Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  “No, the old ass knows his limits. Besides, he’s totally into my mother. But he’ll be like, Hey, son, how’d you get such a class act to go out with you? Who’d you bribe?”

  “Nice guy,” Mary said.

  “Oh, my daddy’s a piece of work.”

  Mary had almost canceled the trip. Four days with somebody’s parents? What was she thinking? But it would be four days in New York City. His mother had bought tickets to take Mary to see Merce Cunningham. Anybody could survive four days in New York, no matter how bad the father was.

  Turned out, the father was a smoker, and since Ross and Lotte weren’t smokers, David was happy to have Mary’s company. He dubbed the two of them “the Smoke Team.” He called Lotte and Ross “the Wussies.” David was always setting up sides.

  Fathers were beside the point anyway. What got Mary from the start was the way being in the Steins’ apartment, way up high above New York City, felt a lot like being in the Conollys’ house. The Steins had too many books and a lousy TV (Mr. Conolly had had the best TV and stereo system). Lotte, David, and Ross ate funny foods. Their apartment was dark, with hardly any sunlight except in the kitchen, and not decorated anywhere as nicely as the Conollys’ house had been. But whenever Lotte walked into a room, there was a hefty thump of connection; Mrs. Conolly could do that to a room. Even the back-and-forth bickering between David and Lotte felt familiar, just like the Conollys’. By that Thanksgiving, Mary and Ross were hot and heavy, and Mary brought Nora and Kevin to the Steins’ for dinner, but Kevin acted bratty. A few times during the years, Nora joined the Steins for Passover seders, but the Steins’ scene had never clicked for Nora, which pissed Mary off a bit. Nora could have at least tried, since Mary was making the effort to include her. Whatever, the Steins’ became Mary’s next home.

  All these thoughts about the Conollys and the Steins had started coming up one day when Dr. Cather pushed Mary hard and asked her, “Can you remember what you were thinking or feeling when you decided to give birth to Natassia? What I mean, Mary, is that you are a very practical person. You’ve always had high expectations for yourself in terms of your dance career. To bring a baby into your life at the start of what was clearly going to be a successful career…What were your expectations?”

  In other words, What the fuck were you thinking?

  In the earliest days of that pregnancy, Mary had had a couple intense, more-real-than-life dreams that included her birth mother: the woman was there, spooking Mary but being nice to her, letting Mary move ahead of her while they were waiting in a long, long line to buy a car. Plus, Ross (idiot!) had called his parents long-distance from Rome and bragged to them that Mary’s period was ten days late.

  “Ross,” Mary had yelled in the middle of some piazza, “why’d you call them?”

  “It took my father years to get my mother pregnant. You should’ve heard him.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothing. Total transatlantic silence. He was so jealous he couldn’t speak, that old faggot.”

  Within a week, a letter arrived from Lotte with a package containing a bottle of folic-acid tablets for Mary. “We support you,” Lotte wrote, “whatever you decide.” It was almost like having Mrs. Conolly alive again when Lotte wrote, “I will help you.”

  Alone in Lotte’s tiny kitchen now, Mary stared out the window. There was nothing like sunsets on the Upper West Side, so bruised and beautiful. Cather had been pushing a discussion lately, something Mary didn’t like talking about, but, sitting in the kitchen, she had the sick feeling that probably Cather was barking up the right tree. Shit. Oh, shit. Mary was crying now, needed to grab a paper towel off the rack. It’s Kevin’s fault.

  Kevin had just not let things go with that Hiliard gardener, Tomio. Every time Kevin came upstate to visit—about once a week these days—he and Tomio had long talks in the gardens and in the garages, and so now, whenever Kevin and Mary were walking around and ran into Tomio, they had to stop. Usually they just talked polite bullshit, flowers and motors. But one night, Mary heard herself saying, “Can I ask you something? During the Korean War, did you ever hear of a big bridge blowup over this river, the Han River?”

  “June 28, 1950,” Tomio said.

  “Yeah, it was like in the middle of the night, right? Some fat South Korean general who was a sumo wrestler planned the blowup as a way to keep the North Koreans from getting farther south, but the timing got messed up and the bridge was full of civilians when it exploded.”

  “Maybe eight hundred people died. Maybe more.” Tomio was nodding his head, looking hard at Mary. “This is one terrible moment in terrible war.”

