Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  As Lotte told everyone later, “Her behavior that night was erratic, snapping at us, then being so, so sweet, trying so hard to control herself.”

  But Natassia couldn’t control herself. Ten minutes after getting the busy signal, she dialed the BF’s number again. The line wasn’t busy anymore, but he didn’t pick up. The machine answered. “Hi, it’s me,” she said, her voice not as sweet as it had been earlier. “Hi, I know you’re there,” she said, but he didn’t answer. “Pick up!” she finally shouted. “Fucking pick it up!”

  And then he got on the phone and broke up with her.

  All Lotte heard, all she was able to tell the others about later, when the crisis kicked in, were Natassia’s pleas and repeated apologies for having shouted at him. Apparently the guy was trying to say something about having had a chance to think while he was away and deciding that things had got too serious between them.

  “That’s your decision,” Natassia told him, crying, sitting on the hallway floor. “That’s not my decision. You met somebody in Chicago, didn’t you? You met somebody you like better.”

  For a long time she sat listening to him with her fist in her mouth. Whatever he was saying was making her cry harder. Finally, she whimpered, “I’m boring, aren’t I? You think I’m stupid.” She told him she didn’t want to date other people. “If you want to, you can. But don’t break up with me. Please?”

  The phone call went on for hours. Stretching the long phone cord, Natassia wandered from the hallway into her bedroom and back, not caring if her grandparents heard her. When she wasn’t speaking, her thumb or fingers or fist was in her mouth. It seemed to Lotte that Natassia had to repeat things often, speak slowly. Several times she asked the guy to repeat what he’d said. Lotte began to suspect that maybe he didn’t speak English very well. At one point Lotte saw Natassia crumpled on the couch hugging a pillow between her legs, pulling at her hair. “But I love you,” she kept crying into the phone. “Please, don’t break up with me.”

  When Mary heard this story a few days later, she wanted to yell at Lotte, Why didn’t you get her off the phone? Why’d you let her do that to herself? It was the first time Mary could ever remember feeling that Lotte was wrong, but Mary couldn’t say a word. The obvious response would have been, Why weren’t you there to take care of your own daughter?

  Three times that Tuesday night the guy got off the phone with Natassia, and three times she called him back. It was way past midnight when Lotte found Natassia crying with her head on the kitchen counter.

  “THE ENTIRE SCENE WAS PATHETIC,” Lotte told them. It was Sunday morning now, and Lotte, Mary, and Ross were sitting at the kitchen table of the apartment on West End Avenue. Ross had arrived on Friday afternoon, because by Thursday they’d had to step up the Valium the psychiatrist had prescribed for Natassia, and she was going in daily for sessions.

  “So what happened after the phone call?” Mary asked. She was out of Camels and was shaking a Tareyton from a pack David had left on the table when he went out to buy food.

  “Hey, hey,” David said from the doorway, and they all turned. He’d just walked in with a hot bag of bagels. “Leave me a few of those smokes.”

  “I’m just taking one,” Mary said. “I’ll owe you.”

  “Ah, you owe me more than a cigarette, my dear.”

  “Lotte, finish the story,” Mary insisted. “After all those phone calls, what?”

  “Well, like I told you. Wednesday morning, I got her out of bed. She’d been crying most of the night and only slept a few hours. I asked if she wanted to stay home. She said no. I thought that was a good sign. David made coffee. Oh, by the way, do we need to make more coffee?”

  “Yes,” Ross and Mary said at the same time.

  “David, dear, make more coffee? Half decaf, so we can drink lots. Anyway, on Wednesday morning. We had breakfast. She showered and dressed. I took her to school in a cab.”

  “How was she then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Quiet. Upset. But not crying. I thought at school her friends would cheer her up. She was still erratic, coming in and out of that terrible dark mood, but when I saw her talking to her girlfriends on the sidewalk I told the cab to go on to the office.”

  Natassia never went into her school that day. After her grandmother’s cab pulled away, Natassia walked to the subway and went downtown to the BF’s.

