by Kalman Nadia
Stalina flogged her topic. Osip tried to make the radishes into stars, as his grandmother Baba Rufa had done, and dropped new tissues into Milla’s lap.
“Now is time,” Stalina finally said, her English taking the place of a concession, “for you to go upstairs and put on something coquetlivaya. See how I am?” Stalina passed her tiny raccoon hands over her low-cut brown blouse. “And heels high. See how long my legs are looking? If you just try a little bit, you can look like the painting Neznakomka. You have nice cheeks and black hair like Strange Lady in painting, but she has the style. She has little hat, yes, Osya?”
In the end, Milla agreed to wash her face and change her clothes. Stalina tried for mascara, was rebuffed, took it in sportsmanlike fashion. Milla had reached the kitchen door before Osip could muster a properly hearty, “No more crying, or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”
Milla
Upstairs, Yana sat atop a pile of clothing she planned to donate to less enlightened women, bracing herself on one foot while taking photographs of the other. Whereas Milla, trying to save their parents money, had insisted that state college would be fine, Yana had fought and won herself Columbia, professors who interested themselves in her feet.
Milla kicked desultorily at the pile until Yana looked up from the camera. “Apparently, a skirt is the least I can do,” Milla said. She sat on the rug. It was the closest thing to her and she was too tired to stand. “Is there something here that would fit me?”
Yana raised an eyebrow. Actually, she raised both. She’d been practicing for years, but still hadn’t mastered it. “You’re just letting her pimp you out?”
“Yes. I am just letting her pimp me out.” Milla sighed, traced a woolen flower with her finger. Yana seemed to want a debate. “I can’t wear my own clothes, okay? Everything I own, except for these, I wore with Malcolm, so I can’t wear it.”
Yana half-rolled off the pile, a bubble skirt tumbling in her wake, and sat herself next to Milla. “I know. In the middle of dinner, you could drop a tampon. That always freaks guys out,” she said, with the hard-bitten authority of one who’d done accidentally what she was proposing Milla do on purpose.
Milla shook her head.
“Come on. You know Mom would be all…” They looked at each other. It was impossible to imagine what their mother would be like. Milla waited for another unhelpful idea to alight upon her sister. There was something restful about watching this process cycle through. “Hey,” Yana said, hitting her on the arm, “Now that you and Malcolm are taking a little break, don’t worry, you’ll totally get back together, but now, you get a chance to explore your sexuality.”
Milla nodded and tried to believe the part about getting back together.
“You could find out you like women, or peeing on people.” Yana crawled forward and pulled a plaid skirt, a black sweater, and heels from the pile.
“What’s wrong with the sweater?” Milla said.
“Too low-cut. It’s all, ‘Come taste my melons, honeybees.’” Yana pointed her index fingers at her flat chest.
Milla stepped out of her sweatpants and reached for the skirt. Although Yana’s break would go on for another week, Milla’s ended tomorrow. She would have to wake up at six, drive the road that for seven months had meant returning to Malcolm. Now, it would only mean returning to her eight o’clock auditing class. It would feel like a road through the shadow of the valley of death, where Jesus was supposed to be with you so you did not fear, but, being Jewish, Milla would be alone. Would this breakup drive her to Christianity? She should tell Malcolm: he, whose parents were such big Jews, was responsible for assimilation. A tear, on behalf of the Jewish people, came to her eye.
Yana put an arm around her and led her to the large mirror in their parents’ room. They looked together into the frame. The skirt was longer on her than it had been on Yana. Milla had been shocked by sadness into looking like she was fourteen, a Catholic-school girl, of the actual, not music-video, variety. Could sadness make your ankles thicker? She could tell that Yana, inexperienced in having something nice to say, was furiously attempting to summon a compliment. She cried again, for Yana’s underdeveloped social skills.
Katya
Katya was neither dyeing her hair nor shaving it off. She was taking neither drugs nor a pregnancy test. She was not, in short, doing any of the things her parents feared.
Katya was trying to feel happy, while simultaneously preventing the voice of former Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev from coming out of her mouth.
