave partisan—did she want to be a coward all her life? Zoe would make a lousy partisan. Because the bravest thing she’s ever done—or ever expects to do—in the cockpit of a plane that isn’t even real—is, after multiple false starts and second-guesses, reaching out and resting her hand atop Gideon’s.

  She’s ready to spring back and claim a mere slip of the wrist at the first hint of disapproval. Or visible revulsion. Instead, Zoe sees Gideon smiling. So she just sits back.

  And dares to fly.

  Zoe shows up in Brighton for dinner the following day without calling or texting. No one is surprised to see her. Reporting for debriefing was understood. Baba didn’t get her chance to offer Zoe the customary twenty-minute recap of her sins during their visit with Alex.

  Deda finishes eating, kisses the top of Zoe’s head, and says he’s stepping out to take a stroll on the boardwalk, so they might have girl talk.

  Mama clears the dishes and carries her stack to the kitchen. A waist-high island separates it from the dining room, so she can see and hear everything. Baba gathers the edges of the tablecloth and takes it to the balcony to shake off the crumbs. A glass door separates it from the dining room, so she can see and hear everything. Balissa is left sitting at the table with Zoe.

  Zoe figures she can do this the Soviet way—pretend she has no interest in the subject she has the most interest in and spend thirty minutes discussing everything but—or she can go all-American, like squeezing a pimple before it’s ready to burst. It’s painful, and half the time it gets infected and takes longer to heal, but at least you’ve done something rather than wait passively.

  “So.” Call her a Yankee Doodle Dandy. “What did you think of Alex?”

  The three women somehow manage to exchange glances without looking at one another.

  “He is a very nice boy,” Mama says.

  “Shrewd,” Baba adds. “Ambitious. Enterprising. Dynamic.”

  “An excellent young man for you,” Mama concludes.

  “Not the right man for you,” Baba says at the same time.

  Zoe’s head swivels. She’s used to Baba contradicting anything anyone says out of principle. And she’s certainly used to Baba disapproving of anything Zoe does, out of habit. But Zoe honestly thought, this time, she’d gotten it right. Finally done something her entire family could approve of, maybe even praise! Her shock is seen and raised by her confusion. How in the world has she managed to screw up again?

  Baba finishes cleaning off the tablecloth and folds it while reentering the dining room. Mama takes off her apron, hangs it on a hook, and leaves the dishes to soak, then reenters the dining room. They stand on either side of Zoe.

  “Why would you say such a thing, Mama?” Zoe’s mother seems as confused as Zoe. She, too, must have hoped this would be that rare Baba-condoned situation. “Alex is precisely the sort of man you’ve always held up as an example. It’s what you loved about Eugene!”

  “And how did that work out?” Baba reminds her.

  “That was my fault, not his.”

  Zoe can’t believe it. Might Mama, at long last, let slip what drove her to leave her marriage? Maybe Zoe has finally done something right, after all!

  Julia continues, “I know I disappointed you, Mama. You may not have been happy with Papa all these years, but at least you stuck it out.”

  And now Mama is admitting the forty-fifth anniversary she’s been so insistent on is in celebration of a less-than-ideal couple? Zoe sneaks a peek at Balissa to check if Zoe is hearing what she thinks she’s hearing, but her great-grandmother appears as serene as if they were discussing a grocery list. No, she’d be more invested in a grocery list. Balissa claims Baba buys the wrong kind of sunflower seeds. She says they never taste like the ones back home. The ones back home, she says, tasted as sweet as candy.

  “Papa and me is Papa and me,” Baba says, “and you and Eugene is you and Eugene. The difference is, I failed with a good man. You failed with a bad one.”

  “What was wrong with him?” Zoe bursts out, pissed that a conversation that was supposed to be about her has bypassed her completely.

  “Tell her,” Baba commands with a dismissive sweep of her arm. “Keeping it secret only makes Zoya imagine the worst.”

  She’s right. When Zoe was little, she imagined her father as a literal monster. As a sophisticated, know-it-all teen, she cynically assumed there’d been an affair. Now that she’s older and knows a whole lot less, she’s actually afraid to hear about physical abuse or assault.

&nbs
p; “Insurance.” Mama sighs, her voice a combination of embarrassment and defeat. She sinks into a chair and buries her face in her hands. She’s gone beet red, and there are tears in her eyes.

  “Insurance?” Zoe repeats numbly.

  “Insurance,” Baba repeats, scoffing.

  That, most definitely, is not what Zoe imagined.

  Mama’s eyes peek out between her fingers. She mutters, “You know I met your papa when I went to work in his office, bookkeeping.”

  Zoe did know that.

  “After we married, he promoted me from part-time to full-time.”

  Baba corrects, “He fired his regular man and put Mama in, this time without paying her.”

  Mama flops back in her chair, hands by her sides, fingers twitching nervously, like she’s playing an imaginary keyboard. Balissa cocks her head, notices, and smiles. She does it when she gets anxious, too. Zoe proudly broke herself of the family habit years earlier.

  Mama says, “Doing his books, I saw where Eugene was being dishonest. He would bill insurance companies for procedures he didn’t perform. Or he would use one person’s Medicare number to treat another. Most of his patients were on welfare, so it was easy to cheat. He would sign papers saying a person deserved disability payments. The government doesn’t look closely.”

  “Exactly!” Baba crows. “If Eugene hadn’t done this, somebody else would have. And it is not as if he hurt his patients, only the idiot government. They deserve this. Why should bureaucrats decide who needs what procedure, when, and how much doctor should charge for it; why bureaucrats decide who should work and who should not? Why should he play by the rules when no one else does? Why should he be the fool?”

  So the big secret is Zoe’s dad was . . . no different from most of the dads she’d known growing up? If they weren’t doctors signing disability claims, they were office managers stealing software and selling copies of it at half-off retail price, or store owners who didn’t charge tax, or piano teachers who accepted cash only for lessons while collecting welfare. Baba was right. In Brighton, playing by the rules was considered being a chump. Why in the world had Mama chosen to break from the pack and take a stand there, of all places?