Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  In the kitchen, though, he was a slob. “Jesus,” Mary whispered. She didn’t know a lot about kitchens, but she knew Kevin had done a number of stupid things. A grease-filled pan sat on the still-turned-on burner, bubbling, smoking, ready to set off the smoke alarm. Another pan, full of good wineglasses, tilted on the top of the trash can. Linen napkins were clumped here and there on the counter, sopping up gunk. “Jesus,” she whispered again.

  But who was she to complain? The guy was in the next room teaching Natassia how to act like a civilized human being. They were now into their second week of sharing a living space, and it was getting harder to think of Kevin as a little brother. As Mary scooped up all the goop caught in the drain, it occurred to her that having Kevin around made it even nicer than when Mary and Natassia were alone together. Since Natassia’s breakdown, Mary hadn’t wanted—hadn’t trusted—anyone else to be with them. But this time with Kevin was…something.

  There was brown caked-up stuff stuck in a big pan. Mary went at it with steel wool, even though she had a hunch she wasn’t supposed to. Nora yelled every Christmas, while guests were helping to clean up her kitchen, that the good pots should not be scoured. Tough shit. Nora wasn’t here. She hadn’t even bothered calling Kevin on Christmas. How lost they’d all felt at first—Mary, Natassia, and Kevin—together just because everyone else had somewhere to go and the three of them didn’t. But it had shifted into a sweet slow-motion, a dance of inertia. Incubating, hibernating, blissful inertia.

  By eleven-thirty, the kitchen was clean, and Natassia and Kevin were tied at Scrabble. They put in a video, The Last Emperor. Close to midnight, they switched to TV and counted down until the ball dropped in Times Square. “Goodbye, 1989,” Mary mumbled. She was half asleep, curled up in a nest of cushions on the carpet. “Good riddance.”

  Kevin opened a small bottle of champagne, which he and Mary split. Kevin asked Mary if it was all right to offer a small glass of champagne to Natassia. Mary said okay, but Natassia didn’t want any. “Je déteste le champagne! We should go to the roof to watch fireworks,” Natassia said. “The view’d be great up there.”

  Kevin yawned.

  Which made Natassia yawn and say, “But we’d have to walk up the steps.”

  Mary said, “We don’t have to go up there.”

  They ate the chocolate crème brûlée without torching it. Mary didn’t finish hers, so Kevin and Natassia split it. Everyone was in bed by twelve-thirty.

  “I’M NOT READY to go upstate yet,” Natassia announced on the morning of January 2, when Mary said they’d be leaving the next day. “I’ll stay in the city at Grammy’s.”

  “Absolutely not,” Mary told her. “I want you with me.”

  “M-o-m-m,” she said, like a toddler. “I hate it up there.”

  “Natassia.” Kevin’s tone of voice meant, Stop it. He was tired and pissed. He’d said only once, “I can’t believe Nora hasn’t even called,” but Mary could tell that Kevin was disappointed that Nora and Christopher had never shown up.

  “You guys—”

  “Natassia, you’re acting like a two-year-old who doesn’t understand English,” Mary told her.

  “You’re treating me like a two-year-old.”

  Kevin intervened. “If you get yourself packed and ready in twenty minutes, I’ll drive you and your mother upstate. And I’ll take you skiing tomorrow.”

  “Cool. I’ve never been skiing,” Natassia said. “Thanks.”

  Mary wanted to kiss him.

  CHAPTER 32 :

  JANUARY

  1990

  Kevin’s Rambler held up until they reached Hiliard, and when they arrived, the car died. A local garage said they would need two days to get the car going again. Mary was relieved on two counts: they wouldn’t be able to go skiing (Mary couldn’t afford an injury right now), and she wouldn’t be left alone yet with Natassia.

  During the process of getting the car towed, Kevin had became friendly with Mr. Tommy, the school’s groundskeeper, and now, Wednesday afternoon, Kevin and Natassia were helping him shovel walkways. Since early morning, Mary had been at the computer, one-finger-typing additional information into the pages Natassia and Kevin had typed for her in the city. When Kevin came into the cottage to get a Pepsi, he said, “While I’m up here, Mary, let me know if there’s anything I can help you with.”