  “All I wanted to do was talk to him about it,” she told her grandmother later, in Dr. Ralph Silvers’ office. “Just talk, that’s all.” Natassia sat on the psychiatrist’s scratched-up leather couch and hugged her legs. “That’s really all I wanted, just to talk, but he wouldn’t answer his buzzer. Then I tried calling him?” Her voice went up in that query that implied blamelessness. “From the pay phone at the corner? I tried, like, a bunch of times, and he wouldn’t answer.” She sobbed as the psychiatrist and her grandmother watched, sobbed without bothering to cover her face, which was rubbed raw, and her freckles were scarlet. “I kept thinking about all the times I used to call him from that same pay phone—like if his buzzer wasn’t working? or if I went downtown and wanted to surprise him?—and he’d be so happy to see me, and today he wouldn’t even pick up. He used to say I made him completely happy. What did I do—” Her chest heaved, and she stuffed her dirty bare feet deeper between the cushions of Dr. Silvers’ sofa. She bit the ends of her hair.

  Apparently, that Wednesday, Natassia had spent from nine-thirty in the morning until four-fifteen sitting on the stoop of the BF’s building, waiting for him to leave his apartment. In late afternoon, when he finally came out to the street, he wouldn’t talk to her. That’s what Natassia told Lotte.

  “Apparently there was a scene,” Lotte told the others as she sliced her big white-handled bread knife into a sesame bagel. It had always been Lotte’s job at these Sunday breakfasts to slice the bagels. As if no one else could be trusted with the knife. “Here, dear.” Lotte handed the halved bagel to Mary and brushed crumbs onto the floor. “Sesame is what you eat, right?”

  Pumpernickel was the only kind of bagel Mary allowed herself, but she said, “Yeah, thanks. What do you mean, there was a scene?”

  “David, pumpernickel? All I know is, a policewoman brought Natassia to my office. I know it was around five-thirty, because I had an author in for a late meeting. Poor guy had come all the way down from Vermont, but he was gracious when we had to cut it short. Anyway, Natassia—when I went out into the lobby to get her—well, she was hysterical. That’s all I can tell you—hysterical, sweaty, dirty, a mess.”

  “Je-sus,” Ross muttered.

  David handed Mary the bowl of cream cheese. She put the bowl down. “What was she wearing?”

  “Now you want too much from me,” Lotte said. “Who remembers what anyone was wearing? I guess the usual jeans. David, why only two onion bagels? Ross needs more than two.”

  Ross’s chubby, clean doctor’s fingers kept picking crumbs off the top of the Entenmann’s crumb cake. “I guess,” he said, “what I don’t understand yet is why you took her to Silvers.”

  Measuring coffee into the glass basket of his Pyrex coffeepot, David counted aloud the last spoonfuls, “Six, seven, eight.” He filled the glass pot with water and asked Ross, “What’s wrong with Silvers?”

  “God, nothing’s wrong with Silvers. Silvers is great. No one’s been in practice as long as he’s been.” Ross lifted a slice of lox into his mouth. All morning, Mary had been watching Ross switch from salty foods to sweet, then back to salty. It made her think of years ago, how he used to like to suck on her skin—forearm, thigh, heel, earlobe, anywhere. She didn’t particularly like it. Sometimes it hurt. He said that what he liked was having new sensations in his mouth all the time. Done with the salmon, he sliced a big chunk of coffee cake. “Who’s got more experience than Silvers? But…”

  It was clear where Ross was headed. He hated Dr. Silvers, thought he was ancient and senile and nuts, and Ross was coming around to it in that way he had, with that abilit
y to criticize and flatter at the same time. David, too, was crafty with words, and Mary remembered now how David and Ross edged into a fight—agreeing with each other, conceding points, until the two of them eventually strangled each other with cleverness. “I guess I’d just like to see Natassia in therapy with someone younger than Silvers,” Ross said, poured himself a huge mug of coffee, and started in with the spoonfuls of sugar. “Maybe a woman therapist. Someone experienced with kids, with crisis intervention.”

  “Silvers is a brilliant man, the best psychiatrist on—”

  “The Upper West Side. I know, Dad, I know.”

  “And he’s been—”

  “He’s been your ally for over twenty years. But that’s another thing.” Mary counted eight spoonfuls of sugar. Ross’s sugar habit had got much worse since he’d stopped drinking. “Should Silvers really be treating the granddaughter of one of his patients?”