The bathroom, in which her mother had installed light bulbs too bright for the sockets, light bulbs that fizzled in complaint and burned the backs of your eyes, was not the best place for Katya’s work, but she had no lock on her bedroom door and both her sisters were home.
She turned to the shower curtain, which had a map of the U.S. (purchased by her father: no one taught geography in American schools) and put her finger on New York, squeezed her eyes shut, tried to ignore the pear-shaped light-ghosts. Happiness…New York…She was Sid Vicious’s girlfriend (Yeah, she knew he was dead, punk was dead, so what), not one he’d want to kill, like Nancy Spungeon, but a good one, one who’d smear oil on his face to make the pimples come, who’d chase away the MTV magnates with an axe. “I’m punk enough for the both of us,” she imagined herself saying to a sniveling Sid. She was on stage, screaming out:
Fuck — memory!
Fuck — society!
Fuck — the words you say!
Fuck — come what may!
She was particularly proud of the change in meaning between the third and fourth fucks.
The crowd moshed, screaming her name. Not her regular name, Katya, but her punk name, Vonyuchinka, which meant “the stinking one” in Russian. She opened her mouth to vomit down on them — “Comrades, thanks to your most efficacious efforts, gross radish production has risen by an unheard-of and heroic percentage of six and three tenths…” Could her sisters hear her out in the hallway? They — or, rather, Yana — continued to talk.
She waited for it to wind down, smothering her mouth with a leopard-spotted towel.
“It’s time to go downstairs,” Yana said through the door. “Are you on your cell phone?” Brezhnev grunted something about ironworks. “Are you too cool to answer?”
“Or — not cool enough,” Milla said, with a smile in her voice. Katya, still lip-locked to her towel, felt proud to be cheering her sister up after her breakup. It was great to be such a loser that, just by locking yourself in a bathroom, you created a party everywhere else.
Yana said, “Time to face Potatoface.”
Milla didn’t laugh. Ha. Yana always thought she was so funny.
Katya lifted her face from the clammy towel, watched in the mirror as her lips finally stilled.
The first time had been at her fourth birthday party. As she unwrapped a gigantic stuffed monkey, a man’s voice burst from her chest, saying something about disobedience in Romania, and her mother scooped her up and carried her to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub and said, “Moy Greh,” and cried.
Katya had thought Greh meant Greek, and kicked a Greek girl in her day care center for weeks afterwards. Finally, she summoned up the courage to check the word with Milla. It turned out that it meant sin. Milla had been nice about it; nice, but nosy. Katya had pulled her furry hood over her face and stuffed her mouth with the salty hairs until Milla stopped asking.
Years later, during one of her parents’ parties, she realized whose voice it was. Everyone was drunk and trading impressions. “Systema-titty,” her mother’s friend Edward had growled, in an unmistakable tone, and everyone instantly guessed: Brezhnev, the unwitting erotic wordsmith, “Our Nabokov.”
She bit her lip to stop remembering and took out her flask. Vodka made Katya feel very cultural, very right. It allowed her to go to school sometimes, to answer questions sometimes. It was, as she’d learned in ninth grade health class, a “powerful depressant.”
&nb
sp; Milla
Katya had escaped upstairs, and Yana had invented some task in the kitchen, of all places for her to be. Roman, the new-immigrant nephew the Chaikins had living with them, had been shooed by Alla Chaikin to the den to practice his English in front of the television.
The Chaikins had already complimented Stalina’s newest Art Deco statuette, of an Asian man in mid-twirl, hand cocked at his side, a whip in his fist. They had enquired about her uncle Lev, who still hadn’t left his apartment, which was crazy; and about her grandmother Byata, who’d moved to Boston, which was equally crazy. All the parents had agreed America would be well-rid of Hillary Clinton, a woman utterly lacking in zhenstvinost, feminine charm, as well as any genuine feeling for Israel. Having concluded those preliminaries to their mutual satisfaction, the parents now freely bestowed their energies upon Milla and Leonid.
Alla Chaikin said to Milla, “Leonid sounds like the name of an old commissioner, or Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, even.” She shuddered at the thought. “Lenya’s eyebrows look nothing like Brezhnev’s. Call him Len-Len, like you did in Rome.”