  “What you can do for me is keep that kid away from me.”

  “Right-o.”

  “You probably think I’m a rotten mother.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin said, grunting a little as he unbuckled his black old-man overshoes. “You really are. Especially since she’s a completely charming, undemanding, self-sufficient, gracious, and sweet-tempered kid.”

  Mary turned away from the computer and faced him. “You’re fed up with her, too? It’s not just me? You think she’s been difficult?”

  “She’s been”—he was bending over, sopping up chunks of muddy snow off the slate floor with a bathroom towel—“a ridiculous brat.”

  “Kevin! I didn’t think you noticed. You treat her so nice. How can you stand to be with her?”

  “She’s not my kid, that’s how.”

  “What would you do if she was?”

  “Slap her silly.”

  Mary, delighted, laughed out loud. “So it’s not just me.”

  MR. TOMMY was a silent Japanese man. His work brought him close to the cottage almost every day, but he never spoke to Mary or Natassia. He’d only nod at them, sternly. Mary had taken offense at Mr. Tommy’s manner. “I don’t know what’s bugging him. He’s always pissed off when he sees us.”

  “How would you like it,” Natassia had asked Mary, “if you were a grown man who’s like in his fifties and a master gardener, and you had all these rich kids calling you Mr. Tommy? And rich garden ladies bugging you for clippings and manure all the time.”

  “Well, he could say hello. He’s not the only one who hates working here.”

  Over those couple winter days, though, Kevin got Mr. Tommy talking. First about where to find a mechanic for the decrepit Rambler. Then about the old vehicles in Mr. Tommy’s storage barn. Kevin and Natassia found a broken sled, and Mr. Tommy let them use his tool shop to fix it up. Natassia and Kevin sledded all afternoon while Mary sat in the cottage working on her papers. When Natassia and Kevin came back in, Kevin told her, “Tomio said to ask him if you ever need help around the cottage.”

  “You’re supposed to call him Mr. Tommy.”

  “His name’s Tomio, and, Mom, like right away he knew your dad was a U.S. serviceman during the Korean War. He said he recognized your mixed looks.”

  “You should talk to him, Mar,” Kevin said. “He was in Korea during the war. Interesting guy. He knows all kinds of stuff. I think I’ve got some engine belts down in the city that I’m going to bring up here to see if he can do something with them.”

  Later, as they sat around the coffee table eating Kevin’s beef stew, Natassia started again: “Mom, Tomio said that after the war, in Korea, there were thousands and thousands of servicemen’s babies who were, like, totally rejected by society. He said it was really sad. All these kids wandering around the cities and in the countryside and everywhere, trying to find food or someplace to live. Nobody would take them in, because they didn’t have fathers, and without a father’s family name, you’re basically considered like nobody in Korea.”

  Kevin stood to gather up plates. “If you need help with anything, Mary, you should ask him. He really did say to tell you that.”

  “And, Mom, Tomio said—”

  “Natassia, your mom can talk to him herself about all that if she feels like.”

  “I just wanted to tell her how he said she was really lucky. Mom, he couldn’t believe when I told him the story of how your father went back to Korea to find you and bring you home. He said he never heard a story like that.”

  “Yeah,” Mary said, “lucky.”

  “I’m just glad we broke the ice with him,” Natassia said
. “It was so weird, we’re like the only Asian people on this campus, and we weren’t even talking to each other.”

  Mary looked at Natassia. “Why do you do that? You don’t even look Asian.”

  “But I am.”

  “You’re Jewish,” Mary told her.

  “Just half.”

  Mary had never thought of Natassia as anything but Jewish, and, by association, Mary actually thought of herself as being a little Jewish—more Jewish than anything else. “Do you tell people you’re Asian? When they ask, is that what you say? When you’re filling out those forms and you have to check off if you’re white or African American or Asian or whatever—”

  “I check off ‘white’ and I check off ‘Asian.’ Usually. When people ask me, I say I’m half Jewish and part Korean. What do you say?”