  “I guess my mother was crossing that bridge when that happened. She was the only one in her family who made it across.”

  Kevin said, “Jesus.” Tomio looked at Mary with eyes so piercing she could not look away from him. Natassia asked, “How’d you know that, Mom? You never told me.”

  There were only two bits of information Mary had about her Korean mother. The story of the bridge explosion was one bit.

  Tomio looked over at Kevin, as if for permission, then said to Mary, “I must speak and tell you this—it is very impossible your mother was what you think.” Mary had to watch Tomio’s mouth as he spoke. His English was difficult for her to understand, and he spoke quickly, as if embarrassed about his accent and wanting to get what he was saying out as fast as possible. Like a beginning dancer who races through the steps to get them over with. But she watched Tomio’s mouth, and eventually his speech slowed down and she understood.

  “True prostitute,” Tomio said, “she knows how not have a baby. Especially then, in that war. There was no food. Truly.” Tomio stomped his foot. “No. Food.” He smiled broadly at this bad news. “In war, every person is prostitute. You”—he gave a laugh, confusing Mary about where this conversation was going—“you are true lucky. True, true lucky. Your American father, soldier? Officer?”

  “Just your run-of-the-mill grunt,” Mary told him.

  “No officer?”

  “No way.”

  “For him to go back to Korea—oh, this.” Tomio shook his head. “Believe me, your mother happy all her days to send baby daughter to U.S. To send with U.S. father to feed and give education and give house. Your mother very good. True lucky mother.”

  The only other piece of information Mary had about her mother had come from Dorie, who had said, when Mary got pregnant the second time, at age eighteen, and was forced to ask for money for an abortion, “Right on schedule.” And when Mary asked what Dorie meant by that, Dorie said, “How old do you think your Korean mother was when she got knocked up?” To Tomio that night, Mary said, “My mother was really young, like thirteen, when that bridge thing happened. I wasn’t born till she was sixteen. Three years she was on her own. I mean, with no family, how else do you think she survived?”

  Again, Tomio looked at Kevin. “Can I say?” Kevin shrugged, so Tomio continued. “I believe your mother—Korean—and your American father, they love. Maybe big love. Or little soldier, GI Joe, why go back?”

  Mary was holding a cigarette burnt to the nub; she’d forgotten to smoke it. “That would explain why Dorie hated me.”

  “Mary,” Kevin insisted, “did you hear him? It changes everything, even the idea, even the possibility.”

  Tomio’s theory changed nothing for Mary that night, but as she sat now in Lotte’s tiny kitchen, Mary felt a rocking at the pit of her stomach, as if a boulder that had been falling and falling and tumbling forever had finally, just recently, hit the ground. She’d found a book in the Hiliard library and begun reading about her mother’s war, about the tragedy on the bridge. It was just Mary’s luck that the prettiest story of her life—that her birth parents might have been in love—was so bad it was making Mary’s asthma worse. Lately she’d been holding a cigarette between her teeth most of the day, but she couldn’t light up. Imagine hauling yourself over that collapsing bridge, imagine no food. Truly, no food. A life so
bad that the best card you had to play was letting your baby be taken halfway across the frigging globe, saying to a little GI twerp like Jerry Mudd, Here, take care of her. Knowing you’d never ever see your kid again.

  Mary was crying so hard now, she didn’t know how she was going to catch her breath. She looked down at her open palms in her lap, her shaking thirty-six-year-old hands, and within them, she saw baby hands. Tiny hands. And Mary knew that this time she was crying for herself. Stop! But she couldn’t stop. And through the tears she saw adult hands again, a mother’s hands, her mother’s hands. And Mary was crying so hard she had to stand up and pace the six-foot-long kitchen. The cigarette slipped from her fingers, rolled somewhere. Mary crouched to the floor but she couldn’t see.

  Jesus, what was my mother—beautiful, or phenomenally sexy, or what? To get Jerry to do it? At this point in her life, Mary knew that it took more than a really good fuck to get a man like Jerry Mudd to be a better person than he really was. She thought it all the way through: Jerry would have had to tell his wife he’d cheated on her, then tell her he had a kid in Korea, then tell her he was bringing the kid back, moving the kid into their house. When he went overseas, Jerry and Dorie had been married only four months. Poor Dorie, that bitch. No wonder she was so mean to me. Jerry then had to tell the armed services what he’d done, and the U.S. government and the Korean government and the church. He told his neighbors and relatives. The guys at the warehouse, they all knew.