Arkady Chaikin said, “Yes, and she chased him around. ‘Len-Len, I have such a good prince-and-princess book for you.’”
“But he’d say, ‘Father, hide me!’” said Alla Chaikin. “He didn’t like books.”
“He still doesn’t,” said Arkady Chaikin.
“Such an American,” said Alla Chaikin.
Leonid Chaikin modestly lowered his gaze.
“He doesn’t have time to read,” Milla’s mother said. “Didn’t he just get promoted?”
“Who told you?” Mrs. Chaikin said, and then, quickly, “And do you know the first thing he bought with his raise?”
“Ma,” Leonid said. He hooked his thumb in his suspenders. Only he and the Brooks Brothers mannequin in the mall ever wore suspenders.
“Tell us,” Stalina said, putting a playful hand over Leonid’s mouth. His face looked especially large compared to the hand. Milla couldn’t believe that her mother was willingly touching his lips.
“I’m not bragging,” Mrs. Chaikin said, and Stalina vigorously shook her head. “It’s just very interesting, because Arkady and I, we never even knew things like this existed. Show them, Lenka.”
Leonid removed Stalina’s hand. “Come on, Ma.”
“You are come on,” Mrs. Chaikin said.
“Batyushka, my lord,” Stalina said. “Millatchka, look.”
Milla lowered her eyes to the object in Leonid’s hand: a gold money clip. They were all so gauche. How could her mother, who had taught her that word, betray her own standards so completely? She wished she could tell Malcolm how awful they all were, but she would never have that chance again.
“It’s just more convenient than a wallet,” Leonid said. “When I went to Japan, they —”
Stalina said, “No apologies, Leonchik. You saw something perfect, and you grabbed.” She rolled this last sentence in Milla’s direction as if it were a tank.
Roman
Roman’s mother wasn’t always a narcomanka, but she was always a hairdresser, which was bad enough, a girl from a good Jewish family. To their credit, all their relatives had made dire predictions about his mother for years, which mitigated Roman’s surprise when, at age eight, he had returned from a field trip to the Institute of Metal Testing to find his mother asleep on the couch, shiny-skinned, a needle sticking out of her arm like a helpful arrow in a diagram.
A few years ago, his mother had found Love! with a man who sold underwear on the street and claimed a Mafia connection. That was what she’d been looking for all along, didn’t Roman understand? He’d get there soon enough himself.
The more this new love beat her, the more heroin she needed, and the more heroin he provided, the more he beat her. One night, Roman jumped on the man’s back, and his mother took out one of the kitchen knives. Its ultimate destination was to be Roman. He finally agreed to go stay with his aunt and uncle in America.
Now, Roman sat alone in the Molochniks’ den, watching the same program he had watched in Russia: beautiful American teenagers lit another beach bonfire. During the commercials, he re-drew X’s on the backs of his hands. Someone had left half a beer on the coffee table. He reminded himself he was straight-edge now.
A girl came in, darkening the room with her black-hole hair.
“You can change,” he said, holding out the remote control. She must be one of the Molochnik daughters. His aunt had told him they were intelligentniye girls, so he’d thought they would be ugly. This girl changed the channel to one on which some boys were flopping their hair around and breaking mirrors. The music was all right, a little soft for him. He preferred hip-hop and rap.
“MTV?” he said.
“MTV sucks.” With jerky little motions, she sat on the floor. She was a scrawny mosquito, but sexy, but probably a druggie, but a rich Americanka, so she’d be okay. Not that drugs were okay for anyone, he let the X’s remind him.
“You go to high?” That was wrong, he could tell from her expression. He couldn’t grind away at English any more. “Do you go to university?”
“In school,” she said, in a laughably heavy American accent.
“Do you like this band?” Now the main boy was drawing a piece of mirrored glass across his throat, but no blood came out.
“They’re a little soft,” she said.
“I think the same!” He told himself to calm down and furrowed his brow, which people said made him look older. “But seriously, they are — posers.”