  “I say I’m nothing. American. A mutt. I say my father went to the Korean War and screwed around. Then he felt guilty and went back and pulled me out of an orphanage.”

  Natassia pushed back from the coffee table and rose up onto her knees. “You were in an orphanage? I can’t believe you lived in an orphanage and you never told me.”

  “After he found me, he had to put me there for a couple months while paperwork cleared. I was six or seven months old when he got me. I don’t remember any of it.”

  “Like, was it a really bad orphanage or what?” Natassia asked.

  “I’m telling you, I missed the whole thing.” Mary was watching Kevin stack logs in the fireplace for a fire, something Mary had never thought of doing. She had actually never really noticed the fireplace—it was just where she kept her suitcases and empty boxes.

  ON THURSDAY, Kevin’s car was ready, and he headed back to the city. As soon as Natassia and Mary were alone, Natassia said, “Now what am I supposed to do up here for two weeks until classes start? I don’t even know why we’re here.”

  “Because it’s our home.”

  “It’s your pathetic home, not mine.”

  “Natassia, it’s going to be a long couple of weeks for both of us if—”

  The phone rang. They let it ring four times until the machine picked up. They listened. “Mary, it’s me. If you’re there, pick up. I think you’re there, so—”

  Mary grabbed the receiver. “Nora. Hi.”

  “Mary, when you stayed in the loft, did you call Japan? And Thailand and Germany?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot—”

  “You forgot? How’m I supposed to pay for this? I’m not Lotte, Mary.”

  “Nora—”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “Nora, stop. Don’t say another thing. How much do I owe you for the phone calls? I’ll send cash, tomorrow, FedEx Overnight.”

  “Look, Overnight isn’t necessary. And, sorry, I’m a little—”

  “Just tell me how much.”

  “It comes to twenty-eight dollars and seventy-nine cents.”

  “You’ll have it—but Nora, are you okay? Something’s wrong. You’re being totally weird,” Mary said, and Nora hung up on her.

  “Bitch,” Mary said to the phone as she slammed down the receiver.

  “What’d she want?”

  “Put your coat on, Natassia. I have to walk down into town to get money out of a cash machine.”

  “It’s cold. There’s no way I’m walking all the way out there.”

  “You were outside for hours sledding with Kevin, and it was colder than today.”

  “Don’t stare at me like that, Mom. You’re hallucinating. Go by yourself.”

  There were a thousand angry things Mary wanted to say to Natassia. All of them would have started a fight, and this mess with Nora was already bad enough. Mary stepped into her boots, grabbed her coat, pulled on her cap, forgot her gloves, left.

  The walk across the campus was white and deep, and Mary cried as she walked. She cried because she so much wanted to kill something, someone, anything. But she couldn’t kill—she still hadn’t finished writing the papers for the board of trustees.

  Everything was snowed over. The campus was pretty, and then the neighborhood she had to walk through was pretty; Mary hated all of it. She felt better when she finally got out of the pristine streets and was walking along the side of the main road, in the gravel and debris. Step by angry step, she thought of a TV show she’d watched late the night before. It was about crocodiles, the relationship between crocodiles and lions. The show was filmed during the dry season, all the lakes and ponds were parched, and a crocodile was stuck in a mud bath—the croc indistinguishable from the mud until you noticed its eyeballs moving. The big deal for the animals, obviously, was hunger and thirst. Cut to close-up of a dead buffalo, torn open, and a hippo eating the buffalo’s innards, munching the undigested grassy stuff in its stomach. Crocs smelled the food from four miles away. They, too, came slinking up to the carcass. All the animals were out to get what they could, like looting during a blackout in the city. When the crocs arrived at the buffalo, lions came up and started nipping at the crocs, which were soon circled by lions. It looked really bad for the crocodiles, but, unbelievably, they still had the advantage. Why? Their digestive system, being less delicate than the lions’, less delicate than most other animals’ digestive systems, made it possible for the crocs to eat anything, everything. Meat, skin, bone, horns, the whole shebang. Those crocs weren’t going to die.

  It’s just like this business with the school and the board of trustees, and with Nora, and with Natassia, too. Everybody’s a scavenger. Whoever had the strongest stomach would eat.