  David was crouched down in front of the opened refrigerator, digging around in the vegetable drawer. “You’re absolutely right, Ross, to bring that up. For someone else, I’d say no. For someone as good as Silvers is, it’s not a problem. In fact, it can only help that he knows her family.” David had to grip the counter as he pulled himself up from the refrigerator drawer. For the first time ever, Mary realized, These are old people who are raising my daughter.

  “You, Dad. Silvers knows you, not the rest of us.”

  “Well, he’s heard all about you.” David came back to the table and put green onions on everyone’s plate. Ross bit off the ends of his onions between sips of coffee. Mary gave her onions back, put them on David’s plate. David caught Mary’s eye. “You, too, he’s heard about.”

  They all looked at Mary. Under the table, Ross tapped his thigh against hers, a sign of support, but she moved her leg away.

  Lotte’s big hand reached over and covered Mary’s hand and greased it up with butter. “What hard days these have been for you, Mary.”

  “It’s not over for her,” Mary said, standing to get more coffee. “I mean, shit, we were up with her again all last night. She’s still waking up screaming. She cries all the time. She’s been fucking crying for four days straight.”

  “Hey,” David said, “you’re too short to swear.”

  “Dad.”

  “Mary may be right,” Lotte said into her coffee mug.

  Yeah? If I’m so right, then why won’t you tell me what I need to know about my own daughter? For example, what, exactly, did happen in Silvers’ office on Wednesday night? And what are we going to do next?

  “Sometimes I think the answer is, just bring Natassia to Spokane to live with me out there. And with Harriet.”

  David looked up from slicing onions and gave Ross that frosted gaze Natassia had mastered. “The answer,” David said after a long pause, “is to find the asshole who did this to Natassia and kill him.”

  “Fuck him,” Ross said. “I’m not even going to honor him with discussion. I’d like to beat the living shit out of him.”

  “Oh, Ross,” Lotte said, “the idea of Natassia so far away in Spokane—what would you do with her out there?”

  “Hike, ski, canoe. Christ, breathe some fresh air for a change.”

  “Meaning?” David asked.

  “Meaning that life here is fucked. Totally fucked for a kid to be growing up with concrete all around her, and some letch coming on to her, and it was just as fucked up when I—”

  “And I take it that life in your Spokane is not fucked?” David said in a flat voice.

  All morning it had been cloudy, but as Mary carried her mug back to her place, a shot of sunlight broke through and hit—bull’s-eye—right onto the white-painted wooden table. Onto the chipped plates and softening bar of butter and the lox-stained wax paper. Sun on the table brought up the smell of salmon and the green onions on David’s plate. There was the sound of traffic, a repetitious static, like a needle caught in the groove of a turntable, coming up from the street and in through the screens, which were rusty and punched in here and there. Mary and Ross and his parents hadn’t been together in this kitchen like this in years, but right now it seemed to Mary as if none of them had moved through time. All their lives, it seemed, they had done nothing but sit at this round table covered with this same breakfast, trying to decide what to do about Natassia.

  NATASSIA WAS FIVE YEARS OLD when they had sat here with bagels, listening to Lotte finally spell it out—Here’s what David and I would like to do, meaning, Here’s what we are going to do. Lotte and David wanted Natassia to live with them, full-time. They wanted to keep her at the Montessori school. They’d pay all the tuition. They’d buy her clothes, feed her, cover her medical care. “She’ll be listed as a dependent on our tax returns,” David said. Lotte listed all the specifics they wanted to take responsibility for, but the fact was that she and David were already doing everything for Natassia.

  At that time, Mary and Ross were supposedly living together. They had a tiny walk-up in the Village, on Thompson Street, but often one or the other of them didn’t come home for days at a time. They’d foul up the schedule of whose turn it was to pick up Natassia at her grandparents’ or at nursery school, whose turn to feed her or put her to bed. They’d have big fights and forget she was in the room. Or they’d go away and come back and forget where she was.