  My mother. It’s fucking amazing what she got Jerry to do. That young girl in Korea, so helpless, but she had managed to get herself over that burning, falling, exploding bridge, managed to stay alive with no family, and managed to get her baby out of a war zone and to upstate New York. True lucky, Tomio had said. True lucky.

  “But it was shit,” Mary whispered to the ugly linoleum kitchen floor. “Growing up with them was total shit.” She leaned back against the oven door and tilted up her head. Oh God. The books Mary had found were full of pictures of peasants crying on roadsides, and Mary could picture that young girl, her mother, alone, curled up, small, squatting on haunches, just like Mary was now, just like Mary in starting position for her solo—home base—those moments when she was nothing but a pulsing heart behind a thirty-foot-high curtain, on a sixty-foot-wide stage, with an audience filling a fifteen-hundred-seat auditorium, and when the curtain went up Mary took off—maybe as fast as her mother crossing that bridge—both of them doing what they had to do to stay alive.

  “You know what your problem is?” Ross had said to Mary years ago. “You know how to be mad, but you don’t know how to be sad.” I’m sad now, Ross, I’m good and sad now. With her face inside her cupped hands, Mary saw blackness, and it matched the terror she’d felt all year long for Natassia, which matched the terror she’d felt as a kid, and this was how she came to know the Korean woman who gave birth to her. Terror. After a while, Mary lowered her hands. Her cigarette appeared in front of her, just under the base of the refrigerator. She put the cigarette up to her nose, but the smell of it made her wince. It was a wonder, a frigging wonder, that she had managed to keep not only herself but also her daughter alive all these years. “Jesus,” Mary whispered. “I’m amazing, I’m fucking amazing.” She kept staring at her hands. “My mother. I bet anything she was a smoker.”

  CHAPTER 43 :

  MAY

  1990

  Back upstate after David’s memorial service, Mary checked in with Harriet now and then, and she heard several disturbing stories about Ross’s behavior in the weeks leading up to his disappearance: On his way back to Spokane after the first meeting in Heather’s office, he’d been taken off the plane in Minneapolis. He was drunk and annoying people. Back home, he’d used a pellet gun to kill squirrels in the backyard, then skinned them and hung the skins on trees to “teach the rest of them a lesson.” He’d had a string of nights of impotence, and he’d shaved his pubic hair and buried it under a tree, hoping to “reverse the bad spell.”

  WITH ROSS God knows where, Lotte wasn’t managing well in the city. She was seeing lots of doctors, having all kinds of aches. “Listen, dear,” she told Mary, “Natassia is so concerned about her exams, let’s do this—instead of you dragging her with you to Albany for those days you’re performing, why don’t I come up to Hiliard to stay with her? Actually, Natassia’s been hinting that she’d like me to see her school and all.”

  And at the same time, Natassia was whining, “Mom, I really don’t want to go to Albany and sit through those rehearsals. Please, don’t make me.”

  Mary called Kevin. “I don’t feel good about leaving those two up here by themselves. Kevin, I hate to bother you—we’ve already relied on you too much—but—”

  “I’d love to come stay with Natassia and Lotte while you’re in Albany.”

  THE “BABYSITTING” was set up, but for a day or so Mary was dreading the trip to Albany. A respiratory infection had her coughing hacking coughs and sweating a fever, and it wouldn’t go away. So many times in the past, she had performed in this condition, and she would do it next week, but Mary had really hoped the Hiliard job would mean never having to push her body around this way again. Antibiotics had her feeling woozy and dim. When she called Franklin’s secretary to cancel her classes—Mary just could not get out of bed—the secretary said, “My, your family certainly is high-maintenance.”

  “It’s me this time, Tracey. I’m the one who’s sick this time. I might even be dead already, for all I know.”

  Then, the next day, day six of not being able to smoke any smokes at all, Mary woke up and her lungs felt as if they were two gigantic dance studios where rows of tall, open windows were letting in all kinds of extra air.