  BY THE TIME Mary got back home from the cash machine, Natassia had moved all of her belongings—books and blankets and clothes—into the small bedroom at the far end of the cottage. She’d pulled her mattress from the living room. She did not want to sleep next to her mother anymore.

  “Listen,” Mary said, “I called Heather from a pay phone. You have an appointment with her tomorrow at three, and another one the next day at three.”

  “I won’t be able to go. I called Daddy and told him I want to fly out to Spokane to visit him and Harriet until classes start.”

  “Oh, you did?” Mary stood holding her dripping hat and coat.

  “Daddy’s working on getting me a ticket. He said he’ll call back tonight with the flight schedule. We’re trying to get me something for tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Tomorrow?” But your father’s an addict. Natassia, defiant, was standing tall next to the wall phone. Mary had no idea what to do. “Where’d you take the TV to?”

  “My room. You can have it all to yourself when I’m gone, but I want to watch a movie by myself now, before I kill myself from boredom.”

  “Natassia!”

  “I just mean it’s deadly boring up here, that’s all. Is that news to anybody?”

  BY TEN THAT NIGHT, Ross hadn’t called. When Natassia called him, Harriet answered. She knew nothing about the plane tickets or Natassia’s plans. Mary understood everything, just from watching Natassia’s face. “Yeah,” Natassia said, “I’ll wait here for him to call.”

  Forty minutes later, Ross called. Again, Mary could read between the lines. Ross had never got around to calling the travel agent. He was trying to convince Natassia that it might be better if she stayed put for now and kept her appointments with Heather. He was trying to promise that he’d plan something spectacular for Spring Break. They’d drive to Jasper, go skiing. He’d take Natassia to see a glacier.

  “I’m not really into glaciers,” she told him.

  That night, in her new room, Natassia cried. In the living room, lying on her futon, aching, Mary listened. She wants her father, she wants him to be a better father than he is. Hell, that’s what Ross wanted, too. There wasn’t a thing Mary could do about that. Ross and Natassia would have to figure it out. Mary had to stay out of the way.

  Natassia’s weeping quieted around midnight, and Mary went in to check on her. She was asleep, her face striped with red tearstains. Mary covered her up to her chin with blankets.
The cottage was getting cold tonight. She tucked a pillow up against Natassia’s side, where she knew Natassia liked it. Mary turned on a night light. As she was turning off the reading light by the bed, she glanced at the notebook opened on the floor: a poem.

  GET OUT OF MY LIFE

  Go on,

  goon.

  No! Go.

  Mary stared at sleeping Natassia and felt the deep relief of not having the kid’s angry face staring at her. Mary kissed Natassia’s head. Without opening her eyes, Natassia made a kissing sound. “I love you,” Mary said. Another too-sleepy kiss from Natassia.

  A few hours later, Mary woke and went into Natassia’s room to check on her. She was asleep, hadn’t moved. On the way back to her futon, Mary needed a blanket for herself, and she stepped into the room where Kevin had slept. The wind whipping around the cottage was making everything icy. Confused, sleepy, Mary stood a moment in the dark bedroom. Suddenly she wanted very much to lie down in the sheets where Kevin had slept.

  IT ICED during the night. The next morning, when Mary headed up to the Admin Building, Mr. Tommy was tossing salt onto the walkways. He nodded but said nothing, just like always. This time, though, Mary spoke. “Hey, hi. Cold morning, huh?”

  “Hello,” he said. He pointed to the walkways and warned Mary, “Dangerous. You must be careful.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “thanks,” but he was already bowing his head and looking away.

  Up at the building, Mary stood just inside the lobby doors, waiting for the FedEx truck to come pick up her envelope of cash for Nora. Fifty bucks: $28.79 for the phone calls, plus some extra to help Nora get rid of the bug up her butt, whatever it was. Mary was nervous. She hadn’t done this FedEx business much before, not Overnight Priority, so when a brown UPS truck drove up and the driver walked into the building with a box, she said, “Oh no. Did I call the wrong place? I need this to go overnight delivery.”