  Ross was in an intensive premed program at Columbia and working as a hospital orderly. He was doing his Dr. Kildare number, working all kinds of crazy hours, but not bringing any money home. Mary was rehearsing full-time for her third tour with Tim Dillon Dancers and still teaching a couple classes and even waiting tables at a coffee shop on Bleecker Street a couple mornings a week. She was having an affair—her first and only infidelity ever, that’s how angry she was at Ross—with the accompanist for her classes. Ross knew about the guy and was pretending he didn’t know. Mary had picked up some nasty infection that made her itch and burn all the time, and she couldn’t shake it, and Ross kept trying to get her into bed. Mary was trying to make sure Ross didn’t get the infection, and at the same time she was trying to let him know she wanted out.

  Things weren’t good.

  So, the Sunday of the June weekend when they’d celebrated Natassia’s fifth birthday at Lotte and David’s, Lotte put it to them. “Please, for everybody’s sake, especially Natassia’s, let her live here with us. You two, go, go with God’s blessing. Live your lives, do what you love to do, but stop making each other crazy. Give yourselves a chance to grow up.” Mary watched Lotte’s plump-knuckled hand slice a knife through a bagel and felt relief rolling and rolling inside herself.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Ross said. He was stirring his coffee, acting like this was nothing but chitchat. Mary wanted to say to him, Look at your mother when she talks to you. Listen. “Natassia’s ours, Mom. She stays with us.”

  “Ross.” Mary said it clipped, fast, irritated.

  David, slurping up a mouthful of cantaloupe, said, “You’re both lousy parents. There’s been neglect of that child that’s bordered on the criminal. Leaving her places, forgetting about her. Things have gone on that could, and should, be reported.”

  “Da-vid,” Lotte warned. She handed him a paper towel to wipe the cantaloupe juice caught in the cleft of his chin. As expensively dressed as he always was, David usually had food stains on his clothes—that morning, orange on the front of his white Izod, bagel crumbs caught in the chest hairs peeping out of his open collar.

  “You son of a bitch,” Ross said to his father, and stood up so fast he sent his chair skidding. His unbrushed long hair was a wild dark bush. “What kind of report have you filed?” But Mary was thinking, It’s about time someone turned us in. Ross moved away from the table, as if afraid of what he might do to his father. “What fucking kind of report? She’s my daughter, not yours.”

  “Did you ever hear of grandparents’ rights?” David said, smug, not looking at Ross, whose face seemed paralyzed, he was so stunned. “Wise up, boy,” David said, spooning up the
last scraps of his melon. “Grandparents have the right to petition for custody.”

  “You stupid jackass,” Lotte whispered. She grabbed at his arm. “You and your goddamn grandparents’ rights. The right to stick your granddaughter directly into the hands of Social Services, is where she’d end up with your grandparents’ rights. A ward of the city, the state, what have you. I’ll kill you, David, for sure, before I let you start with that.”

  But by now Ross had started to cry, saying, “She’s mine, not yours,” and he slid his back down the surface of the wall until he was sitting in the corner next to the trash can, looking like one of Mary’s spoiled brothers throwing a fit.

  Jesus, she thought, grow up.

  Ross’s big feet in his green high-top sneakers were sticking out halfway across the floor. He had a hole in the bottom of one shoe. His wrinkled shirt and pants were from the Goodwill and ragged, yet he was wearing the expensive gold watch his parents had given him when he’d finally finished his college credits. Mary wanted to tell him he was a lie of a human being.

  She wanted to tell everything, everything there was to tell. She wanted to inform Ross’s parents that just a few weeks earlier she’d walked into the Thompson Street apartment one afternoon and found their brilliant premed son sitting on the futon—jeans on, shirt off—and a nurse dressed in her nurse’s clothes was sitting on the floor, and the two of them were shooting up. If Mary hadn’t forgotten to pick up Natassia that day, the kid would have seen her father with a needle in his arm.

  Ross said he’d done heroin only that one time. The nurse was his friend. She’d offered to share so he could try it just once, with her, and it’d be clean and safe. Ross swore up and down he wasn’t sleeping with the nurse, as if Mary cared about that. That Sunday morning, watching him cry on his parents’ kitchen floor, Mary wanted to tell Lotte and David to go ahead and file a report with any agency they could think of. She’d help them fill out the papers. Especially when she heard Ross whimpering, “If my baby ended up in Social Services, I’d kill you.”