  IN ALBANY, the dress rehearsal went as Mary and the other dancers had expected—not great, nowhere near perfect, but good enough. The dancers of the current company had just returned from an extended tour on the West Coast and Canada, and they were beat. There were only three rehearsals with the current dancers and former company members all together, so it was a surprise to none of them that there were some lapses—a couple entrances were delayed or too early, timing was a bit off here and there.

  For Mary, the real surprise was how happy she felt onstage after her one-and-a-half-year absence. “So-Lo” began with Mary behind the curtain in a crouch. From the moment the curtain opened and she leaped up, Mary was aware—from the makeup on her face to the pumping of her heart—of only one sensation: I love this, I love doing this.

  Except for the thirty minutes, total, that she was onstage, Mary had a toothpick in her mouth the whole time. Still, no cigarettes, not one pipe.

  For the performance, Mary was afraid it wouldn’t happen again like it had during the dress rehearsal, that thorough glee, that adrenaline-sharpened awareness that she was alive and doing exactly what she’d been born for.

  But it did happen again. The dancers got a standing ovation; there were two curtain calls. Backstage afterward, everyone was giddy. The company manager came around with opened bottles of cheap champagne in each hand, pouring wherever she saw a glass or mug or paper cup. There were many toasts, including a toast for Mary, who didn’t remember postperformance being this much fun. As she made her way to the pay phone to call Natassia, Mary felt weightless, hardly any guilt—tomorrow morning, early, she’d be driving back to Natassia. No question. Meanwhile, Mary didn’t have to worry about what Ross might be doing or failing to do. And there was a delicious absence of fear in knowing that Kevin was with Natassia and Lotte. That night, when Mary got them on the phone, all three told her, “Everything here is okay.”

  “It went good here, too,” Mary told them, “but I miss you.”

  Most of the dancers were heading out to a restaurant. One car was going back to the hotel, and that’s what Mary decided to do.

  For the first time ever, Mary had requested a nonsmoking room, so this trip smelled different from all the other times she’d traveled. Her roommate wasn’t back yet, and Mary had the r
oom all to herself, which would have been an unlikely bit of heaven on a tour. The room was chilly with air-conditioned air. The wallpaper was blue, and the room had an interior window that looked out on an indoor swimming pool. Maybe I’ll take a long swim later. Two queen-sized beds. She clicked the remote to turn on the television.

  Then she clicked it right off. “I want to go home,” she said to the room.

  In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, didn’t take a shower, cleared her stuff off the counter, and popped a fresh toothpick into her mouth. She grabbed her bag of dirty rehearsal clothes, stuffed everything into her backpack, wrote her roommate a short note. Then Mary got into Kevin’s car, tucked two ice packs under her hips, and hit the road, with the front windows wide open. She was driving through nighttime mountains, taking the curves like a dance, her foot a tiny bit heavy on the pedal. Hiliard, New York, was the only place she wanted to be.

  A couple hours outside of Albany, she stopped at an all-night convenience store to pee. There was a pay phone. Natassia answered. “Mom?” Quickly, on a different phone extension, Kevin picked up. “Mary?” Together, at the same time, Natassia and Kevin asked, “Are you okay?”

  Mary laughed. “You two sound like parrots. Everything’s fine.”

  “I’m beating his butt in this Scrabble game,” Natassia said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m on my way home. I just called to tell you that. Where’s Lotte?”

  “Asleep. Did the hotel have bedbugs or something?”

  “I just missed you guys. I want to wake up at home, so I left.”

  “We’ll wait up for you,” Kevin said.

  “He will,” Natassia said. “I’m going to bed soon. My study group’s meeting really early, at breakfast.”

  CHAPTER 44 :

  JUNE

  1990

  Memorial Day weekend Saturday, 1990, 10:47 p.m.

  The thing about freedom is, if you use it randomly, for random action, you’re a loser. Mom’s been trying to talk to her students about this since last winter, when Charlie almost screwed things up for her with the naked dancing. The board of trustees made Franklin Fields bring in a therapist to have an “open talk session” with the students. Sometimes this place is so bogus. But Mom stayed and talked to them after the therapist left, and she’s like, You guys have to use your freedom for some good reason. Like, onstage, you have to be free to dance but have enough discipline to know what you’re doing. She keeps telling them this stuff, which I agree with. But, aside from my group of friends here, everybody’s mostly morons. Poppy used to say, “You can maybe turn a brain surgeon into a dancer, but you’ll never turn a dancer into a brain surgeon.”