She turned and smiled, only on one side of her mouth, a little suspicious. Her teeth were fine. If she only used a few drugs, it was okay, he’d teach her the straight-edge lifestyle.
“So, do you have a young friend?” he said. She squinted. Her nose also squinted. “Boo? Mac?” He gave secret thanks to MTV: Russia.
She shook her head, and behind her, a man stretched a stick of gum across a city street.
“Really?” Could he pull this off? Only in Russian. “It’s just that you’re so cool and hot.”
Her face turned red, and she said in a familiar male voice, no American accent at all: “The Israeli aggressor has finally revealed its predatory —”
And his face was set to laugh, because it was a joke, wasn’t it? She hopped up, still speaking — “Never before has an invader —” and slammed the door shut.
Leonid
Leonid, upon being tipsily instructed by his mother to run off and play with Milla Molochnik, found himself on an allergy-inducing carpet opposite an implacable foe. Meanwhile, his cousin Roman was probably jacking off in the TV room. That option was not open to Leonid, no, he had to be a model of excellence for all Russian boys in the tri-state area, had been ever since, and even slightly before (thanks to his SAT scores), his acceptance to Harvard seven years ago.
He wasn’t interested in this Brezhnev-browed lump, who jerked like an epileptic every time the phone rang, displacing the Scrabble tiles; didn’t she know he could be banging a hot model right now? Or at least his group’s cute-from-behind secretary, in a few years, when he’d risen a bit more in the hierarchy, gotten his MBA? Didn’t this Milla know this was his only night off for the next five weeks? Still, he roused himself to say, “So, do you ski downhill? Ever get out to Aspen?” Most Russians only knew how to ski cross-country, only knew small hills, slow speeds. Perhaps she was different; he was open to that possibility.
She shrugged with one shoulder. At least she was quiet. From the dining room came the voice of Yana, the hairy middle sister. “That is racist.”
Leonid’s mother said, “No, Yanatchka, I like the black people very much. I’ve often wished I could be merry like a black lady.”
Yana stomped past them and upstairs, slammed a door, and then must have turned on some rap music.
Leonid said, “Do you like rap? Snoop Dogg?”
“Snoop Dogg is for rapists.” Milla’s mouth twisted strangely during this sentence, as if she were in a language cl
ass. Had he heard her correctly? He’d known her since they were little, but she was acting very differently tonight. Perhaps she had developed a crush on him, and was trying to flirt, by arguing? His mother had told him that her mother had some romantic ambitions for the two of them. He turned partly away so as not to meet her glare, or stare, or whatever she thought she was doing.
From the kitchen issued some strange Russian words being, in a manner, sung. He couldn’t understand all the words — some kind of animal, maybe a goat, or was it a nobleman, marching, banging on a drum, and the drum was made out of the goat’s or nobleman’s skin. Neither definition made complete sense for both the marching and the drum-skin. This kind of thing was exactly why he’d never taken any poetry at Harvard.
Next, he heard some ostentatious clapping, and Mrs. Molochnik saying, “All right, Osya. Don’t beat the table, it didn’t do anything to you.”
Mr. Molochnik said, “Think, my friends, how our bards sacrificed. Alexander Galich: imprisoned, murdered.”
“I think he was only exiled,” Leonid’s father said.
“He died trying to fix a radio, right, Arkady?” Alla said.
“You don’t think the KGB had its dirty tentacles all over that transistor? You are like children.”
“Osya,” Mrs. Molochnik said.
“Forgive me, what do I know? What’s the point of arguing? He’s dead, dead, dead all the same.”
Mrs. Molochnik said, “Osip Mikhailovich, what do you say about getting a little sleep?”
“I understand,” Mr. Molochnik said. “This is a time to talk about happy things. Bim bom, bim bom, that’s what we should be singing.” He shuffled past Leonid and Milla, raising a hand in greeting or farewell, and made his way up the stairs, still bim-boming.
“Your turn,” Milla said. Leonid put down the word Zen, which, breathing noisily through her nose, she challenged and disqualified. He only had to play one turn after that — a meek tree — before his parents collected him.