The girls like to dance together when their parents aren’t home
Their mom still works half-time but now with meetings in the afternoons and sometimes little trips to places like Owasso, and their dad has started taking teaching gigs. One day the girls see an ice-skating routine on TV set to swing dance music, and the next time they know it’s going to be on they tape it so they can watch it again and practice. Zoe likes the part where Amy picks her up and swings her around. Zoe picks the dog up and swings it around, too.
The ice skaters they like all come from the former Soviet Union. In Europe the countries can change sometimes depending on the politics—they already know this from their dad. Now the girls learn that some of the people from the former Soviet Union use a different kind of alphabet, and they ask their mom to take them to the library so they can learn it. They find out that the Russian alphabet has five letters more than the English alphabet. Amy practices writing out the new shapes. Amy, having invented numerous alphabets that her sister has consistently failed to learn, thereby precluding the exchange of private communications, now gets hopeful that a real foreign language may turn out to be the way to go.
The only downside is the Soviets have jumbled up their many letters, and Z is in the middle, not at the end. Alphabetical order has always been Amy’s favorite, better than chronological and a vast improvement over order of importance. Zoe, on the other hand, has long complained at the injustice of an alphabet that always puts her last. She considers this new system at least a partial vengeance of the Z’s upon the A’s: now Z is seventh, as though it’s catching up.
Zoe wants to learn a language, too, but isn’t sure if what she wants to learn is Russian because by now the girls have learned that Zoe’s favorite ice skaters are from Ukraine which has recently turned into a separate place from Russia.
Their parents are astonished to discover a true feud arising between their daughters; more astonishing still is that the source of the feud is a question of sovereignty in Eastern Europe. The girls build separate forts in the living room now with their octopi posted as sentries at the entry flaps and reproductions in crayon of their respective nations’ flags, Russia meticulous red and navy stripes, Ukraine some yellow ovals floating over light blue zigzags.
Although their father is a geographer, no one in the family has a passport; it has never occurred to anyone to learn another language. But their parents are pleased to find them motivated to learn, and so they try to broker a truce between them by finding someone who can tutor them in both languages.
This only intensifies the fighting.
Some words surface in proximity, like swimmers moving in the same direction, keeping the same pace, who nonetheless have never met and never will—like Russian’s гриф, which means vulture, although it is pronounced like grief; the same thing happens to people on trains and buses, and pedestrians.
Overlaps like these need not be meaningless, although they happen for no reason—even mean has also meant to hold in common, to remember, to long for, and to love.
Amy and Zoe fall in love for the first time, at the same time, with the same boy
Sasha is a former student of their father’s at the Tulsa Junior College, from the eastern part of Ukraine where they speak both languages. He is tall and thin, with pale skin and smooth features. His nose is slightly crooked, which the girls find charming.
Everything about Sasha is charming to the girls. He has curly black hair and long eyelashes and scruffy black eyebrows. The girls like the way he laughs and the way he walks and the things he talks about. He teaches Zoe Ukrainian for half an hour and Amy Russian for an hour every Thursday from 3:30 to 4:00 and from 4:00 to 5:00 respectively.
Sasha is an energetic boy who always has something new to report to them about the outside world. Sasha stars in plays and plays in a band. To Amy and Zoe, Sasha might as well be Michael Jackson, or the President.
The girls compete for his attention, but there is no competition. Amy is almost thirteen years old now. She is almost all grown up. She can feel him watching her sometimes, and in these moments, she feels both thrill and panic, neither first, and she understands that she is in love.
Sasha’s eyes are kind, and soft, and one time she gets lost in them and loses her train of thought and can’t finish her sentence and turns bright red. The whole week between that class and the next class she spends blushing each time it comes back to her, which is all the time. She doesn’t tell Zoe. This is the second secret that exists between them.
Amy spends hours studying Russian in their room with the door closed. Her favorite letter in the Cyrillic alphabet is ж, which looks like a butterfly and sounds like the s in treasure, zh. Amy copies out all the words from her pocket dictionary that start with ж.
Zoe is less diligent, preferring to play. Zoe rescues two baby squirrels from the street and names them Orange and Banana and dedicates her afternoons to feeding them and training them to become wild again when they are old enough.
Amy learns twenty new words per day and goes over all the old ones. She makes flash cards out of expired coupons and junk mail. Then in her spare time she plays Oregon Trail with Zoe, taking over whenever it is time to hunt the rabbits because the sound it makes when your shot is successful is the most satisfying sound in the world. Zoe claims it isn’t fair for Amy to do all the shooting because in real life Amy stopped eating any meat at all, but Amy says that doesn’t matter and leaves Zoe with no option but to relent.
Their mother tells Sasha that Zoe’s memory got damaged in the surgery, but Amy knows the doctors said it didn’t, and that it must just be the squirrels. She does not say so. She just gives Sasha a significant glance that she is sure he understands.
The girls get their periods within a day of each other
By now Zoe is ten and Amy is thirteen. Amy gets hers first, on a Sunday. She knows what it is and is proud of herself for knowing, but what she does not know is what to do about it, so she goes and finds their mom, who because it is Sunday is playing Dr. Mario on Zoe’s Game Boy. Dr. Mario is like Tetris only with pills and viruses instead of blocks. Zoe doesn’t play her Game Boy much because she’s been so busy.
Amy clears her throat and whispers as loud as she can that she has her period and that she needs to know what to do. Their mom jumps up and leaves the Game Boy on top of the washing machine. This makes Amy feel important, and for an afternoon, Amy and her mom have something in common.
But then Zoe gets her period the next day while their mom’s at work, and Amy has to show her about pads and split the stack their mom had given her and listen to her whine and cry about her stupid cramps. It is typical of Zoe to have to do things at the same time as Amy, in spite of their respective ages. Now she acts as though getting your period is worse than having your skull split open and your brain rearranged. Amy shudders to think what will be next.
In ancient Greece a clue was just a skein of yarn until enough mythical figures unraveled their ways out of mazes.
Amy sends secret messages to her sister that her sister can’t read
She wants to make Zoe study more, but the plan backfires, and Zoe gets frustrated and threatens to give up.
Amy exchanges her first emails with Sasha. She pretends to have questions she doesn’t really have. You have to be very careful typing emails because there isn’t any way of going back to remove a wrong letter, you have to just start over if you mess up. It’s a little bit like walking a tightrope over a gigantic canyon that will kill you if you fall. Amy tries to focus on the letters’ bright green lines. She doesn’t know how you send emails in Russian or if you can so she writes to him in English.
He always answers. This is the third secret that exists between Amy and Zoe, who thankfully is deemed a little young for emails still. Zoe loses interest anyway, after an initial outburst, and wanders off whenever Amy sits down at their mother’s desk.
Sasha appears not to use capital letters, which lends his emails an air of the forbidden
even though they are only explaining the difference between the accusative case and the genitive case for the hundred millionth time. Amy wishes she could write to Sasha about something else, but she can never come up with anything.
Winter comes early and cold. There is ice on the sidewalks, and the dog slips and falls every time they take it out. It looks funny with its stocky little legs that fly in all directions, but Amy tells Zoe not to laugh because it seems to her the dog can understand and feels embarrassed. Amy always ends up having to scoop it up in her arms and lug it home, even though it’s dirty, although she doesn’t really mind as much as she pretends to. It’s nice to hold a living thing to you, especially a small thing like a baby or a dog.
Over the summer Amy perfects her knots
As it turns out she excels at canoes. She always lets Zoe go with her even though Zoe isn’t very strong so Amy basically has to paddle by herself. Amy likes the way the water drops from the paddle onto her bare legs when she switches sides. It’s lake water: dirty, cool.
At the end of each session there is a dance in front of the lodge or inside if it is raining. But it hardly ever rains at the end of a session. Amy wants to dance with the other campers. At first she tries, but she can’t shake the feeling that everyone is watching her, and she can’t. So Zoe doesn’t dance either. She just sits beside Amy and taps her orange-and-black-striped tennis shoes against the hard bare dirt. Actually they’re Amy’s shoes, passed down, because the girls keep growing.
Their mother doesn’t work there anymore, but she comes to pick them up and stays awhile talking to all the people she knows. One time on the way home she stops to save a couple of box turtles trying to cross the road. She puts them in a big tin bucket on the porch and gives them the scraps left over from lunch and dinner. But then the tortoises get maggots inside their shells from sitting in one place for too long, and they have to let them go.
Words are worlds, with capacities enough for polar opposites, like left, meaning remaining and departed, or oversight, both supervision and failure to see.
There is an aisle at the MedEx that the girls never visit
One day it occurs to them that they could go by themselves while their parents are out. It is like when they learned how to read and worlds opened up before them: now they can’t imagine why they never went before, although they can’t remember what it was like before they went, either.
On this aisle they find pads for their periods and tampons, which is what they came to look at, but they also find things they’d never dreamed of, like intimate feminine wash, intimate waxing kits, and personal lubricant pumps. They widen their purview. They find condoms, pills for sexual fitness, pregnancy tests you pee on to see if you have a baby or not.
Speechlessly they agree to spend their savings on a box of tampons, a box of condoms, and a set of two pregnancy tests, one for each. Amy has more money because Zoe always spends hers, and anyway she gets three dollars less per month because she’s younger, despite her protests.
Amy makes Zoe make the actual purchase, too embarrassed, standing by the door like their parents might walk in at any moment. Too excited to resent her sister, Zoe is effervescent on the short walk home, swinging the sack of contraband wantonly around. At home they rip apart the boxes and take turns examining the instruction sheets inside. They take turns peeing on the pregnancy tests. They discuss if they will ever really use the tampons. Ever since their mom explained what being raped was they have worried what will happen to them when they grow up. Their mom said if they ever did get raped they must remember the way her brother’s girlfriend got freed without being murdered was to always look the rapist in the eye, which made him feel sorry for her, so even though he’d planned to shoot her, he did not. Their uncle’s girlfriend said he said he planned to kill her, and he had a gun, which he raped her with, as well. Zoe asked how you can rape someone with a gun as though she understood all the other parts of the story. Their mom explained that the rapist inserted the gun into their uncle’s girlfriend’s vagina.
They peer into the diagrams on the instructions, how to insert it into your vagina. They don’t know. It’s more fun to pee on the pregnancy tests.
They empty out a doll case and stuff everything inside and put it all the way at the very back of their closet, behind their shoes. They cover the case in sweaters.
Their uncle broke up with his girlfriend because afterwards it was too hard. Their uncle died of alcoholism. Not suicide.
Of the apparently infinite quantity of delights offered to Amy by her recent forays into the garden of Russian grammar, the single most fascinating fact is that in the present tense, the verb to be literally goes without saying, so that in order to express, for instance, Amy is in love, you would only need Amy in love, or at most a dash: Amy—in love
Sasha is my teacher would just be Sasha—my teacher. Sasha is my friend would just be Sasha—my friend. Sasha is my boyfriend would just be Sasha—my boyfriend. I am Mrs. Sasha Doronyuk would just be I—Mrs. Sasha Doronyuk. And so on. In the past tense, on the other hand, and for the future, Russian offers no shortcuts.
The second most fascinating fact is that nouns in Russian get declined in the same way that verbs get conjugated—in the same way that I say but he says. These declensions are called cases. A noun’s case depends on what its role is in any given sentence. This makes every sentence like a play. Sometimes the actor dog plays one character; sometimes it plays another. If I see the dog (собаку), it is declined in a different way than if I do something with the dog (собакою), talk about the dog (собаке), or if the dog does something on its own, like bark (собака). The result of this is that everyone’s performance belongs so definitively to them and them alone that you no longer have to rely on any order in space or time to make a statement clear.
Amy memorizes the declensions with the same zeal she once applied and still occasionally applies to her Kumon. Amy loves clarity; Amy loves rules; Amy loves when things are perfect. Amy loves that in Russian there is a formal and informal way to address another person; Amy loves that she and Sasha use the informal way, even though technically he is still her teacher, and technically they do not know one another that well. Amy never realized how far removed she could feel from someone until she contemplated that formal form of address; now being close feels even closer. Amy loves that gender is always indicated; she gets excited when Sasha says an adjective that applies to her, in the feminine, as when he says an adjective that applies to him, in the masculine.
The laws of our world, like gravity, or time, do not apply in theirs.
During the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer the girls do nothing else
Riveted, they even manage to forget about Sasha for up to ten minutes at a time. Astonishingly, both girls win: Zoe, backing the Ukrainian Oksana Baiul, wins the gold in ladies’ singles, while Amy, backing the Russians Yekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov, wins the gold in pairs.
Uncharacteristically, Amy admits that her sister’s skater did a pretty good job. She approves in particular of Baiul’s performance to the Camille Saint-Saëns cello solo about the dying swan. Both girls find it so mesmerizing that they rewind the tape over and over and practice flapping slowly like Oksana, trying to see if they can get as graceful as her. They try and hold their legs up without using their arms. They try to do the splits.
Zoe’s favorite part of skating is the jumping, and accordingly, she leaps around the house a lot. Amy’s favorite part is spinning. In the swan performance Oksana Baiul starts spinning on one leg, bringing the other up from behind to meet her hands. Clasping her skate she forms a perfect backwards circle with her body and then leans in until the circle becomes parallel to the ice. She spins and spins. Amy closes her eyes and pretends that she is spinning, but you can’t really spin on the carpet. Mostly she just stands like a flamingo, like she used to when she was a kid.
Nonetheless there is no one better than Yekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov, who are perfect at
skating and also in love and also the most beautiful people in the world besides Sasha. Amy wishes she could be just like Katya and that Sasha could be just like Sergei even though Sasha is also already perfect. Yekaterina Gordeeva is the most beautiful woman in the world. She has a pure, simple face, with pretty blue eyes and smooth brown hair that is always pulled back. She is very petite. Amy would love to be that small. You could hide wherever you wanted and curl up much better.
The way they look at each other and how they manage to do everything at exactly the same time, even triples, and the way he raises her over his head, slowly, like he is relishing how much he loves her and like she weighs nothing, and the way she leans back like it has never occurred to her he could kill her if he dropped her on the ice on her head—everything about Yekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov Amy loves.
Amy would like to become Russian. Russia is very far from Oklahoma, though, and Amy does not know how she would get there. She doesn’t own a suitcase, and the allowance she receives from their parents is thirteen dollars per month. She knows her grandparents have a little bit more money, but she can’t ask her grandparents, who don’t approve of Russians.
Amy thinks and thinks without coming to any solution.
I guess I’ve thrown myself into my travels as though maneuvering through time as well as space, and flouting gravity.
Zoe still has seizures, but not as often as before, and when she does they aren’t as bad
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